had objected to earlier was directly related to his new appointment. He had used his diplomatic connections with the Israeli embassy to initiate and then pursue the idea of a joint nuclear project between the two states.
Tonight he would be handing over another batch of documents to the Israeli attache to be forwarded in the diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv.
He glanced at his wristwatch. He still had twenty minutes before he must go up to change for dinner, and he switched all his concentration back to the papers in front of him.
Nanny had laid out the Zandra Rhodes couture model and run Isabella's bath.
'You are late, Miss. Bella. And I still have to do your hair.' She was a Cape Coloured, her Hottentot blood mixed with that of most of the world's seafaring nations.
'Don't fuss so, Nanny,' Isabella protested, but Nanny swept her off to the bathroom with as little ceremony as she had when Isabella was five years old.
While Isabella sank with a luxurious sigh chin-deep into the steaming foam, Nanny gathered up her discarded clothes.
'Your dress is stained with grass, child, and your new panties are torn.
What you been up to?' Nanny washed all Isabella's underclothes by hand; she would trust no laundry with them.
'I've been playing touch-rugby with a Hell's Angel, Nanny. Our team won thirty-love.' 'You'll get yourself in bad trouble. All the Courtneys got hot blood.' Nanny held up the torn panties and examined them with heavy disapproval.
'Long past time you were safely married.' 'You've got a dirty mind. Now tell me what's been happening today. What about Klonkie's new girl-friend?' Isabella knew how to distract her.
Nanny was an inveterate gossip, and this was the time of day when she brought Isabella up to date on the doings and undoings of the entire household. While she chattered, Isabella made little murmurs of encouragement, but she was listening with only half her attention, and when she stood up to soap herself she examined her body in the steamy full-length mirror across the room.
'Do you think I'm getting fat, Nanny)' 'You are so skinny, that's why no boy married you yet,' Nanny sniffed, and went through to the bedroom.
Isabella tried to be completely objective as she studied herself. Was there any way in which her body could be improved? Should her bosom be a little bigger? And did the tips point outwards at too acute an angle? Were her hips too wide or should her bottom be smaller? After critical reflection, she shook her head. It all looked just about perfect from where she stood.
'Ramsey de Santiago y Machado,' she whispered, 'you will never know what you missed.' And why did that make her feel so miserable?
'You are talking to yourself again, child.'Nanny came back with a bath-towel the size of a bed-sheet and held it open for her. 'Out you get now. We are running out of time.' She enveloped Isabella in the towel as she stepped out of the bath, and vigorously began to rub her back dry. It was no good trying to convince Nanny that she could dry herself.
'Don't be so rough.' Isabella had been making the same protest for twenty years, and Nanny ignored it.
'How many times have you been married, Nanny?' 'You know well that I been married four times, but I only been churched just once.' Nanny checked and looked at her with new attention. 'Why you ask about marrying? Did you find something interesting, that's why the torn panties?' 'You vulgar old woman!' Isabella avoided her eyes and snatched up her Thai-silk gown on the way to the bedroom.
She picked up the hairbrush and made one stroke through her hair before Nanny took it away from her.
'That's my job, child,' she said firmly; and Isabella sat down and closed her eyes giving herself up to the familiar comfort of having Nanny brush out her hair for her.
'Do you know, I think I'll have a baby, just so you'll have someone else to fuss over, and get you off my back.' Nanny missed a stroke, taken by the attractions of that proposal, and then she said sternly, 'You get yourself married first before we talk babies.' The Zandra Rhodes creation was an ethereal cloud of subtle colour, spangled with sequins and seed pearls. Even Nanny nodded and looked complacent as Isabella pirouetted in front of her.
Isabella was halfway down the staircase on her way to a last-minute conference with Chef when a thought occurre& to her and she stopped abruptly. The Spanish chargi d'affaires was one of tonight's dinner-guests, and it took only a second for her to rearrange the table-seating in her mind.
'Yes, of course.'The Spanish chargi nodded immediately she mentioned the name. 'An old Andalusian family. As I recall, the Marques de Santiago y Machado left Spain and went to Cuba after the Civil War. He had considerable sugar and tobacco interests on the island at one time, but I imagine Castro changed all that.' A marquds - the reply silenced Isabella for a moment. Her knowledge of Spanish nobility was less than elementary, but she imagined that a marquds ranked just below a duke.
'The Marquesa Isabella de Santiago y Machado.' With awe she allowed herself to consider the prospect, and she saw again in her mind's eye those deadly green eyes and for a moment she had difficulty breathing. Her voice was still ragged as she asked: 'How old is the marques?' 'Oh, he would be getting on a little now. That is, if he is still alive. He must be in his late sixties or early seventies.' 'He had a son perhaps?' 'That I don't know.' The chargg shook his head. 'But it would be easy to find out. If you wish, I will make some enquiries for you.' 'Oh, that would be so kind of you.' Isabella laid her hand on his arm and gave him her most brilliant smile.
Marques or not, you don't get away from Isabella Courtney that easily, she thought smugly.
'It took you almost two weeks to make contact, and then when you had at last done so you immediately allowed the subject to escape.' The man seated at the head of the table stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray in front of him and immediately lit another. The first two fingertips of his right hand were stained dark yellow, and the smoke from the oval Turkish cigarettes that he smoked incessantly had already tarred the air in the small room to a blue fog. 'Was that in accordance with your orders?' he asked.
Ramsey Machado shrugged lightly. 'It was the only certain way of getting and holding her attention. You must realize that this woman is accustomed to male adulation. She has only to lift a finger and men come swarming about her. I think you must trust my judgement in this matter.' 'You allowed her to get away.' The older man knew he was repeating himself, but this fellow needled him.
He did not like him, and did not know him well enough yet to trust him. Not that he ever fully trusted any one of his operatives. However, this one was too self- assured, too disrespectful. He had turned aside the rebuke with a shrug, where another might have cringed. He had blatantly set his own judgement above that of a superior officer.
Joe Cicero hooded his eyes. They were as opaque as puddles of old engine oil, startlingly black against the pallor of his skin and the silver-white hair that hung limply over his ears and forehead.
'Your orders were to make contact and to maintain it.' 'With respect, Comrade Director, my orders were to inveigle myself into the woman's confidence, not to rush at her barking like a mad dog.' No, Joe Cicero did not like him. His attitude was offensive, but that was not the only reason. He was a foreigner.
Joe Cicero considered any fton-Russian a foreigner. No matter what the concept of international socialism dictated, East Germans, Yugoslavs, Hungarians, Cubans and Poles - they were all foreigners to him. It infuriated him to have to pass on responsibility for so much of the section that he had headed for almost thirty years to others. Especially people like this.
Not only was Machado a foreigner, but also his very roots and origins were corrupt. He was no scion of the proletariat, not even of the despised bourgeoisie, but was a full member of that hated and outdated system of class and privilege, an aristocrat.
True, Machado disparaged and despised his origins, and used his tide now only to achieve his goals, but to Joe Cicero his blood-lines were tainted and his aristocratic manners and affectations were an insult to all he, Cicero, believed in.
Furthermore he had been born in Spain, a fascist country historically ruled by a Catholic monarchy which was the enemy of the people, even more so now under the monstrous Franco who had put down the communist revolution. He might call himself a Cuban socialist, but to Joe Cicero he stank of Spanish fascism and aristocracy.
'You let her get away,' he persisted. 'After all this time and money wasted.' He realized that he was being ponderous and heavy-handed, and he knew that his powers were failing. The sickness was already slowing his wits.
Ramsey smiled, that condescending smile that Joe Cicero hated so well. 'She is on the line, like a fish; she may swim and dive only until I am ready to reel her in.' Again he had contradicted his superior, and Joe Cicero considered the last but the- most poignant reason for his dislike of the man. His youth and comeliness and health. It made him painfully aware of his own mortality, for Joe Cicero was dying.
Since childhood he had chain-smoked these rank Turkish cigarettes, and on his last visit to Moscow the doctors had at last diagnosed the cancer in his lungs and offered him treatment in one of the sanatoria reserved for officers of his seniority. Instead Joe Cicero had elected to continue in service, to see his department securely handed over to his successor. He had not then known that this Spaniard was to be that
