by Blake Banner
“I hope it’s not one of those cream ones you Americans favor, Harry. They really are only acceptable in the tropics, you know.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
* * *
I stepped into the Garden of Eden in Benalmadena without a plan. It was a reconnaissance mission which I was open to developing into something more. I was aware that my approach was contrary to every basic principle I had been taught in the Regiment. But we were running out of time fast, and I had to do something.
I had showered and shaved, and dressed in the kind of cream tuxedo the brigadier thought was vulgar, unless you were in the tropics. But I figured if Rick didn’t mind in Casablanca, why should I give a damn? I had asked around and been informed that the Garden of Eden was the most expensive, exclusive club in Benalmádena, frequented by politicians, Russian Mafia and Arab princes. The management’s idea was that by charging prices nobody could pay, it would keep out the riff-raff and attract billionaires who liked to talk about how much they paid for things. I climbed the steps to the front door and peered in.
The place looked tacky and cheap, and I’d seen better pole dancers in Texas roadside bars. A guy dressed in a purple general’s uniform with more gold braid than Colonel Gaddafi bowed and asked me if I needed valet parking. I told him my chauffer would pick me up and he bowed again and asked me to have an enjoyable evening. He made it sound like it really mattered to him. I gave him fifty bucks just for being so good at being fake.
I found the saloon and pushed in. The room was heaving with expensive people above whom naked girls danced. The mix of voices and music was deafening. I made my way to the bar where an Australian kid in a purple waistcoat leaned forward and shouted, asking me what it would be. I said it would be a martini dry, and, for the hell of it, I told him to make it shaken, not stirred. While he was shaking it, I told him, “A friend of mine, Bill Hartmann, from Washington, said the Garden of Eden had the sweetest girls in Benalmádena. What do you think?”
Like most young Aussies, he spoke in questions. “Personally? I think the sweetest chicks are Kiwis? But that depends what you’re looking for.” He poured the drink and dropped an olive in it. “If you’re looking for a wild night on the town, then maybe you need to talk to Jamil? I’ve heard his girls will give you a night you’ll never forget. But he is exclusive and expensive, even by our standards?”
“Yeah?” I sipped the martini. It was good. “Expensive isn’t a problem. Where can I talk to Jamil?”
“Take a seat. I’ll see if he’s around.”
He didn’t take long to show up. He was in the kind of evening suit the brigadier would have approved of. He sat next to me at the bar, selected a Balkan Sobranie from a gold cigarette case and lit it with a gold Cartier lighter. I felt glad I wasn’t him. He watched me a moment with expressionless black eyes and said, “You say you are friend of Captain Bill Hartmann?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. We’ve met. We were introduced by Charles Cavendish. You know him?”
He nodded. “The billionaire club is a small one. I know Charles.”
“I told him I was coming to Benalmádena on business. He said Bill could put me in touch with some girls who wouldn’t be worried by my…special tastes.”
That made him smile. “Special tastes are expensive.”
“Yeah, that’s not a problem.”
“May I ask what line of business you are in, Mr.…”
I put an ironic smile on my right cheek. “My name is Smith. John Smith. And what I do pays far too much for me to talk about it. Are you going to introduce me to some nice girls?” I held up my Amex Black and added, “I’d like to tell Charles you were very accommodating.”
He spread his hands. “Any friend of Charles’s is a friend of mine. Please…” He gestured with his hands toward the back of the club. I followed him through the press of dancing, laughing bodies to a door padded in burgundy leather. He opened the door onto a silent stairwell with a burgundy carpet and wood-paneled walls. At the top of those stairs we came to another leather-padded door where Jamil punched a code into a pad.
The door swung open and we went through into an elaborate, over-luxurious lounge, like something out of decadent, pre-war Berlin. He closed the door behind us and pulled a tasseled cord. He said, “Drink, Mr. Smith?” I shook my head. “I’ve had a drink. Now I’d like to indulge my special tastes.”
A tall blonde in an expensive red cocktail dress came in from a passage to the right of the room. She smiled at me but didn’t say anything. Jamil said, “Our purpose is to give you a night you will never forget, Mr. Smith. What, exactly, are you looking for?”
I said, “I like to get pretty physical.” I looked at the blonde for some reaction. There was none, but she held my eye. I said, “But I don’t want some whore who’s been around the block sixteen times and gets bored. You understand me? I want something fresh.” I turned back to Jamil. “Bill told me you had…,” I paused for effect, “new girls on a regular basis. I want a girl who has never experienced this. I want to see real fear in her eyes.” I held Jamil’s eye. “I’ve seen real fear, Jamil. I know what it looks like. And I know a fake. Can you deliver?”
He smiled. “Oh, yes, Mr. Smith, we can deliver. We have, as you say, new girls who have never experienced this.”
I grinned. “Came over thinking they were going to be secretaries, huh?”
“Something like that, yes.”
He glanced at the woman and she said, “Please follow me.” She led me down a corridor which led down to the left. It was a dogleg with half a dozen doors. She led me to the last one. Just beyond it was a saloon where several men in suits were sitting with women. A couple of tough guys in double-breasted suits sitting at the bar watched me go into the room. The woman said to me, “Please wait. Your girl will be here in a moment.”
Twenty
The room was luxurious in a way the brigadier would have called vulgar. It was all reds, purples and pinks—and overstuffed. There was a big bed, a drinks cabinet and a bucket of ice with a bottle of Moet in it. I poured myself a Scotch single malt and waited. After a couple of minutes the door opened and a pretty young girl stepped in. She was maybe twenty, blonde and slim, with a nice figure. She was wearing the kind of chrome bikini Conan the Barbarian might have approved of. She looked terrified, and it was real.
I said, “Hi, sweetheart. What’s your name?”
“Whatever you want it to be.” She said it like she had memorized the phrase. She sounded Russian, or East European at least. Up till a few weeks earlier, she had been naïve and young. Now she was old and scared. Her voice trembled when she spoke. I said, “What did your mother call you?”
She struggled a moment with her feelings and said, “Blanka.”
“Come here, Blanka.”
She winced and stepped up to me. I took her face in my hands and asked her in a whisper, “Tell me the truth, are we being filmed or recorded?”
“What…?”
I bent to her ear like I was biting it. “I am going to get you out of here, but I need to know, are we being filmed or recorded?”
I felt the hot breath from her lips on my ear. “No, privacy guaranteed. No cameras.”
It wasn’t much of a guarantee, but it was as good as I was going to get. I let her go and smiled at her. “Sit on the bed with me. You want a drink?”
She was trembling. She said, “Yes…if you want me to…”
I went to the drinks cabinet, poured her a whiskey and handed it to her. She took a sip and flinched. I sat beside her. “I’m a cop,” I said simply. “In a few minutes this place is going to be crawling with armed policemen. All of the management will either be killed or put in prison for the rest of their lives. But not you, if you help me, I can help you. You understand?” She nodded. I went on, “Tell me something, you need papers?”
She nodded a small, terrified nod. “Yes.”
“I can arrange that for you. But first I need you to help me, OK?”
“I need to know, Blanka, a girl who was brought here yesterday, blonde, about thirty-something…”
“Not girl like me.” She shook her head. “Woman, she is locked in room, not come out.”
“That’s her. Where is she?”
“She is other end of club, when you come in?” I nodded. “There on right, near office. Madam is stay with her.”
I nodded. “That’s good. Now, how much muscle is there? Is it just the two guys at the bar, or are there more?”
“Just two tonight here…but others downstairs.”
I took a pull on my whisky and thought. “How many like you, Blanka?”
“Like me?”
“Yeah, who don’t want to be here.”
“One or two. Most girls are professional. But I think I am coming to work as maid in hotel. Like me only one or two.”
“OK,” I nodded, “I am going to need you to be strong. When I leave this room all hell is going to break loose. When that happens I need you to run, get the other girls like you and get the hell out of here—through the lounge, down the stairs and out through the club. Run for your life. Go to the parking lot. There is a white convertible by the gate. A Mustang. You wait in the Mustang. I’ll come for you.”
I knew I was making a mistake. I knew I could not improvise like this. But I also knew I could not leave this kid in the hands of these bastards. When I left, she left with me.
I got off the bed, went to the door and wrenched it open. The two thugs at the bar looked over. They were both big. The one on the right had a big blond moustache and big hair. The one on the left had no hair and a mouth that had been cut with a razorblade. I strode across the saloon toward them and, when I was three steps away I said, “You work here, right?”
The big hair was on his feet, looking confused. “Yah,” he said. “What is your problem?”
I pointed back to the room. “You want to come and explain to this girl that the client is never wrong, and that I am the client?”
They looked at each other a moment and grinned. I followed them into the room and closed the door. They stood towering over Blanka, looking down at her. Big hair said, “You want me to hit you, Blanka?”
It was the last thing he ever said, aside from an ugly, juddering hissing sound as I drove the Fairbairn & Sykes into his fifth intercostals. He stood on tiptoes and juddered while his pal wasted two precious seconds frowning at him. During those two seconds I took a long step with my left leg and smashed my right instep into the bald guy’s balls.
Maybe he had been castrated. Maybe he was some kid of special case. Any normal man would have curled up and died. This guy winced, then came at me swinging both fists in wide arcs.
I ducked under his fists and lunged forward, driving my right fist into his solar plexus and my left into his floating ribs. That stopped him long enough for me to pull back. He looked unhappy, but he was gearing up to come at me again. One of the golden rules of Jeet Kune Do is, finish it fast. But this guy had no intention of going down any time soon. He charged and I sprang forward in a scissor jump and smashed my right heel into the tip of his jaw. His eyes rolled up into his head and he dropped like a sack of potatoes.
I removed my knife from Big Hair’s back and turned to Blanka. She was in shock, looking at the two bodies on the floor.
“Blanka, go to your room, get dressed and prepare to leave. Do it now.”
She shifted her gaze and stared me in the face.
“Go!” I said, “Go now!” I pulled her up and shoved her toward the door. “Go!”
I reached inside the bald monster’s jacket and found his piece. I pulled it and walked back into the bar. There I let off ten rounds, three into the ceiling and seven into the bottles of spirits behind the bar.
Pandemonium erupted. The girls ran screaming for the corridor. The men fell cowering to the floor, covering their heads. I snatched a green plastic lighter from a table, grabbed a paper napkin, set fire to it and dropped it behind the bar. It ignited the cocktail of whisky, cognac and rum and big, colorful flames leapt up. The barman in his burgundy waistcoat emerged screaming.
Now I was hearing shouts from the corridor. I headed for the shouts, shouldering my way through milling, screaming, half-naked girls, back toward the entrance lounge. Every door I came to I kicked in, half-hoping to see the colonel, shouting to the occupants, “Get out! Get out! Now! Run!”
They were all converging on the entrance. I was following, shouting, “What the hell are you waiting for? Go on! Get out of here!”
Then I saw Jamil and the woman, scrambling their way through the mob. She looked pale and he had his hands to his head. I pulled the Fairbairn & Sykes from its sheath at my ankle. Jamil was walking toward me, his eyes were wild, his hands held out. “What is this? What are you doing? What is going on?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have anything to say to him. I grabbed his collar and drove the blade deep into his heart. One it was lodged I gave it a twist and pulled it out, to allow his blood to flow freely. He gaped, but not for long. His life ebbed fast and there was one less parasite on the planet.
The Russian woman was backing away, with both hands held up in front of her. She was maybe ten feet away. It was an easy throw. Nobody ever looks as startled as they do when they have a blade buried three inches into their forehead.
The door was open and there was nobody left alive to control the mass of panicking girls and clients. Somebody down the hall was shouting, “Fire! Fire!” and the press through the door was a massive free-for-all.
I walked past them and took the corridor from which the Russian madam had appeared when I had first come in. There were six rooms. I kicked open the first four. They were empty. As I went for the fifth I heard the voice behind me.
“How the hell are you still alive, Bauer? I am going to kill you tonight, and you are going to stay dead! We finish this here, tonight.”
I turned. “Hirsch. Where is she?”
He came at me like a puma. It was unexpected. He was fast and strong. He was in the air and his right leg flashed. The pain was impossible to describe and I felt myself smash against the wall behind me. I tried to support myself on a small lamp table, but it couldn’t take my weight. It overturned and I went down after it. My head was ringing. I couldn’t stand and I couldn’t see straight. I felt his knee press on my chest and his left fist grab my collar. I knew what was coming next and when I felt him tense, I let gravity pull my head to the side. His fist smashed its deathblow into the wall and I heard him curse. He stood, gripping his hand and swearing.
Through the haze of pain I reached out and grabbed the broken lamp. I levered myself to my feet and went at him as he was reaching in his jacket for his piece. I rammed the lamp straight into his face. He staggered back, covering his eyes. His gun was in his hand. I could not give him a second to react. I leapt forward and rammed again, stabbing at his eyes. He screamed and I did it again and stamped on his knee for good measure. He bellowed with pain. I lunged forward, grabbed the barrel of his gun and levered it out of his hand. He smashed his left fist into my ribs and as I backed up he lashed out with his right foot in a high kick that grazed my face.
Then he leapt into the air, spinning and lashing out in a flying back kick. I managed to weave and roll, but his heel caught the edge of my jaw and I staggered. He landed feet wide, knees bent, and delivered two power punches to my belly. I doubled up, retching, but the only thing in my head was Don’t let go of the piece! His right uppercut smashed into my nose and I went down on my back. As I hit the floor, he jumped with both knees up. He was going to slam down into my chest with both heels and I was going to die.
I didn’t aim. I screamed with rage, thrust the gun in his direction and blasted ten 9mm slugs into his body. He collapsed in a bloody heap on my legs, and I put three more slugs in him where he lay.
I dragged my feet from under him and painfully got to my
feet. I pulled my fighting knife from the madam’s skull, slipped it in my sleeve and limped down the passage to where the last two doors stood closed. I opened the first. It was a bedroom, like the others, and like the others it was empty.
So I opened the last. There were carpeted stairs leading up to another level. I dragged myself up. There was no door at the top, just a landing that expanded out into a large, open space. There was a desk, a sideboard and there were a sofa and two armchairs arranged around a coffee table. Two glasses sat on the table.
Charles Cavendish rose to his feet. He looked as evil as I felt. Beside him the colonel sat motionless, expressionless. Cavendish said, “Bauer? Who the hell are you? What do you want?”
“Cavendish?” I must have looked like spawn from hell. I could taste the blood from the gashes on my face trickling into my mouth, and it was making my belly burn. “I killed you, you son of a bitch.”
He was shaking his head. “You killed my wife. You destroyed my yacht. But I came round, I got in a lifeboat and I was blown free. I knew you’d come here. You want your colonel, well, here she is.”
I took three long strides and backhanded him. He staggered and fell across the sofa, blood trickling from his nose. I leveled the Sig at him. “This time you stay dead, Cavendish.”
The colonel kind of curled up on herself, covering her ears and squeezing her eyes shut. The movement was so weird and out of character it worried and distracted me. It worried and distracted me for a second too long.
Cavendish seized the moment, rushed at me and smashed his glass into my face. I raised my hands instinctively and felt the glass shatter against the gun and cut savagely into my chest. I fell back and crashed to the floor.
The colonel had not moved but she was screaming, “Go, Harry! Go! Go! Please just go!”
I scrambled to get to my feet and saw Cavendish, bending over a briefcase. He removed a gun which I recognized as a Sig Sauer P226. He aimed it at me and pulled the trigger. Something smacked into my chest, twice, and Cavendish stood, smiling at me.
“Don’t worry, Harry. It’s not aconite, but it is the gun you so helpfully provided. This recipe is based on curare. It is very fast-acting. Within a few seconds you are going to find it very hard to move.”