by Jerry Ahern
“I set myself up for the Devil’s Princes to come after me. A guy by the name of Tyrone Cash is behind what happened to Ernie. Cash and two other guys—Randy Jones and Balthaszar Roman—were in it with him. They’re the top guys in this street gang. Big cocaine and crack dealers. Got a reputation for killing anybody who gets in their way. That’s why I set myself up. If they run true to pattern, they’ll come after me. Only place they’d know to look was the hotel. But to be on the safe side, I wanted Thelma and the kids out of the house.”
“Does Ernie’s sister’s house present that much better an alternative?”
“Best we’ve got.”
“Could have tried a hotel.”
“Ernie’s brother-in-law’s a cop. I checked. He’s gonna be home tonight watching a football game.”
“Assuming they’re safe then, you set it up for these gentlemen with the picturesque-sounding names to come to the hotel and kill you?”
“Right.” Babcock nodded.
“What exactly did you do?”
Babcock quickly told Hughes about the visit to Devil’s Princes’ headquarters earlier in the day and the invitation he had left, including the false room number and then setting it up to have the incoming calls transferred to his own room.
“That’s wonderful except for two things: First, the hotel operator, unless she’s busy, might give them the correct room number in the event they need to call you again; and second, what about the poor slob in the target room?”
“It was the best I could do on the spur of the moment. I figure I can do something about the people in the other room. I’m not sure what just yet. And with you here—you said you’re on the same floor?”
“I’m the poor slob in the next room.”
Babcock started to laugh and then so did Hughes, although he didn’t know why. Neither of them had a gun and it was likely that the delegation from the Devil’s Princes would.
Chapter Nine
Abe Cross finished with his bow tie. He refused to consider a clip-on, so he contented himself with an imperfect but sincere knot.
When he had first started playing in the London hotels after the surgical strike in Iran was behind him, he had purchased a tuxedo off the rack. But after he’d felt secure enough in what he was doing that it appeared he would be doing it for quite some time, he had had three tuxedos custom tailored, three not an inordinate number since he needed to wear one every night with the places he worked. He had one white dinner jacket as well, just for necessity since he had always thought they made the wearer look like a lost waiter without a tray.
He found his cigarettes and lighter, grabbed up his music case and started out of his cabin. For the first time in a long time, the prospect of working was not just tolerable, but exciting. Jenny Hall was what excited him. He’d found that her arrangements were quite compatible with his own style of playing and, when he improvised a little, she not only didn’t complain, but would vocalize along with it. Her voice was another matter. It was a perfect blending of alto timbre and a range which got her comfortably into soprano. And when she hit those notes, the higher ones, it was something he couldn’t describe.
He wondered if he was in love.
The corridor was crowded and passengers were still arriving, stewards carting unbelievably stacked luggage carriers out of the elevators and into cabins, so many people moving about that twice he had to let an elevator pass before there was room enough for him to squeeze aboard.
“Do you work here, young man?” He turned his head and saw a pair of pretty blue eyes behind him under a crown of soft grey hair. She reminded him of his aunt a little.
“Yes, ma ’am. I’m Abe Cross. I’m playing in the Seabreeze Lounge.”
“Ohh! The piano! I love the piano, don’t I Fred?”
Fred was apparently her husband, who looked at once bored and embarrassed but nodded that she did, indeed, like the piano.
“Well, I tell you what.” Cross smiled. “When you come down some evening and catch me play, just ask for something you’d like to hear and I’ll bet I can play it.”
“Do you know ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’?”
“My mother was a big fan of Liberace. I can play it. But I don’t have a candelabra, I’m afraid.” For that matter, he didn’t have a brother named George, either.
The elevator ride mercifully ended and he glanced at his Rolex as he made his way along the corridor—should it be called a companionway? he wondered—toward the Seabreeze Lounge. He entered from the enclosure-protected side as he had at noon. Now there was an elaborate easel set-up with a poster announcing the “vocal magic” of songstress Jennifer Hall. They didn’t know how right they were about the magic part, he thought. The publicity still inset into the poster didn’t do her justice at all but still looked good enough to eat. At the lower third of the poster it said something about the “inimitable piano styling of Abe Cross,” which made it sound as though he took pianos in for a wash and a set. The lounge was already filling up and as he started for the piano, he heard a familiar voice, Helen the barmaid. “Want something?”
“Ice water’d be terrific. Thanks.”
“Man, you are different from Lenny Brooks.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. He stepped up onto the smallish stage and started laying out his music. He heard a voice behind him, a man’s, totally unfamiliar. “Mr. Cross?”
“Yes,” He quickly added a ‘sir’ after he saw the uniform. He guessed he’d been expecting somebody who looked like the guy from “The Love Boat,” but the captain of the Empress Britannia was a short, stockily built man with a thick head of dark hair so brown it was almost black, streaks of grey at the sides, the sideburns short and pure white.
“I’m John Milewski, but I answer to the name Captain.” He extended his hand—it was the size of a five-pound ham and had heavy black hair on the back—and smiled. “I understand you play terrifically. I have spies everywhere.” And then he grinned. “And I also understand you were a Naval officer. Correct?”
“That’s right, Captain. I was a lieutenant.”
“Dry land or water?”
“A little of both. I was a SEAL Team Leader. Last duty station was in the Med. But that was a while ago.”
“Annapolis?”
“Nope. Navy ROTC.”
The grin widened still further. “Good. Annapolis men can be a pain in the ass. I know. I was one. Have a drink with me later, all right?”
“That’ll be my pleasure, sir.”
“Well, good luck, tonight. Won’t be seeing me around much until after we shove off and we’re out of Naples harbor.” He cocked his head like some sort of salute and strode off.
Abe Cross returned to laying out his music. Helen showed up with the ice water. He checked his watch. He didn’t have to start for another ten minutes according to the schedule given him that afternoon, but he decided to get off on the right foot just in case the captain did have spies everywhere.
He took some of the more popular Beatles songs, in a medley alternating the faster ones with the slower ones, the focus of the medley the song “Yesterday,” measures of it used to segue from one song into another and to cover key changes. He glanced at his watch again when he was through. It had killed twelve minutes. He noticed the grey-haired lady from the elevator and he did a long, complicated sounding but easy enough run which led into “I’ll Be Seeing You.” He glanced up as she sat down and she looked positively sweet as she smiled at him. He segued into “I’ll Get By,” and then decided on a slightly different attack before he started having people coming down with hyperglycemia attacks. Movie tunes were always popular and at once unexpected. He did “The Magnificent Seven” and “High Noon.”
A gorgeous blonde whose breasts and the top of her dress were slowly but steadily parting company it seemed, came up to the piano and gave him a big smile and slipped five bucks into a glass Helen the barmaid had put out and asked him if he could play any Barry Mannilow and he told her he could.
Fred, the little old lady’s husband, came up, apparently having seen the donation from the blonde, and started slipping a ten into the glass. “Those were on me. Tell her I said so,” Cross told the man.
“Thanks, fella.”
“Anytime.” He had learned to play on one level of consciousness and carry on conversations, even once or twice make change.
After about twenty minutes, Helen came by and asked if he needed anything and he asked for an ashtray. As he lit up a Pall Mail, he started playing “Set ‘Em Up Joe,” the cigarette hanging from the left comer of his mouth. It was the wrong brand of cigarettes, he didn’t own a porkpie hat, and he wasn’t Sinatra, but Abe Cross kept playing the song anyway….
He hadn’t gotten rid of the PPK. It was smaller than his own gun and easier to carry around aboard the ship if it came to that. But there was no reason to suppose that it would. He moved through the engine room now, along a section of pipe which brought steam to the turbines, which in turn cranked the screws. He’d been tapped for the job by the people at Langley for one reason. The ampule couldn’t be transferred by military aircraft because the military might somehow get wind of it and want it for their own biowarfare studies, he’d been told. And it couldn’t be transported by civilian aircraft because the airports would be watched. Even though he had always worked the Orient whenever he’d done any out-of-country things, it was always possible that someone would recognize him from a file photo or something.
There was an ancillary problem with moving the ampule by aircraft at any event. A virus, he’d been told, it might be something which could infect when vectored in air. If some catastrophe were to take place on a seagoing vessel at least, the worst that could happen was the ampule going down. He had placed the ampule and its maroon container inside a waterproof, air-cushioned bag just in case of that.
He was told that no one would suspect that such a valuable and dangerous item would be taken out the slow, old-fashioned way, by ship, anyway. The reason he’d been tapped for the assignment was that he’d spent two years in the Merchant Marines before finishing college and was qualified to pass himself off as an experienced man below decks. He didn’t relish the idea of taking a cruise this way, but it was all in the line of duty.
He had packed his good clothing and changed to worn Levi’s, a work shirt and even a peacoat and watchcap, taken his spurious seaman’s documents and reported for work, the job arranged for him in advance before he had even reached Italy. He had asked why a cruise ship rather than some merchant vessel. He had been told it would be less suspicious. That hadn’t rung one hundred percent true to him, but he had learned that information was often withheld for the supposed greater good of the mission.
He found an easily identifiable junction of pipes, yellow ones meeting red ones. He set about finding a suitable location in which to stash the ampule….
Ephraim Vols had not come to Italy prepared for a cruise at sea on a luxury liner. But the information the truth serum caused Thomas Alyard to reveal had led him inexorably to the conclusion that a cruise it must be. Through the description and name given him by Alyard, he had worked through contacts in the Italian Communist party to learn that a man of different name but identical description had chartered a plane from Rome to Naples less than twelve hours before. Fabrizzi’s description of the man having matched identically to Alyard’s, Vols had assumed it reasonably accurate. The man had rented a car at the airfield and returned it at his hotel, after which he had checked out leaving no forwarding address. A description gotten from an awakened desk clerk at the hotel had indicated that the American—another name used at the hotel—had left wearing blue jeans and a seaman’s jacket. On a hunch, Vols had telephoned a source in the longshoremen’s union and, after an hour’s wait, been phoned back. Two black seamen speaking English and matching the same general description had signed aboard vessels leaving Naples harbor that night. One had given the name Nigel Hornsby, spoken ‘like an Englishman, like you,’ and joined the crew of the Herculaneum, a merchant vessel leaving for Marseille and Cardiff. The second, giving his name as Alvin Leeds, had taken work below decks on the cruise ship Empress Britannia.
Vols had taken the only course of action open to him, since he had kept his word and left Thomas Alyard alive and well. He had ordered the man called Piotr to fly to Marseille and the man called Vassily to go on to Cardiff, each man with the same directive. If the black seaman leaves the vessel, kill him if necessary but first find out if he has the ampule. Each of his men had an injection kit similar to his own, the truth serum marked as insulin so it could get past airport security checks.
Something the longeshoremen’s union contact had said about Alvin Leeds had made Vols determine to pursue Leeds himself. The job had been waiting for Leeds, held for him. That was not entirely unusual, but unusual enough to make a connection.
There had been more telephone calls then. Arranging passage on the Empress, rousting a sympathizer who ran a men’s clothier—Vols had brought nothing with him to Italy except a change of underwear and socks, one clean shirt and his toothbrush and electric razor.
As a passenger, his luggage would be subject to search and any real weapons were impossible to bring along. But he could always improvise. Three suits and a tuxedo hastily altered and an appropriate number of shirts, ties, underpants (he never wore undershirts) and other necessities and a set of expensive luggage to help him look the part of the tourist (and because he liked real leather and had been looking for an excuse to get it past his expense reports)—he felt he was set. A last-minute call to Anna in Albania; David Stakowski had killed himself in his cell, the Albanians failing to keep the suicide watch Vols had ordered through her. Orders to Anna to fly to New York City where the Empress would first dock so she could take the ampule into an escape route that could be arranged while she awaited his arrival. And a promise to Anna that after this was over, they would still see to that Christmas tree he’d promised to show her. A taxicab to the docks, through the inspection points, his luggage taken away to be brought on board.
The “All Ashore That’s Going Ashore” gong already sounding, people waving vigorously from the decks to the docks and from the docks to the decks, Ephraim Vols ascended the gangplank and boarded the Empress. The first officer welcomed him aboard and the recreation director assured him he’d have an exciting trip.
He hoped not too exciting. The call made just before his call to Anna had given him encoded specific details about the contents of the ampule. And if he hadn’t talked to Anna, felt the reassurance of her calm, he would have become ill.
Chapter Ten
When they stopped at the K-Mart, Lewis Babcock had asked, “Why do you want to stop here?”
“Lewis. Hotel rooms offer some potential for improvising weapons, certainly; but when we have such a vastly richer opportunity open to us, we’d be fools not to take advantage of it. Wouldn’t we?”
As they had driven from Ernie’s sister’s house, Hughes had worked up a list. He tore the list in half now and gave one half to Babcock. “Remember with the steak knives, not the ones with serrated edges. Right?”
Hughes went through the store as methodically and as quickly as he could, purchasing a small crowbar, brass-headed carpet tacks, a claw hammer, ammonia, several pressure-sensitive wall switches, a hundred feet of electrical wire, black electrical tape, extension cords and—he counted himself in luck this time of year—an electric fan. The fan was on sale. He located Christmas tree lights. He found two pairs of safety goggles and two pairs of white workmen’s coveralls in more or less correct sizes.
Babcock was already at the checkout counter, looking as though he felt slightly stupid. “You have everything, Lewis.”
“I even found your water pistols. They were on sale.”
“Good. I hate spending too much for something,” Hughes enthused.
Out to the car with their purchases and a quick ride downtown, traffic at the hour relatively light for such a large city.
There were a few stares as they walked through the lobby, especially directed at the unbagged box for the electric fan, Hughes felt.
They checked Hughes’s room. There had been no messages and nothing was disturbed. Each of them armed with a steak knife, they entered Babcock’s room. No messages and nothing disturbed there either.
“You mind telling me what all this junk is for, Mr. Hughes?”
“I’ll explain as we go, Lewis. First, check the water pistols that their good and tight and try to judge how true to aim they are at under a dozen feet. Use the shower as your backstop, And” —Hughes smiled—“if it’s all the same to you, Lewis, I’d love the one that’s shaped like a Luger. The green one.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. And I haven’t gone senile, either, Lewis. Hurry with that accuracy test,” and Hughes began unpacking the fan….
The green plastic Luger-shaped water pistol, Babcock had told him, shot a foot low at twelve feet and six inches to the left.
Darwin Hughes sat in darkness in a straight-backed chair in the far corner of his room, alone, the water pistol on the table beside him and alongside it, one of the pressure-sensitive switches, the switch bridged off the wall outlet beside the door leading into the corridor. Leading from the wall was an extension cord, which was connected to the two strings of Christmas tree lights over the door.
In the almost total darkness, he could read the luminous face of his Rolex perfectly well. It was 4:00 A.M. If the Devil’s Princes were ever going to come, they would come within this next hour. If they didn’t come, he would have lost an entire night’s sleep for nothing and poor Ernie Hayes would be bound over from his pre-trial hearing and face a frame-up that he might never escape short of the kind of drastic measures that Hughes’s brief meeting with Hayes’s wife had confirmed Hayes himself would never condone.
