by Denis Pitts
By mid-afternoon he had planned to be on one of the several ferries which ply passengers between Naples and the Island of Ischia. Until then he was in considerable danger. He knew that. If they found him, Ragnelli’s operation would eat him up and spit him out.
But even here, in this city which was saturated with Mafiosa, he reckoned he was safe for a few hours at least before the word was out.
He and the girl would walk to the harbour, and in Ischia where there were no customs and few questions they would be aboard a seventy foot chartered motor yacht within a matter of minutes and away into the open Mediterranean. The yacht was well provisioned, and he had made arrangements to moor in the Turkish sector of Cyprus where few Europeans were allowed. Money, again, had changed hands.
At nine-thirty, when the banks opened on the following morning, James Murphy would be a dollar millionaire with a new identity and a forged Irish passport to prove it.
He had made too many enemies in the past two or three years. It was an undeniable hazard of that lucrative trade. At least two Arab kingdoms had placed him on their list for elimination, largely because they were close to war with each other and Murphy had been supplying them with substantial quantities of weapons with which to fight each other. The British Special Branch had accumulated a file on him several inches thick and they were ready to move for his extradition.
It was time to be moving on, he had reckoned. And Ragnelli would have to take his place in the queue for his execution.
The news from Juliet Mike Oscar had shattered him momentarily. But he had recovered well.
The French Foreign Office had been dubious about allowing the aircraft to land on French territory, but his contact was a persuasive man.
It had taken him less than an hour to locate a replacement engine. It was one of twelve which had been newly reconditioned for the Greek Air Force by a private engineering firm in Piraeus and, by mid-morning it had been crated and was on its way to the International Airport.
This part had been simple. He was paying several thousand dollars over the odds, certainly, but he had saved himself several days of argument with Greek bureaucracy. This engine would, in turn, be replaced by the damaged engine from Djibouti. The serial numbers would be changed and the Greeks and the Air Registration Board would be none the wiser.
The Athenian handling agent had managed to get the engine on to an early Misrair freighting flight to Cairo while another agent, under the promise of a substantial bonus, would personally supervise its loading on to the ageing Super Constellation which plied the Red Sea local service.
A delay of twenty-four hours. That was not bad. The Rhodesian buyer in London, Peterson, had whined, and Murphy himself could not be one hundred per cent sure of the money until the aircraft touched down. But nonetheless he walked with a confident bounce from the heat of the piazza into the cool hotel lobby. The concierge bowed slightly as he told Murphy that the Signora had taken the key to the suite an hour before.
Murphy was already feeling a strong tingle of desire as he pressed the button in the antique caged elevator. There is nothing quite like a feeling of danger to get a man really eager for it, he was thinking, and his pace quickened even more along the heavy pile carpet which led to the suite.
A ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign hung on the big brass door knob. Murphy smiled. She was ready, just as he had requested.
He opened the door and went into the sitting room. The bedroom door was two inches open.
It was only then that he saw the man sitting in a deep armchair in a corner behind him. The man was heavily tanned, with a skinny body like those of the workmen in the street outside. He wore faded blue jeans and a white string vest. There were splashes of blood on the vest.
The man trained a small Beretta pistol on Murphy’s groin.
‘Good morning, Murphy,’ said the man. He flicked the gun possibly a centimetre away from Murphy’s genitals towards the bedroom. ‘Take a look at her. You’re next. That is unless you can get Mr Ragnelli his aeroplane back.’
‘You will switch off engines and you will leave the aircraft while it is inspected.’
*
They liked his voice even less.
Martin glanced through the windshield. There were three jeeps in view now, one of them parked directly beneath him. He could see the rifling on the barrel of the Schmeitzer machine gun. The black legionnaire behind it peered directly along the sights at his head.
‘Cut everything except the cooling system and open the doors,’ he said. His voice was weary and resigned.
Martin rose slowly and reluctantly and clambered down from the flight-deck, on to the steps and into heat which made him feel sick and strangely cold as his body thermostat fought to adjust. Harry followed and then Stubbles, who blinked owl-like into the fierceness of that sun.
‘Hey, it’s the real thing,’ he said. ‘D’ya ever see Beau geste? That’s how they dressed in Beau Geste.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Yeah, that was a great movie. Gary Cooper. They all wore those crazy hats.’
‘Cool it.’
Martin was looking round. A fourth jeep was parked under the tailplane. A fifth was racing along the apron leaving a spectacular trail of dust. This jeep circled the parked aircraft twice clearly for dramatic effect, the driver making his tyres squeal continually, and then stopped a few yards from the waiting airmen. A blond man in a khaki shirt and shorts, wearing a kepi with a brilliantly white sunshade over his neck and sporting the three bars of a captain, climbed out with relaxed ease and walked across towards them. A cigarette was hanging from his mouth.
There was an arrogant assurance about his walk. Martin found himself clenching his right hand into an instinctive fist. He looked at the massive holster on the man’s thigh and unclenched his fingers. Here, he thought, is a one hundred per cent French pig who is going to ride me and Martin Gore is going to have to take it, aren’t you Martin Gore?
The captain stood in front of him and looked at all three of them in turn. There was dislike in his eyes. He faced Harry.
‘Who are you?’
‘I am the captain of this aircraft,’ snapped Martin. ‘And I am telling you that there is an international law that no one smokes within fifty yards of a parked aeroplane. That means anyone. So take that dog-end out of your mouth and kill it.’
‘You are ordering me?’
‘Spit it out or I’ll take it out.’
They were glaring at each other.
Great start to a new acquaintance, Martin was thinking. Ten minutes from now and you’ll be begging this bastard for a spanner and a gantry and help to change the engine. So what do you do? You square up to the pig.
The Frenchman took the cigarette out of his mouth. He blew the acrid caporal smoke in a thin stream towards Martin’s face. And he replaced it in his mouth.
‘I must inform you that you are all three of you to be held and the aircraft impounded while inquiries are being made. What is the nature of your cargo?’
‘The cigarette, monsieur.’
‘If you must choose to be obstructive, Captain’ … The Frenchman managed to combine disbelief and contempt into the word “captain” … ‘I shall hold you at gunpoint and you may find yourselves sitting in the sun for the next few hours. Your flight documents, please.’
‘The cigarette,’ Martin was shouting now. ‘That lousy cigarette.’ Harry touched his arm and he pushed him away angrily.
The Frenchman unclipped the holster. He had become bored with this Englishman. And then Sorrel stepped out of the hatch.
She had made-up her face and she had changed into a simply cut dress of white cotton with a neck-line which plunged to her waist. She smiled at everybody.
The effect of that frail, feminine body in that acutely masculine set-up was monumental. She looked at the men with an almost childlike innocence. She had special eyes for the Frenchman. The innocent eyes of a fawn who had found the hunter.
‘Hallo,’ she said. ‘Having
trouble?’
The cigarette disappeared from the Frenchman’s mouth immediately. He straightened his back and saluted automatically.
‘Mam’selle,’ he said. His eyes ranged several times up and down her body, pausing at the whiteness of her breasts and then settling on her eyes, which remained wide open and questioning.
Martin breathed again. ‘Harry, get the papers,’ he said quietly. He was trying to read Sorrel’s mind but could only guess her scenario. ‘Captain, this is Miss Francis who is a passenger.’
The Frenchman did not hear him. His eyes had not left the girl for one instant.
Martin looked down and saw, with satisfaction, that the Frenchman had ground his cigarette, half smoked, on to the surface of the runway.
*
Murphy pushed the door open very slowly. He smelled the carnage at once, a curious, subtle scent of blood and flesh which was almost overpowered by the other scent of perfume and toilet water that the girl had been using. She was dead. She lay spreadeagled on the bed, naked, her body vivid with violet-coloured bruises. Her neck had been sliced cleanly under her right ear and the blood must have fountained from the artery because it covered much of the bed and the wall behind it. There was no repose in her death. Her face was a loathsome, grotesque mask of terror.
Murphy had seen a lot of horror. He had created it, encouraged it and had achieved a considerable reputation for it. In his time he had ordered the massacre of whole villages in the Congo and he had used a few tribeswomen for target practice. He had ordered his men to burn down a large school and to machine gun down the children as they ran from the flames. He had shot his own men, sometimes in the head to kill them instantly, sometimes, as a punishment, in the lower abdomen, so that they would die in agony.
But those had been blacks.
This obscenity had lain in his arms a few hours before. He had stroked that hair which was matted now with fast congealing blood.
He felt bile flood into his mouth and wanted desperately to vomit.
He heard a movement behind him and he felt the jab of the pistol at the base of his skull. The man said, ‘She started to scream.’
Murphy backed slowly and the barrel maintained a steady pressure on his neck. He turned away from the bedroom and heard the door close behind him.
‘You bastard,’ he said.
‘Sit down, Murphy.’ The man in the vest spoke English which was Neapolitan Brooklyn. ‘My name is Michele and you are my contract. A rushed job and I don’t like rushed jobs. My instructions are to persuade you to turn Mr Ragnelli’s aeroplane round and to see that it and its contents are handed back to his agent, who is waiting in Karachi.’
‘And then?’ asked Murphy.
‘And then, Mr Murphy, Mr Ragnelli will consider your future with some care.’
‘And if I can’t turn it round?’
‘You saw the girl. It was too bad that that should have to happen. And then there is the question of Mr Ragnelli’s money, which you appear to have diverted to your own bank.’ The man sighed deeply. He was talking with a resigned voice like a schoolmaster to an errant pupil.
‘You surprise me, Murphy. You were one of Mr Ragnelli’s favourites. You were in the upper echelons of the organisation, not like me. I’m just a humble tradesman. And you thought you could get away in Naples of all places. Do you know that I have had a cousin watching your yacht in Ischia for the last twenty-four hours?’
‘I can’t reach the aeroplane by radio,’ said Murphy. ‘It’ll be out of range.’
‘You don’t need to. You can telephone. Or cable the captain.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The aeroplane is on the ground, Murphy. We know that too. That’s why I didn’t bother to come to your office. I’ve got cousins everywhere. You’d be surprised how many employees Mr Ragnelli has in this operation. I only wish to know one thing. We can take care of the rest. Just where is that aircraft now?’
*
It was a small, grubby room with no windows, and the only furniture were two flimsy chairs with rush matting seats and a table with a flower-patterned formica top. The walls were flyblown and a single exposed bulb provided the only light. The room was hot and clammy and the only breathable air came from a noisy ventilator in the ceiling.
Martin Gore had been sitting in this room for one hour exactly by his wrist chronometer and he was fighting hard against the urge to smash the table and chairs into microscopic fragments against the wall. He was moist with sweat and the ventilator, which badly needed oiling, grated on his already exposed nerves.
‘You will wait there while we inspect your flight documents,’ the blond captain had snarled quite gleefully.
He had been braced for this confinement from the moment that things had started going wrong in mid-air. He had answers for most of the questions they would ask: all right, he was running missiles and not Campbell’s tinned soup; he was off course by fifteen hundred miles in a military aircraft with no markings. Weapons were an everyday cargo in this part of the world, sure enough, but the men who flew them were vulnerable.
No, he could have sat in this room for the next twenty-four hours and not murmured a word of protest. He was used to waiting; all pilots are. They wait for weather, for repairs to be carried out, for last minute cargo and delayed passengers. A lot of pilots, like Martin, wait for charters and get hungry.
A cruel resentment was building up inside Martin. It was not the waiting or the discomfort.
In a room, maybe three doors along the corridor outside, he could hear the clatter of china and the clink of expensive glassware. He could smell cooking, good cooking, and he could hear the voice of the French captain and Sorrel’s laughter.
He gripped both ends of the table and closed his lips tightly and then said, ‘Bitch’. He said it again several times and it relieved nothing. He experimented with the word. He said, ‘Perfidious bitch, deceitful bitch,’ and expanded the thesis, still talking aloud, until he had named the girl a whore, a trollop, a slut, harlot and hooker.
*
He had never liked the girl from the moment that he and Harry had answered Murphy’s advertisement in Aviation Weekly and had found themselves facing her in the luxurious Interguns Head Office in Brussels.
Sorrel was typing at the reception desk and her fingers did not stop moving as she glanced up and saw the two men waiting. It was an arrogant, sardonic look.
Harry had muttered, ‘Man, did you ever feel like you were knee high to a wood-louse? Look at them laser beam eyes.’
When she finally condescended to speak to them, there had been something withering and contemptuous about her manner which had them both backing towards the door.
Only Murphy’s appearance in the room and his almost immediate offer of the charter from Taiwan saved the situation.
An hour later, when Murphy called the girl into his inner office to dictate to her the terms of his agreement with them, Martin had more time to study her. There was no doubt about it, she was cool and tough and completely self-possessed. When Murphy mentioned the actual fee she interjected, ‘They’re only pilots, you know, not pop stars.’
And Martin and Harry liked even less the way she handed the typed-out document and the advance payment cheque with airy condescension.
For all his dislike, though, Martin had built up a strong sexual feeling about the girl. During the days which had followed that first meeting, especially in the loneliness of the Taipei hotel room, he had sets of fantasies about her, each of which ended in the girl surrendering and becoming warm and human.
The sounds of eating and drinking had stopped and the voices in that nearby room were muted. He could not hear laughing any more.
His imagination began to tick like a time-bomb. He saw it all on the dirty wall of the interrogation room as though he were watching a pornographic film. The Frenchman’s big, brown, hairy hands were sliding inside that cleavage, her cream white breasts were held and caressed, her cherry pink nipples clutched be
tween nicotine-stained fingers.
‘Filth,’ he said.
And listened. There was no sound now and he strained to hear more, knowing that he was piling on his personal agony.
That bastard’s hands were good, blast him. He knew just how to use them on that body. They were deft and gentle and they maintained that steady, ever increasing urgency which he guessed she would like.
It was the Frenchman who was taming her, not Martin.
‘Cow.’
Martin closed his eyes and turned away from the movie but it went on playing with those hands sliding the zip to the small of her back and she, unprotesting, her tongue too eager for his, allowing him to slide the dress over her buttocks.
‘Fornicator!’
Even in the fiercest throes of jealousy, Martin had to smile at the word which had been buried deep in his Church of England past, and he dug for more from the Bible which lurked somewhere in his mind.
‘Harridan! Jezebel!’
She was naked now in the film and the Frenchman stood before her and undressed.
‘At least you could take that stupid bloody hat off, you Frog bastard,’ he yelled at the wall. He began to laugh at the fierce scope of his own imagination which suddenly produced horns of the other man’s head, sticking out from either side of the kepi, and painted a spiky little beard on the face.
The laughter helped to ooze the tension from him for a few moments. He was able to think rationally again. The film had stopped.
And what was she doing? Was she, even now, discarding them, possibly even organising another crew to take Juliet Mike Oscar on? Was she even now talking to Murphy, preparing to leave him and the others in some rat-ridden Arab cell while others took the money?
She was certainly capable of this and so was Murphy. Perhaps he shouldn’t have shaken her about in mid-flight. She could be, he was sure, a singularly vindictive person. And yet it was the violence of that encounter which had increased the lust in him for Sorrel. He wanted her very badly.
