The Death Bird Contract by Philip Atlee

Author:Philip Atlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

Man, everybody wants to go home.

With three pipes of good opium in me, my head drowsy and my limbs heated, it seemed entirely natural for me to be nursed by this splendidly endowed lady from Hanoi. I may even have curled up my toes a trifle in an attempt to achieve the fetal position. But alas! No matter where you go, the destroyer of the dream follows.

“My!” said a cool, admiring voice. “It must be a real chore to burp him.”

I opened my eyes and saw Jannina looking down at us, her hands akimbo on her hips. Danielle van Doc deftly retrieved her ivory breast and sacked it up again. And I was pushing up to explain to Jannina when she walked out of the smoking chamber and into the room where the cocktail party was going on. Prince Hassan was smiling faintly, adjusting his splendid headdress, and the other smokers got up from their quilted pads and prepared to leave, their eyes serene.

When I reentered the other room, the talk was more lively and animated, which was natural because the smoker had lasted two hours. Another obvious factor was the story, gleefully whispered, of my adoption by Miss van Doc. Raton Mojica, the welterweight fighter, gave me the victory sign and kissed the bare shoulders of his showgirl, and squat General Salazar was smiling broadly into his silver tankard.

Jannina was standing between Lewis Wardlaw and Prince Hassan, and as I approached she ignored me pointedly. Wardlaw, his slight ambassadorial smile in evidence, asked if I wouldn’t like a drink. He had a ’55 Taittinger Blanc, which was quite decent. I nodded, and almost immediately a waiter was bowing before me. His small tray held only the fluted glass of champagne and a damask napkin.

Somebody has organized this man’s life to a precise science, I thought. He can even hold a revel in a mountain catacomb, with this many people, and make every catering need look easy. What was more important still, he could manage these logistics of pleasure with an almost unbelievable affront to the Mexican dead, in what is probably the strongest bastion of the Catholic faith, the city of Guanajuato in the State of Guanajuato, locked in the mountains of central Mexico.

I sipped my champagne, regarded Jannina, and her glance flicked across me. Wardlaw, with easy affability, was explaining the location of the Mexican oil fields to Prince Hassan, occasionally slipping into fluent French. The tall Arab was trigger-sharp in his responses, and his English was Establishment.

I wasn’t much interested in the Prince, however. Because unless he was one of the Kuwaiti Salims, he was just another arrogant mongrel who practiced mindless feudal judgment, cutting the hands off petty thieves while his own innumerable sex-idiot cousins were squandering millions in the pursuit of dubious pleasures. Thinking that we had gotten maximum mileage out of our invitation, and not wanting to rush our admission to Wardlaw’s coterie of pleasure seekers, I finished my glass of champagne and held it out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.