Assignment - Palermo

by Edward S. Aarons

  “They’re three of a kind, Cajun.”

  “Is the name of Gabriella Vanini associated with them anywhere?”

  “Sorry. Nothing, Sam.”

  “Let Don Hine give it up, then,” Durell said.

  Lem Gray was dry. “He has, old buddy, he has.”

  The computers in London reported hundreds of Vaninis in the telephone directories, from Hamburg, Germany, to Catania in Sicily. So far there was nothing on a Gabriella Vanini specifically. Durell paced Thompson’s little apartment. The hours went by. He knew he was pushing himself beyond the edge of reasonable fatigue. He brewed more coffee and finished the bourbon. Then he got out maps of Europe and began checking bus, railroad, and airline schedules out of Lugano. But it was only a short jump from the lakes to Milan, in Italy, and it was like counting the holes in an enormous seive from there. O’Malley could be anywhere by now.

  Noon came and went.

  Lem Gray called back from London. “It’s hopeless, Cajun. The machine has given up.”

  “All right, Lem. Thanks, anyway.”

  At three in the afternoon Durell sat bolt upright out of a sound sleep. He had dozed in a chair beside the telephone. Thompson was downstairs in the shop. Traffic sounds came up from the narrow street below. Durell considered the thought that had wakened him for perhaps thirty seconds; then he made what he knew must be his last call and his last chance. If he failed, he would fall too far behind in the chase ever to catch up with O’Malley again.

  Onan McElroy was the K Section resident in Naples Central. He was a little elfin man who had once worked with Colonel Mignon and knew more than most about Italian secret societies. The telephone rang four times before McElroy’s light voice answered in Italian. Durell identified himself briefly in code.

  “For hell’s sake,” McElroy complained. “ ’Tis the leprechaun out of the bayous, himself.”

  “Onan, it’s important. You’ve got to do it.”

  “Do what, Cajun?”

  Durell explained about Gabriella Vanini. “She’s just a name. She had to be in the States for O’Malley to have met her, because this is O’Malley’s first trip to Europe, so he didn’t get to know her here. She’s back in Europe now, because O’Malley is looking for her in this area. Maybe she’s in Italy, maybe not. But if she was in the States, there’s a chance she was traveling on business or work or something and not just a tourist, right? Can you check with Work Permit Records, Emigre Labor Certificates, that sort of thing? The Italian government licenses laborers to go abroad. The girl isn’t a laborer, of course, but there might be something like that in the records.”

  “Cajun, it’s siesta time down here. Everything is closed. Maybe in a couple of hours—”

  “I need the data now. You can do it, Onan.”

  There was a long sigh, a yawn, a little grunt. “All right, will do. My taxi business will suffer, though.” “Hurry it up,” Durell said.

  An hour later he had it.

  “We have the record of the whole family,” McElroy said tersely. “The Vanini Family Circus.”

  “The what?”

  “A circus. A troupe of traveling acrobats. They claim to have been in the business for over a century. Performed for all the crowned heads of Europe and so forth. Come from Palermo. Everything in the files is clean.”

  “Is a Gabriella Vanini registered with them?”

  “Sure. A trapeze artist. Does a high wire act, a horseback riding act-—you name it, the gal does it. The troupe just got back from a three-month tour of the States.”

  “Good,” said Durell. “Where are they now?” “France, somewhere. They registered the schedule with their agent’s office. Hold the line, Sam . . . Here it is. French Riviera. Cagne, yesterday. And a couple of other little towns farther down toward Nice.”

  “Thanks, Onan. Thanks for everything.”

  “You owe me something,” McElroy said bitterly. “What’s that?”

  “An afternoon’s siesta.”

  10

  A LIGHT wind blew over the Cote d’Azur and smelled of the sea and pine woods and fish. The sky was filled with tumbling cumulus that sent long patches of shadow prowling over the fishing boats and the mountainous coast eastward toward the Italian border.

  Durell had driven down from Switzerland in the Caravelle. He drove carefully, seeking anonymity in the thick traffic that crawled down from the Alps. The Vanini Family Circus had advertised itself with bright posters splashed along the highway from Cagne to Nice, and he simply followed the signs. He found the circus set up in an empty lot along the stone quai of a half-moon harbor, where bright Riviera yachts were berthed.

  He parked nearby and got out. No one paid any attention to him. He looked tall in his dark blue suit, white button-down shirt, and dark knitted tie. The circus was a typical small-town operation, with two aged tents serviced by battered house trailers that had been altered to serve as ticket booths and dressing rooms for the performers. The signs in French boasted a century-old continuity for the “Flying Vaninis, Performers to the Crowned Heads Of Europe Since 1866.” The posters were garish and had been used too long. Everything pointed to slow decay and economic failure of the enterprise.

  There was a large billboard that advertised: Gabriella, The Flying Ballerina. He doubted that the slim, silver-spangled girl with the long hair crowned with a diadem, shown flying between two trapeze bars and hanging by her teeth from a leather strap, resembled the real thing. The cool wind was filled with the sound of mauls pounding stakes, the neighing of a circus horse, the cough of a mangy, caged lion. Clothing hung from the trailers and snapped in the breeze.

  “You like her?” Someone spoke in Italian-accented French behind him. “You come see tonight, eh? An artist, she is, our Gabriella. Molte belle, signore. She is my aunt.”

  Durell turned to view a flash of white teeth gleaming under a bristly black moustache. The man was stocky, Sicilian, wearing a gaudy sport shirt and khaki trousers stained stiff with paint. There was pride and love in the fierce eyes that regarded Gabriella’s poster.

  “Your aunt?”

  The man grinned. “We have a very complicated family, signore. I am old enough to be her papa, I assure you.”

  “From your advertisements it looks like she’s your whole circus.”

  “No, no, signore. But she could be. She is a marvel, an angel, the way she flies. She is the bright spirit that gives us all our hope and courage.”

  “I’d like to meet her,” Durell suggested bluntly. “Pardon, this is not permitted. You are a patron, she is the performer. In our family we do not encourage—”

  Durell took out a wad of 100-franc notes and nodded to the big tent. “I won’t be in town this evening. Couldn’t I just watch her work out?”

  The “nephew” eyed the money hungrily and brushed his fierce moustache. He looked sad. “I am sorry.” Then he brightened. “Unless, perhaps, you are—what do you call it?—a talent scout?”

  Durell took the cue. “I understand a rival firm has been considering Gabriella for a cinema role.”

  The man’s mouth opened. “I hear nothing of this, signore. It is impossible.” He shook his round head. “In any case Gabriella would never leave the family. Never!”

  “No one else has inquired about her?”

  There was a second’s pause that told Durell what he wanted to know. “No one like you, signore.”

  “But someone has been here?”

  “An old friend, only.” The man scowled. “A troublemaker who disturbs our angel’s heart and drives her to the wind and the sea.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She is not here now. She is out there somewhere.” He waved a thick arm at the blue Mediterranean. “She loves the sailboats and goes alone when she can. She will return only in time for performance tonight.” “You have no idea which way—?”

  “None. And I think you lie and are bad man, not a talent scout. You are one of them who brings trouble to us. Perhaps police. I do not kn
ow. Today one cannot tell blacks from whites.”

  Durell caught at a splinter of the man’s thought. “One of whom? Who do you mean?”

  The man assured himself they were out of earshot of the laborers working around the tents. “Signore, I beg of you. If you are one of the Fratelli, leave us alone. We are not involved in your affairs. We interfere with nothing.” Fear glinted in his dark eyes. “We ask only to live in peace, eh? We wish to know nothing. Has not Gabriella made this clear? Vecchio Zio has given her a promise of protection—”

  “What has she done?”

  “Nothing!” The man almost shouted the word. “Is it her fault to be born a princess of the dark, this lovely angel who seeks only sunlight and the wind?” “Who else has been here?” Durell asked again.

  “The Devil himself.” The man crossed himself and turned away. “Now I have my work to do.”

  It could be Karl Kronin, Durell thought, as he surveyed the organized confusion around the circus tents. It all looked innocent. A fisherman’s diesel engine knocked at the wind. Traffic droned on the Lower Corniche road. Early tourists in bikinis walked by. All at once he smelled and tasted the danger here and he stared closely at the poster of Gabriella Vanini, with her slim, lovely figure and her dark flying hair. How close was she to O’Malley? Was it significant that she had gone sailing today? She had been disturbed. By O’Malley? Had she gone to find him?

  He scanned the blue sea under the tumbling white clouds. Several sails bent out there under the loom of the mountainous coast. They must be early-bird yachtsmen trying their wings on this windy spring day. The needle in the haystack again. He felt frustrated. He had to reach O’Malley and the girl could take him to O’Malley. But Karl Kronin was somewhere nearby. He could feel it in his bones. And where Kronin walked, death walked on his heels.

  He went out on the stone quai, where charter boats were moored. Ten minutes later he was aboard a sleek motor cruiser, passing the mole. The captain was a slim teen-ager from Provence in a singlet, duck pants, and sneakers. The varnished plaque over the sky deck announced his name as Jean Dufours.

  “Mademoiselle took the Manta,” he told Durell in English. “A real chick, eh, monsieur? You like my English? It is good, non? I learn from American college girls.”

  “It’s good. Can you spot the Manta, Jean?”

  “When I see it, dad. She went toward Juan-les-Pins. I watch her trying to—how you say it?—cool it. She burns a blue flame.”

  Durell smiled and began to feel his years. “A bonus for you if we find her in the next half hour.”

  “You wantto catch her bad?” The boy grinned, showing white teeth. “Another is anxious to catch her, a gentleman your age, and three, maybe four men—damned Germans I think. They took Papa Simone’s boat.”

  “What did he look like—this other man and his friends?”

  Jean laughed. “Voyons. Bald, dressed for the city, like you. Walked with a limp. Hard yellow eyes. I would not let him have my boat at any price.”

  He had described, briefly, Karl Kronin. . . .

  Durell scanned the mountainous Riviera coast with care. Eastward the resort hotels nestled in their coves and harbors with glittering opulence. To the west, sunlight reflected on a trailer camp located on a small rocky promontory. There was scrub brush, pines, a dark, coarse sand beach, then an area of private villas hugging the steep coast. Jean abruptly throttled his engines.

  “Voila. The Manta, monsieur. Below Madame Kronsky’s house. The yellow one. She has not yet come down for the season.”

  “You’re sure it’s the right boat?”

  “I know it well. No one is aboard, though.”

  The sailboat they sought had been beached on the crescent sands of a tiny inlet under the yellow villa. The trailer camp was a mile to the left, the aluminum trailers and brightly colored tents half-hidden in the pines.

  “Take us in,” Durell ordered.

  They eased gently into the rock-bound little cove. No other boats were in sight. The boy kicked their stern about with a flat ripple of exhaust, which echoed back from the steep slopes. They grounded twenty feet from the red sloop. “She is not here, dad,” Jean said.

  “We’ll go ashore and find her.”

  “You wish me to accompany you? I thought you wanted to be alone with her, monsieur.. A rendezvous—” “She’s in trouble. Have you a weapon aboard?” _ The young French boy’s eyes gleamed an electric blue. “I have a Remington—pump gun, is it? I use it for the target shoot. I was right, then. I think you are an agent—a cop, hein?"

  “I’m not a cop,” Durell said shortly.

  “Then it is five hundred extra for me and the gun ashore. In advance.”

  Durell paid him. “All right.”

  He waded through the cold water and walked across the dark coarse sand to the red sloop. There was no sign of Gabriella. But a clear set of small footprints led across the beach and a deserted terrace under the closed villa. Jean followed, his rifle held easily in the crook of his elbow. He looked tough and competent. Durell was sure that Gabriella had come here for a specific purpose. But her prints led away from the trailer camp to the left. If she had sailed here for a meeting with O’Malley, she’d have headed for the camp. On the other hand, if it was Kronin who had hired the other boat to follow her, then he was desperately far behind. She might have been cut off from her goal. Still, he saw no sign of another charter boat, and when he asked Jean, the blond boy shook his head.

  “Papa Simone’s boat is not here.”

  “It should be.”

  There were only the girl’s prints, and this was briefly reassuring. Gabriella had walked close to the water’s edge and then clambered over mossy rocks into the woods. Her path then became more difficult to follow. Sunlight dappled the soft turf like gold coins. She wore sneakers, however, and here and there a tread was visible. Durell quickened his stride. Beside the graveled road that led to the shuttered villa she had halted uncertainly, taking a few steps in several directions. Then her prints changed abruptly as she began to run along the gravel, the toe marks deeper. Something had frightened her away, driving her up the mountainside.

  “Hurry,” he told the boy.

  A few moments later they came across several sets of prints in the raked gravel, made by running men. They cut across the steep promontory and turned to follow Gabriella Vanini’s trail.

  “Two men,” Jean said. “Will they be armed?”

  “Yes. So be careful.” .

  “What has the girl done, eh?”

  Durell’s reply was cut off by a thin, faint scream from the woods above. It could have been the lonely cry of a bird, but he knew it wasn’t. It came from beyond the private driveway that looped down to the yellow villa. He ran faster. The boy kept pace with an easy, loping stride.

  “Papa Simone’s boat,” he called softly.

  In another cove, invisible from where they had landed, was a moored motor cruiser. Durell spared it a quick glance from their height above it but did not slacken his pace. He thought he saw someone still aboard, glimpsed

  through the intervening pines. A bald head, a very tall and menacing figure, even at this distance. Kronin? But it was too far away to be certain.

  The girl screamed again.

  Then they heard the heavy, booming shot.

  As if it were a signal, scores of seabirds lifted from the rocky, wooded slope and flew screeching into the blue sky. Their cries wiped out any immediate reply to the shot. Durell plunged upward through the shadowed pines, his feet slipping in the needles. He dropped flat behind a thin, gray shelf of granite. The young skipper kept up with him.

  “There they are,” Jean breathed.

  There were two of them, squat and somehow alien to this quiet place, wearing heavy city clothes. One, with a gun in his hand, walked balancing on a spine of rock toward a copse of trees near the crest of the promontory. Beyond him sea and sky shown benignly. The Riviera coast was hazed by distance toward the Italian frontier. The man wor
e a narrow-brimmed gray hat and a dark topcoat with a velour collar. The second man was circling right, through the woods. The girl was not in sight.

  Durell drew a tight breath. Jean lifted his rifle. “I could give them both a piqûre of lead, eh?”

  “Wait.”

  “But they hunt her like she was a wounded bird.”

  “Let’s spot her first,” Durell said.

  There might be more men from the other boat, circling the mountainside to cut off Gabriella’s flight. He couldn’t chance surprise. Defeat could mean a bullet in the back of the head. But why the girl? She hadn’t been mixed up in the business in Switzerland. Was it all just a blood feud for breaking the tribal rules of the Fratelli della Notte? In any case it surely meant that O’Malley was nearby, and she had come to meet him in this lonely place.

  But why was Gabriella Vanini, an acrobat in a two-bit gypsy circus, so important? He had to keep her alive to answer his questions.

  The man in the narrow-brimmed hat still probed along the tiny cliff-edge. The other had crossed the patch of woods and was climbing higher. He came out of the pines and yelled to his companion, and they both broke into a run.

  Durell started up—and swore softly as the boy beside him lost patience and fired at the man on the rocks. The sound was enormous and then it was snatched away by the sigh of the sea wind. The man on the ledge staggered and turned a dark, shocked face toward them. Then he fell or dropped beyond the crest of the hill. Durell did not know if he had been hit or not.

  “Come on,” he snapped.

  They had lost the advantage of surprise now. He waved Jean to the right and plunged into the pine shadows. The man there had disappeared. Then he saw a small rustic cabin that cast dark shadows on the woody slope. The girl was hiding there, flattened against the peeled-log back wall. She wore dark slacks and a white blouse under a rumpled sweat shirt that had holes in both elbows. He saw everything with a sudden, sharp clarity that took in the details of her enormous frightened eyes, her wind-tangled hair, her open mouth straining for breath after her flight. She looked like a small animal gone to ground after pursuit by a pack of hunting dogs. . . .