Peril Is My Pay Page 6

  “Gerhard Henlein, a Sudeten Czech, was Hilda’s father. He was anti-Nazi, and Pericles Andros betrayed him to gain control of the wine business himself. Gerhard Henlein died in a concentration camp, one of the very few Sudeten Czechs to do so, and only because Andros betrayed him. And now, on the night Hilda Henlein is abducted, Andros appears mysteriously from the grave. I tell you there must be a connection. Precisely what it is, that I do not know. But now do you see, Pan Drum, why finding Andros may well mean finding Hilda Henlein as well?”

  I saw—and I didn’t see. Sure, Andros’ betrayal of Hilda Henlein’s father twenty years ago was too much of a coincidence to ignore. But why, two decades later, should Andros—a fugitive who had to avoid the limelight at all costs—risk revealing himself to find and possibly abduct the daughter of the man he had betrayed? If Talese was right, Andros’ one goal, aside from keeping out of the clutches of Interpol and the Guardia Finanza, was to regain his fortune, tied up in Switzerland. How could the discus-throwing daughter of the Czech wine merchant whose concentration-camp death he’d been responsible for help him do that?

  Hodza asked Chief Battaglia suddenly: “Have the Russians contacted you yet, pan?”

  When Battaglia shook his head, the plump Czech’s relief was pathetic. His lips quirked up in a tentative smile; he chuckled throatily and said, “Not yet, not yet.” Then the tentative smile became an enormous grin and the throaty chuckle a compulsive, bubbling laugh. I knew then what was eating at Hodza; if we didn’t find Hilda Henlein, he feared the Russians would single him out as a scapegoat.

  He stopped smiling. “If they do, you will tell them I have done everything, everything in my power to …” His voice trailed off. He had realized his mistake too late. Like all obsessively frightened men, he didn’t know when to make his exit line. Moments before he’d held us with the spell of his story; now he was just a timid little man with a bad case of jitters.

  Battaglia and Talese spoke together in Italian for a while. Lederer told me: “Before you got here, the Colonel sketched in your background for me, Drum.”

  “Surprised?” Lois asked him.

  “Young lady, I don’t have time to be surprised. I’m grateful. If Chet is a trained investigator, he can help us find Kyle.”

  In a city of two million people? I thought. But I didn’t say that. All of a sudden I remembered something. “When Kyle took a powder last night he was heading for a trattoría in Trastevere. He thought he might find Hilda there. He didn’t. But he told one of his buddies on the team where he was going. Any idea who that would have been?”

  “Perry O’Mara,” Lederer said promptly. “They’re old college chums from Texas. You mean Kyle might be going back there again?”

  “I’m almost sure he would.”

  “O’Mara’s a shot putter,” Lederer said for no reason at all, then reached for a phone on one of the room’s three gray desks. “Oh hell,” he growled, not picking the phone up. “Perry’s on pass, won’t be back until dinner. What do we do now?”

  What we did now was listen to Colonel Talese. “Several courses of action are open to us, Signor Lederer,” he said. “Chief Battaglia has what I think you call a dragnet searching all Rome for the missing couple. And the concièrge, Mozzoni, who was run down on the Via Veneto yesterday, as well as the thug Fassolino shot dead by the police on the Spanish Steps—both belonged to a ring of smugglers led by a man named Carnuvale who made a fortune because The Insurance guaranteed his shipments in the old days. Carnuvale, who used to deal in heroin and Swiss watch-movements, served a prison term in Tuscany. He is free now, and rumored to be in Rome. If the Guardia can find Carnuvale, they may find the man who ordered Mozzoni’s death, the man who got away when Fassolino was killed.”

  “Andros?” I said.

  “Perhaps, signore. This is the lead I will follow. And yourself? You and the lovely signorina wait for Perry O’Mara, yes?”

  I nodded, but Lois said: “Not me. Kyle knows I’m staying at the Flora. Even though he had a run-in with you, he may try to contact me again, Chet. Or Hilda might. I’m going back to the Flora.”

  “What about Spanish Villa?” I asked Talese.

  “Covered,” Battaglia answered for him. “Wolfgang Henlein or anyone else leaving Villa di Spagna will be followed.”

  No matter how good Talese was at his line of work, or Battaglia at his, or I at mine, you needed a place to start. We were lucky; we had several. Any one of them might lead us to Kyle and Hilda, any one of us might turn up a stone and find Pericles Andros under it.

  Any one or all of them might be red herrings.

  As the meeting broke up, Hodza pleaded: “If the Russians come, Pan Battaglia, will you be kind enough to tell them I am doing everything, everything within my power?”

  Battaglia fingered his fierce mustache and nodded without enthusiasm. As it turned out, the Russians did come. They always do—to pick up the pieces.

  But that was later, and by then it was too late for them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MY PLACE TO START WAS Perry O’Mara.

  The burly shot putter returned to Olympic Village at seven that evening. He was built like a barrel and had the face of a cherub. “Kyle’s not back yet?” was the first thing he said to Lederer in the coach’s office.

  “That’s right, he’s not. Perry, I want you to meet Chester Drum. He’s a detective looking for Kyle.”

  “Uh-huh,” Perry said doubtfully.

  I asked him about the trattoría in Trastevere.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “I just came from there. I figured Kyle might pop up. He didn’t.”

  “Where is it?”

  “On the Piazza Santa Maria. Crespi’s, it’s called.” Perry stabbed a huge finger in my direction. “You going there?” And, when I said I was: “Want me to go back with you? Not that it’ll do any good. Kyle didn’t show. That kook! What’s he doing it for?”

  “You’re not going anywhere with Mr. Drum,” Lederer said. “You have a good meal and then an hour or two relaxing and then you hit the sack. Games begin next Monday—or have you forgotten why you flew to Rome?”

  “Who, me? I didn’t forget. I just hope to hell Kyle didn’t.”

  The Piazza Santa Maria was a cobbled square on the other side of the Tiber. It was cluttered with small tables from the trattorías that lined two of its sides. Potted trees and light bulbs hung in loops across the side streets that fed the piazza added a festive touch. This was the pre-dusk hour the Romans treasure above all others: the hour of the aperitif, of the cool earthy chianti in straw-covered bottles, of the hot Italian eyes roving restlessly from table to table, of the sad mandolin music from the open doors of the trattorías.

  It was also the hour, last night, when Mozzoni had died.

  Crespi’s was one of the smaller trattorías on the plaza. Inside, a dark mandolin player as lean as a foil was strumming La Paloma. I sat down at a table and looked the place over. Crespi’s did most of its business on the piazza itself, for ten or twelve small tables were enough to crowd the small room inside. All the customers, except for three fair-haired boys in dark blazers and white flannels who I decided belonged to the British Olympic team, seemed Italian.

  A waiter in knickers and a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and buckled shoes, drew red wine from a tap at the rear of the room and brought it to my table.

  “Buona sera, signore,” he said. “In che posso servirle?”

  “The wine’s fine for now,” I said, as he poured a glass for me and left the bottle on the table.

  “You are English too?”

  “American.”

  “Ah, American. Of course. You like the vino?”

  I tasted it. “Delicious.” And it was.

  “From Tuscany,” the waiter said proudly. The costume he wore was ancient Tuscan garb. “In casks, and better even than antinuri.”

  Just then one of the English lads called out: “Is he coming soon?”

  “We shan’t be
able to stay late,” another one said.

  The waiter beamed at them. “Soon. Very soon, signores, and then you will see.”

  He drifted back to the wine taps. The foil-lean mandolin player began on Santa Lucia, playing it with dignity and feeling. I began to like Crespi’s.

  The mandolin stopped suddenly.

  If Perry O’Mara was built like a barrel, the man who entered the trattoría through a doorway alongside the wine casks was built like the Heidelberg Tun. In Tuscan checked shirt and knickers, he must have weighed in at three hundred and fifty pounds. He had small dark eyes embedded in pouches of fat, and a grin that could have swallowed a bowl of pasta whole—bowl and all. Like so many really fat men, and unlike any fat woman I have ever seen, he followed his huge belly into the room easily and gracefully, as if he carried all that weight as effortlessly as I carried my passport.

  He planted himself like a tree in front of the English lads’ table, gazed down at them and boomed in their language: “Sprigs! Anchovies! It is no contest!” He gave the waiter a baleful look. “For this I interrupt my dinner?”

  “But there are three of them, Count Carlo,” the waiter placated him, also in English. Obviously their banter was part of Count Carlo’s act, whatever it was. Otherwise they’d, have argued in Italian.

  “Bah!” scoffed the fat man, thumping his tub of a belly with both fists. “Three or thirty, it would make no difference. I am Count Carlo Crespi.”

  “Of course, if he would rather withdraw,” one of the English lads said.

  The waiter said: “A bargain is a bargain, Count.” He turned to the three English lads. “Then it is understood? If you so much as make Count Carlo wince, you take home with you all the vino you can carry. If you fail, you stand a bottle of wine for every patron in the trattoría.”

  “And for my dinner,” said the fat man.

  The English lads nodded. They matched coins on the table, and with a self-conscious smile one of them stood up. “Really, I almost hate to do this,” he said.

  Count Carlo Crespi just smiled.

  The mandolin player strummed a chord, and it was suddenly-very quiet in the trattoría. The English lad stood squarely in front of Count Carlo, who was waiting with his hands at his sides and a slight sneer on his face. The patrons at the other tables sat like statues, watching.

  “Come along, come along,” Count Carlo boomed impatiently.

  Still smiling self-consciously, the English lad dropped his right shoulder and swung his right fist as hard as he could at Carlo Crespi’s enormous and unprotected gut.

  There was a collective gasp from the other patrons in the trattoría. I had the impression that they had witnessed their hero’s wager before; they sounded like a claque. The English lad stepped back, nursing his fist against his own lean belly. “Incredible,” he said. “It was like hitting a plank.”

  Count Carlo hadn’t budged. He was still sneering.

  “Next, signores,” the waiter said softly.

  The second English lad tried his fist on Count Carlo’s belly. The fat man just stood there and took it. The lad howled, massaging his wrist.

  The third one stood up. “I think I ought to tell you I am a middle-weight boxer on the Olympic squad.”

  Count Carlo’s sneer didn’t go away.

  The middle-weight boxer set his weight evenly on both feet and swung. Pivoting, he got the full weight of his body behind the blow. It landed right where he wanted it to land, in Carlo Crespi’s enormous breadbasket.

  Count Carlo belched restrainedly and politely excused himself, then said: “Vino for all. And I am dining on cuscinetti filanti al prosciutto e mozzarella, cioppino, saltimbocca alla romana and spumoni zabaióne. That too on the Englishmen’s bill. I wish you all bon appétit.”

  Crespi’s claque made appropriate stamping and clapping sounds, the English lads sat down and watched the waiter draw bottle after bottle of the red chianti from the taps, and the mandolin player took up Santa Lucia where he had left off. When a fresh bottle of chianti was deposited on my table, I told the waiter:

  “I’d like to see Count Carlo.”

  “To try it of the stomach, signore? You too?”

  “No. Something else. A personal matter.”

  “A moment.”

  Seconds later the fat proprietor of Crespi’s floated over to my table, as graceful as a cumulus cloud in a high wind on a summer day.

  “That was something to see,” I said.

  Count Carlo bowed. “Lambs! They did not even extend me.”

  “Join me for some wine?”

  “For one glass only, signore. And I thank you.”

  Count Carlo’s buttocks overflowed the seat of a chair. When the waiter brought him a glass and filled it, he savored the wine sip by sip.

  “I’m looking for someone,” I said. “I was supposed to meet her here.”

  “And she has not arrived?”

  “That’s right.”

  Count Carlo pursed his lips. “Roman women,” he said deprecatingly. “The loveliest in all the world, yes? But for them the clock lacks importance. A half hour, an hour, she will come. Enjoy your wine.”

  “As a matter of fact she isn’t Roman,” I said.

  “No?”

  “She’s a Czech.”

  Count Carlo’s eyes almost disappeared in their folds of fat. “A Czech, you say? How very interesting. To meet you in my little trattoría?”

  “I don’t know if she—”

  “Sit where you are, signore. For only a moment.”

  Lunging to his feet, Count Carlo went out through the doorway alongside the wine taps. I watched the young Englishmen watching all the wine being downed at their expense. Sportingly, one of them raised his glass to me. We both drank.

  Then Count Carlo returned through the doorway near the wine taps. Behind him, and looking mad enough to impale me with a javelin if he’d had one, was Kyle Ryder.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU doing here?” Kyle snapped.

  “Looking for you. And Hilda Henlein.”

  “You can clear out.”

  “Let’s both wait for Hilda. Is she coming?”

  “Both wait, hell. I’ll give you just about three seconds to drift.”

  “Use your head, Kyle. You think you’re the only one looking for Hilda?”

  “Okay, you are. I can see that, and I don’t like it. Your time’s up, snooper.”

  “I don’t mean me. The Reds want to find Hilda.”

  “That isn’t news.”

  “So does an international gangster named Pericles Andros.”

  “I never heard of him. Don’t pull that foreign-intrigue routine on me.”

  “Andros was in Prague during the war. He sent Gerhard Henlein to a concentration camp.”

  “Save it for your report to my old man. I’m not kidding, Drum. This is between me and Hilda. Get lost, before I kick your teeth down your throat.”

  “She coming?”

  Kyle grabbed my arm and yanked. The bottle of wine overturned, rolled to the edge of the table and smashed on the floor. Count Carlo sighed. Then Kyle yanked me to my feet. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  His left hand was free. He let go a hook that might—but only might—have hurt Count Carlo’s stomach. There was no doubt it would have made me a sick man, had it landed. I sidestepped, and it went blurring past my jaw. Following through, Kyle leaned across the table. His momentum loosened the hold his right hand had on my arm. I heard chairs scrape back. Someone shouted in Italian.

  Grasping Kyle’s right wrist, I used it as a lever to turn him. I forced it up between his shoulders in a hammer lock. Kyle was mad, but I was madder. All I wanted to do was help him. All he wanted to do, every chance he got, was break my jaw.

  “Now damn it,” I said, “you’re going to listen.”

  I had him. If he moved in any direction he’d risk a broken arm. Past his shoulder I could see people scampering out of the trattoría. They wanted no
part of our fight. The young Englishmen were still there, though. One of them came over and said, “I say, you oughtn’t—”

  “Keep the hell out of this!” Kyle cried.

  A girl’s voice, pleasantly contralto but anxious, called: “Kyle. The truck. Signor Carnuvale is here.”

  I looked up. Standing in the doorway near the wine taps was a Teutonic goddess. She had long, lank blond hair, big blue eyes so dark they were almost violet, high heavy cheekbones and full lips that were red without any lipstick on them. If the doorway wasn’t a doorway for gnomes, and it wasn’t, it made her six feet tall in her dark-blue dress and her flat-heeled shoes. She was big all over, but superbly proportioned.

  Except for her size, she wasn’t built for throwing the discus. Straight shoulders, firm bold breasts, pinched-in waist, tautly rounded hips and a showgirl’s long smooth legs. She was built for moonlight and champagne and the distant sound of surf outside your window on a cliff over a beach about a hundred miles from nowhere, and the lush fulfillment of every man’s dreams.

  Did I say she was beautiful? She was beautiful.

  She saw me holding Kyle in a hammer lock, said “Ach du lieber Gott!” and came flashing across the little trattoría like an avenging valkyrie.

  Kyle said: “Crespi.”

  The big Italian made Hilda Henlein’s swift sally unnecessary. His enormous arms wrapped themselves around my arms, his great belly butted the seat of my pants and he lifted me. I let go of Kyle. Crespi started to squeeze. I started to wish I was back in Washington, doing something simple like shooting it out with syndicate goons who had infiltrated a labor union.

  I lashed out with my left foot. The heel caught Crespi’s kneecap. He roared and let go, and I was on my feet again. I turned and, turning, let Crespi have the right fist. I have never thrown a punch harder, but I didn’t have much hope for it. I thought Crespi might break my arm off at the wrist and throw it back at me.