Edie Investigates Read Online Free PDF Page A

All the same, she’ll be glad when this mission is over and she can go back to her natural habitat.
    She turns to the wall briefly as if to fuss with her hair and adjusts a part of her dress which is doing something she would generally expect only from a confident and somewhat risquée lover. These outfits have no shame.
    When she looks back across the lounge, she can see the man she is meeting. Stocky to the point of tubby, he has a wide face with watery eyes which reminds her—as it did in his file—of a poached egg.
    “Good evening, Lady,” he booms. “It is very fine to have such a rose of England on our wessel!”
    Edie simpers, broadly, so that the room can see. And the room is watching, no question about that, two lads by the bar in sharp suits who aren’t visiting academicians for all they claim to be, but Hungarian AVH. The left one has a bulge in his pocket too small to be a gun, so she suspects it’s a billy cosh. The other, leaner and fastidious, plucks an olive from his martini and affords her a glimpse of a narrow case she identifies as holding a syringe. So.
    “Oh, why, how very flattering! And who are you, sir?” she says aloud, letting it fall into a gap in everyone else’s conversation. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”A mild chastisement there, and some of the other men, the ones who have already tried their luck, wince a little in sympathy. The Lady Edith has proven elusive, and the beaus are growing frantic. Contests of strength are becoming something of a daily matter—shuffleboard, chess, even shooting from the top deck—they all mysteriously come to a fever when Edie chances to walk by.
    “I am Dmitri. To you always I am Dima! I am from Soviet Embassy the cultural attaché,” which is true, though he doesn’t mention he’s about the eighth assistant attaché, which is naughty, or that he’s a spy, which is an open secret everyone is too polite to mention. Anyway, Lady Edith is a pinhead aristocratic wife-in-waiting, and not the sort of person to know that sort of thing at all.
    “Oh, how terribly thrilling! You’re a Bolshevik! You must think me absolutely awful!”
    “No! But why?”
    “I’m a Lady! A terrible oppressor.”
    “Is accident of birth, Lady. Also, the wretched enemy from glorious socialism bourgeois capitalism. You are feudal. A necessary part of the ascent to perfected mode. And very pretty! I am a man who does not fail to notice this, even if you must be put up against the wall sooner or later!”
    The entire assembled company of kibitzing young men gapes briefly at this last suggestion, but it seems to go right over Lady Edith’s head.
    “Oh, my, must I? Am I in frightful danger from you, then?”
    “Of the gravest sort,” replies the tubby Soviet, with a twinkle, and Lady Edith actually flushes slightly and makes a gesture of insincere shock.
    “You are incorrigible, Dima,” she flusters, “and entirely too forward!”
    “I am a peasant, Lady,” Dima says quite untruthfully, “but you should not fear my rough hands. With you they will be gentle. And as for the revolution—if you have the right sort of friends anything is possible!”
    “Goodness,” simpers Edie. “Then I do hope we shall be friends. I shall no doubt find use for your rough hands. And in any case,” she adds, placing a lingering index finger on his round shoulder, “I do enjoy the company of a man of substance.”
    Dima goggles at her a little, obviously hoping this is the simple truth, and the thwarted suitors groan to one another. All that time practicing the exercises of Joseph Pilates when they should have been eating eggs and sitting still. A disaster. And an unfair one at that.
    The boys at the bar give each other a regulation sneer. Cheap theatre!
    And it is. Edie knows fine well that this charade will not persuade them, and that is not her intention. Her employer wishes devoutly, however, that they believe that is her plan, so that they will look no further,