The Rockabye Contract

By Philip Atlee

A wild plot leads a covert operative around the globe—and into deadly trouble: “I admire Philip Atlee’s writing tremendously.” —Raymond Chandler

Joe Gall’s current assignment involves escorting a sexy folk singer on an international journey—but as always for the ex–CIA operative, there’s more going on behind the scenes. Before this job is through, Gall will find himself untangling a mystery involving a toy manufacturer, an assassination plot, and a dictator’s goons—and trying desperately to make it out alive . . .
 
This classic series of action novels featuring the fearless freelancer comes from the Edgar Award–nominated author praised as “the John D. MacDonald of espionage fiction” (Larry McMurtry, The New York Times).

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781504065726

Philip Atlee

Philip Atlee (1915–1991) was the creator of the long-running Joe Gall Mysteries, which is comprised of twenty-two novels published in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Atlee wrote several novels and screenplays—including Thunder Road starring Robert Mitchum, and Big Jim McLain starring John Wayne—before producing the series for which he is known. An avid flyer, he was a member of the Flying Tigers before World War II and joined the Marines after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The helicopter thrashed off Kennedy International Airport, through the night air, and I approached New York City like any travel-weary malcontent. I have been to most places and am not inclined to rhapsodize, but as we neared the lighted towers of Manhattan I made an involuntary obeisance. Babylon, Baghdad, and Tokyo were nothing; down among these blazing ziggurats and incredible hives was the mightiest pulse of the world …

Then, staring at the tremendous night jewelry, I smiled wryly. The metropolis glowing and flickering and coruscating below me would look different in the harshness of daylight. I would be able to see the people, and their debris …

When we had touched down on the rooftop heliport, I checked my bags and went downtown in a cab to the Eunuch’s Horn, a basement discothèque where I had an appointment.

I got there in time to catch the first show. The place was a smoky cave, jammed tight with uptown trade, and I had to fight my way to the end of the small bar. A Miss Hester Prim, who had just come on stage, was wearing a short black vinyl skirt and black boots. Strands of her flaming hair had been taped over the nipples of her breasts, and she handled the twelvestring Gibson like a ukulele. Hester was a big girl, several inches over six feet.

Miss Prim opened with a couple of Child ballads, straight, to not much of a hand. Then she went into the big-beat sound with some imitation Beatle arrangements that got over better. From them she segued into a bawdy Roger Miller and an even bluer lament for a hairdresser named Freddie. Her timing was good, her delivery droll, and she bowed off to heavy applause.

When the applause became insistent, she encored with a fiery number she said was her own arrangement of Lorca’s Bloody Sunday. Pre-Franco Spain could have sued, had there been any jurisdiction, but she got another full hand and that was it. I glanced at my watch and saw that she had done forty minutes. Her voice was appealing, in a light alto range, but she was no Baez, for all her boot-stamping. It was the superb body that had held them.

As the central stage darkened, four smaller spots flared on around the club with young dancers go-going languidly under them. They were all scantily skirted, nubile, and wore lowslung belts to emphasize their pelvic thrustings. Their hand motions were not lovely-hula by any definition; they just kept spading around without any particular grace.

The joint stunk, but I toughed it out. Sweat, spilled beer, the heat from packed bodies, and hazy tobacco smoke … most of all, the stale aroma of a place that never saw the sun. I stayed because I was monitoring the conversation, trying to tune my ear to the random drawls and laughing quips around me. It was part of my work; I had to get with this background.

I was about to leave the United States on another contract assignment for the agency, and the oversized folk singer was my cover. Hester Prim was going on a European tour, and I was her manager.

We were flying to London the next morning, before dawn, on Lufthansa.

The tour was legitimate. Hester opened on a Palladium bill. Not a headliner, of course; she followed the trained bears from Irkutsk, but anywhere on that bill is good. From London we went to West Germany.

Twenty minutes later, Hester came striding through the bar crowd in a white raincoat, with people glancing at her and whispering. Several of them handed her slips of paper to autograph.

I moved away from the bar to stand beside her, waiting. When she turned, smiling automatically, and saw that I didn’t want her autograph, the green eyes flickered.

Hi, she said, and smiled differently—for all her size, and the pancake makeup and eye-shadow, like a gamin who has finally outgrown her baby fat but remembers where it went.

I’m Charles Ayres, I lied. Could I buy you a drink?

So you’re the man.

I’m a man.

Rooster’s Ass, Charley! the tall girl said. There are a lot of people around who ain’t women. That is, they have outdoor plumbing. But damned few of them are keepers, as men …

In that case, I admitted, I’m the man. I was smiling back at her, but without much wattage. Not only oversized but emancipated, too. I don’t socialize a lot. In fact, the big shift to the pill left me stranded with nearly a full gross of condoms. How about the drink?

Not here, she said. Let’s crash out, hunh?

Right.

We started through the crowded entrance, where more people pawed at her. Bulled our way past them and up the few steps to the street. Hester took a deep breath.

"What is wrong with these snots? she asked me, straightening the white raincoat and buckling its belt more securely. Aren’t they getting any?"

People were still jostling us, streaming out of the cellar dive, although other talent was supposed to be on soon. I concluded that Hester must be the big draw at the Eunuch’s Horn. When I asked about it, she shrugged.

I guess. Max Simonson, the manager of the sewer, nearly dropped dead when I told him I was leaving. He’s been paying me a fast three hundred a week since the publicity hit, but that’s because I’m a gorgeous freak. Those kids doing the go-go stuff get fifteen a night.

What dance are they doing? I asked. We had moved on down the sidewalk, away from the crowded club entrance, and could converse in normal tones.

Oh, they call it soul stuff. All they’re really doing is flashing their butts, so what difference does it make? The sound itself is changing, getting more bluesy, comes from Motown mostly.

At the corner, we began to pass groups of lounging boys and girls, most of them twentyish or younger. The girls wore sweaters and tight short skirts or clinging stretch pants, with boots or chukka-style shoes. The boys, as many bearded as not, looked scruffier, and affected skin-tight jeans with their artillery tailored to the action station. Some of the bulges on the young studs seemed exorbitant, and I wondered if we had entered a new era of the false codpiece.

Strolling by these disaffected ones, we passed knots of scornful homosexuals, fluting sotto voce bons mots and birdlike laughter. Quite a few of them seemed to be in drag, but I didn’t feel like searching anybody for that kind of news. At the intersection, a bus farted pure carbon monoxide at all the odd celebrants.

Hester and I walked on, and she got quite a few rude suggestions. I sighed, because I wouldn’t prove anything by low-bridging these characters. After all, she did invite comment.

Pizza palaces, darkened storefronts, dim doorways with malodorous steps, and even a psychic delicatessen … a flacked-out wino with one foot hung in an overturned garbage can. Had he been in the can, trying to get out?

We were shunted aside rudely by a haughty quartet of pimpled youths carrying instrument cases. Tiny lower-class faces framed by masses of hair, they bumped us and went strolling on down the East Village street like conquerors. The odds were long that they had no bookings anywhere, that not one of them could read a lead sheet properly, and that their only audience lay with the underaged vaginas.

In short, boys with noise.

Yet you couldn’t fob them off that easily. They strutted, these nonmusicians, and might have pressed an imitation tribal chant out of their mouthings. "YEH, YEH, YEH!" And if they had, the record might have sold a million copies, every one of them bought by teenyboppers who had cadged the money from their parents.

So, perhaps rich boys with noise. Busboys and neophyte masturbators turned macaroni, the princes of cheap street. Thousands of good musicians, mostly Negro, must have been watching their progress with amazement and chagrin. These inept white howlers were getting on the Sullivan show regularly, while people who could really blow or sing were fighting for cheap club dates …

Hester and I strolled on, past the Head Shop on East Ninth. This emporium had on display in its window a two-foot-long Pyrex glass pipe with a nest of smaller glass accessories. Studying it, I told Hester that it was probably a fine pipe, but would also serve admirably for simple retort work in the laboratory, if a fellow had something like that in view. To manufacture LSD, for example.

You are so right, country cousin, the tall girl said, laughing. We walked on and found a heterosexual saloon with fumed and cracked-black-leather booths in the back. Hester had a sandwich and a Coke, while I stalled through a Black Daniel’s. Then we talked and I learned more than she did, but that was what I had been trained to do.

When it was time for her to go back to the Eunuch’s Horn for her final show, I said I would stick around in the bar for a while and meet her at the club later. The tall girl nodded, pecked a kiss at my right ear, and swung out like one of Beauty’s daughters. Seemingly quite invigorated by one turkey-on-rye-with-Russian-dressing and a Coke.

I crooked a finger and the friendly Irishman at the bar sang out Black Daniel’s, right? I nodded, and he brought the drink back to the booth, with a half-glass of soda on the side. From where I sat, I could see the street outside, and for another hour I watched the Village parade at midnight.

It was motley, to a man who lived in the country.

Chapter 2

I walked back to the Eunuch’s Horn just before the last show broke. The crowd was not as large as at the first show, but the cave was still packed. And the mule-girls were still frigging thin air to the bluesy beat from Motown.

The joint had nearly emptied when Hester joined me at the bar. She looked tired, and I said we’d better catch a cab.

Not yet, the tall girl said. Let’s make a block.

We walked a block, and she found an ice-cream parlor. My Ozark soul revolted against such an establishment being open after midnight, but she only said Foo! Went inside and bought a triple-dip cone. I refused one. We walked to a taxi stand, and, miraculously, found a cab pulling in. The cabbie was a beetle-browed thug; he slammed the flag down and U-turned toward uptown.

Have a taste, insisted Hester as we were thrown back against the worn upholstery. When I refused, she asked me for a kiss and I gave her a glancing one. I was beginning to be irritated with the subworld in which she spent her time and made her living.

Her friends, the hippies and kicksters. Calm hatred for everyone over thirty was in their eyes. Goddammit, I hadn’t intended to get older; it had been an accident. Something that had happened while I was out in the boondocks, in places they couldn’t even spell.… Fighting wars or trying to prop up American contentions in obscure alleys….

Hester sensed my anger. She patted my cheek and sat back in her corner, long legs folded, licking contentedly at her cone. The cab rolled uptown.

When we coasted to a halt before a Central Park South apartment marquee, the doorman helped Hester and her dripping ice-cream cone out. The tall girl strode into the brightly lighted lobby.

After I had paid the cabbie, I went in too, and the elevator operator said Miss Prim lived in 12A.

The ivory-paneled door to that apartment was open, but Hester was nowhere in sight. Logs had flaked to fiery chunks in the Georgian fireplace. When I called, her faint shout came up the right hallway.

Lock the door and hook the chain, dear old Charley, or we might get busted yet.

I bolted the front door, put the chain on, and walked down the right hallway until I came to a dim room that had vivid colors flowing across its ceiling.

Here, lover, called Hester. I turned into the room and found her stretched out in the briefest of shortie nightgowns, on a bare mattress. She was still licking at the cone. There was no furniture in the room, but through the multicolored dimness I could see other bare mattresses and leather poufs. Like the sitting room, this one had an entire glass wall fronting on the park.

It was a room for modern revels. Hidden pin spots, separate from the flowing bands of color