Goddesses Never Die Read online

  GODDESSES NEVER DIE

  George B. Mair

  © George B. Mair 1969

  George B. Mair has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1969 by Jarrolds Publishers.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  To my wife

  trudie

  who has given me everything and more—with thanks.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One – ‘It left him feeling strangely naked’

  Chapter Two – ‘A stiff dose of barbiturates is the best way to heaven’

  Chapter Three – ‘Truth could buy time’

  Chapter Four – ‘Honeymoon without the honey’

  Chapter Five – ‘I like being on top’

  Chapter Six – ‘Prepare for a little surprise’

  Chapter Seven – ‘Goddesses are old-fashioned, Doctor’

  Chapter Eight – ‘Your fate will be less easy’

  Chapter Nine – ‘Death is the only thing so common as birth’

  Chapter Ten – ‘You almost made me angry’

  Chapter Eleven – ‘Goddesses never die’

  Chapter Twelve – ‘We can play together too’

  Chapter One – ‘It left him feeling strangely naked’

  The thermometer in New Delhi airport was touching 110°F. when Grant’s Boeing 727 dipped into quivering hot air which struck the fuselage like blast from a furnace. He felt it penetrate even his seat, and writhed uncomfortably against sweat and leather until the machine roared to a stop.

  Touchdown was on schedule, but a stop-over of almost eight hours was unavoidable and he was too lazy to make a trip into town. It was bad enough there, in the dusty, drab, noisy terminal, but the transit lounge was reasonably quiet and Grant ordered a glass of fresh orange laced with the juice of two lemons while he lit a cigarette—the need for which was born from reaction after a long flight—and then casually reached for an English paper bought during a thirty-minute break in Teheran.

  A hand gently touched his elbow. ‘Sahib. You like me to bring menu? Fix lunch.’

  Grant nodded. Indian cuisine was still British Raj kitchen at its best and he had learned that even inside airports local chefs remembered the teachings of their fathers and the tastes of a past generation. Or generations.

  The bearer handed him a small whisky. ‘Then try this, sahib, and lunch will be ready in half an hour.’

  The whisky was cooler than room temperature. It was, he suspected, Johnnie Walker because in some things the sub-continent was conservative and Johnnie Walker still outsold American rye or bourbon.

  And then his eye lighted on small print at the bottom of a news column. It ran to only one paragraph, but every phrase was loaded. Provided, that was, that one knew some of the background, and he re-read it carefully.

  ‘Miss Harmony Dove was yesterday found not guilty of inciting public disturbances in London’s Hyde Park last month but checked out of her hotel on the same afternoon. When questioned at the airport before take-off for a holiday in the East she denied that she was a beatnik, a hippie or a flower girl, refused to comment on her alleged association with scientologists and denied engagement to Prince Marcello Brando Biagi of Sicily.’

  Grant sipped his drink thoughtfully. He had met Harmony only once, and that at a party in Paris where she had worn a skin-tight pair of flesh-coloured slacks and top overlaid by ermine panties and an ermine bra, not forgetting ear pendants which were at least five inches long. Though the story behind them had once hit the headlines even more than their length, since they were formed of human nails threaded together with strands of jet-black hair ending in a small cluster of tiny jade rings, each tinted with a fleck of crimson. She alleged that both nails and hair had been purchased before death from a notorious American mass murderer and removed by a doctor after the family had been given possession of his body. The money, she said, had been used in his defence, and, anyhow, she had added, he wasn’t a murderer. But the ear-rings had caused a minor riot when some teenagers scragged her on leaving the party and ran off with half the set, leaving Harmony with a bleeding cheek and a scratch from hairline to shoulder-blade.

  He had helped to break up the mob, manhandled her into a taxi and escorted her to a flat where her farewell had been characteristic. ‘Some people’ll do anything for a byline in the weekend papers. I suppose I should thank you, but I don’t like people who use me for their own publicity.’ And she had walked into a lighted entrance hall in Ashley Gardens, Chelsea, leaving behind a heavy smell of perfume overlaid with sweat and a whiff of blood.

  She hadn’t even asked his name, but two days later took off for South America with her Italian—or rather Sicilian—prince.

  Grant would hardly have been human had he not used his position to probe her background, and the more he discovered the more he had been intrigued.

  Daughter of an Egyptian pasha and a Hungarian actress she had been born in Berlin just after the end of the second war. She had first become interesting to the press when she swam naked in a vast goldfish bowl filled with champagne on her fourteenth birthday. The scene had been photographed, and pictures sold through Western Europe raised enough to pay for at least the champagne.

  One year later she ran away from school in Switzerland, alleging that the headmistress was a lesbian and that perverted practices were standard among pupils who numbered some of the world’s social cream. Which had caused a second major scandal, especially when her allegations were found to be true after a frantic court of enquiry had tried to hush matters up.

  It then began to seem that she had decided upon a major adventure per year, and her sixteenth birthday found her on vacation with an international banker who committed suicide before the end of her holiday. A fortune in real estate and an even larger fortune in gilt-edged securities were left to her in trust through a will drawn up just before he died. There was also a letter to the man’s family which was never made public and no one contested the will. Which suggested an untold story.

  By this time her birthday had become an annual event which no newsman could afford to overlook, and she distinguished herself on her seventeenth by climbing the Matterhorn alone, collecting self-take pictures on top and returning intact with a time which was just inside the record.

  The following year found her at loggerheads with her family and her eighteenth birthday gift to the world was the announcement that her father was working hand in glove with the Russians, that he was now promoting a left-wing take-over in Egypt, and that, in any event, he had never married her mother.

  Her father died within twenty-four hours of the news breaking and the knife which killed him hadn’t penetrated his back accidentally, but Harmony’s comment was again characteristic. ‘Is he really dead? Then why all the fuss? Death is the only thing which is as common as birth.’

  She had then unexpectedly disappeared for two years and returned with entrance qualifications to the university to spend her twenty-first year reading social anthropology in Rome. And naturally enough her ‘coming of age’ was one of the star social occasions of Rome when she fixed permission to use the Colosseum for a party which turned out to be a revival of Rome in its glory complete with gladiators and a few wild animals hired from a zoo in Guatemala. The animals were supposedly harmless, and the whole thing was to have been good wholesome fun, such as had become popular with tourists on the Spanish coast where they ‘fought’ baby bulls and were given a certificate. It was just unfortunate that the lion drawn to fight a leading drug addict and ‘queer’ who was making an impression on the Italian film world should have been less domesticated than had been realised. The man
died bloodily and the party was broken up by the police. Though again the girl’s comments were to the point. ‘Maybe God did it for us. He was a bad man. And that was a good lion, so why did you shoot him? Now this will cost me more money than I can afford, and anyhow his skin is spoiled so I can’t even use it for a rug.’

  Two months later she called a press conference in Milan, changed her name to Harmony Dove, was photographed with white doves nestling against the critical areas of her anatomy, and with a famous pop-group playing in harmony in the background. Harmony Dove, it seemed, had been launched. And in the following week she announced her engagement to a Sicilian prince whom A.D.S.A.D. suspected of being involved with the Mafia. Yet marriage had been delayed for over two years. And now it seemed that the engagement was ‘off’. Somehow Grant suspected that a very dead prince would be found in some unexpected place, and for a moment he wished that he was back home to follow up the story.

  His own contact with her had been a year earlier. And it was said that the murderer from whom she had purchased the nails had been a hatchet man for the Mafia itself. Which, Grant felt, didn’t make sense. Nor, for that part, did Harmony. She was too absurd to be true. Yet she was as real as Miss Elizabeth Taylor or Princess Ira. And she was even more newsworthy than the average cosmopolite. Not even Olga Detterding could rival her as a newsman’s dream, and now, thought Grant, she was off to Karachi.

  But why Karachi?

  It made no sense.

  Karachi was almost as bad as Calcutta.

  Some said even worse.

  She seemed to be stepping out of character. Unless, of course, she was up to something at the Inter-Continental Hotel. Which was exactly her cup of tea and sufficiently switched-on to interest even Miss Dove, who, as the press knew, was now notoriously fastidious about her addresses.

  He laid down the paper and smiled. People like Harmony Dove made life interesting, even for hardened sinners like himself. And it was good to be larger than life. He remembered a recent article to the effect that only five per cent of all humanity were ‘leaders’ in the broadest sense of the word. A sense which included people assuming responsibility like taxi drivers, news editors, surgeons, solicitors and politicians or television producers. The remaining ninety-five per cent of humanity were ants or drones or cannon fodder according to how one looked at them. But Grant knew that of the élite five per cent probably only .05 were really top like Harmony. Or himself, for that matter. People who could grip life by the throat and shake out of it every last thing which mattered. Very few people sucked the orange till the pips squeaked. Which was why humanity was shortly going to fizzle out, with legs redundant because of radio or television: fighting redundant because of nuclear war-heads: traditional medicine redundant because of computerised check-ups plus computerised therapy. Ninety-five per cent of the world was shortly going to find itself unemployable and ninety-five per cent of mankind with its senses unemployed.

  Except for people like Harmony and himself. And a few others!

  It was a grim prospect.

  The bearer handed him a second whisky and half an hour later he sat down to a plate of thick Scotch broth, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and a bowl of fresh fruit, all washed down with cider and followed by a pot of richly brewed Assam tea.

  It was the best meal he had had in months, cooked to perfection and served with deeply white starched napkins on fresh table linen. In fact, he grinned sourly, it was better than England, which had gone all Wimpy, Forte, Fraser or what-have-you and lost some of the magic which had made Edwardia and Victoriana a paradise for the privileged minority.

  He was due to take off for Katmandu within two hours, and he decided to arrive fresh. A bath was arranged after a suitable tip, and he lazed for over an hour in tepid water, brooding. The name Harmony Dove had captured his imagination, and he could see her again in a series of composite pictures ranging from the haughty woman who had sat silent beside him in the taxi after a riot to lushed-up glamour pix in glossy magazines. But all had certain things in common. She had a passion for white. Ermine was her favourite fur and she was said to have five ermine coats. Her make-up was as celebrated as her moral reputation—a rich tan relieved by dark artificial eyelashes, accentuated black eyebrows and a touch of gold shading on the upperlids, the whole rounded off by rather pale, almost apricottinted, lipstick and fingernails enamelled off-white above golden half-moons.

  Her jewels were almost legendary for her age: and yet somehow restrained—apart from the celebrated ‘horror’ ear-rings, as the press had once called them: a necklace of graded jade beads with ear pendants to match, a diamond said to be worth a quarter of a million—sterling and not dollars—a pigeon’s blood-ruby brooch which was most often seen against her left breast, a bracelet of faultless blue lapis lazuli set in fourteen-carat gold, three jade slave bangles and anklets to match, but each touched with a crimson splash which was part of the stone and very rare. Finally, and as every fashion reader knew, her only other jewel was a star sapphire which she wore clipped to the side of her long silver hair. It was mounted in a tortoiseshell clasp and her hair was almost waist length, framing her ovoid features in a cascade of silver.

  All in all she was remarkable, and when she chose to reveal her figure in form-fitting tights she was unforgettable. But when she chose to hide it in a sari she was sensational. And on those rare occasions when she wore a bikini at the shady side of some private swimming pool, or on the beach at Barbados Sandy Lane Hotel—one of her favourite haunts when not at Acapulco—then it had been noted by gossip writers that her legs were long and powerful, her breasts full and upward pointing, her belly scaphoid, and her well-set shoulders gracing slender arms whose muscles were said to be strong as whip-cord.

  Her standard beat seemed to be Sicily, Sardinia, the Caribbean, Lisbon and Paris, so it was difficult to understand why she should now have chosen Karachi, and for some reason the mystery bothered Grant as he rubbed himself down with a heavy bath towel. He was sensitive to the unusual, and he could not place Harmony in the ramshackle squalor of Karachi.

  The bearer, a youth of around seventeen who was married and had two children, beamed as Grant handed him ten rupees and pointed to a daintily laid table. ‘More tea, sahib. Then take-off for Katmandu in forty minutes precise.’

  This time the tea was from Ceylon and there were two pastries which might have come from a Dorchester trolley. His flight number was called on the Tannoy as he sipped the last of his second cup, and thirty minutes later he was a thousand feet above the plains on a Royal Nepalese Fokker Friendship F-27. His holiday, he felt, had begun.

  The aircraft was half full. There were eight erratically dressed types whom he labelled as hippies, three small Nepalese business men, three Americans, a Dutch couple and, in the distance, a peculiar crew-cut, bullet-shaped head peeping above the top of a seat. The head was vaguely familiar, and somehow it had disagreeable associations. But Grant chose to ignore hunches. For once he was on holiday and his companion was flight manager for Royal Nepalese Air Lines.

  Grant gathered from him that ten thousand tourists per year visited Nepal; that the word ‘tourist’ included all foreigners and even those on diplomatic missions; that there was a decent road to the Tibetan frontier but that it tended to be monotonous in places; that the king had suffered a serious stroke quite recently and was expected to die within the year; that no one in Nepal visualised danger from China and that tourist hotels were probably better avoided by people who wished to get the ‘feel’ of the country. He was given an address on the outskirts of Katmandu, where quarters were ‘austere but clean’, told that there would be a decent taxi service from the hotel to anywhere he might go, but that a permit from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was obligatory if one wished to leave the valley of Katmandu. Taxis ran to one rupee per mile with one rupee per hour of waiting time, and Nepalese rupees were worth considerably less than the Indian, but that the cost of living for a Westerner would be found more than reasonable.
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  The Nepalese airman was helpful and even gave Grant a lift in his own car to the house where he could stay for as long as he wished. ‘Because for people like you, sir,’ said his companion, ‘there is no difficulty in extending the seven-day visa. We make it seven days only to weed out undesirables, so stay as long as you please, and do me the honour of visiting me in my house.’

  Grant shook hands and bowed. His bearer led him to his room—a square cement box with a green carpet and two comfortable beds. The curtains were yellow, there was a balcony, and peasants in the street walked en route to the market bowed to forty-five degrees below vast bundles of wood.

  His holiday had really begun.

  But as he turned from the window a car drew up outside. The bullet-headed man from his own flight strolled up the path and Grant placed him within five seconds. His name was Coia and he was a district Mafia official in New York State.

  He sighed contentedly. What good were holidays, anyhow! And he refused to believe that the Mafia was here for fun. It had run into trouble both in Sicily and Sardinia. But in Nepal there was a wide open market ready for full exploitation. Both LSD and hashish could be bought in the open market and smoked freely. Both crops were grown on the plains a little distance from the valley. Drugs were, he knew, attracting hippies from scores of countries. And if hippies why not the Mafia? Sammy Coia’s arrival could not be by chance, so it looked as though he had blundered on to a story, and for a fleeting moment he regretted the gun left in Paris.

  Action might lie round the corner.

  And even for today but if not, then tomorrow.

  Chapter Two – ‘A stiff dose of barbiturates is the best way to heaven’

  The house served only breakfast, but the owner, an agreeable young man with whom Grant had had an hour-long chat over a cup of tea, recommended the Peace Restaurant, only a couple of hundred yards along the road towards the city. Any such name from Grant’s angle was suspicious, and it was run, he had been told, by two Chinese plus a few Hindu waiters or chefs. But the food was said to be good, and already Grant was learning much about the new Nepal.