My King The President (20 page)

Cancelossi didn’t take another step forward. Instead, he turned to me and said, “Father Ralph, from the large island just to our south, may I present Senor Enrique Hernandez, a.k.a. Carillo, a.k.a. Gomez, and any number of other Latin names. Also known in certain, rather exclusive circles as Hemiola.”

Chapter 18

The chill that seized me, shaking my whole body, couldn’t have been either suppressed or hidden. I was glad the slightly built Cuban was watching Cancelossi’s face, not mine. It was all I could do to simply stare, saying absolutely nothing, mesmerized by what was happening.

Apparently, Cancelossi the Younger didn’t have any more of a clue than I did. “Papa, what are you doing? Why have you brought—”

His father shot him a glance full of poison. “I thought I told you twice already to keep your mouth shut. I’m not going to say it again. Go to your cabin. Now!”

Johnny meekly obeyed, and Cancelossi turned to the Cuban, softened his tone and said, “Senor, Bruno will show you to your own cabin. I’m sure you will want to freshen up and change into something more casual. You’ll find everything you need there, I think, also in your, ah, size. Join me for cocktails on the aft deck in exactly one hour. We can discuss your next commission then.”

When Bruno and the Cuban were out of sight, Cancelossi waited a couple more minutes, then took me by the elbow and led me out as well, saying nothing further until we reached cabin Number 6. He opened its teak door, gestured for me go inside, and said, “The shower is there, behind the mirrored door. There are fresh clothes for you here, too, in the closet. Jackson will take those you’re wearing to be cleaned. He’ll bring them back in plenty of time for dinner. When you get cleaned up, come have a drink with me, aft, on the sun deck. I’m sure you desire an explanation of my surprise.”

That was the understatement of the decade. After thanking him, I took the much-needed shower, found new underwear in the top drawer of the chest, and a white polo shirt and Bermuda shorts in the closet, along with several pairs of Sperry boat shoes, one pair my size. While I had been in the shower, somebody had come in and collected Ralph’s clothes and shoes, leaving my wallet and the last of my money on top of the bunk where I’d also dropped his wristwatch.

Feeling a lot fresher, my nerves now more or less under control, I made my way aft. Cancelossi was sitting at a large table on the sun deck, smoking. I had no more than sat down when Mike Tyson (or Jackson or whatever the steward’s name was) brought a tray of drinks, which he placed before us, along with monogrammed napkins. I knew before reaching for mine that it was my favorite—with lime! Gratefully taking a first sip gave me the excuse of not having to ask a first question. Cancelossi dismissed his black servant, took a swallow of his own drink, lit yet another Camel, inhaled deeply, then fixed me with those cold eyes. “It was Johnny, of course. Almost sixty years old and except for figures, hasn’t gotten one ounce smarter than when he was in Charleston. If it wasn’t for his mother…” He left that sentence hanging, puffed again, and went on, “He can’t
wait
for me to die. Can’t be patient a couple more lousy months. After your last visit, it took me only two days to find out that Koontz had contacted him, blackmailed the poor simpleton with that ancient Charleston business, and talked him into going over my head to hire Hemiola for the hit on you. Since all the books were in order, I figured he had been skimming us for years in order to have enough ready cash to pay the little killer. I confronted Johnny with it in our earlier session, and he finally admitted everything.”

“So, why
did
you bring him here? Hemiola, I mean.”

Cancelossi’s face turned even darker. “I don’t like being used or lied to, especially by my own son. That Cuban never would have taken the contract if Johnny hadn’t convinced him I was doing the hiring. After I got that part figured out, I gave Bruno a quarter of a million to entice Hemiola out here, with the promise of four times that much to ‘do another job’ for me. A more, ah, important contract as it were. Part of what I’ve done by bringing him here is for your benefit, and partly to teach that imbecile son of mine an important, long overdue lesson.”

With those words, he clammed up and I took the hint. We sat there in silence for a good twenty minutes, drinking. The Gulf Stream was behaving nicely. Low, innocent swells. There was no other vessel in sight below the cloudless sky. The air was warm. The breeze, most of which was created by the backward wash of the yacht’s cruising speed, swirled around our heads, flinging Cancelossi’s smoke away in ghostly gray wisps. I couldn’t help thinking of it as a metaphor for the old man himself. Soon, he’d drift away, too, and what would he leave behind? Was that what he was thinking about?

Finally, he glanced at his Rolex again, looked at me with a serious frown, coughed, and said, “Time to go fishing.”

The moment he said that, Bruno appeared, guiding the Cuban killer, now dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, white ducks, and sandals. Johnny Cancelossi, still wearing his three-piece, was a step behind them. The old man gestured for Hemiola and Junior to be seated, then glanced up at Bruno and softly said, “Take care of the crew, please, then change course.”

I had no idea what he meant by “taking care of the crew” but Bruno certainly did. He hurried forward without a word. Cancelossi ignored his son and inquired of his most recent guest if he was hungry.

A flicker of irritation crossed Cancelossi’s face, then was gone. Like his smoke trails. He looked at me, a nasty sneer on his lips. “All business, this guy. Neat. No nonsense. No waste. Just like his life and profession. Just like his chain of unseen contact links. Just like his sizable bank accounts in Switzerland and the Caymans, resulting from twenty-five very tidy and rather surgical operations. Or is it twenty-six?”

The Cuban’s face remained implacable. He flicked a manicured finger toward me. “Why is this priest here?” he wanted to know.

“What priest?” Cancelossi replied, enjoying himself now. “This man is no priest, although I will admit he could fool most people unless he tried to say Mass in Latin. No, my Cuban friend, his real name is Jebediah Willard. The man Johnny here paid you to kill, except both of you fucked up royally.”

I was watching Hemiola’s still inscrutable face, which didn’t so much as twitch under Cancelossi’s scathing insult, but neither did I fail to notice that Bruno had returned, and had taken up a stance behind his master’s deck chair. To my left, Cancelossi the Younger sucked in a very audible gasp.

Ignoring him again, the Prince of Miami continued, “Not only that, you embarrassed me as well. Led people to my door. Now, that was unforgivable, and for that you must pay. Both of you. Bruno?”

The giant moved quickly to a wooden locker on the bulkhead, opened its door and removed a short-barreled shotgun, which he then pointed at the Cuban’s head, only two inches away. Cancelossi leaned forward, his voice cold. “A man with your experience with weapons will surely recognize that piece. In Sicily, it is called the
Lupo
. Stand up.”

Cancelossi glanced up at Bruno, who promptly delivered a backhanded, vicious slap to the handsome face, and as soon as the man’s head stopped moving, grabbed the pony tail and jerked the killer straight up out of his chair. From the corner of my unbelieving eye, I saw that Johnny C. was frozen in his own fear. Like me, he was totally speechless. Bruno dragged the Cuban four feet away to the semi-circular rail of the fantail, keeping the barrels of the shotgun glued to his temple.

I watched in morbid fascination as the man with the too-handsome face, now showing fury mixed with stark fear, nervously began unbuttoning his shirt. It fell away, and I caught my breath. What looked like a large Ace bandage was wrapped snugly around his chest.
Some kind of wound
?

Impatient now, Cancelossi’s hand fluttered up, scattering ashes, and Bruno produced a razor sharp switchblade from his pocket and proceeded to carefully cut away the bandage, revealing a pair of small, but undeniably female breasts. I stared then at the Prince of Miami. Looking at me with a kind of triumph in his glittering, bloodshot eyes, he said, “That’s why Hemiola has been so successful, Willard. Goes into a country, a city, or a hotel as a woman, does the job as a man, and leaves as a woman again. Or vice versa. Exactly like her nickname.” He nodded at Bruno yet again, and the big man used the knife to cut the rubber bands away from the long hair that cascaded down around the perfectly formed face, onto shapely shoulders.

“Quite attractive, isn’t she?” Cancelossi said, leaning back and lighting another Camel.

It was true. The half-naked woman standing before us was more than attractive. She was, in fact, lovely. Beautiful enough to elicit a pathetic protest from the man whose eyes she was now staring into, silently pleading.

“Papa,” Johnny croaked, “Please, you’re not —”

“Shut your fucking mouth!” Cancelossi then stood, walked around the table to his son, folded his arms, and hissed, “No, Johnny, I’m not.
You
are.”

Then he turned. “Bruno, give him the shotgun.”

Bruno took a couple of slow steps backwards, towards us, keeping the barrels pointed at Hemiola, who stood like a statue, still not believing her change of luck. He handed the shotgun to Johnny.

Hemiola saw her last chance. “Wait, Johnny. Don’t you want to see the rest?” Slowly, like a teasing stripper, she undid the zipper of her pants. She started wriggling out of them, pulling black panties down at the same time.

Everything that happened next seemed to take an hour, although in real time it was only a few seconds: Johnny whining, refusing. His father slapping him back and forth across the mouth, cursing him in both English and Italian, yelling, “Shoot, damn you!”

Johnny aiming high and firing both barrels over her head. I flinched, but not before seeing a flash of steel. Quicker than mercury, she sprang at the old man, swinging the straight razor open. My own reaction was slow, but in time. The vicious body block I threw into her from her blind side knocked her over the side rail. Even before she splashed into the water, I heard Cancelossi scream again, this time at Bruno. “Kill the engines!”

I didn’t see Bruno move. I was already over the rail myself, diving deep.

The water was beautifully clear. As soon as I flattened out from my dive, emerging from my own bubbles, I observed two things at once: The cavitations of the
ANNA B
’s huge twin screws was sucking me toward them faster than I thought was possible, but the yacht’s speed had already carried her past me. Not Hemiola. Bruno had been a bit too late with the engines. In horror, I saw the black hair flailing around the port side prop shaft, then only a red swirl. A second or two later, the propellers stopped, and the woman’s nude, headless body drifted toward me like in a grotesque, slow motion ballet. Without thinking, I caught one slender arm and pulled the body up with me, surfacing thirty or forty yards astern of the boat, which was already turning to starboard.

The rest, after Bruno’s strong hands pulled me—and Hemiola’s corpse—onto the yacht’s swim landing was mostly a blur: Johnny Cancelossi lying on the sun deck, blubbering like a baby. Bruno carrying the headless, bloody body up to the lower deck where a butcher block had previously been placed. The cleaver. The force of Bruno’s powerful forearm. The separation of limbs from trunk. The enormous hooks, from some
abattoir
in hell, baited, and then thrown overboard. The
ANNA B
slowing down to trolling speed. Bruno with the long-handled brush and fire hose, cleaning, scrubbing. And all the while, Don Salvatore Cancelossi sitting calmly in his deck chair, skinny arms crossed, watching, nodding, chain-smoking. He said only two words to me. “
Corpus delecti
.”

By sunset, I vaguely also remember him quietly saying that the fish were biting good. Real good. The bait was almost gone. Telling me Bruno would fly me back to the mainland, but hoping I’d wait until after dinner to go.
After
dinner
? His telling me he knew I was resourceful enough to do the rest of my job without his assistance, advising me to stay in the priest’s clothes as long as it took, asking me to bring the Judge back to him in Miami if I possibly could. Telling me who the seventh dwarf was.

And, telling me that my father was indeed still alive, being held in the stockade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and that if I did have the diaries of poor Mac McCarty, to use them for a swap.

Chapter 19

Under any other circumstances, I would have enjoyed my pampered trip back to Washington. Who wouldn’t be impressed with a free helicopter ride from the middle of the Gulf Stream to the airport at Ft. Lauderdale, being hustled immediately aboard a private “company” Lear for the relatively short flight to Dulles, then into a limo waiting to take you to whatever address you named? Bruno, first as pilot, then as traveling companion, accompanied me all the way to 1400 Market—without opening his mouth once.

During both flights and the limo ride, I hadn’t minded his muteness, nor had I made any comment to him, not even to ask him to express my appreciation to his boss, who had so graphically removed one major mountain of an obstacle that had been standing in my path. I had closed my eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, several times to reassemble a mental version of my rip sheet, now so drastically altered. Each time, it started off all right, but rapidly became obscured by an untypical lack of concentration. All my thoughts kept bouncing off the sides my brain, like in a pinball machine. I couldn’t focus on any one string of thoughts. Nothing connected. True, Walt’s, Cecil’s, and Father Tim’s murders had been—if by proxy—avenged. In spades. But Hemiola’s grisly death had finalized only one of my problems. Too many others remained. Who had blown up my boat? Who had killed Jean Tyndall? And, my most pressing concern; who had destroyed the cabin, killed Pete Suggs, and kidnapped Cal? Oh, yeah, there was plenty of work left to be done. My mind’s eye kept seeing my father in some medieval dungeon, naked, hanging from iron manacles, being tortured by devices and machines more cruel than any King or Kafka could have imagined. Each time that image drifted over and into my subconscious, I shook my head to banish it, and started over. I had a name and a clue, of course, thanks to the old Sicilian who knew how to keep a promise. I now knew who Koontz’s seventh dwarf was, and where Cal might be, but had no idea on earth how to get to either one.