1966 - You Have Yourself a Deal Read Online Free Page A

forty-six years, came into the small room Forrester had put at Dorey’s disposal. With Dorey was O’Halloran.
    “Well?” Dorey asked, getting to his feet.
    “She’s Erica Olsen, Kung’s mistress,” Wolfert said. “I’ve seen his initials on his various possessions too often to mistake the marks on this woman. This is a very special kind of tattoo . . . a special colour, almost impossible to fake.”
    Dorey looked sharply at this man who was considered to be the top expert in Chinese customs.
    “Almost?”
    “I suppose a very clever tattoo artist could just fake it, but I doubt it. I’m covering myself.” Wolfert’s fat face lit up with a knowing smile. “No one can ever be absolutely certain, but I am willing to bet my pension she is Kung’s mistress.”
    Dorey looked at O’Halloran.
    “Watch her, Tim. I’ll have to alert Washington. I can’t do anything without their say-so.” He rubbed his forehead as he thought. “More delay, but this could be something big. I’ll get back to the Embassy.”
    “You don’t have to worry about her,” O’Halloran said. “She’ll f be right here, safe and sound, when you want her.”
    But he was not to know that in a few hours Malik would be arriving in Paris. Even when Malik finally arrived, the Divisional Head of M.I.6 was so furious that his man had been knocked on the head and had lost Malik that he neglected to warn O’Halloran that the most dangerous of Russian agents was now roaming, unwatched around Paris. Had O’Halloran known this, he would have guarded Erica Olsen more closely. But he didn’t know. He assumed a patrolling guard, armed with an automatic rifle, was good enough.
    But when dealing with Malik, nothing was good enough.
    A few minutes after 6 p.m., a delicately built youth walked into Sadu Mitchell’s shop. He carried a small suitcase, shabby with metal corners, the kind of suitcase a door-to-door salesman would use. His complexion was unhealthy, the colour and texture of dead, stale fish and his small, black eyes flicked to right and left with the suspicious restlessness of a man who trusts no one. He could have been twenty-five, even thirty, but was in fact eighteen.
    His coal-black hair was cropped close and lay over his small head like a skullcap. His movements were as supple and as sinuous as those of a snake.
    Jo-Jo Chandy had been born in Marseilles. His father had been a waterside pimp: his mother unknown. When he was ten years old, his father had been killed in a knife fight. This hadn’t bothered Jo-Jo. He was glad to be free and he soon made a reasonable I living working as a drummer for a Negro prostitute whose sexual technique gained her Jo-Jo’s admiration and many clients. When he had saved enough money, he decided Paris would offer many more opportunities for his evil talents. But here, for a time, he found he was mistaken. The police were unsympathetic to pimps and after being arrested and beaten up several times, he gave up and took a job in a Chinese restaurant as a plongeur. Here he met a Chinese girl: one of Yet-Sen’s agents. She was quick to recognise in this thin, vicious boy a potential and useful weapon. Yet-Sen took charge of him. Jo-Jo received training and money. A year later, he became one of Yet-Sen’s most reliable hatchet men.
    Completely amoral, with no sense of right or wrong, Jo-Jo existed only for money. There was no task, no matter how dangerous or vicious, that he hesitated to undertake providing the final reward was money. Life for him was the spin of the roulette wheel. His philosophy was what you put in you took out, and never mind the risk.
    Pearl Kuo, who was completing a sale of jade to a fat American woman wearing an absurd flowered hat and an equally absurd pair of bejewelled spectacles, looked for a brief moment at Jo-Jo as he came into the shop. She knew who he was. His arrival excited her. At last, she thought, Sadu was to take an active part in the Chinese movement: something she had