Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (28 page)

For a moment I thought it was Di, back early from her trip.

But then lightning lit up the room, and there they were, stepping inside: two men, standing in their own puddles, their dark suits soaked, big men—one taller than the other, but both wide, massive specimens.

The first one wore a toupee which was plastered to him like a dark, many-fingered hand gripping his head; his glowering, battered, boxer’s face, with small, glittering wide-set eyes, flat nose, hairline mustache, was like a parody of those Inca masks.

The shorter one was no less massive and his eyes were slits in a round, slash-scarred face.

Both had big guns in their big fists—automatics, possibly .45s—the kind of gun that makes a small hole going in and on the way out leaves a picture window to your insides.

They were the men I’d seen with Lansky at the Biltmore.

They were, I had no doubt, the men the late Arthur had seen at Lyford Cay on another wind-swept, rain-lashed night.

All of this I gathered in the particle of a second that the lightning gave me before the room settled back into pitch black.

They were moving toward my bed, to their left as they came in; the tangle of sheets and blankets may have looked like a person, in the nonlight—and they hadn’t seen me stretched out on the couch, when they entered in that flash of lightning, looking instead toward the bed where even now they were firing their automatics, the thunder of the guns, the orange fiery muzzle flashes, drowning out the storm as they killed the mattress, sheets and blankets, making scorched smoky holes.

My nine-millimeter, goddamnit, was in my suitcase, over by the bed, over near them; I lifted a lamp off an end table and pitched it at them. The heavy base caught the short one in the forehead, and he yelped and tumbled back into his partner, who saw me charging and fired at me, but was too tangled up with his pal to aim and managed only to shatter a window.

Then I was on them, pushing them to the wall, the groggy round-faced short one waking up as I clutched his balls in one hand and squeezed and yanked and as he cried in agony, screeching like a parrot, his partner behind him did an awkward dance, trying to get around him to me, where he could shoot me or club me or anything, but I had snatched the short one’s .45 from limp fingers and fired it past the screaming smaller man, aiming for the tall one’s face but missing, in the commotion, and succeeding only in shooting off his left ear, which flew off his head and landed in a sodden scarlet lump against the wall, splattering, sticking there like a big squashed bug.

Now they both were hollering, but the one whose nuts I’d squeezed had recovered enough to elbow me in the midsection, and I tumbled back onto the bed, rolled off the other side, onto the floor, but retaining the .45 even as another .45 from a howling one-eared asshole was chewing holes in the wall just over my head behind me.

I leapt up to return fire, but after one round the goddamn thing was empty, and I threw it and caught somebody somewhere, because I heard a scream as I hit the deck again, with more slugs zinging overhead.

The darkness allowed me to crawl on the wood floor toward the couch, which could provide cover till I got to those double glass doors, where I could get the fuck away from these guys. Without a gun, there was only so much damage I could do.

But when the next stroke of lightning lit the room, I found myself exposed, crouched like a dog on the floor, bare ass in the air, with one of them at my right—the tall one, whose little eyes were big as he pointed the .45 with one hand and held on to the bloody place where his left ear used to be with the other—and standing right in front of those glass doors that were my escape route was the shorter one, the slits of his eyes widened into something savage and furious now, his hands held out like claws. He looked like a sumo wrestler in a wet business suit….

I dove into him. He was the unarmed one, after all, and I’m not sure whether we shattered the glass of the doors, or whether the one-eared man behind us did with his barrage of gunfire, but shatter it did as we flew through the disintegrating glass into the rain, and I was nicked by some shards, but the fat human cushion below me was really cut to shit, a bloody punctured unconscious thing, probably dead. I scrambled off him, the rain splattering my bare flesh like hard wet bullets, the cold a shock even under these circumstances, and scurried into the trees.

“You fucker!” the one-eared man screamed, standing over his fallen partner, and he fired the .45 into the darkness where he’d seen me go.

Only I was behind the biggest tree I could find, a tree too big to sway in the still-punishing wind, and when the lightning gave the night a silvery instant of day, I saw my weapon.

Despite the storm, I heard him snap the new clip into the automatic. And I heard his feet crunching on the twigs and leaves and splashing puddles, and when he came lumbering by with his rain-plastered toupee and his red used-to-be ear, I stepped out and hit him in the forehead with the coconut so hard I heard a crack; whether it was his head or the coconut, I couldn’t be sure. But I had more sympathy for the latter as I stood there, pelted by rain, palms bending around me, naked as Tarzan before Jane sewed him a loincloth, grinning down crazily at an unconscious man with one ear and a wet off-center toupee.

I took the .45 out of his loose fingers and maybe I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t somehow reached out and grabbed my leg, but I emptied the thing into his face, three bullets that turned his battered pug’s puss into a mask more grotesque than even the Incas ever imagined.

I stumbled away from him and fell to my knees, in the muck, gasping. I must have looked like some crazy native making a sacrifice to the gods. Winded, hurting, I hung my head, let the .45 fall to the wet ground, listened to the sky rumble, let the water purify me, or try to.

He didn’t say anything.

He was laughing; or maybe he was crying.

But when I looked up, the short one, his face cut and soiled and red-streaked, his suit soaked with as much blood as rain, a big goddamn shard of glass sticking out of one leg like a lightning bolt that got stuck there, was standing over me with the other .45 in one hand.

Somehow I knew it was loaded, now.

“Are you praying, you bastard?” he shouted over the rain. “You should be.”

He raised the .45 and I was looking into the black eye of its barrel about to dive to one side when the gunshot stopped me.

But it stopped him worse.

The shot hadn’t been from a .45—from a much smaller weapon, I would say—and the short wide lightning-scarred thug staggered before me like a tree about to fall. In his forehead, not quite exactly between his eyes, was a quarter-size black hole; a comma of red welled out and was washed away by the rain and now I dove to one side as he fell, heavily, throwing water from the sodden ground every which way.

Behind him, in the jagged doorway we’d made through the glass doors, was a tall, slender figure. From where I knelt I couldn’t make out his features, but he wore a black turtleneck shirt and black pants, like a commando.

Then the lightning showed me the harshly handsome angles of his face.

“For God’s sake, man,” Fleming said, “come in out of the rain.”

He came to me, skirting the corpse he’d made, helped me up, and took me around to the side door, to avoid the broken glass. Once we were inside—though the storm was coming in after us, through the broken doors and a bullet-shattered window—he wrapped me in a blanket and said, “Would you excuse me?”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t quite ready to say anything.

He went into the bathroom and closed the door and I heard the sound of violent retching.

When he came back, touching his lips with a tissue, he seemed chagrined. “Sorry.”

“Didn’t you ever kill anybody before?”

“Actually,” he said, sitting next to me, “no.”

I told him he’d picked a good place to start.

“I had a report that those two arrived by clipper this afternoon,” Fleming said. “I’ve been looking for them. I thought they might be coming to call on you, so I dropped by. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Next time,” I said numbly, “do try to ring first.”

He withdrew his beat-up gold cigarette case and lighted himself up.

“Give me one of those,” I said.

He did.

We sat and smoked quietly and as we did, the storm began to abate. I asked him if he’d seen the boat they’d used; I figured there might be a third man, piloting the craft. Fleming said no. Was Daniel still in his shack near the dock? Yes. Within fifteen minutes, the rain was pattering, not pelting, and the wind was a whisper, not a howl.

“The worst is over,” he said.

“Is it?” I asked. “Tell me, Naval Intelligence—what suddenly turned me into a loose end those assholes had to tie up?”

Fleming was lighting a new smoke. “Why don’t you ask Meyer Lansky and Harold Christie?”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled as he waved his match out. “They’re in a suite at the British Colonial, right now—talking business. I can give you the room number, if you like….”

I was dressed and out of there within fifteen minutes—and I had my own weapon now, the nine-millimeter Browning. With an extra clip.

“Is the main house open?” Fleming asked. “I need to use the phone.”

I gave him the keys. “You’re not coming?”

“No. I’ll just stay behind and…tidy up. Happy hunting, Mr. Heller.”

Somehow I knew what Fleming meant by “tidying up”: those two bodies would soon be gone, as if they’d never been here.

But that wasn’t my concern.

I had tidying up of my own to do.

The world was a pale ghostly green as I padded across the tar roof, feet splashing big pools into little ones. After the storm, the wind had turned lazy and gentle and cool. Getting up here had been no problem—stairs led to the flat roof of the central tower of the British Colonial Hotel—but now things would get tricky.

Meyer Lansky had the sixth-floor suite, the penthouse, in the six-story tower that was the axis of the hotel structure. Right now I was directly above that suite, leaning up against a terra-cotta facade which extended up another half-story and faced the ocean; on the other side was a massive plaque of Columbus, which jutted up higher than the rest of the facade, and atop it like a huge coachman’s lamp was an electric lantern that must have been a good five hundred watts. This was the source of the pale green mock moonlight.

By standing on tiptoe, I could peer over the wall of the facade to the balcony a story below. Meyer Lansky’s balcony. About a fifteen-foot drop, if I wanted to climb over at the point just before the abrupt jut of the Columbus plaque. If I didn’t break a leg or two, trying that drop, and instead missed the balcony altogether, five stories below the cement patio of Davy Jones’ Locker café was patiently waiting.

For a Saturday night, things were quiet—despite my already active evening, it was not yet eleven p.m., but the storm had hit early enough to keep people home or in their hotel rooms. Below, a few couples stood looking out at the restless sea and wind-brushed palms, doing their best not to step or stand in puddles, dodging the occasional fallen branch.

About six feet down was a decorative overhang above the balcony; it was probably just under a foot wide. I reached in my pocket for one of half a dozen cigarettes I’d bummed off the British agent. Lighted one up with a match from the British Colonial matchbook I’d picked up when I was checking the lobby for Lansky muscle. I hadn’t seen anybody who seemed to qualify, but when I went up to the sixth floor, there was a pockmarked burly sentry in the hall by the door to the suite; he wore a two-tone blue suit and sat in a folding chair too small for him, reading
Ring
magazine. I had walked on by him and taken these stairs to the roof.

Now I leaned against the back of the facade, sucking in the smoke, a strong, bitter blend, my white linen suit washed green by the lantern, the nine-millimeter snug under my arm in the shoulder holster, jacket unbuttoned. I could go find some rope…with all the boats around that wouldn’t be hard…I could tie it around the base of that big electric coachman’s lamp and…

Fuck it.

I tossed the cigarette and it sizzled in a puddle and I climbed over the facade and dropped myself down the stucco face of the building until my hands were hooked over and gripping the edges above, wrists bent, while below my feet stretched and danced in the air, searching for that overhang.

I didn’t dare risk just dropping there—not enough width to maintain my balance. Over to my left was the lower part of the Columbus plaque; it was recessed and ornate, with a lot of rococo design work.

I let go with my left hand and every muscle in my body pulled as my right hand held on and my left scrambled over the plaque’s surface, like a blind man searching for a light switch, until finally my fingers clutched some sculptured rococo work that served as a handle for me to grab on to.

I let go with my right hand, and my body swung toward where my left hand held on, but suddenly my feet were touching the overhang—and not just my toes; my feet, turned sideways, had footing, at least as long as I had hold of whatever I had hold of in that damn ornate plaque.

Then my right hand searched for something else to grip among the design work, found another rococo handle, and my feet were securely under me and I had my full balance, and I dropped to the floor of the balcony below.

The water puddled there made me slip and I fell back, hard, against the wrought iron of the balcony itself, shaking it, but I didn’t lose my balance, and it didn’t give way, and I had my gun out from under my arm and in my hand when the French doors opened and a heavyset bodyguard in a straw fedora and tropical shirt—he looked a little like Wallace Beery—peeked out, his hands empty, to see if a branch had fallen or something.

I was on my feet with my gun in his belly before the stupid surprised expression was off his face. In fact, it was still there when I plucked his long-barreled .38 from under his arm, sticking it in my own waistband.

“Now back up,” I said, “hands high.”

“Look who dropped in,” intoned a deep, firm voice.

Meyer Lansky sat casually on a couch, legs crossed, in the sitting area of the big one-room suite; Harold Christie sat across from him in a comfortable armchair. Lansky, in light blue sport shirt and dark blue slacks, wearing sandals and socks, was smiling; he seemed faintly amused by my entrance.

Christie, who wore a rumpled canary-color linen suit with a red bow tie, looked astounded, and dismayed, the money-color eyes wide and blinking. He looked ten years older than when I first met him, at Westbourne, not so long ago; also skinnier, the flesh hanging on him like another rumpled suit.

Between them was a coffee table on which were their drinks and a briefcase that I figured belonged to Christie. A well-stocked bar was at the left, and a double bed was over at the right. The two of them—but for the bodyguard and me—were alone.

I ignored Lansky; also Christie, who was saying, “What in the hell are
you
doing here, Heller? What in the hell is he
doing
here?”

‘Tell your friend in the hall to come inside,” I told the bodyguard. “Tell him Mr. Lansky wants to talk to him.”

He nodded.

“Meyer,” I said, “tell him no signals. Otherwise I shoot up the place.”

“No signals, Eddie.”

Eddie nodded.

He poked his head out and said, “Boss wants to see you.”

The burly guy in the two-tone suit came in with
Ring
magazine under his arm and his guard down.

“What the fuck…?”

But he didn’t argue with the nine-millimeter in my one hand as my other took his .38 out from under his arm. Now I had two of them in my belt, Zapata-style.

“In the toilet,” I said, pointing the way with the nine-millimeter. “Immediate seating….”

I locked them in by wedging a chair under the knob.

“Get yourself a drink while you’re up, Mr. Heller,” Lansky said cordially.

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself. It disappoints me that you think you have to go to such absurd lengths to see me. If you wanted to stop by, all you had to do was call.”

I stood between them, Lansky at my left, Christie at my right. Lansky was obviously unarmed and Christie wasn’t the type.

“You’re understaffed tonight, Meyer,” I said. “Two of your best boys are missing.”

The sharp, dark eyes tensed; otherwise, his weak-chinned homely face gave an impression of unconcern.

“And what two boys would those be?” he asked blandly.

“The two boys that were with you at the Biltmore, last time we spoke.”

“You’re mistaken. Those two had the weekend off. They didn’t make this trip.”

I smiled pleasantly. “Are you sure? Maybe I didn’t describe them well enough. There’s one with a bad toupee and a cheesy little mustache, although you might not recognize him now because I shot off one of his ears and, well, put three or four rounds in his face.”

Lansky’s eyes tightened even more, but otherwise his countenance didn’t change; Christie’s mouth was open, and he was trembling—that old witness-box flop sweat was starting in again.

“The other one has a scar, kind of shaped like a lightning bolt, on his left cheek, I think it’s his left cheek, with a kind of round face, oh, and a new touch—there’s a hole in his forehead…about here.”

Lansky nodded once. “I believe I do know who you’re referring to.”

“You should. You sent them to whack me out tonight.”

He shook his head no; gestured gently with an open hand. “You’re mistaken. I believe what you’re saying—I believe they did what you say they did, and that you did what you say you did. But I didn’t send them. Did you, Harold?”

Christie reacted as indignantly as if he’d been slapped. “Certainly not!”

I looked at them, one at a time, and laughed. “Why the hell don’t I believe you, fellas? A couple of standup citizens like you.”

Lansky sat forward; his manner was reasonable. He didn’t seem frightened, unlike Christie, who looked on the verge of wetting his pants. “Mr. Heller, why in the world would I want to have you killed? Before tonight, at least, you’ve done nothing to offend me.”

“He’s insane,” Christie said. “He insists on trying to put the blame for Harry’s death on me!”

“Well,
I
certainly had no part in Sir Harry’s death,” Lansky said flatly.

“I think you did,” I said. “I think Harold here asked you to send two of your strong-arm boys…specifically, my uninvited, now-deceased guests this evening…to help convince Harry to change his mind about blocking your mutual efforts to bring casinos into the Bahamas. But Oakes was a tough old bird, and he put up a fight and got himself killed—after which your two boys improvised that voodoo routine, to confuse the issue.”

“Mr. Heller,” Lansky said, shaking his head, smiling like a disappointed parent, “you’re the one who’s confused.”

“Oh really?”

“Really. If I wanted to put gambling into the Bahamas, Harry Oakes couldn’t have stood in my way.”

I was holding the nine-millimeter on him, but his calm, hard eyes were equally on me, and similarly deadly. And what he was saying echoed things Freddie de Marigny had told me in his jail cell….

“Gambling already is legal here,” Lansky said. “Merely suspended for the duration of the war. The law does forbid Bahamian residents from gambling, which is fine.” He might have been delivering a lecture on traffic safety at a junior high school. “The point is to get tourist trade. But with the war on, Mr. Heller, there are no tourists to speak of.”

“Which means,” Christie said edgily, bitterly, “there is no rush whatsoever to put casinos into the Bahamas!”

“Harold’s right,” Lansky said. “This doesn’t become a pressing issue until after war’s end…and even then, Sir Harry couldn’t have stood in my way. He would’ve had to be on the Executive Council to consider gaming license applications—and he wasn’t. He was a powerful man, yes—but he didn’t wield any power with Bay Street. He was an outsider, and he liked it that way.

“Heller,” Christie said earnestly, “Harry didn’t give a damn about gambling in the Bahamas—he didn’t care about the
Bahamas
anymore! He was gearing up to move to Mexico City—surely, you knew that….”

“No matter what either of you say,” I said, gun tight in my hand, “the two assassins who killed Sir Harry Oakes were
your
men, Lansky! The same two men that the dead Lyford Cay caretaker saw that night, the same two men I shot the shit out of about a fucking hour ago!”

Lansky may have been worried now; he could see that I was wound a little taut.

“Mr. Heller—if those two were responsible for Sir Harry’s death, it wasn’t at my say-so. It was some…free-lance assignment they picked up.”

Christie seemed to settle back in his chair, trying to disappear into it.

I turned the gun on him. “Then
you
hired them…you knew them, through your friend, here—”

“Heller,” Christie said desperately, “I had nothing to do with Harry’s death! I loved the man!”

“Mr. Heller,” Lansky said, and he risked leaning out and putting his hand on my wrist—not the wrist of the hand with the gun in it, but my wrist. “I’m a Jew.”

I looked at him like he was nuts.

“You’re
a Jew, aren’t you, Heller?”

“Well…yeah. I suppose.”

“You suppose! It’s not something you have to think about, man! You think that evil bastard Hitler would take time to think about it?”

The homely little man actually seemed upset. Finally.

“What the hell are you babbling about, Lansky?”

When he spoke, he bit off each word, like a telegram he was dictating. “Do you really think I’d knowingly get in bed with a bunch of goddamn fucking Nazis, just to make a
buck?”

It was like cold water had been thrown on me. “Nazis?”

Christie was glaring at Lansky.

I looked from one to the other. “What the hell do you mean—
Nazis?”

Lansky let go of my wrist. “I’ve already said too much. You got balls, Mr. Heller, and brains, but right now you need the latter more than the former.”

A sick feeling was growing in the pit of my stomach.

Lansky stood. He put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Go. Go now, and this is just an honest misunderstanding. Stay, and…well, you’re either going to have to kill everyone here, or wind up with me mad at you. And we don’t either one of us want either one of those things, do we?”

Christie was sitting there like a toad in a suit, sweat and desperation all over his face. I might have to talk to him again—but I didn’t want Lansky around. Suddenly I knew that Lansky was damn near an innocent bystander in all this.

Suddenly I knew how big a mistake I’d made.

We were frozen there for what seemed like forever and was probably thirty seconds. Lansky stood looking patient, Christie sat looking distressed and me, I probably had the same green pallor as when I’d climbed down the building bathed in that pale green light.

“You gentlemen must have business to do,” I said, backing up, gun in hand, but lowered. “If you’ll excuse me.”

“This time I will,” Lansky said. “Why don’t you just use the door this time?”

I did.