Stiletto (7 page)

Grotesquely the witness slid forward, face down on the table, his hands knocking the chips away from him, his face coming to rest on a pile of them.

A woman screamed. Jordan lifted the Twister’s head. His eyes were open, expressionless. Jordan dropped his hand. “Help me get him out of here!” he snapped.

The bodyguards moved quickly. They lifted the Twister expertly and started toward the assistant manager’s office. There was a brief moment of hysteria. But only a moment.

The calm monotonous voices of the house men spoke up, quietly reassuring. “It’s all right, folks. The man just fainted. It’s all right.”

Such is the promise of Las Vegas—the free money, the dream of tomorrow—that in a moment the wheel began to turn again and the man was all but forgotten by those who had sat at the table with him.

That is by all but the croupier who was fired the next morning for stealing five thousand dollars from the pile of chips that had lain in front of the Twister.

They turned to look as the men hurried past them carrying the Twister. Barbara looked up into Cesare’s face.

His eyes were cold and shining, his mouth was slightly open as if in a twisted smile. He turned to look after them then back to her.

A shiver ran through her. “Why do you look like that?”

His face softened suddenly and his lips turned to a real smile. “I was just thinking that they have everything figured here. No matter what you do you can’t win.”

He took a deep breath. The pain was in his gut now. He could hardly keep from crying out with it. “Come,” he said. “There is nothing for us here.”

***

The telephone on Baker’s desk began to ring again just as he started to leave the office. He walked back and picked it up.

It was Jordan. His voice crackled excitedly through the telephone. “They just killed the Twister!”

Slowly Baker sank into his seat. “Killed? How?”

“Stiletto! The same way they got Adams.” Jordan’s voice almost broke. “I’m sorry, George. We were on him every minute. I don’t know how they did it. There were over a thousand people in that casino tonight.”

Baker’s mind suddenly cleared. “Look,” he said. “Call me back in an hour. I want to call Miami and make sure that Vanicola is okay.”

He pressed down the button on the phone then let it come up again. The operator came on. “Get me Special Agent Stanley in Miami Beach,” he said.

They know the witnesses, he thought to himself while the call was going through. They know. All the secrecy, all the preparation would be for nothing.

They know.

The room was silent except for the soft whisper of her sleep. He stared up at the ceiling, his eyes wide. It was so many years ago he had almost forgotten.

The war. There had been nothing like it since. Everything else was a substitute. A substitute for death. The great danger, the great excitement, the feeling of power that ran through your body with the knowledge of the death-force inside you tearing its way out, bringing you closer to your own destiny.

He smiled slowly into the dark, a feeling of well-being permeating his body. He reached for a cigarette on the night table. The package was empty.

He slid silently out of the bed and crossed the room to the dresser, took a cigarette from the package there and lit it. Through the terrace doors the first gray streaks of dawn were lifting the horizon.

“Cesare.” Her voice was a whisper from the bed.

He turned toward her. He could not see her in the dark. “Yes?”

“Open the second bottle of champagne.” Her voice was husky with sleep.

“We already did,” he said.

“But I’m still thirsty,” she said in a small girl’s voice.

Cesare laughed almost inaudibly. “You are an insatiable woman.”

He heard the rustle of the sheets as she sat up. “I can’t help it if I’m still thirsty, can I?”

He laughed again. “I guess you can’t,” he answered and went out onto the terrace.

The night was still and in the distance he could hear the sound of the crickets and the faint dry whisper of the desert wind. The dark blue of the sky was lightening with the thrust of morning. He leaned against the railing looking out into the desert.

She came out onto the terrace behind him. He didn’t turn around. She came up close behind him and slipped her arms around his chest and leaned her head against his naked back.

“It will soon be morning,” she said.

“I know,” he answered.

She pressed her lips to his shoulder. “Your skin is smooth and clean and soft. Sometimes I wonder where all the fierce driving strength comes from. I didn’t know a man could be like you.”

He laughed, turning around. “It must be the wines I drank when I was a boy. The wines of Sicily are supposed to be good for your blood and your skin.”

She looked up into his face. There were some things about him she would never understand. “When you make love to me, why do you always say you are dying?” she asked in a wondering tone. “What a strange thing to say at a time like that.”

He smiled down at her. “That is what we Italians call it. The little death.”

“Why?” she asked. “When everything inside you is bursting open and being born why should you say it is like dying?”

The smile faded from his lips. “Is it not? Is not each birth the beginning of death? Do you not feel the pain of it?”

She shook her head. “No. Only the lifting joy of it.” She looked up into his eyes. “Maybe that’s the difference between us. Maybe that’s why I feel even when you’re closest to me that there’s a part of you that’s far away in a world I know nothing about.”

“That’s silly,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” she said quickly. “Like the way you looked when they carried that man past us. One moment it was like I could feel you inside me, right in that room with all those people. The next moment they came by and you were gone. He was dead, wasn’t he?”

He stared down at her. “What makes you say that?”

“He was dead,” she whispered. “I could tell from the expression on your face. You knew. Nobody else knew. But you knew.”

“That’s a foolish thing to say,” he said lightly. “How would I know?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. But it was the same expression you had on your face when you came out of the building the day we started on our trip. Then when we opened the newspapers on the plane we read about that man being killed in the court around the corner from where we were.”

She placed her head against his chest and did not see the slowly tightening expression of his face. “I don’t have to read tomorrow’s papers to know that the man downstairs was killed. I can feel it. I wonder what it will be like in Miami.”

He wondered if she could feel his heart beginning to thump through his naked flesh. He forced his voice to be light. “Like it always is. Sunny and warm.”

She looked up into his eyes. “That’s not what I meant, darling. I mean will someone die there too?”

The veil was gone from his eyes and she was looking deep into them. “People die everywhere, every day,” he said.

She felt almost hypnotized. “You’re not the Angel of Death, are you, darling?”

He laughed suddenly and the veil was back. “Now that is a crazy thing to say.”

“It’s not really,” she spoke slowly. “I read in a story once about a girl who fell in love with the Angel of Death.”

His hand caught the back of her head and held her close to his chest. “What happened to her?” he asked.

He could feel her lips move against his breast. “She died. When he knew that she knew who he was, he had to take her with him.”

She looked up at him suddenly. “Will you take me with you, Cesare?”

His hand tightened in the long hair that hung down her shoulders, pulling her head back so that her face turned up toward him. “I will take you with me,” he said, placing his mouth brutally on her lips.

He could hear her gasp of pain as his free hand took her breast. She turned her face from him and cried aloud, “Cesare! You’re hurting me!”

He ground her face to his naked chest and moved her head slowly in a widening circle, never stopping the pressure of his hand on her breast. He heard her moan softly and a torrent began to rise inside him. The circle became wider, she was moaning steadily now as she sank slowly to her knees.

She cried aloud at his growing strength. “Cesare! Stop, please stop! The pain, I can’t stand the pain!”

He was smiling now. There was power inside him. And life. And death. His voice seemed to come from some distant place outside him. “It is time you learned, my dear, how exquisite the pleasure of pain can be.”

“Don’t, Cesare, don’t!” Her body began to shiver in a wild convulsion. “I can’t stand the pain! I am dying!”

He looked down at her and let go suddenly. She almost fell, then her hands caught his hips and she clung to him, sobbing, “Cesare, I love you! I love you!”

Miami Beach is a sun town built on a sterile strip of sand along the Florida coast. Each year by an artificial insemination of capital it gives birth to a new hotel. The St. Tropez is this year’s new hotel.

Not far from the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc, the St. Tropez rises eleven stories into the ocean sky in an architectural style vaguely reminiscent of a Picasso impression of the palace at Monte Carlo. The Floridians, who judge beauty by the amount of rental per room in season, call it the most beautiful hotel ever built. The rental per room is eighty dollars a day.

It has a ten-foot-wide beach fronting on the ocean on which no one is ever seen except the tourists in off season. It also has a cloverleaf pool that has been proclaimed as the largest pool ever built. It is completely surrounded by four tiers of cabanas, stepped back so they resemble bleachers in a ball park and do not obstruct the sun. Each cabana is complete with private bath and telephone, card table, chairs and small refrigerator.

By three o’clock in the afternoon each cabana has a gin game going full blast, the players generally sitting in their shorts and swim suits, shielded from the sun they waste at the going rate per diem. Around the pool on long wooden lounge chairs are the sun worshipers, their bodies glistening with oil and lotions, trying to make the most of their already overburdened pocketbooks.

Sam Vanicola was standing at the window of the suite in the St. Tropez, looking down at the pool. He was a big man. Even when he was a punk kid running errands for Lepke in Brooklyn, he was big. He weighed over two hundred pounds then, now he weighed two-forty on his five-eleven frame.

He gave a snort of disgust and came back into the room where three men were playing cards. He looked down at them. “This is a lot of crap!” he announced.

Special Agent Stanley looked up at him. “We got our orders, Sam,” he said genially.

“Orders, borders!” Vanicola snorted. “Look, it didn’t mean nuttin’ when they kept Abe Reles locked up in his hotel room in the Half Moon in Brooklyn. They got to him anyway.”

Stanley smiled again. “How do you know, Sam? He went out the window and they said it was suicide.”

“That’s a horse laugh!” Vanicola replied. “I knew him. That boy was pushed. He’d never jump.”

“Besides,” Stanley persisted. “That was twenty years ago. Things are different now.”

Vanicola laughed. “They sure are,” he said derisively. “Dinky Adams gets his on his way into court, Jake the Twister in a room with a thousand people—and you tell me things are different.”

Stanley fell silent. He exchanged glances with the other agents. They didn’t speak.

Vanicola took a cigar out of his pocket, walked across the room and sat down on the couch. He bit the end off the cigar and spat it out on the rug. He lit it and leaned back, looking at them. His voice was less harsh now. “Now look, you guys. I’m a taxpayer too. The guvviment is spending two C’s a day of my good money to keep me in a joint like this. What for they spending the dough if nobody gets any benefit out of it?”

Stanley got up from his chair. “You’d rather sit in the pokey?” he asked.

Vanicola stared up at him. “Don’t make me laugh, Stanley. You do and I clam up. You ain’t got no more chances left after me.”

“What’s the matter with you anyway, Sam?” Stanley cried out in sheer frustration. “What’ve you got against staying alive?”

Vanicola’s eyes were suddenly serious. “The way I look at it I was dead the day you picked me up. If I didn’t talk you had me on a murder rap; if I did, it would only be a question of time before the boys got to me. Now I’m runnin’ out of time real fast. So why don’t you call up your boss and tell him all I wanna do is spend an hour or two down at that pool every afternoon? I’ll go along with everything else you say.”

Stanley walked over to the window and looked down at the pool. There was the usual number of people down there. Vanicola’s voice came from the couch.

“Nobody can get to me down there. You can cover every entrance. There are only two.”

Stanley turned and went into the next room and closed the door behind him. Vanicola looked over at the two agents seated at the card table. They began to play gin again. He sat there silently, puffing at his cigar.

A few minutes later Stanley came out. He crossed the room and stood in front of Vanicola. “Okay, Sam, you get what you want. But, remember, if you see anything we don’t, recognize anyone, you let us know right away. We don’t want anything to happen to you.”

Vanicola got out of the chair and walked over to the window. He looked down at the pool. “Sure, sure,” he agreed quickly. “I ain’t that much in a hurry to croak.”

Stanley walked back to the card table and sat down. Vanicola turned and looked after him. He smiled but there was no humor in his eyes. “At least I’ll be sure of one thing,” Vanicola said.

One of the agents looked up at him. “What’s that, Sam?”

“Getting a pretty good tan,” he answered. “Ain’t nobody who’ll come to see me when they lay me out won’t be able to tell where I spent the winter.”

***

Barbara was standing on the balcony looking out at the ocean when she heard the telephone ringing in the room. She walked inside and picked it up.

“New York calling Count Cardinali,” the operator said.