The Sphinx (6 page)

“Well?” he
asked, frowning over a six-page letter on sugar production. “You look like the
cat who cornered the cream market.”

“And why
shouldn’t I? You asked the impossible, o boss, and the impossible has been
accomplished.”

She tore a page
from her shorthand pad and put it down in front of him. On it was written First
Bank of Franco-Africa, 1214 K Street, and under that was a telephone number.

He picked it
up. “What’s this? Something to do with Lorie Semple?”

“Only her
telephone number,” said Maggie smugly. “And only the address of the bank where
she works.”-

Gene raised an
eyebrow. “She works? You mean she doesn’t spend her whole life shut up in that
house at. Merriam?”

“Of course not.
Why should she do that?”

“I don’t know,”
said Gene. “The way that place is guarded, it seems like they lock themselves
in there and never come out.”

Maggie stubbed
her cigarette out. “That’s a typical chauvinist attitude. If they won’t swoon
at your feet and beg you to take them to bed, they must be living some kind of
mysterious existence locked up in a weird old house. I mean, it’s the only
explanation.”

“You didn’t see
the size- of those goddamn guard dogs. They were this big.”

“They were
probably friendly St. Bernards coming to rescue you. If you hadn’t panicked,
they might even have given you a tot of brandy.”

Gene checked
his watch. If he took a cab, he might get up to the Franco-African Bank before
it opened, which meant that he could catch Lorie in the street. “Listen,
Maggie,” he said. “I’m going out. I won’t be long. If Walter calls, or if Mark
starts sniffing around, just say that I’m out on an urgent diplomatic call.
I’ll be back in half an hour.”

“Gene,” said
Maggie, warningly. “Don’t let this business go to your head. If the lady really
doesn’t want to know you, don’t go making a fool of yourself.”

“Maggie,” he
said, shucking on his coat, “did I ever make a fool of myself?”

“Only once,”
she said tartly, and went back to her desk.

He stepped out
into the street and hailed a cab. The driver was a silent black with a huge,
pungent cigar, and by the time they reached K Street, Gene was glad to get out
into the chilly October air. He paid the driver, tipped him, and then walked
over to the wide stainless steel doors of the Franco-African Bank. A small
delegation of Algerians was waiting there, too, shuffling their feet and
talking to each other In thickly accented French. Gene couldn’t catch
everything they said, but he gathered that they’d been disappointed by the
Jefferson Memorial.

One of them
said it reminded him of a sports pavilion.

A few minutes
before the bank was due to open, two girls came walking down K Street and
joined the waiting customers. They looked to Gene like tellers, and so he
stepped across with a hesitant smile. “Ladies?” he said.

They turned and
stared at him blankly. One of them had upswept spectacles,. and the other was
chewing gum with such relentless energy that every muscle in. her face was
working away like a rubber mask.

“Excuse me,”
said Gene, “but do you ladies work here?”

“What’s it to
you?” said the one with the gum.

“Well,” said
Gene, feeling embarrassed, “it’s just that a friend of mine works here, and I
was wondering if you knew her. Her name’s Lorie Semple.”

“Lorie? Sure.
She’s in the foreign exchange department.”

“Do you know if
she’s coming in to work today?” asked Gene.

“Never known
her to miss a day,” said the girl with, the gum. “She’s real fit, you know.
Exercises a lot. Isometrics, all that.”

“Are you her
boyfriend?” asked the girl with tips wept spectacles.

Gene shook his
head. “Oh, no, nothing like that. Just a friend.”

“She could do
with a boyfriend,” said the girl, knowingly.

“Why?” said
Gene. “Do you think she’s lonely?”

“Oh, I don’t
know. She’s kind of wistful You know what I mean by wistful? She talks about
getting married a lot, and she’s a cute looker but she never has any
boyfriends. Maybe there’s something in her personality, you know. Also, she’s
very tall. I don’t think boys really go for girls that tall.”

“My Sam says
dating her would be like dating the New York Nets. You know?” said the girl
with the gum.

Gene continued;
“I know it seems kind of personal to ask you this, but do you like her?”

“Oh, sure,”
said the girl with the gum. “Lorie’s a sweet kid. Real sweet. You couldn’t
dislike her if you tried. But then she’s pretty hard to get to know. I mean, I
don’t even know where she lives. How can you dislike someone if you don’t know
anything about them?”

As the girl was
talking, Gene glimpsed a black Cadillac limousine drawing hi to the curb.

Instinctively,
he guessed it was Lorie, and he bent his knees slightly so that he was hidden
from sight behind the chattering group of Algerians.

“Is there
something wrong with your knees?” asked the girl with the upswept spectacles.

Gene grinned.
“No, no. Just doing my on-the-spot exercises. Hold still for a moment, would
you?”

He heard the
limousine stop, and then the back door opened, paused, and slammed. Footsteps
came tapping across the sidewalk, and the limousine pulled away and joined the
honking K Street traffic. He stood up to his full height, and there she was.

In her working
clothes, she looked, if anything, more beautiful. She was wearing an
immaculately tailored black suit with a high-shouldered jacket and a pencil
skirt, and a black 1950s-style hat.

Her
golden-brown, hair was severely pinned back, but that only emphasized the
classic slant of her cheekbones and her bright green eyes. When she saw him she
stopped at once, and held her black, snakeskin pocketbook close to her chest.

“Hello, Lorie,”
he said gently.

The two tellers
looked from Gene to Lorie and back again, and the one with the gum gave the one
with the upswept spectacles a quick nudge in the ribs.

Lorie said
nothing at first, but stepped a few paces nearer, her eyes lowered, and her
lips slightly parted.

“So you found
me,” she said, in that deep husky voice of hers. “I suppose I knew that you
would. Who told you?”

He shook his
head, and smiled. “You’re not that hard to find. My secretary’s been working on
it.”

“Well,” she
said, “I suppose I should be flattered. An important man like you, taking so
much trouble over someone as insignificant as me.”

“Don’t be
ridiculous. I wanted to see you.” She looked up. Her green eyes widened. This
girl is incredibly beautiful, he thought. She’s like some kind of fantasy. How
can a girl be this beautiful and so stand-offish at the same time? It simply doesn’t
make sense.

“After Saturday
night, I didn’t think you’d want to.” Lorie said.

“Of course I
did. The one animal that intrigues me is a girl that bites. I was ‘round on
Sunday, ringing at the bell, but I don’t suppose Mathieu told you that.”

“You came
yesterday?”

“Sure I did.
You think Saturday night’s little misunderstanding would put me off?”

“I don’t
understand. I thought I made it clear that I didn’t want to see you anymore.”

“About as clear
as Mississippi mud. One minute you said you liked me, and the next minute you
were treating my tongue like a Big Mac.”

“I didn’t mean
to hurt you,” she said. “Is it still sore?”

“Only when I
lick.”

She looked
away, and a slice of early-morning sun illuminated her golden eyelashes and her
unusual green eyes.

“I’m sorry it
happened that way,” she said quietly. “I wish it could have been different.”

“It could have
been different,” he insisted. “In. fact, it could still be different now. I
could take you to dinner tonight, and we could make up for Saturday night three
times over.”

She reached out
and held his hand. Her fingers felt warm and slender, and her grip was firm.

“Gene,” she
said plainly, “I want to tell you that you’re one of the most attractive men
I’ve ever met. I like you more than you’ll ever understand. That, and only
that, is the reason why I won’t go out with you.”

He shook his
head in bewilderment. “I thought political logic was screwy enough,” he told
her.

“But I just
don’t grasp what you’re saying. Are you frightened of getting too serious? Is
that it?

Are you worried
about your own feelings?”

“No,” she said
softly. “It’s nothing like that.”

“Then what is
it? For Christ’s sake, Lorie, you have to tell me.”

She simply
said, “I can’t.”

He didn’t know
what else he could do to convince ten They stood side by side on the sunlit
sidewalk until the doors of the Franco-African Bank were unlocked from the
inside and opened, and then she touched his arm just once and walked in,

“Lorie,” he
said as she went.

She paused, but
didn’t look back.

He knew what he
wanted to tell her, but he didn’t have the words to explain what he felt, so he
just turned away and walked off down K Street, his hands jammed in his coat
pockets and his head bent. The girl the upswept glasses tittered as he went off,
until the girl with the gum said “Ssshhh,” and hurried her into-the bank.

He didn’t
really surprise himself .when he finally came to the conclusion that he was
going to have to sneak over the wall of the Semple estate and check the place
out. It was the kind of blunt, straightforward thinking that had won him his
job with the State Department, and particular favor with the Kennedy camp. His
answer to every sensitive and puzzling diplomatic dilemma was to “get straight
hi there and find out what the hell’s going on.”

He was an
uncomplicated thinker, but he was also a methodical man with a talent for
detail, and he reckoned he could execute a one-man commando raid on the Semple
estate with such precision that he could get in and out of the grounds without anyone
ever knowing he was there.

All he wanted
to do was look over the house and the ground and hopefully gather one or two
clues about Lorie Semple’s stubborn insistence that any kind of romance between
them was out of the question.

Ever since
Monday morning, Lorie had become an increasingly alluring obsession. He knew
how adolescent his infatuation was, but there was nothing he could do to get
her out of his mind.

He doodled her
name on his blotting pad, and even tried to sketch pictures of her face. And
what made it worse was the way that her words kept coursing through his mind. /
want to tell you that you’re one of the most attractive men I’ve ever met, I
like you more than you’ll ever understand.

“You,” said
Maggie, setting a styrofoam cup of coffee down on his desk, “have got it bad.”

“Got what bad?”
he said.

“The dreaded
Lorie Semples. A disease known to modern medical science as rampant puppy love.
That’s what.”

He sipped his
coffee and scalded his lip.

“I deny it
categorically,” he told her. “And apart from that, how can anyone of thirty-two
suffer from puppy love?”

“Don’t ask me,”
she said with a shrug. “Just ask the person who wrote Lorie Semple twenty-four
times of your best blotting paper.”

“You expect me
to use that cheap purple stuff, for her!”

Maggie sat down
and leaned confidingly on his desk. “Come on, Gene,” she said quietly, “why
don’t you admit it? I haven’t seen you like this for years.”

He sipped some
more coffee.

“All right, I
admit it. She’s stuck in my mind and I can’t get her out. It’s the ridiculous
way that she says she likes me, and at the same time says we can never go out
together. It’s driving me crazy, if you must know.”

“What are you
going to do about it?” she asked.

He sat there
for a while, drinking his coffee in quick, burning mouthfuls, trying to make up
his mind whether he ought to tell her or not. In the end, he decided in favor.
Maggie’s thinking was always level and logical, and always sympathetic, too.

“I’m working
out a plan,” he said slowly, “I want to break into the Semple estate.”

Maggie sat
back. “You’re working out a plan to .do what!”

“Maggie,” he
said, “I’ve got to know. Breaking in there, finding out for myself, that’s the
only way. I’ve got to see what it is that makes her so reluctant, t mean, maybe
it’s her mother. .Maybe the old girl’s crippled, and Lorie doesn’t want to get
herself involved with anyone who’s going to take her away from nursing her.”

“Gene, you’re
out of your mind. Supposing you get caught?”

He shook his
head. “Not a hope. I’ve worked it out that I can get in there, snoop around a
little, and get out again with no problems.”

“There are
dogs. Dogs as big as this. You said so yourself.”

“Even dogs as
big as that get thrown off by gas. I’m going to take a few of those sprays that
mail carriers use. It’s suppose to stun them for long enough to take a letter
up someone’s drive, and that will be long enough for me.”

“What about the
chauffeur, Mathieu?”

“He won’t even
know I’m there. In case he does find out, I’m taking a .38. I won’t use it, of
course, but if he’s such a kravmaga expert, I’d prefer to have something to
wave around in self-defense.”

Maggie sat
there biting her lip for a long time. “Can I persuade you not to do it?” she
asked after a while.

“I don’t think
so. I’ve made up my mind.”

“Even though it
might ruin your career?”

He reached for
a cigarette. “It won’t do that, even if I’m caught red-handed. All I have to
say is that I was paying her a visit, and that the .Semples mistakenly took me
for a prowler. Christ, Maggie, I’m not going to burglarize the place. I’m only
going to take a quick look around the grounds and maybe a fast check through
the windows.”