Carmody's Run

by Bill Pronzini

  The predators, hungry and waiting, almost devoured her in the first month.

  But she was bright and self-protective and she learned quickly. She learned that pretty girls with a desire to become actresses, even those with more than a little talent, were ten francs a hundred; that the ones with the lushest bodies and the penchant for sexual deviation and promiscuity were the most likely to succeed; that the world of glamour and glitter she had created in her mind was only an illusion, no more genuine than the illusions that world itself created. She’d made a few compromises, but only in the beginning, only until she learned all of her lessons well and grew from a foolish girl into a disenchanted woman. Then she’d packed her bags and fled the predators, gone to Spain to lick her wounds.

  A month after her arrival in Malaga, at a sidewalk café, handsome, clever Fernando Man had come into her life. And for a while the new-found cynicism had evaporated, her faith in life and her goals had been restored. She gave herself fully to Fernando for six long, giddy weeks, with the unshakable certainty that she loved him and he loved her in return... until the night he had kissed her gently and said, “Goodbye, querida,” and walked out of her life without looking back. That had been the final disillusionment. And with it had come revulsion for Europe and all that had happened to her here. Now she really was a grown woman, and she knew the time had come for her to quit wasting any more of her life on foolish childhood dreams, to go home and get a job and confine her acting to little theater groups and try to find a much more attainable brand of fulfillment.

  The problem was, she was out of money by then. And she dreaded the idea of having to ask her parents for return fare; the inability to get home on her own would have robbed her of what remained of her pride. When Zaanhof had approached her with his offer, he had seemed so much like a godsend that she’d asked few questions and accepted almost immediately.

  Zaanhof came back into the room with two tulip glasses of sherry. He had taken off his suit coat, opened his shirt at the throat, and he was still smiling, always so damned cheerful. He looked cherubic and grandfatherly. But when he gave her one of the glasses, he also sat down beside her—close beside her, much too close.

  “To you, dear lady,” he said, raising his glass. “A pleasant trip and future happiness.”

  “Thank you,” Gillian said. She tasted her sherry, then drained the glass too quickly. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to have my money.

  “You are in a rush to leave?”

  “I thought I made that clear. I’m very tired.”

  He watched her eyes. There was a new intensity in his gaze, a kind of deep burning. And all at once Gillian was as frightened of him as she was of Carmody. She started to rise, to put distance between them—and he reached out casually with his free hand and closed his fingers over the soft flesh of her thigh.

  Gillian stiffened. “Don’t do that;’ she said. “Let go of me.”

  Instead he tightened his grip, moved closer His gaze was feverish now, his lips moist; there was no mistaking the look of him. She tried to slide sideways, to get up, but his fingers dug painfully into her thigh.

  “Stop that! Let me up.”

  “There is no hurry, dear lady. No hurry at all.”

  “Damn you, let me go!”

  “Fire and ice,” Zaanhof murmured. “Fire and ice.”

  Gillian raked her nails across the back of his hand. He cried out, released his hold; blood welled up along the furrows she’d made. She jumped to her feet and backed away toward the fireplace, thinking that she should have known, men like him were all alike, ugly men, dangerous men, predators... she should have known!

  He was on his feet too, now, watching her. “Fire and ice:’ he said.

  “No,” Gillian said. Firm, direct, without showing fear. Never show fear, they fed on fear. “Don’t come any closer, Mr. Zaanhof, I mean it. Just give me my money and let me go, you made a bargain–”

  “And I intend to keep it. You shall have your money, dear lady. I ask only your affection in return. Is that too great a request? I am a gentle lover, I will not hurt you, I will only please you. Many men have pleased you, have they not?”

  “No!”

  Zaanhof’s smile was loose, wetly sexual. “A few minutes of passion and we will part friends. I will be generous too, dear lady. An extra five hundred dollars, perhaps an extra thousand–”

  “No! What do you think I am?”

  His eyes told her what he thought she was. He took two steps toward her, caressing her body with those dirty eyes. She backed away, kept backing until the wall of the fireplace stopped her... and then Zaanhof pounced. Put his hands on her, gathered her against his soft, round body, kissed her neck, ground his hips against her in the motions of love.

  She struggled frantically, tried to bite him, tried to knee him. He held her too tightly, pressed hard against the stone wall, his hips pumping at a faster rhythm. She could feel his arousal, and when she moaned deep in her throat he misinterpreted the sound and made the mistake of releasing one of her arms so he could fondle her breast.

  Gillian used her nails on him again, this time tearing them along his neck. Zaanhof groaned, but he didn’t let go of her; the groan was almost one of pleasure. Her free hand clawed over the stones, struck the mantelpiece, touched one of the heavy wood statuettes. Her fingers closed over it, hefted it, and without thinking she brought it slashing down against his head.

  He grunted, released her. Sagged backward and fell to one knee, pawing at the spot where she’d hit him. She tried to get around him, to run, but she hadn’t hurt him badly and she wasn’t quick enough. He lunged upright and now there was more than lust in his face, there was pain and a terrible, deadly rage; then he lunged at her. She swung at him again with the statuette, blindly, a sidearm swing that missed his head but connected with the side of his neck. She hit him a third time, in the face, heard him yell with pain, saw him stumble as his feet tangled in one of the braided rugs. He toppled over backward, arms flailing. His buttocks struck the floor and then his head collided with a corner on the low table in front of the couch.

  Zaanhof’s eyes seemed to pop from their sockets. His body stiffened, as if with an electrical shock; then the eyes filmed and the body relaxed and he seemed to shrink within his clothing, like a snail dissolving after you’d poured salt on it. He didn’t move.

  Gillian dropped the statuette, stared down at him in horror. He was dead. There was blood now, around his head, not much, a little blood, but he was dead... those staring eyes, there was no mistake. He was dead.

  I killed him, she thought.

  Panic ripped at her. And she ran.

  MONDAY, MIDNIGHT CARMODY

  When no one came to the door the third time Carmody rang the bell, he went to work on the latch with his Swiss knife.

  Calle Salvador Anglada was dark and empty behind him. Middle-class residential neighborhoods like this one, not far from Barcelona’s Plaza Toros Arenas bullfight stadium, shut down early. There were thick shadows here in the entranceway of number 52, and he worked with a minimum of noise; he didn’t have to worry about being seen. But he was wary just the same.

  It took him five minutes to get the door open. Inside was a foyer and a staircase lifting upward into blackness. Carmody shut the door, drew the Beretta, crossed to the stairs. Halfway up, he paused to listen. The house had the feel and stillness of desertion.

  He went up the rest of the way, along a short hallway and into a sparsely furnished parlor. He took a slow turn around the parlor, using his pencil flash to guide him. Then he went back into the hallway and checked the other rooms upstairs. They too were deserted.

  Carmody holstered the Beretta, reentered the parlor. A rolltop desk, closed but unlocked, stood against the near wall. He sat down in front of it, rolled up the slatted cover, sifted through the papers in drawers and cubbyholes. They were all in Spanish, but he could speak and read the language passably well, as long as he wasn’t confronted with the Mallorquina or
Catalan dialects. The papers were bills, receipts, a couple of fairly torrid love notes, some miscellaneous personal documents. Nothing for him in any of them.

  He closed the desk, went down to the master bedroom. A sliding closet door was open on one side of the room; on the floor inside, thrown there or dropped in haste from the hangers, were scattered items of clothing. Two drawers in a carved-wood dresser were pulled out and empty.

  Carmody looked through the nightstands; nothing. He left the bedroom and entered the kitchen. Nothing. In the spare bedroom, in the storage closet, on the rear porch-nothing.

  He returned to the landing at the top of the stairs. So Jose’ Alvarez had disappeared along with Zaanhof and the girl—and in a hurry. Ordinarily, whenever Alvarez quit Barcelona on business or pleasure, he left word at a mid city disco bar called El Halcón Negro; but Carmody had gone there from the airport, and no one at El Halcón Negro had seen or heard from Alvarez in days. Carmody hadn’t had much doubt that the Spaniard was mixed up in whatever the hell was going on. Now he had gone.

  Alvarez’s involvement meant big money and important people were also involved. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the guts to jeopardize his operation in Barcelona, his relationship with Carmody. Zaanhof? Possible but not likely. When you’re important enough and moneyed enough, you hire things done instead of doing them yourself.

  The Dutchman and Gillian Waltham and José Alvarez. And how many others? And who was behind it all, and why?

  He went down the stairs, out along Calle Salvador Anglada to where he’d parked his rental car. It was too late to accomplish anything else tonight; and he needed sleep. He drove uptown to Avenida del Generalissimo Franco, took a room at the Hotel de Santander, left a call for seven a.m., and went to bed.

  TUESDAY MORNING–CARMODY

  As far as Carmody was concerned, Malaga was the asshole of Spain.

  Scorched and wilted by the perpetual heat, filled with too many cars and too few transient accommodations and narrow, refuse-littered streets, it still had some inexplicable lure for the tourists. They came in droves, packed the sidewalks and sidewalk cafés, wandered out into busy streets and were picked off at the rate of a hundred a year by hurtling taxis and buses and private cars. Malaga was noisy from dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn. And overpriced. And inhabited by hordes of small-time grifters and con artists who were so afraid of the Guardia Civil that they confined their activities to the pettiest of larcenies-human mosquitoes feeding on little drops of tourist blood. And when the hot winds blew, as they did often enough, Malaga became an oven that cooked your temper and fried your brain. Every time Carmody came here he developed a malignant headache.

  He drove in from the airport at ten-thirty, in another rented Mercedes, cursing the reckless Spanish drivers and the witless jaywalking tourists. He had the windows rolled up and the air conditioning on, shutting out the heat and the noise. But already his head was starting to ache.

  Before leaving the Hotel de Santander in Barcelona, he had made three calls. The first was to Van Hagen in Amsterdam, but Van Hagen didn’t have much to tell him. He hadn’t been able to find out anything about the man who’d called himself Zaanhof; no one in the city knew him or could identify him from his description. No one except Hubert Ten Eyck, and he was of no help at all. Zaanhof had approached him last Saturday, offered him the equivalent of five hundred dollars for one afternoon’s use of his candy shop, cash in advance, no questions asked or answered. Ten Eyck needed the money, a fact that Zaanhof had seemed to know; he’d agreed on the spot. He had never seen Zaanhof before or since, knew nothing about him.

  Carmody’s other calls had been to his contacts in Madrid and Lisbon. They hadn’t had anything for him either. Gillian Waltham was as elusive a figure as Zaanhof–probably a pawn, as young and naive as she was, but she still had some of the answers. And no one named Virgil Franklin lived in Malaga or had any connection with José Alvarez past or present, in Spain or in Portugal. Carmody told both contacts to put the word out on Alvarez, that he wanted him found and held, and gave the American Express office as his Malaga contact address.

  He entered the city on Malaga’s version of an Avenida del Generalissimo Franco, found street parking, paid ten pesetas to one of the flock of old, gray-uniformed “attendants”; parking was supposed to be free, but if you forgot or refused to pay one of the old men, your car had a way of being ticketed or even towed away. Another example of the cheap grifting that went on here. The dry, hot air was harsh in his lungs as he walked under drooping palms and shade trees to the Plaza del General Quiepo de Llano.

  He had to go into three different bookstalls before he found one that had a street map. On the guia turisticahe located Calle Cristobal Ortiz, saw that it was just off the Plaza Obispo, not far from where he was now. He found his way there through a maze of narrow, crowded side streets.

  The Bar Emperador was larger but otherwise no different from the dozens of other open-air bars that littered Malaga and the other resort areas of Spain. Cream pastries displayed without cover for tourists and flies, standard menu of drinks and sandwiches and seafood and strawberries-and-cream; painted on walls and window glass in several languages, tawdry arrangement of tables and chairs all but blocking the cobblestoned passage in front. Two elderly Spaniards sat drinking San Miguel at one of the tables; at another three red-faced British women made dull remarks over chocolate-milk-and-cognac abominations called Lumumba’s. A young waiter in a black suit and a limp bow tie lounged sleepily in the entranceway.

  Carmody sat down away from the other customers, ordered a cold San Miguel from the waiter. On the table was a souvenir menu card like the one he’d found in Gillian’s purse in Amsterdam. If she lived in Malaga, or was staying in the area, the chances were good that she had come here from Amsterdam. The chances were less good that she was well-enough known at the Bar Emperador for him to pry loose her address, but the bar was one of only two leads he had to her.

  When the waiter brought his San Miguel, Carmody asked him in Spanish if he knew a girl named Gillian Waltham, an American girl. Then he described her. As used to tourists as he was, the waiter was a little surprised to hear an American speaking anything but English; it served to make him friendly. No, señor, he did not know a girl by that name or description. So many young women, so many Americans, came to the Bar Emperador that it was impossible to know but a few regular customers and she was not among them.

  Carmody gave him a hundred-peseta note, asked him to check with the other employees. The San Miguel was cold enough to suit his taste; he drank half of it from the bottle, then lit a cigar and spread open the guia turistica. Calle Villalonga, where the Liana Butler listed in Gillian’s address book lived, was off the Paseo de la Farola, down near the harbor— a good distance away. He debated walking back to his rental car, decided to hell with fighting the tourists and the traffic. He’d take a taxi instead.

  The waiter came back with his head shaking and his hands spread apologetically. Carmody gave him another hundred pesetas, finished his beer, and went hunting a cab.

  The building in which Liane Butler lived was a twelve story apartment complex facing the harbor—one of the cheaply and hurriedly put up brick-and-stucco jobs that the Spaniards favored. There was little or no steel in any of them and they looked as though a stiff breeze would topple them like towers made of kids’ building blocks. This one was a year or two old, which meant that it had another three or four before the plumbing and the exposed electrical wiring began to malfunction, and cracks appeared in floors and walls, and it ceased being acceptable to the transplants from other countries and became cheap housing for the natives.

  A bank of name-marked mailboxes told him that the Butler woman lived on the sixth floor, rear. Inside, a shuddering elevator took him up to a passageway no wider than a sidewalk. On its left were the apartment entrances, on the right a low wall and a sheer drop into a center courtyard. It was like stepping out onto a parapet.

  Carmody stopped before a
blue door with Liane Butler’s name in a tarnished metal plate at eye level. He rang the bell. There were steps inside, and a chain rattled, and the door opened jerkily; a face framed by long black hair appeared, saying, “Liane, did you forget your key—”

  And then yellow-brown cat’s eyes popped wide, and the door was flung hard toward his face. Carmody hit it with his shoulder, shoved roughly inside.

  Just like that he had found Gillian Waltham.

  TUESDAY, LATE MORNING–CARMODY

  She backpedaled rapidly into a room adorned with bullfight posters, one hand up to her mouth and her eyes full of trapped terror. Carmody threw the door shut, slid the chain lock into place, took the Beretta off his hip—watching Gillian reach a pair of open glass doors at the far end of the room She stopped there, looked out onto the balcony, looked back at him and saw the gun. Her face went as white as custard.

  “No,” she said, “oh God, no!”

  “Shut up;” Carmody told her. “I’m not going to use this as long as you keep your head and don’t give me any trouble. All I want from you are answers. And Zaanhof.”

  She shook her head—a gesture without meaning. Her cheeks and mouth were puffy with fatigue, for whatever reason, she hadn’t slept much last night.

  “How... how did you find—”

  “How do you think?”

  Another headshake.

  Carmody said, “You the only one here?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you expect Liane?”

  “I... yes, she went shopping, she should be back…

  “What is she to you?”

  “A friend... just a friend.”

  “Does she know about me, about Zaanhof?”

  “No. No, I didn’t tell her anything.”

  “All right. If she comes while we’re talking, you send her away. Make up a story—and don’t give her the idea that there’s anything wrong.”