“My friend is here,” she said, blushing.
“What friend are you talking about?” he demanded, and then Alys drifted by to whisper in his ear.
“The poor little thing wants a sanitary napkin,” she said. “Tell her they’re in the washrooms.”
“They’re in the washrooms, Brenda,” he said.
The girl nodded. “Some of the girls call it ‘my friend.’ I call it ‘my personal hygiene’ because that’s what it says on the bag in the bathroom in school.”
“So go to the washroom,” said Hake, patting her cautiously on%the shoulder; and then to Alys, “Why me?”
“Because you’re the father-surrogate, of course. I’m only a kind of elderly girl,” she said sympathetically. “Well. It’s going to be a long flight. I think I’ll see if I can catch some sleep.”
“Me too,” said Hake hopefully, surrendering his tray to a no longer smiling stew.
The hope never materialized. All through the five-hour flight Hake and the stews quelled insurrection. At least, Hake thought, toward the end of it, he was beginning to know some of them as individuals: Jimmy and Martin and Brenda; black Heidi and little blonde Tiffany; Michael, Mickey and Mike; the big, gentle, Buddha-like twelve-year- old, Sam-Wang; the three oldest girls, all from the little religious backwater of Ocean Grove. They all looked astonishingly alike, wedge-cut hairdos and disapproved lipstick and eye-shadow, but they were not related. One was named Grace, and one was named Pru, and the shortest and strongest and meanest of the three was named Demeter. Demeter was the one who swatted the youngest boys on the rear as they stretched across adult passengers to get at each other. Demeter and Grace finked to the Lufthansa stews when three of the junior-highs were smoking in the toilet. Demeter and Pru bribed the smaller ones to be quiet with the in-flight game kits. How splendid it all would have been, if only the Ocean Grovers had been doing it all to help Hake, instead of trying to soften him up for their own misdeeds: sharing drinks with the salesmen in the first-class lounge, making illicit dates with the male flight attendants. Through it all Alys slept like a baby, head on the shoulder of the Turkish Army officer in the seat next to her. But Hake didn’t sleep, and neither did the stews.
Eleven hours down, four hundred and fifty-nine to go. It was going to be a long trip.
They arrived at the immense, echoing Frankfurt-am-Main airport at two a.m., local time. Worst of all possible times: because of the time difference, the kids were not really quite ready for sleep; but they would have to be up and presenting marmosets to a Kinderhalle at nine that very morning. Hake kept the children whipped into line in the transit lounge while Alys, yawning prettily, sorted through the room assignments.
Somehow Hake got them all through Customs and into the main departure hall. There were no chairs, of course; but somehow he kept them from killing each other through the hour-long wait for their chartered bus; until the driver arrived, furiously complaining in German, finally managing to explain that he had been waiting outside in the parking lot for the past two hours. Somehow he got them into their rooms at the shiny big hotel, with the baggage approximately in the right rooms, or close enough. “I’ve put you in with Mickey and Sam-Wang,” Alys said, handing him keys. “Sam snores. And Mickey’s mother says he wets the bed if he isn’t got up at least twice during the night, so— Anyway, I’ve finished your room assignments for you, Horny,” she said virtuously. “Now I think I’d better tuck in myself. It’s been a long day. Oh, I’ve had to take an extra room. It wouldn’t be fair to the children to put any of them in with me, I’m so restless. I’d keep them up all night.”
He watched her sway gracefully into one of the exposed teardrop elevators, then sighed, finished signing the registration cards and counting the passports and followed to his own room.
He found the bed so delightful that he allowed himself to lie with his arms crossed behind his head for a while, enjoying the prospect of sleep before letting himself experience it. Sam-Wang’s snoring blended with the mutter of the air-conditioner and the distant yammer of someone’s TV set across the hall. At least his virtue was spared—no, not his virtue so much as his sense of professional morality; bird-dogging around European hotels with Alys would have seemed pretty attractive if he hadn’t been her marriage counselor. But if she wasn’t after his body, why was she here? For that matter, why was he here? He had no doubt in the world that Lo-Wate Bottling Company, or whatever the spook factory chose to call itself, was behind it all.
That was clear enough. But what was it, exactly, that they were behind? If they were sending a new agent on a mission to Western Europe, shouldn’t they tell him what the mission was? Were the marmosets secret intelligence couriers? Was Curmudgeon going to turn up in trenchcoat and fedora, out of some rain-shadowed doorway, to hand him The Papers? And if so, what would the papers say? It seemed a lousy way to run an intelligence agency.
No doubt it would all be revealed to him in time. He uncrossed his arms, rolled over, buried his head in the pillow, closed his eyes—
And opened them again.
He had forgotten to put Mickey on the pot.
It would have been easy enough to go on forgetting it, but a trust was a trust. Hake pushed himself out of bed, thrust his arms into his robe and coaxed the half-sleeping ten-year-old into the bathroom. With difficulty he steered him away from the bidet to the proper appliance, but then was rewarded for his efforts and got the still unawake boy back into bed… just as the phone rang stridently.
Hake swore and grabbed it. A voice screeched in his ear, “Where the hell are my marmosets?”
“Marmosets? Who is this?” Hake demanded in a hoarse whisper; Sam-Wang’s snoring had stopped and Mickey was rocking resentfully in his bed.
“Jasper Medina. You better get down here, Hake, and start explaining where the monkeys are. I’ll be at the elevators.” And he hung up.
Resentfully Hake carried his discarded clothes into the bathroom and put them back on. As he combed his hair he glowered at his reflection: that healthy outdoors face now had circles under its eyes, and this trip was just beginning! He let himself out as quietly as he could and waited for the glass elevator bubble to come for him.
Waiting for him in the main lobby was a tall, lean man with bald head and white beard, chewing on a corncob pipe. “Hake? What’s your excuse for this foul-up? What do you mean, you don’t know what I’m talking about? There’s twenty-two pair of Golden Lion marmoset fancies coming in with you, and where are they? My boys’ve been all over Frankfurt tonight, trying to locate them!”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t you listen, sonny? I’m Medina, from the Paris office. IPF. These are my assistants—” he pointed to four men clustered around the wall telephones, two of them talking into instruments, the other two standing by. “Sven. Dieter. Carlos. Mario. We’re supposed to help out with your project.”
“I sure can use a little of that,” said Hake feelingly, beginning to feel more friendly. “Those kids—”
“Kids? Oh, no, Hake, we’ve got nothing to do with the kids. We’ll take care of the marmosets for you, if you’ll just tell us where they are. But not the kids. Now if you’ll just—wait a minute. What is it, Dieter?”
One of the men was coming toward them, beaming. “Jasper,” he said—he pronounced it “Yosper”—“these monkeys, we have found them. At the Zookontrolle, and all quite well.”
“Ah.” Medina puffed on his pipe, and then smiled broadly. “Well, in that case, Hake,” he said, offering his hand, “there’s no need for us to waste time here, is there? Get a good night’s sleep. I’ll meet you for breakfast.”