Spy and Other Short Stories

Reuben Israel

Description

A mixed bag of coming-of-age action and adventure, alternate history, mystery, horror, science fiction, crime, satire, fairytale and drama, to tickle your fancy.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Date de parution: 11 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781543766950
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SPY AND OTHER SHORT STORIES
REUBEN ISRAEL


Copyright © 2022 by Reuben Israel.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-5437-6694-3

eBook
978-1-5437-6695-0
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
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CONTENTS
Spy
I
Progeny
Ugly
The Cavern
 
About the Author
Spy
I was a spy for all of three months the year before I graduated. It was a summer job with prospects in the intelligence service. To be honest I half went in for the idea of being a secret agent. I might not be good with women and all that, but laser wristwatches and stun rings and weapons of localized and particular destruction are my kind of thing. (Madness in the Q department has to be at least quasi directed. If nothing else, they have two random word generators, [offensive capability] x [everyday personal item] set them off in tandem, and the resulting combination will be the project for the next quarter. Gems such as the Close Quarters Combat Wallet, the Acid Spray Name Card, and Laser Mint will prove invaluable for surprise alone.) The Agency had other ideas: undergrads are pliable, intelligent, vital, and poor. That made them useful and expendable, like paperclips. They knew what they were doing, and I was just too naive to even begin thinking like someone who never runs out of paperclips.
The spymaster over me was a slow, limited man who betrayed no weakness or affect apart from an onomatopoeic relish in the way he said “lunch” – juicily and crunchily, both at once, while an unsightly glisten gathered at the corners of his mouth – I was given rudimentary training in breaking and entering, loitering, theft, forgery, and lying. They didn’t trust me with any gadget or weapon, and the only promise they would give was that if I was caught they would claim that they never knew me, which – so claimed the person I privately codenamed The Luncheon – was my best chance of survival, so long as I admitted nothing.
I was sent to courier a used bus ticket to a certain place, and exchange it with another agent for an empty plastic lighter with a rude word scratched on it, and courier that to a certain rubbish bin. When it was dropped I was to hang around the cabbages at a certain storefront. Within ten minutes I was passed another package by the storekeeper’s assistant disguised as a wrapped cabbage; this, to City Hall, exchanged for another wrapped cabbage by cold drop, then to the quay and dropped at high tide for a frogman to retrieve, and then... it’s all very complicated and hush-hush and I can’t remember most of it now. Anyway, at one point I was accosted and sprayed with chloroform from a pressurized cufflink, and the next thing I knew I woke up alone at a cafe booth with cold pancakes and a plain coffee in front of me. The place smelled strongly either of moldy peanuts or alfa toxin. One look at the waitresses and I knew two things: this place was a front, and all the spoons were poisoned.
I got up and almost walked out when the waitress stood in my way.
“Bill, please.”
“No, please.”
She put a finger into the cleavage of her uniform and pulled it a teasing inch down. Her smile was a curved knife used for gutting sheep.
“You have to pay.”
“For what? Breathing?”
“No,” she spat impatiently, “sitting.”
“Sitting where? Here?”
“Hair.”
“Do you mean ‘here’?”
“ Hare! ”
It was a misunderstanding. I was trying to understand her, and she, a sextuple agent, was using a spybook from an ex-redefected spy who she thought I was spying on but had counter-infiltrated my organization as a slow but experienced spymaster, codenamed The Glutton. It’s very complicated. She was very cross, because she had followed me since I went into a handicap stall at the train station – I was seriously urgent, and she thought I was defecting – and had lost sight of two others who were trailing her. One was genuinely trying to marry her, and the other was after her parcels.
Nevertheless, so that the afternoon would not be totally lost, she tried to seduce me. I had been prepared for this: I told her that I was gay. She doubted it, but played along. She lowered her voice.
“Then let’s say I am a gay man in a woman’s body.”
“...Are you?” I said, because she had suddenly grown an Adam’s apple that had not been there before.
“Let’s just say.”
“No,” I said, but there was no escape now. A real gay man started propositioning me from the back. I suppose it was my fault wriggling into him. Now I was trapped between not wanting to blow my cover and having to blow him. Luckily, he was a civilian, not on his guard. When the waitress had her back turned to refill coffee I fed him a piece of pancake on a teaspoon and fled while he clutched at his throat.
I quit the secret service after that. They were nice enough to pay me pro-bono, with a little bit extra, with which I bought the spymaster a vegetarian chicken pie and some very good Australian nougat as thanks.
I knew they would never let go of me. I would always be looking behind my back so long as this man lived. But my plan worked: the nougat popped the cyanide capsules he had hidden in his teeth.
No one knew I got him; everyone suspected everyone else of suspecting everyone suspecting everyone. It is complicated.
I got away.
I was now a Man with a Pastry.
They call me the Man with the Gluten Bun.
I
An extraordinary man lives at Hougang Avenue Two, block 316, #01-110. A fat little man with a fat, mean, boorish little face. The face seemed to suggest the possibility that, once upon a time on the evolutionary chart, Little Red Riding Hood, in a bout of hostage-trauma reflex that demanded a substitute for the Big Bad Wolf as a sexual ideal, had a discrete liaison with the last surviving Chinny Chin Chin, who wore pigtails and whose father had been a bricklayer for the Great Wall. Face, neck and armpits permanently glazed with cheap cologne-candied sweat, hair plastered undecidedly on his head, less like the counterfeit coif with innovative dermal adhesive strips that was advertised than a melted vinyl record atop the pointed end of an ostrich egg, he is not, contrary to his beliefs, and never to begin with, a hit with the ladies. His tentative forays into that territory tended to end with the ladies giving a hit to him.
In short, not a good-looking man.
He is, however, a damn good reporter.