I was glad I could help. That was not a nice thing. You would like something to drink? You, Helm?”
A buzzard, Eleanor had said, but she’d gotten the wrong bird. This was not a scavenger but a predator, a very old and very dangerous predator, a totally different bird of prey from the aristocratic lady hawk I’d once known. The body was shrunken inside the light loose slacks and shirt that looked almost like pajamas, and the face was skull-like under the leathery brown skin; but the menace was still there in the fierce hooked nose and the hooded brown eyes that watched and weighed without a hint of senility. We had our drinks, brought us by a statuesque golden blonde in very snug violet trousers, worn so low that the suspense was almost unbearable. Her breasts were restrained, if you’ll excuse a bit of exaggeration, by a rudimentary violet brassiere that obviously wasn’t up to the job. We talked about the flight we’d had across the Gulf Stream, and the fine weather, and the sailboats out on the water we could see from the penthouse patio, and the sportfishing boat Velo still owned but didn’t get out on anymore, doctor’s orders.
“Ha, that doctor,” he said. “One day soon I will tell the boys to put me on the boat and strap me in the fighting chair and raise for me the biggest marlin in the world, and when I have killed myself fighting that big fish they must cut it loose with my thanks. Ha, these doctors who want to keep us all living after the machinery is no good any more. There are too many people in the world; the least they can do is arrange for the old ones like me to self-destruct comfortably when the time comes and make room for the new ones. But the big fish will do the job for me. Not a bad way to go, ha! Now we eat, and then we talk business. Help me with the chair, girl. Not you, Helm. I prefer to be pushed around by the pretty ladies, ha!”
It was an act, he was doing his moribund-old-man routine and watching us carefully meanwhile and making up his mind: there was no doubt in my mind that he had a pretty good idea what I’d come for. The blonde served us, teetering on five-inch heels, and it was hard to decide if the inadequate brassiere was going to give up the unequal struggle before, or after, the precarious pants fell down around the ankles. I saw Eleanor watching me with that prim, disapproving look women always get watching a man reacting in a perfectly normal way to perfectly normal age-old stimuli, without which reaction the race would long since have become extinct. The blonde made an unnecessarily intimate business of pouring my coffee, and one of her elaborately madeup eyes winked its incredible lashes at me, letting me know that there was a real girl—mischievous and perhaps a bit malicious—inside the efficient decorative robot.
“So,” Giuseppe Velo said. “That will be all, my dear. Leave the coffee, we’ll help ourselves. All right, Helm. What is it you want from old Seppi Velo?”
“Manuel Sapio,” I said.
Chapter 20
The silence went on for quite a while after I’d spoken. Velo stared at me hard across the table with those hooded eyes. Abruptly, as if dismissing me and the nonsense I’d just spoken, he switched his attention to Eleanor, addressing her politely,
“We are supposed to be evil men, living for nothing but evil, Miss Brand,” he murmured. “Selling young ladies into white slavery. Teaching school children the delights of marijuana and cocaine and heroin. Intimidating innocent storekeepers and poor downtrodden prostitutes and robbing them of their hard-earned wages. If we play golf, it’s only to arrange a wicked political deal on the course. If we go skiing, it’s only to hold a secret meeting at the lodge with our fellow gangsters and racketeers. If we go fishing, it’s merely to scout out that area of ocean or river for a future drug delivery.”
When he paused, Eleanor said, “Are you saying that you’re terribly misunderstood, Mr. Velo?”
He smiled thinly. “Not exactly, my dear; but it does not seem to occur to anyone that evil men require relaxation just as much as good men, and often participate in sports simply because they need and enjoy them. Evil is very hard work, Miss Brand, and requires just as much concentration as good.” He turned his cold brown gaze on me. “Considerable money and effort have been invested in the man you call Sapio, who now calls himself Lorca.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’ve come to you, sir.”
“I control nothing any longer,” he said. “I have little influence. I’m only an old man sitting on a rooftop waiting to die. But I know that much is expected from this Lorca, now that he has attained such a favorable position.”
I said, “Mr. Velo, you had better tell your associates— former associates if you prefer—that they are going to lose Senator Lorca very soon.”
Velo’s eyes narrowed. “You are taking him out? A United States Senator?” When I didn’t speak, he asked curiously, “How do you know this patio is safe? There could be a microphone in that vase of flowers.”
I grinned. “Hell, I brought my own reporter, Mr. Velo. She’s sitting right there beside you. To hell with your mikes. Just tell her what you want printed and she’ll print it for you. Right, Elly?” After a moment, I said, “That is, assuming that you care to have the whole of Lorca’s recent record published. When you hear it, I rather doubt that you will.”
He studied me carefully across the table, and nodded slowly. “So, let me hear it.”
It took a while. I took him clear back to that seaside bluff in Mexico where I’d last seen Sapio-Lorca apparently dead, and brought him up to the present by easy stages. When I had finished, Eleanor rose and refilled the coffee cups—well, hers and mine. Velo said he wasn’t really supposed to have had even one; he’d certainly better not have two. As Eleanor sat down again, he tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the glass-topped table.
“You haven’t mentioned the thing that happened to Miss Brand,” he said. “Those were Lorca’s men. We checked afterward, in case there should be complaints. But no complaints were made.”
I said, “Miss Brand’s difficulty was not an agency affair. Anyway, she found her own solution with your help. And I haven’t mentioned a girl named Arlette Swallow, either, who had her pretty face brutally reconstructed by Senator Lorca back in his Sapio incarnation; and was recently killed along with her brother to keep the story quiet. Justice is not our business, sir. As my chief likes to say, we can’t take care of every sonofabitch just because he’s a sonofabitch, it’s too hard to know where to draw the line.
But Lorca has turned this thing into a matter of survival, us or him.”
“You have no proof.”
“For a court of law, no. But then it isn’t his lawyers he’s using against us.”
“So what do you want from old Seppi Velo?”
I said, “My instructions are to solve the Lorca problem discreetly. Will I be allowed to do that, sir? Or will your friends and associates in whatever you call your extensive organization these days insist on trying to protect their investment in this man?”
The hooded brown eyes regarded me steadily across the table. “If they do, what happens?”
I shook my head. “Let’s not go into that, Mr. Velo,” I said. “You’ve checked me out; you know the kind of agency that’s behind me; you can figure it out. I don’t want to say anything that can be construed as a threat, sir.”
He smiled faintly. “The most effective threat of all, ha!” He glanced at Eleanor. “I like this man of yours. He is polite and he speaks well. But I think he overestimates my resources.”
I said, “There’s one more thing. I think the Lorca investment will eventually turn sour, anyway. You might suggest that to your friends.”
“Explain yourself.”
I said, “Consider, sir, here’s a man who’s achieved a powerful political office. With a little work, pulling a few political strings, he could probably destroy us in a perfectly legal manner, cutting our appropriations to nothing, or simply having us legislated out of existence. Yet he resorts to murder and blackmail instead, risking everything he’s achieved for you and for himself. Why?”
Velo said softly, “That clumsy bully-boy with a hole
in his head has never achieved anything for me. I advised against trying to make use of him; I could not believe that a little money and a few hypocritical words could sell a gorilla like that to the American people, even with a good public relations firm on the job; proof that old Velo is hopelessly out of date. Lorca was expertly packaged and sold, and the people loved buying him. Him and his scar and his mystic, purifying experience, not to mention his loud-mouthed anti-crime crusade. So I am not in a very good position to recommend that he should be abandoned now.” The old man frowned. “Why do you think he takes the risk?”
“Political deals take time,” I said, “particularly for a newcomer to Washington not yet firmly entrenched in his office. I think the operation wasn’t wholly successful, Mr. Velo, even with divine intervention or whatever Lorca likes to call it. I think he was all right for a while, sure, maybe even exaggerating his weak arm and his speech impediment for effect; but I have a hunch that now something upstairs is going wrong again and he knows it. Why would he be in such a hurry to pay off old scores if he didn’t know his time was, shall we say, kind of limited? Ask your friends if they really want to go out on a limb for a guy who may not be functioning effectively very much longer, regardless of what action we take.”
Velo sat there frowning thoughtfully after I’d finished. At last he pressed a hidden button and the girl in the low-slung violet pants appeared.
“I’ll use the inside phone, Wanda,” he said. “Then you can clear away this mess and see that our guests are comfortable while they wait.”
We watched him being rolled out of sight inside the penthouse; then Eleanor rose and walked to the edge of the roof, looking out over the beach and the water. I went to the bar near the door to make myself a drink but the blonde, Wanda, returning, forestalled me, asked what I wanted, and mixed it for me. A very obliging girl. When I went to stand beside Eleanor, she didn’t look at me. When I asked if she wanted a drink, she shook her head, still not looking at me.
“Doghouse day,” I said. “If I can stand it for breakfast, I guess I can stand it for lunch. Ah, well, if she’s jealous that must mean she loves me.”
Eleanor glanced at me sharply. “Jealous? Of that . . . that manikin?”
“Shh, not so loud. She’s bigger than you and she looks in good shape. I bet she could take you.”
“Yes, she certainly makes no secret of her shape!” Then there was a small, stifled sound and I glanced at her quickly, thinking I’d heard a sob, but realizing belatedly that what I’d really heard was a giggle. “God, I sound stupid, don’t I?” Eleanor murmured. “It’s just that girls like that, so sleek and beautiful, so arrogantly sure of how beautiful they are, give me an awful inferiority complex. Dumb!” After a moment she said, “You’re being very polite all of a sudden, Mr. Wild Bill Hickok. What happened to the Wild West act?” She mimicked my words. “No, Mr. Velo, sir, I don’t want to say anything that can possibly be construed as a threat, please, sir.”
I said, “Hell, you’ve got to tailor your performance to your audience. This is no mush-head from the OFS. If I started acting tough with this guy he’d make me prove it. And I don’t in the least mind bucking Bennett and his boys after the games they tried to play; but I’d rather not go up against the whole damned syndicate or Unione Whatsisname or whatever the hell they call it, not if I can avoid it by a little simple hypocritical politeness.”
Velo was on the phone for better than half an hour; then Wanda, who’d kept herself busy clearing the table and tidying the bar, received a signal of some kind and disappeared. Shortly, she came back shoving the wheelchair. She rolled Velo up to where we’d settled in some beach-type furniture in the shade of the plastic awning.
“All right, my dear, run along,” he said. “I don’t want to be bothered with any calls or anything, understand?” After she’d left, he said, “They’re checking. You have this much in your favor: they don’t think much of his risking the reputation as a reformed citizen they went to a great deal of trouble to build for him, just for a private vengeance.” He smiled thinly. “Of course, it’s only your word so far; a little proof would help. And it’s not that anybody minds a little vengeance, you understand. It’s in the blood; and it keeps people from getting out of line, knowing that if you step on somebody’s toes too hard he’ll come back and cut yours off with an axe. But it’s not supposed to interfere with important business like this, particularly not if it involves us with a government agency, one we make a point of steering clear of. So they’re checking. But they say there’s nothing to your medical theory. They’re kept informed, of course. The man’s in practically perfect health, considering.”
“Informed,” I said. “Who informs them, Lorca himself?” Velo glanced at Eleanor. “Smart, isn’t he?” he said, and looked back to me. “The question did come up. No, the information comes from other sources as well; but it was suggested that even the medical profession isn’t completely incorruptible. That’s being checked also. There will have to be some high level discussion—”
He stopped as the blonde came up and paused by the wheelchair, waiting for Velo’s attention. He turned his head. “What is it?”
“There’s a call for—”
The brown, predatory old face turned suddenly vicious. “You dumb broad, I told you I didn’t want to be bothered with any calls. Listen when I talk or comes it a fat lip.” The blonde’s lovely face was impassive and her voice was expressionless. “You old goat, you told me you didn’t want to be bothered. You didn’t tell me he didn’t want to be bothered.” She jerked her head toward me.
Velo frowned. “The call is for? . . .”
“Helm. That’s his name, isn’t it?”
Velo looked at me, still frowning, and I said, “We didn’t announce our visit here, but we didn’t make it a big secret, either. We came from the airport in a taxi. I didn’t check for a tail in all that traffic, since I figured it wasn’t likely I’d lead anybody to you you couldn’t handle, Mr. Velo.”
“So take your call. Show him the phone, Wanda.”
The old man’s voice was remote and uninterested. I rose, but the girl gave me a small signal with her hand, asking me to wait. She stepped over and kissed Giuseppe Velo lightly on his leathery brown skull. He glanced up with an odd mixture of guilt and relief on his predatory face; I realized suddenly how old he really was. He reached out and gave her an affectionate pat behind, and they were friends again.
As I crossed the patio beside the girl, matching her healthy, high-heeled stride, I said, “It must be interesting.”
“Don’t knock it,” she said. “I’d spend a year working in a hospital to earn what he pays me in a week. He’s not a bad old guy.”
“He’s a very bad old guy,” I said.
Her bare golden shoulders moved minutely. “Well, maybe that’s what keeps it interesting. There’s the phone.” I picked it up and waited for the sound of her high heels to die away. “Helm here,” I said.
“The Sacred Earth Protective Force,” said a woman’s voice I’d never heard before.
“What about it?”
“Are you interested?”
“I might be,” I said. “What will it cost me?”
“Three bullets,” said the voice. It was low and husky, with a faint masculine quality that bothered me; and I remembered that a woman with a deep and husky contralto voice had called a certain Roger Elliot and told him his hard-drinking wife was playing around with Bob Devine, leading to the latter’s violent demise. The voice went on, “One for each of them. Go to. . . .”
I made her repeat the address. “Who are you?” I asked. There was a laugh and the line went dead. I put the phone down, went out to say goodbye to my host and thank him for an excellent and entertaining lunch.
Chapter 21
Bennett made it the subject of a full-dress council of war, of course. If we’d been the only outfit involved, I would simply have got in touch with Mac for some quick
instructions if I could—generally
he’s easy enough to catch and, as it turned out, we caught him at the airport just before he took off for Washington. But if he’d been unavailable I’d have figured out what he probably wanted me to do about what I’d just heard over the phone, and done it. No problem. I’ve worked for him long enough to know how his mind operates; and conveniently enough, mine just happens to operate very much like it. Whether we are that way because we’ve worked together so long, or whether we’ve worked together so long because we are that way, is something for the philosophers to figure out after they solve the one about the chicken and the egg.
But with the OFS involved, the formalities had to be observed; and the whole deal got as complicated as a mid-eastern peace conference. We wound up high up in a Miami hotel in another hospitality suite practically indistinguishable from the one in which we’d held our last conference in Nassau. Bennett brought along his whole honor guard: Lawson, the heavyset man who didn’t like me much because I’d been instrumental in making him shoot his partner, the two gofers I’d first seen guarding the door, and handsome brainless Warren Peterson whom he seemed to have adopted as a pet.
Our side wasn’t quite as badly outnumbered as it had been on the previous occasion; we’d been reinforced by Brent, our standby man in Miami. I figured Mac had brought him along for his local knowledge; but it was possible that Brent was also present to show Mr. Bennett that we did have nice, polite, well-behaved young men on the payroll, as well as rude and unreasonable old campaigners like me.
“Velo!” Bennett said sharply after we’d all settled down and he’d been given the background information. “You say your man got an anonymous phone call while he was visiting the old Don himself, that senile Mafia crook? What was Helm doing there, anyway?”
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