Assignment - Palermo (16 page)

“I’m not bored,” he told the girl.

“This is a place,” she said, “where time can be made to fly on wings of pleasure. This is where the best of all possible worlds can come true.”

“For some men,” he admitted.

“Yes. But you are not like most men.” She took off her half-glasses. “My name is Lora Smith. I come from Kansas City. Isn’t that a laugh?”

“I don’t know. Is it funny?”

“Tragicomic. I’ve been studying you.”

“And what have you concluded?”

“You’re too good to waste, damn you. Did you know that Cagliostro, that fabulous man, came from Palermo?”

“No, I didn’t know that. Thank you.”

“So did Uccelatti. And Vecchio Zio.”

“And?”

“You dope, they’re going to kill you. Don’t you know that, either?” She reached out a cool, slim hand. “Come with me.”

“Where?”

“You can wait in my room. Or they’ll do it right here, you poor fool. I saw it happen twice before. And my Ouija board tells me I should save you.”

“When did you consult it?”

“Before you came. I believe in it. Don’t laugh, or I’ll smack you. I’m only trying to help.”

“Why?”

“Because I like you. And I’m sick and tired, and bored to tears.”

“They might decide to kill you, too, Lora.”

“That wouldn’t be any loss,” she said, “except to a few of my very special, very rich, and very aristocratic customers who come sneaking in here to visit me.”

“I think it would be a terrible loss,” he said. “Shut up. I know what you want and I could give it to you.”

“For a price?”

“So I’m the whore with a heart of gold.” She shrugged and smiled. Without her glasses her eyes were a brilliant brown, big and clear. “Yes, for a price. You only have a few more minutes. You’d better believe it.”

“I do,” he said. He stood up. “Let’s go.”

There was no chair in her room, and he had to sit on her chaste-looking tester bed. It was three flights up richly carpeted stairs to her quarters. Unlike what he imagined the other rooms in the crib might be, Lora Smith’s bedroom looked like something out of an upper-middle-class Kansas City suburban house. There were white nylon swag curtains over the windows, a maple Colonial bedstead, a braided New England rug, a Seth Thomas nineteenth-century banjo clock. The walls were feminine pink, the dresser antique white. He was astonished and then decided that the virginal college-

girl atmosphere probably appealed to the Palmeritan aristocrats who patronized her wares. It would titillate their cosmopolitan tastes.

“Oh, God,” she sighed. She did something to her hair, and it' fell in a silvery cascade about her shoulders. She picked up the white telephone. “It will take a little time.”

She twisted her full hips as she stood beside the phone on the dresser, and a zipper began to run automatically down her back along a fine spine and an astonishingly slender waist. Her skin was a golden tan under the silver lame. She talked into the phone in a rapid undertone too fast for Durell’s rusty Italian to interpret. There seemed to be only monosyllables in reply. She spoke more urgently for a few more seconds, then hung up.

“They’ll call back,” she said.

“Who?”

“One of my friends.”

“A business acquaintance?”

“Yes. A very rich and important man.”

“Who?” he asked again.

“It doesn’t matter. We must wait twenty minutes.”

“I’m not so sure—

“God, I’ve been lonely for a man like you.” As she walked toward him the dress came all the way apart in two sections and fell in a soft slither of silver about her feet. She stepped out of it without a pause, with an expertise that impressed him. Her body was shockingly smooth and firm and strong as she pushed him back with a hand on his chest and fell upon him. Her mouth was avid, as if trying to devour him. He had the fleeting thought that she might be after the money in his belt, but her passion seemed valid enough.

“Please,” she gasped. “Oh, please!”

Then she laughed, a small, deep, gurgling sound in her arched throat. She rolled across him, her body as smooth as warm, flowing water. “Darling. Oh, you poor darling.” She reached for something under her virginal pillow.

Perhaps if her firm, golden hip hadn’t pressed so hard against his wounded shoulder as she wriggled and stretched over him, he would not have been warned. As it was, the spasm of pain was too much for the painkiller pills in him. He lurched up with a small gasp, just in time to see her snake the knife out from under the silken pillow.

Lora made a thin hissing sound and plunged the knife at his chest. Her brown eyes were malevolent. She hated him, hated all men, and the gesture was an act of infinite retribution. The blade seemed to scream with light, as if flashed before his eyes, and he twitched aside, and it thudded into the soft coverlet. In an instant he rolled away from her, crouching on the bed as she came up on her knees and drove at him again. He parried with his right arm, caught the impact of her stroke against his wrist, and then swung with his left, heedless of the pain in his shoulder. She was good, quick as a lithe golden cat. He missed, lurched to one side, and the knife went hissing through his sleeve and plunged again into the mattress. He had time for only one more try. His fist made a hard, satisfactory sound as it made contact with her jaw. He did not hold anything back. She was knocked sidewise, her head and shoulders twisting as she slid off the opposite side of the bed, and she landed on the floor with a solid thump. Her flexed hips and sprawled legs still rested on the bed. She did not move.

Durell drew a long, shaken breath and pulled the stiletto from the mattress, broke the blade, and tossed it aside. He crawled on hands and knees across the bed and looked down her long naked body to her face on the floor beyond. Her eyes were closed. A trickle of blood came from a corner of her mouth.

“What for, Lora Smith?” he asked softly.

But he knew the answer already.

There was a back stairway from the third floor down to the main level behind the “reception room” and Madame Firenza’s office. Durell moved quickly, closed the door to Lora’s room, and walked in dark silence down the steps. There was no alarm. Radios played in various other rooms in the crib. He heard a girl cry out. A man spoke in a low voice. Another girl laughed. A glass broke behind still another door. But everything was quiet in the parlor when he returned.

The man with the Dali moustache was gone. The hi-fi stereo player was silent. Most of the lights had been put out except for an eerie blood-red trade lamp in the hallway. Not a girl was in sight.

“Cefalu!” he called.

There was no reply.

The door to Firenza’s business office was slightly ajar. Durell flattened beside it against the wall. A hissing sound, like escaping steam, came from inside. It was someone’s breathing. He went in quickly, using IPE technique, and came up from his crouch very slowly and carefully, his gun ready. Madame Firenza sat behind her modem polished desk as if she had never moved. The noises came from her. Her eyes were like marbles pushed by careless fingers into the dough of her face. They rolled toward him, then toward a corner of the sterile office. Flung like a rag doll into the corner was Michelangelo Cefalu.

His throat was cut from ear to ear.

“WHO?” he asked.

“I did it.”

“Why?”

“He attacked me.”

“
Attacked
you?”

There was more hissing of steam. It sounded as if there was a leaky valve somewhere deep in that mountain of flesh garbed in the lemon silk dress. She laughed and then coughed and sprayed thick gobbets of raspberry drops over her pristine desk. The coughing went on for a time, and then she raised a fat hand and patted her mouth primly, like an old maiden aunt at tea. Durell heeled the door shut behind him. There was no window in this room, and he didn’t like that. He looked at Cefalu again. The taxi driver who had worked for Onan McElroy was very dead. He had the thought that Madame Firenza was dead, too, but she didn’t know it. The establishment of joy was rapidly turning into a charnel house.

“Why?” he asked again.

She spoke carefully, bracing herself with both hands on the desk. “I tried to do as you asked. Why not? I am a free woman. I never feared a man in my life. I made your telephone calls. The nurse who took Gabriella to see Vecchio Zio is not in the city. She has vanished. Perhaps gone to visit relatives in Messina, they say. It is not true. They removed her.”

“ ‘They?’ ”

“The Fratelli della Notte. There seems to be trouble in the Brotherhood. There are always two sides to life, Americano. The right hand and the left, the top and the bottom, the light and the dark. There are two sides to the Fratelli, also, these days. It was difficult to choose. I made the wrong choice.”

“I’d better call a doctor. Where did Cefalu get you?” “It is deep inside. I have no pain. But a doctor will not help me. No doctor would dare come here now, even if it were of any use.”

“Firenza—”

She laughed and coughed again and dabbed at the ruby drops on her mouth. “Did you think Cefalu was your friend?”

“He worked for a friend of mine. He was helping me tonight.”

“You should think about it. When you are finished with me here, you should go to my kitchen in the cellar and eat and drink and think about it.”

“I’m not hungry.” He thought she had lost her wits. “Please go on, Firenza.”

She spoke carefully. “The second call I made was to find the driver who took the child Gabriella to see Vecchio Zio many years ago. This call was more interesting than the first. I have connections, you see. Important men who are torn between fear of the Brothers of the Night and fear of what I can do to their reputations, because they have been clients of mine. It was not too difficult to learn the name of the man who drove Gabriella, long ago, to Vecchio Zio.” “And—?”

“I can still help you, Americano. Why not? Cefalu thought he was stronger than I. While I was talking on the telephone he came to me across the room and stabbed me. He thought I was finished. But my fat, which makes some men laugh and others desire me, saved me. I took the knife he had used, pulled it from my body, and cut his throat with it, as you see. And I am not sorry.”

“You say you learned the name of the driver.” “Of course. He was—how do you say it?—a double agent. Working both sides of the street. It was Cefalu.”

SHE DIED laughing.

It was quiet in the room and all through the house. Durell opened the office door. The hall was empty. He went away from the room with the bar and found the stairs to the cellar. A smell of cooking drifted up the narrow, whitewashed steps. The house was very old, and the stairs creaked as he went down. He had to duck his head under an old, blackened beam at the bottom of the narrow chute. Below, the kitchen was shiny and clean, with a red brick floor, an old-fashioned nickel-and-iron stove, a water pump handle above a wooden, zinc-lined sink, and strings of garlic, rosemary, basil, and tarragon hanging from hooks in the beamed ceiling, which also held netted hams and unidentified bags.

At the big stone, assiduously grinding herbs in a fine old brass mortar and pestle, was Bruno Brutelli. Seated at a table, immersed in a slick and glossy magazine with a photo cover of a racehorse, was Joey Milan.

Durell was beyond surprise.

Thin vermicelli was coming to a boil in a big enameled pot on the stove. The bubbling of water was accompanied by a thin, preoccupied whistling from between Joey Milan’s teeth. Bruno heard him first, turned his huge body, and looked at Durell from under beetling brows. His eyes were calm.

“Hey, Joey, he’s here. Just like she said.”

“What happened to you?” Durell asked quietly.

“We faked out,” Milan said. “We didn’t like the scene on Uccelatti’s yacht.”

“They just let you go?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Are they looking for you?”

“Sure, but some friends of Bruno’s, relatives here in the old country, sent us here. You know how Bruno is. He likes kitchens. We been waiting an hour for you. The madame said you’d be down.”

“What about O’Malley?”

They looked at each other. Bruno made a disparaging sound. Joey Milan began to whistle again.

“They still got him,” Bruno grumbled.

“He didn’t want to come with us,” Joey said.

“And Gabriella?”

Both men shrugged.

“Is she on the
Vesper
?”

“We didn’t see her.” Joey Milan put away his shiny racing magazine. “We talked it over, Bruno and me, and we figured Frankie put his money on the wrong horse.”

“Who are you betting on now?” Durell asked.

“You, Cajun.”

“All the way?”

“Win, place, and show.”

“Then, let’s go,” Durell said.

Bruno protested. “We’ve got time. You can’t get herbs like these back in the States. Or this pasta. I never finished the vermicelli a la putana in Naples.” His ugly face grinned. “I figure this is the right place to cook it. It don’t take the girls long between tricks.” “If we stay here much longer,” Durell said, “it will be your last meal.”

They walked together through the dark alleys of Palermo’s slums toward the bright center of the city. It was ten o’clock. The evening was soft and languorous, redolent with the scent of orange blossoms. The almond trees in the piazzas twinkled with white and pink flowers. Beyond the Piazza della Vittoria they passed the Sclafani and Royal Palaces, built by the Arabs for their emir and later Normanized and rebuilt for Frederick II’s seat of government. They turned right beyond the cathedral, which had been founded by an English priest named Walter of the Mill. The Palmeritans remembered him as Gualtiero Offamilio. At the Quatro Canto they turned left down the Via Maquedo. Durell felt better in the crowds of strollers and traffic.

On the way he explained what he wanted to do. Both men were dubious, but he led them back along the waterfront toward Acquasanta and the Villa del Golfo. An Alitalia jet to Naples shook the stars overhead. There was a constant uproar from motorboats and water-skiers off the beaches, a counterpoint of music from the sidewalk cafes, a hum of traffic along the boulevard.