Deadlier Than The Male by Henry Reymond - Chapter 01
1967 Genre: Vintage Sleaze / Spy Guy
IF YOU WANT
TO GET AN OIL CONCESSION, MURDER THE MAN WHO OWNS IT.
Try a plane crash, a fake suicide, death by a small bomb. There're lots of ways.
When too many magnates suddenly die, BULLDOG DRUMMOND follows a couple of gorgeous assassins into the country of an oil-rich playboy king.
The king boards a pleasure boat loaded with ladies—at least one of them lethal—while Drummond gains entry to a strange fortress.
What happens between Drummond, a sneering arch-villain, and the house harem winds up in the most grotesque, macabre death duel since Goldfinger.
Chapter 01
If you had ever been privileged to find yourself suddenly standing in the office of the president of Keller Oil, you would have felt at once that there was something decidedly odd about it. But you would have been unlikely, most unlikely, to realize what it was.
However, the chances of anyone unauthorized ever getting into the holy of holies that was the office of the president of Keller Oil were about as good as a snowflake's chance in hell. When someone is as powerful a figure in the world of high finance and giant industry as Henry Keller, their immediate surroundings are pretty sacrosanct. Their private office is not exactly the place any Tom, Dick, or Harry just wanders into. Even Sir Tom and Sir Harry would need to make an appointment through Keller's considerable secretarial office, and they might well have to wait a good while till they got to see the great man himself.
The president of Keller Oil is one of the powerful figures of the world. And the powerful figures of the world know they need protection and go to extensive lengths to make sure they have it.
Yet, if by some strange chance you were standing there on the thick carpet that stretched from corner to corner of the deeply comfortable, heavily paneled, plushly furnished office, you would have that faint feeling of unease. There would be something unexplained. Perhaps something to do with the fact that for all the luxury of the furnishings there was not a single window in the office. Which might be just the whim of Henry Keller. When you are president of a concern as mighty and impregnable as Keller Oil, you are entitled to a high ration of whims.
Watching Mr. Keller, seated at his enormous, glossily sleek desk, with the heavy tooled-leather blotter in front of him and the discreet, weighty, gold-gleaming desk furniture all in its appointed place, you could well believe he had his whims and indulged them to the hilt.
For instance, it pleased him when the door opened very quietly and smoothly not to show by the least sign that he was aware that a young personal assistant had stepped into the room. The young man padded across to the desk without apparently making the least sound. One of the things you learned first of all, when you joined the immediate entourage of the president of Keller Oil, was the simple art of moving from place to place within the great man's hearing without making the least noise.
So, without any noticeable sound the young man went and stood beside the desk, silently waiting. After a minute and a half had gone by in complete silence, with the head of Keller Oil apparently deeply absorbed in a confidential report, quite suddenly and without the least warning, he held out his right hand. At once the personal assistant handed him the message he carried on a stiff sheet of white paper.
All along Henry Keller had been well aware of everything that had been going on. This was a Henry Keller whim.
He liked to play this little trick at every moment of the day, the trick of pretending not to know what was happening while being perfectly aware of everything. Just a personal idiosyncrasy. But a key to his character all the same: Henry Keller was the sort of man it would take a very slick operator to deceive.
Now, Keller glanced at the message on the small sheet of paper. One quick glance, and immediately the contents were absorbed, reflected upon, noted for action. Mr. Keller reached out a pudgy hand, its nails assiduously manicured, and gently touched the button of the desk intercom, no gimcrack affair in metal and plastic, but a discreet and beautifully worked little box in the finest inlaid woods.
With hardly a second's delay, a voice from the outer office spoke.
"Sir?"
That was the way Henry Keller liked it. The one quick answering word-brief, to the point, and very deferential.
He answered in a tone every bit as businesslike.
"Beirut? How long?"
You could not have conveyed what you wanted to know in fewer words. And the reply, which came back as promptly as the first answer, was equally terse.
"One hour, twenty-two minutes, sir."
Mr. Keller glanced from the little gold grille of the intercom microphone across to the young man waiting silently and absolutely still on the other side of the big desk.
"Get Hardacre on the phone."
The word please was seldom on Mr. Keller's lips. Mr. Keller did not ask; he ordered. He rarely moved in the world where anybody had to ask for anything. He kept himself very much to himself, in his own little universe where everybody was only too delighted to do what he wanted, without any nonsense about receiving a polite request.
The young assistant did make some slight concession to the ordinary conventions of human behavior at this point.
To Mr. Keller's abrupt order, he replied with perhaps more words than were absolutely necessary.
"Yes, Mr. Keller," he said.
The personal assistant padded across the thick carpet of the office and was out of the door within seconds. "Moving the Keller way" his immediate senior in the organization had called it when he had first given him his instructions on the day when he had been admitted to the higher reaches of the organization. And he knew enough, and respected the size of his salary check enough, to have learned that lesson well.
The outer office to the president's personal office at the headquarters of Keller Oil was a surprisingly small room.
It was carpeted less luxuriously than the president's own office, and here there was no effort to conceal the efficient working of metal and plastic behind smoothly veneered woods. Here efficiency came first.
It came first even in the trim little secretary who sat at her neat desk, ready at any instant to be there on the other end of the intercom when Henry Keller's finger touched the ivory button at his side. Efficiency came first, but when it was a question of working in the president's office at Keller Oil, you could always find someone who combined· a high degree of efficiency with a large measure of sheer feminine attractiveness.
The secretary was just such a combination.
No doubt the young man, who came out of Mr. Keller's presence with the faintest sigh of relief, would have liked' to take his time crossing that outer office. But Mr. Keller had given an order. The young man walked through the outer office as if it had been as bare as a prison cell.
The door facing that of Mr. Keller's private office was a heavy metal sliding affair. The young man put his hand in the recessed handle and with an effort slid the door open.
At once he was met with a deep roar of sound.
And the mystery of Mr. Keller's deeply carpeted, heavily furnished, plush, windowless personal office was at once explained. That vibrant, contained roar of sound could come from only one source-the four powerful engines of a large aircraft.
The personal office of the president of Keller Oil was not situated at any one point of the globe-not in New York where the organization sold many million dollars' worth of oil every year; not in London, where more huge sales were conducted and where tankers ploughing steadily over the seven seas were watched over with loving care; not in the Middle East where a great many oil wells were worked night and day for the benefit of Mr. Keller; not at any fixed point anywhere-but in the air. The head of Keller Oil kept on the move. His office, for all its luxury fittings which rivaled and exceeded those of any other business president, was simply one section of a well-maintained, silver-gleaming Boeing 707.
In Mr. Keller's own office only the faintest feeling of unease would tell you that most of the time you were several thousand feet up in the air. In the office of Mr. Keller's secretary you might realize that you were in a plane, if you ever had time to think about it. Mr. Keller's secretary was allowed two portholes, one on either side of the room.
Beyond the sliding door that led out of her office you would have no doubt whatever where you were. There was the noise for one thing, droning, powerful, insistent, never-ending.
And nothing in the way of ornament or luxury was allowed to get in the way of flying the airplane with that very high degree of efficiency Mr. Keller demanded, and got. So, through the pulsating roar of the engines came the almost continuous voice of the aircraft's radio operator as he pinpointed their position, checked and double-checked, and made sure that nothing went astray with the business of transporting the head of Keller Oil to whatever part of the world he wanted to visit next.
Functional, too, was the galley, which came between the secretary's office and the flight deck at the front of the plane. It contained everything that could possibly be needed to maintain the comfort and well-being of Henry Keller. It also made a few concessions to the necessity of feeding the people who looked after Mr. Keller.
But there was no doubt about which came first. There was the blender for making Mr. Keller's ultra-fresh orange juice.
There was the brightly polished array of beaten copper Turkish coffee saucepans, necessary because every now and again Mr. Keller liked his after-dinner coffee that way. There was the delicate Kang Hsi tea service and the canisters of the China tea that especially tickled Mr. Keller's palate on the odd occasions when the president of Keller Oil took it into his head to drink tea.
But there was one item in the galley which, though functional enough, was decidedly something to be appreciated for looks alone: the air hostess who was preparing Mr. Keller's mid-morning coffee.
She was dressed in the uniform of the Keller Organization, which, though chic as only a couturier-designed uniform can be, might have looked a little military on anyone else. On this girl, an out-of-this-world ash blonde, it seemed only to add to the femininity of her appearance.
Mr. Keller's personal assistant had even more of a struggle to stick to the path of duty as he slid past her in the passageway on his mission to the radio operator to get Mr. Keller his phone call to Hardacre. His devotion to duty was rewarded by a brief smile from the hostess. As he entered the flight deck his thoughts were not on Mr. Keller's business.
But they quickly returned to it. He leaned over the navigating table where the radio operator was busy making sure that Mr. Keller was at exactly the spot he wanted to be.
"Mr. Keller wants London," he said.
Without a word, the radio operator turned to his instruments and began to make the necessary adjustments. Beyond him the pilot and copilot sat silently at their controls. In another plane they might have turned round for a moment and indulged in a little backchat to pass the time away. But this was Henry Keller's plane. Backchat was out.
In the galley the ash-blonde hostess glanced at the chronometer in the row of dials above the big microwave cooker.
Time to take Mr. Keller his coffee. It was already prepared, just as be liked it. The Danish Bing and Grondahl coffee pot contained exactly the right quantity at exactly the right color, and beside it was the cup Mr. Keller always used. In the sugar bowl were the fawn-colored crystals specially sent from London to wherever Mr. Keller's plane was due to take on fresh supplies. The blonde slid open the door into the secretary's office, picked up the tray, and went in.
As soon as the secretary saw her, she darted up, scurried round her desk, and quietly opened Mr. Keller's door. The hostess gave her the same fleeting smile she had given Mr. Keller's personal assistant, and with a sleek swaying motion went into the room. Behind her the secretary gently closed the door.
Without a word and walking as silently as the personal assistant, though with an altogether different effect, the hostess crossed the office and rested the coffee tray on the desk at exactly the angle, and in the precise position, that she had once, and only once, been instructed that Mr. Keller liked it.
The shadow of her figure fell across the tooled-leather blotter in front of Mr. Keller as she poured the first cup of milky, aromatic coffee.
By not the slightest sign or motion did he indicate that he was aware that the girl had even entered the room.
She went, quietly as ever, to the sideboard, a fine piece of seventeenth-century Dutch marquetry work, and slid open the top left-hand drawer. She took out a cigar box containing the rarest Havanas from Communist Cuba. Political considerations worried Mr. Keller only when they intruded on business deals.
The next move in the routine of presenting the president of Keller Oil with the bodily comforts he required at this exact stage of the morning was as clearly laid down as all the preceding ones. A solitary cigar from the box was to be placed on an eighteenth-century French silver salver that stood on top of the marquetry sideboard. It was then to be carried over, together with a cigar cutter and five long matches, to the desk.
Why then did the blonde deftly flip open the box as usual but fail to take out a cigar? Why from the pocket in her uniform jacket did she extract a single cigar exactly the same in size, shape, and color as those in the box and place this, instead of one of the others, on the salver?