Hazards (18 page)

“Okay, now I’ve heard of it,” I said. “So what?”

“Every stone came from a Colombian mine, and it is the property of the government of Colombia. It was on display in Bogota until two nights ago.”

“Until you stole it,” I suggested.

“That is such an ugly word,” said von Horst. “We
emancipated
it.”

“That’s an even uglier word,” I said.

“Emancipated?” he asked.

“No—‘we’,” I said. “Who is this ‘we’ what emasculated it?”

“Emancipated,” he said. “The Pebbles were under extremely heavy guard, so I had to enlist some help.”

“How much?”

“There were four of them to begin with.”

“You added more?”

He shook his head. “The police subtracted one. Poor Meloshka.”

“Meloshka?” I repeated. “Is that a man, a woman, or maybe something else?”

“Meloshka Krympjyntoveitchsk,” he replied. “A wonderful man, small, quick, elusive—he would have made a great running back in your American football.”

“Forget my American football and tell me about your Colombian Pebbles,” I said.

“Well, it was impossible to free the Pebbles from captivity without setting off alarms, and since Meloshka was much the shiftiest of us, we gave the Pebbles to him while we led the police on a wild goose chase. Four wild goose chases, in fact.”

“So this Meloshka ran off with your emeralds,” I said.

“Absolutely not, Doctor Jones,” said von Horst. “He was a man of honor. He knew the Pebbles were too hot to handle right now, so he put them in a safety deposit box, then passed the name of the bank and number of the box on to me.” He shook his head. “Poor Meloshka. The police shot and killed him not ten minutes later.”

“So you’ve got the information?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Well, then, you know where the Pebbles of Jupiter are.”

“Generically,” he replied.

“What’s this generically nonsense?” I said. “Either you know or you don’t.”

“I know they’re in Bogota, and I know they’re in a safety deposit box,” he said. “But I don’t know what bank, and I don’t know what box.”

“When did you forget how to read?” I said.

He turned his lounge chair over on its side, reached into a hole he’d slit in the bottom of it, and pulled out a piece of paper. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “
You
read it.”

I took a look at it. There were two or three letters I recognized, but I sure as hell couldn’t make no sense out of the rest of them.

“All right,” I said. “You’ve had your joke. Now tell me where the Pebbles of Jupiter are, or I’m leaving.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “This was written in Meloshka’s native tongue—but I don’t know what country he came from or what language he speaks.”

“Why don’t you just take it to the local college?” I said. “They got to have someone who speaks languages what’s got hardly any vowels in ’em.”

“Because I would rather split the emeralds two ways with you than four ways with my partners,” he said, which certainly seemed in keeping with my own thoughts on the matter. “They know Meloshka was shot near the Casa Medina. They suspect that he saw me before he died, but they don’t know it for a fact, so they are watching my every movement, waiting for me to retrieve the jewels. “

“So you want me to go to the college for you and get this thing translated into something resembling English?” I said.

He shook his head. “At least one of them will follow anyone who leaves my room. If they see you heading to the university they’ll know you have the paper with you, and your life won’t be worth a plugged nickel.”

“Well,” I said, “suppose you tell me how I can get ’em if I don’t know where they are?”

“They’re perfectly safe wherever they are,” said von Horst. “No one can retrieve them without knowing the bank, the box number, and the name under which the box is registered, and that’s all on this piece of paper and nowhere else.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to follow his line of reasoning. “Your partners don’t know where they are, I don’t know where they are, you don’t know where they are, and you don’t want me to go over to the college. What am I missing here?”

“I have a friend in Medellin, a Professor Jablonovitch, who is an expert in Eastern European languages. We will mail the paper to him, and for a small fee he will translate it for us. Then, at our leisure, perhaps four or five months from now, when the heat is off, we’ll liberate the Pebbles of Jupiter.”

“I’m still missing something,” I said. “You got the paper, and you know this professor. So where do I come in?”

“I’m being watched day and night by my partners,” said von Horst. “The instant I leave the building they will accost and strip-search me.” Suddenly he grimaced. “I
hate
being strip-searched, especially by Pedro el Flor.”

“Pedro the Flower?” I said.

He nodded. “They searched me on my way to the jail, and they will search me every time I leave this hotel.”

“So you’re stuck here forever,” I said. “Or until they die of old age.”

He shook his head. “I’m leaving for Buenos Aires next week. They will search me one last time, and conclude that I do not have the paper with me. Then, after Professor Jablonovitch receives it and has had time to translate it, I’ll stop by his house in a few months, get the translation, and eventually send you back for the emeralds, since they’ll still be watching for me.” He walked to a desk, pulled out an envelope that was already stamped and addressed to Jablonovitch, put Meloshka’s note in it, and sealed it. “Can I trust you to take this to the post office and mail it for me?”

“Why not just leave it at the hotel desk and let them do it?”

“I can’t be sure my partners haven’t gotten to them. But once it’s mailed, it’s safe. I’ve used a phony return address, so that once it’s mixed in with the other mail they’ll never be able to spot it.” He held the envelope up for me to see. “One or more of them will follow you when you leave here, but if you don’t head toward a bank or the university, they’ll wait to see what you’re up to. All you have to do is drop this off, and then just go about your daily life, such as it is, until we’re ready to move.”

“And we split fifty-fifty?” I said.

“Of course.”

“Okay,” I said. “Give me the envelope.”

He handed it over. “Take great care with it. It contains our future.”

“I’ll be back to let you know the post office has got it,” I said, walking to the door.

“I’ll be waiting,” promised von Horst.

I shoved the letter into a pocket, walked out the door, and climbed down the stairs to the lobby. There was a couple of disreputable-looking characters sitting on the furniture, staring at me, and off in a corner I saw a beautifully-groomed young man wearing a pair of pink satin pants and a matching shirt, scarf and shoes, and I knew he had to be Pedro el Flor.

I walked out the door and headed off down the street, stopping to window-shop just long enough to see that I was being followed. I didn’t let on that I’d seen him. Instead I stopped at a local bar and had a few beers, and finally the guy who was tailing me must have figgered if I was in possession of anything valuable I’d be off doing something about it, so he got up and went back to the hotel. I stuck around another half hour, went into the men’s room (which was lit by candles) long enough to steam open the envelope, then snuck out the back way and headed off to the university.

It took me an hour to wade through all the red tape the secretaries hurled at me, but finally I wound up in the language department, and I was introduced to a little bitty bald-headed specs-wearing guy named Doctor McGillicuddy. I told anyone who would listen that I felt just fine and didn’t need no doctor, and he explained that he wasn’t no more of a doctor than I was, that Doctor McGillicuddy was just easier to pronounce than Expert Translator McGillicuddy.

“Now, where is the cipher?” he said, reaching out his hand.

“I ain’t got no cipher,” I said, pulling out the sheet of paper. “All I got is this here conundrum what nobody seems able to read.”

“Let me see it,” he said.

I handed it over.

“One of the dead Slavic dialects, I suspect,” he said, walking over to his desk, where he plumped himself down and opened up half a dozen big thick books. He looked from one to another, then started scribbling under each word. Finally he looked up at me, frowning.

“Is this some kind of joke?” he demanded.

“Not to the best of my knowledge,” I said. “Why?’

“Because this is what it says:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Sugar is sweet

And so are you.
”

“Are you sure there ain’t no address and box number on it?” I said.

“Of course I’m sure!” he snapped. “Now get out of here and stop wasting my time! And take
this”
—he crumpled up the note and flang it at me—“with you!”

I caught it and left the room. On my way out of the building I was about to toss it in the garbage, but then my prodigious brain kicked into high gear, and I figgered that von Horst
knew
I was bright enough to lose his partners and make my way to the university. And
that
meant he knew I’d open the envelope and find someone to translate it. And that’s where the old thinking machine ran into a stone wall, because if the letter was a phony, why did he give it to me? After all, unlike his partners,
I
wasn’t threatening his life and limb. I’d been peacefully minding my own business in a Bogota jail cell. If he paid my way out, he needed me for
something.
And if it wasn’t getting the letter translated, then what was it?

I mulled on it for another half hour, and all that happened was that my head started hurting, so I decided that the thing to do was go back to the Casa Medina and confront von Horst. When I reached the lobby I didn’t see Pedro nor his two friends, which gave me a very uneasy feeling, but it wasn’t half as uneasy as when I pounded on von Horst’s door and didn’t get no answer.

I went back down to the front desk and asked when he’d be back, and the clerk just shrugged and said he didn’t know, that von Horst had just brung his tab up to date, turned in his key, and walked out the door.

“What about them three guys what was living in the lobby here?” I asked.

“That Pedro was such a cute one,” he said with a wistful smile.

“Did they leave with von Horst?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

“You want to tell me what that means?”

“He walked out the door, and a moment later they began following him,” said the clerk, “but about ten minutes later they came back looking very disgruntled and asked if he had left a forwarding address.”

“Did he?” I asked, not surprised that he’d been able to lose them.

He shook his head. “No, Señor.”

I walked to the front door.

“Señor?” he called after me.

“Yeah?” I said.

“If you see el Flor, give him my regards.”

Then I was out in the street, trying to figure out where von Horst would have gone. If he was staying in town, he could just as easily have stayed right at the Casa Medina, so I figgered he’d flown the coop. I couldn’t see him doing any work himself, which meant he didn’t drive out of town. And there wasn’t more than two flights a day from the airport, and it wasn’t much worse than even money that at least one of them would land a little early, like against the side of a mountain. That meant the likeliest place to look was the train station, so I moseyed on over to it and asked if Erich von Horst had bought a ticket earlier that day.

“Erich von Horst?” said the cashier. “No, I would remember such a foreign name.”

“You’re sure?” I said.

“Absolutely,” he said. “In fact, we’ve had only one foreign traveler all day. He bought a first class ticket to Medellin.”

“You
sure
he wasn’t named von Horst?” I insisted.

“I am certain of it. He had a long name, very difficult to pronounce.”

Suddenly I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and held it up for him to read. “This look familiar?” I said.

“Professor Jablonovitch!” he exclaimed. “That was the man!”

I thanked him, then retired to a bar filled with friendly ladies of quality to do a little serious thinking. If I had any doubts before, now I
knew
there was something about that letter that von Horst needed. I uncrumpled Meloshka’s note and held it over a candle to bring out any hidden messages, but there weren’t none and all that happened was I accidentally set the cuff of my shirt on fire. Dousing it with tequila just made it blaze all the brighter, but eventually the bartender came over and tossed a bucket of water on me. I was kind of jumping around, wagging my arm like unto a bird preparing for takeoff, but all the time I was thinking, too. Von Horst had to know I’d find someone to translate the note, and he knew I was brilliant enough not to destroy the letter once I’d heard the translation, so as I saw it, this was a chess game between two of the finest intellects on the planet.

I stared at that letter, and stared at it, and then stared at it some more, and for the life of me I couldn’t figger out what kind of scam von Horst had in mind. I knew I was holding the secret to the location of the Pebbles of Jupiter, but I kept coming up blank.

Finally I decided to go back to the Casa Medina once more and see if there were any hints in his room. As I walked in, there was a new clerk on duty, and the old one was just heading for the door, resplendent in his tuxedo.

“Got a heavy date?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “I don’t think Pedro weighs more than one hundred and forty pounds.”

“Well, good luck to you,” I said. “Before you leave, tell your pal behind the desk that I left something in von Horst’s room and I need to retrieve it.”

He told the new clerk to give me a key, and then he was on his way out the door and I started climbing the stairs to von Horst’s suite. I let myself in, checked all the surfaces—tables, cabinets, nightstands—and didn’t find nothing. All the drawers were empty too. So was the closet. And the medicine cabinet. I was just about to leave when I damned near tripped over a waste basket that was by the front door, and suddenly I saw a crumpled piece of paper in it. I bent over, picked it up, straightened it out, and read it. It was a paid receipt for services rendered, and it came from the Gonzales Brothers Photography Studio over on Avenue La Esperanza.