Drumbeat Erica

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Yes. Most of it uphill, too.” She didn’t quite smile. “Of course, I could always drive you.”

  “Stop trying to see how tough I am to intimidate.”

  “Very, very tough.”

  I put the drinks down.

  She walked two small steps into my arms, her face tilted up. As we kissed, I could feel all of her against me, small but very female, through the rose-colored muu-muu.

  “I knew it would be good,” she whispered softly against my cheek. “I thought so when I first saw you, but I knew it for sure when we kissed in the restaurant. Was that very wicked of me?”

  “Diabolical,” I said, and lifted the mane of raven hair to kiss the nape of her neck.

  “I mean, Ahmed taught me that too. It was part of growing up. Now if I—want a man and feel it will be good I let him know that. Life is too short to waste time playing at silly little flirtations. They only delay—”

  “How old are you?” I interrupted. She sounded like an earnest coed reciting from a sociology thesis.

  “Twenty five. I know I don’t look it, but—”

  “Then stop babbling,” I said.

  Her eyes flashed angrily for an instant. “What a polite way of saying shut up.”

  “Okay,” I said, grinning. “At least I was polite.”

  “Stop babbling,” she said, grinning too.

  We kissed again. Her babbling was the only shyness she displayed, and it ended after the second kiss.

  We wandered into the bedroom on one pair of legs. She was right about it being good.

  19

  SOME TIME about halfway through the eight hours of deep and restoring sleep that ought to have followed, I woke up. I felt the weight of Suzanne’s leg on my leg. She was sleeping on her side, curled against me, her tousled hair spread on my shoulder. She sighed. I reached out with my right hand and got my watch off the night table. It was four-thirty.

  I had been dreaming. I was back in the gym aboard the Rotterdam. The same mob of people was watching while Shiraz and Erica went through their judo paces.

  “I’m coming at you with a knife,” Erica said, and Shiraz smiled a smug smile and slowly, the way people can be slowed down in a dream sometimes, went through the motions of taking the make-believe knife away from her. The only trouble was it was no make-believe knife. The two girls wearing apache shirts began to scream. Erica raised the real knife and plunged it into Shiraz’s heart. He flopped on his back like a fish in a rowboat. Instead of dying instantly, as he should have, he crooked a finger at me so that I could hear his dying statement like a good private eye.

  “I’ll bet you feel sorry for me,” he said. “You poor slob, I feel sorrier for you. I’m checking out, but you’ll have to work for her a whole damn year.”

  Erica nodded. “A bargain’s a bargain.”

  I tried to argue that our cockeyed bargain hadn’t been made until after the judo exhibition. It was no use. It was a very logical dream. Erica said:

  “Sure, but you’re dreaming this in Gstaad next week.”

  Suzanne stirred against me. She purred sleepily, like a cat. Her lips began to move against my arm.

  “Cheri,” she whispered.

  She rolled over, partially on top of me.

  I sat up and she rolled away.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I got out of bed in the darkness, stubbed my toe on something, found my clothes scattered here and there and dressed in a hurry.

  Shiraz rents a car in Amsterdam, I thought, and pilots it like an F-105 down through Germany into Switzerland. Purpose: to shake a would-be assassin. I’d known his destination, and so had the Rotterdam’s Mr. Fontein. Figure whoever had been making VIP arrangements for him in Amsterdam knew it too.

  Anybody else?

  Nobody else, unless he had told them.

  There was Erica. She was a challenge he had to lick. The big movie star ego would require that.

  The big movie star ego might have phoned her just before leaving Amsterdam. Or maybe Erica had phoned him. His yen for her gave Erica a neat advantage in the assassin department.

  The wife won’t be back for a few days. How’s about you dropping down to Gstaad while she’s gone?

  She had dropped down to Gstaad with Jeremy Budd, and Budd had climbed a mountain with his rifle but had missed the target. Which left Erica, the one bait Shiraz was sure to strike at.

  “But where are you going?” Suzanne asked.

  For a moment I thought Erica had paid her to keep me occupied, but I scrapped the notion in a hurry. After all she’d described Jeremy Budd as the guy who’d bribed her to put the finger on Shiraz.

  “Where are you going?” Suzanne asked again, sitting up in bed and switching on the night lamp.

  “I had a nightmare,” I told her, and clomped outside in my ski boots.

  It was snowing hard when I hit the street, big feathery flakes spilling out of the windless night. I walked quickly, ankle-deep in snow, past the dark shop windows and the chalets. There were no footprints but my own and no cars parked on the deserted street.

  I trudged up the hill just this side of the railroad trestle. The hill was called Oberbort, and it was where the really big money that came to Gstaad paid for the chalets that started at about a hundred thousand bucks a throw. It was where the retired Mexican funnyman had his chalet. It was where Ahmed Shiraz might be in the process of getting himself killed.

  I went on up past the Palace Hotel. A few insomniac lights glowed through the falling snow. An unseen woman called out something bitterly, either in her sleep or because she couldn’t sleep. I silently wished her luck and kept going, climbing higher past bigger chalets. My ski boots made no sound in the fresh snow. A clump fell from an overladen spruce branch. I almost jumped a foot. At five o’clock in the morning, double-timing up a hillside through the darkness to prevent murder, I felt like an intruder in an unreal world.

  The feeling of unreality left when I saw a single upstairs window lighted in the Mexican funnyman’s chalet. I opened the gate in the picket fence. It creaked, but nobody used that as an excuse to take a shot at me.

  Two cars were parked outside the garage, both mounded with snow. One was Shiraz’s rented Mercedes. The other was a low-slung Citroën DS, its license plate and nationality plaque snow-covered. Shiraz’s visitor, whoever it was, had been there a while. I rubbed snow off the trunk lid of the Citroën, searching for the nationality plaque. I could just make it out in the light from the upstairs window. It said NL. NL stands for Netherlands.

  I wished I’d had about four more hours of sleep. I wished I had a gun, I climbed the stairs to the front door and rang the bell.

  After a while a light came on through the Judas window in the door. The door opened three inches and Erica said, “I do believe it is Mr. Chester Drum of Washington and Geneva.”

  I didn’t dispute that statement.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here. Open up.”

  She opened up. I went inside past her into the long hallway that was decorated with posters from the Plaza de Toros de Mexico.

  “Turn around,” she said.

  I turned to face her.

  Her voice had that slightly singsong and ready-to-giggle quality that made me think she was on LSD.

  She smiled at me and cut loose with a right-handed hay maker that took me completely by surprise. You don’t expect a woman, not even Erica Nordstrom, to take a man-sized swing at you like that. It landed flush on the point of my jaw and I went back two steps and felt tears springing to my eyes.

  “Damn,” Erica said, rubbing her fist. “I hurt my hand.”

  She had hurt my jaw too, but it was nice to know she lacked the punch to deck me.

  “I had to try that,” she said. “I ought to have known I couldn’t knock you down.” She smiled. I didn’t smile.

  “Now that you found out,” I said, “where’s Shiraz?”

  “I’ve put men down for the count before—big a
s you are. Bigger. It surprises the hell out of them—when they wake up.” A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Damn you, I think I broke a knuckle.”

  “Where’s Shiraz?”

  “Oh him. Upstairs. Taking a little trip. Some people LSD hits like a sledge hammer. He’s one of them.”

  “I’m surprised he’s still alive,” I said mildly.

  “He’s alive all right. It’s strange, isn’t it?” She looked puzzled. She fingered her right fist gingerly. “What’s your jaw made out of, granite?”

  It was hard to get her to concentrate. Except for that she had the acid under control. I wondered why she’d taken it. Just giving it to Shiraz should have been enough. She could have killed him at leisure, especially since it hit him the way she said it had. He would have even died happy.

  “What’s strange?” I asked.

  “I told you on the ship. I never killed a man before It isn’t easy. It’s goddam hard. Am I—soft or something?”

  She was wearing a man’s pajamas, probably Shiraz’s. They were too large in the shoulder but otherwise fitted her pretty well.

  “A very strange thing. I don’t just dislike the guy, I despise him. It should have been so easy to kill him.”

  “You can always get someone else to do the dirty work. You tried it earlier.”

  “Oh that,” she said, dismissing it as unimportant. “Jeremy never was much of a shot with a rifle. So I waited until Shiraz got home, and knocked on the door. Just like that. He was delighted to see me. Never thought I’d actually come, he said. I had it all planned. The idea really excited me. Talk about games.”

  “What idea?”

  She blushed. It surprised me. The one thing Erica really had going for her, if she knew how to use it, was that element of surprise. One minute she’d come on like a waterfront roughneck, the next like a demure schoolgirl.

  “We’d have a trip. Then I’d let him seduce me. After that I was going to kill him. Just like a black widow spider.”

  “But it didn’t work out that way?”

  “We went on a trip. Just a little tiny small one. He sat around sniffing colors and touching sounds. Then he played at hallucinating. He turned me into every woman he’d ever had and maybe then some. He got very erotic but he was as passive as a frightened kitten. That’s what the USD did to him.”

  What the LSD did to her was make her talk. She couldn’t stop. She found it unpleasant enough so that the flush stayed in her cheeks, and she averted those big green eyes, but she went on talking.

  “Pretty soon we—well, we arrived at the second stage of my game. I—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, feeling like a reluctant Peeping Tom. “Nobody asked for a blow by blow of your love life. Let’s go upstairs.”

  But she barred the way. “You asked, I’m telling. Next comes the part that hurts, because it would have been so damn easy. He just flopped back on the bed and fell asleep. I looked at him. I looked at the pillow. I rolled him off it. He didn’t make a peep. I had the pillow in my hands. I brought it down close to his face. It should have been so simple. All I had to do was lower the pillow a little and—I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. I sat there, on the edge of the bed, with the pillow. What’s the matter with me?”

  “You’re human after all,” I said. “That’s what’s the matter with you.”

  “I went on sitting there a long time. I even tried to relax by letting the acid take hold but I still couldn’t finish what I’d come to do. Ridiculous, isn’t it?” She looked past me then. She brightened. “Especially since it’s going to be done anyway.”

  I felt a draft on my neck.

  Erica smiled. “I finally called Jeremy. He was back at the hotel by then. In fact, when you rang the bell I thought it was him.”

  I started to turn around.

  “I’m glad you got here first, man,” a voice said behind me. “Makes things easier all around.”

  Jeremy Budd stood in the doorway with an automatic in his hand.

  20

  HALLUCINATE LIKE hell, a voice inside my head said.

  All you have to do is sit here and concentrate on not letting the acid get to you. Then, if you can do that, all you have to do is pick yourself up off the floor. Nobody had told me to sit on the floor, but it was a very nice, hard, cold floor, and down there, looking up, or listening up, you could hear the light streaming from the overhead fixture. Then, if you can pick yourself up off the floor, all you have to do is walk over to Erica, seated near the door, take Jeremy’s automatic away from her, make her tell you where Jeremy has taken Shiraz and find them before Jeremy murders him. A lead pipe cinch.

  But I did none of it. I sat there listening to the colors streaming down from the light. A guy with a pretty good left hand was playing bass.

  We had gone upstairs, first Erica, then me, then Jeremy and the automatic. Shiraz was still asleep, nude, stretched out on the rumpled bed. Erica held the gun on me while Shiraz was slapped into some semblance of wakefulness by Jeremy, and finally got dressed with his. help. He sat there smiling at the walls. He said nothing. I knew he was going to be a whole lot of help in the business of saving his life.

  “Where’s the acid?” Jeremy asked Erica.

  A pair of ski pants and an anorak were draped neatly over the back of a chair. Erica got a sugar cube from the pocket of the anorak. She brought it to me.

  “Eat it,” she said.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Sock him one,” Jeremy said. “Not too hard. He’s got to be able to move.”

  Erica whacked the side of my head with the barrel of the automatic. I had been sitting on the edge of the bed. I fell across it.

  “Do yourself a favor,” Erica said, “and eat it.”

  I sat up and munched on the sugar cube. It tasted just like a sugar cube.

  Jeremy looked at his watch. “Ten minutes ought to do it,” he said. “Then the four of us go for a nice little drive.”

  Erica looked at him. “You’ve got it wrong. Drum’s not going anywhere.”

  “I get it,” Jeremy said sarcastically, his not-quite-girlish face smiling a smile about as wide as the edge of a razor blade. “I take the actor out and chill him, and Drum sits here waiting, knowing all about it, and then we let him go. I must have been dense not to have figured out exactly what you had in mind.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” Erica said. “or I’ll beat the stuffing out of you. I mean it, Jeremy.”

  “That’s what I like,” he said. “A real united front.”

  Erica was mad at herself and taking it out on Jeremy. I wondered if there was anything in it for me.

  “Why don’t you two fight?” I suggested. “I’ll be referee.”

  Erica didn’t hear me. “I’ve done it before when you got out of line,” she told Jeremy. “I’ll do it again if you make me.”

  “Yeah. You made a great success of this operation so far. Christ, all you had to do was—”

  “I didn’t. You do it. That’s what I’m paying you for.”

  “Sure. Then Drum holds us in the palm of his hand. I said I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not paying you to like it.”

  “You’re not paying me to set myself up for a murder rap.”

  She didn’t let the argument go any further. She walked in front of him with the automatic in her hand, and all she said was his name: “Jeremy.”

  He just looked at her. She took a step closer to him, and he flinched. An odd sleepy look came into his eyes.

  “All right,” he said after a while. “But tell me what happens to Drum.”

  “Nothing happens to him except he joins the organization. Isn’t that right?” she asked me.

  “Anything you say.”

  Shiraz, dressed, was on his feet staring at the window and listening to music none of the rest of us could hear. He had a bemused expression on his face.

  “You know what to do,” Erica told Jeremy.

  He looked at the autom
atic in her hand. “What about the cannon?” he said.

  “You’ll find a .44 Magnum in the night table drawer,” Erica told him, and Jeremy opened the drawer and found it.

  “I guess we get rolling, Shiraz,” Jeremy said. “You’re going to love this. I’ll tell you all about it on the way.” That odd sleepy look came into his eyes again. He nudged the actor with the Magnum. He told Erica, “Figure an hour. You be there. One hour.”

  “I’ll be there,” Erica promised.

  “Wha’?” Shiraz said. I wondered how much of the conversation he’d heard. I wondered what if anything it had meant to him off dreaming somewhere on an acid trip.

  He stared at me. He didn’t see me. “Drum gets here,” he told Erica, “you let him in, okay?”

  “Okay, baby.”

  Shiraz smiled delightedly, as if she had done him a great favor, and drifted out the doorway with Jeremy at his heels. I heard their footsteps on the stairs. A minute later I heard a car start. Jeremy gunned the motor and then the sound of it receded.

  I sat on the floor and listened to the falling snow. It played an arpeggio and went on from there. I was beginning to hallucinate.

  What’s-her-name Erica paced back and forth like a caged tigress. I turned her into a caged tigress. She purred. I hoped she wasn’t particularly hungry.

  “You’re a caged tigress,” I said.

  “You’re lucky,” she said.

  “I am?”

  “The waiting. You’re off on a trip, but mine’s almost over. It’s easy for you.”

  “Why not join me?” I said cagily. “Why not take some more acid?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “We both would,” I said. It wasn’t just an acid dream. I had seen Erica before, in times of stress, take some LSD. You don’t get hooked on the stuff, the way you do on heroin, but you can get to depend on it. Erica was probably more dependent on it than she liked to admit. I tried to concentrate.

  “What difference would it make?” I said. “Do you know where Jeremy’s taking him?”

  “What if I did?”

  “Well, I don’t. So what difference would it make if you took acid? You’ve got the gun. Don’t tell me you’re scared.”