Hammerlocke

by Jack Barnao

  We crossed the river and I glanced at Carla. "You're heading out of town?"

  "It's the only choice."

  She reached the end of the bridge and turned left. Ahead of us I saw the roadblock, a couple of "road-up" trestles, holding the outward bound traffic down to a single lane. A pair of uniformed cops were standing there, looking bored. They brightened when we drove up. From thirty yards away, down the beam of the headlight, you could see their faces get more animated as they made out our car, something out of the run of Fiats and vans.

  "Keep your mouth shut, just smile and nod," Carla told me out of the corner of her mouth.

  She stopped beside the policeman, wound her window down and asked "Che?" which I knew meant "What?" and was about as polite. It worked. The coppers were younger than she was. I could see them glancing at one another, preparing the comments on her beauty that they would make to one another after we'd gone. But in her presence they were like little boys in front of their grade school teacher. They fell over one another to be nice, explaining everything to her. One of them made the mistake of leaning down and putting his hand on the frame of the open window. She stiffened and he moved his hand as guiltily as if it had been on her thigh, which she had been careful to leave half uncovered. After a minute they saluted her and she paid them off with a smile and drove by.

  "Nice going. What would you have done if they'd wanted to look in the trunk?" I asked casually.

  "There is no secret to controlling policemen, any men," she said snootily.

  "Not for you. I'll give you that much. You're not just a pretty face."

  "God!" she said. "Do any of you ever grow up?"

  We drove for thirty-five minutes through the dark, past a cheerful Italian muddle of vineyards and olive groves and small fields. We went through a couple of villages, places with only a few lights still on this late. Then we came to an old stone farm with a wall around it. Carla swept through the gateway at forty miles an hour and jerked to a stop, inches short of the midden. "Come on," she told me and got out.

  I followed her towards the farm door, which was opened by a woman, dumpy and sixtyish, dressed in the inevitable black.

  She and Carla exchanged shrieks of Italian that would have seemed angry if they hadn't ended up kissing one another on the cheek. Then the woman spoke to me but I stood and smiled in the darkness, letting Carla explain how dumb I was. In the meantime I was checking the farmhouse as a defensive position. Unless the enemy used mortars, a couple of men could hold out here for days. The wall around the barnyard was eighteen inches thick, the house itself was solid. Carla had chosen well.

  Now we were safe I asked Carla for the keys. She handed them to me, not even looking at me, and I opened the trunk. The man groaned and eased himself out. That was a good sign. If he was well enough to move on his own, he might get away without doctoring. I knew he needed a tetanus shot but if he'd ever had one before he would manage.

  The women rattled on some more and then Carla told me, "Take him inside, I'll put the car away in the barn."

  "I'm sticking with you," I told her. "For all I know, this could be another setup."

  "For Jesus' sweet sake," she hissed but she didn't argue when I leaned Mazzerini against the farmhouse wall and sat in the car as she drove it into a barn. I helped her shut and bar the big door then we went back to the house. The woman had the wounded man on a chair in the kitchen and was heating water on a gas stove. She chattered at Carla when we came in, and Carla told me, "She says this man has been beaten, did you do it?"

  "Tell her no, I've got enough enemies on the go for one night. I don't need her after me."

  She lifted her face and laughed, the first honest sound that had come out of her all evening. "You're scared of an old woman?"

  "Terrified." I grinned at her. "I'm hoping she's going to feed us and I keep remembering that Lucrezia Borgia was from around here somewhere."

  "You know your history," Carla said and made an approving little nod. If it was intended to soften me up it was a failure. I just wondered what she had in mind for me. Was a posse of men in black shirts with white ties coming to blow holes in me? That was about the only event I could imagine that could make Carla spontaneously cheerful.

  She said something else but I ignored her, watching while the woman sponged away the blood and dirt from the cuts in the man's face. He was tough—I gave him that—he didn't flinch; but then, she was moving carefully, the way a milkmaid washes the udder of a restive cow. Any attempt at gentleness had to be heaven against the hell he'd gone through in that hole in the ground.

  "Who kicked you?" I asked him and he blinked as if coming back into his body was a task almost too much for him. I repeated the question and he spoke at last.

  "One of them was the man with his leg gone. I think God punished him for what he did."

  "If God worked the way you think, signor, the world would be full of one-legged men," I told him. "Why were they beating you?"

  "It was about the boy. They thought I knew where he was."

  Another possibility shot to hell, he didn't know where Herbie was either. "What's your name, your real name?"

  His voice suddenly changed, as if he recognized how much less a wheel he was now than he had been yesterday morning. "I am called Giovanni Mazzerini," he said.

  I sniffed. Carla was watching me out of her big emerald eyes, wondering if I was smart enough to remember the original cover story. I was. "That's supposed to be your warehouse, is it?"

  He shook his head, gently, flinching as he bumped his face against the gentle fingers of the old woman. "I do not own warehouses, signor, I am a little man."

  "Somebody thought you were big, or else they thought you were lying to them, which was it?"

  He shrugged again, a tiny movement, like a baby's first uncertain steps. He was going to get better, once he started talking with his whole body I would know he was fit.

  "I was with the men who took the boy from you this morning." He gave an officious little gasp and his hand came up to make that stroking motion down his cheek. "You were a tiger, signor."

  "You got away with the boy. Where is he? What happened, I thought you guys were all shot?"

  Now he was recovered enough to strut a little for me, still reclining on the old faded couch but his body stiffened; if he could have stood up he would have swaggered. "Nobody shoots me," he said.

  "You ran like hell, I guess," I said. I liked him better devalued, it wouldn't pay to have him striking poses.

  "I escaped," he said primly.

  "Then you must have seen who got the boy. Tell me or I'll take over where those other guys left off, and I'm stronger than they were."

  That deflated him. He shrugged again but it was defeated. "They were just men, ordinary men, with guns."

  "More than one?"

  "Two men," he said, proud again at his escape.

  "Two men with guns and you got away without being shot? You're lying to me, Giovanni, and I don't like liars. You were part of the plan, weren't you?"

  "No," he almost screamed it. The old woman turned and scowled at me and muttered something but made no attempt to interfere. She looked old enough to remember the war. Maybe she'd seen the Germans working over a partisan, maybe right here in this kitchen. Her face told me she figured I was no better. I smiled at her and spoke to Carla. "Tell this old trout that I saved this man's life, will you?"

  Carla spoke and the woman answered and the man tried to chime in. It was like having a seat at a new opera. I got annoyed. "For Christ's sake, I don't need the last act of Pagliacci. I just want to pick this guy's memory a little."

  Carla held up her hand and the woman stopped speaking.

  Giovanni said, "I am telling you the truth, signor. I got away. I ran, they shot at me, they missed. They did not miss my friends."

  "If you don't know who shot at you, you must know who kicked you."

  He flicked a glance at Carla. "I think the signora knows the men better than I."
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  I straightened out and turned to Carla. "You and I need to have a little chat, Carla. We can do it here or we can do it in private. Which would you suggest?"

  She stood there, as proud as a lioness. "If you hurt me my friends will kill you."

  "Spare me the drama. Let's talk."

  "Come," she said, flicking her head imperiously towards the door. I followed her and we went out of the kitchen into the family parlor. It was crowded with furniture, big stuffed chairs and a horsehair couch and religious pictures on the walls, the Sacred Heart, Saint Sebastian, the Madonna. I hoped it made Carla feel like confessing.

  I indicated a chair and she sat, crossing her knees primly.

  "Okay, what did he mean by saying you knew the men who were kicking him?"

  She flared. "You listen to scum like him?"

  "Frankly I don't know who's lying and who's telling the truth. But something isn't kosher. Your friends lied to me, certainly. They told me Herbie was in that warehouse. Why would they do that?"

  She shrugged. "You were there. You were useful. They sent you. I suppose that chickenshit Savario ran when he heard shooting."

  "Like a rabbit," I agreed. "But how come you didn't whisk me back to the old homestead? Then we could find out where Herbie is from this guy we've picked up and go get him."

  "I don't want to share the information with them. We don't need them anymore, now we've got a line on where the kid is," she said.

  "But I thought you were working with them."

  She smiled a taut smile, the kind you see on the faces of aging movie stars afraid their makeup will chip. "If you're crossing a river you need a boat. But when you're across the river and climbing a mountain, why carry the boat?"

  "Okay. I'm impressed. You took a course on comparative religion and studied Zen. What the hell does that have to do with Herbie?"

  "Given a few minutes with that garbage in the kitchen I will know where the boy is," she said. "I no longer need the help of my former friends."

  "That's great, but what if somebody else finds out before you do?"

  "They will be killed." She looked at me like a kindergarten teacher looking at the class dunce. "You have to understand, Locke, there's big money at stake here."

  "Big money nothing. His father is just a run-of-the-mill millionaire. In fact, less, he's spread too thin. He doesn't have a whole bunch of cash to slap around on ransoms. That's all an illusion."

  Now she sneered. "You are still a soldier, aren't you? You'll never be anything more. Didn't your employer ever tell you that he took out five million dollars' worth of kidnap insurance on his son?"

  Chapter 14

  It must have amused her to see my chin hit my chest. Five million dollars' worth of ransom insurance? He had never mentioned it to me, the bodyguard, and yet these wolves knew all about it. That meant only one thing. Ridley was working some kind of scam. He had arranged the ransom money, and then arranged for the kidnapping. The Mafia picked up the kid, he paid up, and they would split the cash. Smart, or what?

  "Then he's in this thing, up to his scummy eyeballs," I summed up.

  Carla shook her head, pityingly. "You're a slow study, Locke. Of course he is. That's why he hired a bodyguard for the boy, to make it look as if it was all legitimate."

  I moved a pace closer to her, close enough to be menacing but not close enough that her artfully crossed leg could swing up and put me out of the game. "Then what's to stop me clobbering you and driving back into town and giving this news to Capelli? Or is he in on this as well?"

  "What's stopping you is that you've killed a man." She waved both hands, all Italian again. "Oh sure, you'd get an interested hearing from Capelli. Then the father would deny it and they would get around to counting bodies and find you were guilty. I don't think you'd like an Italian prison. A blue-eyed WASP surrounded by a thousand horny little Italian men for twenty-five years."

  She was probably right there but that didn't matter. I wasn't anxious to spend time in anybody's jail, however well run. I backed off a pace and perched on the big soft arm of a chair. It looked as if I was a fugitive. If I had to cover up the killing of Giacomo I'd already left it too late. The police would have questioned the guy I'd spared in the warehouse. He would have sung the entire score of his favorite opera. I was a marked man. I'd been bested.

  "Has the old bird next door got anything to drink around the place? This is getting a little heavy," I said. Clever, Locke. No sense irritating the fair Carla anymore. She was the only key to the prison door. If she could help me find the kid and put his father away, people might listen to me.

  "They make their own grappa," Carla sneered. "It's not the kind of fancy drink you'd order but it may get your heart started again."

  "A Christian sentiment," I told her, grinning like Stepin Fetchit.

  I didn't even bother following her out of the room. I was in her hands for the next little while. I needed time to think.

  She came back with a bottle of what looked like lighter fluid and two tiny thick glasses. "I think I'll join you," she said cheerfully. "This is the most fun I've had in a long time."

  "The John Locke Protection and Entertainment Committee. We aim to please," I said and poured the drinks.

  She raised hers mockingly. "Cin-cin."

  "May your shadow never grow less." I raised mine and took a glug. It was the real stuff. You could have run a jeep on it. I noticed she took hers down without a blink. I wondered if she could fight as well and drive a tank. She seemed tough enough, for all her beauty. I poured myself a second dram of white lightning and offered the bottle to her. She nodded and I topped her up. As a junior officer it had never been my job to plan strategy. Tactics yes. The only tactical move I could see filling the bill here was to get her drunk, that way she couldn't sell me downriver.

  "The way I read all this, Ridley has an arrangement with your friends. They take the kid, he provides the money and they divvy it up after the smoke clears, right?"

  "Right," she said and raised her glass again. Maybe it was the exhilaration of seeing me behind the eightball, maybe she was a wino, I'm not sure, but she glugged it down and handed me the glass. I refilled.

  "The only fly in all this mutually profitable ointment is the fact that some ringer has grabbed the kid, right?"

  "Right again," she said. She raised her glass then pointed to mine. "Hey, what's the matter, can't you handle a real drink?"

  I threw mine back and had thirds, a half second before she was after her fourth glass. Nice going, Locke; two more of these and she'll be on her ear. Then all I'd have to do would be sneak past the last of the Borgias outside, hotwire the Mercedes, and head for the border. I could dump it there and take a train. Once I got into Germany I had some friends who could make me invisible.

  I discarded the idea even as it rolled through my mind. No way was I running out on my job. I had to find Herbie. Dammit, I'd lost him, I had to get him back or break my contract and that was not my way of working.

  "Maybe I can be useful when your soldiers find where the kid is being kept," I suggested. "I seem to be sharper than the bulk of the Mafia hoods around here."

  She sat up straight and slammed her glass down on the arm of the couch, bouncing it in the softness, jolting the contents out in a fine spray. "Mafia," she hissed. "That's the way you see it, isn't it? I'll bet you just loved The Godfather, didn't you?"

  "I never saw it. I was in Oman, making like an Arab when it played."

  My humor didn't humor her. "You live with clichés, you smug goddamn WASPs. You hear a word once and every Italian is tarred with that brush."

  I held one hand up, making a pantomime of it, acting as if the liquor had hit me a lot harder than it had so far. "Look, no offense intended. Yes, it's a cliché, but this is Italy and Capelli told me that your father and your late husband were both killed by what he called Mafia people in the U.S."

  "Wrong," she said.

  "I'm only repeating what I heard. Sorry if it offends
you."

  "It angers me," she said, and there were tiny pinch marks on each side of her nose. "It angers me because it's wrong and it's glib."

  "What did happen?" I asked gently. I wanted to understand her and she seemed close to speaking the truth.

  She looked down into her glass, squeezing it tight enough to make all her knuckles white. "What happened was that my father married me off to a man he wanted to make a deal with. My own father treated me like a chattel, because I was his daughter, not his son."

  "And then what?" I was coaxing, as if I was trying to talk her in from a window ledge.

  "And then his deal didn't take." She looked up at me with her eyes blazing, but filled with tears. "My beloved husband killed my father with the help of some people from Italy."

  "I'm sorry, Carla."

  "Don't be. He got his, a week later," she said, pronouncing each word hard and separate.

  "What happened? A gang war?"

  She laughed, and dashed her tears away with the back of her hand. "That's what the police thought. Only they're wrong. I arranged it."

  Deep waters. I just shook my head and looked sympathetic.

  She stood up, holding her glass in both hands. Then she drained it and set it down on the table. "You're the only man I've ever told that to. Just you."

  There was still nothing to say. I sat there on the arm of the chair and tried to look duly grateful.

  "Yes, I went to New York. Yes, I came here and found my way in with this scum whose name you probably heard from Capelli." She turned and glared at me, nostrils flaring. God she was gorgeous.

  "It all sounded plausible," I said apologetically. Maybe we were going to get some truth here. Or maybe it was amateur theatricals night and she was putting on a star performance.