The Language of Cannibals

by George C. Chesbro

  Tommy Barrett, from what I could tell by simply looking at him, wasn’t in the same league. Not as far as experience was concerned. They contrasted, yet somehow they matched perfectly. I guessed they were happy together.

  Of one thing I was certain: Neither one of them used drugs, at least not on a regular basis, and even then not the hard stuff. I can spot most serious heads a block away, if not by needle tracks then by the pupils of the eyes, the pallor of the skin, nervous mannerisms, or any one of a hundred other traits that are apparent to the trained observer.

  Whatever the couple’s problems, drugs wasn’t one of them. And, if Tommy Barrett was a notorious pusher, what was he doing in the middle of St. Mark’s Square peddling charcoal sketches to tourists?

  And what was I doing in Italy?

  There was no doubt but that the elder Barrett had lied. But why? It seemed I had inherited a puzzle along with my retainer, and the shape of that puzzle was constantly changing. I decided to try some new pieces.

  I stepped forward and touched Elizabeth Hotaling gently on the arm, then leaned toward Tommy Barrett.

  “Excuse me,” I said quietly. “I’m Robert Frederickson. I wonder if I could talk to you privately? I won’t take much of your time.”

  “I don’t bargain on the price of the sketches, mister,” Barrett said without looking up. His tone was not hostile, simply businesslike.

  “The sketches are two dollars apiece, Mr. Frederickson,” the girl said. “That really isn’t very much, and it’s the best work you’ll find around here. If you’re interested in oils, we’d love to have you visit our apartment. I make excellent cappuccino.”

  “I’m sure you do, Miss Hotaling, and I’d like to see Mr. Barrett’s work, but first I’d like to talk to you.”

  I waited for the reaction that came; the man and woman exchanged quick glances. I followed up my lead. “You’re Elizabeth Hotaling and you’re Tommy Barrett,” I said, indicating the two of them. “I’m here to deliver a message from Tommy’s brother.”

  Barrett suddenly paused in the middle of a stroke, then carefully placed the piece of charcoal he’d been working with into the chalk tray of his easel. He slowly turned on his stool, away from the crowd. I walked around to the front of him, the girl trailing a few steps behind.

  “Who are you?” Barrett said softly, his eyes searching my face.

  “I gave you my name. I’m a private detective from New York. As I said, your brother sent me here to deliver a message.”

  “Mister, I don’t have a brother.”

  I can’t say I was surprised. That was the way the case had been going. Now the trick was to discover who the man in my office had been, and what game he was playing. I decided to go slow with Barrett and the girl; reactions were proving more reliable than words.

  “I’m sure you must know this man,” I said carefully, watching Barrett. “He’s big, over six feet. Snappy dresser. He talks good, but you can tell—”

  The description was meager but it had an immediate effect on the young painter and his girl friend. Elizabeth Hotaling let out a strangled sob and struck at my back with her fists. The blows didn’t hurt but they did distract me long enough to enable Tommy Barrett to bounce one of his wooden easel frames off the side of my head, knocking me to my knees. Barrett grabbed the girl’s hand, dragging her after him into the crowd.

  The blow had dazed me. Still, I would have been up and after them if it had not been for the man kneeling over me, his knee digging into the muscles of my arm.

  Even in this rather untenable situation, pain shrieking through every nerve end in my body, I couldn’t help but admire his technique; it was beautiful. To the crowd it must have seemed as though he was trying to help me; only I could see the ugly black sapper he pulled from beneath his sport coat, or the short, hard stroke that slammed into the base of my skull.

  The smell of rotting fish finally woke me up. I was dangling over the edge of a walkway between two buildings, my face about four inches above the surface of a particularly foul-smelling, stagnant stretch of backwater from one of the canals.

  I had no idea how the man had gotten me here. Probably, he’d simply picked me up and carried me off. After all, in this day and age, who asks questions just because you’re carrying around a dwarf?

  One thing was certain: The man knew his trade, and if he’d wanted me dead I’d be at the bottom of the canal instead of just smelling it.

  There had been no need to find Tommy Barrett because Tommy Barrett hadn’t been hiding. Anyone could have done what I had done so far, but I had been chosen to do it, which meant that I was, if not the star of the opera, at least first tenor. Why?

  I was sure I’d never seen the man in my office in my life and I hadn’t been busy enough to make that kind of enemy. I tried to make some connection with my work at the university but couldn’t. I doubted any parent would go to these lengths because I’d failed a student.

  I was hurting. I managed to drag myself out through the labyrinth of alleys to the main square, then got on a water bus. It was late. There wasn’t a cab in sight back at the main terminal, and the buses had stopped running. Despite my disheveled appearance, I managed to hitch a ride back to Mestra.

  It was time to call Garth. As much as I hated to admit it, Big Brother’s help was needed. Actually, what I needed was information, and that information, if it existed, would most likely be found on a police blotter. But it could wait. Figuring the time differential, Garth would be just getting out of bed, and there wasn’t much he could do for me there. Besides, I needed sleep myself if I hoped to make any sense over the phone.

  I stumbled into my room and immediately knew something was wrong; the empty space on the night stand where I had placed the notebook caught and held my attention like a gun bore aimed at my belly.

  Grimacing against the pain in my head, I made a quick check of the room. It didn’t take me long to discover that the lock on my suitcase had been sprung. Nothing was missing. My clothes were a bit rumpled, but it almost seemed as if the searcher had made a conscious effort to leave everything as he had found it, despite the fact that I would certainly know he had been there because of the missing notebook. That produced a discordant note inside my head, but things up there were already so out of tune that I didn’t give it much thought; I hurt too much.

  I went into the bathroom and filled the sink with cold water, then plunged my head in and gingerly scrubbed at the caked blood where the blackjack had bounced off. I blew bubbles beneath the water to take my mind off the pain. I owed somebody, I thought; I certainly did owe somebody.

  The two policemen were waiting for me when I came out.

  They looked like Abbott and Costello. Both men had their guns drawn and pointed at me. Costello was down on one knee, his arm extended straight out in front of him as though he was preparing to defend against the Charge of the Light Brigade. I almost laughed; instead, I muttered a long string of carefully selected obscenities.

  Neither man said anything. Abbott jiggled his gun and Costello rose and went to my suitcase. The fat man groped around inside the lining for a few moments, then smiled. Mad genius that I am, it suddenly occurred to me whoever had taken the notebook wasn’t entirely dishonest.

  Like a pack rat, the man had felt compelled to leave something behind to soothe my ruffled feelings. Like the plastic bag filled with heroin that Costello was now holding in his hand.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I said. The words blurred on my tongue. “Do you think I’d be stupid enough to leave a bag of heroin laying around in an empty suitcase? Look at the lock; it’s been jimmied.”

  “The condition of your luggage is no concern of ours, signor,” Abbott said evenly. His tone belied his comical appearance. He was a serious man, and he hated me. It was obvious that somewhere along the line he’d picked up more than a passing interest in people he suspected of pushing drugs.

  “My name is Frederickson; Dr. Robert Frederickson. I’m a private detective. I di
dn’t put those drugs there. I’ve never seen that plastic bag before in my life.”

  “We’ll have plenty of time to work these details out, signor. In the meantime, you should know that the boy you sold drugs to this afternoon is dead.”

  “What boy?” I whispered.

  “The artist. We found his body in an alley. He had died from an overdose of the heroin you sold him. Fortunately, we have many informants. It was not difficult to find a man of your—”

  He hesitated, embarrassed. I rushed to fill in the silence. “What about the girl that was with him?”

  “Venice has many alleys, signor.”

  Little tumblers were clicking in my brain, tapping out a combination that spelled a prison cell. Or death. I was glad I hadn’t eaten. As it was, I was fighting off a bad case of the dry heaves. I was sure that whoever was framing me wouldn’t stop here, and I wasn’t anxious to wait around to see what other surprises were in store for me.

  “Signor, you are under arrest for possession of heroin and for the murder of Thomas Barrett.”

  Costello came for me and I reacted instinctively, trying to imagine myself back in the center ring, where the punishment for bad timing might be a broken bone or the mocking laughter of the crowd, but never a bullet in the brain.

  I drove the point of my shoe into Costello’s shin, then leapt forward, tucking myself into a ball, rolling, then exploding into the side of Abbott’s knees. Abbott crumpled over me, shielding me for a moment with his body from the death in his partner’s hand.

  I didn’t stop. I used the momentum from my first rush to carry me over into another roll, then planted my feet under me and leaped head first for the window, closing my eyes and balling my fists to minimize any injuries from the flying glass. I opened my eyes just in time, reaching out and grabbing the edge of the steel railing on the fire escape outside the window. That saved me from a five-story fall.

  I broke my reverse swing by shortening the extension of my arms and using my right hip to absorb the shock of my body falling back against the railing. Glass was showering all around and I could smell the odor of my own blood.

  There was the ugly sound of a gunshot, then the whine of steel striking steel. It was still Circus all the way. There was no time to climb down, so I dropped; story by story, breaking my fall at each level by grabbing at the railings.

  My left shoulder went on the last level, yanked out of its socket. I hit the sidewalk in free fall, immediately flexing my knees and rolling. After what seemed an hour or two of rolling around like a marble I came to a stop in an upright position against a garbage can that must have been filled with concrete.

  Abbott was leaning out the window of my room, peering down into the darkness. My left arm with its dislocated shoulder was useless, and my legs hurt like hell, but I could tell they weren’t broken. I allowed myself a small smile of satisfaction.

  I wasn’t dead, which meant I must have made it. I got up, ducked into an alley, somehow managed to climb a fence and kept going, keeping to the alleys.

  A half mile away I sat down to rest and think.

  Mongo the Magnificent? Mongo the Village Idiot. I’d been had. And now I was a fugitive. I tried to rationalize why I had run, reminding myself that my frame was being nailed together by a master. That was true enough, but the real reason was pride.

  Pride? A foolish thing, perhaps, to risk one’s life for. Still, for me, pride was my life—or the only thing that made life worth living. Pride was the stuff oiling the gears that kept me going in a giants’ world.

  Pride made me care. The matter might have been cleared up while I was in custody, but it would have been done by somebody else. I would leave my prison cell a miserable, stupid dwarf who had been used as a pawn, a little man who had been made a messenger of death. I wanted to know who had involved me in Tommy Barrett’s death. And why. I wanted to find out for myself.

  The fact that I had run would be taken as conclusive evidence of guilt, and I could probably expect to be shot the next time around. Given my rather quaint physical characteristics, I figured I didn’t have too many hours of freedom left.

  I needed a phone. I knew where there was an American Express office open twenty-four hours a day and I hurried there. I knew it was risky to put myself inside four walls, but I couldn’t see where I had any choice, not if I wanted to do something with the time I had.

  I tried not to think of the surrounding glass or the fact that the office only seemed to have one door as I entered and walked up to the clerk on duty.

  I gave him the number I wanted to call. The lines were free and it took him only a few moments to make the connection with New York. He motioned me to one of the booths lining the opposite wall. I went into the booth, closed the door, and squatted down on the floor, bracing my back against the wall.

  “Garth?”

  “Mongo! What the hell are you doing waking me up in the middle of the night?! And what’s the matter with your voice?”

  “Listen, big man, you’re lucky I can talk at all,” I said. I tried to sound nasty so we could continue playing our family game, but I couldn’t. His voice sounded too good. “Garth, I’m in trouble. I need your help.”

  “Go ahead,” Garth said. I could tell he was wide awake now. His voice was deadly serious.

  “I need information on a man who may or may not be named James Barrett. It’s probably an alias, but I want you to check it out for me anyway. Find out if there is a James Barrett with a record, and get back to me as soon as you can. I’ll give you a number where—”

  “I just left one James Barrett about four hours ago,” Garth said. He sounded puzzled. “Jimmy Barrett is my partner.”

  “Describe him.”

  “About five foot eight, eyes: blue. Hair: none. He’s pushing retirement. Part of his left ear lobe is missing—”

  I suddenly felt very sick and my arm was beginning to throb.

  “And he has a son,” I finished. My voice was barely a whisper.

  “Yeah,” Garth said. “Tommy. Nice boy. Barrett says the kid’s an artist, apparently pretty good. The last I heard he was spending the summer in Italy. What does that have to do with you?”

  “He’s dead,” I said too loudly. “What it has to do with me is that I helped kill him.”

  There was complete silence on the other end of the line. Slowly, my voice stretched thin by pain and fatigue, I filled Garth in on where I was and what had happened. My own words seemed alien to me, a shrieking whine emanating from some broken tape recorder inside my soul. The words hurt, and I used that pain to lash myself for my own gullibility and incompetence, for not smelling the set-up earlier and maybe preventing the death—or deaths—that had occurred. Finally it was over and Garth’s voice came at me, soft but laced with rage, punctuated with heavy breathing.

  “All right, Mongo, I know who the man is from your description. His name is Pernod, Vincent Pernod, and he’s one of the biggest drug men around, a contractor for the Mafia. You’ve just had a taste of Pernod’s sense of humor and style of revenge.”

  “Why Barrett, and why me? And what’s the connection with the girl?”

  “Jimmy and I have spent the last eighteen months trying to run Pernod down, which means building a case. The pressure was building on him to the point where New York, his most lucrative market, was being taken away, and it was only a matter of time before we nailed him.

  “Pernod doesn’t take kindly to that kind of treatment and obviously he decided to do something about it. Killing Tommy Barrett was his way of getting at my partner; destroying you in the process was his way of getting at me. Add to that the fact that Elizabeth Hotaling is, or was, Pernod’s ex-mistress and you begin to get a picture of how dirty the water is that you’ve been swimming in.”

  My knuckles were white where I had gripped the receiver. Pernod had had me pegged perfectly. He’d been sure I wouldn’t contact Garth until it was too late, and he’d been right.

  “Tommy met the girl down at the pr
ecinct station. He’d come to see his father about something and Elizabeth Hotaling was waiting while we grilled her boyfriend. You saw the results.”

  My brain was beginning to play tricks on me. I was having acid-flashes of memory; Pernod in my office, the man and woman in the pallazza, the sapper bouncing off my skull. My rage was growing, exploding hot splinters of hatred.

  “He has Italian help,” I said, thinking of the two men I’d run into.

  “Sure. He has a farm outside Rome, somewhere near Cinecittà,” Garth said absently. “There’s a small airstrip there, and we think that’s how he gets his drops.”

  “Drops?”

  “Drops—drug shipments. They bring the raw stuff in by plane from Lebanon and Turkey, then—”

  “I’ve got it,” I said. That explained the grain on the suit of the man who’d been following me.

  “Now listen, Mongo,” Garth continued evenly. “You haven’t killed anyone, except maybe yourself if you keep running around loose. I have contacts there, and I know the department will put me on the first plane out of here. When the Italian authorities find out you’ve been messing with Pernod they’ll more than likely give you a medal. I don’t want them to give it to you posthumously, which means you turn yourself in now. Do I make sense?”

  He made sense. I told him so and hung up. I was dialing the local police when I happened to glance in the direction of the clerk. I hung up and stepped out of the booth.

  “Excuse me,” I said, pointing to the calendar on the wall, “what’s today’s date?”

  The clerk glanced up at the calendar, then ripped off the previous day’s sheet.

  “August twenty-third, signor. I forgot to change it.”

  I mumbled my thanks and headed out the door. The clerk yelled after me, asking something about my arm. I ignored him. August 23rd: 8-23. Now I knew why they’d wanted the notebook back. 823drop10. Pernod was expecting a drop this day, either at ten in the morning or ten in the evening.