The Revengers (24 page)

I looked where she’d been looking, and grinned. “Oh, you mean the slacks.”

“I know you said you don’t like women in pants and I don’t like me in them either; but I was just too damned tired to wash out a blouse last night and this is all I had clean in my suitcase. I’ve been moving around too fast to get any laundry done the past week or so.” She grinned. “Anyway, Seppi Velo just loves trousered ladies; he’s always got at least one blonde around in skintight pants. I think he likes to pinch them where they’re tightest. At his age, it’s probably all the excitement he can stand.”

“In those,” I said, “you’re going to wind up with your ass black and blue before Velo ever gets a crack at you. My fingers are itching already.”

But that was going too far; I was taking unfair advantage of her moment of friendliness. She looked at me coolly. “I think we’d better get moving if we’re going to be in Miami Beach in time for lunch,” she said.

I watched her walking briskly ahead of me in her high-heeled blue sandals, crisp white linen slacks and a thin little navy blue sweater with a round neck and short sleeves. The slacks weren’t really outrageously snug, they just fit as well as they should; and I thought that, some day when we were friends again, I’d have to tell her that in addition to having very nice shoulders and ankles she had a very nice little bottom. When we got to the airport I saw a couple of young men in greasy coveralls look up from their work to watch her go by on her way out to the waiting plane, not the prettiest girl in the world, perhaps, not the most beautifully proportioned body in the classic sense, but a neat, taut, youthful figure, unique and unmistakably feminine, a specimen any girl-watcher would be proud to add to his private collection of attractive memories. I didn’t at all mind being the man fortunate enough to be her escort and thereby earning their brief envy. It seemed too bad that she was psychologically incapable of recognizing and enjoying their admiration.

It was the same two-propeller, four-person plane with the same silent moustached pilot. We got into the rear seats although Eleanor indicated that she wouldn’t really mind if I sat up front where my long legs would be more comfortable. Apparently she wasn’t yearning for my companionship; but as we took off I felt her fingers find my arm and tighten briefly. It was nice to know that planes still scared her a little, even after all the traveling she must have done. They scare me, too.

When she removed her hand, I glanced at her, and saw that her face was faintly pink. “Only the little ones,” she murmured. “I can take the big ones, but the little ones still bother me a little. I’m never quite sure they’ll get all the way off the ground.”

“I know,” I said.

She hesitated, and looked at me directly. “I’m a bitch,” she said.

“So what else is new?”

“No, let me apologize. I just felt so . . . naked this morning. Now you know everything about me.”

“Well, you know a hell of a lot about me, too, so I guess we’re even,” I said.

We sat for a while, listening to the motors and watching the colorful islands of the Bahamas pass below.

“Matt.”

“Yes?”

“That girl,” she said, looking straight ahead. “The one in the jungle?”

“What girl in the jungle?” I asked. “Oh, that girl.”

“The girl agent you said you rescued.” Eleanor gave me a sidelong, glance. “Sheila Summerton was her name, wasn’t it? That was one of the operations I did get some information on.” After a little she said dryly, “The record wasn’t clear on the point, but I bet you slept with her, too.”

I remembered the starved and abused scrap of female humanity we’d brought out of the jungle, all bones and eyes, and the slim, big-eyed, haunted girl she’d become. We’d managed to lay to rest a few of her ghosts eventually, if you’ll excuse the phrase. But it hadn’t worked out in the end. She’d been too gentle for the business. Her gentleness was what had betrayed her in the first place, when she’d been unable to pull a trigger that needed pulling badly. Later, her gentleness had almost got me killed. She’d left us and I hadn’t heard from her, or of her, since.

I said, “As you add up my sex life, Miss Brand, you might keep in mind that you’re referring to a handful of ladies encountered over a considerable number of years. It’s not quite as if I’d serviced them all last week.”

She shook her head quickly. “Please don’t get mad. That girl . . . she’d had a hard time, too. Can’t you see that I might be interested?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am. Since you ask so nicely, I did sleep with her. Later, after fattening her up a bit. She was pretty skinny when we got her out of there. I felt, well, a bit guilty about it, considering everything, but she laughed at me and said that after going through all that why shouldn’t she go to bed with a man she liked for a change? I realize that didn’t say much for her taste in men, but otherwise it seemed like a healthy attitude.”

Eleanor was silent. Maybe she didn’t think it was a healthy attitude; or maybe she felt it was a little too healthy for a girl who had, after all, been through considerably more than she, Eleanor Brand, had. Maybe she thought I was making comparisons, not altogether in her favor. As a matter of fact, I had spoken without really thinking how it would sound to her. I was just a bit stale on Miss Eleanor Brand’s psychosexual problems this morning. I had a few problems of my own, like just what to say to that Miami Beach godfather type, Giuseppi Velo.

But before I could get that problem solved, and it wasn’t really solvable until I’d gotten some notion of Velo’s attitude, we’d landed in Miami and had another problem presented to us, or at least a distraction. Airports with all those strangers running around aren’t good places to be if you have somebody to protect, and I was doing my best to pick up possible hostile blips on the radar screen as I followed along behind Eleanor, aware that she, too, was looking for somebody; the difference being that she knew who.

He turned out to be a tall man with cynical eyes and wild sandy hair, who handed her a large manila envelope, kidded her briefly about some past incident or assignment they’d shared and took off, never having spoken to me. I didn’t belong to the inner journalistic circle; I was just part of the view. I was watching him move away and making another sweep of the premises when I heard Eleanor make an odd strangled sound that had me whirling and reaching for my gun instinctively. By using a private plane we’d short-circuited the hijack-scanners, so I hadn’t had to go through that firearms-shuffle again.

But Eleanor was standing there unharmed. Her face was very pale, however; and I reached for the photograph she’d been staring at. She shook her head quickly.

“No, look at this one first. Arlette Swallow.”

It was a stock eight-by-ten-inch glossy glamor photo of a pert, pretty young woman with fluffy blond hair, an interestingly inadequate costume, and a big guitar. I gave it back to Eleanor and she handed me the second print.

“Arlette Swallow.”

It would have been worse if I hadn’t already seen her reaction to it; but it was bad enough. The girl in this picture was dead. It was a police photo and, although the features had not been damaged by whatever had killed her, there was hardly enough resemblance to let me recognize her as the same girl. The blond hair had darkened and looked as if it had been stringy and uncared for even before death. The pert nose had become oddly flattened and a little crooked; but the cutie-pie mouth was the feature that had changed most. The upper lip was marred by a great slashing scar, like a badly repaired harelip. There was another ugly scar across the right cheek. I cleared my throat.

“Standard beer-bottle job,” I said. Eleanor glanced at me. I said, “Okay. Chivas Regal. Piper Heidsieck. But the one I saw on a man was a good old Budweiser operation. He got it busted across his face and then he was chopped up with what was left. Looked worse than this, but then he hadn’t been very pretty to start with.”

Eleanor shivered. “And I’ve been making a big deal of how terribly I suffered with a couple of black eyes and a couple of chipped teeth! The poor kid! All she had was her pretty face, really; and he got mad or drunk and . . . spoiled it for her. And wouldn’t even get her to a good surgeon who could, at least, have minimized the damage! No wonder she got bitter enough to want to hurt him publicly, seeing that in the mirror every day.”

“What are the other ones?” I asked.

She licked her lips. “Brother Pete, of course. Pre- and postmortem, also. They were both killed in the same auto accident the day after I got. . . worked over.”

I said, “And if you swallow that accident, we’ll try you on the Easter Bunny. And I’d say that was a deliberate job of face-wrecking, not just an ugly-drunk act. My hunch is the girl was dumb enough to play around and Lorca/ Sapio caught her at it. It would be his early Sapio style, to fix her so no man would ever want her again. But later, as Lorca, he couldn’t afford to have her arising from the ashes of his lurid past, with that face, and lousing up his new goody-goody image, not to mention his election.” I gave her back the photo and watched her slip it into the envelope. “So now we know why he turned his wreckers loose on you when somebody tipped you off to the name ‘Swallow.’ Let’s go visit Mr. Velo.”

We arrived at the tall waterfront building right on time and a sun-burned young man in a very flowery sports shirt, worn over very white pants, came forward to help us out of the taxi and steer us to the private elevator at the rear of the lobby, which took us straight up to the penthouse.

There were a couple of men at the door, also dressed in a casual way, but their attitude was not quite so casual. One of them followed along behind us as our tanned young guide led us through the gleaming apartment and out onto the sun roof, where a very brown old man awaited us in a wheelchair under a green plastic awning that shaded a table set for three. The man who had followed us hurried past and whispered in the old man’s ear.

I said, “If it’s the gun that’s bothering him, you’re welcome to it, Mr. Velo. I’ve been assigned to protect the lady; but I’m sure she’s quite safe here.”

I opened my jacket invitingly; but the old man shook his head quickly. “They only do what they are told to do,” he said. He waved the man away and the young guide as well. When we were alone, he said, “You’re Helm? Also known as Eric, ha! From W, ha! So many tricks and codes and ciphers, like little boys playing Blackbeard the Pirate. And the little newspaper girl who is so tough; my soldiers were impressed and they don’t impress easily. Come here, girl.” Eleanor stepped forward, and the old man reached up and touched the faint scar on her lip with a bony brown finger. “They said you’d taken a beating, but I see it’s better now.

I was glad I could help. That was not a nice thing. You would like something to drink? You, Helm?”

A buzzard, Eleanor had said, but she’d gotten the wrong bird. This was not a scavenger but a predator, a very old and very dangerous predator, a totally different bird of prey from the aristocratic lady hawk I’d once known. The body was shrunken inside the light loose slacks and shirt that looked almost like pajamas, and the face was skull-like under the leathery brown skin; but the menace was still there in the fierce hooked nose and the hooded brown eyes that watched and weighed without a hint of senility. We had our drinks, brought us by a statuesque golden blonde in very snug violet trousers, worn so low that the suspense was almost unbearable. Her breasts were restrained, if you’ll excuse a bit of exaggeration, by a rudimentary violet brassiere that obviously wasn’t up to the job. We talked about the flight we’d had across the Gulf Stream, and the fine weather, and the sailboats out on the water we could see from the penthouse patio, and the sportfishing boat Velo still owned but didn’t get out on anymore, doctor’s orders.

“Ha, that doctor,” he said. “One day soon I will tell the boys to put me on the boat and strap me in the fighting chair and raise for me the biggest marlin in the world, and when I have killed myself fighting that big fish they must cut it loose with my thanks. Ha, these doctors who want to keep us all living after the machinery is no good any more. There are too many people in the world; the least they can do is arrange for the old ones like me to self-destruct comfortably when the time comes and make room for the new ones. But the big fish will do the job for me. Not a bad way to go, ha! Now we eat, and then we talk business. Help me with the chair, girl. Not you, Helm. I prefer to be pushed around by the pretty ladies, ha!”

It was an act, he was doing his moribund-old-man routine and watching us carefully meanwhile and making up his mind: there was no doubt in my mind that he had a pretty good idea what I’d come for. The blonde served us, teetering on five-inch heels, and it was hard to decide if the inadequate brassiere was going to give up the unequal struggle before, or after, the precarious pants fell down around the ankles. I saw Eleanor watching me with that prim, disapproving look women always get watching a man reacting in a perfectly normal way to perfectly normal age-old stimuli, without which reaction the race would long since have become extinct. The blonde made an unnecessarily intimate business of pouring my coffee, and one of her elaborately madeup eyes winked its incredible lashes at me, letting me know that there was a real girl—mischievous and perhaps a bit malicious—inside the efficient decorative robot.

“So,” Giuseppe Velo said. “That will be all, my dear. Leave the coffee, we’ll help ourselves. All right, Helm. What is it you want from old Seppi Velo?”

“Manuel Sapio,” I said.

The silence went on for quite a while after I’d spoken. Velo stared at me hard across the table with those hooded eyes. Abruptly, as if dismissing me and the nonsense I’d just spoken, he switched his attention to Eleanor, addressing her politely,

“We are supposed to be evil men, living for nothing but evil, Miss Brand,” he murmured. “Selling young ladies into white slavery. Teaching school children the delights of marijuana and cocaine and heroin. Intimidating innocent storekeepers and poor downtrodden prostitutes and robbing them of their hard-earned wages. If we play golf, it’s only to arrange a wicked political deal on the course. If we go skiing, it’s only to hold a secret meeting at the lodge with our fellow gangsters and racketeers. If we go fishing, it’s merely to scout out that area of ocean or river for a future drug delivery.”