Assignment — Angelina (15 page)

"I would kill her, if I had the true courage. I have been thinking of it all afternoon. She brings mad thoughts to my mind. But we cannot get rid of her, Slago, because it is all her money. She had financed all this. Why? I know she never truly loved me, but she helped me come across the border to the West. She has her own plans, her own goals. Do you know how much she hates this country? She thought she had great talent that was once rejected. She told me one night, in London, how she was given an acting part, a good part in a great show, and then she was kicked out for another actress because the other actress had a man who put money into the production. So she gave it up and left, with her bitterness and her hatred, and she came to Europe. All of this is her idea, Slago. She is after something she will not talk about, but I don't know what it is."

"I thought it was simple," Slago said. "I thought we were all after just one thing — money."

"She wishes for something else."

"And you're sure you don't know what it is?"

"I can guess. I do not want to talk about it."

"Maybe you better talk about it," Slago said.

"She is using Mark. She is using you and me. She is smarter than all three of us together."

"Nobody's smarter than the knife. That cuts 'em all down to fish bait. Keep talking, Erich."

"No, I have said enough."

"You said too much and not enough. Tell me, Erich."

Corbin looked up and saw Slago's face and he remembered who and what Slago was.

At a little before seven, Angelina sat on a stool in the bar of the Belmont Hotel and sipped straight rum from a shot glass. She hoped Durell would not worry about her. She hoped he understood how she felt about Pete, which had very little to do with how she felt about Durell. It was something she owed Pete, she told herself, and it didn't matter that Sam had other ideas about how to handle them. Sipping the rum, she recalled what he had said about abandoning her if she didn't obey his orders. But she couldn't believe he would do this. She knew him too well; she remembered too much about him. Remembering, she smiled, the languid warmth of a bayou afternoon probing deep inside her.

They were here in this ratty hotel, the men who had killed Pete Labouisse. She was not afraid of them. All her life, she had known how to maneuver men to satisfy her own whims. She had given little, actually, and it was not her fault if her face and body promised so much. ! She had long ago discovered that men always jumped to the same conclusion about her, but they never found out the truth until she had gotten what she wanted from them. And what she had always wanted until now was very simple. She wanted money.

At least, this was what she had wanted until Sam came back. Now she had to admit to a certain amount of confusion. She was still in love with him. For Sam, it was all only a pleasant memory, a warm area of patterns that made him what he was today. But she felt sure she could make him love her again. Once this was over, there would be time. She would make him love her, and then things would be the way they used to be. So if she could hurry things up, instead of just waiting and watching, the way he wanted to do it, then she could settle things sooner.

Angelina finished the rum just as Slago returned to the hotel. He came in alone, moving slowly, and he turned straight to the bar, just as she had hoped he would.

Angelina felt a quickening of tension, but she put the shot glass down with a steady hand, Her face was lovely and serene, reflected in the bar mirror. There were two men at the far end of the bar, arguing about baseball, and a middle-aged woman with a Martini held in a deathgrip in her ringed fingers. Slago took a stool two removed from her and ordered rye and then looked up under his heavy brows and saw her in the mirror.

For a moment nothing changed in his broad, flat face. His brush of salt-and-pepper hair and his big, powerful hands were the things Angelina remembered.

She smiled at him.

He looked at her, and there was a flatness in his eyes that momentarily turned her stomach to jelly. She kept the smile there, working at it, trying hard to get across to him what she wanted. He didn't understand. She saw shock and then disbelief, and then fear and rage, all mirrored fleetingly in those pale eyes in the mirror.

He got up and took the stool next to hers and said in a hoarse whisper: "You're dead, sister."

"Do I look it?" Angelina asked.

"You're fingering me, huh?"

"For the cops? No."

"Where are they?"

"I'm alone. Can't you see that?"

"I believe that. Like the moon is green cheese. They move in now, right now, and you're dead, right here at this bar."

"They're not here. I'm alone. I didn't know whether you'd recognize me or not. We're a long way from where we saw each other last."

Slago wet his lips. His heart still pounded from the shock she had given him by showing up here. He looked at the bartender, but the man was down at the other end of the bar, entering the baseball argument with his two other customers. The woman with the Martini had a drunken fixity in the way she held her glass and stared at nothing. Slago turned his head on his thick neck. He looked into the lobby, he looked through the Venetian slats on the bar window at die dark street. He looked back at Angelina.

"I don't get it"

"I'm here on business."

"What business?"

"We'll talk about that later," Angelina said. "Buy me another drink. Just rum. Cuban, please."

His mouth was open. He was sweating. She had him, he thought. Seeing his confusion, Angelina felt elation until she told herself to be careful, reminding herself that this was the man with the knife, and he had done that thing to Pete, and there was no telling what went on inside that skull of his.

"You saw me at Moon's," Slago said. "I had my hands on you and you got away. Now you're here. How come?"

"I told you. I traced you because of business."

"What business? Who are you?"

"I want to make a deal. May I have that drink, please?"

He didn't understand it. In Slago's world, a woman served only one purpose. You called for them when you needed them, and then you put them aside and forgot them until the next time.

"We'll drink upstairs," he said. He wondered if Mark was back yet. He had left Erich uptown with the station wagon. "We'll talk business, all right." He felt a trembling in his bowels. He put his hand on Angelina's wrist and exerted pressure. Not much. Just enough to hurt her. "Come on, sister."

"My name is Angelina."

"And you're alone," he said flatly.

"That's right. Let go of me."

"Come on."

She stood up. He kept his hand on her wrist. She didn't let the pain show through. It wasn't the pain that bothered her. It was the hatred. She didn't know if she could keep it pushed down where he wouldn't see it yet. She wanted to kill him — slowly, the hard way, the way he had killed poor Pete. She didn't want it to come impersonally, from the law. She wanted him to know who was the cause of his death, she wanted him to think about death coming for him. If he knew her as a person, as an individual and not just the blank face of justice, then it would hurt him more and she would be satisfied.

"You don't have to force me," she said quietly.

The pressure on her wrist relaxed a little. Nobody paid any attention to them as they crossed the dingy lobby to the elevator.

Mark wasn't back yet. Slago closed the door, turned the key in the lock, and then, with no warning and no change in his face, he suddenly flung Angelina across the room toward the bed. She stumbled and fell across it, lost her handbag, slid to one knee on the floor, and pulled herself up again.

Slago leaned back against the door. He looked at her legs. "Now, talk."

"Is this the way you always do business?"

"It's the way I do it with you."

Angelina straightened her skirt. One of her nylons had a run in it. She picked up her handbag. He hadn't thought to take her bag away yet. He wouldn't find anything in it, anyway. The knife was still strapped high up inside her thigh, where not even the flare of her skirt as she fell had revealed it.

"You're Slago, aren't you?"

"Keep talking."

"I'm not sure if you're the one I ought to talk to. You're just the muscle. Big Socks told me about you and Fleming. He doesn't know about the Corbins, except that you four are together."

Slago said, surprised: "You know Big Socks Johnson?"

"I've done business with him back home. A sort of sales representative, you might say."

Slago blinked his mean little eyes. "Did he send you?"

"No. I want in. On my own."

"In on what?"

"On what you people have. On how you cracked the bank."

"Why should you get in?"

"Because I know who you are."

"You won't get a chance to talk about it now," Slago said.

"I've already talked. With pen and paper, on a letter to the law. If anything happens to me, if I don't get back to somebody who's waiting for me, the letter goes to the law."

Slago laughed. "That's pure corn."

"It still works."

"So you think you can jack in because you know us?"

"You don't have any choice," Angelina said. "Besides, I can help. Now let's be civilized and have a drink and talk about it."

Slago wished Mark was here. Mark would know what to do with this one. He opened and closed his hands. He made them into hard fists, enjoying the pull of the muscles up his arm. Maybe she was bluffing. She looked cool and smart, though. She was a lush piece. He didn't miss any of that, either. He had heard about the bayou women. This one was smart, but she was only a woman, after all. He made up his mind, watching her take a cigarette from her handbag and light it. The room was quiet. A shabby room in a shabby hotel, filled with people who avoided trouble like the plague.

Angelina saw the change in Slago s face. For a moment it puzzled her. She was sure she had convinced him of two things: that she wasn't fingering him for the police, and that she would carry through her proposal. She watched the way he moved away from the door. His thick shoulders were hunched and his head was pulled into his neck. Something in his eyes looked unnatural.

"Sweetheart, you made a big mistake," Slago said hoarsely. "We ain't stayin' here long enough for any letter of yours to give us any trouble."

"Lets have that drink," Angelina said.

"Shut up and listen. Who sent you? Who's your friend with the letter? Is it that Durell?"

"I just came to talk business in a friendly way," Angelina said. She knew this was all wrong, because she now sounded defensive. All she wanted was for him to busy himself with the bottle. When he wasn't ready, that's when she would do it to him. The shock of the first blow with the knife would make him helpless. After that she would talk to him, tell him who she was and what she intended to do with him. But she took a step backward, toward the bed, and she knew this was wrong, too. "Maybe we'd better wait until Fleming and the Corbins show up," she said.

"You don't think I can handle you, sister?"

"It isn't that. I..."

He slapped her. His move was quicker than she had expected, so quick that the full force of his heavy hand crashed across her cheek and nose. She dropped her handbag. He kicked it aside. He put both hands out and crushed her breasts and pushed her and she fell back on the bed in an agony of pain. She tried to kick at him, but he laughed softly and then he caught her leg and pulled her half off the bed. Her skirt slid up. All the way up.

He saw the Bowie knife strapped to her thigh, and he laughed.

All at once, Angelina knew that this one was different from any other man she had known. And with the knowing, there came a terror that was also different from any fear in the past. She had made a mistake. She had been too sure of herself, certain that Slago was just a man, like any other man when it came to being controlled by a woman. She saw the true blankness in his laughing face, the way his mouth hung open. She tried to get the gleaming Bowie knife.

That was a mistake, too.

His strength was incredible, and he enjoyed using it. He took the knife from her with an easy twist that sent pain screaming up through the shock of his hand that violated her. She twisted and fell to her knees before him. He had her arm pulled up high behind her then, forcing her head and shoulders down, and he raised his knee and crashed it against her face and then let go of her arm. She fell backward, half under the bed, and tried to crawl away from the screaming pain. She wanted to scream, but she couldn't. Her face felt broken. She felt his hands on her, ripping her clothes away. She felt him pick her up, his fingers digging into her flesh. She bounced on the bed.

"Come on, baby. You wanted to wrestle," he said.

And he said: "Knives are my business, baby."

She saw he had the Bowie knife in his right hand. His left hooked her brassiere, broke it, flung it away. She couldn't breathe. There was a crushing weight on her chest and she saw the ceiling move, fading away into a bright violet shot through with red, a color that wriggled and flooded violently down upon her like a rain of blood. She screamed then, but she didn't hear the sound.

"Who's your friend with the letter? Is it Durell?"

His voice echoed violently inside the dark chamber of her mind. There was no room for it, no room for anything but her panic and the red pain he was inflicting on her. She saw her hands beat against his looming face. Her fists seemed futile, as if they belonged to some stranger, flailing without conscious volition. They were puny against his sullen, maniacal strength. How could she have been so wrong? She should never have left Durell; he had warned her. She had been so sure that her way was right, that they were only men, after all.