Authors: Donald Hamilton
“The marinas over in Nassau are cheaper,” she said as we finished tying up, “but they’re so big and busy it would be hard to tell if anybody was sneaking up on us there. I thought we’d be better off here; and it’s more comfortable, too. The facilities are cleaner, and you don’t get the wash of the harbor traffic.” After a moment, she went on in a casual way, “I can find out where Connie-the-Big-Man lives, if you’re interested.”
The Hurricane Hole Marina was surrounded by a grassy parklike area. It was bordered, in the vicinity of our slip, by a rather dense grove of trees that could have sheltered a regiment of hostile riflemen. We’d have been safer at a big open dock, no matter how crowded. I wished the lady would concentrate on the sailing, at which she was good, and leave to me the strategy, at which she wasn’t. But now that we’d made our deal, it wasn’t my job to second-guess her, just to follow wherever she wanted to take me, short of the grave.
“You’re keeping an eye on Grieg’s house?” I asked. “Your people are?”
Gina nodded. “Yes. I don’t have the address in my head, but I can get it for you. We’re watching both his houses, as a matter of fact. He’s got another one over in West Palm; that’s his respectable domicile complete with beautiful wife and cute kiddies. Two cute kiddies, one of each. But he conducts his drug operations from here, with a mistress in attendance. I can have somebody check and see if he’s in residence.” I regarded her for a moment, then shook my head sadly. “There are things to be said for frankness, sweetheart. I have a lot more respect for an honest wench who comes right out and asks me to murder a man for her than for a sneaky female who just hints around it.”
Her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “My God, you can’t think I meant—”
“If not, why bother to tell me about Mr. Grieg? What the hell do I care where he lives and whether or not he’s in residence? All I want is the location of his secret cay, and I’m not likely to get that by knocking on his door and asking.”
Gina said, “You killed his men. When he learns about it, and he will, he’s bound to retaliate in some way, isn’t he? I thought you might want to forestall that by, well, striking first.”
“I thought you were the little girl who was trying to avoid unnecessary violence.”
Her voice was suddenly harsh: “That’s when we were talking about human beings, Matt. Even nasty, violent human beings like you. But Constantine Grieg does not qualify as human. You know what he does! You know what he sells!”
I looked at her sharply and said, “Hell, I thought we were nobly battling the nuclear menace, or you were. Now all of a sudden we’re engaged in a corny crusade against drugs and drug smugglers. What a let-down!”
“You don’t mean that! You can’t possibly condone…”
I frowned, bewildered. “How the hell did we get into this? I don’t know a damn thing about drugs, sweetheart. An occasional Scotch or martini does the job for me, and I’ve never monkeyed with the other stuff except when I had to go through the motions to make a cover look authentic. But the world seems to be lousy with people just panting to save other people from chemical perdition, and I leave them to it. Certainly at the moment I’ve got more important business, and I thought you did, too. Let’s keep our collective eyes on the atomic ball, huh, and let the marijuana fall where it may.”
“That’s a dreadfully callous attitude!”
“I’m a dreadfully callous guy. And I didn’t come all this way to make a touch on a pot king for high moral reasons, even if it would make a lovely lady very happy, the bloodthirsty bitch.”
She said sullenly, “Nevertheless, I’m right, and you know it! If you don’t do something about him, he’s going to do something about you, he’s bound to. And me, too. After all, he’s already responsible for one attempt on my life.”
I sighed. “Okay, you get on the phone and locate him, and I’ll see what I can work out. I’ve got a couple of calls to make, too. And then let’s clean up the ship and ourselves and go out and have a good dinner on the town, like a nice yachting couple relaxing after a tough ocean voyage.”
“Matt.” She reached out to touch my arm as I started to turn away. Her anger had evaporated, and her expression was apologetic. “Matt, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… There are things you don’t know about me. If you knew, you’d understand.”
I said, “I’m making some guesses.”
“I know. You’re good at that.” Suddenly she laughed and rose on tiptoe to kiss me on the mouth. “But keep them to yourself, or my lawyers will sue you for slander. God, a shower is going to feel good, isn’t it? But
first
we clean up the ship, Mister, before we do anything else, or people will think we’re a couple of seagoing slobs…”
Later, chores done, we hiked across the high toll bridge in the fading evening light—cars two bucks; pedestrians free—to have dinner at the Bridge Inn, a noisy, colorful place that served us some elderly and inedible shrimp that Gina insisted on sending back to the kitchen. She was right, of course, but I wasn’t really in the mood for hassling a waiter about a shellfish when more serious conflicts awaited me. The rest of the meal was better but still nothing to bring tears of joy to the eyes of Duncan Hines.
“What is it with us?” Gina asked softly as we sipped our coffee afterward.
“What do you mean?”
“You and I,” she said. “We do get along after a fashion, we even fight in a comfortable way. I call you violent and nasty, and you call me a bloodthirsty bitch, and we’re friends again. But how can you stand me? I’m a shallow society tramp who’s slept with everything in pants, and a few things in skirts just for variety. A few years back, after… after a rather traumatic experience, I got religion of sorts and decided I’d better save the world, but that doesn’t make me a very good person, really. After all, it’s just a matter of self-preservation. As I think I said before, we rich folks have even more reason not to want our world blown up than the poor folks; we’ve got more to lose. It’s only good sense for us to do what we can to keep the poor old globe in one piece. But even if I’m engaged in a reasonably worthy project for a change, it doesn’t make me a very lovable individual, does it?”
This was a new Georgina Williston, humble and self-critical and a little frightening, considering the arrogant and dictatorial sailing expert I’d had to deal with on the boat.
“Maybe I hate lovable individuals,” I said.
She shook her head quickly. “No. Your lovable Amy girl is just the type I’d expect you to go for. A kind of atonement. The poor kid
needs
somebody, or you think she does; and I suspect that way in the back of your mind is a nagging guilt for all the people you’ve damaged and killed in the line of business. Here’s a way for you to redress the balance just a little; so you try to make up to her for her hating parents and the men who’ve used her for their own gratification without a thought of what they might be doing to the girl herself. You’re kind and gentle with her, so gentle you can hardly perform when the time comes. Just what I’d expect from what I know about you. But what the hell are you doing making eyes at this beat-up society babe on her two-bit save-the-world crusade?”
“Don’t run yourself down like that, Gina.”
She shook her head, dismissing my words, and went on harshly: “And what am I doing, getting mushy about the kind of gun-toting macho bastard I detest?” She drew a long breath and glanced at her watch. “Seven-thirty. Enough of this philosophical crap. Let’s check our weapons and go see this Grieg bastard.”
“No weapons,” I said. “The arrangements have been made, and it’s strictly a social visit.”
“I don’t pay social visits to people who traffic in human suffering!”
I said, “Cut it out, Gina. Give your moral superiority a rest. And what’s all this loose talk about weapons? Are you carrying?”
“Carrying?”
“A gun?” I watched her eyes betray her; and I had her purse before she could pull it away. Inside, I found a little .25 auto that I’d hidden on the boat in what I’d thought was a pretty secure place. “You’ve been snooping,” I said. “Did you find the chopper in the bilge, too?”
“There weren’t any weapons in the bilge.” She frowned. “I thought a chopper was a helicopter.”
“Back in the old Capone days it stood for a tommy gun. In those days they didn’t have a lot of helos flying around to confuse the issue.” I pushed my chair back. “Let’s go see
el Hombre Grande.
The Big Man.”
He was big all right. Rising to greet us, he made the massive desk in front of him look like toy furniture. At six four and two hundred I’m no midget, although I’m more bones than meat; but Grieg had me beat by an inch or two vertically. Horizontally, it was no contest at all. A real mountain of a man.
With whiskers, he’d have looked like a grizzly bear in a three-piece suit. Perhaps this was the reason he was so carefully shaved, after-shaved, and talcumed, with his wavy black hair trimmed closer than fashionable these shaggy days. Even with the hair neatly clipped his head still looked plenty big enough for his enormous body. His skin was dark olive. His eyes were brown, under bushy black eyebrows. His suit was brown, his shirt was striped brown and white, and his brown tie was very neatly tied. His shoes I couldn’t see for the desk.
With all this expanse of civilized attire confronting me, I was glad I’d dressed up for dinner in the only suit I’d brought along, blue, and the only tie, blue with a pattern of white; and that Gina was wearing her little white denim dress, nicely upgraded by high-heeled white pumps and some discreetly expensive jewelry, so that it looked as smart as if it were silk or satin—actually smarter in its understated way.
But the statuesque blonde behind Greig was more dramatic. She was wearing shiny, skintight, raspberry-red pants that looked as if they’d glow in the dark and a loose, lacy, sleeveless white top that made no great effort to conceal her spectacular pectoral development. She was almost six feet tall. Her piled-up golden hair and high-heeled sandals jacked her up well past the two-yard mark. The big man and woman made a formidable couple, standing there. I wondered what the wife in West Palm Beach was like. Perhaps she was a pale, downtrodden little mouse—but Gina had described her as beautiful. A clever, passionless woman, then, who was happy to share the task of satisfying the giant she’d married as long as the sharing was done in another country and didn’t affect her pride or her home or her income. Or maybe she was a perfectly innocent married lady who knew nothing about her husband’s illicit business or his illicit love. But it didn’t seem likely.
The fifth person in the room, kind of guarding the door behind Gina and me, was small and mustached and Oriental. He looked like an undertaker’s assistant in his black suit. I had a hunch that he might have helped the undertaking business along a bit from time to time at that, with the gun that showed just a little under his armpit. He’d been waiting for us outside the iron gates of the estate, coming to the taxi as it stopped and getting in beside the driver.
“I am Coyote,” he’d said over his shoulder as, on his signal, the gateman pushed the button that made the iron barrier swing open for us. Then the man who’d called himself Coyote had continued: “The lady will please to give the gun in her purse to the gentleman. So. Take care of it for her, mister, please. We have word of your reliability. We have none of hers. Please excuse.”
We’d ridden up the drive through the trees, in the dark, getting no real notion of the place except that there was a lot of it. Coyote had helped Gina out politely at the door and escorted her inside, letting me trail along behind. I wasn’t sure whether it was more a sign of his trust in me or of his mistrust of her. We’d been ushered into a big study, or office, to meet the folks.
Now Connie spoke to me, in a deep voice consistent with his size: “I got a call from Miami Beach, Mr. Velo on the line. I don’t take orders from Giuseppe Velo; but I’m not too proud to take advice. He said you’d called him. He said if you wanted to talk to me I’d better let you, sometimes you made sense. So talk.”
I said, “Talking is better than shooting, Mr. Grieg.”
I reached into my shirt pocket, making the movement slow and deliberate. I walked forward, still moving with deliberation, placed a slip of paper on the desk, and moved back cautiously. My back felt very vulnerable. When a man, Oriental or Occidental, calls himself by a silly menace-name like Coyote, you don’t want to take any chances with him. He’s trying to prove something, and he might try to prove it on you. The big man behind the desk reached out for the piece of paper and sat down to study it, frowning a little.
“A position at sea?” he said. “But what’s the number three thousand four hundred and eighty-six supposed to mean?”
I said, “You sail one of your ships to twenty-six degrees and ten minutes north latitude, seventy-eight degrees and twenty minutes west longitude. Then you climb into your little submersible or bathysphere and go three thousand four hundred and eighty-six feet straight down. They ought to be right there, at those coordinates, along with their hot-rod boat.”
There was a lengthy silence. I saw Grieg looking down at his desk, the top of which was actually a large chart of the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and part of Florida, sealed under transparent plastic.
“Thirty miles northwest of Great Stirrup Light.” He spoke without expression. “Well, that would be about the spot all right.”
Sudden anger made the woman step forward to stare over his shoulder. Unlike Grieg, she didn’t have a voice to match her size. You’d think she’d sing contralto, but what came out was a rather shrill soprano.
“Christ, this is Pauli and his boys the skinny bastard’s talking about!”
“I know what he’s talking about.” Grieg spoke quite mildly. He looked at me. “You got all four of them? How? A torpedo at the waterline? A grenade in the cockpit?”
I said, “I won’t pry into your professional secrets, Mr. Grieg, if you don’t pry into mine. All you need to know is that they’re down there and that they’re dead.”
“They’d damn well have to be dead, almost six hundred fathoms down, wouldn’t they?” He stared at me across the big desk. “I guess you think you’re pretty good.”