Hostage Tower by John Denis Read Free Book Online Page A

moustache was about to enter, was one such gallery.
    â€˜PRIMITIVES INC.’ dealt, as its name implied, in primitive art. This meant that it engaged agents, who suborned other agents who, in turn, bribed African village headmen, to lean on their tribes to produce badly carved, multi-hued bric-a-brac for half a bowl of gruel, which then sold on Upper Madison Avenue for six hundred bucks apiece.
    The receptionist sat at a gleaming steel and glass desk (Stockholm, c. 1978) amid a weird but well-arranged clutter of masks, assegais and fertility symbols.
    â€˜Good morning, Mr Whitlock,’ she smirked.
    â€˜And to you, Mary-Lou,’ C.W. answered. Then he flashed her a brilliant smile and said, ‘Hey, that rhymes.’ Mary-Lou grinned back. He was a dish, she decided; pity he was … well, you know, black. She tried to think of a suitable rhyme for ‘C.W.’, but her intellectual equipment wasn’t up to it.
    â€˜Anything doing, gorgeous?’ C.W. enquired.
    â€˜It so happens,’ Mary-Lou replied coyly, ‘that yes, there is.’
    C.W. was rapidly losing patience, but tried not to show it. The dumb white chicks, he mused, were even more of a pain in the ass than the smart ones, of whom there were not all that many.
    â€˜A message, perhaps?’ he suggested.
    â€˜In back,’ she inclined her peroxided head. ‘You know.’
    â€˜Indeedy I do,’ C.W. simpered. He rolled his eyes as he passed her desk and crossed to the door leading to the lavish, semi-private display area behind the main gallery. Here the sculptures staring down at him from lucite shelves were, if even more wildly expensive, at least genuine and finely wrought. The semi-private nature of the rear gallery was required of the owners, because many of the costlier fertility symbols were all too explicitly fertile.
    The gallery served (for a fee) as one of C.W.’s collection of New York dead-letter boxes, a facility that chimed in well with his tendency todivide his life into separate, equally secret, compartments. He had this in common with Sabrina Carver, too.
    On a splendid oak refectory table sat a large, flat parcel. C.W. twisted the fastening string around his finger, and snapped the twine as if it were cotton. He shuffled aside the decorative paper wrapping, and looked with undisguised pleasure on a fresh wheel of his favourite French cheese, Brie.
    C.W. selected a Pathan ornamental dagger from the wall, and cut himself a generous slice. He bit into it. The rind was deliciously crisp, the cheese at a perfect creamy consistency. C.W. munched the remainder of the slice, then set the knife into the far edge of the wheel, and cut the entire cheese precisely in half.
    He dipped the blade of the dagger into one segment, and traced a path along it. Puzzled, he repeated the process on the other crescent. The point of the knife encountered an obstruction. C.W. smiled, and hooked it out.
    It was a small package, enclosed in rice-paper. He scraped the rice-paper off, and unfolded five one thousand US dollar bills, and a first-class airline ticket to Paris. The flight was in three days’ time. There was no explanatory note.
    He stared at the money and the ticket, blinked, and then grinned as he noticed in the top left-hand corner of the ticket cover, the scrawled initials ‘L. van B’.
    â€˜Classy,’ C.W. said, admiringly. ‘Very classy.’ He walked out humming ‘The last time I saw Paris’.
    Bureaucracy thrives on paper. Paper demands circulation. In order to facilitate distribution bureaucrats love drawing up lists that squeeze as many people as possible on to them while, in order to save paper, confining them to a single sheet. Thus was born the acronym, an indispensable arm of bureaucracy.
    The United Nations is bureaucracy run riot, and acronyms proliferate there like hamsters. Few of them are important. One, in a little-frequented part of the UN Building in New York,