Hour of the Assassins (32 page)

“I'll bet you say that to all the boys,” he said.

“You bastard!” she snapped, her eyes flashing. She tried to slap him again, but he easily caught her wrist in his hand.

“Don't,” he warned, “or I'll break it. This time it won't be for fun.” And his eyes glittered as coldly as hers.

“You think you're really something, don't you?”

“Tell me, is it just me, or are you out to get the entire male sex?” He felt her wrist relax and he released it as if it were something dirty.

“You're so damn smart, you figure it out,” she sneered.

“Let's not pretend you didn't want this. You brought me here.”

“Of course I used you. Who am I supposed to fuck around here? The Indians? I'd sooner do it with one of the goats out back,” she retorted, her face contorted with disgust. Perhaps some of that disgust was for herself, he mused. The sound of the rain was lighter now. Soon it would stop.

“No, it's more than that,” he said finally. “You hated me from the minute you saw me. But why? Who am I to you?”

“My father is a brilliant man,” she said.

“Yeah, I'll bet he's a wow doing his Great White Father act for the Indians,” he said, egging her on, his senses alert and probing. Danger, as real and palpable as the black beetle, had entered the room. She had something to tell him if he could just needle it out of her.

“He's more of a man than you are, old as he is. Someday the world will recognize his genius,” she said defiantly. “Take that magnificent diagnosis he did on that little Chama boy. It was my father who discovered that blackwater fever is a complication of falciparum malaria. He wrote a paper for
Lancet
, proving that blackwater fever is an antibody-antigen reaction resulting in intravascular haemolysis, but the fools refused to publish it. They said that his research methods weren't rigorous enough, that his results weren't conclusive! They wanted control groups. Control groups!” she said, her eyes blazing.

The rain had stopped and the outside air was thick with sunshine. A rainbow had formed in the sky over the compound, the colors rich and sparkling, like some giant snake curved over the jungle. The air steamed in the relentless heat and clouds of mosquitoes rose Like columns of smoke in the strong light. Pockets of mist lay over the mud puddles, white and gleaming, as though it had snowed during the storm.

“What's wrong with control groups?”

“What do you know, anyway?” she retorted.

“Not much, I guess.”

“My father established the institute to help the Indians, not to experiment on them. He's too kind a man for that. That's why they worship the ground he walks on; that's why we all do. He's the finest man I've ever known. Hell, he's the only real man I've ever known.”

“He seems to treat the Indians very well,” Caine said carefully.

“It's not just the Indios, it's everyone. He's an incredible philosopher and medical researcher. He's a linguist and an anthropologist. Someday his theories on the origin of the Indian races will revolutionize our knowledge of the development of man. He's even an architect. He designed and built everything you see here. When he came to the Urubamba, all this was nothing but malaria-infested jungle. He did it all by himself. And that's not all. He's a zoologist who has classified dozens of new insect and bacterial species. Even in this place he's brought us the culture of the world. He's a brilliant violinist. You should hear him play Mozart and Schumann. It's glorious,” she rhapsodized.

“What about your mother?”

“She died when I was a little girl. She was his mistress in—” she hesitated, “—in another place. But she wasn't worthy of him, that's why he never married her. That's right,” she declared defiantly, thrusting her chin out as if it were a weapon. “I'm a bastard! My father didn't have to take me in, especially with all he had to do, a busy, important man like him, but he did. He's the most wonderful man in the world!”

“The way you talk about him, he sounds more like your lover than your father.”

“He was,” she said simply. Her words hung in the air between them like a curtain. He turned to look at her, the side of her face lit with a bright bar of sunlight, her hair a splash of gold in the drab room. She was lying on her side, her head supported on her arm, her expression as motionless and veiled as the Sphinx. She ignored the fly sipping at a bead of sweat in the hollow where her neck joined her breastbone. With her golden helmet of hair, her virginal, almost boyish face and flat chest, she might have reminded him of a young knight, an adolescent Parsifal, were it not for the damp triangle of curly, light brown pubic hair. For the first time he looked around the whitewashed room.

The room was as bare as a nun's cell, with none of the usual feminine dust collectors. The furniture consisted of the narrow bed, a nightstand, chest of drawers made of cedar, and an old mahogany standing closet. The furniture had the heavy look that was fashionable in Europe during the thirties. A crude dressing table, mirror, and a chair completed the room. The bed and the closet stood on legs set into coffee cans filled with liquid disinfectant, the acrid aroma permeating the room. The whitewashed walls were bare except for a colorful glass display case of butterflies and a large framed black-and-white portrait of Mendoza hung over her bed. A gauzelike mosquito net was draped over one of the bedposts, like a shroud, and a single screened window looked out over the vegetable patch.

“Where was all this?” he asked.

“We were living in—” She hesitated, and he could have sworn she was about to say Paraguay. Then she shrugged, her thin shoulders looking frail and white in the bright afternoon light.

“We moved around a lot. After my mother—” She stopped and began again. “Anyway, there was nothing permanent in my life. There were no other children to play with. We were very isolated. All I had was my father.”

He could picture her as a small, solemn little girl, isolated on the
finca
in Pedro Juan Caballero, her only companion, a doll. How lonely it must have been for her in that gloomy house, populated only by that maniacal man and the brooding ghosts of old crimes, he thought, feeling the first stirrings of a kind of sympathy for her. But pity was expensive baggage. Dao had taught him that, he remembered. He wasn't there to pity her. He was there to kill her only real lover, her messiah, he thought disgustedly.

“It was a hard time for my father. He must have been very lonely. Even as a child I knew that my father was a great man, but one whose genius had been rejected by the world, by blind fools who couldn't hold a candle to him,” she said with a voice that seemed to come not from her, but from the shadows of the room. It might have been the black beetle that was talking. He could hear the croaking of the frogs. A macaw was squawking nearby with a voice that was almost human.

“One day, I must have been about twelve years old, I got into one of my father's medical books with my coloring crayons. I ruined it,” she said happily, a faint Mona Lisa smile bringing a dimple to her cheek.

“I must have colored every page. My father was furious. I remember him shouting at me and I ran to the bathroom to hide. I suppose I wanted his attention. Even then I wanted him all to myself. It felt good somehow, with him pounding in fury at the bathroom door, screaming at me to come out. It was scary, but it was exciting, too. I could feel myself tingling and getting wet between my legs, but I didn't even know what it was. I had no one to tell me what those feelings were all about.

“Finally he smashed in the bathroom door and stood there, panting. I was cowering on the floor, looking up at his red, angry face glaring down at me. It was terrifying and yet there was also that tingling sense of excitement. Then he grabbed me by the arm and he sat down on the folded-down toilet seat. He took off his belt and dragged me across his lap, pulling up my skirt. He tore off my panties and I was completely exposed and helpless. He beat me with his belt while I squirmed and screamed, but he wouldn't stop. The pain was terrible, but it felt good too, somehow. I knew he was right to punish me and I loved him for it. Then I felt his hand fumbling between my legs and it felt wet and good. He slapped my thighs apart and I didn't fight. I only wanted to please him. Then he took me, right there on the bathroom floor. And I loved it, do you hear? I loved it! I was proud that I could give pleasure to this great man, my father.”

“A great man,” Caine echoed, his voice a bleak murmur that she either didn't hear, or ignored.

“That was how it all began,” she said with an air of quiet dignity, like that artificial solemnity that people tend to wear in church. “We were lovers until he sent me away to school in Switzerland. And even if he was my father, he was more of a man and a better lover than any of those fumbling, posturing Swiss boys we used to sneak out at night to see. Because I loved him! And he loved me!” she declared defiantly.

“Love,” Caine snorted. “Is that what you call it?”

“Yes, love!”

“Yeah, well, in my country we call it incest and statutory rape.”

“I knew you wouldn't understand,” $he hissed through clenched teeth.

“You're right.” He shrugged. “I'm far too crude to ever understand the finer points of child molestation. But there's just one thing I don't understand: Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I wanted you to know what a wonderful man you've come to destroy.”

He grabbed her arms so tightly that she winced, and he stared intensely at her cold, perfect features. His eyes were like tiny green lights and at that instant he was ready to kill her. His body was desperate for movement, but he had to find out more.

“Where did you get that idea?”

She shrugged listlessly, as if the answer was self-evident.

“You're from
der Seestern
, aren't you?”

Her answer rocked his head back like a slap and his hands slid lifelessly away from her arms. The Starfish again! And all he could think of was how right Koenig had been about how it's what you don't know that'll kill you. Because her words were his death sentence. That's one for the books, he thought with savage irony: hearing your own death sentence pronounced conversationally by a naked woman.

It was proof positive that Mendoza really was Mengele, he thought. It tied Mendoza to Vienna and the Mengele office in Asunción, where he had found the memo. Not that it mattered anymore. Because it was a setup and he knew he'd never leave the institute alive. Whoever or whatever
der Seestern
was, they had been running him on a one-way mission. Because there was no way out. They had been expecting him! He had flown into the institute like an insect into a Venus flytrap. No, he amended the thought bitterly, looking with a sense of revulsion at her cold beauty, she was the Venus flytrap. He tried to joke his way out of it. He needed time, desperately.

“Actually, I'm from a company called Petrotex. We're into oil, not fish.”

“We've been expecting someone, Señor McClure or whatever your name is. We knew it would have to be an outsider, a professional. As soon as we heard you were coming from Pucallpa, we knew it was you. From the second I saw you I was certain of it. That's why I brought you here,” she said, her eyes sparkling with satisfaction.

“Will you kindly tell me what the hell
der Seestern is
all about?” he demanded irritably and made his move. He shoved her aside and started toward his pants, where the Bauer was, discarded on the floor near the door. But he was too late.

“That is something you and I will have to discuss, Señor McClure, or is it Foster now?” Mendoza said amiably from the doorway.

Mendoza wasn't alone. Helga stood against the far wall, pointing the Bauer at Caine and smiling grimly, her mouth opening and closing like that of a fish. Caine slumped back on the bed in utter defeat. He was disgusted with himself for having been caught by lust, the oldest trap in the business. And this time there was no way out.

He couldn't even try a bluff about his identity to hang on to the McClure cover, because of the tall, blond young man in jungle whites standing next to Mendoza. He looked familiar to Caine; he was one of the men in the BMW who had tried to run him off the road near Bariloche. That he recognized Caine was apparent by the calm certitude with which he pointed the barrel of Caine's own Winchester at Caine's chest, the muzzle opening looking as large as the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel.

CHAPTER 13

“Did you enjoy having sex with my daughter?” Mendoza asked.

“You ought to know,” Caine retorted, and Rolf, the blond man from the BMW, savagely slapped his face. Caine spat out a mouthful of blood and grinned. He had expected something more sophisticated from the Angel of Death of Auschwitz.

“What is your name, anyway? McClure, Foster, or Caine?” Mendoza asked conversationally. They had been through his knapsack and found the other passports, he realized. He shrugged his shoulders as best he could, with his hands and feel tied to a steel chair in Mendoza's laboratory.

“Foster's good enough,” Caine lied. He was a professional spy; he'd be telling lies on his deathbed.

“As you wish,” Mendoza muttered through his thin lips. And then he was staring at Caine's icy green eyes and the cruel smile that came to Caine's mouth, blurred with blood, like a smeared painting.

“Dr. Mengele, I presume,” Caine said.

“Of course,” the old man snapped and gave Caine a perfunctory Prussian nod that oddly managed to be both contemptuous and respectful. He was leaning against the lab counter, his hands on his hips and his legs crossed at the ankles. Helga stood nearby, a glint of satisfaction in her piggy eyes, the Bauer still in her hand. Rolf stood near Caine, his hands balled into fists, anxious to start beating Caine, like a dog straining to slip the leash. Inger had gone. Caine sighed and shook his head.