Mission: Earth "Voyage of Vengeance" (27 page)

"They don't give Spartacus's address," said Teenie. "But maybe this guy, Crassus, that licked him, is still around. Do they have city directories in Rome where..."

"Teenie," I said, "Spartacus, it says here, died in 71 B. C. That's two thousand years ago. More. And it only mentions Crassus once. You're dealing with ancient history."

"Oh, (bleep)," said Teenie. "The way people move around, you can't keep track of anybody. I tried to locate an aunt in Chicago once and (bleep) if she hadn't moved five times. I wouldn't have run her down at all if I hadn't seen in the papers they'd just put her in the city jail."

She looked at the globe, did some tracings with her finger and then said, "All right. We'll go to Civitawhatchacallit and take it from there."

"We'll be alongside at dawn," said Bitts. "We're cleared into Italy and all we have to do is sail. So I'll up anchor and away. Have a good night's sleep. When you get a look at Rome traffic, you'll need it!"

Well, I didn't get a good night's sleep. You would have thought all that walking would have tired Teenie out. But after two pieces of hashish candy and other things, I was giggling and doing other things until past midnight.

True to his promise, when I awoke, Captain Bitts had us tied up alongside a dock in Civitavecchia. It was early. The steward had left a port open the night before and it was the din that had awakened me. I looked out. I had a vista of the dock, a forest of cargo booms and funnels and a locomotive stopped nearby which just then gave another blast on its whistle and almost caved in my eardrums. The Italians are an industrious people and especially when it conies to making noise.

I was about to draw back when a flash of color caught my eye. It was Teenie in some scarlet running shorts and a bikini bra. She was at a peddler's stand looking at guidebooks. She was apparently having an argument against his efforts to sell her lottery tickets.

Once more I was about to draw back when I saw a shadowy figure beyond Teenie. A hand reached out and seized her arm.

The black-jowled man!

There he was in his three-piece suit!

He glanced toward the ship and then he yanked Teenie into the dimness behind the booth. They seemed to be having an argument. He had his face very close to Teenie's and he was scowling as he talked.

Then she said something.

He looked at her. And then he did an astonishing thing! He went down on his knees and raised his hands in supplication.

She kept shaking her head. Then she raised a finger in admonishment. He looked at the ground under his knees in dejection.

Teenie kept on talking. Then she started to walk away.

The black-jowled man grabbed at her wrist. She stopped. She spoke.

He looked at the ground again and then he nodded slowly.

She walked back to the ship. The black-jowled man got up, staring after her. He dusted off his knees.

Teenie yelled something to the port gangway sentry who yelled something up to the deck. Then one of our own sailors appeared and Teenie yelled something at him.

She turned and went back to the black-jowled man and they went off down the dock and out of sight.

At breakfast, I was astonished to find Madison. I should have thought he would be off to Rome. I said so.

"Oh, Teenie has gone there," said Madison. "She left word that she might be absent a day or two. I don't think she'll find much about Spartacus in Rome anyway. He was defeated way to the south, in Lucania, when he was attempting to cross to Sicily. Besides, I've got to get my notes together on Napoleon. What a man. He did such a thorough job, France has never amounted to a hill of beans since. Just a little foreign runt, too. What a PR triumph!"

We saw nothing of Teenie for two days. She came back in a small truck. It was stacked with glittering trunks and luggage. She bounded up the gangway in a silver sequin hunting outfit topped with a plumed hat.

I was on the deck and she bounced up to me. "Look at my silver boots!" she said, lifting one sideways so I could see it better. "Ain't they the screaming most?"

"Teenie, what on Earth is in all those trunks and bags?"

"Oh, them," she said, glancing down where the crew was bringing them aboard. "They're mostly empty. I didn't have anything to put my stuff in. A couple are full, though. That's what delayed me: The (bleeped)
modiste
didn't have a single model the same size I was and I had to stand around getting measured and measured and fitted and fitted. And she kept putting big hems in, saying how I'd grow. Well, maybe I will. Man, do they have great food in them deluxe hotels! I thought all wops ate was spaghetti and I haven't even seen a strand of it! The greatest chow you ever chomped. Am I in time for supper? Boy, am I starved!" She started to rush off. Then she halted. "Those black grips are yours. You didn't have any luggage either." She rushed off.

She appeared at dinner in a black silk evening gown, obviously created by one of Rome's finest couturiers, the effect spoiled somewhat by the rubber band on her ponytail.

"What about Spartacus?" said Madison.

"Who? Oh, yes. Spartacus," said Teenie. "Well, it seems we have to go to Naples to find out."

So I told the captain to sail for Naples, but Teenie didn't seem to have her mind on outlaws. She came into my bed salon in a negligee of absolutely transparent sea green, put a new phonograph down in the middle of the rug and sat before it.

"This is the greatest gadget, Inky," she said. "It runs on batteries and it plays a record upside down or vertical or any way at all with a laser beam. No chance for a roll to slide a needle out of a groove. And now I can play my records without a single scratch."

It had two detachable speakers she set up some way apart. "I got some yowley new singles, too. Just wait until you hear this one!"

She turned it on full volume. The drums pounded. The guitars yelled. The bass boomed. A tenor and a chorus sang:

The last part of the song almost made me jump out of my skin.

"Ain't it flowy?" said Teenie with dreamy eyes.

"It's terrible," I said. "It doesn't even rhyme."

"Oh, but the sentiment," said Teenie. "I just love a sentimental song. Here's a bhong I fixed for you. Have a puff."

I took one puff.

Suddenly the whole room went up in a spiral of bright pink. As I tingled from head to toe, I still retained wit to ask, "What was in that pipe?"

"Hash oil," said Teenie. "The absolute jet plane of Mary Jane. It's the very best in Rome. Fifty (bleeping) bucks a gram! And I got a whole bottle of it!"

The sea-green negligee slid to the floor. I had enough wit to know what would happen now. But all I could do was giggle.

And horror of horrors, the music did sound wonderful, even the shouted, "WATCH OUT!"

Oh, Gods, if I only had!

In Naples, another teeming forest of cargo booms with tugs and trains running about under them like wild animals, we found no trace of Spartacus. But Teenie got on the trail there of somebody called Garibaldi who had helped wrest a lot of Italy from the age-long domination of Austria and gotten shot for his pains. And this took us to a place where he had once landed-Palermo, Sicily.

Of course, in Palermo, one had access to a whole island full of bandits and outlaws that not even the Italian government could cope with. This was the ancestral home of the Mafia. In a hired car, Madison, Teenie and myself drove all over that very extensive island. And one could imagine, from that rugged and sometimes barren terrain, how it could breed so many hit men. It was no surprise to be told that it had been largely settled by pirates.

We even took an excursion to the eastern end of the island where Mount Etna smokes into the sky. The name itself means "I burn" and judging by the number of eruptions and lives taken by it, it is well named.

The thought of driving the last twenty-one miles above the town of Catania just to get to the top made me quite dizzy and it took quite a few "grouches" and "spoilsports" from Teenie to get me up there.

At the top she was very intent. It was a brilliantly clear day and she stood with the high velocity, smoke-tinged wind whipping at her ponytail and, with Madison's help and a map, spotted the Italian mainland to the northeast, spotted Malta to the south and then a dim haze which might have been Tunisia to the southwest. She tried in vain to see Corsica. She stared to the east and squinted her eyes hard trying to see Greece. And then cupped them, squinting, trying to see Turkey. But, of course, even from ten thousand feet, they were under the horizon, Greece being over three hundred and Turkey over six hundred miles away.

"Well, I'll be a son of a (bleepch)," she said. "Old Bittie wasn't lying. The world
is
round after all!"

All the way down through the lava flows, down through the beech forests, down across the vineyards and back to Catania, she kept marvelling about it. "Why don't we fall off?" she said. "What if we skidded or something? How come the water doesn't run out of the ocean?"

Madison tried to explain gravity to her by holding up a couple of oranges as we bounced along. She held the oranges. She even made the driver stop the car. But she couldn't get the oranges to snap together the way Madison had said. She thought he was lying.

We made the ninety miles back to Palermo in time for a late dinner aboard and you would have thought it would have left its mark on her. It didn't. She explained to me that hash oil cured anything and that is the last I remembered.

The next morning at breakfast she unfortunately found the town, Corleone, just south of us. "Hey," she said, "isn't there a Corleone mob?"

I flinched visibly.

Madison assured her that there was indeed a Corleone mob. They controlled the unions and shipping lines and every U. S. port, gambling and prostitution, and if it wasn't for them, Faustino "The Noose" Narcotici,
capo di tutti capi,
would be a happy man indeed. The Corleones were death on drugs.

"Prostitution?" said Teenie. "I didn't know there was a whore's union. Hey, Inky, how does this fit in with your white slavery racket? Do you have a closed shop or don't you?"

"The Corleones," I said stiffly, "are people you leave very much alone."

"Hey," she said, "that sounds dangerous. Maybe we better get the hell out of here while we still have our scalps. Where is your list, Maddie? We better get them screws churning."

She got the list and promptly marched off to the ship library. The sports director wouldn't take my word for it that I hadn't had any pot last night and he worked me until my muscles screamed.

Despite all the warnings and urgency at breakfast, when I left the gym and came to lunch, we were still in Palermo and there was no sign of Teenie at the table.

"She went ashore about nine," the Chief Steward said. "She was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses in them and said she was going to the University of Palermo. Her fiance went with her."

I dawdled through the afternoon. We still lay in port. I didn't want to go ashore: this talk about Corleones had made me a bit nervous.

I looked at the viewers. Heller was busy taking examinations at Empire University. Maliciously, I thought that if Teenie was so suddenly interested in universities, maybe she should be sicked on to him. Longingly I fingered the two-way-response radio. I just couldn't figure out how to get Teenie back to New York without my being later hit for rape of a minor.

The Countess Krak had both Balmor and Bang-Bang in tow, still looking for a graduation present. She went into a store and, for a bit, my attention lagged. Then suddenly I found myself staring at a handful of rifle shells!

"Yes, ma'am," came a clerk's voice. "Those are Holland and Holland.375 Magnum cartridges."

"They knock an elephant flat," said Bang-Bang. "One boom, one dead elephant."

"I was thinking of other game," said the Countess Krak.

Any lethargy I felt up to that instant congealed into panic.

Those huge, gleaming brass cases with their lethal slugs had only one message for me.

I almost shrieked. Then I realized that it was a knock on the door. Sanity returned.

I was only too glad to shut down the volume and throw a hasty blanket over the viewers.

"Miss Teenie is back," came the Chief Steward's voice. "And I think she needs your help."

I hastily left. Anything to get away from those deadly viewers.

She and Madison were in the library. Her unlensed glasses askew, Teenie pointed at a tower of books Madison had worn himself out carrying.

"Those (bleeped) professors," Teenie said, "are supposed to be so educated and half of them don't even speak English. We had to buy those at a bookstore. They got plenty of pictures but I didn't notice until we were halfway back to the ship that they're all in Italian! So it's up to you, Inky. You're the only one that can sling the spaghetti around. Start translating." She sank into a chair and began to inhale the cream soda that a steward brought, reducing the bottle tide at an alarming rate. "Whew!" she said. "It's good to wash the catacombs out of my throat."