Remember to Kill Me (The Pierre Chambrun Mysteries, 19)

by Hugh Pentecost

  Avilla did a strange thing. He took his right hand out of his pocket, placed each hand stiffly against his thighs and stood there like a kid about to recite something. And that’s exactly what he did.

  ‘“Here is Edward Bear, coming down the stairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs … Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.”’

  Mrs. Haven’s face relaxed in a joyful expression. ‘Ricardo!’ she said.

  Avilla crossed over to her, took both her hands in his, bent down and kissed them both in an old-world gesture. I saw that he wore a black glove on his right hand. He turned, smiling at all of us.

  ‘Many years ago Mrs. Haven taught me my first English,’ he said. ‘We began with A. A. Milne’s classic children’s book. I have never forgotten the first paragraph of Winnie-the-Pooh. Forty-five years and it has stayed with me all that time.’

  The room was crowding up. Lois Tranter had come in the room and was standing by the door staring at Avilla. Eddie Walsh came in just behind her.

  ‘You sent for me, Mr. Chambrun? Oh, hi, Mr. Avilla.’

  ‘Hello, Eddie,’ Avilla said.

  ‘There was a message for you but you never came in to get it,’ Eddie said. ‘Night before last. A phone number. I gave it to Mr. Chambrun.’

  ‘Thanks, Eddie,’ Avilla said. ‘It probably wasn’t important. Ship-to-shore phone number.’

  Chambrun broke into the chitchat. ‘Miss Tranter?’ was all he said.

  Lois Tranter’s face had lost all its color. ‘That is the man my father pointed out to me in the Trapeze Bar the night before last. He is the man my father said was Ricardo Avilla.’

  ‘I am flattered that you remember me from somewhere, Miss Tranter,’ Avilla said. ‘I understand you are responsible for the extraordinary likeness the police artist was able to make of me. But you are mistaken about seeing me in the Trapeze the night before last. I wasn’t there. I was on a yacht in the boat basin with my host and some of his friends.’

  ‘He wasn’t in my bar,’ Eddie said, giving Lois Tranter a ‘so there!’ look.

  Avilla, still holding one of Mrs. Haven’s hands, turned to Chambrun. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what the concern is about my being in the Trapeze the night before last. I wasn’t there, and if it matters, I can produce witnesses who can testify that I wasn’t there.’

  ‘And the next night?’ Guardino asked.

  ‘The night of the excitement here?’ Avilla asked. ‘Playing bridge with David Romberg and two of his friends.’

  ‘On the yacht?’

  ‘On the yacht.’ Avilla looked down at Mrs. Haven. He was tall enough to look down at a tall lady. ‘Our bridge game was just ending, about two in the morning, when one of the ship’s officers came into the card room to tell us what was happening here. We turned on the ship’s television and watched and heard about the turmoil here.’ He turned back to Mrs. Haven. ‘I was shocked to hear that someone had attacked you, dear lady. I called the hotel immediately to find out about your condition. I may say it took forever to locate someone who could tell me anything not hysterical. I was finally assured that you were not seriously hurt.’

  ‘Just a scratch,’ Mrs. Haven said.

  ‘Very high up on my agenda is to find the man responsible for that, dear lady, and deal with him privately,’ Avilla said. ‘I won’t require the kind of evidence Mr. Guardino would need.’

  Sam Yardley got into the act at that point. ‘Let’s say for the moment, Avilla, that you could be lying.’

  Avilla smiled at him. ‘It’s your job to think that way, isn’t it, Mr. Yardley?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you, Mr. Avilla, that when you are dealing with terrorists you have to consider every alternative.’

  ‘I concede,’ Avilla said, his smile widening. ‘Let’s say, for the moment, that I could be lying.’

  ‘David Romberg sells arms and tanks—who knows what else?—to armed forces in Central America, of any side or country. Over the years, Avilla, you have probably done a great deal of business with him—automatic weapons, tanks, ammunition. You probably plan to continue dealing with him in the future.’

  ‘I will agree, so that you can complete your theory, Mr. Yardley.’

  ‘If you needed someone to provide you with an alibi, David Romberg would be a likely candidate. He sells to both sides, he cares for no man or cause but himself. It would not be to his advantage to lose a good customer like you.’

  ‘’Specially with Russian money behind you,’ Guardino said.

  Avilla’s smile evaporated. ‘Would you go to bed with a poison snake, Guardino? Perhaps you would, but I would not.’ He looked at Chambrun. ‘Would you mind telling me why it’s important whether or not I was in the Trapeze Bar night before last?’

  ‘Only that Miss Tranter says you were and Eddie Walsh says you were not,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘And you think one of them is not telling the truth?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Chambrun said. ‘Miss Tranter’s father could have pointed out someone who looks like you, been mistaken.’

  ‘And then she could give the police artist an exact description of the man?’ Guardino asked. ‘Not very likely, is it?’

  ‘Then Eddie and I are lying?’ Avilla asked.

  ‘You for your own reasons,’ Guardino said. ‘The bartender could be bought.’

  ‘Now just a minute, Buster!’ Eddie said.

  ‘Shut up, Eddie,’ Chambrun said quietly. ‘I know you’re telling the truth as you know it.’

  ‘Would you like to tell me why I should lie about not being at the Trapeze night before last, Guardino?’ Avilla asked. ‘I have been a regular customer there for the last few weeks. Nothing extraordinary happened there the night before last. Why should I deny being there if I was?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but I think you are,’ Guardino said. ‘Miss Tranter couldn’t have described you so accurately if you weren’t the man her father pointed out to her.’

  ‘And I say he wasn’t there!’ Eddie Walsh said.

  The music goes round and round, I thought.

  ‘We’re wasting time on this point which we don’t seem to be able to resolve,’ Chambrun said. ‘Let me lay it on the line for you, Avilla. We believe that the men holding the hostages in Twenty-two B have someone on the outside who is keeping them in touch with what’s going on here in the hotel. When we knew you were here, circulating, thanks to Miss Tranter, we thought you might be that outsider.’

  ‘Romberg’s yacht could be equipped with sophisticated radio equipment,’ Guardino said. ‘Could that explain why Avilla has been spending his evenings there? So he could make contact with his friends without being molested?’

  ‘Two men in the Annex had such equipment and were using it,’ Chambrun said. He told Avilla briefly about his experience there. ‘You must know, Mr. Avilla, involved or not, who these people in Twenty-two B are.’

  ‘Who they are—faces and names—no,’ Avilla said. ‘Who they represent, yes. They are part of a so-called revolutionary group, sponsored by the Russians, who wish to overthrow existing powers who are supported by your government.’

  ‘And you and your family have been part of a revolutionary group who have been trying to overthrow governments for half a century,’ Yardley said.

  ‘I am afraid you are unable to see any colors, Mr. Yardley, but black and white,’ Avilla said. ‘Or red and red-white-and-blue. My family has been interested in true democracy ever since I can remember. We have only been interested in the common man, the ordinary citizen. That is the color we follow, the color of sunshine, and free air, and no slavery. You can give that color a name if you like. I know if it pleases you to think we are communists, if it suits your purposes, you will put that name to us. If, on some other occasion it suits you to think of us as being on your side, you will call us true democrats. We, the Avillas, have always
been on the side of freedom for the real people in our world.’

  ‘A nice speech,’ Guardino said. ‘We should all stand and cheer, I suppose.’

  ‘Your family has a history of the same kind of hostage-taking that is going on here,’ Chambrun said. ‘Mrs. Haven can vouch for that.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Avilla said. ‘Hostage-taking is as commonplace in my world as street muggings and drug-related massacres are in yours.’ He smiled at Mrs. Haven. ‘I will never forget this brave lady’s last words to my grandfather when she was being released. “Remember to kill me if you see me again,” she said. She would see that we were punished if she ever saw us again.’

  ‘Not this boy,’ Mrs. Haven said.

  ‘This boy’ was now in his fifties!

  ‘I remember telling my grandfather, after she was gone, that we needed to learn another way to come downstairs, not bump, bump, bump on the back of our heads,’ Avilla said, his smile back again. ‘I decided then that you can’t help decent people by harming other decent people. I have never in my whole life held anyone hostage. I remembered Mrs. Haven.’

  ‘Bravo!’ Guardino said.

  ‘Can we get back to who the people upstairs are?’ Chambrun said, with exaggerated patience.

  ‘Let me put it to you this way,’ Avilla said. ‘The eight prisoners whose release they are demanding are all communist-supported rebels. Mr. Yardley can probably tell you even more than I can about them. The CIA must have a detailed record on each of them. I can tell you this, though. They are my enemies as well as yours.’

  ‘Tell me this,’ Chambrun said. ‘Why would they choose a place like this to hold their hostages? They have to know they have locked themselves into a trap unless we choose to unlock it for them. They could have rented a house or an apartment somewhere in the city, taken their hostages there, and we’d never have known where they were.’

  Avilla nodded his head, slowly. ‘You are, at least, asking the right questions, Mr. Chambrun.’

  ‘I trust you will give me the right answer,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘Not difficult,’ Avilla said. ‘Those eight prisoners whose release they are demanding are dangerous enemies of what, I sometimes think ironically, we call the free world. If they picked up any four people on the street as hostages—Smith, Jones, Brown, Greene—there’s very little chance Washington and London would even consider bargaining. It would be a dastardly crime, a horror story, but Smith, Jones, Brown, and Greene would be out of luck. Washington and London would express their regrets, probably pay some kind of reparations to the unlucky families of the dead hostages, but they wouldn’t set eight dangerous enemies free. For hostages they had to get people of real importance. They have done just that; an important British diplomat, the chief peace negotiator for the Organization of American States, a key member of the State Department, and a famous woman entertainer. The big governments have to hesitate about their being wiped out. The hostage-takers have something real to bargain with.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain the risk of using this hotel as a place to hold them,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘You’re not thinking, Mr. Chambrun,’ Avilla said. ‘Security. Men like Tranter and Sir George Brooks and Raul Ortiz don’t walk around unwatched. Moreover they, and the girl, were all together in one place. The chance of snatching them, one by one, and getting them out of the hotel to some other hiding place would be almost zero. They planned cleverly. They staged the raid on the hotel and in the wild confusion that followed they had no difficulty grabbing their victims and holding them in one place in the hotel. They’d had plenty of time to prepare. Security broke down in the confusion of the raid and in a matter of minutes they had their hostages under lock and key.’

  It was a reasonable answer to Chambrun’s question, not that it mattered, I thought. Why they had done it wasn’t important. They had done it.

  ‘So now I come to the key question,’ Chambrun said. ‘It must be as apparent to you as it is to me, Mr. Avilla, that even if Washington and London finally agree to free eight prisoners, there is no way the people in Twenty-two B can let the hostages go. They will probably insist that we provide them and the hostages with a way out of the hotel. But they won’t let the hostages go then, either. They know too much about who is who.’

  ‘I’m afraid I agree with that,’ Avilla said.

  ‘So if you were in our position, Avilla, what would you do to save the hostages?’

  ‘I would try to find a bargaining chip,’ Avilla said.

  ‘I think we have one,’ Guardino said, his voice harsh. ‘We tell them we have their outside man and it’s him or the hostages.’

  Avilla’s smile had turned weary. ‘Meaning me, Guardino?’

  ‘Meaning you!’

  ‘Let me tell you something, Guardino. You tell them you have Ricardo Avilla, their outside man, and will feed him to the sharks if they don’t release the hostages, you may have something. They might die laughing! If they didn’t, they couldn’t be more pleased to know I was in trouble and out of their hair. I am their very dangerous enemy, Mr. Guardino.’

  ‘You say!’

  ‘I say. And I say one more thing,’ Avilla said. ‘You can threaten me, you can threaten the prisoners, and they won’t turn a hair. They know you won’t, you can’t, it’s not in your nature to kill me or them in cold blood. But if I threaten them—they know I cut my teeth on violence.’

  ‘Threaten them with what?’ Chambrun asked.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ Avilla said.

  Chapter Two

  I THOUGHT AVILLA HADN’T come quite clean with us. He might not know for sure how he could threaten the people in Twenty-two B, but I thought he had an idea. What it was, I couldn’t guess. His values, his world, and the values and world of those madmen upstairs were totally beyond my ability to get a handle on them.

  ‘Don’t hold back on us, Avilla,’ Chambrun said, and I realized that he’d been thinking along just the same lines as I had.

  ‘You wouldn’t listen to what I’m thinking,’ Avilla said, and his smile was totally gone now.

  ‘Try me,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘I need just a clue as to who those people are, I would get my hands on someone who matters to them—’ Avilla’s voice hardened. ‘They would believe me if I told them it was a life for a life.’

  ‘You know perfectly well we wouldn’t let you carry out any such threat,’ Guardino said. ‘They’d know that, too.’

  Avilla appeared not to hear him. ‘I shouldn’t have waited so long,’ he said. ‘There isn’t time to do what needs to be done.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Chambrun asked.

  ‘I should go through the list of registered guests, to see who might be here that I know.’

  ‘Hundreds of guests have checked out.’

  ‘But if I came across someone from my part of the world who might be suspicious. But it would take hours to go through that list.’

  ‘There is your friend Luis Sanchez, who’s barricaded in a private room downstairs,’ Chambrun said. ‘He’s been here for the better part of a week. He may have seen someone who would mean something to you.’

  ‘Of course! Where do I find him?’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere alone, Avilla,’ Guardino said. ‘I’m not giving you the chance to just walk out on us.’

  ‘Come along, and welcome,’ Avilla said. ‘Bring your whole damn police force with you if you want. I’m looking for killers!’

  Jerry Dodd and the two men left us and the office was silent for a moment. Mrs. Haven broke the spell.

  ‘I think you can trust that man,’ she said. ‘I knew him as a boy and all the things that made him tick then. I don’t think he’s changed.’

  ‘He remembers, too, Mrs. Haven,’ Sam Yardley said. ‘“Remember to kill me.” Could he have been the one who came up on the roof the night of the raid to take Sir George Brooks, saw you, and “remembered”?’

  The old lady shook her head. ‘I’d feel it in my bones if that’s the way it w
as,’ she said.

  Lois Tranter came on stage then. ‘He is the man my father pointed out to me in the Trapeze,’ she said. ‘I know the bartender says I’m wrong, but there has to be an explanation for that.’

  ‘No way,’ Eddie Walsh said.

  ‘If I can use your other phone, I’ll try to locate David Romberg,’ Yardley said. ‘If he can provide Avilla with alibis—’

  ‘You yourself said Romberg might be willing to cover for a good customer,’ Chambrun said.

  ‘There were friends, bridge partners according to Avilla, other guests probably. The yacht’s crew. Not all of them could be set up to provide alibis.’

  ‘Worth a try,’ Chambrun said, and Yardley took off for the outer office.

  ‘Everyone seems to be out to clear that man,’ Lois Tranter said. ‘I’m certain he’s in the conspiracy that’s holding my father. All he wants to do is get somewhere he can communicate with them and tell them what you’re planning.’

  ‘Then he can’t do us any harm, Miss Tranter,’ Chambrun said, ‘because so far we don’t have a plan and he knows it.’

  ‘This man Sanchez?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I know, from my father, that he’s one of the OAS peace negotiators. But he could be double-talking, too, couldn’t he, Mr. Chambrun? He tried to persuade Mark that Avilla wasn’t a likely villain. There’s no way to trust anyone from that world.’

  ‘That’s your father’s theory?’

  ‘That everyone wants power, no matter who you betray,’ Lois said.

  ‘Maybe someone will betray the people in Twenty-two B if Avilla gets lucky,’ Chambrun said. ‘We have to take all the chances that come our way, Miss Tranter. Now if you and Mrs. Haven will excuse us—and thank you for coming.’

  ‘What do I do?’ Lois Tranter cried out. ‘Looking for Avilla was something. Now there’s nothing. My father is going to die if you don’t come up with something, Mr. Chambrun.’

  Chambrun glanced at his watch. ‘We have three hours and a half, Miss Tranter,’ he said.

  For a moment it was like family in the office; The Man, Betsy, Lieutenant Hardy, and me. Eddie Walsh had left with the two women. Hardy hadn’t spoken a single word or asked a question from the moment Avilla had arrived with Jerry Dodd.