Assignment - Palermo

by Edward S. Aarons

  “I’m ready,” Bruno said amiably. “Let’s find a place where I can cook this stuff.”

  They checked into a hotel near the Theresa Barra glove shop, since Durell felt uneasy about leaving his companions, and especially Gabriella, exposed temporarily on the open streets of Naples. An accident would be simple to arrange in the wild traffic along the Via Partenope. The bay never looked more beautiful or serene. Distant Capri loomed far off in the blue water, the height of Anacapri seeming to float in the incredible sky. The sidewalk cafes were crowded now, and among them were early-bird tourists, with their inevitable festoons of cameras, beating the summer crush.

  The hotel apartment was small and dingy, but it seemed safe enough. It was three o’clock. Half an hour to his appointment with Adolfo Cimadori.

  “You going alone?” O’Malley asked aggressively.

  “Better that way. You three take care of the girl.

  She’s more important to us than Fort Knox.”

  “You trust that Adolfo flower?”

  “No, but he’s our only lead now.”

  “I am sorry,” Gabriella apologized. “Perhaps if we went to Palermo and tried some of the roads, I would recognize them, and it might come back to me, the way to Vecchio Zio’s place.”

  “ ‘Castle,’ you said,” Durell reminded her.

  “Yes, an old Crusader or Norman ruin.”

  “Well, that may be a help. Only so many of them are still habitable.” Durell frowned. “But Sicily is too big. It would take a long time to check them all out.” “I am so sorry. I—I wish I had not agreed to this. It was wrong of me. I was mistaken about Zio. I thought —hoped—he would see me at any time.”

  “Keep on believing it,” Durell said.

  “But these men who try to stop us—they must all take orders from Zio.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “It could not be otherwise,” she objected. “Zio commands and Zio is obeyed.”

  “Maybe not this time.”

  But there was more on her mind. Durell was aware of it from the way she hovered near him, as if she were reluctant to stay with O’Malley. She bit her pink lip and made a little sound and traced a faded rose in the carpet with her foot, arching her toe like a ballerina. O’Malley, lounging in the kitchen doorway of the hotel apartment, glowered at her.

  “What’s bugging you, kitten?” he asked.

  “Nothing, O’Malley. But I would feel safer—” “With the Cajun?”

  “Perhaps. Not that I reflect on you, but—”

  “But he’s getting to you, is that it?”

  “O’Malley, you have no right to criticize me,” she flared. “You have no claim on me.”

  “Oh, yes, I have, baby. Lots of claims.” He twitched away from the door and crossed toward Durell. He walked like a fighter crossing a ring, his shoulders hunched. Attracted by the tightness of his voice, Bruno and Joey came to watch. All at once the atmosphere in the drab apartment was electric. “Cajun, are you playing for her?” O’Malley asked.

  “No.”

  “She’s my girl. You know that?”

  Gabriella said in a small voice, “I am not your girl, O’Malley. I am free. I have always been free.”

  “You’re not going with the Cajun.”

  It was an ultimatum, and Durell saw no profit in taking it up. O’Malley was too volatile. He reminded himself he was dealing with men who had no morality. Shrugging, he moved Gabriella toward the kitchen door.

  “Go and help Bruno get his fancy dinner together, like a good girl. O’Malley is right. You’re safer here. What I have to do now is better done alone.”

  “But they only want to lure you where they can kill you,” she protested. “O’Malley, you should go with him.”

  “You certainly worry about the Cajun, don’t you?” O’Malley asked angrily.

  “I worry about all of us.”

  “Please do as I say,” Durell told her.

  Reluctantly she walked toward the kitchen. Bruno lumbered after her, and his voice made a low growl as they talked in there. Joey Milan picked up a deck of cards he had acquired somewhere and made thin riffling sounds as he shuffled them. His eyes never left Durell. O’Malley paced to the window and back, lean and dangerous. From the kitchen came a clatter of pots and pans. The sound eased him, and he laughed. “All right, Cajun, we won’t knife each other about it, right? Just remember, she’s my girl.”

  “If she says so.”

  “I say so. It’s enough, right?” Some of the feral look left O’Malley’s eyes. “So you go to that pink-pants Adolfo’s place alone. But what if you don’t come back? I’ve given you all I could get on Kronin and the Fratelli. Now I’m only interested in finding a way out for me and Gabriella. Any way, understand? On any terms. Maybe Joey and Bruno and I should’ve gone to Rio or somewhere and forgot the whole business.” O’Malley swore softly. “I don’t know how I ever got stupid enough to get on this patriotic kick in the first place.”

  Durell smiled. “We all have our neuroses.”

  He had a few minutes to spare. He walked in the sunshine of the Via Partenope, with the cone of Vesuvius looming in the distant haze across the Bay, and on impulse he turned into the Theresa Barra shop and asked an obliging clerk if he could use the telephone in the back room. They remembered him from his last visit, and he was waved on.

  He called Naples Control and asked for Onan McElroy. He was in luck. Razzatti was on duty. Durell identified himself with the usual code phrase, and Mc-Elroy came on and told him he’d been alerted by Thompson in Geneva and what could he do now for him? Durell asked for a rundown on Adolfo Cimadori and the contessa, his mother, at once.

  McElroy replied immediately. “He’s no good, Cajun. The locals know all about him but haven’t touched him yet because he’s small dung. They want the Fratelli, too.” The K Section man paused. “Is your phone safe?” Durell looked through the doorway into the shop. It was empty except for two obviously innocent American tourists, buying gloves for the woman and a Borsalino hat for the man. “Yes, safe enough.”

  “Good. We know Adolfo’s trying to break away from Mama’s whip and set himself up as a pezzo di novanta—a big shot—in the narcotics business. It’s a small operation, with a sideline in white slavery, what else? So the fuzz hasn’t touched him. They want the contessa badly and hope the son will slip in the muck and give them the break they need. But Cajun, you’re wading into deep and dirty waters.”

  “I know. What I want to learn is if Adolfo ever goes to Sicily—and when and where if he goes.”

  “Can do. Give me a bit of time.”

  “I’ll call back,” Durell said.

  He hung up and thanked the clerk and walked around the corner, beyond the American Express office, crossed the Via Santa Lucia to the taxi stand opposite, and gave the villainous cab driver the address of Adolfo Cimadori at Via Mirabella, 45.

  Sometimes you had no choice about the tools you used in the business, he reflected, and couldn’t examine too much into their quality. Success was measured by accomplishment and survival. You paid any price for the first and often the second, too. Cruelty was a regular signpost in his shadow world. You had to sacrifice friends if it came to a choice. O’Malley suspected this. Even though there once had been a time when he’d known every vagary of O’Malley’s temperament, he did not feel assured now. O’Malley was sulky, regretting the cause he had taken up. Durell didn’t know how far he could trust O’Malley or the other two.

  But Gabriella was different. She had a basic innocence that made her defenseless. She would grow up before this was ended, and the process would be most painful. Already, with the news that her fabled Zio refused to see her, she knew that her security had trembled and turned into a quagmire under her feet. He felt protective toward her, despite the rules he had to obey, and he knew he would defy those rules in order to see her safely through her coming ordeal.

  The taxi halted, and the driver pointed to the address he wanted.

  Fo
r Naples, it was a quiet street. The apartment house was new, built on the rubble of old devastation. It had a garden court with a long facade that faced the tilted uphill street. Concrete balconies were gay with laundry, like a display of flags. An arcade led into a central court, with a piece of concrete statuary as hideous and stupid as most of the undisciplined, phony work that passed as modern art. Children ran and screamed in the sunny corners of the court. Beyond was another entrance and a row of mailboxes with elegantly polished and engraved brass nameplates.

  He found Cimadori’s name under number 4C and pushed the bell. There was no elevator. He took the concrete staircase that angled up in a narrow shaft toward a skylight far above.

  The afternoon was sultry, but it was cool in this rabbit warren. Originally there had been pretensions to elegance here, but the volatile Neapolitans had dulled this somewhat. At the fourth-floor landing he looked back and thought he saw a shadow move far below. But he wasn’t sure and went on.

  The door to 4C was locked. He rang and waited, rang again, then thought he heard the scrape of footsteps on the stairs. He walked back and looked down the shaft.

  Nothing. But he felt pretty sure now.

  A fire exit led him onto the long balcony that overlooked the courtyard where the children played. Their screaming quarrels drifted up in distorted echoes. Durell walked along the balcony, counting windows under the slanted awnings that had been let down against the afternoon sun. It was the hour in Naples when shops closed and the long siesta took place, and Neapolitans hid from the day’s heat.

  He was sweating when he reached the right window, but it was not from the sun that cooked the concrete walls. The window he wanted was open. He stood there, wishing the children below would be silent for just a moment so he could listen better. But he could hear nothing inside Cimadori’s apartment and moved in quickly, past the limp draperies, aware of his shadow shooting ahead to betray him. Danger waited here, but he could not guess where and when it might strike. He was familiar with this fear and considered the primordial tightening in his belly as natural and useful. It alerted his reflexes, and he did not let it stop him.

  The room was empty, furnished in an Italian version of Danish modern, with elaborately slung canvas chairs, an orange couch under a big painting that was only a splash of disorienting color, a coffee table set with liqueurs, including one tall golden bottle of Strega. There was perfume in the air—and a smell of something else.

  Durell crossed the room to a hall door beyond the foyer. The chain was not on. He turned the latch and put it on free but did not open it. Then he returned to the main room of the apartment.

  “Adolfo?” he called quietly. He did not expect an answer. But he got a small, muffled animal grunt from the next room.

  This door was inches ajar. He pushed it open with the muzzle of his gun. He did not remember taking it from his underarm holster. The door was heavy. He pushed it silently open to reveal a bedroom with rich ornamentation and sumptuous silken hangings. The shutters were tightly closed, but a red-shaded lamp beside the huge swan bed cast a bloody glow over the gilt and silver room.

  Adolfo lay on the bed in a foetal position, legs tight under his belly, his neck bent, one patent-leather shoe on the floor under his dangling feet. He wore a red silk jacket and an open silk shirt and dark slacks. In the middle of his shirt was an embellishment Adolfo Cimadori obviously had not wanted or expected. It was the jeweled, elaborate hilt of a knife. The ruby stone at the end of the grip was not as scarlet as the blood that flowed down his groin and stained the expensive coverlet of his swan bed.

  The miracle was that he still lived.

  His eyes were blind and black, and a long sigh came from his slack mouth as Durell moved nearer. He tried to say something, but it was only meaningless air. Durell did not touch him.

  The air smelled of perfume, blood, and feces, which stained Adolfo’s elegant slacks.

  He moved around the bed and checked the bath, going fast; but he found only sunshine on a glittering tray of cosmetics. He repeated the careful, swift process with two closet doors. Nobody waited for him to turn his back.

  He returned to the dying man. “Adolfo, can you hear me?”

  The breath sighed with sibilance. “Si . . ."

  “Who did it, Adolfo?”

  He got a faint negative shake of the head. Adolfo drew his knees up tighter against the wound in his belly. There was grayness under his skin. In his eyes was defiance and even amusement.

  “Can’t you tell me?” Durell insisted.

  “I could—but I—I will not,” he gasped.

  “I brought you the money. Twenty-five thousand American dollars.”

  “Leave it—beside me.”

  “But we made a bargain.”

  Petty avarice flickered in the dying eyes. “Si.”

  “Then tell me where to find Vecchio Zio.” Durell was urgent. “Quickly.”

  “Would—would a dottore help me?”

  “No.”

  “Zio—” There was a long pause. “Ah, it hurts!”

  “Where can I find Zio?”

  “He will—he will kill you.”

  “I don’t believe that. He’ll help Gabriella.”

  “No. Mama—spoke the truth.”

  Durell said: “The money is yours. Where is he?” “Castel San Gi—Gi—”

  There was a pause.

  “Go on,” Durell said thinly.

  But he spoke to a dead man.

  15

  DURELL tore the room apart. He worked with efficient haste, rooting out every possible secret. But someone had been here before him. Someone who was almost as professional as he. He found nothing.

  He searched the dead man, not moving him any more than necessary. He found nothing there, either. Then he returned to the brightly colored living room. The children still screeched and ran in the courtyard.

  And Karl Kronin waited for him.

  He was not surprised. He had expected it.

  Kronin seemed bigger than life, a dark shadow that darkened all the gay plumage of Cimadori’s cage. He was like an evil bird of prey, bald head shining, shoulders hunched, feet fiat on the rug, in a dark suit, an immaculate white shirt, and a dark tie with a stone in it that winked like a third eye. The gaze was hooded and vulturine; but there was sensuality in the broad, thick lips. His voice was heavy and hoarse.

  “Ah, Mr. Durell, such a disappointment. I must ask you not to shoot me out of hand. It would be a disaster for both of us. You may keep your gun on me, but do not use it yet, please.” Kronin smiled with complete assurance.

  Durell’s finger had indeed tightened with temptation on the trigger of his gun. Here was the man who had tried to kill him; here was the murderer of blind Colonel Mignon and foolish Amos Rand. Kronin’s only rule was gold and personal power and enjoyment of his role at the center of international affairs. Durell felt a dryness in his throat and hatred in his belly. But he could not afford to pull the trigger. Kronin was right.

  The man’s English was only slightly accented. “I have come to bargain with you, and you expected me, eh? So. If you shoot me now, your mission will—how do you say it?—go down the drain. So I weighed the risks. I am not more personally brave than the next man, but I know all about you, Mr. Durell. You are intelligent and dangerous. But intelligence comes first. May we talk for a few moments?”

  “Did you kill Adolfo?” he asked.

  “That piece of dung? Not I.”

  “Your men, then?”

  “That is what they are paid for.” Kronin’s bald head was thrust even farther forward on his heavy shoulders. He was a powerful man, and Durell knew he wore a false left leg, although even when Kronin moved, ever so carefully under his gun, he scarcely betrayed his limp. It was said that Kronin lost the leg while fighting with the Albanian Reds against King Zog. But many things were said about Kronin, and no one could separate truth from the lies. All Durell knew at this moment was that he faced a man who was ruthless, amoral, and
a Judas who would betray anyone for less than thirty pieces of silver. Kronin had almost put the fear of God into him. Now he had the hunter before him. It would be easy to kill him, Durell decided.

  As if divining his thought, Kronin gestured for permission to sit down, hiked up his trouser leg with meticulous care, and showed a glint of aluminum from his false limb as he settled himself.

  “We can come to terms of mutual profit,” he said decisively. “I know you do not believe this, but if you hear me out, you will know I speak the truth. Otherwise, why should I take this dreadful risk of confronting you? We both know this world better than most. I admire you. I wish we could work together.” He held up a placating hand against Durell’s anger. “I do not seriously suggest this. I know your morality. But it is a pity, since we are more intelligent than most, and life could be full and rich for us if we could cooperate.”

  “There isn’t room in the world for both of us,” Durell said harshly.

  “But you will listen?”

  Durell nodded. “For a few moments.”

  “Good. As for what you seek here, you have lost it, as you know. A pity you found Adolfo dead, eh? He might actually have helped you, in his petty way.”

  So, Durell thought, Kronin did not know that his assassin had slipped and left before making certain that Cimadori was actually dead. Kronin did not know that Adolfo had gasped out a few words before he died. “Go on,” he said.

  “Adolfo was dirt, as I said. A foolish and dissipated young man,. indulging in perverted luxuries. One cannot survive like a child playing with fire. No one will mourn him. How much money did he want?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Durell said.

  “And you brought it with you?”

  “I have it, yes.”

  Kronin licked his wide lips. He looked more evil than ever. There was an instant hunger in him that he could not hide. “It is a small sum but tidy.”

  “Do you think you can get it from me?”

  “Perhaps. Is it worth your life?”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” said Durell.

  “Then is it worth Gabriella’s life? Because you are all dead, you know. Dead and not aware of it yet. You have no idea how we can wait, how patient we can be. A few months, some years, even twenty years. And you will be cruelly dead. The charming Gabriella will be first.”