Peril Is My Pay Read online

“I don’t know. Maybe because he was delivering a message from Wolfgang Henlein’s sister to an American named Kyle Ryder.”

  The smile faded, but the frown remained. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for Ryder.”

  “He’s not here. I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Which is it?”

  “Don’t get wise, fellow. I eat up guys like you. Want some advice? Go crawl back where you came from.”

  “Thanks for the advice. I’ll remember not to come around when you’re hungry.”

  A muscle on his jaw twitched. In a soft and deadly voice he said: “Just how was Mozzoni killed?”

  “An old Citroën ran him down on the Via Veneto.”

  Kenny smirked. “I thought you said he was murdered.”

  “He was. It was no accident.”

  “Mozzoni drives an old Citroën himself.”

  “Not this time he didn’t. You live here?”

  “I come around,” he said vaguely.

  “Maybe you were driving Mozzoni’s car tonight.”

  Kenny looked at Simonetta, said, “That does it,” and started to move.

  All the Kennys came past all the mirrors. I’d been right on two counts—he moved as easily as a cat and he knew his way through the maze. The mirrors threw me. I was facing too many of him.

  He got in the first blow, a left chop to the jaw. He could hit the way Wolfgang Henlein could whine or Simonetta could marry. I bounced back against a screen with three mirrors on it, the screen folded, tumbled and crashed—and I had three times seven years’ bad luck.

  I fought for balance and walked into a mirror. Simonetta laughed. Kenny, looming in the mirror, grabbed my shoulder from behind and turned me. Spinning, I hit him in the face with a short, hard right. It jolted him, but he smiled. He was a boy who didn’t mind a fight.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I said. “I came here to ask questions but I don’t mind answering yours. Try asking them with your mouth instead of your fists.”

  He tucked his jaw behind his left shoulder, put up both hands and came for me.

  Just then I heard a car stopping outside. Kenny missed with a left and a wild right. I clinched with him. Downstairs, a door banged. A man’s voice called up the stairway in Italian.

  “Carabinieri,” Simonetta said. “They want everyone downstairs.”

  I broke the clinch. Kenny cuffed at me as he was moving away, and then Simonetta calmly walked between us. “The carabinieri are waiting,” she told Kenny.

  He sneered at me. “I’m not finished with you, fellow. There’ll come a time.”

  “I’ll mark it on my calendar.”

  We all went through the maze of mirrors and out the door and downstairs.

  A uniformed carabinieri was waiting for us in the hall. He showed his teeth and said something in Italian when Kenny knuckled blood from his lips, then ushered us into Wolfgang Henlein’s small room.

  Two carabinieri stood like sentries on either side of the the door. Lois sat on the daybed and smiled in relief when she saw me. Wolfgang, black eye, fat lip, bare chest and all, paced back and forth nervously before a wall of his canvases. And in the center of the room, watching us enter, stood a tall, slat-thin, suave number wearing the kind of hairline mustache you could hide under the edge of a fingernail, and a sky-blue raw-silk suit you could buy in the specialty shops on the Via Condotti—provided you had three hundred bucks to buy it with.

  He clicked his heels and introduced himself: “Colonel Talese,” and triggered memory for me.

  “Three years ago,” I said.

  “The Venetian Archipelago,” he said, and grinned. “Signor Drum, is it really you?”

  Looking at him, I suddenly saw the little man in the white linen suit again. “Pericles Andros!” I blurted.

  “But of course. It was on the Andros case that we met. Fortunatissimo!”

  “No, I don’t mean that. I just saw Andros tonight, Colonel.”

  His smile stiffened. “Pericles Andros? That is impossible.”

  “I saw him on the Via Veneto. Didn’t recognize him at first because his hair had gone white on him. It was Pericles Andros, all right.”

  “Impossible,” Colonel Talese said again. “Pericles Andros was sentenced to ninety years in prison—on a penal island like your Alcatraz.”

  “Then he escaped. He’s here in Rome.”

  “Impossible,” Colonel Talese said a third time. “Two years ago he tried to escape. The body was washed up on the shore near Rimini. Andros had been in the water a month, Signor Drum. I saw what was left of him.”

  “I’m telling you who I saw.”

  “Then you saw someone who looked like him. For ten years I followed the trail that led to Pericles Andros, signore. Then you came along and, as you say in your country, we nabbed him. Don’t you think I would assure myself, after all that time, that Pericles Andros was dead?”

  Stubbornly I persisted: “I saw him outside Doney’s. When Mozzoni was killed.”

  One of the uniformed carabinieri was interrogating Simonetta and Kenny. Wolfgang was still pacing. Lois’ green eyes darted from my face to Talese’s like a spectator’s at a tennis match. And I remembered Pericles Andros.

  Our one and only meeting, after a chase that had covered four thousand miles from Washington and New York to Rome and Venice, had been in a Palladian mansion on a small island off the Venetian Archipelago.* Andros was an international criminal sought by the police of a dozen countries. At the time they hadn’t even known his name. He was called The Insurance, and he netted a hundred million bucks a year insuring heroin shipments originating in the Middle East and destined for delivery by the international dope-running syndicate in France, England and the States. I had tracked him down, cornered him and captured him, and he had pulled a Dr. Moriarity on me, vowing that we would meet again under other circumstances.

  We had met tonight in Rome. Despite Colonel Talese’s assurances, I knew that.

  “Allow me to tell you something, Signor Drum,” the Colonel said. “You are aware of the discretion employed by Swiss banks in the handling of funds?”

  “I think so. They give a depositor a code number, and no one can get any information on his account, let alone money from it, unless he has the number.”

  “Not even the depositor’s closest relative,” Talese said. “Not even a sovereign government involved in the disposition of his estate. This too is why I know Pericles Andros is dead.”

  “Better explain that.”

  “Andros lived in splendor, like a Renaissance duke. But even so, he amassed a fortune which has been estimated at close to three-quarters of a billion dollars. Three-quarters of a billion dollars, signore. Very well. The Swiss and Italian governments are haggling over it.”

  “What about the bank?” I said.

  “So far they have made no move,” Talese admitted.

  “Then they’re not convinced Andros is dead?”

  “They are cautious. Switzerland is a cautious country, signore. While my own government is sure Andros is dead, the Swiss are still waiting. But my sources of information inform me that they will take action soon. Though they have not accepted it yet as a matter for the courts to use, apparently they are as convinced as I am that Pericles Andros is dead. Ècco-la, you see?”

  Talese took out a pack of Due Palmes and lit one. “But I did not come here to discuss Pericles Andros. We are confronted with a homicide.”

  “I thought you were chief of the Italian Narcotics Bureau.”

  “I am. The dead man, Mozzoni, has been under surveillance for months. He was a runner of raw heroin—on the usual route, signore. From Istanbul to Italy, and then north. Just as we believed he would have led us to the Rome headquarters of the ring, Signor Mozzoni retired from the business and took employment here as a concièrge.” Colonel Talese gave an eloquent Italian shrug which included hands, arms and shoulders, and admitted grudgingly: “In the past it is believed he worked with The Insurance.�
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  “And tonight,” I said triumphantly, “I bump into Andros just when Mozzoni gets killed. You still insist Andros is dead?”

  “I only state what I know, signore. Believe me, Andros is very much dead. As for Mozzoni, the usual story: a dispute over the division of spoils with another member of the ring, Mozzoni goes into hiding, Mozzoni is killed. Our man saw him die on the Via Veneto. That was no hit-and-run homicide. Signor Mozzoni was murdered.”

  At least we agreed on that much. I didn’t say anything.

  “Signor Drum,” Talese asked, “have you come to Italy for your government again? Can you tell me why?”

  “A personal matter. The government isn’t involved.”

  Talese looked disappointed. “But having to do with the narcotics traffic?”

  “No. The Olympic Games.”

  We chewed that around for a few minutes. I told Talese that Hilda Henlein had been abducted from the Villa di Spagna, according to her brother’s story, and that Kyle Ryder had left Olympic Village this evening, destination unknown. I tried, not successfully, to relate those two facts to Mozzoni’s death.

  “Correlation but not causality, as the logicians say, signore,” Colonel Talese told me. “We know why Mozzoni was killed.”

  “I know who saw him get killed,” I said.

  That brought us back to where we’d started, and Talese as yet would have none of it. “Prego,” he reminded me. Please. “I saw the body.”

  “Then look at it this way,” I urged. “Mozzoni was the go-between for Wolfgang Henlein and Miss Hackett. Doesn’t it strike you as stretching the long arm of coincidence too far to deny a connection between that and Mozzoni’s murder?”

  Talese chuckled. “Twenty years of police work, signore, has convinced me that we live in a world of coincidence and melodrama which would make the milieu of a thriller writer seem tame by comparison.”

  I knew he was no fool. I also knew his attitude toward me had changed when I’d admitted my mission to Italy wasn’t government sponsored. Whatever he said now, Talese wouldn’t write all this off as coincidence. He couldn’t.

  What he said now was: “Ècco, we seem to be finished here for now.” He conferred in Italian with the trio of carabinieri, not telling me what if anything they had learned from Wolfgang, Simonetta and Kenny. Instead he asked me:

  “You are staying?”

  Kenny said: “He’s getting the hell out or I’ll throw him out.”

  Talese fingered his hairline mustache and waited for my answer. A showdown with Kenny now, on Kenny’s terms, would get me into a brawl. I wanted facts, not a fight.

  “We’re going,” I told Talese. Kenny smirked, Wolfgang looked sullen and self-pitying, Simonetta indifferent, Lois relieved.

  Outside, moonlight bathed the cobblestones of the Via Margutta in white. It was eleven-thirty. Colonel Talese and the three carabinieri had come in a Fiat, a small four-door job that would be a tight squeeze for them. “I regret we cannot offer you transportation,” Colonel Talese said.

  “That’s all right,” Lois told him. “I’m all wound up. I’d rather walk.”

  Talese took me aside. “A word of advice, signore. The man inside, the American, does not like you?”

  “Putting it mildly.”

  “He is a bad one, that one. An expatriate American, an artist’s model, a gambler. He killed a man once.”

  “And he’s still walking around?”

  “Justifiable homicide. The victim was a drug addict. He attacked this man Farmer.” His match glowed in the night as Talese lit another Due Palme. “At least that is what the court decided. Take care, signore. But give us reason and we will cheerfully run Signor Kenneth Farmer out of Italy.”

  Talese’s teeth flashed at Lois in a wide Latin grin. He bowed slightly. “You are very lovely, signorina. A pleasure to have met you.”

  He climbed in after the carabinieri, and the little Fiat rasped away from the curb.

  I started walking with Lois. “What happened upstairs?” she asked me. “Mr. Farmer was bleeding.”

  “We had a fight. Tell you later.”

  The moonlight thrust long deep shadows ahead of us. Via Margutta was deserted. We didn’t have far to go: along the Margutta to a narrow side street, then along Via del Babuino to the Spanish Steps and up them and along the edge of the Borghese Gardens to the Pinciana Gate. Lois Hackett was staying at the Hotel Flora, around the corner from the Eliseo.

  Lois’ high heels click-clacked on the cobbles. Pericles Andros, I kept thinking. Talese was wrong. He wasn’t dead. I had seen him. But what did Pericles Andros and his three-quarters of a billion dollars tied up in a Swiss bank have to do with Hilda Henlein and Kyle Ryder? Or with an ex-dope-runner-turned-concièrge named Mozzoni getting himself killed before he could arrange a meeting between Hilda and Kyle?

  We reached the base of the Spanish Steps. Mist from the floodlit fountain in the piazza cooled us. The steps loomed above us—the equivalent of eight stories of them, wide, lamplit, with the Trinita dei Monti church at the top.

  Lois said: “Will you look at those stairs? I’m as soft as marshmallow, I told you. Let me get my breath before we start climbing.”

  We paused. I heard footsteps echoing hollowly on cobbles behind us. They stopped an instant after we did. I turned slowly, saw only the piazza and its floodlit fountain. Then arm in arm a man and a woman entered the piazza and walked across it. The woman was laughing. I took a deep breath, told myself just thinking of Pericles Andros on the loose again had set my nerves on edge, and asked Lois:

  “All set for Everest?”

  “As set as I’ll ever be.”

  We climbed the first four flights of the broad steps. Halfway up the fourth flight, two lampposts on columns divided the steps into three ramps. Beyond them was a wide landing with narrower staircases arching on either side of it before the broad steps began again above a colonnaded gallery. I could see the twin towers of Trinita dei Monti silhouetted against the moonlight.

  It was very quiet. Rome’s streets are not night streets. The Via Condotti below the piazza at the foot of the Spanish Steps had been deserted, its shop windows shuttered with corrugated metal.

  Lois leaned on my arm. “Give a girl a break. I’m pooped.”

  We stopped—and I heard footsteps again.

  As I started to turn, three explosive roars shattered the night’s silence and three spurts of orange blossomed in the darkness to the left of the fountain in the piazza.

  One of the lamp lights burst over our head, showering us with glass.

  Lois screamed. I crouched and brought her down at my side just as the gun roared again.

  Whoever it was had missed so far. But we had four flights of stairs below us and four above, with the blank shuttered night faces of tenement buildings on either side. He had missed—but he would have all the time he needed to improve his aim.

  * See Terror is my Trade by Stephen Marlowe

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FOR A WHILE THE ONLY SOUND I heard was our breathing and the distant hiss and roar of the fountain far below us at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Then Lois whimpered, and her shoe scraped on cement. I felt her flank stiffen against me as we crouched under the shattered light. I gripped her hand tightly. Her fingers shook. She tugged at me. She wanted to run for it.

  “Hold it,” I whispered urgently. “He can’t see us now. We’re all right as long as he can’t see us.”

  I felt her fingers relax, but she said: “He wants to kill us.” She repeated her words, as if she couldn’t believe them. “He wants to kill us. What are we going to do?”

  I didn’t answer her. I turned to look up at the silhouette of the Trinita dei Monti church at the top of the stairs.

  “I’m so scared, Chet.”

  “If we can make it to the church,” I said.

  Four flights more. We’d be vulnerable all the way up. But he’d shot four times, then held his fire. Now he’d want to make sure. Or maybe he thought he’d hit
us already. Either way, he’d climb closer before he tried again, and as yet there was no sound but the fountain below us.

  Ten yards to our left, ancient tenement buildings shouldered against the balustrade of the Spanish Steps. They were five-story buildings. At this height we were on a level with their fourth floors. The closeness of their silent, shuttered windows mocked us, but the moon cast their shadows across the broad steps, and darkness was a friend.

  I began to edge toward the balustrade, drawing Lois after me by her hand.

  “Keep close to the balustrade,” I said. “We’re going up.”

  “To the church? We’ll never make it.”

  Before I could answer her, the man below us called out something in Italian. Lois sobbed.

  A light winked on above the colonnaded gallery where the steps curved.

  There were two of them. One below with a gun. And one above with a flashlight, blocking our way to Trinita dei Monti. He’d probably scaled the heights some other way—which was what the man with the gun had been waiting for. Gun below and flashlight above, they had us trapped between them.

  The light swung and bobbed as the man came downstairs slowly. The yellow beam bounced back and forth. He was searching for us.

  Still crouching, we reached the balustrade. I had thought the tenement buildings fronted on it directly, but I was wrong. A gap of half a dozen feet separated the low balusters from the nearest shuttered window.

  Silence once more. The man with the light was coming down. The man with the gun had started on his way up. The only way we had left to go was over the balustrade, and over the balustrade was a four-story drop to the gloom of an unseen courtyard.

  The light dipped toward us. We ducked, and it passed over our heads. I wouldn’t have wanted to bet on that happening again. Next time he would be closer. And when he impaled us with his light, the man with the gun would start shooting.

  I stood up and leaned over the balustrade suddenly. A six-foot gap, then a shuttered window with an ornate arch over it. The arch looked wide enough to support my hands. The latticed shutter looked flimsy.

  Flimsy enough for me to kick it in while dangling from the arch? And Lois?