He could hear Gerda von Rothe breathing softly beside him and her leg, plump and pneumatic, lay warm against his own. Nick moved away just enough to break the contact. The woman stirred and muttered something in her sleep. He could not make out the words, but she spoke in German.
He became aware of soft music seeping into the room. It was muted, very low, and had been there all along. He lay unmoving, eyes closed, trying to induce a semi-trance and sort things out in his mind. But the music kept intruding and he knew it would continue to do so until he had identified it. It was a Freudian thing he had about any environment in which he found himself — he must know it in depth. Scan every factor which might contribute to his life, on death! Dot every “i” and cross every “t.” He was really a practical ecologist, as Hawk had once put it, studying cause and effect with the object of staying alive.
At last he identified the music — The Bartered Bride by Smetana. He felt faint surprise. After last night, and into the early hours of this morning, spent coping with the silver-haired Amazon beside him, he would have expected Wagner at least. Perhaps the Ride of The Valkyries. Nick sighed in not unpleasant remembrance. Gerda had certainly given him a ride! The woman was insatiable. If she was in truth seventy years old — he was glad he had not met her when she was thirty. He would be dead this morning.
With a finger he removed the night matter from his eyes and opened them. He stared at the ceiling. It was a good sixty feet above him, arched and groined. If he had needed a reminder that he was in a medieval fortress, a fairy castle stolen from the Rhine, the ceiling would have done it. Banners and pennons hung limply from the arches, each bearing the white lily of cosmetic fame. It was a jarring note.
Nick let his slightly bloodshot eyes roam around the bedroom. If you could call an acre of tesselated floor a bedroom. There were several tall windows, with mullions, covered now with messaline drapes, not more than fifty feet from him. He wondered what the windows overlooked. A possible escape route?
The bed in which he was lying was enormous. It was a boat bed, fashioned in the form of a huge golden swan. Baronial living, this. Nick thought briefly of the other men who had been brought here by The Bitch. They must have serviced her in this very bed, just as he had last night. What had become of them? He thought he knew — dead men could not tattle of strange amours!
He became aware of a strange whirring and clicking overhead. A moment later a picture flashed on the creamy blank wall farthest from him. There was a projector up there in the arches, as well as the speaker for music. Both worked automatically. He remembered last night, after The Bitch had brought him to this amazing room by way of a secret passage — and made him take a cold shower — how he and the woman had lain in bed and watched the pictures flash on and off the wall. Erotic pictures, if you cared for euphemism. Pornographic, if you stuck to truth. They had been exciting, Nick recalled, and of good quality. But trust the von Rothe to have nothing but the best, even in pornography.
The thing must have an automatic timer, Nick conjectured, since now it was showing quite innocuous landscapes. There was the Matterhorn, a shot of the Arctic, with polar bears, and then the Tower of London. A flash of a baseball game. Mickey Mantle was just stroking a homer. Nick lay and watched with some interest. Quite a fascinating gadget. The Bitch had murmured, last night, that she preferred it to the stasis of paintings.
The projector made a mistake. It flashed a decidedly lewd picture on the wall. A man and three women indulging in sexual acrobatics. Nick grinned and repressed a chuckle. The machine was mixed up — there were obviously night pictures and day pictures, bed and non-bed pictures.
“The damned thing needs repairing,” said a sleepy voice beside him. “It’s always getting mixed up. I’ll switch it off.”
Killmaster was tempted to say, “Gutem Morgen, schön Fräulein.” But he remembered in time that he was Jamie McPherson, poor ignorant Jamie with no education. Here to do a job for the Fräulein von Rothe. A slight job of murder.
So he said: “Good morning, Gerda. You’re right — that machine is mixed, up. It shouldn’t show pictures like that so early in the morning. Might give a fellow ideas.” He summoned the best leer of which he was capable at that hour.
The woman ignored him. She leaned to fumble beneath her side of the bed. The picture faded from the. wall and the music stopped. Nick made a note of that. Control buttons beneath the bed. For the music and projector — and what else? Call it intuition, or the seventh sense he had developed over the years, but he was thinking that she must have some sort of alarm system.
Gerda von Rothe sat up in bed and faced him. The royal purple sheet of finest silk, no ersatz for this lady, covered her only to the waist. Her big torso was tawny, tinted with the same golden sheen as her face, and there was not an ounce of flab on her. Her face, even with the lines of sleep still on it, was a scimitar of arrogant beauty, the mouth wide and the eyes like emeralds. Her breasts were large and heavy and very firm, with long red nipples and brownish halos. They pointed directly at Nick now, like twin cannons. She made no attempt to cover herself.
“You were drunk last night,” she accused. Her green stare was hard. She ran a big hand through tousled silver hair. “It will not happen again, do you understand!” It was not a question.
He nodded. “I understand. I’m sorry about it. I had a bottle of tequila in my pack and well, I just had too much I reckon. But it turned out all right. I got here, didn’t I?”
The scarlet mouth curled. “That is not the point, fool. I am paying you to do a job for me. You must not botch it.” She bit hard into her lower lip and stared at him for a long moment. “It will go hard with you, Jamie, if you bungle it. If they don’t kill you first, I will. You must be sure to understand that. For one thing, if you do drink and botch it, they will kill you without doubt. Both Harper and Hurtada are very tough and they know how to handle guns. It is not going to be easy to kill them.”
So at last his victims had names! Nick had no intention of killing them or anyone, unless it lay in the line of duty, but it was good to know whom he was supposed to kill. Harper he knew about, of course, and he could guess that Hurtada was the mestizo — the Chinese, rather, who was passing as a mestizo. He wondered just how much of the truth The Bitch intended telling him?
Nick repeated the names. “Hurtada and Harper? Them’s the guys I knock off, huh? You said you would make a plan, Gerda. Maybe you better tell me now. I need to know a lot, everything there is to know, if I ain’t going to botch it like you say. How soon you want these characters killed? When? Where? How? You see what I mean?”
Her smile was faint. “You are learning, Jamie. At least you did not ask why I want them killed. Nor would I tell you. Call it a... a sort of a palace revolution. Do you know what that means?”
“No, I don’t guess I do. But you got the palace for it, all right.”
“So I have, Jamie. And that is just the point — the old fool who built this castle was a romantic, a man born out of his time. He must have been raised on Scott and Ouida — but of course that means nothing to you.”
“No. It don’t.”
“Of course not. But the point is that this castle is huge. There are places where even I have not been — and there are dungeons and secret passages and a great many hidden, out of the way nooks. Places where a body would never be found. You will explore the castle today, Jamie, and find a suitable spot, or spots. If they do not suit you there is always the ocean. I’ll leave that up to you. But you must kill Harper and Hurtada separately, if you can, and nobody must see you do it. That is very important. I want them to vanish into thin air, with no trace. How you do it is your business. After all, you must expect to do something for twenty thousand dollars.” The Bitch rolled over close to him and stroked his biceps with her fingertips. “I was right about you, Jamie. You would have made a marvelous gladiator.” Heat glowed in the green eyes now. Nick groaned inwardly. The Bitch was in estrus again. He felt a sudden overwhelming desire to go to the bathroom.