Peril Is My Pay

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Hey down there!” a voice shouted.

  I sat down on a hard chair and saw nothing and thought of nothing. My head slumped. My lap got wet. I was dripping blood onto it.

  “Hey down there!” the voice shouted again. “Who’s there? What happened? What? What was all that shooting?”

  “Keep your goddam shirt on,” I growled, very tough.

  “Drum?”

  The voice was familiar. I couldn’t place it. You don’t get shot every day. You don’t often get shot in the head at all and walk away from it. Hard-headed bastard.

  The hard-headed bastard got up, sank to his knees and got up again and went out to the kitchen. Over the chipped porcelain sink was a mirror. The hard-headed bastard gripped the sink and saw himself in the mirror and smiled a ghastly smile.

  How the hell could you recognize anyone through all that blood?

  The sink had a pump. I pulled the handle down and waited for the gush of water. When it came I ducked my head under it. Gripping the edge of the sink again, I looked at the face in the mirror.

  A little pale, a little yellow in the eyes and blue in the lips, but the same face I’d taken out of Quimper.

  There was a gash about three inches long running from my hairline toward the back of my head, wide enough and deep enough to ooze blood freely. It was oozing blood freely.

  “Drum?” the voice called again. I recognized it then: Kyle Ryder. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “In a minute,” I said. I don’t know if he heard me. He was upstairs somewhere. My voice was as feeble as a kitten’s first meow.

  On knees like rubber I wobbled to the pantry door. I knocked this and that over and found what I was looking for. It was a bottle, more than half full. The label said Calvados. I uncorked it and made the kind of sounds you will make if you are drinking sloppily. After a while my knees felt better. I started up the stairs.

  There was a hall up there and three rooms, only one of them occupied. It was occupied by Wolfgang Henlein, bound hand and foot with heavy twine to the brass bedstead, and Kyle Ryder, bound the same way to a chair.

  “They took Hilda,” Kyle said. I went to untie him. My fingers felt too big, and clumsy. Finally I got his arms free. “Jeez, you’re hit,” he said. He bent to work on his legs.

  I was still trying to find the knots that bound Wolfgang Henlein when Kyle came over, found them and released him.

  “My fault,” Wolfgang said. “It’s all my fault.” He was rubbing his arms.

  “All right, all right,” Kyle said. He looked at me. “They took Hilda,” he said again.

  “And killed Simonetta,” I said from a great distance. “Ran her down.”

  From an even greater distance Kyle shouted: “Catch him!”

  If either one of them reached me in time, I didn’t remember it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE gendarmes CAME JUST after sunset, in three cars.

  Kyle was in the lead car with Colonel Talese and two French cops in sun-tans and blue caps. Earlier, Kyle had gone on foot to find a phone. Kenny Farmer or the Greek had ripped the wires in the house. Kyle had to hike all the way to a village halfway between here and Quimper, and by the time the cops came to pick him up and drive the rest of the way, the sun had gone down.

  The gendarmes prowled around the house, as cops will. A doctor came in one of the cars. He looked at my head and winced. He examined my eyes and muttered in French.

  Colonel Talese said: “I met Miss Hackett at Le Bourget. We flew together to Quimper. She is waiting.” He smiled slightly. “Very upset. She heard the police say an American named Chester Drum had been injured.”

  “Any lead on the Greek or Hilda?” I asked.

  But the doctor, a little man with rimless glasses and a puckered mouth like a pink prune, placed his small hands on Colonel Talese’s chest and pushed the Italian away.

  “Now is not the time. My patient has lost much blood. He suffers from shock. He has a concussion. No questions and no answers now. You understand?”

  Talese understood. Cop-talk eddied and flowed in the room around me. I became drowsy. The doctor used Novocain, a straight razor and a needle and gut on my scalp, in that order. He took sixteen stitches. Then he surprised me by offering me a large slug of Calvados.

  “You will rest the night here,” he said.

  I looked at Colonel Talese. “Naturally, I am going back to Quimper,” he said.

  “Okay, then so am I.”

  “I cannot take the responsibility,” the doctor said.

  I stood up, not fast. “Who asked you to? I’ll take it.” They bundled me in two blankets. I went outside under my own power, carrying a fresh bottle of Calvados which Talese had found in the pantry.

  The three-car column pulled out for Quimper a few minutes later. I went in the first car with Talese and the doctor. Kyle and Wolfgang joined the gendarmes in the second. Simonetta’s body had the trunk of the third all to itself.

  Lois was seated on the edge of the bed in Kyle and Hilda’s honeymoon room in the Hotel L’Epée with her hip against my side and her hand on my shoulder. “Does it hurt a lot? Is there anything you need?”

  What I needed, most of the time, was more Calvados. Until after midnight a troup of Basque dancers and singers from Spain were making a racket across the Odet, shrilling on pipes, banging sticks, flamenco-stamping, drawing the kind of applause which will remind you you have sixteen stitches in your scalp.

  The gendarmes had blocked all the roads out of Quimper, and all we could do was wait. The large front room in L’Epée served as our command post, though the gendarmes favored their headquarters, the doctor favored the hospital, at least for me, and so did Lois. Talese wanted to be left alone in a room anywhere with Wolfgang Henlein, because Wolf was talking.

  Humor the halt, the lame and the blind. I got my way. My way was Room 217 at L’Epée, Lois and I on the bed, Talese in a big chair near the window, Wolf in a hard chair near the dresser, Kyle pacing a furrow in the worn carpet.

  Wolf had a need to talk, both to justify himself compulsively and to wallow in self-pity. We could have tied him up, but we couldn’t have shut him up. Andros, he told us, didn’t stop at betraying Gerhard Henlein to the Nazis during the war. He also had an affair with his victim’s wife. The go-between had been a woman named Maria Mydlar, a Slovakian Czech who ran the Hradcany Café in Prague, one of the outlets for Henlein’s wine business.

  Two years after Gerhard Henlein’s betrayal, the Greek got into trouble with the Nazis. He fled for his life, leaving behind an infant daughter named Hilda. Wolf was then eleven.

  By the time Wolf reached his early twenties the war was over, the Czech democratic government had fallen and the Reds were in control. Hilda, as a promising athlete, had been taken under the wing of the Ministry of Education. Six months after their mother, a diabetic, died of insulin shock, Wolf fled to the West. Czechoslovakia was no place for an unsuccessful artist.

  He thought he’d seen the last of his sister, and certainly the last of Pericles Andros. But after the Oslo Games last year, Wolf was approached by Lois Hackett, who offered him the same role the Mydlar woman had played for his mother and Andros. Unsuccessful and lonely, Wolf longed to re-establish himself with his sister if she was coming West.

  A while after Lois had arranged for the exchange of letters between Kyle and Hilda, Simonetta gave Wolf a room at Villa di Spagna. The little Czech was flattered, assuming Simonetta had taken a fellow-artist’s interest in his work.

  Two months passed before Andros chanced meeting Wolf at all. By then Simonetta had felt out the Czech for him, and Wolf was ready to play ball—figuring if he helped Andros get hold of Hilda and through Hilda three-quarters of a billion bucks, he’d be fixed for life.

  In case anything went wrong, Wolf had set up a secret rendezvous for Kyle and Hilda—the Trattoría Crespi. This was at Andros’ suggestion; Crespi was a loyal Andros man. Wolf, again at Andros’ suggestion, also talked the lovers into a honeym
oon at Quimper. As we were to learn a little later, Quimper was one of several options Andros could put into play.

  Things boiled over when Hilda got to Rome.

  Simonetta and Kenny Farmer, who was her lover for two years, never intended playing ball with Andros. Mozzoni’s job was to see that they did.

  “And I—” Wolf smiled bitterly, remembering—“I told Hilda what we had in store for her when she came to the Margutta. She wouldn’t even believe Andros existed. I had a letter he had given me, which my mother wrote after he fled Czechoslovakia. Hilda refused to accept it as genuine. She was furious, and we fought. She ran away.”

  Mozzoni, meanwhile, had an appointment with Lois at Doney’s. She thought they would set up the meeting between Kyle and Hilda, and that would be that. But Andros was waiting at Doney’s too. Mozzoni would set up an appointment for Hilda, all right, but Andros would get there before Kyle did.

  What Mozzoni didn’t know was that Hilda had flown the coop.

  “But he knew the rest of it,” I said. “He must have figured Simonetta and Kenny Farmer were hatching a scheme to double-cross Andros. Sure, Simonetta had to go along with Andros, giving Wolf a room, feeling him out, because that way at least she’d know what the Greek had up his sleeve. But she had to stop him, because if Andros got his daughter to co-operate, Simonetta could kiss her stranglehold on the Greek’s fortune good-bye.

  “As for Andros, he needed Simonetta at the beginning. He couldn’t just walk up to Wolf and ask him to help, because Wolf had been old enough to remember how his father was betrayed. He could work on Wolf through Simonetta, though, reasoning Wolf would listen to one of the shining lights of the Margutta, and he did. But if Hilda agreed to play ball, that would be the end for Simonetta. All Andros had to do—and still has to do—is get Hilda declared his legal heir in Switzerland. Once that happens, Andros is back in business.”

  I looked at Talese. “Mozzoni did some snooping, overheard Simonetta and Farmer, and was caught in the act. He ran for it. Straight to Doney’s, to report to Andros. Farmer took off after him—in Mozzoni’s own car.”

  “And ran him down on the Via Veneto,” Talese said.

  I nodded, and then Wolf was talking again.

  In case of trouble, Hilda was supposed to meet Kyle at Crespi’s. But hadn’t Wolf suggested the trattoría himself? Wouldn’t Hilda expect more betrayal there?

  “I had a hunch something was really fouled up,” Kyle said. “I went to Crespi’s. Hilda wasn’t there.” He gave me a sheepish smile. “Then I went to the only other place I could think of—to see Miss Hackett at the Flora. You know what happened there.”

  Kyle returned to Crespi’s and prowled around the neighborhood until the trattoría closed. No Hilda. He took a room in a small albèrgo nearby and waited.

  Wolf, meanwhile, still had the smell of Andros’ fortune in his nostrils. With Mozzoni dead, he could reason Simonetta and Kenny Farmer were playing their own game. So, not knowing where to contact Andros, Wolf prowled the streets all night. In the morning he went to Crespi’s.

  He met Carnuvale there. As Wolf told it, it was hate at first sight. He didn’t know what to do, though, and Carnuvale was the Greek’s man. The word to Wolf: go ahead with the rest of the plans.

  That meant picking up the airlines tickets he’d already ordered for Paris and Quimper. “Andros wasn’t taking any chances,” Wolf said. “He’d made arrangements ahead here in Quimper too, just in case.”

  Talking to Carnuvale, Wolf had mentioned Kenny Farmer’s name. That delighted Carnuvale. He knew Farmer. He thought it extremely amusing that Farmer would try to double-cross Pericles Andros. Carnuvale was confident he could put the fear of God into Farmer, Wolf told us. It wouldn’t have been hard. Carnuvale was a Mafiosa.

  “Then Carnuvale contacted Farmer?” Talese asked.

  “He must have,” I said. “That’s how Farmer and Simonetta learned about the Quimper flight.”

  My head hurt. Lois mopped sweat off my forehead with the edge of the sheet. “You’ve got a fever,” she said.

  “After I picked up our tickets,” Wolf went on, “I returned to Trastevere. I found Hilda across the square from Crespi’s, afraid to go in.”

  At first she’d wanted no part of him. She was just waiting for Kyle, hoping he’d show up. But she’d seen the papers: the police were turning Rome upside down looking for her and Kyle. And behind the police, she knew, would be Emil Hodza and the Czechs. She was desperate to get out of Rome, as long as she had Kyle with her.

  “I also pointed out,” Wolf explained, “that Andros had proof he was her father and—”

  “So that’s how you did it, you bastard!” Kyle shouted. “You must have told her the Czechs couldn’t touch her if she could prove her father was Greek. That’s how you got her to come, how you got her to trust you. Your own sister. How low can you get?”

  Wolf stood up. He went to the window and listened to the Spanish music across the Odet. He turned suddenly. “All right,” he said, his face bleak. “All right. Low enough to kill a man for her.”

  “Prego?” Colonel Talese said. Beg your pardon? He did not understand.

  “Of course,” I said. “He killed Carnuvale.”

  Wolf nodded defiantly. In a masochistic way he was enjoying himself. “Anyway,” he said, “I convinced Hilda the best thing they could do was come with me—to Quimper. So Hilda and I met Kyle in the back room at Crespi’s. Then, while we were still waiting for Carnuvale, Drum came.”

  “I almost hit the ceiling when I saw you.” Kyle took up the story. “I still thought my old man had paid you to keep Hilda and me apart.”

  “Hilda and Kyle got in the back of the truck,” Wolf told us. “I was up front with Carnuvale. I thought he would drive us to Ciampino Airport.” But Carnuvale drove north from Rome along the Via Flaminia. He’d arranged a rendezvous with Andros outside the city.

  “I can’t explain it,” Wolf said. “I won’t try to. All at once it was very important to me to fulfill my promise to Hilda. I was going to take her and Kyle to Quimper. When I told Carnuvale that, he laughed. ‘You do what you’re told,’ he said.”

  Wolf’s lips were dry. He licked them. “But I had to take them to the airport as I had promised. I had decided that. I would worry about Andros and the rest of it later, in Quimper.”

  Carnuvale had other ideas. When Wolf showed him the airline tickets, he laughed again. They fought. Carnuvale grabbed for one of the tickets.

  “There was a wrench on the floor,” Wolf said. “I saw red. I picked up the wrench and hit him. I kept hitting him. His foot slipped off the accelerator. The truck started to swerve. I grabbed the wheel. ‘Get out!’ I shouted. ‘We’re going to crash!’”

  “In back we could feel how the truck was swerving,” Kyle said. “Wolf hollered again. I could see him through the rear window of the cab, leaning across Carnuvale, steering. The truck had slowed down. Then suddenly Wolf lunged to his right, opened the door and jumped.”

  All three of them got clear of the truck with superficial bruises, Kyle and Hilda from the tailgate, Wolf from the cab. “The truck rolled down a little hill and crashed through a flimsy barrier into an excavation pit,” Wolf said. “I couldn’t go down there. Kyle did. Carnuvale was dead.”

  I asked Kyle: “You mean after all that, you still flew here with Wolf?”

  “Wolf swore Andros didn’t know about Quimper. What the hell, Andros had made his move on the Via Flaminia, and Wolf had stopped him, so why Quimper too? And there was another reason. Hilda had a thing about Andros. It was eating at her. Still is, I guess. I realized sooner or later we’d have to clear the air there.” Kyle looked rueful. “And if Andros came to Quimper, I thought I could take care of myself and Hilda.”

  Luck was with them at the airport, as Talese and I already knew. They made it there in a cab, and from Ciampino to Paris and Paris to Quimper.

  Wolf checked into the Cornouaille and Kyle and Hilda into this room at the Epée. At a distance,
and without knowing what his sister was like, even some small part of three-quarters of a billion bucks had seemed pretty good to Wolf. “But in Quimper I … I realized I loved my sister,” Wolf said, agonizing over the words. “Funny, isn’t it? I had planned to use her and betray her, but I—”

  “Yeah. It’s funny,” Kyle said savagely. “A million laughs.”

  “Let him talk, Kyle,” Lois said. “I believe him.”

  With Carnuvale dead, Andros could only assume Hilda had reached Quimper. He flew here. That was the day Lois and I had hung around Rome, powerless to do anything.

  After reading the riot act to Wolf, who claimed he didn’t know Carnuvale was dead because they had taken a taxi to Ciampino Airport, Andros went to work soft-selling Hilda. “He even had a photostat of a birth certificate the Nazis had issued in Prague,” Wolf told us. “It said a daughter had been born out of wedlock to Pana Gerhard Henlein and Pericles Andros. And the letters,” Wolf said, leaning forward. “I’ve seen them. My mother wrote that Andros was the one love of her life, that she would do anything for him, anything.”

  If the mother would, then couldn’t the daughter do this one little thing? That must have been the Greek’s approach. If all she had to do was make a few trips to Switzerland for the man who had meant so much to her mother.…

  “She called me,” Lois said. “The poor kid was all mixed up.”

  “Which is when Kenny Farmer and Simonetta walked in on her,” I said, and asked Wolf: “Then what happened?”

  “Simonetta and Farmer had rented the cottage where you found us. They took Hilda and Kyle there in a taxi.”

  “The one thing they had to do was keep Hilda and Andros apart,” Kyle said. “Simonetta was scared the Greek might twist Hilda’s arm. I heard her arguing with Farmer. The more she talked, the more Simonetta got a bug in her ear. She would be sure of remaining Andros’ go-between only if they killed Hilda.”

  But Farmer balked at that ultimate step. That should have sent up the danger signals for Simonetta. Farmer had run down Mozzoni without compunction, hadn’t he? So why not kill Hilda too?