Donald Hamilton: The Betrayers

She was really a strikingly good-looking woman, particularly in that company. I mean, at least half the ladies present, Jill included, were sporting the bright native dresses. They apparently came in all conceivable variations of the basic Mother Hubbard theme: long and short, tight and loose, plain and flowered. And while the style isn't unattractive, it doesn't make a woman look particularly well-dressed, at least not to my conservative Mainland eyes. I am also unalterably opposed to bare legs and sandals under dress-up conditions. Pardon me for being stuffy, but if the rules require me to put on coat and tie, the women can damn well struggle into stockings and high heels. Besides, they look prettier that way.

Against that background of shapelessly fluttering prints, Isobel McLain looked unique and priceless in her unobtrusively well-fitting black dress. She gave the impression of being fairly tall, but that was only an illusion, I discovered, looking down at her from my six-feet-four. Without her heels, she'd have been a full foot shorter. Her proportions were attractive, decidedly feminine without being vulgarly spectacular. Her hair was dark brown, done in a smooth, restrained bubble with the ends tucked in, one of the nicer styles evolved from those giant bird's-nest hairdos of a few seasons back.

Her features were regular, her teeth were good, her skin was good, her posture was good, and you could say the same of a thousand women you'd never turn to look at twice. The simple fact was that she was a knockout, at least in the adult division. A man whose taste ran exclusively to leggy, breathless juveniles might not have been as impressed as I was. I put her age between thirty and thirty-five, although she could have passed for less.

I asked, "Is your husband here, Mrs. McLain?"

She shook her head. "No. Kenneth and I are taking separate vacations this year. He finds it restful to watch dice bounce around a table. Or horses run around a track. Or roulette wheels just go around and around and around." She shrugged. "Unfortunately, I don't. And after a while one gets tired of pretending, don't you know?"

A faint uneasiness made me look at her more sharply; she'd said a little too much in answer to a simple question. I mean, the cool, reserved, bored lady she was supposed to be would hardly have let a perfect stranger so far into her private life so soon.

Or maybe she would, away from home with a couple of Scotches inside her-I noticed she'd already set her glass back on the bar for another refill. Still, it was a jarring note, a reminder that in our world of deceit and intrigue nothing was necessarily what it seemed, not even an attractive woman. Particularly not an attractive woman.

"Do I understand that you live in Washington, D.C., Mrs. McLain?" I asked, and we went on from there to discuss the nation's capital and its dreadful summer climate.

I set a couple of casual traps for her-I'd brought up the subject for that purpose-but they caught nothing. Whether or not she actually lived there, she knew the city. She got out of me that I was an underpaid government employee blowing my savings on an extravagant vacation, and we played the do-you-know-Joe game half-heartedly. Neither of us was greatly surprised to discover that, apart from a couple of headwaiters, we had no Washington friends or acquaintances in common. That pretty well finished the supply of cocktail-party conversation on both sides, and the silence was getting awkward when the industrious hotel hostess broke in on us again.

"Here's somebody who insists on meeting you, Mr. Helm. She says that anybody who gets up at dawn to go swimming must be worth knowing."

Our girl in Honolulu had made it at last.

AS I TURNED TO Jill, introduced as Miss Darnley, I was aware of Isobel McLain being led away in invisible chains. Perhaps it was just as well. I hadn't really been making a red-hot impression there, or if I had, the lady had concealed it bravely.

Jill, alias Miss Darnley, was obviously going to be a different proposition. Her eager expression said she was just waiting to be impressed by me, no matter how stupid and boring I turned out to be.

I noticed that she was dutifully drinking the rum punch, and she seemed to be impersonating, as far as her fair complexion would permit, a cute Hawaiian maiden just converted to modesty and Christianity, in a flowing, flowered muu-muu thing that reached the floor. In addition to the orchids in her hair she had an orchid lei around her neck. This sounds pretty fancy and expensive, I guess, but as I've already intimated, in Hawaii orchids grow like dandelions back home.

I said, "Goody, it's the little girl with the big board. How was the surfing this morning, Miss Darnley?"

"Not very good. We had to wait forever between sets."

"Sets, like in tennis?" I asked.

She laughed. "Big waves come in sets, or groups, of half a dozen or more, Mr. Helm. There'll be a long calm spell when you just sit on the board waiting, and then somebody yells 'outside' and you see the first wave of a set humping up against the horizon. Then you paddle like hell to where you figure the break is coming. Generally you let the first few waves of a set go by, hoping for one big enough to give you a good ride. That's in little summer surf like here off Waikiki. In big winter surf, like off Sunset Beach-that's down at the other end of Oahu-you've got to be careful you don't catch one too big for you to handle and get wiped out."

She was pretty tense, now that she'd finally reached me, and she rattled off this lecture a little too fast, like a kid trying to show off before a grownup-or maybe 1 wasn't being quite fair. Maybe she'd have seemed to be acting quite naturally if I hadn't known who she was and guessed approximately what she was up to.

"Wiped out," I said, dryly. "Sets. Outside. Why, it's a foreign language."

She flushed slightly. "I gather you're not a surfer, Mr.

Helm." She gave me a cool, appraising glance. "Well, it's not a middle-aged pastime, I guess."

I grinned. "Yes, little girl," I said. "Grandpa's rheumatiz do trouble him something fierce."

She laughed. Having insulted each other, we were now friends. She said, smiling, "You asked for it, being so stuffy. All sports have their jargon. And actually, they're mostly all kids out there; they even treat me as if I were an old lady."

"Fancy that," I said. "A mere infant like you? But it seems odd. You'd think that all these plush hotels, with an interesting sport growing right in their front yards, so to speak, would make a big effort to sell it to the tourists old enough to have a little dough to throw around."

"Well, surfing is fairly strenuous and just a bit dangerous."

"So's skiing," I said. "And look how they're cashing in on that back home… What's the matter?"

"The mix-'em-up lady is heading back our way. I don't really want to meet any more enchanting people, do you?"

It was nicely done. Now that we'd found each other, she was suggesting, we didn't need anybody else. Any man would have been proud to have an attractive blonde so attach herself to him, even a blonde wearing something that, stylewise, resembled nothing so much as my grandmother's winter nightgown. Of course the orchids helped. I put out of my mind the fact that she was undoubtedly acting strictly according to instructions- Monk's instructions-and I let myself expand visibly at the implied flattery.

I said, "Well, I was getting kind of tired of the social whirl myself, Miss Darnley. I suppose we could slip out between those bushes and find sanctuary over there at the open-air bar or whatever they call it. What do you say?"

"I say that would be very nice, Mr. Helm."

She set her glass aside, took my arm, and gathered up her voluminous garment with her free hand, displaying rudimentary sandals and a discreet amount of slim brown legs. Shortly we were being seated under a giant tree on the seaside terrace in front of the bar or cocktail lounge, a rustic building that had been shuttered that morning but was now exposed to the breezes from several directions, more a pavilion than a house.