Chapter I
The Gringo Gets a Job
I was sitting there sketching with a pencil — stub on the marble table-top and rubbing it out with my elbow, when he came over and took a gander across my shoulder. It’s a great habit I have of killing time when I can’t pay for a drink I’ve ordered, for instance, or I want to stay out of the hot sun like I did just then. That sun they have down there at Costamala is nothing for a white man to fool around with. But under the big stone arches of this sidewalk café, which they called Filthy Frank’s, it was nice and cool and shady. So all the dirty looks I was getting from the
This guy that had just come up looked like a big shot; he reminded me of some of my former side-kicks in Chi. He had a headlight on his little finger the size of a walnut, and after he’d been breathing down the back of my neck a couple of minutes he said in my own language, without much of an accent: “You do that very well.”
“You can’t eat it, though,” I said.
“You’re a gringo, aren’t you?” he said then.
“It’s a cinch I’m no Chinaman,” I let him know.
“What’re you doing down here?” he asked next.
“I’m taking a sun-bath on the beach,” I told him — and he knew exactly what I meant, all right. My shoes were in two parts, soles and uppers, I had a week’s back-shaving coming to me, and the sea was three hundred miles away, so I didn’t mean that kind of a beach.
“Why you not bring money with you from your own country?” he wanted to know.
“I left kinda quick,” I told him drily.
“Ah, I begin to understand!” He seemed to get strangely interested all at once. He sat down with me, flagged the
“I never said no to that one yet.”
When the drinks showed and we’d each taken a muzzle at them, the next crack was: “So you are — shall we say, a fugitive?”
Seeing that he wanted it that bad, I paid it off to him for a come-on. Whether it was true or not was my own business. “Had a little accident,” I told him. “Just li’l accident with my trigger-finger. And it seemed there was a gun wrapped around it, and it seemed the gun went off, and it seemed there was a guy in front of the gun, and it seemed he lay down flat, and it seemed there’s a law against that up there, dunno why, so I came down here.”
He looked all around him, to make sure we weren’t being overheard. “Whatever the hell it’s all about, here it comes now,” I said to myself.
“I could use someone like you, a man who doesn’t let a little accident worry him,” he breathed. “What would you say to having another little accident — this time for five thousand pesos to repay you for your, ahem, carelessness?”
“So I had you spotted right along, did I?” I said to myself. I took my time about answering, to give the build-up the right look. “That’s eighteen C’s in our money,” I drawled. “Jack it up a little and I’m in. You gotta remember that I can’t lam out this time, there’s no place else to go from here.”
“Seven-fifty,” he said, as though we were talking about the price of neckties or something.
I gave him a sour grin. “For that ticket,” I said, “I’ll do you a catastrophe, let alone an accident. Now, who do I get careless with — and where do I make the mistake?”
“Not so fast,” he said cagily. “We have to know a little more about you first.”
We, meant it was a combine. “You can call me Steve Willoughby,” I said, “and I sleep on my right side. Now what else d’ye wanna know?”
“All right, Stiff.” Some of the velvet wore off and he started showing his claws from this point on. “Now there’s one thing you better get through your head. Once I tell you who this party is who has the accident happen to him, it’s too late for you to back out, you already know too much. So I’m going to give you until tonight to think it over, and you better make pretty damn sure you don’t change your mind after that — if you know what’s good for you.” He fooled around with his pongee vest, which had big pearl buttons, and managed to sell me an eyeful of a packed armpit holster. “Otherwise you li’able to have a little accident yourself.”
I went ahead drawing as though I hadn’t noticed it. “Pretty up-to-date down here yourselves, aren’t you?” I murmured. “
“Tonight will be time enough,” he smiled sleepily. So I knew by that what he wanted the delay for, to check on me and find out if I was all I seemed to be — and I didn’t like the idea much, in fact hardly at all. “You be here tonight at this same table,” he went on, “and you order a big glass of ice’ coffee, and you lay the straw across the top like this, flat — see? And after that, everything takes care of itself. But I advise you to be here, otherwise—” He snapped his fingers. “I wouldn’t give
“And what do I use for money to order this coffee on?” I said surlily, to stay in character.
“Use this for a retainer,” he said, and contemptuously tossed down a crumpled bill. I pounced on it like I’d never seen one before, then after he’d gotten up and strolled off I calmly thumbed the waiter over and handed it to him. “Leave this table just the way it is and don’t get itchy with that wet cloth of yours until I come back, get me?” I said in Spanish.
“I understand,” he said.
I saw my late table-mate cross the sun-baked plaza and get into a whopping Bugatti parked across on the other side. I waited until the man at the wheel had checked out with him, then I went inside. The back room at Filthy Frank’s had one of the few telephones there are in Costamala. I kept my eye on the table from where I was, while I was getting a connection. I could see it through the tall, arched doorway. I made a funnel of my hand, for a silencer. “This is the gringo. Send one of your
I hung up and gave the swinging door next to me a jab with my heel so it flapped in and out a couple of times. Then I showed up outside again as though I’d just come out from the verminous wash-room. I sat down at a different table and ordered another daisy.
In about ten minutes a government man I knew by sight showed up and sat down where I had been first. He wouldn’t have fooled anyone back home for a minute, but they’re slower on the pick-up down there. His technique was punk and I kept cursing under my breath. He ordered some kind of bilge, and then he kept staring straight down at the table. I expected him to come smack over to me after that, but at least he had sense enough not to. He got up and went inside, and we hooked up in there, on different sides of the swinging door.
“That’s Torres, the son of the former minister of war,” he said.
“I wonder who he wants rubbed?” I thought to myself. This was getting into the upper register now. “What else?” I asked.
“The old man is supposed to have had his father shot during the last revolution.”
I didn’t have to wonder any more, after hearing that. “Just forget about it,” I told him. It was a job up my own private alley, I could see that now — one of the very kind I’d been hired for and brought down here from three thousand miles away to handle — and I wasn’t splitting it with anyone. The poor “old man” couldn’t trust anyone in his own country I had a belly-laugh over it without letting it show on my face. They pick his own bodyguard to be their trigger man! Was that punch-drunk or was
The Costamalan dick mooched off one way, looking furtively all around him — he might as well have had a sandwich-board on his shoulders labeled “I am Operative Number 5” — and I ambled off in the other. I thought it over this way: since Torres wasn’t alone in this, and I had no proof so far whom he was out to get, the only thing for me to do was pull my punches until after tonight when I’d made sure. If it was somebody else he was putting the finger on, it was none of my business, I wasn’t a commissioned member of the secret police force; if it was my employer, that was different. I had to be sure, because their idea of a trial down there is to stand the guy up against a wall and bang, bang, bang! — a mouthpiece was never heard of in that country. A spring just meant a season of the year.
I was probably being watched right now, but the thing was — by who? The plaza was dead, too hot for any of the regular bench-lizards to be out yet. There was, however, a guy standing on the opposite corner running through the winning lottery-numbers pasted up on the wall to see if he’d clicked. He’d been there a little too long, though, he should have found out by now. “So it’s you, is it?” I said to myself, “Well, watch me give you a run for your money!”
I took the
Still, a guy with white skin was bound to stick out like a sore thumb in that town, so I knew I’d be picked up again in no time, maybe by someone else, and this was only a breathing spell. The place was stool-riddled. They wanted to check on me, and the idea was not to make it tough for them, but easy. So I used the breathing-spell to give up my own half-way decent quarters, which a beachcomber wouldn’t rate, brought away my razor in my pocket and my differential in a leg holster, like a garter around the calf of my leg. Then I found a mangy, run-down rat-hole in an alley called “La Libertad”; it smelled of stale chili and mouldy plaster, but it was just what I was looking for.
I bought a fifty-centavo room for five pesos. “I’ve been here five days,” I told the guy that ran it.
He didn’t think I had. “This four-fifty extra says I have,” I snapped, so then he agreed I had and probably blamed it on marihuana. “Somebody’s going to stop in between now and evening and ask you,” I told him. “What’s more, I haven’t paid a cent; you don’t know whether to kick me out or turn me over to the police.
They traced me in less than an hour. I could hear the voices down in the flea-bitten patio, and tuned in through the crack of the door. “Si, a gringo,” the owner was saying, “we have one here. For five days now, and he hasn’t paid a cent! Mother of the angels, am I running a charity ward?”
“Not bad, greaseball,” I grinned. I got a look at them over the railing. One was the same guy I’d ditched in the cab, the other one was new to me. Well, I had three of them rogues-galleried now — and Torres’ driver made a possible fourth — but I knew there must be more of them than that in the daisy-chain.
I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning my little buddy from Chicago with the tail of my shirt, and then I went back to Filthy’s in time for what they called the “refresco-hour,” which was when everyone in town showed up there to get tanked. The place was blazing with lights and they were packing them in, but I got my same table back and bought a coffee. They bring it in a glass down there and you could spot what it was all the way across the room. I laid the straw flat across the top of the glass, and then I sat back and waited for the pay-off.
You saw everything there but ladies and gentlemen, the place is known from Nome to Cape Horn and back again; half-breed generals with swords and cocked hats, little man-eaters with tall combs in their hair, Chinese cocottes drinking absinthe, Indian girls with bleached blond hair, the dregs of the earth. Then into this mess, like an angel from another world, stepped a white woman, a lady, and they all soft-pedaled their noise for a minute. She was more than that, she had on the flowing black garb of a religious order, a nursing sister of charity, and a market-basket hung on one arm. In the other hand she held a small receptacle, and went around from table to table asking for contributions for some hospital or something, like the Salvation Army used to do in our saloons in the old days.
They all loosened up, their kind always do, and she got around to where I was sitting last of all. It was a beautifully-timed performance but I didn’t tumble for a minute. I’m no piker, but I was supposed to be a derelict and I wasn’t shelling out and giving myself away that easy. I shook my head uncomfortably while she stood there whining something about the House of the Good Shepherd, with her eyes on my coffee-glass and the transverse straw. Then suddenly at the tag end of her spiel, in the same sing-song voice, she murmured under her breath: “Go to 14
I waited long enough to make it look right, then I blew. Outside, just beyond the radius of the bright lights at Filthy’s, the same Bugatti as earlier in the day was standing. The driver furtively unlatched the rear door, backhand, and jerked his head at it. I got in and we slipped away smooth as oil and headed up the
Chapter II
Rendezvous with Rebellion
The house was on the outskirts of the town, set far back from the street and screened from view by leafy banana trees and other foliage. You wouldn’t have known it was there at all except for the wall that enclosed the grounds; not a light showed. The driver pulled a bell-rope for me and a peon in pajamas came shuffling out and undid the chain that braceleted the outer gate. I followed him up a tiled walk and into the place.
Torres was standing waiting for me on the other side of the door; I noticed he had his differential ready in his hand, a snub-nosed Belgian peacherino, the kind you load at the butt. “So you ordered coffee,” he said, putting it back under his wing.
“I ordered coffee,” I agreed.
“Lucky for you,” he said dryly. “Come in, Stiff.” He motioned toward a door off the main hallway. There were three of them in there, heads close together. Two were the same ones who had checked up on me at the rat-hole. The third was another big shot, I got a load of a diamond crown on one of his grinders when he opened his mouth to talk.
“Amigos,” Torres introduced me, “this is Stiff, who likes the climate down here better than in his own country.” The way he pronounced my name was beginning to jar on me. I wondered if he really knew what it meant in slang; it might yet end up by being appropriate for all I knew.
He handed me a pencil and a square of paper tacked to a drawing-board. “I got them specially for you,” he said, “Now show us what you can do.” He brought out a photograph clipped out of a newspaper and laid it beside me. It was of an old man with fierce white mustaches, wearing a visored army cap. I recognized it right away and got a grip on my chair with one hand. “Go on,” he urged, “copy this picture. But quick, just the sketch, the cartoon, eh? I time you.” He took out his watch and held it in his hand.
It was a pushover; I had a rough outline of the photo down on paper in something under a minute-and-a-half. He passed it around among them. “Do another,” he said, “and see if you can cut it down to a minute, leave out all the shading and fancy business.” I did it in fifty-five seconds.
“Still too long,” he said. “It’s got to come out in thirty seconds. No more than ten strokes of the pencil.” I showed him I could do that too.
He turned triumphantly to the others. “What did I tell you? This man is just what we need, eh? I knew that the minute I watched him at Filthy’s today! All we have to do is fix him up with a clean shirt and a counterfeit staff-artist’s press card — they won’t even search him going in! Being a damned gringo, he can get closer than any of us could without arousing suspicion.”
I had everything I needed to know now except two things — where and when. I wasn’t kept in the dark long. “Know who this is?” he asked me, fluttering the newspaper-likeness.
I shook my head. “Never saw him before in my life.”
His eyes narrowed to malignant slits. “Savinas, President of the Republic. Savinas, dog of a tyrant, butcher, assassin! You’re going to meet him face to face tomorrow night at the Villa Rosa, the Pink House, on the hill. He’s giving a banquet to all his generals to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution. You’re going to ask permission to draw a sketch of him for your paper back in the States. He’s as conceited as a peacock, he’ll be tickled silly! You’re going to stand in front of him and draw him, like you did just now. And when he picks it up and looks at it, you’re going to put a bullet through his head!”
Four pairs of eyes were watching me. There was an automatic lying on the table, no one’s hand was on it but it was pointed my way. “Either, or—” it said. My own was down under my trouser-leg. I could have had an itch down there that needed scratching, for instance, or a shoelace that needed retying — it would have been easy enough. But I was under pretty definite instructions and it was up to me to follow them out. My orders were to protect the old man from harm, and nothing else; not to make a pinch or try to clean up single-handed. I was his personal bodyguard and not his chief of police. And I’m funny that way, I do just what I’m paid for and nothing else. There’s a gent in Alcatraz right now could tell you the same thing. Besides, by tipping off these four in the room with me, I might be letting forty others get away clean, and the whole thing would only start over again next chance they got.
“Well,” he said, “what’ve you got to say?” And his fingers, drumming the table, inched nearer the automatic.
To have taken what he had just paid off to me without a jolt, would have been a dead give-away; they would have tumbled in a minute that I was phony if I’d appeared willing to go through with it that easy. Even a stumblebum derelict would have shied at the kind of proposition this had turned into. So I squawked, not too much and not too little, just enough to make it look right.
“Seventy-five C’s,” I said with a lopsided smile.
For a minute his paw closed on the automatic, and I knew I could never get down to my hoof in time so I didn’t try. But I must have stacked up just right for their trigger-man, I guess he hated to waste me. He banged open a drawer instead and took out some stuff in an envelope. “Here’s a forged Costamalan passport, here’s your ticket for the Pan-American night-plane that touches here at midnight tomorrow night. My Bugatti will be waiting outside the grounds for you. It can get you over to the airfield in ten minutes flat — there’s not another thing on wheels in the country that can catch it. All you have to do is remember which door you came in by in the Villa Rosa; the chief electrician there is in with us. When he hears your shot, a fuse will ‘accidentally’ blow, every light in the place will go out, it will be half an hour before they go on again. What more could you ask?”
He put the gun away. “I’m glad we came to an agreement,” he said smoothly, “I would have hated to have to bury you in the garden outside — my servants just got through spading it.”
I looked politely bored. “And there really is a seventy-five hundred, or zat just a figure of speech? I’ve only got twenty-four hours I can swear to, so I’d like to get the feel of it,” I told him. But what I really wanted was to get out and turn in my report to the old man as quick as I could, so he’d have time enough to take whatever precautions he needed to, and unloading a little of the blood-money around town came in handy as an excuse for getting away.
But they weren’t the suckers they looked. “You can have it right now,” he said, “but I don’t know what good it’s going to do you, because you’re not going any place to spend it. You’re staying right here.” And he took out a rubber-banded wad of it and pitched it at me.
I pocketed it — for evidence. “So what am I gonna do,” I yelped angrily, “sit here and play solitaire with this all night?”
“What’d you have in mind?” he said. He was fiddling with the gun again, this time leaving it in the drawer. I saw one of the others bring one out too. Then he must have pushed a button without my noticing it, for the driver was suddenly standing behind me, blocking the doorway.
“I wanna take a bath in cologne-water,” I said. “I wanna lie there cracking champagne-bottles in the tub. I wanna sleep in silk pajamas and light my Perfecto with a five-peso bill. This is my last night on earth, damn it all; I gotta lot of back splurging to catch up on!”
“You think we’re crazy?” he snapped. “You think this town hasn’t eyes? This afternoon you’re flat broke, tonight you start buying half the town drinks — and talking your head off. I know your kind! Savinas’ police agents pick you up in a minute, ask you where you got the sudden money, they have ways of making people talk. You can do everything you want to do right here under this roof. Take him upstairs and lock the door!” he snapped at the driver. “Then go out and bring in a case of Mumm’s 1915, and a pair of silk pajamas from one of the Chinese stores, and a box of Perfectos, and a deck of cards — anything he wants, I don’t care!”
That being the way it was, I shrugged. “You win,” I said. It was a cinch I’d get out of here before the night was over, anyway, so why gum up the works now?
I followed the driver upstairs to the second floor, to a room at the rear, overlooking the garden. The windows had no bars on them, and it wasn’t much of a jump down from the little balcony outside. Getting out was all right, but I also had to figure on getting back in again before they missed me. I decided I’d put the lam off awhile, until they all started pounding their ears.
The driver started checking off the things I wanted on his fingers. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ll write you out a list.”
“I can’t read,” he grinned apologetically.
I stopped short and gave him a look. Then I grabbed a scrap of paper, scribbled on it in English: “Can’t sleep, give me something that will make me.”
“Here,” I said, “take this with you. Y’know that English pharmacy near Filthy’s? Show it to the guy in there, he’ll give you something that’ll scent up my bath. You wouldn’t know how to ask for it otherwise.”
Torres could read English and might intercept it, but he’d think I wanted it for myself. Who wouldn’t be jumpy the night before they were slated to kill a president?
He went out and locked the door after him. I went right out on the balcony and scanned the garden. It was so choked with banana-fronds and herbage it was hard to gauge how high the drop would be from where I was, so I decided the old bedclothes-rope stunt would be the best bet after all, instead of risking a broken neck. And right while I was looking, the tip of a cigarette glowed red down there in the dark. Probably the peon-gatekeeper was out there, set to watch me. I went back in again as though I’d just come out for a breath of air.
The driver came back again lugging all the stuff for my “celebration.” He also had a small pill-box labeled: “Only one to be taken at a time.” I stuck it in my pocket and got the cover off it after it was in. I could feel a lot of little things like aspirins.
He locked the door again, on the inside this time, and shoved the key into his pants pocket.
“So you’re staying around?” I said.
“I’m sleeping in here with you tonight — boss’ orders,” he told me.
I shrugged.
“You’re sleeping in here all right,” I said to myself, “but not with me, Sun-tan.” I busted the neck off one of the champagne bottles against the wall and got it into two glasses. You couldn’t notice the three little pellets dissolve in all that fizz. I don’t think he’d ever seen champagne before anyway.
We clicked glasses. He made a face. “Bitter,” he said.
“Y’gotta get used to it,” I answered. I got most of mine down the collar of my shirt. It ran down my sleeve, but he didn’t notice it.
“Open up the cards,” I said, “and I’ll teach you how to play rummy. We need somebody else, though. Who’s that guy down in the garden? Get him up here, there’s too much champagne for two of us anyway.”
He went out on the balcony and whistled down. “Hey, Jose,” he whispered, “want to come up and have a drink?”
“Tell him to climb up on the outside,” I said, shuffling. “They’ll never know the difference.”
By the time the gatekeeper had shown up in the room with us, I had his nightcap all ready for him. Then the three of us sat down and I started to teach them.
Chapter III
The Old Man
I let them stay right where they both were — both sound asleep in no time — just took the car-keys away from the driver and emptied both their guns, then put them back again. I could hear them still jabbering downstairs, so I didn’t try getting out the front way. I let myself down over the balcony on two sheets knotted together. I got out by a side gate in the wall, went around to where the Bugatti was, got in at the wheel. It made quite a racket turning over, but I counted on the bunch of greenery in front of the house muffling it. I lit out for downtown and the Villa Rosa.
It was about ten when I was ushered up the long marble staircase to the old man’s private office. He came in a moment later from his sleeping quarters in a dressing-gown, held out his left hand; the right had been shot off in some long-forgotten revolution.
“Well, it worked,” I said. “They swallowed the beachcomber disguise hook, line, and sinker! I told you it was better to find out what we were up against, than sit back and wait for it to happen. This way we know what to expect, at least!”
“And that,” he sighed wearily, sitting down across the desk from me, “is another attempt on my life, no doubt?”
I explained it all to him, how I’d been hired, too. “Tomorrow night, right at your own banquet table here in the Pink House,” I said. “You’d better call the whole thing off until you’ve rounded them up—”
“To do that would be to warn them that we have found out,” the old man explained immediately. “They would scatter and disappear. There is no use making the arrests until I am sure of getting them all, if one stays out of the dragnet that means the whole thing starts over again in a week’s time! I have a better idea. The banquet will take place, so will the assassination — but with blank cartridges! Then, in the darkness and confusion—” He leaned toward me, dropping his voice.
“Boy!” I couldn’t help blurting out admiringly, “no wonder you’ve stayed on top twenty years! They think you’re out of the way, and they take ever this place, give themselves away — then you come back with the loyal part of your army, surround them — and you’ve got ’em all in the hollow of your hand!”
He nodded and said: “You hurry back, now. You can see how important it is that they do not suspect you; nobody but you must be sent here to make this dastardly attempt, otherwise I am a dead man!” He placed his hand upon my shoulder and looked me in the eyes. “
“You’re a brave old gent,” I told him bluntly, not being much on presidential etiquette. “But you’re not taking a chance this time, you’re dealing with a white man now! Are you sure you can count on that regiment down at Santa Marta?”
“They’re full-blooded Indians,” he said, “they’d die for me! It’s the half-breeds who are not to be trusted.”
“Then I’ll get you down to them tomorrow night, right in their own Bugatti. Y’better slip on that bulletproof vest I brought you from Chi, just to be on the safe side — and don’t let your valet see you do it.”
And going down the stairs after I’d left him, between sentinels that would sell out to the highest bidder, I thought to myself: “It must be tough to have to wait till you’re seventy before you find a man you can trust!”
I stopped in at the guard room on the ground floor and put in a requisition-slip he’d initialed for me for a round or two of blanks. They kept them there for firing salutes in the palace courtyard on holidays. Then I climbed back in the Bugatti and headed back where I’d come from. If nothing went wrong, we stood a good chance of outsmarting them between us, him and me. I’d get him safely to that loyal regiment of his tomorrow night if it was the last thing I did; what went on after that was none of my business — he was running the country, not me.
In front of 14, I braked the Bugatti exactly where I’d picked it up, right over the same gasoline-drippings. Then I went around and slipped into the grounds by the side gate, which I’d left ajar. The house was dead, the only light that showed was from the rear room that I’d left, and I could hear snores coming from there. The rope of sheets was still hanging from the balcony, like a white vine in the gloom. Getting up it wasn’t as simple as getting down it had been, but the gardener had managed it without any rope so why shouldn’t I with one?
I was winded by the time I rolled across the balcony-rail and landed on my feet. I hauled the sheets up after me and took a look in. Their Nibs were both dead to the world, sprawled there producing nasal music. One of the two electric globes had burned out during my absence and the corners of the room were in shadow. The door however was still securely locked. I removed the driver’s gun and refilled it with blanks, put it back again. Then I cracked the gardener’s, and just as I had that reloaded, I suddenly froze, bent over him.
There was a little round, cold steel mouth pressing into the back of my neck, just below the hair-line. Sort of kissing me, if you want to be poetic about it. Another one came up against me on my right side, and then a third just over my heart. There hadn’t been a sound in the room around me.
It was Torres’ voice that spoke. “I told you he’d come back. The way he left the gate down there open showed me that.”
I turned slowly, elbows out. The three of them were on top of me, and in the background was the woman who had contacted me at Filthy’s, hood thrown back now and eyes glittering with malice.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Pull your triggers!” she rasped. “You saw me with your own eyes! If he hasn’t already crossed us, he will tomorrow night! He knows too much. Are you going to let him go on living?” She meant it, too.
I was sweating like a needle-shower, not so much because I was afraid of being killed but because I had bungled the whole thing up the way I had.
Torres silenced her with his hand. “One thing at a time. If he has already betrayed us, then killing him won’t save us. If he hasn’t, it will be easy enough to silence him — for the rest of his life. Call the Villa Rosa. One of the presidential secretaries is on my pay-roll. Find out if the banquet has been cancelled or not, that will tell the whole story!”
They frisked me, but missed the leg-holster. They brought out rope and nearly broke both my arms fastening them wrist-to-elbow behind my back. They didn’t waste their time asking me where I’d been or what I’d done, just waited for word to come back.
The one who had gone to find out came running back again. “We’re safe! No orders have been given to postpone the banquet!”
“Then he hasn’t told them yet!” Torres gloated. “Well, we’ll make sure that he doesn’t! Stuff something in his mouth. Help me to get him down to the car. There’s a better way of getting rid of him than killing him here in the house—”
They all turned to look at him inquiringly.
“The House of the Good Shepherd,” he smiled evilly.
My blood froze, and for the first time I knew real fear; I was wishing now they had shot me down a while ago! I hadn’t been in the country long, but I already knew what that place meant, for all its high-sounding name. The State Institute for the Insane, a madhouse with three-feet thick walls, from which no one had ever yet been known to come out alive! I knew how they treated the insane down there, no restrictions, no experts on lunacy to make an examination. Once you were in you were as good as dead! And Torres just had pull enough to have me railroaded into that hell-on-earth, under a false name so that even the old man couldn’t get me out again. And he’d be dead by tomorrow night anyway, shot down by somebody else in my place.
I put up a terrific struggle, but all I could use was my legs, and that didn’t get me anywhere. They dragged me backwards down the stairs and dumped me into the car with my mouth gagged. “The more violent he is, the better!” I heard Torres chuckle. “He won’t last a week in that place!” He turned to the woman, whom they called “La Vibora” — the snake! “You lower your veil and come along with us. You can sign the commitment papers, as his nurse. We’ll book him as a homicidal maniac; the director there is a personal friend of mine.”
They got in with me and we started off, Torres himself at the wheel since his driver was still out. I reared violently, trying to throw myself out of the car and finish myself under the wheels, if I couldn’t do anything else, but one of them brought the butt of his gun down on my head and I slumped and went out. The last thing I heard was Torres saying, “We’ll go through with it tomorrow night just the way we intended to. Send somebody else there with the same sketches this damned gringo made; if he keeps his head lowered until he’s right in front of Savinas the old fool will never know the difference, he’s near-sighted, anyway!”
When I opened my eyes I was still in the back seat of the car, but it was standing still now, and Torres and La Vibora were missing. Greasy, age-old walls loomed near by in the dark, without a single break in them, without even a slit for a window. The House of the Good Shepherd, I remembered hearing, had been the old prison of the Spanish Inquisition three hundred years ago. And now worse things probably went on within it than even then.
A minute later they came back again, with two guards and the fat, sleepy-eyed director. “Here he is,” Torres said. “And I warn you he is a very dangerous type. His obsession is that he has been hired to kill some very influential man; sometimes it is Napoleon, sometimes Julius Caesar, sometimes — may the saints protect us — even our own esteemed beloved president! He escaped, I understand, from an asylum in his own country—”
“Well, he won’t from here!” the director promised softly, with a cruel gleam in his slitted eyes. He motioned the two guards. “Take him in — the necessary papers have all been signed by Señor Torres and the holy sister.”
I tried to hang onto the door handle with my bound hands as they lugged me out of the car feet first, and one of them promptly brought down a short leather-bound truncheon on my already aching skull. I groaned, but didn’t lose consciousness a second time.
A heavy iron door clanged ominously behind me, cutting me off from the world outside, and I was taken into the director’s office and stood up between the two guards like a mummy. He showed his true colors now that Torres and his party were gone, came in after us snarling ill-humoredly.
“Getting me up in the middle of the night like this — as though I haven’t got enough of them on my hands already!” he raged.
He sat down at the desk, banged open a huge book, yellow with age, began filling in an entry, consulting the papers those two devils had signed as he did so. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said. “John Doe, homicidal mania, eh? You better put him by himself, or he’ll kill some of the others. Seventeen’s empty, I think, since that last one hung himself, isn’t it? Throw him in there. If you have any trouble with him, give him the water cure. No knives or forks with his food, of course; pass it into him chopped up. Take away his belt and that necktie—” He threw down the pen, leaned back and yawned. That’s the way they did things.
They were already dragging me out between them, still tied and helpless. Along endless corridors they hauled me, past locked chambers of horrors where voices jabbered, laughed shrilly, or howled. All I kept thinking was, “They gotta leave that gun on me! If they only leave that gun on me—” I knew enough not to struggle, not to antagonize them in any way. There was just a bare chance that they’d overlook it.
They swung open a squealing iron door, so low that you had to stoop to get through it, hustled me in between them. The only light came from the corridor outside. One of them stood over me with his truncheon poised while the other one busied himself freeing my arms. The circulation was all gone. I couldn’t have made a move with them if I’d wanted to.
“Go get him a rig out of the storeroom,” one said.
“At this hour?” the other objected indolently. “Let him stay in his own clothes for tonight!”
They turned all my pockets inside out, to make sure I had nothing sharp-edged hidden about me, took my belt, tie and shoelaces off, then backed warily out, taking care not to turn their backs on me. My numbed right arm was already stealing lopsidedly down toward my leg, but they beat me to it; the cell door had crashed closed and the key turned in the lock before it got there. I heard their footsteps die away outside, and I was left there in a greasy six-by-four cell, without even a cot, just a pile of straw over in the corner. The door was the only opening in it, and the two small grilles at top and bottom of that — one for spying on me, the other for passing food through — were the only means of ventilation.
I stood there upright in the pitch-darkness of that awful place, quivering, tense, and I was holding something pressed to my lips with both hands, kissing it. Something that wasn’t made to be kissed — a Colt automatic, still warm from my leg. It was all I had, in that darkest hour of my life, with the noises of bedlam percolating through the slitted door from outside. It was going to get me out of there, one way — or the other. I knew if I stayed there longer than twenty-four hours I stood a good chance of going whacky myself. A place like that will do that to you.
Then I hid it in the straw. To leave it strapped to my leg would have meant losing it; they’d muffed it the first time, but they wouldn’t when they came back in the morning to put me into asylum-garb. I lay down close by it, keeping my body over it, and the long ghastly night slipped away. The horrible noises at least died down after a while, as the inmates fell asleep.
It was when they started growing louder again that I could tell it must be morning. I had no other way of knowing. A little later the murky yellow that faintly outlined the door-slits changed to gray all at once, so I knew the light in the corridor had been turned off.
The lower of the two openings had tipped me off long ago to the way they’d feed me. It was a small hinged slot that was pushed inward from the outside, without opening the door at all. To simply shoot through it and kill the guy was worse than useless; he might fall down out of reach of my arm and I’d never be able to get the key off him and let myself out. Then they’d simply gang up on me out there and it would be all over. On the other hand, if I waited until they came in to me, to get my clothes, there would almost certainly be two of them to handle. They didn’t, apparently, carry firearms, just those wooden bludgeons.
The problem solved itself without my having to decide. The door-flap suddenly cracked open without any warning, then slapped shut again long before I could get the gun out of the straw and make a move over toward it — and there was a wooden bowl of beans and bread standing there on the floor. So my only chance was when they came in here, the feeding was done too cagily to be able to take advantage of it. I stayed there motionless, sprawled on my side, my right hand buried in the straw just within reach of the gun — waiting, waiting.
Hours went by, and they didn’t come. They must have forgotten they’d left me in my own clothes, or maybe they were too lazy to bother. I hadn’t closed my eyes, but who could think of sleeping in the fix I was in? A hand abruptly snatched the bowl of junk away, thinking it was empty, then finding that it wasn’t, put it back, and I heard myself being cursed out and threatened from the other side of the door. I just lay pat and didn’t make a sound. I figured that was the noon feeding, overlooking the fact that this wasn’t exactly the Ritz. About fifteen minutes later the yellow came back again in the corridor and showed me I’d been half a day slow — it was evening already. And in a little while the banquet would be getting under way! And in a little while after that, somebody uninvited would show up at that banquet! And here I was!
I would have pitched the bowl of food out, to rile them, get them to come in to me, but the slot in the door was latched or something on the outside, I couldn’t budge it. I had a bad time after that. Suppose they didn’t come near me for days, weeks even? And then suddenly, just when I’d given up all hope, there was a tinkering at the door — not the slot this time, but the lock itself.
By the time they got it open, my finger was fish-hooked around the hidden trigger. Two of them came in together, the way I’d figured they would. One just had his truncheon ready, the other had a suit of bughouse-garb slung over his arm. The straw rustled as I shifted the gun to cover the foremost; any fool would have known which one to take first.
They closed the cell door after them before doing anything else, which was just as well. I still didn’t make a move, just lay there breathing heavily.
“Stand up!” the one with the club said.
I didn’t stir.
He swung the club back to bean me one so I’d obey him. There was no question of fair play in this, the odds were too great against me. And there was more than just my life at stake; they’d put me through a night of hell that doesn’t bear dwelling on. So I gave no warning, didn’t even uncover the gun, just blinked my eyes.
It must have seemed to them as though a firecracker exploded in the straw. The one with the club, who was the nearer of the two, opened his mouth and then dropped vertically with it still open that way. The other one turned to get at the door and get out, and I got him in the back of the head. When I peered out into the corridor, it was empty, so I closed the cell door after me and started down it. I could tell by the twittering going on in near-by cells that the gunshots had been heard, but whether the sound would carry any distance in that thick-walled place I doubted.
Anyway, I met no one as far as the turn in the corridor, which seemed miles away. I hugged the wall, in shadow half the time, and of course my hand wasn’t empty nor down at my side. Around the turn I saw a staircase. Whether it was the one they’d carried me up the night before I could no longer remember, but this was no time to be choosy. I started inching down it. My shoes, yawning wide open without laces, were a real danger, threatened to trip me at any moment. On an impulse I stepped out of them and went on just in my socks.
Chapter IV
Death Joins the Party
It was the wisest thing I could have done, it did away with the scrape of shoe leather on stone, silenced my tread, although I hadn’t been thinking about that when I did it. At the foot of the stairs there was another passageway, wider than the one above. At the end of that, in full sight of me, a guard was dozing on a chair tilted back against the wall. If I’d kept my shoes on, he surely would have heard me. This one was armed, too; a Mauser rifle leaned back against the wall, cradled in the crook of his arm. Two cartridge belts full of steel shells criss-crossed his chest. But the big double door just beyond him, with a chain at the bottom and a chain at the top, was the door to the outside world.
Between him and me, though, a brightly lighted side door yawned wide open, splashing yellow on the mouldy wall opposite it. This one I remembered from the night before: the director’s office. And from within came a very faint sound, the scratch of a pen on paper, but enough of a give-away to show that it was occupied. A minute later there was the sound of some one clearing his throat
I could have tried squirming past the opening flat on my stomach, hoping his desk would hide me. But I figured he had the keys, not that fellow at the door. And I figured he had a car too, even if it was only a model-T. So I lounged around the comer of the doorway and sighted my gun at the middle of his face. He looked up and turned from coffee color to green.
He could hardly make the distance between us, he was wobbling like jelly. He had the keys in a big ring fastened at his wrist, I could hear them jangle.
I got him out into the passageway after me, where I could keep an eye on both of them at once. Then I warily closed in edgewise on the sleeping guard, keeping my gun on the director. The guard gave a sudden sigh that told me he was waking up.
I gauged the distance I had drawn the director away from the sheltering doorway of his office. Eight, ten yards. He couldn’t get back in again in time, if he bolted. So I swung the gun backhand, and brought it down violently on the guard’s bare head. He reared and I struck a second time, then he slumped, fell off the chair with a thud. I stopped the flying director right at the office threshold, drew him back toward me with the gun for a magnet.
“Open!” I ordered. He stepped over the prostrate guard, got a key out, fumbled at the ponderous lock with hands that waved like ribbons. I closed in behind him and bored the gun into his spine.
The chains clanged like tocsins when he swung them back out of the way, and the door itself squalled loud enough to wake the dead. But if there were any other guards besides the three I had eliminated, they were off duty, sound asleep somewhere. “You first,” I ordered, and I closed the door after us.
I gave a sudden sharp intake of breath as I came out. A crescent moon was riding the sky. There wasn’t even any afterglow left from the sun any more. The banquet must have been in full swing long ago!
“Quick, your car,” I said, prodding him. “Where do you keep it? Don’t stall now, or—”
Garages weren’t very common down there; it was under an open shed around from the main entrance. “You are at the wheel,” I said, and got in after him. It wasn’t quite a T-model, but it wasn’t much newer, a ’26 Chevvy or something. It ran, that was all that mattered.
“The Villa Rosa,” I said; “make it
It was further out than I thought — everything seemed to be against me — all I kept gritting was “Faster! Faster!” while the damned thing rocked from side to side over the dirt road. But finally after about twenty minutes or so, the lights of the town began to show ahead of us, in a big semicircle. I didn’t need him any more after that.
“Open the door,” I said, and I took the wheel over with one hand, motioned him out with the gun. “Jump — and go to hell!” I slowed just enough so he couldn’t be killed, then sped on again, leaving him back there on his face. A minute later the lights of Costamala had blossomed all around me.
The Villa Rosa was blazing with them when I finally braked outside the grounds, vaulted out and tore for the entrance. It took the fact a minute to sink in — the fact that this meant I was in time and not too late. The pistol shot, they’d told me, was to be the signal for plunging the place in darkness; this meant it hadn’t been fired yet. I didn’t even take time off to be thankful, just kept going.
There were plenty of horse-drawn carriages lined up, and even decrepit taxis, but only a few private cars, and the Bugatti stood out from these like the Normandie from a crowd of tugs. It was off by itself to one side, and I could make out the outline of someone sitting waiting in the front seat. So he was in there already, whoever he was!
Somebody had been passing out champagne to the sentinels at the main entrance, that was all that saved me — rushing at them the way I did, out of the dark, with a bared revolver in my hand. Their rifles had been laid aside and they were too slow on the uptake; by the time they were rushing for them and yelling at me to stand and deliver, I was halfway up the marble staircase already.
The hum of dozens of voices was coming from the big banqueting hall on the second floor. There were no soldiers on guard there, only a couple of plainclothes men. I knocked them both apart before they even saw me coming, and looked in and saw what was going on.
It hadn’t happened yet, but it was going to in about a second more. A long table loaded with flowers, wines, and dishes ran the entire length of the room, from where I was to the opposite side. Halfway down it sat Savinas, and directly in front of him, facing him across the table, stood a man busily sketching on a drawing-board. I couldn’t make out who he was at that distance, and I didn’t give a rap. All I saw was that he had on a thick pair of glasses, to partly conceal his identity. I glimpsed the old man’s face — yellow with fear, glistening with sweat; he was edged as far back in the chair as he could get, unable to save himself. He knew what was coming, knew something had happened, knew they had sent someone else in my place — and yet couldn’t lift a finger in his own defense, surrounded on all sides by men he couldn’t trust.
Right while I stood looking on, the man finished the sketch with a flourish, turned it around and offered it to Savinas. I saw his other hand reach toward his coat, as though to put the pencil away — there was no time to get over there, to call out, to do anything. I simply aimed at the broad part of his skull, above the ear, and fired. I saw him jolt upward, rise about an inch on his toes, and then the whole room plunged into darkness around me, before I even saw him fall. The bribed electrician had simply mistaken the signal, that was all.
Instantly there were two other shots just behind me, from the plainclothes men on door duty, and I dropped, unhit, and swerved to one side. The table was the only thing that showed faintly in the pitch-blackness. I found the edge with my hand, kept my palm on it for a guide, and ran down the length of it, bent double. The body of the would-be assassin, lying in my path, which tripped me and sent me sprawling on my face, showed me where Savinas was — otherwise I might have run too far past him to the lower end.
I picked myself up, reached across the table, and grabbed someone’s shoulder — the
“Boss!” I breathed in his face, “It’s Stiff! Duck underneath to this side. I’ll get you out of here!”
His shoulder sank from reach, not an instant too soon. “Death to the tyrant!” a voice bellowed beside the chair, and there was the hiss of a saber cleaving the air and a splitting of wood. I fired, once, at where the voice had come from, and heard a groan and — crazy sound — the tinkling of a lot of medals and decorations as they swept the table-top.
A moment later a hand gripped my leg, and the game old man had crawled through unhurt to where I was. I hoisted him to his feet. “Keep your head down!” I cautioned, and began zig-zagging toward the door, towing him after me by one hand — the only hand he had.
The big banquet-hall was a pandemonium, chairs going over, glasses breaking, cries of “Lights!
I swept him after me over to the other side of the room, in a big arc, then went at the door obliquely from that direction, sort of offside and out of range. They hadn’t had presence of mind enough to close the door yet, but just as we got to it a match flared in Savinas’ face, and a shot went off so close to him I expected to see him fold up at the end of my outstretched arm. I fired at the face behind the match and it went out. The old man was still on his feet as we got out on the stair-landing. “Thank God you wore that vest,” I panted.
We went down the stairs hugging the wall. Forms brushed by us rushing upward, never guessing who we were. The last hurdle was the pair of sentries at the main entrance, who rushed together with crossed rifles to bar the way as we showed up. They saw his face, and hesitated. “In the name of the President of the Republic, stand aside!” I thundered. It worked. He was still alive, so he was still on top, and the winning side was always their side. They stiffened to attention, but with their mouths still open.
I let go of him and headed for the Bugatti on my own, to get there quicker. It was lighter out here, there were street-lights beyond the grounds shining in, and Torres’ driver must have seen me coming. He had the car-door open and was out on the running-board firing away before I could close in. I didn’t feel anything, and thought I was crazy for a minute, I wasn’t wearing any bullet-proof vest. Then I remembered the blanks I’d put in his gun the night before; they’d seen me do it, but maybe they’d forgotten in their excitement to tell him; and he’d been drugged at the time.
I held my fire and closed in on him. By that time he was down on both knees already and his gun had gone over his shoulder. “
“I am the Devil!” I told him. “In! You’re driving us to Santa Marta!”
Savinas came tottering up, at his last gasp by now, and got in the back seat. “Stay down on the floor,” I warned him. I crowded in next to the palsied driver. “Now aim at that front gate, and never mind waiting for them to open it — this thing has steel fenders!”
The gate burst in two with a terrific clang just as a crowd came spilling out the front steps, peppering away at us and yelling, “He got away! Stop him!”
There wasn’t any chase; nothing in the country could have even kept that Bugatti in sight once it got going.
I turned around after a while and said, “You’re alive, anyway. Why don’t you chuck it all and come back to the States with me?”
He was a game old man, all right. “President I am!” he said, “And President I stay! It will all be over before the sun comes up.”
We got to Santa Marta an hour before midnight, and routed the loyal regiment out of its barracks. I hung around just long enough to make sure what kind of a reception he’d get, and hear him give his orders. I needn’t have worried. They yelled their heads off for him, and started back at a double-quick trot then and there, breathing smoke and flame.
“Get in, Stiff,” the old fellow beamed, his good arm around my shoulder. “We go back now and watch the — how you say — mopping up.”
“You can drop me off at the airfield on the way,” I said. “I got a seat coming to me on the Pan-American, may as well use it now as any other time.”
“But Stiff,” he argued, “I will make you my chief of police, I will name streets after you and put up statues of you — the country is yours!”
“You don’t need me any more,” I said.