Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,32
between herself and the edge of the funnel. But the floor here was slippery and gave no traction to Jackie’s high-heeled shoes. She found herself slipping off the rim. Moe and Larry held on as long as they could, then let her go so as not to be dragged into the pit along with her.
Jackie slowly slid down the incline toward the hole below. She grabbed on to the lip of the funnel and momentarily arrested her slide, but her fingers could find no solid purchase there. She looked up at Moe and Larry and croaked out, “Help me. Please.”
Moe and Larry looked to Curly, who was suddenly by their side. “Not unless you tell us what you’re doing here in Havana,” he called down to Jackie in a surprisingly reasonable tone of voice. “Does it have anything to do with William Walker’s treasure?”
Jackie couldn’t believe it. Walker’s treasure. She should have known that’s what they were after. Somehow they knew about it. It also explained why they had been after her in New Orleans. But little good that information was doing her now.
Moe retrieved the gaff and held it at the ready, waiting to hook Jackie and pull her back up should Curly give the word.
Her fingers slipped a little bit more, and she knew it was only a matter of seconds before she slid down the funnel into the crocodile pit and was torn to pieces by those ravenous creatures. It would be so easy to save herself. All she had to do was answer Curly’s questions. But that was unthinkable, given the pledge she had made to the CIA and her country. Her life was literally going down the drain.
And as she slid slowly, inexorably, down the slick incline of the funnel, with the Three Stooges waiting impassively above her and the hungry crocodiles waiting impatiently below, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier asked herself, For God’s sake, how did I get myself into this mess?
PART TWO
EL TEATRO DE CINEMA
VIII
Feeling like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, Jackie plummeted through the opening at the bottom of the funnel and fell, luckily, only a short distance. She landed with a thud on the muddy floor of the crocodile pit and had the wind momentarily knocked out of her. Trying to convince her lungs to breathe once again, she scanned her new environment and found to her horror that she was at the epicenter of about twenty hungry crocodiles, their scaly hides glistening wetly in the murky light of the pit. One of the beasts was practically face-to-face with her, his breath so foul that it caused Jackie to flinch and her eyes to water. Fortunately, the crocodiles had been totally shocked by her sudden arrival and were holding off from eating her until they had sized up how much of a danger she presented. So, even as they surrounded her, these lumbering beasts maintained a slight, cautious distance from Jackie.
Slowly rising to her unsteady feet, struggling at the same time to gather her wits, Jackie tried hard not to panic. Fear would have been a normal reaction for anyone in this predicament had it not also run counter to her newly honed survival skills as a CIA-trained espionage agent, which, admittedly, hadn’t prepared her for this eventuality. Steady, Jackie, she told herself, you can get out of this. All you have to do is apply your brain. And then, having said this, she felt something stirring in the back of her memory that she knew she must work quickly to retrieve.
It was a memory only several months old, so she didn’t have to work all that hard to recover it. Her family was gathered in the living room watching a show on the new cabinet-model DuMont television when she passed the set going upstairs to get ready for a date and stopped to see what they found so engrossing. But what show was it? And how could it be applicable to what she was facing now? As the crocodiles continued to circle menacingly, Jackie racked her brain to remember what her family had been watching that night. And then it came to her.
A dapper-looking man in a safari jacket. Marlin Perkins. Yes, Marlin Perkins, the famous zoologist and host of Zoo Parade, broadcast on NBC from Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. And there he was standing next to a crocodile, the creature looking slightly more docile than the ones sizing her up here, and talking about the peculiarities of the species.