by Lou Cameron
Gaston nodded and said, “Eh bien, I regard the picture, and it looks dirty enough to be real. Mais, what if Dick refuses to go along with it? As you may have guessed by now, he fails to regard you with much enthusiasm, and—”
“He’s young and idealistic,” Hakim cut in, reaching for his desk set as he added, “We can work out the sticky details after we get him out of that sticky wicket he’s in at the moment, eh what?”
Gaston nodded but said, “It is understood, of course, that I can not speak for anyone but myself and that Dick thinks you are a très disgusting species of crook.”
Hakim picked up the phone and told the operator to give him a certain number before he cupped a hand over the mouthpiece to ask, “Do I have your word that you’ll get that message through for me, with or without your young friend’s help?”
Gaston nodded soberly and said, “Oui, I would rather take it in the ass from the devil than do anything for you, mais I want Dick out of there alive, so …”
He stopped talking as Hakim suddenly snapped into the phone with authority, “Lopez, move in and take that gang out. Make sure you don’t hurt Captain Gringo. But don’t leave anyone else in shape to discuss the noise with the police afterward.”
Then he hung up. So he naturally had no way of knowing when Nurse Page, on the extension in the other room, made her own call to report, “It’s as we assumed. Hakim’s just recruited those soldiers of fortune you were worried about. The rest is up to you. I have to hang up before the old bugger comes in for more perverse sex with me. That was pounds, not dollars, we were talking about, right?”
Nothing worked out just as anyone had planned. Sir Basil’s phone call had barely been made when another total stranger, this one a man, exploded in on Captain Gringo through the shattered shutters of the breezeway window, swinging on a rope by one hand like an ape on a jungle vine as he fired the Le Mat he was holding in the other.
The monstrous Le Mat was a pistol chambered to fire shotgun rounds. So both the noise and effects were awesome. But since Captain Gringo wasn’t on the bed as it got blown to shit and chicken feathers, the acrobat was in trouble before his boot heels hit the floor. Captain Gringo put a smaller and less dramatic .38 slug over his heart and watched, bemused, as the Le Mat hit the rug and the intruder staggered back to fall out the same window he’d just come through. He fell a good spell, silently, then hit bottom with a loud, squishy thud, out of sight and out of mind since some other mother was pumping lead through the door at the same time.
Captain Gringo had been too smart to be in either place they’d guessed at. But as he fired through the cloud of flying feathers and oak splinters he had a pretty good idea where a guy firing through the door from a narrow hallway had to be. He assumed he’d guessed right when he heard another dull thud and a familiar female voice wailed, “Madre de Dios, I told you he was on to us!”
Captain Gringo was on to how she’d gotten in, too, now that he saw the rope from the roof hanging just outside his messed-up side window. He reloaded and put on his hat and jacket before moving over for a closer look. As he’d just guessed, the rope the people kept using to drop in on him uninvited led up to the roof. But the sun still pasted shadows across the way, and now there seemed to be two guys up there. He didn’t think they were looking over the edge at the moment, judging from the shadows of their hat brims. So he risked a quick peep down and out. It was not encouraging. The damned rope only reached a few yards below the sill. The bottom of the breezeway, now littered with a corpse as well as busted bottles and used contraceptives, was solid cement and three stories down.
He hauled the rope in, anyway. Somewhere a police whistle was blowing, and he didn’t want to explain all this to cops, either. He and Gaston had been working on the sneak for the ruling junta in these parts. So he knew that they’d let him go to the wall before they’d let the full story be printed in the opposition newspapers.
He got under where the two guys on the rooftop had to be and had a good look at their shadows across the way before he took a deep breath, pointed the muzzle of his .38 straight up, and emptied it into the ceiling.
He ducked his hat brim as plaster dust rained down on him. He put the empty gun away to hold on to the rope with both hands as he ran for the window, leapt over the sill, and kept going.
He swung way the hell out from the building he’d left, hoping to make it to a window across the way. His boots kicked the shutters in, and some dame inside started screaming. But he saw, to his chagrin, that he just couldn’t make it that way. So he had to hang on as he swung back across the gap.
There was no way to swing back through the window he’d just left, even had he wanted to. He was holding the rope too low. But, looking on the bright side, he now seemed to be aimed at the shutters of the room below his. So he simply hung on until his boots crashed through it and let go of the rope.
He landed on a table near the window and slid across it on his butt, scattering cards and bottles, as the four guys seated at the table with Pepita all screamed at once. As he got to the far side he kicked one in the face with both heels. That slowed him down, even as it broke the other guy’s neck. So the bullet someone fired whipped through where he was supposed to be rather than where he was. He crashed to the floor atop the one whose face he’d kicked in and rolled off, under the table, to grab the nearest handy ankle. He gave it a good twist as he rose, sending the table flying one way as his latest victim fell on his face the other way and, once Captain Gringo had planted a boot heel in his spine, stayed put.
But a guy could get hurt staying put in situations like these. So Captain Gringo ducked as yet another gun roared in the confined, already smoke-filled chamber. Pepita screamed, and the guy who’d hit her by mistake gasped, “Oh, my God!” and then died, because he’d been watching the girl in the red dress crumple to the floor when he should have been paying attention to people still alive. Captain Gringo caught the guy as he watched Pepita fall to the floor, driving a chair rung into his brain through an eye socket. The big Yank threw what was left of the chair at the last guy still on his feet and followed that up with what would have been a shot had the gun he’d grabbed still been loaded. He threw the heavy weapon instead, and the man he’d hit with the chair—hit with hard cold steel as well—staggered back to land with his butt on the sill of the open window, sobbing. “I give up! I’ve had enough, Captain Gringo!”
He screamed even louder when the American moved in on him to throw a right cross that sent him ass over teakettle out the window. From the sickening sound he made hitting bottom Captain Gringo assumed that he’d landed atop the earlier cadaver down below. He didn’t look. He was more interested in reloading now that he had a little peace and quiet around here.
But as he stood among the carnage, his revolver broken, the door popped open and he found himself staring into the muzzle of a gun and a pair of eyes as cold as hazel can get. He sighed and said, “Oh, shit,” even as he tensed to spring.
The man in the doorway lowered his own gun muzzle with a puzzled smile to ask, “Are you not Captain Gringo? I am Lopez. I was sent here for to rescue you. Pero Jesus, Maria y José, you seem to have rescued yourself. How did you get the drop on all these people as well as the ones on the roof above, amigo?”
“I’d rather be your amigo than your enemigo if you can show me the way out of here, poco tiempo.”
“Bueno, I, too, hear the familiar plaintive calls of la policia. Follow me down the back stairs. The others with me will cover us.”
Captain Gringo said that sounded fair, and in less time than it takes to tell about it, he and Lopez were out the back door and into a maze of favela alleyways no police officer in his right mind was about to enter alone. As they felt safe enough to slow to a walk, Lopez explained that the body Captain Gringo might have noticed behind the posada had been picked off by his own men, adding, “Now that we have met, I must say that you do not seem to be in as much danger as we thought.”
Captain Gringo s
hrugged modestly and replied, “A guy lives and learns or he doesn’t live long. Who the fuck are you and how come you’re being so good to me?”
Lopez hesitated, then explained that he was taking Captain Gringo to Gaston, who would no doubt explain it all better than anyone else could. So the American said that sounded fair, too, and as they moved on, he filled Lopez in on his recent confusion. When he’d finished, the other gun slick frowned and observed, “You took everyone in that room out with no bullets of your own, amigo? I fear I am about to be sick.”
“What can I tell you? I was just reloading when you popped in on me, Lopez.”
The Salvadoran gulped and said, “Si, that is what I meant.”
Captain Gringo was at a loss for words when he got to Hakim’s and heard the whole story. Calling Sir Basil a motherfucker would be an insult to motherfuckers, calling him a cocksucker would be sheer flattery. Both soldiers of fortune knew that Hakim had them by the short hairs. As an international criminal who’d been knighted by Queen Victoria for making so much money that way,-naturally Hakim was as free as any other peer of the realm to break his word. But free-lance adventurers who welshed on a deal could discover all too soon that nobody wanted to deal with them.
Gaston had agreed to deliver Hakim’s message. So he had to do it, with or without Captain Gringo’s help. As Gaston had sort of hoped and as Sir Basil had banked on, the tall American helped himself to one of Hakim’s expensive cigars and growled, “I was planning on leaving El Salvador as soon as possible, anyway. It could be injurious to our health to come back here for the money. So let’s talk about payment in advance.”
Hakim shook his head and said, “Let’s talk about my depositing it for you in a Costa Rican bank. You will be going back to San José if and when, eh what?”
Captain Gringo lit the perfecto, blew smoke in the arms king’s face, and said, “Bullshit. You know we hole up there between jobs because it’s one of the few places we’re not wanted by the law. But one of the reasons the Costa Rican cops leave us alone is that we hardly ever bust up Costa Rican banks, and I’d sure be tempted to do just that if I showed up to find that I didn’t have any money on deposit after all.”
Hakim shrugged and said, “If you won’t take my word as a rather distinguished gentleman, I could always give you the deposit slips in advance, postdated, of course.”
Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “I’m not any kind of a gentleman since they took my commission away. But even a slob knows that postdated paper’s worthless. Here’s how we’ll do it. You let us have the deposit slips dated as of the day we leave here, with the interest on the money growing as we go. You’ll know we can’t cash ’em before we get back to San José, so what the hell.”
Hakim thought, then asked, “What’s to stop you lot from simply romping home with my hard-earned money?”
Captain Gringo snorted smoke out his nostrils and snapped, “Not a thing. If we robbed you, we’d only be making money your way, you poor, sweating stevedore. But it seems needlessly complicated since we’d have to go out of our way to avoid your gunrunners as we cut over to the east coast, you asshole.”
Hakim looked pained and said, “Please don’t talk about assholes. Mine’s been giving me ever so much trouble lately. What if you take the deal and the deposit slips and don’t bother to search all that carefully for my expedition? The Honduran jungle may look small on the map, but one only has to be off by a few hundred yards in that perishing greenery, eh what?”
Captain Gringo nodded and said, “You’d best get out the map, then. Give us an educated guess at the route your gunrunners took and we ought to be able to bump into them going the other way. They have to be on a trail, and there ain’t that many trails across the high country.”
Hakim opened a drawer and took out a rolled map. They all crowded around as he unrolled it on his desk. He stabbed a pudgy finger down on the paper to explain, “They landed about here, near the mouth of the Rio Ulua, near the north border.”
Gaston nodded sagely and observed, “Oui, I know that soggy stretch of coast. It grows far more mangrove trees than Honduran customs agents. May one assume that they then moved up the Ulua?”
Hakim shook his head and said, “One may not. Had I wanted to have a business discussion with the Honduran authorities, I’d have put my shipment ashore at a regular seaport. My lads were told to keep to high ground, avoiding human contact until they made it all the way here to El Salvador. Just where in El Salvador no longer matters, since, partly thanks to you two, nobody lives there anymore.”
He traced a line south-southwest across the paper as he continued. “By now they should be up in the continuous cloud cover of the Sierra Neblina. I told them to stay well west of the Great Rift, and they know better than to wander into Guatemala. So we’re talking about an area of say five hundred square miles, and you expect to be paid in advance?”
Captain Gringo shrugged and replied, “If you didn’t think we could do it, you wouldn’t want us to try. We don’t work for free, and you have this habit of stiffing people after they’ve done a job for you. How does this deposit shit work? You cable the funds to San José and they send you the slips?”
Hakim shook his head and said, “I tell my friends at the Bank of England where I want the money deposited and pick up the paper at the same time. That’s not the problem. Making sure you earn the money is the problem. Would you mind, terribly, if I sent someone along with you to keep you on the straight and level?”
Captain Gringo took a thoughtful drag on his smoke and said, “If you can afford it. The original deal called for Gaston and me to cut your gunrunners off on our own, the easy way. There’s nothing straight and level about the Central American high country. So we’d have to ride herd on your greenhorns every step of the way. That would mean more work. More work calls for more pay. Your move.”
Hakim frowned and asked, “What makes you think I’d saddle you with greenhorns? I assure you that everyone working for me is good.”
Captain Gringo laughed and said, “Not good enough, or you’d have them looking for your other gunrunners already. Punching through the high country is going to be tough enough for the two of us alone. If we have to watch where someone else is stepping, it figures to slow us down and cost you more.” He turned to Gaston as he added, “How much do you think we should charge a head as jungle guides, old buddy?”
Gaston chuckled and said, “At least double. Assuming that they carry their own packs, of course. The whole thing strikes me as très fatigue, even if all we have to do is prevent them from stepping on snakes or off a cliff, non?” Hakim had been thinking harder than he’d been listening. He waved a soft hand for silence and said, “You’ve made your point. Obviously you experienced semi-savages can make better time on your own, and the time is getting tight. But I still don’t like the idea of paying you in advance with paper you could cash if you chose to cheat me.”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “I don’t blame you. So why don’t we just forget it? Come on, Gaston. I’ll race you to the nearest cantina.”
Hakim scowled and snapped, “Now just one bloody mo! You can’t back out on me now, damn your eyes!”
Captain Gringo said, “Sure we can. You extorted a deal with Gaston, knowing that I’d have to go along with it. The deal was for us to save your arms company embarrassment by getting that message through for you in time—for money, not because we admired your business methods. If you’re not ready to live up to your part of the bargain, Gaston is free to walk. So we’re walking.”
“I’d like my gun and knife back now, s’il vous plait,” Gaston added with a sardonic smile.
“Not so bloody fast.” Hakim replied, a bit red in the face as he insisted, “I never said I wouldn’t pay you chaps. I simply don’t see fit to pay in advance for a pig in a poke. What if you try and fail?”
Captain Gringo said, “Things will be tough all over. If that gun shipment crosses the border now, you’ll be in trouble and w
e’ll most likely be lost in the jungle—if we’re still alive. You have my word that we’ll give it bur best shot, and if we don’t make contact, we’ll just tear up the deposit slips.”
Hakim shook his head and replied, “Easy enough for you to say. But why should I accept your word when you refuse to accept mine?”
“Shit, that’s a dumb question, even coming from you, Hakim.”
The sly old crook smiled despite himself, pulled out a roll of bills, and said, “Here. Use this to get such trail gear as you’ll need, and meanwhile I’ll phone the local branch of the Bank of England. I should have your bloody paper by this evening. How soon can you two be ready to move out?”
Captain Gringo took the money. Since it was local, he knew it would spend less impressively than it looked. He said, “The sooner, the better—if those other guys are already more than halfway here. The full moon rises early tonight, and the trails this side of the border should be a snap, day or night. Do you want change from this expense money?”
Hakim shook his head and said, “Consider it a tip, in the original meaning. You do know what TIP once stood for, don’t you?”
“To Insure Promptness?”
“You’re a bloody A. If you don’t head off that arms shipment bloody fast, it’s going to cost me my bloody ass. I’m not worried about the local junta. But Her Majesty’s government costs a hell of a lot to buy, and Her Majesty can be so picky about gunrunning.”
As predicted, the mission began as what Gaston called “soup of the duck.” They rode out of San Salvador by moonlight, aboard two small but sturdy Spanish barbs, picked for endurance rather than speed. They were traveling light with bedrolls and only one canteen apiece since where they were headed could hardly qualify as arid country. They’d naturally brought along saddle carbines as well as the pistols they wore. But for once Captain Gringo had nothing heavy to deliver or a complicated guerrilla to lead. The deposit slips Hakim had given them weighed nothing and took up no space hidden in money belts designed to look like regular belts to begin with. At Captain Gringo’s insistence they each packed a small sack of parched corn for the ponies, even though it hardly seemed likely that they’d be needed in a land where even tree bark tended to be soft, green, and edible. As they cleared the city limits of San Salvador, Gaston was singing an old Legion marching song for some reason, off-key. So Captain Gringo told him to shut up.