Peril Is My Pay

by Stephen Marlowe

  But if we didn’t try it we were dead.

  “I’m going through that window,” I whispered against Lois’ ear. “Don’t move. Keep down. When I shout, you jump.”

  “I couldn’t—”

  “You’ve got to. Trust me.”

  I stepped up onto the low balustrade. The light was off at the other end of the broad stairs and starting to swing back toward us. Now the window seemed very far away, now the arch was hardly more than a shadow, now the latticed shutters seemed as substantial as oak doors.

  At least they hadn’t seen me. We were in shadow. But they’d hear it when I kicked the shutters, and Lois’ life would hang on how fast she could move after that.

  If I could smash the shutters.…

  I jumped, arms stretched above my head, knees drawn up. Felt a sickening moment when I was hanging free in space with a pit forty feet deep below me. Then simultaneously my hands clawed at the arch, my arms felt as if they would be torn from their sockets and, completing a pendulum swing, I drove the soles of my shoes against the shutters. They splintered and gave. I let go with my hands and slid across the sill, jarring my spine and the back of my head. The room was dark. I couldn’t see anything. Near me in the darkness, a woman screamed in fear.

  And on the Spanish Steps an echoing scream answered her: Lois. The gun roared twice. Footsteps pounded on cement.

  Whirling to face the window, I saw Lois perched on the balustrade.

  “Jump. You’ll make it.”

  “I can’t!”

  The light swung toward her.

  “Jump!”

  The woman in the dark room cried, “Mama mia!”

  The light reached Lois, and then she jumped.

  Skirt fluttering, legs scissoring, she lost height too quickly. Her body dropped like a stone past the window. “Chet,” she cried, and her hands scrabbled at the sill. I grabbed her arms up high near the shoulders and hauled her in. Together we tumbled to the floor. I heard someone moving in the room, then a light glowed on a night table between two rumpled beds.

  A fat woman in a white shift stood by the night table. Her long dark hair hung loose about her face. Her black eyes darted from Lois to me to the shattered shutters, one of them on the nearer bed and the other still hanging askew from its lower hinge. Behind her in the doorway stood a scrawny middle-aged man brandishing over his head the largest cleaver I had ever seen. A little girl’s voice cried behind him, and then a chorus of little girls’ voices, and then four tousled heads appeared, two under each of his widespread arms in the doorway.

  “The light,” I said. “Shut the light. They have guns. They’re shooting at us.” I got up. “They want to kill us. Capisce?” Do you understand?

  “Gons,” the woman said. “Si. I hear.”

  She shut the light as the man with the cleaver herded the four little girls out of the doorway.

  “Telephone?” I said. “You have a telephone?”

  “Prego?”

  “Telephone. The carabinieri.”

  “Polizía,” the woman said.

  “Si,” the man said. “We understand. But no telephone.”

  With the room dark again, I chanced a quick look out the window. I couldn’t see the man with the gun, but ten yards or so from the window I saw the bright eye of the flashlight. It was pointing down the Spanish Steps. Then suddenly it winked out.

  “Signore?” a voice cried. Calling the man with the gun?

  There was the brisk tattoo of many feet on the stairs. A voice shouted a command. The light winked on and off again, and then its holder was running upstairs in the moonlight, darting frantically from side to side. Seconds later four carabinieri in their gayly plumed hats sprinted up past the window. Two of them had drawn their guns. One shouted again. One fired into the air twice. The man with the flashlight kept running up the stairs.

  The leading carabinieri dropped to one knee, steadied his right wrist on his left forearm and fired once.

  After that the carabinieri walked slowly up the stairs and out of sight.

  “I think they got one of them,” I told Lois. But she didn’t hear me. She had fainted.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “STING, Signore?” THE POLICE doctor asked me.

  It was two hours later. I lay prone on a table in the police station on Via del Babuino, stripped to the waist, while the doctor dabbed something wet and stinging between my shoulder blades.

  “A laceration,” he said. “No more. You are lucky.”

  “You’re sure Miss Hackett’s all right?”

  Lois was inside telling her story for possibly the third time. I sat up and reached for my shirt. Adhesive tape made my back feel stiff.

  The doctor’s small round face smiled. “Some slight hysteria at first. Now Miss Hackett talks compulsively. She is fine.”

  As I got off the table to see for myself, Colonel Talese came in. His raw-silk suit looked as if it had just come off the hanger, but he was worrying his hairline mustache with a nervous fingernail.

  “Pericles Andros,” he told me. “You said Pericles Andros, Mr. Drum.”

  “I saw Andros at the Café Doney. You didn’t believe me.”

  He waved the disbelief aside with a lean, tanned hand. “That was before. I have just come from the hospital. Your assailant died.”

  I said nothing.

  “A bullet in the back. His partner’s gunfire was heard by lovers in the Piazza di Spagna. They summoned the carabinieri.”

  “I know all that. They told me at the Spanish Steps.”

  “The man who died. His name was Giussepi Fassolino. Like Mozzoni, he was in the narcotics trade. Like Mozzoni, he knew Pericles Andros. He did not die at once, Mr. Drum. In the hospital there was a priest, a confession.” Talese paced past a row of filing cabinets and looked out at the hot Roman night.

  “Before he died, before he said his act of contrition, Giussepi Fassolino swore to the identity of the man with him on the Spanish Steps. Swore it, signore, when eternal damnation could be his punishment for lying.” Talese turned suddenly away from the window. “But tell me, Mr. Drum, how can a man I know to be dead be still alive? How can he be here in Rome tonight?”

  “Andros?”

  “Fassolino swore the man he was working for, the man who escaped from the carabinieri on the Spanish Steps tonight, was Pericles Andros.”

  Lois Hackett sat, very subdued, in the back of an unmarked car as the carabinieri drove us to her hotel.

  The Flora held down the corner of the Via Veneto and the Porta Pinciana, and at something after two A.M. its modern lobby was deserted except for the night porter nodding sleepily over his newspaper. With her room key he gave Lois a message. “There is a cable for you, Miss Hackett. From America.”

  “Oh?” Lois said. “Where?” They were almost the first words she had spoken since we left the police station.

  “I take the liberty of leaving it under your door.”

  It was a still-subdued Lois Hackett who went up in the Flora’s elevator with me. I hadn’t tried to intrude on her silence; there were plenty of questions rattling around in my own head to keep me busy. Talese and I had batted around the fact that Pericles Andros was still alive. With three-quarters of a billion bucks on ice, we’d decided, you could buy a pretty convincing phony death. Or maybe Andros hadn’t had to do that: another convict had escaped from the Adriatic prison island with him, but only one body had been washed up on the beach near Rimini.

  It had been in the water over a month, and preliminary identification had been made on the basis of the metal prison ID tags around the corpse’s bloated neck. But the floater had yielded a good set of fingerprints after the skin had been dried and heated. Interpol, the International Organization of Criminal Police with headquarters in Paris, had declared these prints to be Andros’. That, Talese suggested, was where Andros’ money had served him.

  Andros was alive, no doubt about that. But why should he care whether a Czech discus thrower named Hilda Henlein defected
to marry her American sweetheart on the eve of the Olympic Games? With his money and his underworld connections in a dozen countries he had as much reason to be a Red agent as Alfred Krupp did.

  Talese had sent a team of crack investigators to question Simonetta, Kenny Farmer and Wolfgang Henlein again. The results of that interrogation, if any, I’d learn in the morning. “There will be a conference—how you say, a council of war—at Olympic Village in the morning,” Talese had told me. “Kyle Ryder is still missing, and the Henlein girl.”

  “What kind of conference?”

  “The American coach, Mead Lederer. The Czech security officer, Emil Hodza. The Roman chief of police who, after all, is responsible for over-all security during the Games. And now, myself—as it has been established that Pericles Andros is not only alive but involved.” Talese gave me a thin smile. “Also, we can hope, an American private investigator who once again follows the trail of Pericles Andros, signore.”

  “I didn’t know I was—”

  “Please. I have a feeling about you. Once before you cornered and captured Pericles Andros, when Interpol and the police of three countries failed. Doesn’t the Italian philosopher Croce maintain that history moves in dynamic cycles?” Talese lit a Due Palme. “So I bid you good-bye, signore, until tomorrow.”

  Now, in her room at the Flora, Lois opened the yellow cable envelope, read its contents and handed the sheet to me. The cable said:

  AP NEWSWIRE REVEALS ITALIAN REPORTER BABUINO POLICE BEAT SCOOPS LOCAL PRESS RE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE CZECH HILDA HENLEIN AMERICAN KYLE RYDER STOP WIRE FULL REPORT FIRST DAY’S ACTIVITIES EARLIEST REGARDS ROBERTS EUROPEAN-AMERICAN YOUTH FOR FREEDOM INC

  Her green eyes wide, Lois pointed to the cable in my hand. “That’s so you don’t ask me any questions. I couldn’t stand any questions now, Chet. The crazy part of it is I don’t feel anything. We almost died tonight. We almost died. It’s going to hit me all of a sudden and then I’ll come apart at the seams. You better not be around. I’ll bawl like a baby.” Lois touched my arm. “Did I thank you for saving my life?”

  “Don’t. Did I tell you that Andros was probably gunning for me either because he’d recognized me on the Via Veneto and knew I’d have recognized him, or maybe because he was there at Spanish Villa and heard me describe him to Kenny Farmer and Simonetta?”

  “You still saved my life.”

  “He didn’t want to kill you. You just happened to be on hand.”

  “I wish I could get a load on,” Lois said, changing the subject. “I wish I could get high as a Dolomite on a whole bottle of Strega. And,” she added petulantly and almost childishly, “you did so save my life.”

  Shrugging, I picked up the phone on the night table near Lois’ bed. “Any chance of getting room service at this hour?”

  “Room service is closed, signore. What is it you wish?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at Lois. She nodded enthusiastically. “I wasn’t kidding.”

  “A bottle of Strega,” I said.

  “It can be arranged, signore,” the night porter told me. “And of course two glasses.”

  “Man’s a romantic,” I said lightly after I’d hung up. “He thinks he’s aiding and abetting an assignation.”

  Lois didn’t smile. “And all you want is the facts, ma’am—as they say on TV.”

  “I was supposed to watch over Kyle Ryder. I didn’t do much of a job of it tonight.”

  “You think I can help?”

  “You could start by telling me exactly why you came to Rome.”

  Lois pouted. It was a pretty pout on a pretty girl. I found myself staring at that red hair and those green eyes and those freckles of hers. Marianne introduced you, I thought. She’s Marianne’s friend, so stop getting lecherous ideas. I plunked down on the room’s one easy chair, wanting, suddenly, to keep my distance from her. She walked over and perched herself on the chair arm, the lightweight fabric of her skirt drawn taut over her thighs.

  “Ask me questions,” she said ingenuously.

  “I already did.”

  “Okay. You are looking at the one-woman staff of Free Youth, the quarterly magazine of European-American Youth for Freedom, Inc.” She said it the way I spelled it: inc. “And please don’t tell me the name sounds subversive. I know it does, but it isn’t. We ought to change it, I keep telling Mr. Roberts.”

  “Guy who sent the cable?”

  “That’s right. He—”

  Came a discreet knock at the door. I let the night porter in with a tray on which were a bottle of Strega, a bucket of ice and two glasses. “Will this be satisfactory, signore?”

  “A work of art,” I said, not wanting to disappoint him.

  I tipped him, and he shut the door as discreetly as he had knocked at it. Then I poured a little Strega over ice in both glasses. Lois smiled. “Are you kidding? I said I wanted to get as high as a Dolomite.”

  Filling both glasses to the brim, Lois raised one, said “Salut” and “this is where I came in,” and started drinking. She didn’t stop until the ice rattled against her teeth. Then she put the glass down and recited very quickly, as if she wanted to get it all out before the Strega socked her:

  “I told you I’d met both Hilda and Kyle in Oslo last year. I’d been covering the Oslo Games for Free Youth.”

  I interrupted her: “Covering them why?”

  “I was getting to that. There hasn’t been an international athletic event in the past decade where there hasn’t been a strong possibility of some Iron Curtain defections, and that sort of story is Free Youth’s bread and butter.” Still reciting quickly, Lois—or the Strega—winked at me. “And we wouldn’t be above acting as agents provocateur if the occasion arose.

  “European-American, you see, is a refugee organization. Part of our budget is footed by one of the alphabet-soup agencies in Washington, the rest by donations from various corporations and funds. We’ve set up relocation camps in Europe for students who’ve fled the Iron Curtain, and while they stay there we try to place them—with scholarships—in American colleges.

  “Anyhow, as I said, every now and then we get the chance to play agent provocateur. Like with Hilda Henlein. I’ve already told you I arranged her correspondence with Kyle. Her brother Wolf was the intermediary, and until she met Kyle last year she was politically naive. She was a sort of symbol in Czechoslovakia. You know, Golden Youth, that sort of thing.” Lois smiled down at me. The curve of her hip was a few inches from my face as she sat perched on the chair arm. “Golden Youth,” she repeated, and the smile became another pout. “Pardon me if I sound cynical. I always do when I’ve had a little too much to drink.”

  “You don’t sound like a cynic. You sound like a romantic. Romantics always get disappointed with the world and make like cynics.”

  “There’s a difference? But anyway, thanks for the analysis. And at least you’ll have to admit,” she said, beginning to slur her sibilants now, “that I was cynical enough to have old Junius Ryder send you here to look after his son.”

  “What’s cynical about that?”

  “If Hilda Henlein were to defect, she might start a chain reaction in Czechoslovakia that.… I urged Junius Ryder to hire you so you’d be on hand in case I needed you … like if she defected and there was trouble … but of course she did defect and then Signor Mozzoni was killed before he could arrange her meeting with Kyle and then Hilda was abducted from Spanish Villa and.… I need another drink. Pour me some more Strega, will you?”

  “You’ve had enough.”

  “Oh, don’t be an old grump, Chester Drum. Maybe this happens every day to you, but I saw a man murdered this evening and then I was shot at and almost killed and then I had to jump about a hundred miles into a window and then I was dangling by my hands and I almost died and if you don’t pour me another Strega I’ll do it myself.”

  She got to her feet and wobbled there. She was about to launch herself in the direction of the table where the Strega bottle stood. Like most green-eyed redheads
she was a girl who, when she let herself go, really let herself go. I got hold of her hand and said: “Sit down, Lois. And calm down.”

  For a moment she perched again obediently on the arm of the chair. Then she slid off it onto my lap. Her red hair tickled my face. “Feel my heart,” she said. “I’m all unstuck. I told you I’d get that way. They gave me something at the police station. Milky in the bottom of a glass, I don’t know what. It’s making my heart go like a trip hammer. Boy! Feel it. Go on and feel it.”

  She took my hand and placed it on her ribs just below her breast. Her heart was pounding, all right. Then she slumped a little and my hand was touching the firm contour of her breast. All of a sudden my thumper was looking for a new cha-cha-cha rhythm itself. Lois was stacked.

  “See? I told you,” she said, craning her neck so that her moist lips were three inches from my lips. “Boy!” she said again, not quite querulously. “How much of a hint does a guy.… I practically did everything but.… You can kiss me, damn it, Chester Drum.”

  I didn’t kiss her. She kissed me—wetly, more than a little drunkenly, but with heat. “That’s better,” she murmured against my lips.

  I felt like seven different varieties of a horse’s ass. Whatever they had given her to drink at the police station, combined with a tumbler of Strega it was highly aphrodisiac.

  “Tha’s much better,” she slurred.

  I lunged to my feet with one arm supporting her thighs and the other supporting her shoulders. She cuddled against my chest. “I’m going to put you to bed,” I said.

  She giggled. “Take me to bed, Chester. I almost died tonight. I don’t want to die a virgin. I don’t want to.” She nibbled my ear.

  Just then someone knocked at the door. I swung away from the bed with Lois still in my arms. Swinging her legs, she called out petulantly: “Go away, we’re busy in here. Just go away.”

  The door handle turned, the door burst open and Kyle Ryder stood in the doorway.

  “Where is she?” he shouted. “Where’s Hilda?”

  Kyle did not belie the old saw about growing them big in Texas. In loafers and white ducks and a white T-shirt, he was six-feet-three. He must have weighed two hundred and ten pounds. The tight white T-shirt looked as if it had muscles of its own.