Peril Is My Pay

by Stephen Marlowe

  Instead, he shuddered. Then he looked up reproachfully at the ceiling. Then he gazed in glazing popeyed wonder at the wine casks. Then his knees buckled. He crashed into the table, overturning and splintering it. He fell in its debris, making the trattoría shake. He had a gut like the bow of a battlewagon, but he had a glass jaw. It seemed to surprise even him. Maybe no one had ever raised his sights above the Crespi belly.

  I didn’t have time to congratulate myself, because Kyle Ryder came for me.

  “Hold it,” I told him. “She says a guy named Carnuvale is here. He supposed to be your friend? He works, or used to work, for Pericles Andros. The Guardia Finanza’s looking for him. They figured if they found him they’d find you. I guess they were right.”

  “I’ll say this for you, you don’t stop trying,” Kyle admitted. “But I don’t know any Pericles Andros, I never heard of the Guardia Finanza and Carnuvale is just a man with a truck who’s going to help us. So will you, for the last time, get lost?”

  I shook my head. Kyle’s right fist sailed past my ear, burning it like a wood rasp. I backed up and he stumbled over Crespi’s outstretched legs and went down to one knee. He got up with murder in his eyes. I raised my own fists reluctantly. But Kyle had sucker-punched me once, and that was enough.

  “Kyle, wait. Please,” Hilda Henlein said. “I have heard of Pericles Andros. Wolfgang said—”

  “I thought it was all straightened out between you and your brother now.”

  “It is. I know it is,” Hilda said, as if trying to convince herself. A Sudeten Czech, she spoke with a slight German accent. “I want to know who this man is, Kyle. I want him to tell me what he knows about Pericles Andros.”

  “Listen,” Kyle said. “We’d better hurry.”

  “No. I want to find out now.”

  “He’s a private detective. My father hired him to keep us apart,” Kyle said.

  “Wrong,” I said. “To keep you out of the kind of trouble you’ll buy if you go anywhere with Carnuvale.”

  “What is wrong with Signor Carnuvale?” Hilda asked.

  “I told you. He used to work for Pericles Andros. And Andros, in the old days, insured smugglers’ contraband. He was supposed to have died in an attempted escape from a maximum-security prison in the Adriatic. He didn’t. He’s in Rome now, alive.”

  “So what?” Kyle said. “The only thing we want from Carnuvale is transportation. Which we’re getting.”

  “Andros is trying to get his hands on Hilda,” I said. “I don’t know why. But I do know Andros was in Prague about twenty years ago. I do know Andros betrayed Hilda’s father to the Nazis.”

  “And who tells you this?” Hilda Henlein asked in a very soft voice.

  That was when I made my mistake. I said: “A Czech security officer named Emil Hodza. He ought to know.”

  Hilda’s violet eyes narrowed. “Hodza?” she gasped. “You admit you are working with Hodza?”

  “Not just Hodza,” I said. “Hodza’s just the guy who knows the answers. You’ve got half of Rome and the Olympic Village in an uproar. The American coach wants to find you, the Roman police chief, the head of the Guardia Finanza—”

  “Hodza,” Hilda said. The rest of what I’d said hadn’t mattered to her. As far as she was concerned I’d admitted I was hand-in-glove with the Czechs. She swept a wine bottle off a nearby table and smashed it against the edge. Green glass shattered, wine spurted, and Hilda was left holding the neck with a jagged spear of glass at its end. She crouched between Kyle and me, facing me with her improvised weapon. She held it low, like a knifer, alongside her thigh. She moved it in slow circles. Her eyes were gleaming slits. “So now we know,” she said. “You work for Hodza.”

  Kyle didn’t bother telling her that was unlikely. Why should he?

  “Use your head,” I said. “Do you think Colonel Talese of the Guardia Finanza is working for Hodza? Or the Roman chief of police?”

  They backstepped together toward the doorway near the wine taps. Hilda never took her eyes off me. The three young Englishmen sat at their table, wide-eyed and tense, watching us. Otherwise we had the trattoría all to ourselves.

  Until a face appeared in the doorway behind Kyle and Hilda—Wolfgang Henlein. “What’s keeping you?” he asked peevishly. He stepped through the doorway. He held a small automatic in his hand. He stared at me one-eyed and answered his own question with a bitter nod. His black eye was as dark and swollen as an overripe plum.

  “Hold it,” Kyle said when they reached the doorway. “We can’t just leave Drum here. He knows—”

  “Nothing,” Hilda said.

  “Not where we’re going,” Wolfgang said.

  “—that we’re taking off with Carnuvale,” Kyle finished.

  Wolfgang said quickly: “It won’t matter, where we’re going.”

  “Wolf is right,” Hilda said.

  “But Signor Carnuvale’s truck.… I was thinking we could take him with us, drop him off on the road somewhere where it would take him hours to find a cop.…”

  “It is just a truck,” Hilda said. “He hasn’t seen it. He hasn’t seen the license plate. Now hurry.”

  She went through the doorway with Kyle. They were both right, I thought—Kyle in thinking that I could stop them cold, wherever they were going, if I could get to the police soon enough with a description of the truck; Hilda in thinking that I hadn’t seen it and all they had to do now was hurry.

  Gun in hand, Wolfgang backed through the doorway after them. He shut the door. I heard lock tumblers fall.

  I sprinted past the wreckage of Crespi’s table and the wreckage of the Crespi myth, still sprawled on it, and past the Englishmen gawking at me as if they expected me to sprout another head. I hit the cobbled sidewalk still running. It was dark. I pushed my way through a small crowd outside the Trattoría Crespi, skirted the edge of the Piazza Santa Maria with its gayly strung lights overhead and the tables lined up in neat geometric rows, and darted down a narrow alley between Crespi’s and the trattoría next door. The alley smelled of dampness and refuse. A garbage can fell in my path, clattering.

  At the far end of the alley was a waist-high fence. I vaulted it, fought for balance and kept going. A dog yipped and darted out of my path. Fifty feet ahead of me I saw the taillights of a small truck. The truck bed was canvas covered, the flaps down. The starter ground. Whoever sat behind the wheel had no luck. He worried the starter again.

  When I still had twenty feet to go, the truck engine kicked over and the truck began to move. I reached it in three more strides, got one foot on the loading stirrup and both hands on the upper edge of the tailgate.

  The canvas flaps parted half a foot in front of my face. Hilda Henlein’s head leaned out over me, her lank blond hair whipping in the wind as we picked up speed. I heard Kyle call out something behind her. I couldn’t see him.

  “You!” Hilda gasped. “You go back to your Emil Hodza.”

  She swung the jagged bottleneck, slashing for my face with it. I pulled back. The glass missed by inches.

  When she slashed again I had to either take it in the face or let go. I let go, and the tailgate jerked up and away from me. For an instant I smelled the truck’s exhaust, saw its license plate, Roma 74-231, and the “I” of the Italian identification plaque. Then the cobbled street came alive under me. It slammed my back and turned me over and sent me rolling. In quick succession I saw dark sky, the shuttered fronts of stores, the worn cobbles with grease and dirt between them, the storefronts again, the sky, stores, cobbles and then the curb rushing at me.

  I got to my feet, reeling. The truck was gone. Crespi, I thought. Maybe Crespi knew where they were going. And I had the license number of the truck. Using that, Colonel Talese could set up roadblocks, could …

  Roadblocks in a city the size of Rome?

  I lurched back through the alley to the Piazza Santa Maria and the Trattoría Crespi. My breathing had returned to normal. My left shoulder felt badly bruised, but no bones seemed b
roken. The left sleeve of my jacket hung on a thread.

  Before I could enter the trattoría I heard running footsteps clattering across the cobblestones of the piazza. Half a dozen men rushed past the rows of tables outside, four of them in uniform.

  Three husky carabinieri swarmed all over me. The waiter who had served me wine was with them, and the foil-thin mandolin player. A fourth uniformed cop was talking to them. They had plenty to say about me in Italian, all of it apparently no good. A carabinieri holding each arm and the third prodding me from behind, we entered the trattoría. We all looked down at Count Carlo Crespi. He was groaning.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “Outside. The truck. They got away. Every minute we waste …”

  The fourth carabinieri began to question the Englishmen. One of them spoke fluent Italian. If the glances he shot in my direction meant anything, he was confirming the opinion the waiter and the mandolin player had of me.

  “Colonel Talese,” I said wearily, addressing the Englishman who spoke Italian. “He’s with the Guardia Finanza. Tell them to call him.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I GOT TO TALESE’S OFFICE before he did.

  That was because he’d been running down a hot lead on an ex-smuggler named Carnuvale, he told me later. Carnuvale, his sources said, was back in business. Carnuvale was smuggling Swiss watch-movements and German cameras across the Alps into Italy at Domodossola. Carnuvale would drive them by truck into Rome. The fence was a phony count named Crespi who, as a cover, ran a small trattoría by the same name in Trastevere. Talese reached the Trattoría Crespi a half hour after I left it with the carabinieri. He reached his office an hour after we did, because in the back room at Crespi’s he found six cases of Swiss watch-movements and two dozen Leica cameras. Carlo Crespi had been booked as a receiver of smuggled goods.

  But Talese told me all that later, while we were doing the only thing we could do, which was wait. First he had rushed into his office to say enthusiastically: “A profitable evening, Signor Drum. You look for one thing, you find another. This man Carnuvale—”

  “He got away,” I said.

  “—is once more a smuggler, this time of … How did you know he got away?” Then for the first time Talese took in my torn suit. “What happened to you?”

  I told him, starting with the truck and working my way backwards while Talese made two, and received one, phone calls. “Carnuvale and Hilda and Wolf Henlein got away from the Trattoría Crespi in Trastevere in a—”

  “Crespi’s!” he cried. “But tonight I learn all about Crespi.”

  “—truck. It looked like a Peugeot, but I wouldn’t stake my life on that. Italian plate: Roma 74-231. Italian identity plaque.”

  Talese’s first call was to the Roman equivalent of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. After I told him the rest of the story, they called him back. He said, “You were right about the truck. French. A Peugeot. It is registered to Carlo Crespi. Our trails led us in the same direction, Signor Drum, because—but wait.” That was when he made his second call. Then he leaned back in his swivel chair and stared up at the ceiling and told me what had brought him to the Trattoría Crespi a half hour after the carabinieri had escorted me away from it. “So you see,” he concluded, “the contraband is smuggled across the Simplon Pass from Switzerland. Do you think Carnuvale will return to Domodossola?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The Guardia has been alerted. If he does, we’ll have him. If he remains in Rome, the same. What is the matter, Signor Drum?”

  I must have been scowling. “Just thinking. Carnuvale shuttles back and forth between Switzerland and Italy, and Pericles Andros has his money tied up in a Swiss bank. Hilda and Kyle have a secret meeting place in case of trouble, and it turns out to be Crespi’s, where Carnuvale delivers the contraband. I mention Andros to Kyle and Hilda, and Kyle never heard of him but Hilda did.”

  “Of course. She would know the story of how her father was betrayed in Prague.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I got the impression she tied Andros and her brother Wolfgang in her thinking.”

  “Tied them together how?”

  “I have no idea. But the way Hilda and Kyle were talking, it sounded as if Hilda and Wolfgang had had a fight and—Hey, wait a minute! Yesterday Wolfgang told me Hilda was abducted by two men he had never seen before in his life.”

  “Of course,” Talese said again. “And they beat him. He had a black eye to prove it.”

  “Sure, but tonight Carnuvale turns up with Wolfgang at the Trattoría Crespi. To pick up Kyle and Hilda. But if Hilda had been taken from Spanish Villa against her will and with Wolfgang fighting it, how would he have known where to pick her up tonight?”

  Talese shrugged. “Perhaps she escaped and contacted him.”

  “Yeah, that’s possible. If Hilda was abducted last night. But then who did the abducting? Not a couple of goons working for Andros, reason unknown, because if she got away from them she wouldn’t have gone off willingly with Carnuvale tonight. She knew he was involved with Andros. I told her.”

  “Then Hodza,” Talese said. “We only have Hodza’s word he did not arrange to have the girl taken back to Czechoslovakia.”

  “There’s that,” I admitted. “But assuming the Czechs picked her up at Spanish Villa last night, why would they hang around Rome with her all day today? And besides, they’d be professionals. If they’d kidnaped her, she’d have stayed kidnaped.”

  Talese fingernailed his mustache and gave me a searching look. “Are you trying to say there was no abduction?”

  I just nodded, waiting for Talese to pick it up himself.

  “Trying to say, perhaps, that Hilda and Wolfgang Henlein had a fight last night, that she simply left of her own free will?”

  “Sure. Hilda’s an athlete, Colonel. You didn’t see her. I did. She’d be capable of tangling that scrawny brother of hers up like cooked spaghetti—with one hand tied behind her back.”

  “But tonight they go off together. With Kyle Ryder and Carnuvale.”

  “I know. Whatever it was they fought over, they straightened it out some time today.” I said suddenly, “Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe Hilda just thought they did. Wolfgang had a gun in his hand when he came into the trattoría, but if he expected trouble—except for trouble from Hilda herself, or maybe Kyle—they wouldn’t have arranged the pickup there.”

  Talese’s face relaxed in a tired smile. “Supposition, signore,” he said, “but I like the way your mind works. I want you to think, now,” he told me slowly. “They gave no indication of where they were going, of whether they would stay in Rome or not?”

  “None whatever. I’m almost sure of that. But Rome is out. Hilda was scared Hodza would find them. Just because I mentioned his name, she jumped to the conclusion I was working for Hodza. They’ll want to put as much mileage between them and Hodza as they can—even forgetting for the minute whatever the hell plans Andros has in store for them.”

  A large map of Rome covered the wall behind Talese’s desk. He got up and scowled at it, saying: “Then let us assume they are leaving Rome. Let us also assume that, since Carnuvale does the driving, they go north. Carnuvale would have his contacts to the north.”

  Talese traced a line on the map, then another. “North out of Rome from the Piazza Santa Maria,” he mused. “Remaining on the east bank of the Tiber, they could have driven north on the Viale Angelico. Here. But,” Talese said, scowling, “they would make better time if they crossed the Tiber on any of these bridges and drove north on the Via Flaminia. Route three to Narni, a distance of eighty-seven kilometers. Then from Narni north to Firenze and … but of course they could have taken the Via Cassia as well, to Viterbo, Siena.…”

  Colonel Talese was still scowling at his map when the phone rang. “Talese,” he said into it. “Pronto?” And then he listened. I couldn’t see his face. His back stiffened. His knuckles tightened on the receiver. He said a few words in Italian and listened again. He hung up.
He turned to face me slowly.

  “Do you think, perhaps, they wanted to leave Rome bad enough to commit murder?”

  There was no answer to that question. I just said: “What happened?”

  “The Peugeot truck. License Roma 74-231. The police have found it.”

  “Where?”

  “In the excavation for a new apartment building in the northern suburbs. There was a barrier. Flimsy, of wood. The Peugeot crashed through it. I was right, signore. The Via Flaminia.”

  “Okay, okay,” I snapped irritably, feeling the tension mount in me, “get to the point.”

  “Carnuvale was thrown clear of the wreck—dead.”

  “The others?”

  Talese shook his head. “No other bodies were found.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  WE DROVE THERE IN TALESE’S little Fiat 600. It was a longer drive than I had expected, west along the Via Barberini to the Tritone Fountain, then north past the Spanish Steps, where Lois Hackett and I had almost died last night, to the Piazza del Popolo and past its big obelisk and through the gate beyond to the Piazzale Flaminia, and finally the Via Flaminia itself.

  Talese nursed a moody silence. I thought I knew what was bothering him: the apprehension of Carnuvale could have meant a big haul for the Guardia Finanza, for Carnuvale had contacts all along the line to the Simplon Pass and over the Alps into Switzerland. Now Carnuvale was dead, Kyle and Hilda had disappeared, and, except for last night, Pericles Andros hadn’t shown his face once. It was even possible that Carnuvale could have led Talese straight to Andros. To top it all off, Talese just didn’t see himself as a one-man Missing Persons Bureau. If we found Kyle and Hilda’s trail, and if it didn’t lead to the Greek who had returned from the grave to plague Talese, the colonel would start wishing the XVII Olympiad had never come to Rome.

  He drove with a minimum of effort and a maximum of efficiency. The looming cliffs of Villa Ruffo fled by on our right, and a little later, on our left, the monolithic building that housed the Naval Ministry. After that, rank on rank of big apartment buildings bordered the Via Flaminia.