Like a Hole in the Head

by James Hadley Chase

“Boss of what? Boss of a lot of peasants? Is that all that important to him?”

  Raimundo hesitated, then shrugged.

  “Why shouldn’t you know? I’m out of the deal now. Savanto thinks big, makes big plans and makes big promises. All these goddam peasants he talks about look on him as God. So to stay God, he must have money : the kind of money you and I can’t even imagine. His brother runs the Red Dragon organisation and this organisation has the money Savanto needs because they control the gambling and the drug traffic in Venezuela and that’s where the big money is. Toni Savanto, the brother, is dying of cancer of the liver. He can’t last much more than a couple of weeks… if that. Diaz, his son, is a very smart cookie and his heir. So long as he is alive, Savanto hasn’t a hope of taking over the Red Dragons. You would imagine nothing could be more simple than to knock Diaz off. The old man has only to tell me and I’d do it, but that’s not the way he works. Because a quarter of a million, simple-minded, starving peasants look on him as God, and because he is also beginning to think he is God, he doesn’t want it known he has blood on his hands. There are ten men known as the Elders who do the administrative work of the Little Brothers and Savanto is scared of them. They have the power, if they gang up on him, to ease him into retirement. These men would never go along with a killing, but they would go along with a vendetta. That’s part of their tradition.” Raimundo paused as he stared out to sea, then he went on, “So the old man’s problem was how to get rid of Diaz. With Diaz out of the way, the Red Dragons would be like a fat, sleek body without a head. The old man has only to reach out and stick his head on the headless body to have all the money he needs to make good his promises. So he cooks up this idea of getting rid of Diaz and establishing Timoteo, who is his heir, as a guy to be taken seriously. Timoteo was told what to do. When Savanto tells anyone what to do, he does it. So Savanto found a girl and Timoteo took her around until the Elders were sold on the idea he was in love with her. I know Timoteo couldn’t stand the sight of her, but he did what he was told. When the background was killed her. Just before she died, Carlo branded her face with the Red Dragon symbol which was stolen from the old man’s brother. Savanto called the Elders and showed them the girl’s body. He told them Diaz had raped and branded her as a challenge to Timoteo. The Elders fell for it. They said Timoteo had to kill Diaz. They knew Savanto had only to give the sign and Diaz would be dead, but that would he murder. But if Timoteo killed him, that would be justice. So Savanto had to put on a show. He knew he couldn’t force Timoteo to kill Diaz. Timoteo was a yesman to a point, but he stopped at murder. So you got involved, I got involved, and now Timoteo has fouled it up by running away. That puts him in trouble. The Elders know by now what he has done and they have turned their thumbs down. If Savanto wants to remain boss, he has to turn his thumb down too. So Diaz gets a new lease of life and Timoteo is marked to be hit. Later, Savanto will cook up another idea to get rid of Diaz. He’s full of those kind of ideas. So Savanto’s button men are after Timoteo. They will knock off your wife, you and me because we know too much. We are all dead bodies… make no mistake about that, soldier. The word has gone out.”

  What happens if Savanto drops dead?” I asked, flicking the butt of my cigarette into the darkness.

  “He won’t drop dead. He’s built to last.”

  “But suppose he does drop dead. What happens?”

  Raimundo stiffened. He got the message.

  “Timoteo would take over. The peasants wouldn’t do so well but they would survive. But Savanto isn’t going to drop dead.”

  I lit another cigarette.

  “I think it’s time he did.”

  We looked at each other.

  “It can’t be done, soldier,” Raimundo said, shaking his head. “The red light has gone up. This is the first thing Savanto would think of now he knows the operation has turned sour. By now he is surrounded by his button men : men trained for just this job. Get that idea out of your mind.”

  “Do you want to be in on this?” I asked. “Or are you chickening out and sitting here waiting to be slaughtered?”

  “You don’t know what you’re up against, soldier.”

  “Haven’t you the guts to try? What have you to lose?”

  He hesitated.

  “What do I do?”

  “I’m going to kill this man,” I said. “He came into my life with promises. Now you tell me he is going to kill my wife and kill me. Okay, I believe you. He branded me.” I put my fingers through my shirt opening and felt the scar on my chest. “No man can regard himself as God. I don’t give a damn if he is the father of a lot of starving peasants if this is the way he works. I don’t believe these peasants would think anything of him if they knew the kind of animal he is. There is a hell of a lot of talk about tradition. Well, I have traditions too. No one brands me or threatens me and gets away with it. He called me a professional killer. I am just that.” I got to my feet. “You tell me I’ll be dead, but I tell you Savanto will be dead before me. I’m going to kill him!”

  Raimundo shook his head.

  “I go along with all you say, soldier, but you won’t kill him. He is organised. Getting a shot at Diaz is kid’s stuff to getting a shot at Savanto.”

  I crossed the roof to where I had left the rifle and I picked it up.

  “Listen to me, soldier,” Raimundo went on. “No one can hope to knock off Savanto when he is alert, and now, he is very alert. He thinks ahead all the time. Do you imagine he doesn’t know you will come after him? He knows now the set-up has turned sour. He knows Timoteo has taken off with your wife. He’s smart. He knows you will be after his blood. How do you imagine he has survived for so long? Because he’s lucky?” He took a cigarette from his pack that I had left on the parapet and lit it. This is going to kill me, but if I don’t smoke I’ll flip my lid.” He coughed like a man with lung cancer as soon as the smoke reached his sore throat and cursing, he threw the cigarette away. “That’s the way you and I will go, soldier… like dead butts.” He waited a moment while he wheezed, then went on. “He knows you will come after him. He is a judge of men. I’ve worked for him since I was a kid of fifteen and he is an expert in judging men, so he knows you now plan to fix him. But lie has a trained organisation to take care of guys like you. He is up in his lush suite at the Imperial Hotel. He likes living there. The staff drop on their knees and beat their stupid heads on the carpet at the sight of him and he loves that. So a punk like you, soldier, won’t shift him out, but he knows the danger points.” He gave a snorting, derisive laugh. “You’re aiming to nail him as he sits on the balcony of his suite, aren’t you? You aim to use the apartment block across the way to get at him.”

  “That’s the way I’ll get him,” I said.

  Raimundo threw up his hands in despair.

  “Do you imagine he hasn’t thought of that? He thinks of everything.”

  “I’ll kill him from there.”

  “You’re just sounding off,” Raimundo said angrily. “By now, that apartment block will he swarming with his button men. You’d never get within a hundred yards of it! That is the one place Savanto can be got at and that’s why it will be made safe!”

  I swung the rifle from one hand to the other.

  “Because it is safe, it is the one place I can get at him,” I said.

  Raimundo gaped at me.

  “It’s because he is sure and his men will be sure the place is safe that it ceases to be safe,” I said. “They will be so damn sure it’s safe they will he looking elsewhere for the action to start. There are twenty floors in this building with around fifteen rooms to a floor and each room is empty. That offers me three hundred hiding-places, apart from the corridors. How many men do you think will be guarding this block of apartments? At a guess, ten men who are quick on the trigger and very alert. Where will they be? Five of them will he covering the entrances. There will be a couple of men covering the elevators and there are certain to be at least two men on the top floor which overlooks the ho
tel. They will be so satisfied that the other guy is alert, they will cease to be alert after they have been at action stations for more than three or four hours. They will be no different from Army sentries and I know how they behave. I’m going to take a look at the place. Do you want to come?”

  He remained sitting on the parapet for a long moment, then he got to his feet.

  “What have I to lose? I still think you’re crazy, but anything is better than sitting here, waiting for a bullet.”

  “Have you any money?”

  He cocked his head on one side.

  “I’ve a couple of hundred in my room.”

  “That’ll do.”

  As he started towards the trap door, I caught hold of his arm.

  “You take the rifle. I’ll go first. You wait here… I’ll call you.”

  I saw his eyes widen in the moonight.

  “You think they could be here already?” His voice sank to an uneasy whisper.

  “They could be. From now on, I’m taking no chances. Give me your gun.”

  He hesitated, then he picked up the automatic and handed it to me as I handed him the rifle.

  I moved to the trap door and listened, then holding the gun in my hand, I swung myself down into the darkness. I heard nothing and nothing happened. It wasn’t until I had been through the whole house, moving like a shadow, that I was satisfied that Raimundo and I were still on our own. I returned to the foot of the ladder and called to him.

  He came down and I took the rifle from him.

  “Get the money and a suitcase,” I said. “We might have to go to a hotel.”

  Ten minutes later we were heading for Paradise City.

  * * *

  The night porter of the Palm Court Hotel was an elderly negro who was sleeping peacefully behind the reception desk. The flyblown clock behind his nodding head showed 02.22

  We had had some luck. On our way to Paradise City we had come on a car with a hag of golf clubs in the rear seat. I had stood on the brake pedal and had nearly sent Raimundo’s head through the windscreen.

  This car had been parked outside an ‘Eat-’n-Dance’ joint, the kind that litter Highway 1 until you reach Paradise City.

  “Get it!” I said.

  Raimundo read my thoughts. He slid out of the Volkswagen, grabbed the golf bag, emptied the clubs on to the back seat and was back in the car within ten seconds.

  So we arrived at the Palm Court Hotel with the Weston & Lees rifle hidden in the golf bag and a suitcase full of nothing : like two respectable guys on vacation.

  The old negro came awake and blinked at us. After a lot of fumbling with the register, he found us a double room with twin beds on the second floor. We signed in as Toni Franchini and Harry Brewster. I told him we didn’t know how long we’d stay and he didn’t seem to care. He took us up in a creaking elevator, unlocked a door and showed us into a big, shabbily-furnished room. He had tried to take the suitcase and the golf bag, but when I told him I was giving my muscles some exercise, he gave me a dismal smile as if he were sure I was going to gyp him out of his tip. I gave him a dollar after he had proved the plumbing worked and he went away, happy.

  I sat on the bed while Raimundo took the only armchair.

  Before arriving at the hotel we had driven past the Imperial Hotel and past the apartment block, under construction. We had luck as the night traffic was heavy and we could crawl without attracting attention. We even got into a solid jam of cars right outside the apartment block. I was able to take a good look at the building. Part of my Army training was to sum up a situation. I probably saw a lot more than Raimundo did. He was driving as I wanted to examine the set-up I was going to walk into.

  Along the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the apartments was a line of parked cars. As we crawled by them I spotted a Buick in which two men were sitting. There was no one hanging around the entrance to the block which was in darkness. To the left of the block was a builder’s crane, its long steel arm stretching up to the top floor positioned immediately over the roof. The feet of the crane were in a vacant lot, high with weeds, and there was a big hoarding announcing another apartment block was to be built there.

  “How do you see it, soldier?” Raimundo asked.

  “I’ll climb the crane.”

  He gaped at me.

  “You’ll never do it. That goddam crane is twenty storeys high.”

  “That’s the way I’m going. It’s the only way.”

  “You think Savanto’s men haven’t thought of that?”

  “Sure. So what do they do? They put a man or a couple of men in the

  vacant lot to see no one gets near the crane.” I looked intently at him. You and I will fix them… then up I go.”

  “It’s a pipe dream, soldier. You’ll never get up there.”

  “I’m going to bed. We do the job tomorrow night. By that time the guards will have got slack. It’s tricky, but it can be done.”

  When we got back to the hotel, I stripped off and took a shower. By the time Raimundo had taken his shower I was asleep.

  I have this knack of relaxing before a dangerous operation. During my years in the Army I had schooled myself to sleep. I had all day tomorrow to think about what I had to face the following night : now was the time to sleep.

  I came awake with a start to find Raimundo shaking me. The morning sunlight was coming through the faded blind, making me screw up my eyes.

  “Wake up! Listen to this !” Raimundo was saying and the note in his voice brought me fully awake.

  A voice was talking on the radio on the bedside table.

  “Mr. Bill Hartley claims he saw the killing,” the voice said. “When the police arrived with Mr. Hartley after he had raised the alarm the bodies he claimed to have seen had disappeared. There was no evidence that the shooting had occurred. The police are continuing their enquiries but Chief of Police Terrell has hinted that this could be a hoax. We have Mr. Bill Hartley with us in the studio.

  “Mr. Hartley, you tell me you are a bird watcher and you often go to the Cypress swamp early in the morning to observe wild life. That is correct?”

  A voice like gravel going down a chute said : “Yeah. I don’t give a damn what the police say. I saw this killing. I was up a tree with my glasses and I saw these two…”

  “Just a moment, Mr Hartley. Could you give us a description of these two people you saw?”

  “Why, sure. I told the police. There was a man and a woman. The man was a giant. He looked around seven foot to me: thin, swarthy and wearing a pair of black cotton trousers. The woman was blonde and pretty and she was wearing a white bra and white slacks. The thing I particularly noticed about her was her hair was cropped short like a boy’s. Well, these two were running along the sand. He was hanging on to her hand, dragging her along…”

  “Mr. Hartley, how far do you reckon you were from these two?”

  “How far? Five hundred yards, perhaps a little more. I use very powerful glasses.”

  “They were running along the beach. Did you get the impression that they were running away from someone?”

  “I certainly did. They looked like frightened people and they were running like hell.”

  “Then what happened, Mr. Hartley?”

  “They got shot. There were only two shots. The first shot hit the woman. It was a head shot. She fell down and rolled into the surf. The man went down on his knees beside her and there was a second shot. He was hit in the head. I saw the spray of blood and he dropped face down on the woman. It was a hell of a thing to see.”

  “What did you do, Mr. Hartley? You didn’t see the killer?”

  “No, I didn’t see him, but from the sound of the gun he wasn’t far from me. I was scared and shocked as you can imagine. The tide was coming in fast. After five or six minutes, I got down from the tree. It took me half an hour to reach a phone. I called the police. They came out pretty fast. I took them to the place where these two were shot, but by that time the tide had come in. Ther
e were no bodies, no footprints, no nothing. The police think I’m a nut, but…”

  I turned off the radio.

  Raimundo said quietly, “I warned you, soldier… I’m sorry.”

  I felt a trickle of cold sweat run down my face and I flicked it away with my finger.

  “I had lost her anyway,” I said.

  I thought of Lucy, her laugh when she was happy, the way her bottom twitched, her freckles and her eyes that scared easily. Yes, I had lost her in every sense now. She had found this long slob and she had said they thought alike. Thinking about them, I realised they would have made a better pair than she and I had done.

  I lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Ask them to send up coffee,” I said and closed my eyes.

  A bright-eyed, coloured boy came up with a tray of coffee. As he set it down, I said, “Do you want to earn five dollars?”

  His eyes grew round.

  “I sure do.”

  “Is there a sports’ store around here?”

  “A sports’ store? Yeah… at the end of the block.”

  “I want a Levison hunting knife : I want two of them. They cost around thirty dollars each. There’s five bucks in it for you if you go along and get them for me.”

  He gaped at me, a little uneasily.

  “A Levison hunting knife?”

  “That’s it. They’ll stock it. Okay?”

  He nodded, looking from me to Raimundo and from Raimundo back to me.

  “Give him the money,” I said.

  Raimundo took out his two one hundred dollar bills and gave one of them to the boy.

  “Well, it’s your money,” the boy said. “I’ll get them if that’s what you want,” and he left the room.

  “What’s the idea?” Raimundo asked.

  I poured the coffee.

  “Knives are silent,” I said.

  * * *

  We had been lying on our beds for the past two hours. Raimundo seemed to sense the mood I was in. He lay flat on his back, his eyes closed. He was probably dozing. I mourned for Lucy and I buried her. It was a mental thing, but realistic. I gave her the funeral I thought she would like with lots of flowers and organ music and a tall, dignifiedlooking padre. I even said a prayer for her : the first prayer I’ve said since I was a kid. I then thought over the six months we had spent together, picking out the highlights, then I closed the memory book. It had a lock on it and I turned the key and threw the key away. There were now other things to think about. I didn’t imagine I would think of her again. I had lost a lot of buddies during the war. I had gone to their funerals, but never to a memorial service. When I say goodbye, there is nothing else to say.