THE SPY WHO WOULDN’T DIE
Steve - the Man from O.R.G.Y.-Victor was dead. Sure he was. International villains had finally killed him. The hapless, bumbling, but fantastically successful superspy was stone-cold.
Sure.
But as long as there was a warm female body around, Steve Victor just couldn’t act like a corpse!
He had too much else to do. He had his most important assignment to date: to eliminate the free world’s most sinister, most insidious enemy. And all those swinging chicks in Hollywood looked like something to live for. . ..
The trouble was that Steve’s unique talents didn’t seem to count for much on the swinging -but distracting, and definitely dangerous- Sunset Strip. . ..
Topless? You haven't seen anything...yet!
WARM WELCOME
So this was Hollywood . . .
Misty Milo, in that transparent nightie, was somewhere in the darkened room. And the figure following her was entering from the lanai. Moonlight glinted off the barrels of the two guns he was carrying. I shrank down in bed, trying to make as small a target of myself as possible.
It didn’t work. A lamp flicked on, glaring like a spotlight. The beam caught me in the eyes, blinding me.
“You!” The voice behind the guns sounded savage. “Steve Victor !” My name came out sounding like a death sentence.
Hollywood, they say, is a state of mind. My own state of mind was something else again. Bluntly, I felt insecure!
ROOM AT THE TOPLESS
THE MAN FROM O.R.G.Y.
Ted Mark
1967
CHAPTER ONE
DEATH, where is thy sting? In the damnedest places, let me tell you! When a man is dead, he comes up against a slew of problems that the non-dead never encounter. They are problems peculiar to his unalive condition, so to speak. For instance.
The bank won’t honor his checks. The Post Oflice doesn’t forward his mail. Old friends turn pale when he appears. His Diners’ Club card is invalid. He feels alienated from the society of live people around him. There are difliculties in relating to others. Sex becomes a problem - despite the intrinsic advantages of rigor mortis. And, of course, his life insurance is no longer in force.
In my business, that last mentioned is a real hardship. Like, there are times when my line of work is very dangerous indeed. Or, perhaps I shouldn’t say my “line of work.” Perhaps I should say my “avocation.” My work, you see, is sex - which may, or may not be perilous. My sideline, however, is espionage and that’s always in the high-risk column when they’re tabulating the probabilities.
To be more specific, by profession I’m a sex investigator. My name is Steve Victor and I’m sometimes known as the man from O.R.G.Y. The initials stand for Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth. It’s a Kinsey-like, one-man outfit which is subsidized by various foundations interested in rounding out sociological studies of different cultures with data relating to the sex mores and practices of those cultures. I’m considered something of an expert in my field. At least I was before my untimely death.
For a few years before that time I also served another function. I was a top secret agent for the U. S. government. My hush-hush career began in Damascus and ended violently in Washington, D.C. Two factors had been responsible for my I-spy activities. The first was my legitimate occupation, which afforded me valuable connections in the international nether world of sex and gained me entry into erotic places where the ordinary agent might have found himself barred. The second was the high value placed upon my services by Mr. Charles Putnam.
The name is an alias, the man an enigma. He lives somewhere in the wall between the State Department and the CIA, some place deep in the cracks where the plaster of espionage mixes with the putty of diplomacy, some crevice where he can crawl out of the woodwork to wave a flag at me when the occasion demands. He’d waved that flag in Washington, and the result had been a funeral - my funeral.
We’d attended it together, Putnam and I. The turnout had been disappointingly small, but nevertheless the eulogy had left me all choked up. Not so Putnam. His craggy, Mafia victim's face had remained stony throughout the services. No hint of a sigh had shaken his bulky frame. He was as emotionless in the face of my demise as his steel-gray hair and the Homburg he wore. His attitude said there was no place for grief in either espionage or diplomacy.
I'd dropped a handful of dirt onto my coffin and followed Putnam from the cemetery. Back in the crummy furnished room where, as per Putnam’s instructions, I'd been hiding out, I peeled off the disguise necessary to my attending my interment. We then proceeded to reconstruct the situation and make plans for future action.
The situation. Briefly, it was this: As a counterespionage stroke of genius, the Russians had contrived a double for me, Steve Victor. This “double”-agent, real name unknown, called himself Victor Stevkovsky. (Americans, obviously, have no monopoly on corn.) He was like me in every respect. Our faces mirrored one another. Our physiques were athletic twins. Our voices--every inflection —were the same. Even our personalities—the way we laughed, the way we expressed anger or desire-were exactly alike. The Russians had come up with a bogus Steve Victor who was more like me than I was myself.
I’ll skip over all the havoc this raised; I’ve already related it elsewhere. Suffice it to say that in the course of impersonating me, Stevkovsky had made it necessary for Steve Victor (me) to kill Steve Victor (him). But to the world at large, it was the real Steve Victor who'd given up the ghost. And I (the real real Steve Victor), had had to disguise myself to go to my own funeral where I had watched Steve Victor (the phony) lowered into my grave.
Now the plan was for me to impersonate my impersonator. It was Putman’s plan, naturally. Just the sort of scheme you could depend on his convoluted brain to devise. At the moment, back in the cockroach haven he’d arranged as a hideout for me, Putnam explained what he hoped to accomplish by this reverse impersonation.
“By your pretending to be Stevkovsky pretending to be you,” he expounded, “we will gain our first real foothold in the Russian espionage network operating in the U. S. You will be in the unique position of being able to trace the threads of that network right to the top. If we can nail their top man, it will take the Russians a good two years to put together another operation in this country. And a two-year espionage lead on them is worth twenty diplomatic coups.”
“Do you have any sort of lead on that top man?” I asked.
“Not really. Our best information points to his operations center as being in Southern California. But we're not even sure he's a man. It could be a woman.”
“Why Southern California?”
“Lots of reasons. One you might not expect has to do with politics. The latest Commie strategy is to strengthen the right. Their theory is that the more of a stranglehold the fanatic right wing gets on the country, the more fertile will be the soil for eventual revolution. When extreme right-wing philosophy becomes official government policy, liberalism is frustrated. The frustrated liberal can conform - in which case he’s no longer a liberal—-or he can join forces with those to the left of him. Thus he’s pushed into radicalism and, eventually, Russian Communist radicalism. So-—covertly, of course—the Commies are all for the American Nazi Party, the Birchers, the Minutemen, and all the extremist groups and personalities that draw support from the far right."
“Wasn’t that the Commie theory in Germany before the Nazis? Didn’t it sort of backfire there?”
“Sure. I'm not agreeing with their thinking. I’m only explaining it. Communism recruits among the downtrodden. The further right the government, the more downtrodden there are from which to draw recruits. That's in line with basic Communist doctrine.”