Assignment Carlotta Cortez

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Yes.”

  Durell was asleep when Pleasure came in, but he awoke at once, conscious that several hours had passed. He didn’t move or open his eyes. Waking, he sensed the stealth and furtiveness with which the girl slipped into his room and, with infinite caution, closed the door behind her. He lay still. He breathed as if he still slept. He watched her without seeming to, through his lashes.

  She had changed her clothes still another time. This time she wore the suit that Sidonie Osbourne had provided for her. She had altered the style of her hair again, copying another photograph in one of the magazines she had found.

  He felt the bed move as she sat down beside him. She was smiling wistfully.

  “Don’t fool me, Mr. Sam. You’re awake.”

  He opened his eyes wide. “How did you know?”

  She giggled softly. “I really didn’t. It’s just the kind of man you are. I reckon I know you pretty good, one way. Not at all, in another.”

  “And what way is that?”

  “The way you are with me,” she said, simply. “Are you afraid of Pa?”

  “Your father?”

  “He made you promise to be true. To take good care of me.”

  “So he did.”

  “Is that why you won’t even kiss me?”

  He didn’t move away fast enough. She was on him., leaning over him, her roundness pressing hard against him, her young breasts firm. “I’ll be anything you want me to be, Mr. Sam,” she whispered. “You can make me into anything, you hear? I can learn. And you can teach me what I can’t find out for myself.”

  He didn’t know what to say. When she kissed him, her mouth was shockingly soft and pliant, inexperienced, yet with a hint of her savage nature in tie demand she made on him.

  “You can have me,” she whispered fiercely. “I never gave myself to Johnny, you believe that?”

  “If you say so.”

  “But I will, for you.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I just keep thinkin’ about you that way, all the time.”

  “You shouldn’t. I’ve already got a girl.”

  “She’s far away. I’m right here. ’

  She wasn’t too naive, at that, Durell thought. She knew what she was doing to him. He couldn’t help himself.

  “Mr. Sam, will you let Johnny go?”

  “Are you trying to do this really for him?”

  “No, it ain’t that. But I think of him, too.”

  “I can’t, Pleasure.”

  “Anything you want,” she said. She started to unbutton the jacket of her brown suit. He knew very well that she wore nothing under it. He stopped her with a quick gesture of his hand. He felt her young strength when he tried to move away from her. Her hands clung to him, but he pulled away, sat up, and listened to the silence of the house. It was dusk outside. The day had gone by. There hadn’t been any reports from Barney Kels; nothing had developed, or they would have wakened him. He felt depressed—by what was not happening outside, and by what was happening with Pleasure here.

  “Mr. Sam?”

  He went to the window and looked out at the house. “What is it now?”

  “I reckon I better get along home,” she said.

  He saw there was only one light in the Cortez house, down in the first basement level. “Why?”

  “You don’t like me. I just embarrass you. And I done what you wanted me to. I showed you that man who was at Piney Knob. And Johnny ain’t coming here. I don’t think I’d want to be here, anyway, if you caught him. I couldn’t really stand it.”

  He decided to get into the Cortez house as soon as it was totally dark and look around in there for himself, as long as Carlotta and the General had not returned. “Mr. Sam?”

  She was crying. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking small and forlorn, and she had covered her face with her hands and wept.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jensen and Fritsch met him halfway down the back stairs to the kitchen. Fritsch looked flushed and angry again; Jensen was studiously surprised. Barney Kels’ voice came quietly from the kitchen behind them, talking to one of his men.

  “We lost the professor,” Fritsch said abruptly. “He went into a Spanish-language movie house up in Harlem and slipped out a side door. Our man missed the move, somehow. We don’t have any idea where Perez is.”

  Durell chopped the air with annoyance. “And the General?”

  “Still at that cocktail party with Carlotta and Justino.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Fritsch and Jensen looked at each other. Jensen spoke up. “Short of crashing the gate and lining them up to count noses, we’re not sure of anything now. Duncan has completely vanished. So has that caballero, O’Brien. We’ve missed all around.”

  “I say again, let’s pull them all in,” Fritsch growled. “We’re not getting anywhere with this. And we’ve got something on Justino, with the girl’s identification, to justify a few questions in the back room.”

  “Have you got anything more?” Durell asked flatly. “We’ve had some word from Piney Knob. The girl’s father was killed at three o’clock this afternoon. Out in the woods, a knife in the back.”

  Durell felt a shock of blank dismay. “Pa Kendall?” “His wife found him out in the woods behind their barn. Remember it? We’ve got two men with the wife and those kids now—but we locked the bam too late, I guess. Justino must have thought that both the girl and her father could identify him. Which means you were right about keeping the girl safe, anyway,” Fritsch admitted.

  They went into the kitchen, and Jensen said, “We’ve got the killer, Sam. One of the Cortez bodyguards—at least, that’s how he’s registered with the alien registration files. We’ve got him, but he won’t talk. He killed himself when he was cornered by state troopers on the Nashville highway, trying to get away. They trailed him in the snow. He tried to shoot it out, missed everybody, then turned the gun on himself. He couldn’t miss that last shot. It blew his brains out.”

  “So we still have nothing,” Durell said.

  Are you going to tell the girl about her father?” Durell considered it. “No, not yet. She’s got grief enough. She ought to be kept busy, I think. If there’s any food in the place, get her to making some kind of dinner for all of us.”

  “Good enough,” Jensen agreed.

  Fritsch still waited for a more decisive word. “We could pull Justino in, Sam. The girl places him at the hijacking scene on Piney Knob. She could finger him good.”

  “That won’t buy back the eggs.”

  “We’ve got to do something. The newspaper people are beginning to smell around. And Wittington is getting into a flap.”

  Durell told Fritsch he was going to look around inside the Cortez house. Jensen confirmed that there were two servants still inside, as far as their observation went. It was possible, Durell told them, that he might pick up something of value in the General’s rooms, perhaps some hint or direction as to what the route of the eggs might be. If the search was negative, he would decide what to do next.

  Durell arranged a warning signal for himself if any of the Cortez people returned while he was in their house. Barney Kels was to ring the phone just once, and then hang up. Five minutes later, when Pleasure came down with a tearful look on her young face, Durell went out through the back door.

  He walked quickly, conscious of an occasional passerby in the evening darkness. In the alley behind the Cortez house, he looked up at the watch-window of the boarding house opposite the Cortezes’, but the window was dark, of course. He did not signal to Kels’ man up there.

  A steep concrete ramp led down into a private basement garage behind die Cortez house. A flight of wooden stairs led up to the back door. The driveway was fenced on both sides, a narrow squeeze for any car coming in through the wider end of the areaway. Durell tried the garage door carefully. It was locked. He could see the dim shine of a car parked in there. A big car, a rich one, that would suit the Cortezes.
He gave up on the garage door.

  The back windows were all dark. The gate to the tiny garden area alongside the driveway was barred on the inside. The fence was over seven feet high. Durell scaled it silently with a swift, fluid muscular effort, and dropped like a cat on a tiny plot of grass and low shrubs on the opposite side. There was an unavoidable crackling of broken branches when he landed, and he crouched as he was, waiting and listening for signs of alarm before he moved on.

  From the garden, French doors opened off a tiny concrete terrace. He took a small, chrome-steel picklock from his pocket and tried it in the French doors. It took only a moment. He eased one panel open, waited, and slid inside, closed the door carefully, and waited again.

  Nothing happened.

  When he was satisfied that his entry had gone unnoticed, he drifted across the room, opened the opposite door, found the servants’ stairway in the back hall, and ascended swiftly and soundlessly to the upper levels of the house. He used a pencil flashlight to guide himself from room to room.

  His search took more than an hour.

  He tried the General’s bedroom first, with its massive mahogany bed, the high chests of drawers, the flamboyant coat of arms painted on a wall plaque. Opposite the heraldic device was a photograph of the General above crossed ceremonial swords. Durell stared at the man’s fleshy face, the iron mouth, the hint of weakness in the chin. There was a leather-bound photo album in a locked drawer of the night table beside the huge bed, and Durell, having picked the lock, flipped the pages of the album rapidly.

  He had read about the aging dictator’s penchant for very young girls. Apparently Cortez was proud of his bedroom achievements with them. His sexual feats were recorded in page after page of photographs of himself with his unofficial harem. Apparently, when it came to experimentation, the General was willing to try anything.

  Durell scanned the book with an expressionless face and carefully returned it as it was.

  On the dresser there was a photograph of Carlotta, another of Justino and a group of uniformed officers surrounding the General in a celebration of the formation of the first coup and the junta he had formed fifteen years ago when he first seized power. Most of the officers in the photo had been killed off since then. There were no pictures of Johnny Duncan.

  On the other chest of drawers, in a glass case, was a finely executed, beautifully detailed model of the Cortez steam yacht, an ocean-going vessel of over two hundred tons. It was named El Triunfo. Durell searched his memory and recalled that Cortez, when he was ousted by the democratic revolutionaries, had fled his country on the yacht, going first to Dominica, then to Miami, Florida.

  He wondered where El Triunfo was berthed at this moment.

  He went into Carlotta’s room. Here again were the ceremonial portraits of the General and his aides, but none of Johnny Duncan. In fact, there was nothing in evidence to indicate that this was Dunk’s room as well, except for two suits crushed to one side in the massive closets that bulged with Carlotta’s Paris clothes.

  He spent ten minutes in Professor Perez’s barren little apartment in the attic. He found nothing. The papers in the huge desk were meaningless mathematical exercises to him. There was nothing of the man himself here except the disorder, the sense of squalor, the contrasting lack of interest in luxury.

  In the map room below, Durell considered the chairs, the air of a general staff headquarters, and then struck gold when he carefully unlocked a table drawer. Legal documents were carefully bound in a packet with red silk tape. One was the lease for this house. Another was the lease for a property identified only as Ferry’s No. 22, on Water Street, across the river and beyond the Narrows in Jersey.

  He was finished, then.

  From down below, on the ground floor, he heard the single sharp ring of the telephone.

  At the same moment, distinct even through the muting walls, he heard the heavy, explosive sound of a shot in the street.

  The men in the kitchen at Number 11 sat frozen for an instant. Then Barney Kels slowly put down the telephone. Fritsch lurched to his feet. “Jesus, who blew that one?”

  “Come on,” Jensen said.

  There was another shot. Dimly, a woman screamed in the house next to Number 11. Fritsch plunged toward the back door with Kels and Jensen at his heels. Each man had a gun in his hand, as if it had miraculously blossomed there.

  Pleasure stood for another moment at the kitchen stove where she had been broiling chops that Jensen had gotten for dinner. She felt as if someone had suddenly grabbed at her heart and squeezed very hard and painfully.

  Johnny?

  He had come here as Durell said he would, and they had caught him and killed him.

  And she had helped this to happen.

  All at once she moved, snatching up her coat from the hall closet, running toward the front door. Then she paused. She remembered Durell’s strict orders. Under no circumstances was anyone to use the front door. The house was supposed to be vacant, unoccupied. But more than that, no matter what happened, Durell had said, she was supposed to stay here and wait for him, and never step outside unless he said so.

  She didn’t care. Johnny was out there. Maybe he wasn’t killed, maybe he was just hurt, trying to crawl away, bleeding, alone. Johnny needed her.

  Pleasure yanked open the front door of Number 11 and ran out into the street.

  A car was parked across the way, in front of the house Mr. Sam had been watching. It was a large, dark-toned Buick. Some people were getting out of it— those she and Durell had watched leaving the Cortez house that afternoon. She didn’t see the man Durell had called Justino, the one who had been at Piney Knob. Nevertheless, she was afraid of them. The red-haired woman in the mink coat turned her head and saw Pleasure standing on the sidewalk across the street from them and stared. Pleasure suddenly turned and ran for the comer in the opposite direction.

  She only wanted to find Johnny. But as she reached the intersection she heard one more final shot, and from the flat, muted quality of the report, she knew she had run the wrong way. It had come from behind the Cortez house.

  She didn’t know what to do. She looked back and saw Carlotta Cortez move quickly up the stairs to the dark red door of her house. The big man called the General followed her.

  The cross street, opening into the Square at her right, looked empty. But as she hesitated, she heard the sound of quick footsteps running erratically toward her.

  She turned and saw Johnny Duncan.

  He ran awkwardly, his arms held wide as if for balance. His blond hair was blown by the cold wind. As he passed through a pool of light from a street lamp, Pleasure saw that his face was twisted by a frenzy of fear and pain.

  “Johnny!”

  He skidded to an abrupt halt. A wild look of disbelief crossed his face. He searched for her and saw her standing across the intersection, and then he ran toward her, his long legs pumping clumsily. Pleasure looked beyond him, but she didn’t see anyone running after him.

  He caught her hand and they ran, staggering, off-balance, toward the Square. He asked no questions. Several times he turned his head and looked back. When he did this the last time, he tripped and stumbled and fell to the sidewalk, his hand tom from her grasp. He rolled over behind a brownstone step and crouched in the shadows, and Pleasure dropped to her knees on the cold pavement beside him.

  “Johnny, Johnny—are you all right?”

  “Jesus, where did you come from?” he gasped.

  “Mr. Sam brought me here. Mr. Durell, I mean.”

  He looked wild. “Durell is here?”

  “We been watchin’ that house.”

  “Hell,” he said in dismay. “Hell, hell.”

  “Are you hurt, Johnny?”

  He struggled for breath. He lifted himself and peered back over the edge of the step. Nobody was following. There were no more shots. He didn’t understand it.

  Pleasure smoothed the hair from his eyes. “Are you hurt?” she asked again.

 
; “No. Just scared, I guess.”

  “Ain’t you glad to see me, Johnny?”

  “I’m just surprised, that’s all. I’ve got things on my mind.”

  “Like your wife?” she asked.

  His head came around, he stared at her; he started to grin, thought better of it, and drew a ragged breath. “I’m sorry about that, Pleasure.”

  “I ought to yell for Mr. Sam right now,” she said. “I been so mad at you, I could kill you. I ought to yell for them to come and get you.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said quickly. “I’m not running away from Durell.”

  “Is it them others?”

  “Yes. They want to kill me.”

  “Then why don’t you give it up?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “Come on,” she said. “We can go back to Mr. Sam. He promised me he’d go easy with you.” She pulled him to his feet. He resisted for only a moment, then rose, too. They stood exposed on the dark, windy sidewalk. “Come on,” she repeated. “Hurry!”

  He looked vague. “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t think they were shooting at me. I was just trying to get into the house by the back way. I was very careful. I wanted to talk to Carlotta. I wanted to beg her to drop the whole crazy thing, it’s so dangerous and bad—”

  “Come—on!” Pleasure said urgently.

  He stood as if his feet were cemented to the sidewalk. The vagueness deepened as he shook his head. “There was someone else—a man I never saw before. He was trying to get into the house, too. And somebody shot at him. From a back window over there. At least, I think they were shooting at him, not at me. . . .”

  “Johnny, this is dangerous!” Pleasure insisted. “What’s the matter with you?”

  But then it was too late.

  She saw him stare at something behind her, and then she heard the hiss of tires on asphalt as a car slid to the curb beside them. It was not the Buick sedan she had seen in front of the Cortez house. It was smaller, less conspicuous.

  Justino stepped out of it. He smiled.

  “You have given us a difficult time, Johnny. Get in the car. Please hurry.”