Peril Is My Pay

by Stephen Marlowe

  “You were going to get in touch with Kyle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hold it. Don’t go away.”

  I went inside the café and called the American section of Olympic Village on the public phone. Kyle Ryder’s dormitory superintendent told me he was out.

  “Out? I thought they have a curfew.”

  “All I know,” the super told me, “is he got special permission from Mr. Lederer.”

  Mead Lederer, the athletic director and football coach of a Big Ten university, was manager of the American Olympic team. “Can you put me through to Lederer? This is Chester Drum.”

  “Sure.” I heard a click, and some rapid-fire Italian. “Pronto, signore,” the switchboard girl said, and then I heard Lederer’s deep, rumbling voice. “Lederer speaking.”

  “Drum, Mr. Lederer. I’m trying to reach Kyle. I hear you gave him special permission to break curfew tonight.”

  “You’re kidding,” Lederer said. “Of course I did. To meet you. Since you are a friend of his father’s—”

  “Must have got our signals crossed,” I said quickly.

  “The boys need their rest, Mr. Drum. They’ve got to stay honed to a fine edge.”

  “Nothing to worry about. Just got our signals crossed. If Kyle shows up—”

  “If?”

  “When Kyle shows up, give me a ring. I’m at the Eliseo. If I’m not in, leave a message.”

  I hung up before Lederer could make anything of our mutual confusion. Outside I told Lois, “Kyle’s gone.”

  “But he was supposed to wait until I—”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Surely you don’t think the Czechs … you hear stories of what they’d do to stop someone from defecting.…”

  “Hilda’s brother lives where?”

  “The Margutta. The Street of Artists.”

  “Come on.”

  “You’re not going to the cops?”

  “We’re going to the Margutta.”

  “But if the Czechs are trying to stop them … if they killed Signor Mozzoni …”

  We’d come full circle. I paid for our drinks, hailed a cruising cab and said, “The Czechs didn’t train Hilda Henlein as a hotshot discus thrower with the idea of letting her defect any old time she got the urge. Besides, I was hired to keep Kyle Ryder out of trouble. Figure he was waiting for word from you and didn’t get it. Where do you think he’d go?”

  “The Margutta?”

  “Sure.”

  “But a while ago you said you didn’t care if Kyle got thrown out of Italy for triggering an international incident. If that’s the way you feel, what made you change your mind about going to the carabinieri?”

  The Fiat cab lurched to a stop at the curb. “Get in. We’ll meet the cops at the Margutta. That’s where they’ll go when they identify Mozzoni. And that could be where Kyle is, or was, or will be. Let’s see if we can head him off. That boy’s got a temper. Maybe we can get our hands on him before the cops do.”

  “Signore?” the driver asked me.

  “Via Margutta.”

  “Bene.”

  We sped away from the curbside lights into the Roman night.

  The Margutta was a narrow street running for just a few blocks between Piazza del Popolo and the Spanish Steps. It was lined with two- and three-story apartment buildings with tile roofs and shuttered windows, and it paralleled a sheer bluff that raised the Borghese Gardens above the streets of Rome.

  “What’s the address?” I asked Lois.

  “No street number. It’s called Villa di Spagna.”

  Spanish Villa turned out to be a two-story yellow stucco building with a highly stylized painting of a flamenco dancer on the door under one of those elaborate bellpulls the Romans go for. I yanked it. Inside Villa di Spagna I could hear the loud jangle of a bell.

  Instantly the light coming through the slits in the window shutter immediately to the left of the door blinked out. We waited. No answer. I yanked the bellpull again.

  And again, no answer.

  I leaned off the little stoop and rapped my knuckles against the shutter. “Henlein?” The same silence greeted our ears. Lois tugged at my sleeve. “We know you’re in there, Henlein,” I said.

  “Maybe it wasn’t him.”

  “Maybe.” I banged the shutter again.

  “A minute, one minute,” a man’s voice whined.

  The door opened a moment later, and a man wearing a dark crew cut, a pair of faded jeans, a shiner, a fat lip, and nothing else, stood scowling in the doorway. He held a hunk of what looked like raw liver in his right hand. He pressed it against his black eye. A dribble of blood was drying into a scab beneath his lower lip.

  “Well?” he said, using English because I had used it.

  Before I could answer, Lois said, “I’m Lois Hackett. You must be Wolfgang Henlein.”

  He gave a little bow and stole a line from Saki, even managing a smile which seemed to hurt his mouth. “If I must, I must.” He stopped smiling. “And your friend is?”

  “The name is Drum. I’m looking for Kyle Ryder.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to come here. He’s not here.”

  “What about your sister? She here?”

  Wolfgang Henlein’s good eye narrowed. “Please, Mr. Henlein,” Lois urged. “We’re trying to help.”

  Wolfgang Henlein glanced at me. “You’re pretty big,” he said. He wasn’t. He probably weighed a hundred and fifty pounds—with a bucket of water in each hand. “You’re pretty big,” he said again, and if his tone meant anything he didn’t lose any love on us big slobs. “You should have come earlier. We could have used you earlier.”

  “Hilda isn’t here?” Lois asked. “I thought—”

  “Earlier. She was here earlier.” His English was good, with just a suggestion of broad Slavic vowels underlying it. “Her luggage is still inside. They must have followed her,” he said, and added with bitterness: “Two big men, big as you are. They did this to me and took Hilda.”

  “That poor girl,” Lois said.

  “Her? What about me?” Wolfgang demanded. “She wasn’t knocked around like I was. She doesn’t have this eye.”

  “Where’d they take her?” I asked. “Back to Olympic Village?”

  “How should I know? They knocked me unconscious. I never saw them before in my life.”

  “They were Czech, though?”

  “I don’t know. They never spoke.” He looked me over again. I had the impression he’d hated me on sight for my six-one, hundred-and-ninety-pound body. “You’re lucky you came late. Did I say they were your size? They were bigger, mister. Even bigger.”

  “Look,” I said, “let’s go inside and you can stand on a chair and feel better.”

  “Make a joke of it. They didn’t do this to you. I’m hurt. They hurt me. I don’t want to talk. Just go away. They hurt me bad, I tell you.” He seemed morbidly fascinated by the imaginary extent of his own injuries.

  Wondering if anger could jar him out of his self-pity and earn us some facts, I said, “If there were two of them and they were as big as you say and they cuffed you around, you’re lucky to come out of it with no more then a shiner and a puffy lip. Stop bawling.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  I wasn’t, but his bristling reaction surprised me. “Should I?”

  “Go on, get out of here.” He waved his hand and the purplish hunk of raw liver. He swung it at my face. I caught his wrist. He was small-boned and not strong. His fingers clenched on the liver; blood ran from it.

  “Signor Mozzoni was murdered on the Via Veneto,” I said. “The cops are probably on their way here right now.”

  He repeated the word with bewilderment that seemed genuine enough. “Murdered?”

  “Who else knew he was going to meet Miss Hackett?” I took a shot in the dark. “A little man in a white linen suit, maybe? Thinning white hair combed straight back, wearing dark glasses and a black silk handkerchief in his breast pocket?”<
br />
  “Let go of me,” Wolfgang said. When I released his wrist, he dropped the liver, kicked it off the stoop and wiped his bloody hand on his hairless chest. Then he said: “No one. No one else knew.” He’d let go of his anger along with the hunk of liver. His face had become a sullen, unreadable mask. At my reference to the man in dark glasses?

  “Who else lives here besides you?”

  “Mozzoni has the ground floor. I only have one room and the use of the kitchen. There are two studios upstairs. One is rented all year by a Swedish sculptor. He’s out of the country now.”

  “The other?”

  “An Italian artist lives there. She owns this building. Her name is Novella Simonetta. She’s successful,” he said with the same bitterness he’d used on my size, “because she paints the kind of phonily surrealistic pap the public wants.” He squared his small shoulders and puffed out his scrawny chest. “No one can accuse me of that.”

  I didn’t accuse him of it. Neither did Lois, who said: “I’ve heard of Simonetta, Chet. She has an oddball reputation, but her canvases command a stiff price.”

  “Simonetta owns the building?” I asked Wolfgang. “Not Signor Mozzoni?”

  “He is—was—just the concièrge. Simonetta owns it.”

  “She rented you your room?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Since last summer.”

  “Since the Games in Oslo?”

  “Why, yes. On my return I needed a small studio. Simonetta had this one for let.”

  I walked past Wolfgang and into a dim hallway. He made a move to bar my path, then changed his mind. He opened the door to his room. As he switched on the light I looked in over his shoulder and saw walls lined with well-rendered but uninspired landscapes and portraits done in oil; an easel, a daybed, a table, two chairs and a cheap composition suitcase. The room didn’t look as if it had been the scene of a brawl, but then Wolfgang wouldn’t have put up much of a fight.

  “The suitcase is your sister’s?”

  “Yes, Hilda’s.”

  “Keep him company,” I told Lois. “I want to see your oddball painter before the carabinieri get here.”

  Oddball, as it turned out, was putting it mildly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NOVELLA SIMONETTA DID IT with mirrors.

  The stairs were steep, the door heavy. No one answered my knock. I tried the latch. It wasn’t locked.

  “Anybody home?” I said.

  What I saw when I opened the door was a sultry-looking brunette, a bottle of Chianti, an easel with an unfinished painting on it and a half-dozen candles in silver candlesticks.

  But I saw all of them many times—life-size and smaller than life-size and also bits and pieces and facets of all of them, front view and rear view and from the side and at various angles.

  Novella Simonetta, I said, did it with mirrors.

  There were mirrors on the walls and mirrors on the ceiling and one on the side of the door, and large and small mirrors on standing screens placed at angles all around the large room. It was like walking into a maze. I took a step into it and saw my own reflection picked up and bounced around the room. Another step, and I bumped into a mirror.

  The sultry brunette, who would be Novella Simonetta, looked up from what she was painting. All her eyes glared at me from all the mirrors as she said, “Don’t just stand there staring, Kenny,” in English, and then all the eyes, which had been wide to begin with, widened some more and she said something in Italian which must have been, “You’re not Kenny.”

  “No, I’m not Kenny,” I said.

  “My robe, you fool,” she said imperiously, and all her bare right arms and right hands and index fingers pointed all over the room. “It is on that chair. Get it.”

  The bottle of Chianti was wearing straw from the neck down. Novella Simonetta was wearing silk from the waist down. Above it she was bare—a hundred Novella Simonettas in a hundred big and small mirrors all over the room and at every possible angle. Her skin was that blend of tan and olive which Italian skin gets if it spends a lot of the summer at the beach in Ostia. She wore her short black hair in disarrayed bangs. She had a high-bridged classic nose and big dark eyes that helped the mirrors reflect the candlelight. Her bare breasts were as arrogantly tilted as her nose was classically straight. The suntan did not stop above or below them.

  Just one of her would have been something to see. A hundred mirrored poses of her from all over the room were overwhelming.

  I took a stab at where she might have been pointing. It wasn’t a chair with a robe draped across its back. It was another mirror. I took another stab. Same no luck: a reflection of a reflection.

  Lunging off the three-legged stool she’d been sitting on, Novella Simonetta made three right-angle turns around three mirrored screens. The reflections nearest me grew larger. Novella Simonetta went straight to the chair, which wasn’t six feet to my left, scooped up her black silk robe and draped it over her shoulders. I followed her back to the easel, careful not to tread on her heels but even more careful not to do an Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass with one of the mirrors.

  “Well?” she said.

  Over her shoulder I saw the painting on the easel. It showed bits and pieces of Novella Simonetta, not in any particular anatomical order, not restricted as to number, and not in any standard size, which her talented brush had gleaned from all the mirrors in the room.

  “Well, it’s different,” I said.

  “I don’t mean the portrait, you fool. What do you want?” Her eyes flashed in the candlelight. “You think perhaps I need your approval of my technique? Of the mirrors which show the model all shapes and sizes at once? Of the candles which offer highlight and shadow and the mystery of things dimly seen? Of the fact that I have search all over the world for the perfect woman to paint and have return wiser to the Margutta to paint myself, Novella Simonetta?”

  She took a long drink from the Chianti bottle. All her reflections took long drinks from all their Chianti bottles. “What do you want? Who are you?”

  “How long have you been painting?” I said.

  The question surprised her, and her answer surprised me. “Six years professionally. Ever since the Dane tells me I have talent. He was my first husband.”

  “No, I mean how long have you been painting tonight?”

  “Tonight?” Her answer was vague. “I lose myself in my work. Hours.”

  “There was some trouble downstairs. A fight.”

  “I hear nothing. I am absorbed. The Belgie used to tell me I am like hypnotize myself.”

  “Who’s the Belgie?”

  “Second husband.” She and her reflections drank more Chianti. “Who fights downstairs?”

  “Henlein. Did you know his sister was coming here tonight?”

  “He has a sister?” She answered her own question: “Yes, of course. An athlete from Czechoslovakia. A shot-putter?”

  “She throws the discus.”

  “I do not know she is coming. The Anglo tells me always to mind my own business. The Anglo,” she said, “was my third husband.”

  When I’d entered the maze of mirrors she’d mistaken me for someone named Kenny and spoken in English. Kenny could have been the Anglo. Kenny, because I still couldn’t get rid of the nagging idea that I’d seen him somewhere before, could even have been the man in the dark glasses. I said, “Kenny’s the Anglo?”

  Laughter bubbled in her throat. “I haven’t seen the Anglo in years.”

  “Kenny wouldn’t be a little man with thinning white hair, dark glasses and a black handkerchief in the breast pocket of a white linen suit?”

  Her dark eyes narrowed to gleaming slits of reflected candlelight. “Kenny?”

  “On the Via Veneto, watching your concièrge get hit and killed by a car outside the Café Doney?”

  “What is this you tell me? Mozzoni, he is dead?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Novella Simonetta slumped on the three-le
gged stool. Her silk gown parted slightly in front. “Mozzoni, dead? I just see him today.” She stood up and turned her back to me and ran a hand through her short dark hair and stared at her unfinished portrait. “Kenny is not a little man in a white linen suit or any suit at all. Kenny is huge, signore. Bigger even than you.” She swung around suddenly and her voice, which had been shrill at the mention of Mozzoni’s unexpected demise and throaty at the thought of Kenny’s size, both almost in the same breath, was now crisp with anger. “I have tell you about myself,” she said. “I have tell you about Kenny. All you tell me is that Signor Mozzoni is dead. And yourself? Who are you? Why do you come here?”

  “The name is Drum,” I started to explain. “What happened to Mozzoni was no accident. He was murdered. It was an old Citroën that—”

  And then a voice interrupted me from the doorway: “Murdered? Who was murdered, Novella?”

  The voice was deep. It belonged to a tall, husky, insolent-eyed and very handsome male specimen with pale wheat-colored hair worn too long and the downcurving but upturned-at-the-corners lips of a man who thought a great deal of himself. He had entered Simonetta’s studio as quietly as a cat. He stood there in the doorway with a tomcat’s grace. I had a hunch he’d move like a tomcat too, had a hunch he’d know his way through the maze of mirrors that were reflecting him as they reflected Simonetta and me. I guessed, too, that at a word from Simonetta he’d stalk gracefully across the room, either with a big hand out and a Pepsodent smile or with both hands ready to snap my neck like a celery stalk. He was big enough and looked tough enough to give it a try.

  The word from Simonetta was not long in coming. “He will not tell me what he wants. All he says is Signor Mozzoni has been murdered. Find out what he wants, Kenny.”

  The big man gave me the patronizing half frown, half smile which an innocent bystander uses on a noisy drunk. “Mozzoni? The concièrge?” he said mildly. “Why would anyone want to kill Mozzoni?”