Peril Is My Pay

by Stephen Marlowe

  “I fear he wishes to betray his sister. If he is gone, my fears are—how you say?—justiced.”

  “Justified. He wants to betray her how?”

  She squirmed into a more comfortable position on the bed. I didn’t quite squirm watching her, but my collar was tight.

  “You have a first name, Signor Drum?”

  “Chet.”

  “Then I ask you,” she said softly, “why did you come to Quimper, Chet?” She sat up and thrust her long left leg up and out at an angle of forty-five degrees and stroked her knee. “It is hurt. You made me hurt it.” Her skirt was now hiked high enough to show her chastity belt, had she been wearing one. She wasn’t wearing one.

  I stood up and leaned over the bed. “Okay,” I said. “Okay, let’s quit the cross-questioning and let’s quit the posturing. You have a nice body. I saw it on the Margutta. I didn’t come here to see it. I came here because last night you and Kenny Farmer walked into the Hotel L’Epée and took Hilda out with you. Where is she?”

  Simonetta got to her feet too. She ran her hands down her sides to her flanks. Her eyes were misty and, this close, looked big enough for me to float in. “I adore strong men,” she purred. “I am putty in the hands of a strong man. You may now please kiss me.”

  She swayed toward me. I either had to catch her or let her fall. I caught her. She was in my arms but she didn’t feel like putty. Crowding me from thighs to breast, she felt like what she was: a breath-catchingly beautiful hunk of woman. Her hands caressed my back and shoulders. Her lips moved along my cheek and found my lips and stopped.

  I pushed her away, gently, and then harder, because she clung to my lapels. I could still taste her lips and her tongue. Her arms behind her and supporting her weight, she sat down heavily on the bed. I said: “Go out and get yourself a gigolo.” My voice sounded strange. “I’m a detective, lady. When I get into another line of work I’ll let you know.”

  Her voice had changed too. Not indolent now; she used it like a whiplash. “You ask me how Wolfgang will betray his sister, yes? I will tell you how. He will betray her to the Greek.”

  “Andros?”

  Her head bobbed up and down. She had her legs close together now, not crossed. “The Greek. Pericles Andros. The Greek, signore, is my fourth husband.”

  I just stared at her blankly.

  “The Greek always tells me if you want a thing, use any weapon you must to get it.” She drew her right hand out from behind her back. “I did not want a gigolo, signore. I wanted this.”

  She pointed my Magnum at me.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SUNLIGHT STREAMED IN through the window. I heard the bagpipes caterwauling again, distantly. The melody was Danny Boy. I don’t know what the Bretons called it. At the moment I didn’t care. I saw the woman on the bed with my revolver in her hand, pointed where it would be pointed if she had just taken it away from me and if I stood over her.

  It had happened to other men before, maybe to better men than I. It had never happened to me.

  “First time lucky,” I said. “Now give it back before you hurt somebody.”

  All she did was smile.

  I shrugged and said, “Suit yourself. That’s an American gun, Simonetta. While you explored around for the safety catch a kid could take it away from you.”

  “But a woman takes it away from you and your pride is hurt, yes?” I moved toward her. She stopped smiling and waved me off with the Magnum. “Fool, don’t you think I know this is a revolver? And that a revolver has no safety catch? But if it is any sop to your ego I will admit it—I enjoyed our kiss. Another time perhaps.… No! You will keep away from the bed.”

  I kept away from the bed. The bagpipes went on playing. I went on listening to them. Simonetta said:

  “You come to the Villa di Spagna saying you look for Hilda Henlein. Not why you have come or what you will do when you find her. Now you tell me you are a detective, not who you work for or why. I would be a fool to trust you, yes? You understand that?” For a gorgeous woman she had a fine scornful sneer. She used it. “How do I know you are not working for the Greek?”

  “Aren’t you? You said he was your husband.”

  “I have had four husbands. I cannot live long with a man. They do not understand Simonetta. But my fourth husband needs me. We are not divorced. I want him to need me, Signor Drum, and you can help. I have say we are on the same side.”

  Her trouble was the Latin way she used her hands to gesture as she talked. She said, “A year ago, after the Oslo Games, my fourth husband comes to me in Rome and tells me there is an expatriate Czech artist name Wolfgang Henlein.” Saying it, she shrugged and waved her left hand. Then she said, “The Greek tells me become his great friend, become the great good friend of this Czech expatriate, and I do that,” and saying it she shrugged again and waved her right hand. Her right hand held the Magnum, and when she was pointing it at the ceiling I made a swipe for it. She drew her hand back and mine with it. She tried to bite me. Her teeth clicked on air. I got the Magnum.

  “Now let’s hear something else,” I said. “Like, where’s Hilda?”

  She had lost the Magnum but still had her scornful sneer. Using it, she said, “Ècco, a gun is no woman’s weapon. So now you have it once more. Bene. Good. I have merely want to show you Simonetta fears no man. You will help me keep Hilda out of the Greek’s hands, yes? Now? Right now today?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Several kilometers down the Odet. A fisherman’s house. Kenny Farmer and I take her there yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “So the Greek could not—how you say?—sweet-talk her. We have them both. Her American husband too, Kyle Ryder. We wait for him with Hilda outside the albèrgo. The hotel. We have a taxi and Kenny have a gun.”

  “Andros is here in Quimper, isn’t he?”

  “Of course. Since yesterday he talks to Hilda.”

  “What about?”

  She smiled. “Ah, bene. Wonderful. If you ask me that, you do not work for the Greek. I believe now you are come to help us.” She stopped smiling then. “But Wolfgang … the little man … if he has betray us.…”

  “Why do you think he has?”

  “Please.” She stood up. “Already we have waste too much time. You will come with me and I will take you to them, yes?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said. I had put the Magnum back in its shoulder holster. We went to the door. “Mind telling me what Andros is sweet-talking Hilda about?”

  “You really do not know?”

  “No.”

  We walked downstairs and outside to find a taxi. “The Greek, he is Hilda’s father.”

  To get there, we drove in a Citroën 2CV taxi along the Odet and then north of it on a narrow blacktop road. It was marshy country with small square ponds cut geometrically in it and low dykes between them. Gorse and broom grew on the higher ground, and as we approached a town hedgerows replaced the dykes and gently rolling farmland the little ponds.

  All the way to the fisherman’s cottage Simonetta talked a blue streak.

  She had been married to Andros four years, she said, but they’d lived together only the first few months. A year after they had split up Andros was captured by the Guardia Finanza in the Venetian Archipelago. I didn’t tell her I’d been instrumental in his capture. On the point of starting divorce proceedings, she was notified he had died attempting to escape from prison. She’d stopped the proceedings.

  One night five months later, Andros walked in on her. “Don’t think me a fool to tell you this, Signor Drum,” Simonetta said. “You could swear it on the soul of your mother to the authorities and I would simply deny it. But I want you to understand why I wish to keep Hilda and her father apart.”

  Andros came to Simonetta as poor as a church mouse—after the church had burned down. He needed a shave. His suit was patched. He hadn’t eaten a square meal in days.

  “Here before me stands one of the richest men in Europe,” Simone
tta told me, “an insurer of smugglers in a world-wide network, a man with three-quarters of a billion dollars in Switzerland, but who have not enough money in his pocket for a single meal.”

  Andros’ money was safe in Switzerland. The only thing more discreet than a Swiss banker is another Swiss banker. That is why banking is Switzerland’s chief industry. A code number identified Andros’ account. Only the Greek and his banker knew it, and Swiss federal law guaranteed the secret. The irony was that if Andros attempted to withdraw part of the money he ran the risk of apprehension. It would mean crossing the border into Switzerland and making a personal appearance. And until he had enough money to smooth his way across the border he just couldn’t chance it.

  He gave Simonetta his code number. As his wife she would have access to his papers, as his economic agent he had probably given her a sign or password his banker would recognize. The Swiss bank would have to honor her withdrawals from his account. What worried Andros was that Simonetta would simply draw out a cool ten million or so and go merrily traipsing off. He had her watched and put a man he could trust, Mozzoni, in her house.

  But what worried Simonetta was that Andros might get enough money, through her efforts, to become independent of her. So she milked his account, and Andros couldn’t stop her. By the time of the Oslo Games Simonetta had withdrawn two hundred thousand dollars. Andros got forty grand. Simonetta got the rest.

  Then Andros told Simonetta to befriend Wolfgang Henlein. At first she didn’t know why. When Simonetta, a successful painter, offered him a room, Wolfgang accepted with delight. For Simonetta from room to roommate was an easy step; inside of a few weeks her avid willingness to share his bed and her sighs and panting had convinced Wolfgang he was the most virile specimen to hit Italy since Valentino left it.

  Six weeks after he moved into Villa di Spagna, Wolfgang told Simonetta about his sister and Kyle Ryder. “I should say his half-sister,” Simonetta corrected herself as we drove north and west out of Quimper in the 2CV taxi. “Because while Gerhard Henlein was Wolfgang’s father, signore, the Greek was Hilda’s. I do not know how the Greek learned of his daughter’s infatuation for this American, but with the forty thousand dollars I gave him he begins again to make contacts in the underworld, and, Ècco-la, he learns it.”

  Andros, of course, had no intention of playing Cupid, and that worried the hell out of Simonetta. If Andros could get hold of Hilda and prove she was his daughter, she could be his financial go-between with Switzerland. Then there’d be no place in the Greek’s plans for an ex-wife he couldn’t trust. Simonetta might even find herself wearing a garrote for a necklace.

  “I could have go to the Czech Embassy in Rome and tell them of Hilda’s plans for asylum in the West,” she said. But if it wasn’t Hilda, Andros would find some other way. At least this way Simonetta knew his plans. And she’d determined to stop him by seeing to it that the lovers met, married and lived happily ever after in the States, far away from Andros and Switzerland.

  Once Wolfgang learned about Andros, he had other plans for his sister. Hilda would be the key to the Greek’s fortune, and Wolfgang’s attitude could be summed up, according to Simonetta, in three words: count me in.

  “Then Hilda fought with Wolf that night on the Margutta?” I said. “And took off to meet Kyle on her own hook?”

  “Yes. I make a mistake. I think if Wolfgang tells her what the Greek plans she will laugh in his face and wait as we have arrange it for the meeting with Kyle. But instead she runs away.”

  “She had reason to. Andros was waiting at Doney’s when Mozzoni went to meet Lois Hackett.” I asked her suddenly: “Is that why Mozzoni was killed?”

  “I do not know why Mozzoni was killed.”

  We turned off the blacktop road onto a rutted dirt path that snaked between fields of gorse and broom, then ran straight between square, shallow ponds. Mud splattered the windshield.

  “How did you find out they’d flown to Quimper?” I said.

  “Kenny tells me.” Simonetta looked worried suddenly. “Kenny used to smuggle Swiss watch-movements. He knew by reputation a man named Carnuvale who—”

  “Who works for Andros,” I finished for her. “That was bright. You left Kenny out here with them—when he was hand in glove with one of Andros’ men.”

  “Kenny obeys me!” she shouted. “He does what I want. He crawls when I call. He is clay I can mold.”

  I had rattled her. So far she had told me the story as she’d wanted to tell it, but now I had her going. I chided her: “I thought you like strong men.”

  She let out a stream of sibilant Italian curses. Her large dark eyes had narrowed to slits. “Kenny is my slave, I tell you!” she cried. “I say jump and he jumps. I say retire from this of the watch-movements, and he retires. I say Mozzoni is trouble, and he—” Her voice stopped dead.

  “And he runs Mozzoni down for you in the concièrge’s own car.”

  “Idiot! Dropping of a sow! You try to trap me with words and meanwhile perhaps Andros has kill Kyle Ryder. Is that what you want? Because for three-quarters of a billion dollars, signore, Andros would do this thing.”

  The 2CV began to sideslip. Muttering, the driver put it into low gear. Some of the little ponds had overflowed their dykes. The dirt road became a quagmire.

  Finally the driver stopped. “I can go no further,” he said in French. “The mud.”

  “Is it far?”

  “But no. Merely one kilometer more. But my car would become stuck, m’sieu.”

  I paid him and began walking with Simonetta. Sometimes we sank in the mud to our ankles. You could see here and there where the pond water was overflowing the dykes. Behind us the 2CV growled and whined as the driver backed and filed to turn on the narrow muddy road. Then it purred smoothly away.

  “Was it like this before?” I asked Simonetta. “The mud?”

  “No. But it rained the day we came to Quimper. The ponds have flooded.”

  I saw no tire tracks. That could have meant Andros hadn’t come. But it also could have meant he’d passed this way before the dykes overflowed.

  Simonetta pointed. “There it is.”

  Ahead of us, beyond a little rise where heather grew, stood a small two-story house with whitewashed walls and a steeply pitched roof. It seemed serenely undisturbed by the passage of time or the possibility of violence. I began to feel better.

  Then a motor growled to life behind the house. I drew the Magnum and started running. Whoever it was would have to come this way. No other road led away from the house.

  I had covered half the distance to the heather-covered hill when a small truck careened into view, swerving around the side of the house through the mud. I heard the mud sucking at Simonetta’s shoes as she ran behind me.

  “Get down!” I warned her, and dropped on high ground into the heather. But Simonetta’s calves, streaked with mud, flashed by.

  “Kenny!” she shouted. “It is I! I, Simonetta!”

  The truck’s motor raced. Its wheels slipped and floundered, spewing mud, before it came straight up the road. Simonetta ran down to meet it, waving one hand. Through the heather I could see Kenny Farmer’s big shoulders hunched over the wheel, his face intent on Simonetta. Seventy-five yards separated them, then fifty.

  I got up and fired at a front tire. The slug ricocheted off a fender. The window on the passenger side of the truck cab was cranked down. I saw well-groomed white hair, dark glasses and the shoulders and lapels of a white jacket—and the barrel of an automatic. Sitting next to Farmer in the cab of the truck was Pericles Andros.

  He steadied his hand on the rolled-down window. He fired three times, and I tried once more. Nobody hit anything that mattered. One of his slugs tugged at my sleeve. Mine clanged and whined off the truck’s door.

  Simonetta shouted Kenny’s name again. Then she tried to stop running. She slipped in the mud. On one knee she looked up at the truck as it bore down on her. She began to scream in Italian.

  I emptied the
Magnum’s cylinder at the cab of the truck, hoping to hit Kenny or at least make him swerve before they struck her. The truck’s windshield went opaque suddenly, the layers of safety glass shattered by the impact of one of my bullets. Calmly the Greek hammered out the windshield with the butt of his automatic, then reversed the gun and fired again. At the same instant they ran down Simonetta.

  Thirty or forty feet above the truck on the slope of the hill, silhouetted against the blue Breton sky, I made a good target. I dove for the heather as the truck’s right front wheel rolled over Simonetta. The Greek tried one more shot just as the rear wheels of the truck spun Simonetta clear.

  This time I was hit.

  It was like running headfirst into a wall. I went down on all fours and rolled the rest of the way to the bottom of the hill. My face felt hot and wet. I pawed at my eyes and drew my hand away bloody. The truck kept going.

  I got to my feet and staggered to where Simonetta had fallen in the mud. By the time I reached her I couldn’t see the truck any longer. I was shaking. My head ached and every tooth in my mouth felt as if it had been jarred loose. I had to keep pawing the blood out of my eyes.

  Simonetta lay on her side with her knees drawn up. She had flung one forearm across her eyes, as if to avoid seeing the truck that had run her down. Her arm had been broken in several places. Bone showed white through the mud-splattered skin above and below her elbow.

  She made a sound like a gurgling sigh. She tried to raise herself on her good arm. Her eyelids fluttered.

  “Why do you do this thing, Kenny?” she said distinctly. Then she said something in Italian, and then Kenny’s name again, and then clearly in English:

  “Same as you kill Mozzoni for me. Why, Kenny? Why?”

  And then she was dead.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I WENT TO THE HOUSE.

  There was a door. It wasn’t locked. I opened it.

  I saw the kind of dark, heavy furniture you’d find in a French house in the provinces. I saw a wall phone with a crank. I cranked it. The line was dead.