The Consummata (24 page)

So together we exited the ballroom, right past a security guy, and were in that hallway off of which the private sessions were conducted behind closed doors. None of the security staff spoke to her, but they all watched her close—she was clearly the boss.

Only the guy guarding the last door on the other end of the hall said anything, when the masked woman reached for the doorknob.

“Mistress,” he said, and it sounded silly because he was another of the burr-headed Marine types, “you
do
know there is a session in progress.”

She merely nodded, and went on in, and I followed her.

What we saw was the best tableau yet, and the only one that I found really entertaining.

In a fairly small room otherwise stripped bare, Jaimie Halaquez was on his knees on the carpeted floor, wearing only black latex skivvies, and his hands were cuffed behind him and a ball-gag was in his mouth. His back was red and bleeding here and there, laced with maybe a dozen slashes thanks to a thin-lashed metal-tipped whip in the hands of a black-corseted young woman with very short dark hair. She had spike heels and sheer dark stockings and the familiar trappings of the Consummata’s craft. But like Gaita, she was a Latin girl.

Apparently Jaimie preferred to be beaten by his own kind.

He looked over his shoulder at us as the Consummata came in first, and swiveled around to gaze up at her like a praying man seeing a vision of the Madonna. He seemed delighted, seeing her, perhaps thinking he’d get special attention now from that fabled dominatrix.

He was half-right.

Then he saw me, and his eyes reflected a level of fear to which those play-acting girls in the ballroom could only aspire.

In her low, throaty tone, the Consummata said to her helper, “You may go,” and the little Latin chick rolled up her whip and vamoosed.

I grabbed Halaquez by the arm and hauled him to his bare feet.

“I’m taking this clown with me,” I said to my reluctant
hostess. “It can be messy, or you can walk us out, and nobody gets hurt who didn’t pay to be.”

Halaquez, that big bad man, was shaking like he was freezing. Suddenly being in handcuffs and ankle chains wasn’t a good time.

The eyes in the mask holes narrowed, and the Consummata raised a “shush” finger to her lips. Without asking permission, she went to the door, cracked it open, and—before I could do a damn thing about it—she said, “Turn off machine number six. Right now.”

The security guy out there said, “Yes, mistress.”

She shut the door, turned to me and pulled off the mask. The blonde hair went with it, a wig that was part of the getup. She shook her head and the dark hair fell into place.

And I got it.

I understood.

The Consummata was no one woman, rather a character used in the spy game by our side over the years to entrap sick bastards like Halaquez and to ensnare important people with kinks in their make-up who could be interrogated and blackmailed and generally manipulated, because the hidden cameras feeding video-tape (“Turn off machine number six”) would provide the CIA with leverage the likes of which old J. Edgar Hoover himself might envy
.

“I
told
you I was deep cover,” Kim whispered.

“You could walk away,” Kim said, “and let us handle Halaquez in our own way.”

“What,” I said, “and put this bastard back on the Company chessboard, to play more double-agent games? I intend to deliver him to the people he betrayed!”

Her gloved fists were on her latex-clad hips. “We have interrogators who make Consummata-type torture look like the playtime it is. We have truth-inducing drugs and deprivation techniques and psychological manipulation that can—”

“The only thing in this fucking skull worth knowing,” I said, and slapped Halaquez alongside the head, “is the name of the traitor in the Little Havana ranks. And they will get that out of him,
and
deal with it, just fine. Trust me, my love.”

There we stood in the bare little room, with the ball-gagged, handcuffed, very helpless Halaquez a mute witness to our little marital squabble, a husband with his knife and gun, a wife in her black bondage gown.

But she didn’t argue any further.

“He’s yours,” Kim said. “Let them have him.”

I had Halaquez’s arm by one hand, but I took her arm by the other and grinned. “You look pretty damn good in black, doll.”

And she grinned back at me, her mouth full and moist and red. “Do you like it? Then why don’t you kiss me?”

I did. Hard and sweet and tender and rough, mashing my lips into hers with a fierceness that was anything but role play.

“Help me haul his ass out of here,” I said.

“All right,” she said, and pulled on the Consummata mask and again became the blonde dominatrix who ran things around here.

I tagged along as she dragged the whimpering Halaquez out into the corridor and down the wide stairway, and not a single security guy gave us even a second glance. We paused on the landing.

“I’ve got a boat waiting at the dock,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed in the mask holes. “You understand I have to stay behind....”

“You need to do what you need to do,” I said ambiguously, and she towed our quaking prisoner down the rest of the way.

Before long, we had moved through the downstairs and back through the kitchen, and outside where the night had grown a little chilly, wind riffling the palms.

Now we had the handcuffed, ankles-chained Halaquez between us, me with one arm, her with the other, dragging him along like the bag of garbage he was. He was trying to scream behind the ball-gag, but only a muffled grunting emerged, like something unpleasant on the tube with the volume way down.

As we moved along the row of gently swaying palms, he finally stopped his screaming, ceased any protest, his body slumping with despair, almost as if he were asleep or dead, and we had to tow him along. It slowed us, but not much.

When got to the dock, Saladar was still seated up in the
flybridge. He stood, his eyes wide and gleaming, his smile the same. Ever so slightly, he rocked with the motion of the moored craft.

“You have
done
it,
Señor
Morgan!”

“We’ve done it, Luis.” We were almost close enough to the boat to step on board now, with Halaquez between us, like parents hauling a reluctant trick-or-treater to the next house. Kim stepped to one side to remove her mask, while I held our captive loosely by one arm.

“Luis, this is Kim, my wife,” I said. “She’s a government agent. Turns out this whole S & M set-up was an enormous sting.”

Looking up at Saladar in the flybridge, Kim said, “You should know, sir, that you have the option of leaving this prisoner in my charge, for interrogation and maybe prosecution.”

Halaquez straightened suddenly and his eyes were wide with something that was not fear, and I would have sworn he was trying to smile around that ball-gag. And was he laughing?

Could he be laughing...and why?

Saladar drew the .38 from his gunfighter’s holster and shot Halaquez in the head, the report a whip crack that echoed off the water. The near-naked man in the black latex shorts went down in a pile on the dock leaving only a bloody mist behind.

Kim blurted, “What in the
hell—
”

I said nothing, my eyes meeting Saladar’s. He lowered the gun but did not holster it.

“I am sorry, my friend,” he said, bowing his head. He fumbled
for words: “I am afraid...the emotion, it...seeing this traitor...forgive me....”

“I can’t, Luis,” I said.

His chin came up, his eyes implored me. “
Señor
....”

“
You’re
the real traitor, aren’t you, Luis? I suspected as much. I even thought you might try to kill Jaimie here on the voyage home, which would have confirmed it. But you didn’t want to take that risk. You figured I might read the relief in his face when he saw
you
, the man he reported to...the man who has looted, manipulated, sold out, and betrayed his fellow Cubans in Little Havana, for how many years?”

The gun came up, though its snout pointed down at us from his perch. His sneering smile suited his devil’s beard.

“I careened into Little Havana,” I said, “and Pedro and the others embraced me as a possible savior. You played along, but betrayed me from the start. The very start. You were part of that small group, that first night, who knew of my masquerade, and knew I’d be at the Amherst Hotel.”

He may have been a Commie, but his manner was imperial. “There is no need for this,
Señor
Morgan. You waste your words and your final moments. I am a soldier. I fight for a cause. You are a mercenary, the worst kind of capitalist.”

If I distracted him enough, I might get to the .45. My suit coat hung open, after all. Then there was the knife sheathed on my left forearm.

Which could I get to faster?

“I wonder,” I said. “Were you chasing Dick Best’s nonexistent new invention for your
cause
? Or did you only see the wealth it promised?”

But I would never know the answer, because a second whip crack cut through the night and interrupted our conversation, a shot cutting through Saladar’s shoulder in a blurt of blood, shoving him off balance, his .38 tumbling from his hand and plunking into the water like a stone.

Gaita stepped from the shadows and onto the dock, a striking, strange, barefoot vision in a metal-studded black bikini. She too had a .38, not a long-barreled one like Saladar had dropped in the bay, but a little police special that did the job just as well.

“
Ladron!
” she spat, and shot him in the chest.

Saladar teetered on the flybridge.

“
Asesino!
”

And shot him the stomach.

He lurched.

“
Traidor!
”

And shot him in the head.

Finally he tumbled.

Tumbled from the flybridge to the rear deck, and landed hard but surely didn’t feel it, a limp rag of a human hitting with a thud that made the boat rock slightly, a death with none of the dignity he’d worn in life as part of his disguise.

Gaita came over to me and I held her. She was crying, but it seemed more anger than anything else. She started telling me how she’d seen Kim leave the ballroom with me, and how she had gone downstairs to wait to see if we would lead Halaquez out. The little avenger had been one of the girls hired by Kim to work tonight’s affair. Bunny had been unaware, and...

I stopped her before she went into too much detail,
saying, “All I care about is that you’re here, and that you shot that bastard.”

Then I told her to go, and to take the gun with her, advising that she dispose of it.

“Tell Pedro everything!” I called.

“
Si
,
Señor
Morgan!”

She disappeared into the night.

Taking his wrists while I took his feet, Kim helped me swing Jaimie Halaquez’s mostly naked corpse up and onto the rear deck of the
Black Beauty
, where he landed with a noisy thump next to the equally dead Saladar. We hadn’t bothered discussing the obvious—that I would dump the bodies in the ocean.

The whip cracks had sent no one running down the backyard to see what the commotion was. Perhaps nobody heard anything over the blaring strip-club jazz. And the neighbors on either side were a world away.

“Come with me,” I said to my wife. “I have this boat—it’s mine now.”

“You bought it?”

“Luis there sort of bequeathed it to me. And I have enough of a stake for us to get a good start on finding which of Sir Henry’s hiding places holds the money-truck treasure.”

We were on the dock, the wood spongy under our feet, standing down a ways from the bloody mess Halaquez had made. Nearby, on the rear deck of the craft, two corpses were sunning themselves in the dim moonlight. I had some blood spatter on me from Jaimie dying so nearby, and she had some on her black latex gown. Not as romantic a setting as I might have liked. Unusual, though....

“I have to stay,” Kim told me, though the violet eyes revealed she hated saying it. “It’s better if I clear you from the inside.... Someone’s coming.”

A single figure was running down the backyard toward us—not at a breakneck speed, just jogging, and alone.
One of the security guys?

“I can handle whoever this is,” I said.

“So can I. You have time to get on the boat and out of here....”

“Wait...it’s Crowley.”

“Morgan, go!”

“No. No, he and I have a truce. Didn’t he tell you?”

“No! He didn’t.”

She and I hadn’t talked since the fed and I had made our pact.

Then Crowley—in a dark suit that was similar to those of his agents up at the mansion, only better tailored—was on the dock with us. The breeze had picked up and was flapping his unbuttoned suit coat and ruffling his wispy amber hair. He glanced almost casually in the boat and saw the bodies there. Only a minor flinch registered on those bland features.

“So those
were
gunshots,” he said to himself. Then to me, without a greeting, explained, “Guy on the door thought he heard gunfire down here. You do this?”

“No,” I said. “A little Cuban girl who was working for you tonight. That’s your incentive to keep the lid on.”

“Oh,” he sighed, rolling his eyes, “I
plan
to.... Are you all right, Miss Stacy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you’ll excuse me....” He moved away from us, down the dock, and used a walkie-talkie. He told somebody—presumably the man on the door—that there was no problem on the dock, but he would check out the grounds personally. No need for backup.

Then he came back and said to me, “You planning on dumping these dead fish?”

“I am. You have a better idea?”

“No. But I’m coming with you.”

Kim pushed forward. “Walter, let’s just walk away. Let Morgan deal with this. Don’t you two have a truce?”

Crowley said, “A truce until the end of the mission.”

“Actually,” I said, “you promised me twenty-fours after I delivered Halaquez. Well, there he is.”

“Morgan, I already
had
Halaquez, and you stole him out of my custody. Now he’s dead and worthless as an intelligence resource. You violated our agreement. It’s null and void. Now...here’s what we’re going to do.”