Grubkin’s face screwed up into a deep frown. “Picabia?”

  “Yes, comrade. And he was going to live in the mountains of Peru or maybe on the beach in Mexico. It was confusing. But who is Picabia? Is it an operational name?”

  “Never mind.” Grubkin walked over to the wall and pressed a red button. A few seconds later two security officers appeared at the door and Grubkin waved to them.

  “Is this necessary, comrade?” Iliana started talking fast. “Maybe it is only stress.”

  “Stress?” The astonishment was evident in the tone of his voice.

  “Yes, comrade. Filip, I mean Comrade Kozhevnikov said he was doing important work for the Party and the Service. Isn’t that true?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Kozhevnikov squeezed his eyes shut as tight as he could, desperately seeking to return to the dream, but it was no use. All he kept hearing were Grubkin’s words not anymore. He opened his eyes and saw the pair of security thugs standing in front of him. It was then that he realized that he had never really been dreaming at all, that all this was the beginning of a nightmare to come.

  * * * *

  “Assez piquant,” The Quiet Man with the cover name of Cuthwick told the waiter. Spicy, that was the way he always enjoyed his steak tartare. And it was always good at this restaurant. Kozhevnikov had not turned up for the meet at the appointed time and place or at the fall back location. There was nothing more they could do. And why should they even try? The ZIL limousine from the Soviet Embassy no longer made its weekly trip to the French Party headquarters to deposit and later collect the First Secretary. Undoubtedly, their operation had been a success. “And I think the Bordeaux has had enough time to breathe.”

  He said nothing while the server picked up the decanter and poured some of the Lynch-Bages 1982 into his glass and waited for the Quiet Man to sip it before pouring more. He waved languidly at the man, indicating to just go ahead and finish pouring. After adding wine to his glass and that of the young man sitting across the table from him, he set the decanter down and left.

  The young man picked up his glass and, holding it by the stem, swirled it expertly and sniffed at the rim. The Quiet Man did the same and then both of them sipped and let the liquid roll around on their palates and tongues before swallowing.

  “Excellent,” the Quiet Man said in his soft, quiet voice. “Long on the finish.”

  “Unlike our operation. Do you think Kozhevnikov is back in Moscow? They seemed to have gotten on to him rather quickly.”

  “What’s the longevity of a turned agent? Especially one who has fulfilled his purpose.” The Quiet Man regarded his glass of wine. “Saved us the trouble of grassing him, I suppose.”

  “What do you think he told them?”

  “Everything. In the end, they always tell them everything, at least everything that they know. Even if they don’t yet know they know it.”

  The young man whose operational name had been Geoffrey frowned. ‘Will they try and double him back on us?”

  The Quiet Man lifted a forkful of the raw filet mignon into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Moscow Center wouldn’t waste the effort of doubling a staff slave like Kozhevnikov. If he’s lucky, he’ll be sent to a military battalion in Afghanistan; if not, then ….” He let that thought hang in the air while he sipped some of his wine.

  “So Moscow Center believes that the Frenchy, Dubos, the Red that is the Party liaison with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, is a double agent?”

  The Quiet Man called Cuthwick took off his spectacles and polished them on the linen table napkin. “It is genetically impossible for them to think otherwise.” He smiled and placed his spectacles back on his face. The KGB mindset always worked in our favor. He would just sit back and let their paranoia do all the work. They would inform the Sandinistas and even the Cuban DGS that Dubos was an imperialist spy.

  “And what do you think will happen to him? Will Moscow inform the French Party?” His companion had a worried a look on his face. “Will he be hurt in all this?”

  “I imagine not. At least not in the usual way. Perhaps on his next trip to Nicaragua there will be a fatal accident or illness.”

  “And that’s the end of it?”

  “Good heavens, no. It’s just getting started; we’ll leak to the French press that Dubos was murdered by the Sandinistas on orders from Moscow. Then we’ll sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

  “Won’t the Russians retaliate against us?”

  The Quiet Man laughed. “Us? Just who are us? Kozhevnikov was convinced that we are British. After all, what could be more indicative of the Brits than the proper use of the subjunctive in speech? I’ll wager that somewhere between the extraction of the fourth and fifth molars without anesthesia, he has convinced his debriefers of the same. So if they go after anyone, it will be London. We’ve put a rather jolly good show, don’t you think?”

  “It would appear so. Certainly worth this bottle of wine.”

  The Quiet Man smiled again and held up his glass to the light. “Yes, it’s big-boned with plenty of flesh. Quite the treat. Now let’s finish this bottle and order another.”

  What the Quiet Man, smug with success, didn’t realize was that he might have had an even better treat, also big-boned with plenty of flesh. For there had been Iliana, the gatekeeper to the residentura’s strongroom and all its treasure. A woman smitten with a hapless dreamer and who would have done anything to be with him. Iliana, who had her own rude awakening and who, through no fault of her own, had joined her dear Filip in the dank subcellars of the Lubyanka where she was now telling her interrogators about all her dreams. d

  Stan Trybulski, author of One Trick Pony and other crime novels, was a Brooklyn felony trial prosecutor before he went into private practice. Before he entered the legal profession, he was a newspaper reporter, college administrator and bartender (not all at the same time). He now divides his time between France and “two acres of Connecticut tranquility.”

  THE TAHITIAN POWDER BOX MYSTERY

  by James Holding

  CLASSIC REPRINT DEPARTMENT

  INTRODUCTION

  “The Tahitian Powder Box Mystery” was originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1964. It is part of the “Leroy King” series by James Holding—which features writing partners Martin Leroy and King Danforth (who bear a striking similarity to the writing team of the “Ellery Queen” mysteries, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee)! Martin & King travel the world, vacationing with their wives, and solve mysteries along the way. The titles sound like Ellery Queen novels, too—“The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery,” “The Norwegian Apple Mystery,” etc.

  EQMM’s then-editor, none other than Frederic Dannay himself, must have enjoyed the Leroy King stories quite a bit…he published ten of them over the years, and even hired Holding to ghost-write the “Ellery Queen, Jr.” young adult mysteries. (James Holding, Samuel McCoy, and Frank Belknap Long wrote the whole 11-book E.Q., Jr. series between the three of them.)

  The bare bones of Holding’s life are well documented: born James Clark Carlisle Holding, Jr. on April 27, 1907, in Ben Avon, Pennsylvania. Parents: James Clark Carlisle (an engineer) and Laura May Holding (née Krepps). Died: age 89, from a stroke, on March 30, 1997.

  Holding was, by all reports, a bright, ambitious, energetic youth. He attended Yale University, where he was a member of the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity, and graduated with an A.B. in 1928. After graduation, he spent a year exploring Europe. When he returned home, he took a sales job, but soon found a more creative calling in advertising as junior copywriter for the ad company Batte, Barton, Durstine & Osborne in Pittsburgh. In 1931, he married Janet Spice, with whom he had two children, James C.C. Holding III (1933-2010) and Donald Angus Holding (1937-1953).

  His career in advertizing proved successful. He rose swiftly in the ranks to copywriter, then in 1944 became copy chief. He created such advertising slogans as “Fort Pitt, That’s It!” for Fort Pitt Beer. In 1952, he became vice-president of BBD&O.

  Tragedy struck in 1953, with the death of his second son, Donald, in a beach accident while vacationing in Canada. The boy was only 16. James Holding took it hard, and it affected his advertising work. Ultimately he stepped down as Vice President from BBD&O (though he would remain as a consultant for the next decade). Instead, he focused his attention on a lifelong dream—a career as a writer. He set about it with the same drive and determination which made him a successful advertising executive, and the results of his labors were immediate: 1959 saw the sales of his first nine short stories, starting with “An Accident in Honiaria,” which appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and “The Treasure of Pachacamac,” which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (both published in June 1960). He also cracked the lucrative children’s picture-book market with The Lazy Little Zulu (beautifully illustrated by Aliki Brandenberg), his first hardcover, in 1962. More than 250 short stories and poems and 20 children’s books would follow.

  Mystery stories were his forté when writing for adults. He published prolifically in all the leading magazines of the day: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, The Saint Mystery Magazine, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, and many others. Often he had stories in several simultaneously.

  He created a number of long-running series over his 30-year career. “The Photographer” series features Manuel Andradas, a Brazilian hitman who disguises himself as a photographer. Andradas is a moral (relatively) killer, who doesn’t always carry out his assignments to the letter. But you can believe the person he ultimately kills is the one who really deserved it.

  Holding won the John Masefield Poetry Prize and the John Hubbard Curtis Poetry Prize twice. He and wife Janet “retired” (though writers never really retire!) to Sarasota, Florida, in 1971, but returned to Pennsylvania in 1991 when their health began to fail. The couple spent their last years at the Sherwood Oaks Retirement Home.

  James Holding’s last mystery story, “A Visitor to Monbasa,” was published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in June, 1992—exactly 32 years after his first professional appearance there. It is a fitting coda to a long and distinguished career in the mystery field.

  In early 2015, Wildside Press purchased James Holding’s copyrights from his daughter-in-law and has been working to reissue his work. A complete collection of the “Leroy King” series is forthcoming from Crippen & Landru in 2017.

  —John Betancourt

  * * * *

  From a porthole on the Valhalla’s sundeck a bare, slender, human arm suddenly appeared, thrust outward from the shoulder. The hand at the end of the arm tilted a round shallow box and dumped the contents casually into the purple swells that sucked at the ship’s seaward side as she lay alongside the dock in Papeete.

  Then the arm withdrew, having first paused briefly to tap the cardboard container against the ship’s side and thus dislodge the final clinging grains of the box’s contents.

  Nobody saw this happen the first time.

  But on the upper sundeck, directly above the porthole, the Danforths and Leroys stood at the ship’s rail, raptly regarding the spectacular Tahitian sunset that was now painting the sky behind Moorea with gold and vermilion. And Helen Leroy, sniffing delicately, said, “You may not believe it, but this is absolutely the first perfumed sunset I ever saw. Or smelled, rather.”

  “Perfumed?” her husband asked absently, watching the changing colors of sky and sea.

  “Yes, perfumed. Don’t you smell it?”

  “I do,” Carol Danforth said, also sniffing. “And it’s not any cheap, tawdry, domestic perfume, either. That’s Chanel Number Five in my opinion. And my opinion is pretty expert!”

  King Danforth said, “Are you out of your mind? Tahiti is reputedly romantic, I admit. But perfumed sunsets!”

  “I smell it, too,” Leroy said with surprise. “Take a deep breath, King. The girls are right.”

  Danforth followed instructions. “So l smell something nice,” he conceded. “Flowers on the island perhaps? Frangipani? Jasmine?”

  “That’s Chanel Number Five,” Carol insisted. And sneezed.

  Martin Leroy sneezed, too. “Chanel, maybe,” he said then, “but powder, not perfume. Look. That’s what’s making us sneeze.”

  He pointed to a mist of fine particles being lifted in a fragrant cloud over the rail by a gentle updraft of the sunset breeze.

  Danforth said, “Somebody must be jettisoning bath powder out of her porthole somewhere below us.”

  “Who’d throw away Chanel powder, I’d like to know?” Helen said indignantly. “Let me look.” She stretched up on her toes and leaned out over the rail. They all stared downward.

  As they watched, an arm and hand emerged from the porthole below them and emptied the contents of a box into the sea. A light cloud of powder quickly dispersed on the air. When the arm withdrew, Leroy said, “That’s one way to cut your inventory in a hurry.”

  “If you don’t care about your overhead,” quipped Danforth as Leroy sneezed once more.

  “I think it’s a vulgar gesture,” Helen said. “Why not just quietly put the box of powder in her cabin wastebasket if she wants to get rid of it?” She turned to Carol. “I wonder who she is?”

  Carol tossed her dark head. “I’ll count the portholes from the back of the ship and find out,” she said.

  “Later,” Danforth interposed. He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got to get moving. The dinner tour for Les Tropiques is supposed to gather on the dock right now.”

  “Then let’s go,” Leroy said with enthusiasm. “We don’t want to miss the dancing girls!”

  * * * *

  The Tahitian dancing girls were very good. Even Helen and Carol admired their grace, sinuosity, and curiously Caucasian beauty. And the dinner at Les Tropiques restaurant was very good, too.

  Their table was set in a corner of the wide terrace that faced the lagoon. As they ate, darkness gradually dimmed the outlines of the terrace and hid the faint line of white surf breaking over the reef, far out. Down the coast to their right, festive strings of colored lights marked the Valhalla at her pier. At full dark, native boys with torches in their hands came and lighted oil lamps around the edges of the terrace to illuminate the wild, hip-swaying movements of the Tahitian dance troupe.

  Danforth breathed a sigh of purest satisfaction and said, “I never thought I’d live to see the day that a travel folder understated the case for a tourist attraction.”

  “I take it you like Tahiti,” Helen said, laughing. She looked at the dancers in their grass skirts and straw bras, their bare golden flesh burnished by the leaping flare of the oil lamps, and she smiled at Carol.

  “Like it?” said Danforth. “It gets me right here.” He tapped his chest.

  John Rich, a fellow passenger from the Valhalla, was sitting at the next table with three loquacious widows. He leaned over and said with a grin, “I heard that, Mr. Danforth. And how right you are! Isn’t this great?” Rich was a bachelor, slim, dark-eyed, fortyish, with formal good manners but a slightly raffish air. He was very popular with the Valhalla passengers, especially the unattached women. It was rumored he had been the chauffeur-houseman of a recently deceased Detroit industrialist who had remembered him generously in his will. This cruise, the ship’s gossip ran, was in the nature of a celebration of his newfound independence.

  Leroy replied, “It’s great, all right. We can’t afford to go too far overboard, though—not with our wives sitting here with us!”

  Rich laughed and indicated his table companions. “I haven’t got a wife,” he said, “but my harem, here, is trying to make me put on the brakes. I’ve already warned them that I’m striking out on my own right after dinner!”

  “Good hunting,” Leroy said.

  The dinner party broke up just then in a burst of applause for the native dancers.

  * * * *

  Quinn’s, the most famous saloon in the South Seas, was a madhouse when they arrived some time later. Almost every able-bodied passenger from the Valhalla was there, it seemed, and a raucous mob of French, Polynesians, Melanesians, Orientals, and mixtures thereof swelled the uproar. Everybody in the place appeared to be either laughing shrilly, shouting for drinks, beating beer glasses on the scarred table tops, singing drunkenly, or publicly romancing the unashamed native B-girls.

  The Danforths and Leroys found a table as far from the bar as possible and ordered stingers.

  They were no sooner seated than Carol said, “There’s John Rich over there.”

  They looked across the wide room and saw John Rich standing at the end of the bar. He was talking to a barefooted Polynesian girl clad in a low-cut island dress of figured red cotton. The girl’s long straight hair poured down her back like a black waterfall.

  “He’s found himself a Polynesian houri, I see,” Leroy said dreamily. “And not bad, either!”

  Danforth said, “You know what? That girl with Rich is one of the girls who were selling flowers on the porch of Les Tropiques when we came out.”

  “You must have studied her with considerable care to be able to recognize her across a mad place like this at forty paces,” Helen teased him. “For the life of me, I can’t see what’s so terribly attractive to you men about bare feet and long straight black hair.” Helen was an ethereally lovely blonde.

  “Bare feet!” Leroy laughed. “Are her feet bare, too?”

  Danforth said, “She reminds me of something.”

  “Of what?” This was from Carol. “Whistler’s mother?”

  With studied restraint Danforth answered, “No, but something rather curious. After dinner I waited on the porch of Les Tropiques while you three visited the washrooms, remember? John Rich came out of the restaurant while I was waiting. He stopped on the porch and said something to that girl he’s with over there. She was selling flowers then.”