The Whisper of the Axe Read online

  When Teel asked her friends in Peking to watch Bart Simms and his sister in Hong Kong, the assignment was passed to Mr. T’ai-shan. When the report came back that Simms was negotiating with the MACV bagman, General Heller, in Taipeh, Teel was able to put the Kuomintang dope together with the million and a half Simms had spent on the boys in Maryland and the million and a half more he was probably going to have to spend on the campaign and salt-water taffy. That meant he was her competitor in the dope business, among other things. Appreciating the opportunity of throwing such a golden lock on a U.S. Senator as unique as Bart Simms, she arranged the kidnapping of the unique near-senator’s sister and had her held where this unique man’s sister could do Teel the most good.

  Although Mr. T’ai-shan reported it in full to Teel’s friends in Peking, they did not reveal to Teel that the Kuomintang clients, through General Heller, had also paid well to have Mr. T’ai-shan arrange Miss Simms’s kidnapping. Nor did they mention that the Corsican caids with whom the Chinese had once worked closely (at the time when they needed money to finance their movement when the French had occupied Indochina, and the Corsicans and the newly vested Chinese had exchanged many a golden handshake) had also paid well, on behalf of a certain client, to have Miss Simms abducted. Mr. Palladino had told General Heller the strict truth when he said he would not know how to help himself in Asia; he had had to ask the Corsicans. They had all wanted a lock on Simms, through Enid, but of the three kidnappers, Teel alone had Miss Simms’s slender body. And it hadn’t cost her a cent.

  It was a tenuous chain. Teel was only the final accidental link designed to deposit Enid inside China, a messenger who had made the delivery of Enid into China possible. But the CIA, in forging the long, long chain that had begun with the indoctrination of Bart and Enid upon university graduation, turning Bart into an assassin and then the most active narcotics transport executive in the world, had not had the power to foresee the opportunity they had created for themselves as spy masters and power brokers when they had plotted across all those years to put an agent in place inside China. For twenty-seven years the CIA had been the mockery of the Communist world, the African world, the Asian world because they had never contrived to plant an agent successfully within the largest country on earth. All they knew was that confirmed reports showed that “somewhere” inside China foreign guerrillas were being trained. That had been corroborated by interrogations of Arab and Japanese terrorists. They were willing to risk a lot of planning on the gamble that, if she were taken into China by the narcotics industry’s Chinese connections, since she was young, had languages, was sensitive and cooperative, Enid would be sent to one of these training camps and “indoctrinated” until she was a guerrilla soldier of international revolution. The genius of the CIA planning gamble was the building-in of Enid’s “counter-brainwashing” before her Chinese indoctrinations took place, so that she could be split precisely into two halves and loyally serve both masters without conflict.

  In view also of the political future they had planned for him, the CIA wanted to have a further lock on Bart. They arranged all their pieces on the board in a total fail-safe fashion toward the funnel wherein General Heller would, by professional inclination, have Enid kidnapped and taken into China, merely to hold and maintain the lock on Bart, his business partner. As the back-up apparatus they knew they had Mr. Palladino, the Corsicans and the Laotians standing by to move from Vientiane to take Enid, should General Heller not respond to the opportunity (which the CIA knew would then instantly occur to the Sicilian Palladino as a matter of business ethics: Get a lock on your opponent).

  The irony that it was their own unknown enemy, Teel, who moved before anyone else and pulled Enid into China, remained a mystery to the CIA, who assumed it had been either General Heller or Mr. Palladino since they had planned it that way. Nor did Teel know, at the time she ordered the kidnapping, that she was serving and abetting the causes of the CIA against her own revolution but, unlike the CIA, she would find out.

  25

  April 1971

  Enid wanted to get out and get shopping again among the ten thousand bargains of Hong Kong, but she hadn’t started her novel for the day. She went to the writing desk in the living room of their two-bedroom suite at the Peninsula. She began to write almost immediately because she had been composing in her head since she awoke.

  THE SABLE SOUTANE

  by

  CARLOTTA YOU

  There was the requisite purple plain where the people wandered, picking each other’s pockets or sauntering into the salt mines where they raced rats. Far in the dim distance, unreachable on foot or by chartered jet, were the great blue mountains of morals. “Look here, Your Honor,” Buster said to the exigent priest who was shaking an aspergillum at him, “our Gangrad worked like the very devil to get the oil together. It is our oil and we are not going to give it away for any 97¢ a gallon.”

  Just as Enid finished her work for the day the doorbell buzzed. She crossed the room and opened the door. A tall, good-looking man wearing an absolutely beautiful honey, black, and amethyst striped tie and, oddly enough, wearing gloves, entered the room, smiling pleasantly, by crowding her backward. He closed the door with his foot then struck her across the side of her head with something hard. She fell unconscious. The man opened the hall door just wide enough to put his head out. “All right,” he said.

  Two Chinese attendants in white rolled a stretcher down the hall and into the room. The tall man went into the bedroom at the left. (Bart always insisted on separate bedrooms even though they weren’t always both used.) He tossed a letter on the bed. While he did that, one of the Chinese attendants slipped the long needle of a hypodermic into the vein of Enid’s left forearm. They lifted her limp body upon the wheeled stretcher and covered it carefully. Before they finished the tall man had left the suite. The attendants rolled the stretcher along the corridor to the service elevator. When the lift arrived, they put the stretcher into it and directed the operator, in P’u-t’ung-hua, to go to the basement level. The operator looked in the general direction of Enid’s covered face and said, in Cantonese, “Anyone I know?”

  “She’ll be all right,” the smaller Chinese said.

  The ambulance was waiting. One attendant got into the rear area with the patient. The second man started the engine without haste and drove up the concrete ramp out of the rear of the hotel into Middle Road, then into Nathan Road and headed north away from the Tsimshatsui District moving briskly along past the shuttered girlie bars toward Shatin.

  At the second checkpoint at the near side of the Lo Wu bridge, the driver showed the papers bearing Mr. T’ai-shan’s chopmark with the seal of the Bank of China. The ambulance moved across the bridge into the People’s Republic and kept going northeast for seventeen miles to the military airport of Hui-chou where Enid and the stretcher were off-loaded into an ancient, four-motor Handley-Page Hastings C.2, a transport plane with a 4,200-mile range.

  “How long will she be out like that?” one of the pilots asked.

  “About five hours,” Shorty said. “How long is the ride?”

  “Three hours fifty-seven.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  The big old plane put down on schedule at Hsi-ning. The stretcher was taken fifty-five yards across the tarmac to a Chinook helicopter. They were off the pad in seven minutes, flying west by southwest across Lake Kokonor to the Women’s Guerrilla Training Camp base at Hei-ma-ho, forty-one miles from the men’s camp at Ssu-hsin.

  In terms of real effectiveness, Enid did not regain consciousness/awareness for one hundred and sixty-one days. She was kept in median sedation, her mind open and plastic to the program of impressions and requests that the technicians had ready. She arrived at the camp on a chilly April afternoon. She returned to full, if changed, awareness well into September. She had been given the fullest de-briefing Chinese technology could achieve. The de-briefers had expected a routine yield. But Enid was a warehouse of interesting knowledge bec
ause the agency had designed Enid’s long ago basic brainwashing specifically with such a possible de-briefing in mind. Enid’s subconscious mind could defend itself against self-betrayal by triggering her to pour out facts and half-facts within her immediate recall about her twin brother, not herself.

  She told them the details of Bart’s recruitment by the CIA (but not her own). She told them about his work as an assassin in Europe, giving the names of those he had murdered and where. She was explicit, and often truthful, about CIA installations, personnel, policy (as she knew it), methods, operations. They ate it up. Sixty-one copies of 4,216 pages of typescript were circulated throughout China. Case officers and residents were called in from many parts of the world to study Enid’s de-briefing. They knew everything she had to say about Air Opium was true because they had participated in its services. Their people who had worked with Bart were able to confirm all data. She revealed the intention of making Bart the President of the United States after he had become a senator and how this was to be done with capital from uppers, heroin, speed and downers; about Bart’s alliance with Mr. Palladino and the Haitian government. She was as resounding as a drum. Every time they tapped her she gave out the sounds they wanted to hear. They were very much pleased.

  When they had completed the de-briefing they began the painful work of nailing new beliefs and purposes upon Enid’s frail personality. This new briefing assured her dedication as a revolutionary who was eager to bring maximum terror to her country. Enid had been put through so much pain to earn points for two opposing systems, the only blessing to her was that she was induced to forget the pain had ever happened.

  Everything cohered. Enid was wholly transformed once again as if she were changing costumes in a school play.

  She was now a carrier pigeon who could home in either direction. She was so deeply locked in acting out what she had been told she was that she could no longer quite remember who she had ever been, excepting underneath all the detritus piled on her psyche by some of the greatest minds of their generation, there lived on and on in fright and shame the small girl home from school who had entered a room to find Daddy.

  26

  September 1971

  The record of Enid’s account of Bart Simms’s overall arrangement with J.D. Palladino was coded in Peking and sent out to Agatha Teel by courier. The courier, chosen for her intelligence and because her parents were still in the tiny Albanian village of Yn, was Miss Norma Engelson. She had been called in from Zambia to make the drop. On arrival in New York, Miss Engelson checked into her apartment on West 24th Street, washed her hair, drank two slow glasses of cold Wente white wine and then, at a quarter to seven, called Teel at her apartment in Murray Hill.

  “Teel?”

  “This is she.”

  “Remember Engelson from the porch in Locarno?”

  “Yeah!”

  “When can I see you? Business.”

  “Name it.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Well, late. I got people coming for dinner. Hell, come for dinner.”

  “No. I already got a lot on my plate. I’m due in Belfast tomorrow.”

  “Then come on by at eleven thirty.”

  “Now is the best time.”

  “Okay. Sure. Fine.”

  Engelson handed over the envelope, gave Teel the Women’s Liberation handshake grip, backed into the elevator and was off toward the Irish Riviera.

  The first dinner guest, a Pentagon assistant secretary, arrived within four minutes after that, so Teel didn’t get around to decoding and reading the Peking message until after midnight. She read it twice, very slowly, memorizing everything, then she burned it and flushed the ashes away. At one twenty she called William Buffalo. They made a meeting for two fifteen at an all-night cafeteria on Fordham Road in the Bronx.

  “You surprise me every time,” Buffalo said. “I never seen you in a rush before.”

  “It’s just a trick, William,” Teel said easily. “I’m always in a hurry. Now, I got bad news and I got good news. Which you want first?”

  “I take the bad for the hurt and the good to make it better,” he grinned. He looked more frightening when he smiled; a trick of light.

  “I am going to give you two head bookkeepers, William. My own fellows.”

  “Hey! Anything you say is okay, but I got my own bookkeeper, y’know, Dawes, Binchy Dawes. I trust him. Y’ don’t trust me?”

  “You’re a good man.”

  “But—how come? You think you not gettin’ a count?”

  “Oh, I know the count is for true. You been solid. Nothing like that.”

  “Then–what?”

  “The what is that the good news is so good that the takings are going to get so much bigger and fatter and sweeter that, just as insurance, because we all only human after all, I want my own two head bookkeepers counting it as it come in and go out. Why, the good news is so good, my bookkeepers may want to put their own bookkeepers to check on them.”

  Buffalo chuckled as if he were doing an imitation of a man he had just strangled. “I never thought things could get better’n they is right now. Hey, how are my boys and girls doin’ out there somewheres?”

  “Who?”

  “You know—them ones who done time for armed robbery.”

  “They’re fine. Okay?”

  “Sure. What else is good news?”

  “The competition—Palladino, the Sicilian big one—is selling for thirty-one thousand a keye shoreside what he got for six thousand.”

  “Six thousand? No way.”

  “Oh, yes. Palladino has a clean connection out of Formosa backed by high brass out of the old MACV and the CIA is muling it for them.”

  “You lost me. I mean—that’s good news?”

  “It could work out. Find me the best shit chemist there is, like a Corsican. I don’t care what you pay him. Send him to the Sicilian. I want an inside man when we take over. Taking over, William B., is the good news.”

  Teel’s Rolls was parked around the corner from the cafeteria. Her chauffeur, Marty, who packed heat, held the door open.

  “Take it easy, Marty,” Teel said. “No rush. I got to think.”

  “You want to loop the island once, Miss Teel?” Teel liked to make the drive around the edges of Manhattan.

  “That’s it. Let’s loop it.” She got in and Marty closed the door. She didn’t talk to the driver. As the car started she settled back in the darkness to think about how she wanted to handle Hobart Willmott Simms.

  27

  October 1971

  When she was ready to be released from de-briefing for guerrilla training, Enid was billeted with the American cadre in the buildings called Camp Barbara Fritchie. There were five American women installed in the dormitory who had been released from de-briefing two days before Enid arrived. They were less well oriented than Enid because so much more work had gone into putting her together by the Chinese neuro-psychiatrists. Enid’s psyche had been rearranged nicely. She felt deeply at home at Fritchie, eager to learn how to kill.

  The other women were: two blacks, Janie Bossle Weems and Sally Winn, thirty and twenty-six; a Rhode Island-born Filipina named Chelito Gurma, twenty-four; a kinetic New York radical named Zelda Gussow, twenty-five; a New Orleans woman called Fantome Duloissier, thirty-one. They all had records for armed robbery and assault. Weems and Winn had been lady Marines. Gussow and Duloissier had been WACs. Gurma was a special case.

  “Fantome?” Enid said. “Are you kidding me?”

  “So what the hell is your name, sister?”

  “Sister?” Enid said, greatly amused. “Are you playing the Wallace Beery part?”

  “Listen, whatta you want here? You want trouble here?”

  “Where?”

  “Whatta you mean where?”

  Winn said, “If you gotta mix it get it over. We got work.”

  “You ast me if I’m kiddin’ about my name?” Duloissier said shrilly. She wheeled to glare at the other girls. “She’s
makin’ fun of my name! What else have I got since I lost my looks?” She pulled a switchblade knife out of the pocket of the work suit. Enid didn’t wait for any further explanation. She stepped out of her shoes and struck Duloissier at the bridge of the nose with a double flying side-kick known to Enid’s trainers at Langley as yoko-tobi-geri. After the fast double kick, Enid withdrew her leg instantly to maintain her balance when she landed beside her shoes into which she immediately slipped her feet again.

  “Say, you real good at that,” Winn said.

  “I hate knives,” Enid explained.

  “I think you broke her nose,” Chelito said. “Wow—what a mess.”

  “I’ll get her over to the infirmary,” Enid said. “All she needed was a broken nose. She looked too much like Khrushchev as it was.”

  “Jane Bossle and me gone witchew,” Winn said. “In case they make any fuss.”

  They dragged Duloissier outside to the hand truck that had carried Enid’s gear to the dormitory and threw her into it. They rolled the cart across the compound.

  “Where’d you learn to fight with the feet?” Winn asked.

  “My brother showed it to me.”

  “Well, you gotta show me.”

  “Me, too,” Weems said. “That is one fuckin’ great stunt.”

  “Oh, they’ll be teaching it here,” Enid said. “There’s no getting around that.”

  Duloissier was brought around by the corpsman and taped up. Nobody asked any questions. Duloissier held no grudge. “It’s the twelfth time I broke it,” she said. “I’d sell the fuckin’ thing if I could get anything for it, for all the good it ever did me. Jesus, when I think of some of the things I hadda smell wit’ it, I don’t know why I ever kept it.”

  “No kidding,” Enid said earnestly, “did your parents really name you Fantome?”

  “I got it out of a paperback,” Duloissier said. “My real name is Jenny. For Janine.”