The Revenge of Kali-Ra Read online

  Also by K. K. Beck:

  We Interrupt This Broadcast

  Bad Neighbors

  Death in a Deck Chair

  Murder in a Mummy Case

  The Body in the Volvo

  Young Mrs. Cavendish and the Kaiser’s Men

  Unwanted Attentions

  Peril Under the Palms

  The Jane da Silva Novels:

  Cold Smoked

  Electric City

  Amateur Night

  A Hopeless Case

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE REVENGE OF KALI-RA. Copyright © 1999 by Kathrine Beck. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo are registered trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  For information address Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2354-8

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1999 by Mysterious Press.

  First eBook Edition: May 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  This book is affectionately and respectfully dedicated to the memory of Sax Rohmer, the Baroness Orczy, H. Rider Haggard, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and many others, who toiled ceaselessly for no reward other than vast fame and massive fortune.

  PROLOGUE

  Valerian Ricardo selected a cigarette from the gold Cartier box with his initials in diamonds, fitted it into his ebony and silver holder, and strolled onto the balcony of his villa overlooking the Côte d’Azur. A tall, slim man of thirty-five, he had a strangely dissipated face for one so young. His fine brown hair was well oiled and combed flat against his egg-shaped skull, and he wore a maroon silk dressing gown over his white silk pajamas. His manservant, Lucien, proffered a lighter, and Ricardo gazed out over the Mediterranean. “It’s too dammed bright,” he said, retreating back to the dim recesses of the house.

  He had really overdone it this time, he thought. Four or five cocktails with the duchess, then all those giddy debutantes and of course the cocaine, which never failed to energize and invigorate—that had been fine. But he’d had to go on and indulge later in copious amounts of opium more powerful than he had ever experienced, and Valerian Ricardo had experienced plenty.

  He let out a world-weary sigh. At least, he thought, the drug had produced the desired result, a fantastic dream that could be swiftly tailored into one of his enchanting tales. It had been at least three months since the last book had been published, and if Valerian Ricardo was to continue living as he had become accustomed to living—indeed, as he deserved to live—he had better deliver another one by the week after next at the latest.

  Eagerly, he rushed to his bedside and seized his leather-bound notebook. In the early hours of the dawn he had jotted down the main scenes, and there was certainly enough there for a real corker of a yarn. Thank God he had written it down, because now the details were hazy.

  “Hero runs through thicket, pursuing naked girl with jeweled navel. Branches scratch his flesh.” Good.

  “Dagger. Cabochon emeralds and rubies. Plunged into bosom of sleeping woman in gossamer-fine negligee.” Fine.

  “Evil criminal mastermind, once a respectable member of society, now disgraced, directs his empire from a fetid tropical island, sending his minions to do evil.” All right.

  “Beautiful villainess disguised as serving girl.” He’d done that one before but it never failed.

  “Various people bound with stout ropes and locked in closets, etc.” Okay.

  But surely there was more! There had to be! The dream had been very well plotted. Better than anything he’d ever done in the previous twenty or so books.

  Ricardo turned the page. Here were a few more jottings but they were less legible. He managed to make out “family secrets revealed,” “lovers united,” “all resolved,” and “the end.”

  Disgusted, he flung the notebook down. There had been so much more in his dream! He must remember it all. And by next Tuesday at the latest.

  Lucien coughed discreetly. “Has monsieur forgotten that Miss Nadi is coming to luncheon?” he asked, before leaving the room.

  Oh yes. Vera Nadi, the screen vamp who had taken the villa next door. Last night she had lain beside him on the sofa, inhaling the magical fumes which had produced this wonderful novel, the details of which he had now, maddeningly, forgotten. As the hookah gurgled, she had charmed him with reminiscences of her harem childhood in Constantinople. She had been the daughter of the sultan’s favorite, a proud beauty who later escaped to America with the young Vera. The story was slightly at odds with the movie star’s thick New Jersey accent, but Vera had presumably learned her English in Newark where she and her mother had fled. Anyway, film actresses were of course not required to speak.

  Suddenly, he remembered one more thing about his dream. Last night Vera Nadi had shown him a photograph of the sprawling villa she had just built in California. It was in that house, an Arabian Nights sort of house surrounded by dense and fragrant gardens, that his dream novel had taken place. He had brief images of a window, a parapet, large tiled floors. There were fleeting sensations of a moonlight swim, mysterious visitors whose errand was unclear, a gray-eyed girl of wisdom and a dark temptress—or maybe two dark temptresses. But these impressions fled as quickly as they had arrived, taunting him then running off, laughing cruelly, until he knew they were gone. Damn!

  This was doubly vexing because it had all seemed so real. It was almost as if this dream had told a tale that had already happened, or that would happen in the future. Valerian Ricardo had been told by many psychics that he was a highly tuned entity, sensitive to truth from beyond earthly reality, with strong clairvoyant powers.

  Lucien entered the room again. “Miss Nadi has arrived,” he said.

  Valerian Ricardo took a deep breath and slicked back his hair. “Tell her I shall join her shortly. The cream-colored linen lounge suit today, I think. But first, bring me a small absinthe, will you? I seem to have a slight headache.”

  Once Lucien had left, he tore the pages from his notebook to shreds and scattered them from his balcony, whence the gentle breezes carried them down to the Mediterranean.

  BOOK ONE

  In Which the Queen of Doom Awakens from Her Slumber

  CHAPTER I

  TRAPPED BY A MONSOON

  Nadia Wentworth turned the slightly mildewed page. “God,” she said. “This is so totally cool.”

  Kali-Ra strode about the marble floors of the Temple of the Chosen with the gait of a jungle cat. Her green eyes narrowed and emitted a peculiar light, a light that the privileged few of her fanatic followers who had been permitted to bask in the heady presence of their mistress knew only too well. “I am displeased,” she said in a purring, velvety tone. “I have been disobeyed, and now the meddling Englishman, Raymond Vernon, has been allowed to escape.”

  Gasps of fear came from the mouths of the faithful in the temple. When it took on that purr, Kali-Ra’s low, cruel voice was a precursor to the wickedest, the vilest, and the most fiendishly devised punishments and tortures.

  Nadia, a small, dark woman in her twenties, and one of Hollywood’s three most bankable female stars, shifted on the bed, producing horrible squeaks from the ancient springs, eager to learn just what the merciless Kali-Ra had
in mind for those who had let her down.

  Nadia seldom read actual books. If she was thinking of optioning one for her new production company, she’d get her personal assistant, Melanie, to tell her what it was all about. But the monsoon season had come early to the remote South Pacific island where she was shooting the remake of a forties South Seas picture in which she reprised the Hedy Lamarr role of a sarong-clad Polynesian temptress. To update the work, the character had been rewritten as a literal as well as figurative man-eater. The picture was called Cannibal.

  The joke among the crew was that if the rains didn’t let up, they’d be forced to start eating each other. For the last three days, flights had been canceled, and even private planes couldn’t get in or out. The crew had been killing time for a week and a half, holed up in the island’s only hotel, a turn-of-the-century pile undermined by termites and filled with rickety rattan furniture and lizards.

  Nadia had finished looking at the pictures in all her magazines, and had gone back and read every word. There was no TV, let alone cable or satellite dishes. The hotel’s one VCR didn’t track. Even the radio seemed to have just one station, and it had nothing on at all except crazed preachers lecturing people in static-ridden pidgin. Nadia couldn’t even wash her thick dark hair because she’d run out of her special kelp shampoo and her defrizzing conditioning gel finish with healing aloe. Adding insult to injury, the bitchy set hairdresser pointed out that because she was working in a wig, he didn’t have anything for her very special and chronic hair problems.

  Nadia was sick of the picture, the crew, the director, her leading man, the island, and especially the Hotel Splendide, which provided really cheap shampoo in itty-bitty plastic bottles, and no conditioner at all.

  “God,” she’d said to Melanie earlier. “I can’t even trash the hotel room because it was trashed before I even got here. Everything sucks. This is all somebody’s fault. I have been totally screwed over by these so-called producers. I never should have done this picture. I had a weird feeling about it. Why didn’t I say no? Why didn’t we just shoot this in Hawaii, for God’s sake? Why won’t it stop raining? I am so fucking bored!” She scrunched her features into an angry knot. Her face usually wore an irritable expression, a petulant tightness not without a sulky charm. This tightness lost its grip primarily when the camera was on her. Then, her face softened and became dewy, open, receptive and enchanting.

  Apart from the results of neglect, decay, and humidity, nothing much had changed at the Hotel Splendide since Somerset Maugham had checked in on his way to Tahiti. This included the collection of moldy books in the lobby provided for browsing guests. After Nadia’s tirade, Melanie had sighed, and quietly left the room, reappearing some time later with a stack of these well-worn volumes.

  Melanie, a tall redhead with intelligent grayish eyes and a calm demeanor unusual in someone so young, was Nadia’s personal assistant, in charge of everything from acting as liaison with lawyers, publicists, accountants, and personal trainers to making sure that the Evian was room temperature. “There’s an old Scrabble set down there too,” she reported, “but the crew is using it. I can take it away from them if you want.”

  Nadia curled her lip. “Real tactful, Melanie. You know I have a genetic learning disorder that means I can’t spell.” She cast a sullen eye over the collection of books, and was drawn immediately to the cover of The Wrath of Kali-Ra by Valerian Ricardo. It depicted a tall, pale, exotic-looking woman with a cloud of black hair. She wore a diaphanous garment that revealed great breasts and legs, and some stunning jewelry, including bracelets on her upper arms and a band around her forehead in the shape of a snake. The woman had a haughty and cruel expression on her face, and carried a whip.

  “God,” said Nadia reverently. “She looks so totally empowered.”

  “Do you want me to read it and tell it to you?” asked Melanie pleasantly.

  Nadia ignored her and opened up the book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the Web of the Queen of Doom

  Raymond Vernon lit his pipe and leaned nonchalantly against the fireplace at his exclusive London club. Vernon was tall, lean, fit, and a wonderful example of the best of the Anglo-Saxon type. Only a few especially sensitive souls noticed, however, that there was something haunted and weary about his keen, steady, gray eyes. Here was a man whose fate it was to have lived as few men have lived, and to have seen much that was unspeakable.

  Gazing into the distance, as if perceiving some private vision across the room, Vernon began. “There are places in the world where no white man has been, places where strange things happen, strange, mystical things.

  “Often, when a certain occult power is awakened, a torrent of beautiful, deadly evil is unleashed. And, although only a handful of people know the terrible secret, this force is proven time and time again to be what drives a vast conspiracy with world domination as its inevitable end.”

  Colonel Bellingham looked up from his newspaper. “Come now, Vernon. You’re not carrying on about this world domination business again, are you?” he said irritably, twisting the ends of his white mustache. “And this she-devil you claim is hiding behind every lamppost?”

  “You may scoff if you like,” said Raymond Vernon coolly. “But I have seen the face of Kali-Ra, and I have felt the terrible power she possesses. It is, Colonel Bellingham, a power with the beauty of a poisonous, waxy, night-blooming flower, alluring in its scent, yet somehow expressing also the evil that is all the more dangerous because of its seductive beauty.”

  “No, I’ll read it myself,” said Nadia. “The prose is so fabulous.”

  CHAPTER II

  A DISCOVERY AT MANDERLEIGH MANOR

  Nick Iversen pulled up outside the retirement home in suburban Minneapolis where his grandfather lived. He sat in the car for a minute, with the key on “accessory,” until his song on the radio finished playing. He always stalled before going inside Manderleigh Manor. While he stalled, he looked through the windshield at a couple of old ladies with white fuzzy hair and glasses. They clumped along the concrete paths through carefully tended lawn with the aid of aluminum walkers. The women were smiling and chatting with each other and seemed to be having a good time. Why couldn’t Grandpa have been one of those nice old people, the kind that donated their time making tapes of reminiscences for oral history projects?

  Instead, Grandpa was the kind of person who gave old people a bad name. Since a series of small strokes, he tended to come out with blunt, irritable pronouncements and showed absolutely no interest in anybody else. Nick’s mother said this was a cruel trick of nature, altering the personality of a wonderful man through the selective killing of brain cells. Nick, however, thought that Grandpa had probably always been basically crabby and selfish and all the strokes had done was impair his ability to mask these underlying flaws.

  It had been a huge relief when Grandpa had finally agreed to move in here. After his retirement from the lumberyard, he had helped a little with household chores, always under the close supervision of his wife. But since becoming a widower, and especially after the strokes, he had simply abandoned any pretense of housekeeping. He preferred to spend all day on the sofa watching television.

  Stacks of dishes in increasingly precarious piles had appeared on all the flat surfaces in the kitchen. Little nests of dirty clothes sprung up like mushrooms behind doors and in odd corners. Nick had helped his mother dig the old boy out about four times, before announcing that he wouldn’t do it again, and that she shouldn’t either—they’d have to get him into a home.

  Now, Nick visited Grandpa because he felt guilty that he’d instigated the campaign to push the old guy in here. He also felt a residual gratitude for the fact that when he was a little kid, Grandpa had provided him with scraps of plywood and two-by-fours from the lumberyard for the construction of forts and tree houses. With a sigh, Nick forced himself out of the car and into the building.

  The overpolished linoleum floors and the stainless steel elev
ators were pretty grim, but once you got into Grandpa’s little apartment, things weren’t so bad. After all, the furniture had come from the old house, and Nick remembered it all from childhood. The olive green sofa with the crocheted afghan across the back, the fake-colonial maple coffee table with his own baby-teeth marks on one corner, the brown braided oval rug laid over the wall-to-wall carpeting.

  Nick knocked on the blond wood door and listened to the shuffle of slippers and his grandfather snapping, “All right, all right. Coming!”

  “Oh. It’s you,” he said, staring up at his grandson as if he resented the intrusion. He’d seemed pleased enough when Nick had called forty minutes ago and said he was on his way.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” Nick said, trying to sound reasonably cheerful but not phony. “How are you?”

  “Lousy.” Grandpa collapsed back onto the sunken spot on the sofa across from the TV and his eyes drifted immediately back to the screen. Nick reflected bitterly that crotchety baby boomers were always accusing his own generation of having tube-fried brains, and here was someone who’d been in the Battle of the Bulge, using the television like electronic Prozac. “I always feel like hell,” Grandpa elaborated.

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Nick breezily. He knew better than to ask what was wrong. That would just unleash a torrent of vague complaints about the food and the staff. Nick thought the food was pretty good for institutional fare, and that the people who looked after his ungrateful grandfather were incredibly kind and patient, if not candidates for sainthood.

  “I brought you something,” said Nick, handing over a box of Grandpa’s favorite candy, chocolate-covered cherries.