Peril Is My Pay Read online

  Peril Is My Pay

  Stephen Marlowe

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  CHAPTER ONE

  IT WAS A HOT MONDAY evening in August, a week before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games—one of those evenings the Romans love, with no wind to stir the leaves of the ilex trees on the Via Veneto and with the sun cremating itself behind the Pinciana Gate in the old Roman wall at the end of the street. When I spotted her I had my elbows and a snifter of cognac on a streetside table a little bigger than a silver dollar.

  She was walking toward the Café Doney from the direction of the Hotel Flora and the Pinciana Gate beyond it. Same walk I remembered from Washington: just a little pelvic sway, but nothing blatant, just a little bobbing of the pageboy red hair, just a suggestion of lithe ripeness in the way her thighs swelled the summer-weight skirt with each stride she took. All in all, and without even trying, she looked like something delightful that was about to happen to every male outside Doney’s. Heads turned to watch her.

  She saw me. One eyebrow arched over one green eye. A hand moved self-consciously to the back of the pageboy hair. A full lower lip got itself nibbled.

  And she walked right by, heading for an empty table twenty feet away.

  “Lois,” I said. “Lois Hackett.”

  She stopped in midstride and turned with more reluctance than is good for the ego. She was under a light strung in one of the ilex trees then, and I could see the sprinkling of freckles on her face.

  “It’s Chester Drum, isn’t it?”

  “Was, the last time I looked. I didn’t know you’d be coming to Rome.”

  “Neither did I, till yesterday. I just flew in this morning. I’m still a little bewildered. And brother, am I ever beat.”

  She didn’t look beat. She looked poised, expectant and alert, the way American career girls do overseas. I got up and pulled out the empty wicker chair on the other side of the small round table. “Buy you a drink?”

  Her lip got nibbled again. “Well, I guess so.” She smiled, crinkling her nose and making the freckles across its bridge vanish. “They say every American in Rome can be found at sunset outside Doney’s. Here we are.” The words were what they should have been, the light banter of two people who had met once and came together again unexpectedly a week later and four thousand miles away. But after I seated her and sat down across the table she looked distracted or impatient or both.

  A waiter came over. “I’ll have Strega,” Lois Hackett said. The waiter went away. “I’ve never tasted Strega. It sounds romantic. Everything about this city is romantic.”

  “Is that why you flew over?” I asked her lightly.

  “Of course not. You’re looking at a working gal.”

  I knew I was, and said so.

  She frowned. “Don’t think I came over to check on you. Old Junius Ryder’s been getting your cabled reports. You’re doing a good job.”

  “Nothing much to do so far.”

  “Yes. Well.…” Lois Hackett frowned again. The waiter brought her small glass of Strega on a tray. She sipped it cautiously. “Say, this is good. I like the taste.”

  I raised my cognac and said: “Salut.”

  Lois Hackett said quickly: “The reason I’m here, European-American wants me to do an on-the-spot article on the Olympics for their magazine. There isn’t anything mysterious about it.”

  “I didn’t think there was.”

  “Oh.” She nibbled her lip a third time. She wasn’t just impatient, she was nervous. There is a traditional mode of behavior followed at all the sidewalk cafés along the curve of the Via Veneto from the American Embassy to the Pinciana Gate and the Borghese Gardens, and Lois Hackett didn’t break the tradition. What you do is talk animatedly to your table partner but glance on either side of his face to see if the pickings are better elsewhere. It is a prelude to table-hopping.

  The only trouble was, what Lois Hackett saw when she glanced past my face was the wide, many-laned Via Veneto itself. We had a curbside table.

  Lois drummed her fingers on the metal-topped table. She looked at her wrist watch, then past me to the street again. Fiats, French Citroëns, Volkswagens, sleek sports cars and motor scooters sped by. Lois’ head was raised and tilted at an angle. She saw me watching her and said:

  “How is Kyle Ryder?”

  “Behaving himself.”

  “Oh? Is he?” She seemed disappointed.

  “Uh-huh.” It was my turn to ask a question. “How’s Marianne?”

  That got an animated burst of conversation out of Lois. “Fine. Just fine. Busy with the twins, as usual. She asked me to give you a great big kiss for her if I ran into you. She misses you.”

  Everyone who knows Marianne Baker and me tries to play matchmaker. Marianne was the widow of one of my best friends, and there were times—too many of them lately—when we’d come pretty close to making all the matchmakers happy. But I didn’t want Marianne married to a footloose private eye who attracts his share of violence in a violent world, so I’d jumped at this offer of a European assignment.

  Lois Hackett had been Marianne’s roommate at Bryn Mawr. About ten days ago, in Washington, I’d been having cocktails at the Mayflower Bar with Marianne when Lois wandered over, accidentally on purpose. She’d apparently liked what she’d seen well enough to recommend me to Junius Ryder, because the next morning I got a visit from the founder and president of Ryder and Gulf Coast Oil Company.

  “Know my son?” he’d said, and “No” I’d said, and he’d said: “Kyle’s a chip off the old block. Wants his own way. Sometimes it isn’t good for him. He holds the A.A.U. javelin-throwing record, did you know that?” I didn’t have time to say I hadn’t known it. “Two hundred and forty-two feet, five inches. Really something, isn’t it? Kyle was a three-letter man in college. University of Texas, of course.” I didn’t have time to echo his “of course.” “Football, basketball, boxing. Now it’s the javelin. Kyle’s a natural athlete.”

  Junius Ryder had leaned forward across my desk. “Thing is, Kyle’s got woman trouble.”

  “I don’t handle that kind of work,” I said.

  “Hold your horses, Drum. It isn’t what you think.” He gave me a knowing smirk. “No keyhole peeping, no infrared cameras, nothing like that. Kyle’s sowing a wild oat with a Czech Amazon named Hilda Henlein. Met her at the Scandinavian Games in Oslo last year. Now he’s going to the Olympics in Rome. So’s she. She throws the discus.” He didn’t quote the statistics on Hilda Henlein’s exploits with the discus. “Kyle thinks he wants to marry her.” He added, bristling: “A Commie from Sudeten Czechoslovakia—doesn’t that beat all hell? Kyle’s mother is Philadelphia Main Line and he gets the itch for a Czech-peasant type. Can you beat it?”

  I couldn’t beat it. Junius Ryder snipped the end off a dappled green panatella with a gold clipper. “Let him play with her—it isn’t that. He’s a smart boy, he’ll get over it; let him have a ball. But the Commies ride herd on their people over there, and in Oslo Kyle got into a brawl with some of them over this discus dame. He’s got a temper. I had to pull some strings to keep him on the Olympic squad. They don’t want trouble. Who the hell can blame them?”

  “I still don’t see what I—”

  “I said hold your horses. If the Commies ride herd on Hilda Henlein, okay. You ride herd on Kyle. Keep him out of dutch.”

  “You mean keep him away from the girlfriend? It still isn’t my kind of work.”

  “I already said,” Junius Ryder told me magnanimously, “the boy can have her. He can sleep with her from one end of Europe to the other—hell, I was young once. But if the Commies muscle in on him, that’s your job. Nobody’s going to make an official fuss. If they try
to lean on my boy, it will be undercover. That’s where you come in. If they give him a hard time, take them out of the play.”

  I said no. Junius Ryder wouldn’t take no for an answer. I still said no. Ryder said a hundred bucks a day and all expenses and a free trip to Europe. Lois Hackett called me later that day, urging me to take the job. Again I said no.

  That night I saw Marianne for dinner. After dinner we sat around on the terrace in her Georgetown apartment, and there was soft music from the hi-fi inside, and a fat moon, and it got pretty wild. If her housekeeper Mrs. Gower hadn’t wandered out with a tray of drinks, I might have had to make an honest woman of Marianne. But Wally Baker had died violently in the Brandvick case, and Marianne needed a guy who drew a steady paycheck and took his exercise mowing the lawn or repairing the furniture—not a continent-hopping private eye who would pack his B-4 bag, complete with special section for shoulder holster and a brace of Magnums, at the drop of a client’s retainer.

  I’d been seeing too much of Marianne. It was a strain on both of us, since it wouldn’t lead anywhere. The next morning Junius Ryder popped into my office again and dropped his retainer. I packed my B-4 bag and caught a Viscount to New York and a Pan-Am Boeing 707 Intercontinental to Rome. There I’d checked into the Hotel Eliseo, which wasn’t too far from the Olympic Village, and even closer to the Via Veneto. I’d met Kyle Ryder a couple of times since then, as a friend of his father’s. He was behaving himself, but the Czech Olympic team hadn’t arrived yet. It had arrived this morning. So, unexpectedly, had Lois Hackett.

  Now, outside Doney’s on the Via Veneto, Lois was still staring anxiously past my face.

  “Maybe you can find it in the Yellow Pages,” I suggested.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Whatever it is you’re looking for.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” But she kept looking. She smiled, saying: “I went out to Olympic Village this afternoon. They’re really something to see, those kids. Lean and clear-eyed and in perfect shape. Just being among them made me feel as soft as a marshmallow.”

  I was going to say the obvious, that I liked marshmallows. But at that moment Lois’ eyes fastened on something beyond my left shoulder and she stood up quickly, overturning her empty Strega glass and raising one hand in a tentative wave. “Signor Mozzoni,” she called. “I’m over here.”

  Craning my neck, I looked where she was looking—which was across the Via Veneto. A small fat man had just jaywalked off the sidewalk on the south side. He was wearing a blue suit and glasses and was moving fast, his short legs churning. No hurry, as far as I could see, because there was a momentary hiatus in the traffic on the Via Veneto, but he was rushing. Then he saw Lois Hackett sitting with me under the spotlight hung in the ilex tree, and he offered her a big, wide smile.

  “Will you do me a great big favor?” Lois said swiftly and softly. “I have to see him alone.”

  I turned away from the street and started to get up. “The table and Mr. Mozzoni are all yours.” I dropped a five-thousand-lira note on the table.

  “I’m terribly grateful,” Lois said—and then her eyes went wide and her mouth opened in an O of surprise and fear.

  The traffic light at the corner had changed. One car leaped away from the pack waiting there like a barracuda after bait fish. It was an old squareish Citroën with the big corporal’s stripes on its radiator. Its motor roared powerfully.

  Signor Mozzoni was the bait fish.

  Lois Hackett screamed his name: “Signor Mozzoni!”

  “Look out!” I shouted, and took a step off the curb.

  There wasn’t time to do anything but shout. The small fat man in the blue suit turned and saw the Citroën. He stopped walking. For a split second it was like the old army drill-sergeant’s command to a laughing recruit. Wipe that smile off your face. Drop it. Step on it.

  Signor Mozzoni dropped his smile. He couldn’t make up his mind which way to go. His short legs pumped up and down, as on a treadmill. He took one step back toward the south side of the street. Then he changed his mind and lunged for the north side.

  The Citroën’s right headlight spun him. Someone nearby, not Lois, screamed. The Citroën’s right fender scooped him up and hurled him. He flew the rest of the way across the Via Veneto. With his back to us and still amazingly upright, his left heel struck the curb. Momentum hurled him across it. He plowed into a sidewalk table. Its cane legs splintered. The metal top clanged on the cobbled sidewalk as Signor Mozzoni fell on top of it.

  I was in the street then. The Citroën kept going. Traffic behind it had stopped. The Citroën reached the end of the Via Veneto and zoomed through the arch in the Pinciana Gate. Sprinting up the street, a carabinieri in a cockaded hat and with a saber at his side blew his whistle. But the Citroën was gone.

  On the sidewalk the Café Doney tables were deserted. A crowd had gathered around Signor Mozzoni’s body, and more people were coming from all directions.

  Except for the carabinieri fruitlessly chasing the hit-and-run vehicle on foot, there was just one man within sight of the accident not being drawn with morbid compulsion toward its victim; just one man walking away from it. He didn’t hurry. He seemed calm enough. If anything, he seemed too calm. He stepped off the cobbled sidewalk as I stepped on. Our eyes locked. I thought I had seen him before, but I didn’t know where. If the look on his face meant anything, he thought he had seen me before, too. He was a dapper little number in a white linen suit. His thinning hair was white too, and combed sleekly back. He wore dark glasses, though the sun had gone down. A black silk handkerchief drooped from his breast pocket. Our shoulders brushed.

  “Scusi,” he said. Beg your pardon. The voice meant nothing to me. The white linen suit was swallowed by the crowd rushing this way across the Via Veneto.

  I found Lois Hackett in the press of people where Signor Mozzoni had fallen. I grasped her elbow. She was trembling. She swung around. “Oh, God,” she said.

  Over a man’s bald head I could see Signor Mozzoni. He had flopped prone across the round metal tabletop. His head was twisted more than a hundred and eighty degrees around, so that he was staring up at us. His eyes were open. They would stay that way until someone covered or shut them.

  His neck was broken.

  I heard another carabinieri’s whistle. Two hats with two red cockades bobbed at the edge of the crowd.

  “I don’t know him,” Lois Hackett told me. “He wasn’t coming to meet me. I don’t know him, do you understand?”

  “That was no accident, Lois. They aimed that car like a gun. Signor Mozzoni was murdered.”

  “If you want to help Kyle Ryder, I don’t know this man. I don’t know him.”

  One of the carabinieri crouched over the dead man, felt for and found no pulse, and shook his head. A Café Doney waiter brought a crisp white tablecloth and they covered him with it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROME’S STRANGE SAD AMBER-blue dusk was settling over the city when we sat down at a sidewalk table in front of a little café on the Via Sardegna, around the corner from Doney’s.

  I ordered double shots of cognac and they came in large balloon glasses. An American tourist at the next table was describing the hell he’d gone through to get a pair of tickets for the opening-day ceremonies of the Olympic Games. The Italian girl with him chuckled throatily and patted his pink, clean-shaven cheek.

  Lois raised the balloon glass to her lips with both hands. She was still shaking.

  “Drink it,” I said. “All of it.”

  She downed the cognac in two gulps and made a face. I said: “I’m a private dick licensed in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. If I give the cops a reasonable amount of co-operation back home, I can make like a hawkshaw.” I showed her the photostat of my D.C. license. “This and a hundred lira gets me a ticket on the bus to Olympic Village here—if that’s what a ticket costs. I’m not a professional in Italy. I’m just a tourist.”

  “All right. I know that.”

 
“Then act as if you know it.”

  “You mean the carabinieri?”

  “I mean I was hired to come over here and keep Kyle Ryder out of trouble. Without any official status I can do that—up to a point.” I tapped the photostat of my license before putting it away. “I can’t stick my nose in murder four thousand miles from where this means anything.”

  Lois Hackett shuddered. The fast louble cognac on top of Strega, or what she had witnessed, or Rome’s fading dusk, gave her green eyes a glassy quality. “I can tell you why Signor Mozzoni was killed.”

  “Tell the carabinieri.”

  “They’d send Kyle home on the next plane.”

  “That’s for them to decide.”

  Lois gripped the stem of her balloon glass. “Junius Ryder wants you to keep them apart,” she said bitterly. “Doesn’t he?”

  “Keep who apart? Kyle and his Czech Amazon?”

  “Don’t call her that. You sound like Junius Ryder. Hilda’s a lovely girl, very poised, very warm. But I see it now: as far as Mr. Ryder and you are concerned, getting Kyle out of Italy would suit you fine.” She stood up. “I’m going to my hotel, Mr. Drum. Thanks for nothing.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Why should I? All you want to do is—”

  “How come you know Hilda Henlein? She just flew in today. So did you, from the opposite direction.”

  She sat down again. “I met her in Oslo last year. She and Kyle have been corresponding ever since. They want to get married.”

  “Corresponding how? Wouldn’t the Czechs have censored their letters?”

  “Through an intermediary in Italy. Some kind of a simple code.” Her eyes were defiant now. “I suggested it in Oslo. First word of the last line, last word of the first, next to last word of the second line, second word of the next to last line—like that.”

  “Who was the intermediary? Mozzoni?”

  “Hardly. Hilda Henlein has a brother living in Rome, a Czech who fled the country when Masaryk’s government fell. He’s an artist, not very successful, I’m afraid. Signor Mozzoni was the concièrge in his apartment house. If things went according to schedule, Hilda didn’t even unpack when she arrived. She was supposed to meet Kyle tonight, if Signor Mozzoni told me everything was ready.”