The Tricks of the Trade

by Fish, Robert L. ;

  “With somebody practically sitting in your lap?”

  “With somebody blowing garlic in my face. A man named Duarte, Sanchez’s partner. Anyway, since I called you, I’ve been doing some checking. I practically put it to Duarte that it was cocaine—I asked him why he didn’t import it legally as dentists’ supplies, and I thought he was going to have his boys after me. Which I don’t mind telling you is not the most comfortable feeling in the world. Anyway, I guess we ended up friends, so that’s no problem. In any event, I started checking.”

  “And?”

  “And,” André said, a bit smugly because of his success, “not long ago Sanchez spent a month in Bolivia. He sent a postcard from there to Manuela’s girls, the whole bunch—”

  “That’s that club you mentioned?” Kek laughed.

  “Well, sure, I went back there—I mean, it was all in the interests of the investigation. Anyway, he sent this postcard from a place called Talma. I checked it out at the library. It’s nearly on the Argentinian border and on the edge of the Chaco—and the only possible thing a man like Sanchez could do there, or anyone else for that matter, would be to arrange to buy coca leaves. I’m sure he didn’t go for his health. I don’t know where he had the stuff actually made, but my guess would be right in Buenos Aires.”

  “I see.” There was silence as Kek digested this information. “And when will you be back?”

  “Any other information you want dug out?” André sounded airy.

  “No, that’s all.”

  “Then the first plane in the morning. And then a taxi, all the way. Portal to portal.”

  Kek laughed. “Which you richly deserve. And your room will be ready, and this time you can stay in it.” He became serious. “You know, André, when I asked you to go to Barcelona, I really didn’t have too much hope of your getting any information at all. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Just digging out Duarte, in only a few hours, was miraculous—”

  “It was really nothing,” André said modestly.

  “I know better. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night.”

  “Good night, Kek.”

  André hung up, feeling good, and started to take off his shirt. It had been a long day, and while the bed in his cheap hotel room would be hard, he knew, he also knew he would sleep without problems. He climbed into bed and pulled the thin sheet over his chest. One final thought came to him before he fell asleep—the following morning before catching his plane he would have to dig Raul up and give him the price of another bottle.…

  5

  Señor Antonio Duarte was stunned. It was impossible! He glared at the telephone in growing anger, convinced that Sanchez had managed to mishandle things again.

  “He won’t? What do you mean, he won’t?”

  “I mean exactly what I say,” Sanchez said evenly. “He’s refused.”

  “What did you say to him to make him refuse? I heard this André speak with him. I heard every word they said. This André couldn’t have been better or more convincing. It was a good idea, his calling Huuygens, even if you did think of it—”

  “Except it didn’t work,” Sanchez said imperturbably.

  If the thin man in Paris was exhibiting exceptional calmness in face of the disaster, the fact was lost on Duarte. All he knew was that after having been assured by all competent authority that this Kek Huuygens was the only man in the world for the job, and after having put up the funds and having tracked down this André, the hijo de madre in Paris had turned them down. And he had given 500 pesetas to the big-mouthed giant, too! It all had to be Sanchez’s fault!

  “So what did he say? Why did he turn it down? He’s in business to make money, isn’t he?”

  “He didn’t explain,” Sanchez said calmly. “He just said, quite pleasantly, that at the moment he was otherwise occupied and that as far as I and my proposition were concerned, he was apt to be otherwise occupied indefinitely.”

  “The bastard!” Duarte was close to fuming. He had been told, and finally convinced, that without Huuygens they would be taking a terrible chance trying to smuggle it into Spain. And the thought of having to sell it in Argentina, with the subsequent loss in profit, was enough to make a person kill. In Barcelona he controlled the trade; in Argentina he would have to deal with brokers and distributors in a producing market, and for what he would get out of it he would do better to stand on the corner of Florida and Corrientes and peddle it by the packet. “So what do we do?”

  Sanchez smiled at the telephone; there was a touch of cruelty in the thin grimace.

  “M’sieu Huuygens said he wouldn’t take our suitcase through customs, but on the other hand, many of us say things in haste and come to change our minds after further thought.…”

  “You mean you think you can get him to change his mind?” That idiot Sanchez, pulling that scare business! “How?” One way occurred to him; it was the first way that always occurred to him. “Offer him more money. Double the ten thousand! Triple it!”

  “I already did,” Sanchez said quietly. “He still refused. But I have a feeling I know someone who might prevail on him, even if his old friend André did not—”

  “Who?” Duarte said impatiently, in no mood for mystery, and then saw a possibility. “Rosa?”

  “In part,” Sanchez said.

  “In part? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means what it says. Rosa will be helpful. In part.” Sanchez looked at the telephone commiseratingly, as if Duarte were before him. “Don’t worry. It will come out all right.”

  “How long—”

  “A few days more,” Sanchez said soothingly. “Only a few days more. We’ve waited this long, we can afford to wait a few days more. And the material is safe with Schneller in Buenos Aires where it is.”

  The explosion he had hoped to avoid did not come. When Duarte spoke his voice was quiet. Too quiet, Sanchez suddenly realized.

  “This is the last chance,” he said softly. “I have had enough excuses. If I write off five million dollars, I intend to write off several people with it. Good morning.”

  There was a click in Sanchez’s ear. He set the telephone back and looked at it thoughtfully a moment; then he smiled, confident. What he had in mind was bound to work; no need to worry Duarte or his boys. He looked over at the bed. Rosa, nude and lazily smoking a cigarette, returned the look queryingly.

  “Get dressed,” Sanchez said quietly. “You wanted to earn your pay? Well, let’s get started.”

  Rosa shrugged and rolled over, sitting up. She crushed out her cigarette and scratched her stomach. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Play darts,” Sanchez said cryptically and studied the seated woman. Getting fat, he thought, and wondered why eventually they all got fat.…

  Anita, her empty shopping bag under her arm and her purse squeezed tightly, was on her semiweekly shopping trip. The Halles Centrales were gone from the Rue Bergère, moved to the outskirts, and Anita missed them sorely. She missed the friendliness of the stalls, the leisureliness of strolling through the ancient pavilions enjoying smells implanted over centuries. It was not that sources of household needs were not available on almost every corner; she was at the moment, in fact, heading determinedly for the Supermarket Gourmet in the Porte de Maillot. It was simply that to anyone Parisian born and bred there was neither fun nor satisfaction in patronizing one of the fluorescent-lit, sterile, boxlike anthills. One could scarcely haggle with a price stamped on a tin, or pinch a handful of plastic wrap, or even scream at a check-out counter girl; and if not, what purpose to shop at all? It was Anita’s belief that one might as well eat in restaurants all the time and be done with it.

  She crossed the Avenue de la Grande Armée with cars braking dangerously to allow her passage, the drivers courting disaster to pivot their heads and watch her trim figure swing along. She approached the wide glass doors of the market, her mind reviewing her shopping requirements, and was about to push through into the interior when she felt a sh
arp sting on her thigh and involuntarily flinched. In the impatient crowd pushing past her into the store it was impossible to distinguish the silly idiot who had been so careless as to allow an open pin, or some such sharp-pointed implement, to extend lethally from some package or garment. She rubbed the painful spot a moment, muttering unladylike sentiments, and then let the crowd carry her inside the market.

  It was remarkably warm inside the place, warmer than she recalled ever having encountered it, and particularly exceptional for that time of year. It also seemed even noisier than usual. She drew to one side to dig into her purse and pull out a handkerchief, dabbing at her damp brow, and then bravely marched on to the first counter, determined to complete her shopping and leave. She reached out to check a mountain of fresh shrimp stacked high on a bed of ice; the touch of the ice was like an electric shock. She withdrew her hand at once, as if it had been burned. She shook her head, trying to clear away the fuzziness that had suddenly developed, but only seemingly succeeded in increasing the hum that had begun in her ears. The lights in the ceiling were beginning to enlarge, swirling ever more rapidly. My Lord, she thought in amazement, I’ve never fainted in my life but I believe that’s what I’m going to do! She closed her eyes, fighting the sickening sensation, and then crumpled to the ground in a heap, neither particularly dramatic nor graceful.

  Fortunately, no one stumbled over her body in the crowded aisle. A crowd formed instantly, staring down at her almost reverently; one lady bent to pull Anita’s skirt down into a more respectable position and then straightened up again quickly, as if fearful someone might suspect her of angling for the fallen purse. And then a tall, thin man pushed through the crowd and knelt quickly and professionally beside the woman on the floor. He felt her pulse and looked up at the faces gaping down at him.

  “I’m a doctor,” he said with simple dignity in an accented French. “This woman is seriously ill—” His gaze swung from face to face. “Will someone be kind enough to call a cab? There’s a rank, I believe, just around the corner.”

  The store manager had finally arrived. He looked worried, as if somehow the establishment might be charged with the responsibility. “There’s a cot in the washroom.…”

  “Hospital!” the doctor said firmly.

  “Of course. Much better. Much better,” someone said, the tone putting the manager in his place. It was a good-looking woman with perhaps just a trifle too much makeup and with a terrible accent.

  There was a multiple sigh of relief from the assemblage, including the manager. While not callous, they were still sufficiently human to be relieved when decision-making was taken out of their hands. A teen-age student ran to hail a taxi from the rank while Sanchez bent down and, with a strength remarkable for one of his apparent fragility, lifted Anita and bore her from the store. He deposited her inside the cab, gave an address to the driver, followed her inside, and closed the door firmly. Those of the crowd who had followed him to the curb stared after him and then, when the cab had turned a corner and disappeared, stared at the spot where the cab had stood, glorying in having witnessed an event, a happening. Like Anita, many also felt that shopping per se these days was dull.

  Behind, Rosa made sure her hypodermic needle was firmly imbedded in the small potato in which she carried it and then made her way to the street and to the cab awaiting her with her many packages. For Rosa had also been shopping.

  To his cabdriver Sanchez was no longer a doctor but rather a distrait husband.

  “She works too hard,” he said in a worried tone. He saw the cabdriver’s eyes go to the rearview mirror and then saw the bushy eyebrows rise. Even unconscious, Anita did not look as if she labored in the mines or handled a wrench on an automotive assembly line. “On stage half the night,” Sanchez added hurriedly, “and then insisting on getting up to cook my breakfast and clean the house and then the shopping, not to mention rehearsals.…”

  His voice dwindled away, proud of the scene he had just played. The cabdriver glanced in his mirror again at the still, pale face of the girl and mentally shook his head. Anyone who looked that gorgeous getting up to make breakfast for this skeleton-head? Ah, well, it took all types. The skinny guy had to have money coming out of his nose, and money never did any harm with girls. Women! He leaned back, steering with one hand, speaking over his shoulder. “Sure you don’t want a hospital?”

  “No, no!” Sanchez said quickly. “She has these spells all the time. She works too hard. She—” He realized he was repeating himself. “Her own doctor … much better … familiar with her case … I’ll call him as soon as we’re home.…”

  “Right!” said the driver, in perfect agreement. He could understand a distrust of hospitals. On one occasion he had brought a passenger to the emergency room of a hospital with nosebleed; the nurses there had him, the driver, in a wheelchair with a thermometer in his mouth before he could get a word in edgewise, while his passenger, handkerchief to nose, stood to one side and watched him with lugubrious and resentful eyes. It had cost him, he recalled, a good tip.

  He glanced in his sideview mirror to make sure another automobile was nearly upon him in the process of passing and then cut in front of it with a chuckle, tramping on the accelerator. If you couldn’t pull stunts like that when you had a sick woman in your cab, and a perfect excuse for any flic that stopped you, when could you, for heaven’s sake? Eh, answer him that!

  The driver swung about the Gare Montparnasse, cut down the Rue Odessa, shot past the old cemetery, turned down a side street, and pulled up before a shabby building, disappointed for once that no police had attempted to stop him for speeding. The thought was replaced by another almost instantly as he raised his eyes to the cheap sign advertising furnished flats to be rented by the day, week, or month. So if the skinny guy wasn’t rich, what did he have? The driver sighed, accepted the money for his fare, offered halfheartedly to assist with the lady—an offer that was firmly rejected—and drove off muttering to himself at the size of the tip. Sanchez took a deep breath and staggered through the doorway with Anita in his arms.

  The female dragon who acted as concierge for the broken-down building hurried forward suspiciously on his entrance, her mustache bristling. To her Sanchez pretended to be neither doctor nor distrait husband. He was, rather, a concerned cousin.

  “My wife’s cousin, actually,” he explained, almost apologetically. “We were strolling in the park, going to meet my wife for lunch, as a matter of fact, when suddenly—”

  He broke off, profoundly relieved to see Rosa herself enter the seedy foyer, her arms weighted down with packages. He broke into a torrent of Catalonian on the offhand chance that the concierge might understand a little Spanish—she looked just underhanded enough to do so—explaining the story he had concocted for the old lady, and then turned to smile in apology at the concierge for his unforgivable lack of courtesy in not speaking her language.

  Rosa could see no reason whatever to explain anything to this harridan; they paid their rent and that was all there was to it. She had worked under madames who looked a lot more forbidding than this hag and had never let one of them browbeat her in her life. Nor did she intend to start at her experienced years.

  “Open the elevator door,” she commanded the old lady in terrible French.

  Sanchez was amazed to see the old woman hastily pull open the door to the decrepit self-service lift and quickly stand back, either in fear of Rosa or that the whole thing might collapse under the burden of occupancy. Sanchez staggered in with Anita; Rosa followed with her packages. She frowned unvoiced instructions through the peeling paint of the open grillwork; the concierge instantly pulled the door closed and stepped back again. Rosa managed the button with her elbow; they rose amid creaks and clanks occasioned by age and an economy of lubricants on the part of the management.

  Rosa tipped her head downward; Sanchez was amazed to find he actually understood she was referring to the concierge. “You don’t explain anything to those types,” Rosa said catego
rically in Spanish. “You simply tell them. Once you begin to explain, they get all sorts of ideas.”

  Sanchez looked at her with new respect and then brought his mind back to business.

  “You rented the equipment?”

  Rosa stared at him. “What do you think this stuff is I’m dragging? Twins?” She saw the look on his face and realized there was a limit one could push either flippancy or feminine superiority with a caballero type such as Sanchez. She modified her tone. “Camera, plenty of film, tripod, flash equipment.…”

  “What about the developer and the enlarger?”

  Rosa’s first reaction was to tell him she only had two hands, but the truth did not permit this impudence.

  “The man will develop and print the pictures for us. Don’t worry; he thinks they’re just for sale on street corners.” Her smile disappeared as her business instincts, never far from the surface, took over. “It’s not a bad idea. Save some of the negatives. They’ll sell like soap back at Manuela’s.”

  The elevator came to a shuddering halt and settled back, resting, relieved to be finished with one more in an apparently endless vertical hegira. Rosa shifted her bundles enough to release the door latch; they made it into the hallway and down the uncarpeted passage to their room. Rosa shifted her load again and managed the doorknob; at long last they were finally inside. Sanchez dumped Anita unceremoniously onto the bed and fell into a chair, exhausted. Rosa put her packages aside, lit a cigarette, and grinned down at him.

  “You scarcely look in any condition to pose with your girlfriend.”

  Sanchez paid no attention. He leaned forward, wincing, and put a hand back, investigating his spine. Unaccountably, it had not snapped under the strain. He waited until his heart was pounding less furiously and looked up.

  “I’m not going to pose with her.”

  “You’re not?” Rosa looked around the room as if a third man, a hired stud, might be there, possibly hiding. Her dark eyes came back to the seated man, worried. “Then who did you get? That stuff I shot into her doesn’t last forever, you know.”