Honey in His Mouth hcc-60

by Lester Dent

  “Give me that gun, Harsh.”

  “I’ll give you what’s in the barrel, I ain’t kidding you.”

  There was a silence—what the fellow would call a pregnant silence, Harsh thought. He glowered over the shotgun sights and kept the muzzle pointed at Brother’s face.

  Brother smiled a rather odd smile. If the smile was intended to worry Harsh, it succeeded, for he felt certain Brother was going to come at him again. But Brother turned and walked, in no hurry at all, back to the house.

  Harsh tried to get up from the wet sand, but his legs refused the job. He looked down at the shotgun, and then he realized—he was sure by looking at the down hammers—that both barrels had exploded when Brother fired the gun. He had been threatening Brother with an empty weapon.

  FOURTEEN

  When Harsh saw Mr. Hassam the next morning, he threw up his arm and waved him over. He was very glad to see him. Mr. Hassam walked into the sun-splashed dining patio adjacent to the kitchen where Harsh was sitting on an iron spider chair eating breakfast. “You got back, eh? It seemed like you were gone forever.”

  “I came in this morning early.” Mr. Hassam waved at the table. “I like to get my own breakfast. Excuse me.” He went into the kitchen.

  Harsh listened to pans rattling for a time, then moved over to the kitchen door. “What are you fixing yourself?”

  “Pompano sautéed in butter with capers. I like fish for breakfast. Could I fix you some?”

  “I guess I could go for a little more. I got an appetite this morning, for a change. I’m glad to see you back, Mr. Hassam. I mean that. Nobody else around here offers to prepare me breakfast.”

  “Thank you, Harsh. I do not see why you should not be popular.”

  “Neither do I, but I keep having run-ins with different people around here.”

  “You mean Brother?”

  Harsh nodded. “Yeah, that’s who I mean. You know something, I never seen a guy like that bastard. I mean I don’t make him out. No crap. He scares the hell out of me, I’m not fooling you. You know what he tried to do yesterday afternoon? Blow my gut right out of me with a shotgun. Blow it right out of me.”

  Mr. Hassam poured coffee into a cup. “Yes. Brother told me this morning. He is very sorry. He said he lost his head. He asked me to express his regrets.”

  “He what?”

  “He is very sorry, and wants to express his regrets.”

  Harsh laughed. “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  “Harsh, I could explain how you can avoid future trouble with Brother. I mean, I can tell you some things that may help you exercise restraint and tolerance.”

  “I’ll restrain him with a brickbat, he points that shotgun at me again.”

  “Harsh, here is the first thing I want to tell you. Brother has a mental handicap, an affliction known as paranoia. It comes and goes, and sometimes it reaches the point where he has to go to a sanitarium and take shock treatments.”

  “That’s no news to me, Mr. Hassam. I had figured out he was nuts. You just watch him, anybody would know.”

  “Harsh, if you will make allowances for his illness, I think you can handle him. Particularly now, since you bested him in the encounter yesterday.”

  “Oh, he figured I licked him, did he? He had me guessing. I couldn’t tell what he thought. He ruined my night’s sleep. I kept wondering when he was going to pop in on me with another shotgun. That’s a tough boy, that Brother. You know what I did, I kicked him right in the privates as hard as I could. It didn’t faze the bastard. He got up ready to eat me. And he would have, except by then I had my mitts on the blunderbuss.”

  “That is not so strange.”

  “Listen, a kick in the testes like that would put me down for good.”

  “Not if you didn’t have them.”

  Harsh’s jaw dropped. “The hell you say! Is that what he is? I thought those guys were soft and peaceful.”

  “Well, Brother is not. Brother adheres to a routine of rigorous diet and exercise, perhaps to subdue evidence of his handicap, I don’t know.”

  “I’m glad you told me about it, Mr. Hassam. Nobody tells me anything but you. I feel kind of sorry for the guy, at that.”

  “Yes, and you would feel even sorrier if I told you who did it to him.”

  “I would? Why?”

  “It was his brother.”

  “Jesus. You mean his own brother—Jesus!”

  Mr. Hassam tasted of a caper. “El Presidente.”

  Harsh stared. “You mean El Presidente is his...and he had him castrated? The guy I look like?”

  “Now you’re getting it.”

  “Jesus. The first time Brother laid eyes on me, back in that hospital, he gave one hell of a jump. He hated me right off, and he’s hated me ever after. I can begin to see why.”

  Mr. Hassam transferred pompano to plates with the skill of a chef. “I trust this information will enable you to be more tolerant.”

  “Yeah, it will make his crap easier to swallow.” Harsh accepted one of the plates. “What was the trouble between the brothers, anyway?”

  Mr. Hassam smiled thinly. “Miss Muirz. They had a falling out over her.”

  Harsh put the plate holding the pompano on the kitchen cabinet. He stood there for a while. “Miss Muirz.” He picked up a cup of coffee and drank it all. “Well, it figures.”

  Harsh had intended to bring up the subject of the fingerprints on the bank deposit card but the news about Brother caused him to forget it until after breakfast, when Mr. Hassam brought out the mastic material he had brought with him from New York for the hand casts. The materials consisted of a little tin spray can and a jar of the mastic itself which was the color of taffy candy before it is pulled. Harsh was puzzled, but he followed instructions and sat down and permitted his hands to be sprayed from the can—both hands, the healthy one and the one in the cast. This placed an oily coating on his skin, designed to keep the mastic from adhering to the skin.

  Harsh watched Mr. Hassam open the jar of mastic. “Hey, wait a minute. What is this for?”

  “You need not be afraid.”

  “I ain’t worried about my yellow feathers. What is that gunk, is what I wanta know.”

  “We are going to have a custom-made pair of gloves fashioned for you, Harsh.”

  “Yeah? Is that right, now?” Harsh drew his hands back. “Just a new pair of gloves, huh?”

  “You’re not scared, are you?”

  “You know how it is. You’re sure you’re being framed, you get shotguns pointed at your belly, and you get cute answers to questions. I ain’t scared, but I get to wondering.”

  “I wish you would go along with me, Harsh.” Mr. Hassam sounded tired. “I have to do this. I have to get these gloves made, gloves which will carry your fingerprints, so that we can place your prints on additional bank deposit cards. You can understand, we can’t run all the way up here from South America with every bank deposit card. That is all there is to it.”

  “Hell, I thought maybe you were going to knock off some guy and leave my prints on the job.”

  “No, no, nothing like that. I swear it.”

  “I think you’re nuts, Mr. Hassam, no crap. I never ran across such a wild scheme before.”

  “Trust me, Harsh.”

  “Well, okay.” Harsh held out his right hand. “I guess I got very little choice.”

  When Mr. Hassam had stripped the set-up mastic off Harsh’s hands, he left the kitchen at once with it, leaving Harsh to do some second-thinking. He immediately wished he had not consented to having the hand casts made. Why had he been such a sucker, anyway? Mr. Hassam was a slick one, talking him into it. If they were going to make some gloves that anybody could wear and leave his fingerprints scattered around, that was serious. They could rob Fort Knox if they could figure out a way to get the job done, and hang it on him if they wanted to.

  He felt something wriggling down his forehead. He struck it a hard blow with his palm, but it was just a drop of
sweat, which he splashed to nothing.

  He went over to the kitchen sink and washed the oily film off his hands, taking care not to get the cast wet. He had to use quite a lot of soap powder to get it off. Then he examined the gunk still left in the jar. There was not much of it. No label on the jar, no way to tell who made the stuff. Well, he had made another sucker move, that was what he had done.

  He looked at Mr. Hassam narrowly when the latter rejoined him almost two hours later. “Them things you made of my hands, were they all right? They satisfy you?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Could I have a look at them? I’d kinda like to see what they look like.” If he got his hands on the casts, he was going to destroy them.

  “I’m sorry, Harsh. I have already sent them off to New York by air mail.”

  “Oh.” Harsh rubbed the side of his nose with his finger. “Well, I guess that’s that. What else is on the toboggan for today?”

  “More Spanish lessons, if you feel up to it.”

  “Why not.”

  “Shall we go down to the beach, then? More comfortable there.”

  The sea with the early morning sun falling across it looked licorice black, with swatches of scintillating brilliance following along on the wave crests.

  “Not that you ain’t good company, but I would rather sit on the beach with Miss Muirz, if you know what I mean.” Harsh took off his shoes and socks and dug his bare feet into the warm sand. “What happened to that dish anyway?”

  “She had a business trip to make. I imagine she may return today.”

  “Yeah?” Harsh grinned. “I hardly got to know her, she was in and out of here like the Irishman’s flea. So she’s gonna be back, huh? Well, that should pick up things around here.”

  Mr. Hassam looked at him with amusement. “You have my felicitations.”

  Harsh eyed him. “Yeah. What in the hell’s a felicitation?”

  “A blessing.”

  “Yeah. You mean with your fingers crossed, the way you sound.”

  A wave came swelling in and fell on the ash blond beach at their feet with an audible grunt. Mr. Hassam kicked some dry sand out of the wet sand. “Maybe we should get at the Spanish lesson.”

  “If you say so.”

  “How much do you remember of what we have already gone over, Harsh?”

  For some time they practiced what Mr. Hassam called the lilt of the Spanish tongue, which Harsh decided was mostly a way of pronouncing each vowel with great clarity as if he was attacking the sound. He learned how to take the fuzzy edges off his vowels, and how to put vowel glides in certain places so as to lay a special emphasis. A lot of noodle soup, Harsh thought, but he kept at it.

  “You are progressing excellently, Mr. Harsh.”

  “Yeah. Well you would have a time proving it by me. This stuff is way out of my line. Say, am I supposed to be able to spout this stuff like a native? I’ll never make it.”

  “A smattering will do.”

  “Maybe this El Presidente made some speeches or something, ones that were recorded, that I could listen to. Wouldn’t that help?”

  “That will come later.”

  “Okay.”

  They watched a small plane come down the shoreline. The plane had its nose down to within fifty feet of the surf and was making time down the beach. The pilot waved when he went past. Harsh waved back. “That’s a lucky bastard, that pilot. You know I always wished I could fly one of them things. Lot of ’em by here. Must be twenty, thirty, a day. Lot of sightseeing.”

  “Tourists, I imagine.” Mr. Hassam was not much interested in the plane.

  “Yeah, I suppose. A treat for them poor tourists, I bet, getting a look at a palace like this. It ain’t every day you see something that fancy.” The plane had passed on, dragging a broom of sound over the beach. “Take my old man, he wouldn’t believe this. He was a farmer. He had his feet in the clay all his life. He never knew he was sweating his guts out so some people could live high on the hog in places like this. I wonder what he would have thought, give him a look at this.” Harsh glanced at Mr. Hassam. “Maybe it ain’t nothing unusual to you, though.”

  Mr. Hassam looked sober. “I, too, had a humble beginning.” He lay back on the sand and began to talk. He said Harsh might not believe it, but this was a far cry from his own youth also. All but the sand. The sand was the same. Sand was sand, and Mr. Hassam’s had been in dunes, hot as a furnace by day and as nice as a woman at night. “Mr. Harsh, I was born on the sand in a rug tent, begat by a father who bred white asses of fine quality which he exported to Mecca. He bought my mother in a market for a sum of silver piastres the equal of about twenty-five dollars American. Mr. Harsh, does that sound romantic, picturesque? It was not, believe me. I cannot remember a time when I was not hungry there in that desert, and you should have seen me, a skinny teenage kid riding a white ass or a camel. I was seventeen when my father sent me to sell a herd of the asses to a Mecca dealer, and do you know what I did? I took the money the dealer paid and I never went back. I have not seen my father nor my mother again until this day. I went to Damascus, became a fat boy in Damascus. You know what is a fat boy in Damascus? No, nothing nasty. Just a boy the desert has given a permanent hunger for food. I went to work for an importer. In time I found the importer was doing a smuggling business and paying off the local police and bigwigs with a bag of Dutch gold once a month, a bag of gulden left discreetly at the house of the girlfriend of an official. That Dutch gold intrigued me. For decades Dutch gulden have been the most dependable of the world currencies. Anyway, I befriended the girl, we tipped off the military, and we came out of it with one bag of Dutch gold. Or rather, I did, because I left the girl behind but not the gold, and went to Cairo for schooling, and then to Oxford, a great university in England, and then to South America to be a college professor with a specialty in finance. So you see, Mr. Harsh, one thing leads to another and here we are.”

  Mr. Hassam fell silent and his eyes were shiny with memories.

  Harsh waggled his toes in the sand and scratched his face around the edge of the bandage and wondered what was the pitch. He could not think of anything that could have put Mr. Hassam in a reminiscing mood. They had not been drinking or anything. The fat little slicker is leading up to something, Harsh decided.

  “Yeah, Mr. Hassam, here we are.”

  “Two men perhaps more alike in environmental molding than you at first presumed, eh, Mr. Harsh? Two men with the same greed and the same needs.”

  Harsh watched a wave march up the beach. “So you figure I’m greedy?”

  “Well, are you not?”

  “Sure. I guess so. Who ain’t? When you come right down to it, who ain’t?”

  “No one, I imagine.”

  Harsh dumped sand out of one of his shoes.

  “I don’t mind talking to you, Mr. Hassam. You’re a very interesting talker. But ain’t you afraid of wearing the bush out by beating around it? What I mean, why not come to the point?”

  Mr. Hassam’s eyes were suddenly alert and shiny. “I was coming to the point.”

  “Yeah? How, by way of Detroit and points between? What are you driving at anyway?”

  “Harsh, I was pointing out that we both like money.”

  “Well goddamn it now, I know what you were pointing out. I understand the word money.”

  “Harsh, you had a narrow escape yesterday. With the telephone in the cabana, I mean.”

  “I wouldn’t know what you mean. And if I did, I would have a hell of a time figuring out what it had to do with money. I’m sorry, I don’t follow you, Mr. Hassam.”

  “Harsh, you did not knock that telephone off the table accidentally. What you did, you picked up the telephone to make an outside call. Possibly you planned to reach a confederate to help you crack this nut. You found the telephone was not an outside line, and Brother answered on the switchboard, so you pretended the phone had just been knocked off the table. That was quick thinking, Harsh. A man who was not alert,
a man who did not have natural instincts of wariness, would have hung up the phone. That is what a stupid man would have done. But you did not. You were a wary man.”

  Harsh watched the other intently. “Mr. Hassam, I don’t know what you’re driving at. You’ve got me going.”

  “I am trying to tell you the telephone incident convinced me you are the kind of a man it would be safe to do business with, Harsh.”

  “How was that?”

  “You can think on your feet. I mean thinking on your feet comes naturally to you.”

  “I guess opinions about that might differ.”

  Mr. Hassam gave the neighborhood a precautionary look. “You do not need to call in an outside confederate, Harsh. Not when you have one ready-made who knows the ropes.”

  “I guess you mean you and I might work something together.”

  “Precisely.”

  “We put out heads together, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You help me, I help you. That the idea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Hassam, how do you expect me to help you? I mean, what will I have to do?”

  Mr. Hassam smiled thinly. “That will come. I am sure it will come. Frankly, I had not yet worked out a plan.”

  “Well, you can help me right now. I already got my problem. My problem is fifty thousand dollars in that safe, plus nineteen hundred for my car. That son of a bitching Brother locked the money in the safe and gave me one key and kept the other key himself. My problem is to get my dough out of that safe.”

  “Yes, I know about that.”

  “There by God is one place you can help me right now.”

  Mr. Hassam tilted his head back and watched an airplane that was circling high in the sky above the sea. “I do not have the other key to the safe, you know.” The plane’s wings gave off reflections of light like faint sparks.

  “Well, I know one way to get the key off Brother. Knock the son of a bitch on the head and take it.”

  “Yes. Yes indeed.” Mr. Hassam’s voice was dry. “Then you could pocket the fifty thousand, and off you could go. Right?”