by Nick Carter
“Will you help us, Mr. Stephans?”
“The best thing you can do now is to go back home and keep your mouths shut. Never mention a word to anyone.”
“There’s no one else to help us,” she said. “Please?”
I looked at them, father and daughter, trapped in a web of revenge. My duty was to Gregorius and in order to help him I had to keep my promise to Stocelli, to clear him with the Commission. All I’d have to do would be to turn these two over to him, but the thought of what Stocelli would do if he got his hands on Dietrich was sickening. And if I turned Dietrich over to Stocelli, it would be the same as handing him Dietrich’s formula. Within a year, Stocelli would control the entire narcotics rackets in the States. No big-time operator would be able to compete with him. With the risk of smuggling heroin into the States eliminated, and with the incredible profits to be had because of its low manufacturing costs, it would be no time at all before Stocelli would be supplying every narcotics ring in every city in the country. There’d be no way to stop him. Giving Dietrich to Stocelli would be like turning a plague loose on the country.
I knew I had to keep Dietrich’s formula out of Stocelli’s grasp. And since it was locked up in the old man’s mind, I had to get the pair of them out of Mexico.
“All right,” I said. “But you must do exactly what I tell you to.”
“We will.”
“How much heroin do you have in there?” I asked Dietrich.
Dietrich looked up. “Almost forty kilos in crystal form.”
“Get rid of it And anything else you’ve been brewing, too. Get rid of all the glassware. You can’t take a chance that it’ll be seen by a maid or bellhop. Clean the place up thoroughly.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Tomorrow, I want you to book your return flight to the States on the first plane out.”
“And then?”
“For the time being, nothing. That’s all you can do.”
I suddenly felt exhausted. My arm ached with a dull, throbbing pain. I needed rest and sleep.
“What about Stocelli?” asked Dietrich, the fanatical light in his eyes flaring up once more. “What about him? Does he get off scot-free? Does this mean he’ll not be punished?”
“HI take care of Stocelli. You have my word for that.”
“Can I believe you?”
“You’ll have to.”
I rose to my feet and told them that I was tired and that I was leaving, and I walked out the door, shutting it carefully behind me. None of us said anything as I left. There was no more to be said.
When I left Dietrich and his daughter, it was well past four in the morning, but I still had one final chore to do before I could go to sleep. I went back to my room to pick up two tape recorders—a pocket recorder and a slightly larger one. The larger recorder had been fitted with a high-speed playback. It could play back a full hour of tape in less than thirty seconds. To anyone listening, the sound it made would be nothing more than a high-pitched whine.
With both machines, I went down to the deserted lobby and settled myself in one of the telephone booths. Pretending to be speaking into the mouthpiece, I dictated a report of my activities into the small pocket recorder. I covered almost all the events that had occurred, except for the killing of Luis Aparicio. It took me almost fifteen minutes before I was through talking.
Then I got through to Denver.
“You sound tired,” Denver said when he came on the line.
“I am,” I said, tartly, “so let’s get this over with, okay?”
“I’m taping now.”
“High speed,” I said, wearily. “Let’s not take all night.”
“Roger. Ready for reception.”
“Okay, this is private. For playback to Gregorius only. Repeat—for Gregorius only.”
I put the tape cassette into the high-speed player and held it to the mouthpiece of the telephone. I pressed the ‘play’ button, and the machine gave off a whine like the shrill scream of a distant buzz-saw. The sound lasted for seven or eight seconds, then stopped abruptly.
I put the handset to my ear and said, “How was the reception?”
“The scopes say it was okay,” Denver acknowledged.
“All right,” I said. “I want that tape destroyed immediately after transmission to Gregorius.”
“Will do. Anything else?”
“No,” I said. “I guess that’s all for now.”
I hung up. Before I left the booth, I rewound the original cassette, disconnected the microphone, and ran it in the ‘record’ mode in the high speed recorder until the tape was completely erased.
Back in my room, I had to pull the drapes against the glare of the coming dawn. I undressed and got into bed and lay thinking for a long while because my thoughts were on the last part of the message I had sent to Gregorius:
“What Dietrich has discovered is so dangerous that it cannot be entrusted to him. The man is highly neurotic and unstable. If his formula for synthetic heroin ever gets into the wrong hands, I’d hate to think of the consequences. Objectively, I would recommend that he be eliminated—as soon as possible.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I slept until the late afternoon, when an hysterical and terrified Susan aroused me by her frantic pounding on my door.
I stumbled out of bed and opened the door groggily. Susan was clad only in a bikini and a sheer beach jacket. Her long blonde hair cascaded in a tangle over her breasts.
“My father’s gone!” she cried out.
Fear was written in a pale wash across her features. Her eyes were an unfocused blank stare from the shock she was barely able to control.
When I finally calmed her down, I slipped into slacks, a shirt, and sandals. We went up to her suite.
I looked around the living room of the Dietrich suite. It was a shambles. Lamps had been overturned, the coffee table lay on its side. Ashtrays had spilled cigarette butts onto the floor.
I turned to the kitchenette. It was completely empty. Nothing remained of the retorts and tubing and other laboratory apparatus that I’d seen there only hours before.
“There!” said Susan. “See for yourself!”
“Tell me what happened.”
She took a deep breath to calm herself. “I awoke around ten-thirty this morning. Father was still sleeping. We’d gone to bed right after you’d left, but he was so disturbed that I made him take a sleeping pill. I called the airlines as soon as I was up and made reservations for us to leave this afternoon. It was the earliest flight I could get. Then I had a cup of coffee. By that time it was eleven o’clock. I wanted to get a little more sun and I didn’t think it would hurt if I let Father sleep as long as he could, so I went down to the pool. I was down there until just a few minutes ago. I came back to pack and—and found this!” She swept her arm around in a despairing gesture.
“Did you find a note or anything left here?”
She shook her head. “Nothing! Apparently, Father awakened and got dressed. He must have made breakfast for himself. The dishes are still on the table on the terrace. All he ever has is juice, coffee, and an egg.”
I looked around the kitchenette. “Did he clean up in here?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t last night. He was too tired. He said he’d do it this morning.”
“What would he have done with the lab equipment?”
“He’d told me he would smash it and put the broken pieces in the garbage pail.”
“Did he?”
Susan lifted the lid of the trash container. “No. There’s no glassware in here.”
“He told me that he’d made another forty kilos of heroin. Where did he store it?”
“In the cupboard over the sink.”
“Is it there?”
She swung open the cupboard doors so that I could see that the shelves were bare. She turned a baffled face toward me.
“Did he dump it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think
so. He didn’t do anything last night except go to bed.”
“What about the concentrate?”
Susan looked around the kitchenette again. She lifted the lid of the trash container. “Here,” she said, lifting some used paper towels. She held up the plastic bottle. “It’s empty.”
“Thank god for that, at least.”
I walked back into the living room.
“Is he playing another of his games?” I asked Susan. “Has he gone after Stocelli?”
“Oh, my god!” she exclaimed, aghast “I never thought of that!”
“I told him he was playing with killers! What the hell did he think he was doing?”
Susan shook her head silently. Tears filled her eyes. She suddenly threw herself into my arms. Her long, blonde hair streamed down her back. I could feel the heat of her almost naked body against mine, her small, firm breasts pushing against my chest.
She made sniffing sounds against my chest, and I cupped her chin with my hand to turn her face up to mine. She closed her eyes and put her lips against mine and opened her mouth.
In a moment, she took her mouth away, but only a fraction of an inch.
“Oh, god,” she whispered, “make me forget! I can’t take any more of it Please, please . . . make me forget!”
And I did. In the wreckage strewn living room. In the shafts of light streaming through the windows. Somehow, we tore our clothes off and embraced each other, both of us finding forgetfulness and release from our own tensions.
Her breasts fitted the palms of my hands as if they had been molded to their shape. Her thighs spread and wrapped themselves around me. There was no teasing. Nothing but a sudden, furious taking of each other. She took me as much as I took her.
And, finally, engulfed in perspiration, slippery with sweat, pounding in a furious burst of sexual energy, she exploded in my arms, her nails raking at my back, her teeth biting into my shoulder, and her moans filling the room.
We had just moved apart, tired but replete, when the telephone rang.
We looked at each other.
“You answer it,” she said, wearily.
I crossed the room to the table by the window. “Hello?”
“I’m glad to find you there, Carter,” said the man’s voice, abruptly. “Senor Dietrich’s life is in your hands. The lady you have been dating will meet you this evening. Eight o’clock. The same place you dined with her previously. And make sure you aren’t followed by the police.”
The phone went dead in my ear, but not before I recognized the voice of Carlos Ortega, bland, suave, controlled, and with not the slightest hint of emotion or drama.
I put down the phone.
“Who was it?” Susan asked.
“Wrong number,” I said and went back to her.
We spent the afternoon in pleasant carnality. Susan burrowed into me as if to hide from the world. We went into her bedroom and pulled the blinds down and shut out the light and the honor. And we made love.
Later, much later, I left her to go down to my room to change.
“I want you to stay here,” I told her. “Don’t leave the room. Don’t open the door. No exceptions. Do you understand?”
She smiled up at me. “You’ll find him, won’t you?” she asked, but it was more of a statement than a question. “Father will be all right, won’t he?”
I didn’t answer her. I knew that there was no way at all that I could make her aware of the vicious brutality of the men among whom I prowled, or their callous indifference to another man’s pain.
How could I explain to her a world where you wrapped a chain around your gloved fist and smashed a man in the ribs again and again until you heard the dry, crunching snap of breaking bones and watched impassively as he began to spew up his own bright blood? Or laid his hands flat on a board and smashed a crowbar across his knuckles? And ignored the animal screams of pain that came out of his torn throat and paid no attention to the wracking spasms that wrung his body into limp muscle and ripped tissue.
How could I make her understand men like Carlos Ortega or Stocelli or Luis Aparicio? Or myself, for that matter.
With Susan in her present state of mind, it was best to say nothing. She was no Consuela Delgardo.
I kissed her on the cheek and went out, locking the suite behind me.
In my own suite, I immediately noticed the black suitcase that Herbert Dietrich had told me about Thirty kilos of pure heroin. Without opening it, I put the suitcase with mine. Jean-Paul’s body was another matter. If I could have called on AXE, it would have been a simple matter to dispose of it. But I was on my own, and it was a problem.
There was simply no way to get rid of it, and time was getting short I finally decided to delay taking any action. I unwrapped the body, then I lifted him in my arms and brought him out to the terrace, putting him gently down in one of the sundeck chairs. To any casual observer, he looked as if he were taking a nap.
I showered and changed quickly, then strapped Hugo to my left forearm and put on a low-slung shoulder holster. I checked the elbow-slide action of Wilhelmina. I took out the clip of 9mm cartridges, reloaded the clip, and snapped a round in the chamber before I set the safety.
I donned another lightweight jacket. In the daytime, I couldn’t have gotten away with it. A 9mm Luger is a big handgun any way you look at it and the bulge under the jacket would have given me away. But, in the night, I could get by with it. That is, if no one stared at me too closely.
When I was ready, I left my room and cut down the corridor to the service elevator, heading for the back exit.
In less than five minutes, I was out of the hotel, scrunched down in the back seat of a cab, heading for El Centro.
As soon as we’d gone a few blocks, I sat up. We were driving west along the Costera. The Costera is too open and has too many police cars on it for me to feel comfortable, so I had the driver turn off when we came to the Calle Sebastian el Cano. After three blocks, we turned left onto the Avenida Cuauhtemoc, which parallels the Costera almost all the way in to El Centro. Where Cuauhtemoc joins the Avenida Constituyentes, we turned left again. I had him stop at the corner of the Avenida Cinco de Mayo and paid him, watching him drive out of sight before I moved.
I was only two blocks away from the zocalo, behind the cathedral, whose graceful, blue-painted onion-bulb spires make it look like a transplanted Russian Orthodox church. I picked up another cab and had him drop me off several blocks away from Hernando’s. I could have walked the distance, because it wasn’t that far away, but I’d attract less attention driving up in a taxi.
It was eight o’clock exactly when I walked into Hernando’s. The piano player was playing soft rhythms on the piano with his large, black hands, his eyes shut, swaying gently back and forth on his seat. I looked around. Consuela was not at the piano bar. I walked through the dining rooms. She wasn’t in any of them.
I sat down at the bar to have a drink while I waited for her. I looked at my watch. Five minutes after eight. I got up and went over to the public telephone and called the hotel. They rang through to Suite 903. There was no answer. Apparently, Susan was following my instructions to the letter. She wasn’t even answering the telephone.
Consuela was standing at my elbow when I turned away from the phone. She put her arm through mine and kissed me on the cheek.
“You’ve been trying to reach Susan Dietrich at the hotel?”
I nodded.
“Then you know that Miss Dietrich isn’t in her room,” she said. “She hasn’t been there for at least half an hour. She left with someone you’ve already met.”
“Brian Garrett?” I said, with a sinking feeling.
Consuela nodded.
“I suppose he told her a story about taking her to her father?”
“How on earth did you ever guess? That’s exactly what he did. She made no fuss at all.”
“Why?”
“Among other things, to make sure you’d cause no trouble when I take you to meet Carlos la
ter on.” Her face softened. “I’m sorry, Nick. You know I have to go along with them, even if it means hurting you. How much does this girl mean to you?”
I looked at Consuela, in surprise. “I just met her last night,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”
“Somehow, I had the impression she was an old friend of yours.”
“Forget it. What’s the next step?”
“You’re taking me to dinner at La Perla.” She smiled at me. “We’re going to have a pleasant meal and watch the high divers.”
“And Carlos?”
“He’ll meet us there.” She reached up and touched my cheek lightly with her fingers in a gentle caress. “For god’s sake, Nick, don’t look so severe. I’m not so unattractive that you can’t smile at me, am I?”
We descended the narrow, stone steps built steeply into the innermost face of the Quebrada cliffs below the Hotel El Mirador. We’d eaten a light dinner at the El Gourmet restaurant on the Upper level, and now I followed Consuela as she picked her way down in the darkness to La Perla on the lowest level. She found a seat at one of the tables close to the railing that overlooked the narrow finger of the sea and the waves that came rolling in against the base of the cliff.
It was almost ten o’clock. Consuela had not tried to make small talk during dinner.
“How much longer?” I asked her as we sat down.
“Not long. He’ll be here soon. In the meantime, we can watch the high divers.”
By the time we’d finished our first drink, the divers had come out on the low, rocky escarpment to our left and climbed down to a ledge just above the water. There were three of them. One of them dove into the inlet from an outcropping of rock and swam across to the other side. Now, all the lights—except for a few spotlights—were turned off. The first diver came out of the water, his body glistening wet. The spotlights followed him as he picked his way slowly up the almost sheer face of the cliff from which he was going to dive. Toehold after toehold, fingers gripping the rock, he made his way to the top. Finally, he swung himself onto the ledge a hundred and thirty feet above the water of the inlet.