Modesty Blaise Read online

  “Very romantic. I’d like a drink, please, a glass of red wine.

  “I’m not too sure they actually have any wine, but - ” He broke off to stare at the man who stood smiling benevolently at him, with a glass of red wine in one hand and a whisky in the other.

  “Modesty, my dear.” Tarrant bowed his head to her. “Senile though I am, my powers of anticipation are unblunted. Red wine?”

  “Sir Gerald. How kind.” She took the glass. “Do you know David Whitstone? David, this is Sir Gerald Tarrant.”

  “How do you do?” The automatic and never-answered question was asked in unison.

  “Now if only I’d had another hand, my dear boy,” said Tarrant regretfully, “and if only I’d known your taste …”

  “Never mind.” Modesty put a hand on David’s arm. “Go and get yourself a drink.”

  “I don’t think I’ll bother.” He was frowning slightly “There’s rather a mob.”

  “I’d like some cigarettes, please. No, not yours. Some Gauloises.”

  “I’m damn sure they won’t have them.” He met her gaze and shrugged. “Oh, all right.”

  She watched him go, and spoke quietly to Tarrant: “So soon, for your pound of flesh?”

  “It doesn’t arise,” he said carefully. “But if you could see your way to lending me some assistance, I’d be most grateful. Unfortunately the matter has become urgent, even to the point of interrupting your evening. Please feel free to decline.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “See my Minister. He’s at the House now.”

  “Pompous Percy?”

  “You possess trade secrets. Have you met the Right Honorable Percival Thornton?”

  “No. But I know his collection of pictures. One of my subgroups removed a Cézanne from it when he was ambassador in Paris as few years back.”

  “You delight me, Modesty. But I should let auld acquaintance be forgot in this instance. If you intend to see him, that is.”

  She looked toward the maneuvering mob at the bar.

  “Yes.” She finished her drink and handed him the glass. “Shall we go now?”

  “A word to your escort first, perhaps?”

  “I’d rather be discourteous. He took me for granted.”

  “Ah. I shall bear that in mind.”

  They drove down the Strand and Whitehall in Modesty’s Daimler Dart. It was ivory in color, and the engine held no esoteric mysteries of adaptation. Over her evening dress she wore a Dior-designed mink coat in Emba tourmaline, three-quarter length, with bishop type sleeves and a high mandarin collar.

  “Congratulations on bringing Willie Garvin back alive,” Tarrant remarked as they waited at the lights. “A pity he’s lost his touch.” With satisfaction he sensed the slightest stiffening of her body.

  “He hasn’t,” she said briefly.

  “But you weren’t thinking of co-opting him for this job, I take it?”

  “I don’t know what the job is yet.” She left it there, and Tarrant was content for the moment.

  If the job really existed, as he believed, then it would hardly be the kind to send Modesty Blaise into without her right arm. But he had a strong hunch that she was reluctant to bring Willie Garvin in, not because she didn’t want him, but because she felt she had no entitlement to involve him. Tarrant hoped that the right kind of prodding would do the trick.

  In a room overlooking New Palace Yard, the Minister put aside a file and rose behind his desk.

  “Delighted, Miss Blaise. ‘Evening, Tarrant.” He shook hands. His voice was fruity and booming. The Right Honorable Percy Thornton had come to politics from the Bar. He was a reliable man, very methodical, with the virtue of not being too clever and the greater virtue of having a flair for doing the right thing, even if sometimes it was for the wrong reasons.

  Tarrant, as he seated Modesty, saw her take in the fact that despite what the Minister must know of her he remained completely incurious about her. A spark of amusement touched her eyes.

  “Now,” said Thornton, leaning back with a profound stare. “The Sheikdom of Malaurak. I doubt if you know of the place, Miss Blaise?”

  “It’s a small patch of rock and sand between Syria and Iraq. Recognized by the Treaty of ‘56. Oil was found there recently.”

  “Quite so.” Pompous Percy was unruffled. “Now the ruler of this little country is Sheik Abu-Tahir. Not a cultured man, I fear.” He jerked his eyebrows up and down, looking dubious. “Until now, he’s been a penurious, tent-dwelling fellow. Something of a brigand, I suspect. However, we must be charitable, h’mm?”

  “Yes. If you want his oil.” Modesty’s voice held no inflexion. Tarrant sat back, enjoying himself.

  “I think it’s fair to say,” Thornton stated judicially, “or rather, it would not be unfair to say, that we’ve been working to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement. His Highness, as he likes to be called, is in this country now, and we’ve completed secret negotiations for the oil concession. But the arrangement is rather quaint. He’s a difficult chap, eh, Tarrant?”

  “I only saw him briefly at your office two days ago, Minister.”

  “Yes.” Thornton linked his fingers and rested his chin on them, looking at Modesty. “Well, our friend has no time for foreign credits, pieces of paper, anything of that nature, Miss Blaise. We’ve paid him half a million sterling for, ah, current expenses, and the rest of the down payment is to be ten million pounds. In diamonds.”

  He waited for a reaction, received none, and continued with no sign of disappointment.

  “This chap isn’t terribly sophisticated, you understand, and he wants the kind of wealth he can see and touch. To be delivered to the strongroom of the Anglo-Levant Bank in Beirut. Are you with me so far, Miss Blaise?”

  Modesty inclined her head. “Yes. I have been listening.”

  Tarrant treasured the answer for later retailing to Fraser, but the Right Honorable Percival Thornton merely nodded satisfaction.

  “Good,” he boomed briskly. “The diamonds are being amassed in Cape Town and will shortly be carried to Beirut in the strongroom of the Tyboria, one of the passenger ships used for carrying gold consignments.”

  Tarrant coughed. “I did suggest recommending to His Highness that the diamonds should go by air, Minister. They’ll only occupy a few cubic feet. Say one large crate or two smaller ones.”

  “Rejected,” Thornton answered with a wave of his hand. “In March ‘63 King Saud’s private Comet IV crashed in the Italian Alps near Monte Matto. It was carrying jewels, gold and currency to the tune of about four million pounds. And the scattered wreckage was only found after six weeks of searching. Just one small valise of gold was recovered. Now I won’t say Sheik Abu-Tahir read of this, because he doesn’t actually read. But he knows of it. And he’s not going to trust his diamonds to any damned infidel flying machine.”

  Tarrant gestured acceptance, and the Minister looked at Modesty again.

  “There it is, Miss Blaise. Nominally the Sheik is responsible for the diamonds as soon as they’re sealed in the ship’s strongroom at Cape Town. But we want to ensure safe delivery. If anything went wrong, His Highness might get a little , ah …” He sought judiciously for the right word.

  “Stroppy?” Modesty offered politely, and Tarrant closed his eyes with pleasure.

  “Exactly. Stroppy,” nodded Thornton. “And one can’t enforce contracts with minor powers these days. If he did default, and if we happened to have a gunboat within five hundred miles, we’d have to shift it out damn quick before somebody accused us of naked aggression.”

  “Why should anything go wrong with the diamond delivery?” Modesty asked, and the Minister’s glance passed the question to Tarrant.

  “There’s been a leak,” Tarrant said. “This was all top secret, but one of my people in the South of France reported a whisper about an enormous quantity of diamonds being shipped. I told him to trace the source of the whisper, and he died.”

  “Could be co
incidence, of course,” Thornton said, frowning. “We all have to shuffle off this mortal coil sooner or later.”

  “With respect, Minister …” Tarrant weighed the lengths to which he might go, “I feel that piano wire drawn tightly round the throat suggests that in this instance somebody took time by the forelock.”

  “You have a point there,” Thornton nodded, and looked at Modesty. “It’s Tarrant’s job to start at shadows, and he has this unlikely idea that there’s a plot to steal the diamonds. We shall have armed guards on the strongroom, and His Highness has insisted on supplying his own guards as well. So the thing can’t be done, short of piracy, and the Tyboria will be armed against that.”

  “You’re taking expensive precautions which you believe to be wasted?” she asked with a slight lift of the eyebrows.

  “Not quite. I’m giving Tarrant carte blanche for any precautions he thinks necessary, because it’s most important to make a good impression on Sheik Abu-Tahir. We’ve had to mention Tarrant’s suspicions to him, of course, and he’s somewhat alarmed. Therefore I’ve instructed Tarrant to give his full personal attention to the matter. Question of goodwill, Miss Blaise, that’s all.”

  “How do I come into the picture?” Modesty asked. She opened her handbag and took out a thin gold case, but Tarrant was before her with a box of the same Perfecto Finos he had seen her smoking at the penthouse.

  “You’re a part of Tarrant’s carte blanche,” Thornton said with a slight shrug. “He tells me you have profound knowledge of the Continental and Middle Eastern underworlds, and assures me that you are uniquely equipped, in experience and in contacts, to discover if there is a plot, and if so, who’s behind it and how it’s supposed to work.”

  “I see. But you don’t believe in it?”

  Thornton leaned forward and grimaced. It was a moment before she realized that this was a smile. The man was trying to be gallantly reassuring.

  “I’m quite sure Tarrant is imagining things,” he said. “I don’t think you need have any worries that you might be running into danger, Miss Blaise.”

  “Thank you, Minister. That’s very comforting for me.”

  “Not at all.” Thornton waved a gracious hand. “Well, Tarrant, you must take this young lady along to see Sheik Abu-Tahir and tell him all about her before she starts, ah, doing whatever it is. Make a big thing of it with the chap, and keep him right in the picture.”

  “Yes, Minister. I’m lunching with him at his suite in the Ritz tomorrow, so I’ll take Miss Blaise along with me. There is just one point I ought to mention, perhaps, concerning the probability of this plot.”

  “Yes?” There was a touch of impatience in Thornton’s query.

  “At the first rumor I put a local man in to investigate it, and he was garrotted, as you know. But then I sent a man out to follow up. A very good man, Ivor Grant. He handled that rather nasty Czech business, you remember?”

  “Naturally I remember. Well?”

  “Ivor Grant has failed to report on four scheduled times over the past forty-eight hours, Minister. I think we’ve lost him.”

  4

  Ivor Grant was quite certain now that he was going to die. He was a tall, thin, very wiry man of thirty-eight, with black hair sleeked back, though it was untidy now.

  In the past ten years Grant had walked many dark and devious paths for Tarrant. Some had been dangerous, a few very dangerous. But even at the worst times he had always been able to see a way out, at short odds, perhaps, but nevertheless a possible way.

  This time it was different. From the moment he had woken from unconsciousness on the ship, shackled to a bunk in the dark cabin, he had felt a growing sense of being in hands which gripped once and for all.

  That feeling had increased when they brought him ashore under a cloudy, moonless sky, marching him along the mile and a half of rough track which ran the length of the narrow island to the beginning of a rock slope leading up to the monastery. The men were professional and assured. Grant knew that they could only serve a ruthlessly efficient master. They were of several nationalities, and spoke little, but the common language seemed to be English of varying quality.

  The handcuffs on his wrists chinked slightly as he stirred on the solid oak settle which stood against one wall of the small room. On a chair by the open door a swarthy man in a dark T-shirt and denim trousers sat with a gun resting on his knee, watching impassively.

  Grant judged men by their eyes; and these eyes disinterested, lacking all tension, told hún that if he made a sudden move he would get a carefully placed bullet, through the leg, probably. The exact placing depended on the man’s orders.

  Flexing his thighs to ease the cramp in them, Grant sat still and began automatically to arrange facts in his head, as if for a report.

  An island. Very small. Somewhere in the Mediterranean. Two miles long, and tapering from half a mile wide to an elongated point; rocky, barren, with a thin fringe of scrubby beach. But at the western end the island threw up a miniature mountain two hundred feet high, with the great stone monastery perched upon it.

  Number of monks in the monastery, uncertain. There were three at work when he was brought through the big kitchen. They were evidently a silent order, communicating by sign language, and they ignored the fair-haired chunky man with a burpgun who watched over them. But their eyes followed Grant with troubled melancholy.

  He recalled that there were at least another thirty monks kneeling in prayer in the small chapel when he was shepherded along the gallery above and through a heavy wooden door at the end. On a lower level he had passed a row of small, bare cells. In one of them was a body lying roughly stitched in a coarse blanket.

  The man who questioned him was called McWhirter, a lean-faced Scot with a jerky walk and the manner of a hired clown. The questioning was a strange affair, with McWhirter by turns laughing, confidential, persuasive.

  There was no violence. Grant produced frightened indignation and his cover story. McWhirter chuckled delightedly.

  “Och, I wish he’d tell me to break ye doon, Grant laddie,” he beamed, rubbing dry hands together. “We’d have a rare bit o’ fun, eh?” His smile invited Grant to join him in the pleasurable speculation.

  “Who, who’s he?” Grant mumbled, trying to give the impression of a terrified and bewildered man clutching at the straw of appeal to higher authority.

  “Ah! An’ who’s your ‘he’?” countered McWhirter with a boyish hoot of laughter. “Eh? Boulter, is it? Or Dicky Spellman? Or Tarrant, mebbe? It’s a rare gaggle o’ departments ye have in London!”

  Grant’s uncomprehending stare did not alter, but each name hit him like a club. He had worked for Boulter in Military Intelligence before being seconded to Tarrant’s department. And Spellman was the recent appointment on the naval side.

  “I don’t get any of this,” he said doggedly. “What are you all doing here anyway? I mean guns and everything. And I saw a body in one of those cells!”

  “A man o’ God,” McWhirter said reassuringly. “Freed from the base clay at last. It’s not that these clerical fellers made any trouble, exactly, but - ” He looked sideways at Grant and his eyes twinkled. “Weel, they greeted us wi’ a sort of passive resistance, d’ye see, an’ it seemed best if we made a wee example. A scapegoat, ye might say.” He frowned sternly. “Och there’s scriptural precedent for it, laddie. Scriptural precedent.”

  “You … killed one of the monks?” Grant knew with sick distaste that there was little acting in his show of fear.

  “Aye.” McWhirter spread his hands in a wide, sincere gesture. “It was the simplest way for everyone. By far the simplest.”

  “You’re crazy!” Grant said with sudden vigor. “I want to see your boss, whoever he is!”

  “So ye shall,” McWhirter nodded, rising blithely. “But ye have to be patient for a wee while. He has a couple o’ fillums to watch. Carlos here will keep ye company.” He indicated the silent man with the gun.

  “Films?” Grant s
poke like a man doubting his own sanity. The habit of years made him probe for information, even though he would never be able to report it. “You mean … sort of blue films or something?”

  McWhirter stared, all humor fading from the long-jawed face. His eyes held frigid disdain.

  “Ye disgust me, man,” he said coldly, and turned away.

  “Well never mind that, just hold on!” Grant let belligerence creep into his tone. “I don’t care what your boss is doing! I bloody well want to see him! Who does he think he is, anyway?”

  “He’s called Gabriel,” said McWhirter, and went out.

  It was then that Ivor Grant became quite certain that he was going to die. His only concern now, as he sat slumped on the rubbed wooden settle, was the manner of his dying.

  Twenty minutes later McWhirter reappeared, spritely and jocular again. With him was the heavy man with short-cropped fair hair, the man Grant had seen in the monastery kitchen. He spoke slow English with a Nordic accent.

  “Twenty-three thirty hours,” said McWhirter, consulting his wristwatch. “Time all good bairns were in bed, heh? Come along, laddie, Borg will take ye in tow. Wi’ Gabriel, it’s important to watch the timing. Ye mustn’t hustle him, but ye mustn’t keep him waiting, either.”

  Handcuffed to Borg, Grant was led up stone steps, through an empty refectory, and along a broad corridor where saintly statues looked down from niches in the wall. McWhirter paced ahead, long-legged and bouncy, talking continuously.

  “D’ye know The Yeomen of the Guard, Grant laddie? Fairfax’s song.” He burst into a toneless fragment of melody. ” ‘I-i-is l-i-ife a boo-oon …’ Ah, it’s a logical bit o’ philosophy. A man canna complain if he dies in July, since he’s lucky not to ha’ died in June, d’ye see? But on the other hand” McWhirter, striding past a man with an automatic pistol who sat on a wide window ledge, wagged a meaningless finger at the man and winked broadly. The man ignored him.

  “On the other hand,” McWhirter repeated, “ye have the converse in the second stanza. ‘I-iis l-i-ife a tho-o-rn?’ Well in that case a feller can’t complain about dying now when he might have had to live another dawn, heh? Now hush, for God’s sake.” The last words were spoken in a quite different tone.