“Diamonds?”
“Yes.”
“You are a collector?”
“No, an agent for one.”
“Perhaps I know him too.”
“Perhaps. But he prefers to remain anonymous.”
Huymans smiled. “In matters of diamonds, that is often wise. I was a collector myself once, you know.”
“Yes, so I’ve been told.”
“Now I am an old man who prefers cards, sunshine, and cognac.” He didn’t sound bitter; he sounded happy.
“About Jorge Riuyken, Mr. Huymans.”
“Yes. I haven’t seen him in...oh, quite some time. Occasionally we have a meal together. We are both Dutch; there are not many Dutch in Malaga, you know—not many of our station, I should say.”
“Does he live in the city?”
“On the outskirts, yes. My wife and I prefer our yacht to a villa. Jorge is hopelessly land-bound.”
“Riuyken has a villa, then?”
“Oh yes. Quite a large villa.”
“Would you mind telling me the address?” Huymans gave that some thought. “Your business with him—it involves a large sum of money?”
“Several hundred thousand dollars.”
“Ah” The old Dutchman smiled reminiscently. “Jorge once handled a transaction for me of that size. His commission was the largest he had earned up to that time. He was most grateful.”
“He’ll be grateful to you again for helping me.” Carmody said. “His address, Herr Huymans?”
“Calle Sagrario” Huymans said. “Number thirty-two.”
TUESDAY AFTERNOON GILLIAN
It was a crazy idea. She knew it was a crazy idea but once it came to her she couldn’t seem to get rid of it.
She had to get out of Malaga, didn’t she? She couldn’t just wire her folks and then sit here and wait for them to send her the money. There was no telling how soon Zaanhof’s body would be found by the police. Or by one of his friends, maybe even the man who had ordered the ruse with the diamonds. If Carmody found it first... but she couldn’t be sure he would. All she could be sure of was that if the police or Zaanhof’s friends found that bracelet with her name on it, she faced a hideous future. They wouldn’t believe her story of Zaanhof’s attempted rape; too much time had passed, and she’d run away without reporting the death, and she had no proof that he had tried to attack her. Spanish justice was swift and merciless, for foreigners as well as natives. And she had heard Spanish prisons were hellholes, where all sorts of atrocities were committed.
A crazy idea, yes, and a big risk. But she didn’t have any more to lose than if she stayed here and they caught her. And she didn’t have anywhere else to go where she’d be safe even for a little while. It was just crazy enough to save her life and maybe get her out of Spain and eventually back home.
By the time Liane finally returned, late as usual, Gillian knew she was going to do it... if Liane was willing and able to help.
Liane said as she deposited two heavy bags of groceries on the kitchenette table, “I bought some cold meat and things. Are you hungry?”
“Not really, no.”
“Are you still upset about last night?”
She’d told Liane that a man had tried to attack her near the pension where she’d planned to spend the night, that it had shaken her so much she’d been afraid to stay anywhere alone. The lie was much better than the truth —and Liane had been sympathetic.
“A little, I suppose;” she said.
“Well, you’ll get over it. Things like that happen, even in Spain.”
“Liane…”
“What, Gil?”
“Liane... can you let me have four thousand pesetas?”
The dark-haired girl looked at her steadily. “What for? I thought you had plenty of money to get home on.”
“Well, I... I thought I did, but I don’t. I checked air fares and with the connecting flights I’m going to need another sixty dollars...”
Liane took her gently by the shoulders. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there? You’re in some kind of trouble. What is it, Gil?”
“No;” Gillian said too quickly. “Please, Liane, can you let me have the money? I’ll pay you back as soon as I can, you know I will.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, then. Or you’re afraid too.”
“It’s nothing like that, there’s nothing wrong.”
“Yes, there is. If you tell me, maybe I can help—”
“You can help by loaning me four thousand pesetas’ “All right, Gil. I guess you know what you’re doing. If you need the money that badly, it’s yours.”
She left the apartment at two o’clock, with her bags and the four thousand pesetas of Liane’s money. A half-block away on Calle Villalonga, she found a taxi and told the driver to take her to the airport. He drove too fast through the hot afternoon, cutting in and out of the heavy traffic, and the recklessness of his pace gave Gillian an uneasy feeling of headlong flight from unseen pursuers. Nervously, she told him in English to slow down, but he didn’t understand, or pretended not to. He swerved in front of a truck, ran a caution light at an intersection, narrowly missed a tour bus that had crept out from the right-hand curb. Gillian closed her eyes, braced herself on the sweating leather seat.
She had never felt more alone in her life.
TUESDAY AFTERNOON CARMODY
Carmody parked the rented Mercedes on the winding street above Calle Sagrario, made sure he was unobserved before crossing to pine and cypress trees on the far side. He went down through the trees until he could see the white-stone villa nestled below. It was number 32; he’d made a pass in front to identify it before coming up here.
The descent to the rear of the villa was steep; he took his time to keep from losing his footing and to keep from making noise. The back terrace, overgrown with mastic and orange trees, stretched to the base of another steep slope and was enclosed by a rambling, waist-high brick wall. The pines and cypress extended close to the wall on the side where he was.
When he was ten feet from the wall Carmody stopped behind the bole of a pine to look and listen The windows along that side of the villa were shuttered, but he could see an unprotected set of louvered wooden doors under a rear archway. There was nothing to hear except the hot wind.
He moved ahead to the terrace wall, climbed over it. The Beretta was in his hand now, held down low along his right leg. He worked his way across the terrace to the archway where the wooden doors were. When he raised up to look through the down-slanted louvers he could see most of the way to the front entrance. The passage was deserted. But there were lights on somewhere inside; he could see the faint glow of them at the upper edge of the hallway. At this time of day, lights on and shutters fastened down made little sense.
Carmody didn’t like it. Something was wrong here; he could feel it already. He looked at the joining of the two doors, saw no keyhole, and judged that they were locked by a simple bar arrangement. There wasn’t much crime in Spain, with the Franco dictatorship’s stiff penalties for breaking the law, so people didn’t secure their houses the way they did in other countries. He stepped back, then drove his right foot against the joining midway up.
The two halves burst apart, inward. Carmody ran through the opening with the gun up in his hand, along the hallway to where a massive living room opened up. The living room was where the light was coming from. He put his back against the wall there, eased his head around for a look.
He saw the dead man immediately, sprawled on his back between a couch and the fireplace. Eyes open and staring, dried blood staining the tiles around his head. The tubby little Dutchman, Jorge Riuyken.
Carmody said, “Shit!” bitterly and savagely. For a few seconds he stayed where he was, listening; the house had the thick hot hush of desertion. He went into the living room, knelt beside the man who had called himself Peter Zaanhof. Dead a long time -rigor come and gone. Even in this heat, that meant last night sometime, early last n
ight.
He turned the corpse slightly, saw the fingernail scratches on the neck, the bruise marks where Riuyken had been hit with something heavy. He peered at the wound at the base of the skull, then straightened and looked the room over. Matted blood and hair on a corner of the low table nearby. Signs of a struggle. Olive-wood statuette on the floor in front of the fireplace; blood on that too. And something else over there, something silver gleaming in the light. He picked it up, recognized it even before he read the inscription etched into its back side: the dangly bracelet Gillian Waltham had worn the whole time in Amsterdam.
So she’d lied to him after all. Came here last night with Riuyken, after they got in from The Netherlands, and that damn fat Dutchman had made a pass and she wasn’t having any. Clawed him when he pressed it and then hit him with the statuette. He’d gone down, cracked the back of his head hard enough on that low table to kill himself. And she’d panicked and run to the girl friend. From the lay of the room, the physical evidence, that was how it shaped up.
But was that all there was to it? Why hadn’t she told him what had happened? Fear, maybe; and maybe some other reason. If she’d lied about that much, it could be she’d lied about some of the rest of it too—like about knowing who was behind Zaanhof/Riuyken and what the game was all about.
Carmody put the bracelet into his jacket pocket, paused without thinking about it to wipe off the bloody statuette, then searched the house. It was as empty as he’d felt it to be. He found a telephone in Riuyken’s study, sat on the edge of a desk with an oxblood-colored veneer, and dialed the number of the bar across from Liane Butler’s apartment house.
Flores was gone. The barman remembered him, said that he’d left hurriedly half an hour ago. Carmody slammed the receiver down, immediately picked it up again and dialed American Express. There was no answer; they were still shut down for siesta. He banged the handset down for the second time, swung around the desk, sat in the black leather chair behind it, and began going through the drawers.
The right-hand bottom drawer was locked; none of the others told him anything. He tried to jimmy the locked one, but it resisted his attempts. He returned to the living room, went through Riuyken’s pockets, found a ring of keys. He also turned up a fat wallet. He pocketed the keys and opened the wallet.
It contained identification cards, all in the name of Jorge Riuyken; a snapshot of Riuyken and a dark-skinned redhead who looked like a whore; a pornographic color photo of a man and two teen-age girls; several thousand pesetas in large notes; and two thousand American dollars in fifties and hundreds.
Two thousand dollars. The price Gillian had claimed was her fee. This was the payoff money, probably—the bait to get her here last night. She must have panicked after Riuyken died; otherwise she’d have gone through his pockets, and seen the bracelet on the floor as well. Another point in her favor.
He took the fifties and hundreds out of the Dutchman’s wallet and tucked them away inside his own. Maybe he’d give the money and the bracelet to her later on, depending on what she had to say and how he felt about her at the time. Why he should bother—why he’d bothered to wipe her prints off the statuette—he didn’t know and didn’t want to think about.
He replaced Riuyken’s billfold and then went through the rest of the dead man’s clothing without finding anything that interested him. Back in the study, he found that the smallest key on the ring opened the locked desk drawer. Inside the drawer was an accordion file containing miscellaneous correspondence, bills, receipts, bank statements -all of it useless to his purpose.
Carmody studied the other keys on the ring. Two were unusual: long, heavy, with nearly but not quite identical sets of grooves. Safe deposit keys? No, they were too heavy for that. But maybe...
He stood and began to prowl the room. It took him ten minutes to find the safe: it was set into the floor and concealed under a long planter box full of ferns, beneath one of the windows. A little dirt on the floor, from the last time the planter was moved, led him to it.
With the box out of the way, Carmody knelt and examined the safe door. Circular, about eighteen inches in diameter, set flush with the floor. Made of heavy steel. Pull ring in the center, two recessed key slots on either side.
The two long flat keys fitted into the slots, but when he tried turning first one and then the other, the safe remained locked. It worked in some kind of sequence, then. He spent another five minutes of trial and error working it out: left key one half turn clockwise; right key one full turn counterclockwise. When he tugged on the ring, the door lifted and stayed raised on its hinges.
Money—two thick packets of both pesetas and U.S. dollars. And a large alphabetized file made of twin metal loops set into a flat base; more than fifty 4 x 5 cards were strung over the loops.
Carmody carried the file over to the desk where the light was better. Each card contained the names and addresses of men—and a couple of women—in several European countries, England, Canada, the U.S., Brazil. Diamond merchants, collectors, contacts, probably. If Riuyken had been dealing with all these people, he’d had a nice little cottage industry going.
All right. But was one of these names the man who had ordered the Amsterdam ruse? If Gillian Waltham’s story could be believed, the plan had been hurriedly concocted and carried out; she had been approached, briefed, and sent on her way to Majorca within thirty-six hours. With the phony diamonds. Quality synthetics were something a man like Riuyken might keep on hand; but if he’d supplied them, why hadn’t he given them to the girl immediately, had her sew them into her bra herself? Didn’t trust her, maybe. Or maybe they hadn’t come fromRiuyken but from the boss man.
If that was the case, then the boss man had to live somewhere nearby—somewhere in Spain, or Portugal or North Africa, at the outside. There hadn’t been enough time for a lengthy trip to pick up the synthetics or to have them delivered. That was a big if, a longshot, but he didn’t have any better parlay. In the absence of a sure thing, play a longshot; sometimes you got lucky and it came in.
He found a pen and a piece of paper, then went through the file cards again. When he’d flipped over the last one he had a list of eight names and addresses in Spain and one in Lisbon. Five of the eight were in Barcelona, Madrid, and Pamplona; the other three were in closer proximity to Malaga.
Carlos Miralles, Torremolinos.
Albert Opdehyde, Algeciras.
Jaime Rosellon, Mirabela.
There was no way to know whether the three were buyers, sellers, or contacts; Riuyken hadn’t marked the cards in any way. But the addresses, wealthy areas along the Costa del Sol, tipped the scales in favor of private collectors, men with money. Might as well start with those three first.
He put the file away, closed and locked the safe, replaced the planter box, returned the keys to the dead Dutchman’s pocket, and went to play his first longshot.
TUESDAY AFTERNOON–CARMODY
Torremolinos was queen of the Spanish Sun Coast, the place where the jet-setters and the film stars and starlets and the idle rich went to play. Scenic cliffs, luxury hotels, sprawling villas, million-dollar yachts anchored in the harbor, beaches overflowing with lush women and bronzed men from a dozen different countries Even though it was only eight kilometers from Malaga, Torremolinos was worlds apart. You could see, feel, smell, touch, taste the money there. And the two fluids that flowed most frequently, one cold, one hot, were champagne and semen.
If Malaga was the asshole of Spain, neighboring Torremolinos was the country’s lusty genitalia.
Carmody didn’t like it any better. It was just as hot and just as crowded and just as noisy and even more overpriced. He didn’t understand the kind of life that went on there, he didn’t fit into it, and it made him uncomfortable when he had to deal with it. Business didn’t bring him to Torremolinos often, just as it didn’t often bring him to Malaga. He’d have been happy if it never brought him to either town again.
On the outskirts of the village he stopped at a
small pension. The pensiónes tended to be run by friendlier—and hungrier—people than the larger hotels. The woman behind the desk of this one was more than willing to let Carmody use her telephone, and to offer him whatever information he wanted, when he laid the five-hundred peseta note in front of her. Did she know where the Villa Miralles was located? Oh, sí, señor, everyone knew the Villa Miralles and the Señor Carlos Miralles; he lived on one of the jagged cliffs two kilometers back toward Malaga. The road to his villa was private and one kilometer in length. No, señor, there was no gate barring entrance.
Carmody put in a call to the American Express office in Malaga. It was open now, and there was a message for him from the young Spaniard, Flores; he was to call the number Moncada had given him originally. Carmody had the operator get him the number. Flores came on the line on the second ring.
Carmody said, “Where did the girl go?”
“To the airport, señor. She took a taxi driven by a crazy man and I was unable to stay with them in the traffic. But she had two suitcases and I surmised–”
“Never mind all that. Was she at the airport when you got there?”
“No, señor. Her plane had already departed.”
“So you found out where she went?”
“Sí. To Palma de Mallorca.”
“Palma? Are you sure?”
“Yes, señor. Positive.”
Carmody put down the receiver. Why would Gillian go to Majorca? He was sorry, now, he hadn’t told Flores to follow her wherever she went. Her flying to Palma made no sense to him.
He left the pensión, drove back along the two-lane highway, found the private road to the Villa Miralles.
Climbing, he passed between thick growths of bamboo and scrub palm, over and through which he had glimpses of the Mediterranean. The road, surfaced with crushed white rock, rose sharply, hooking left, and finally he could see the estate ahead.
The term “villa” was a misnomer in this case. Moorish in design, it was the kind of patrician country house known in Spain as a palacio rural. Carmody had seen the type before, in the extreme coastal and fashionable interior sections of Majorca. The face of the cliff on which it sat was flat and oval-shaped; house and grounds took up three-quarters of the space. The other quarter was a parking area made of the same crushed white rock as the road—empty now except for a small gray Citröen parked nose up to one of the concrete abutments that marked the cliff’s edge. A low, pastel-colored wall, with a black iron gate set in its middle, separated the parking area from the estate grounds; beyond it Carmody could see yew trees and a jungle-like garden dotted with ironwork sculptures.
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