Honey in His Mouth

FIFTEEN

El Presidente had made his move against the Catholics, and it had not worked out as he had hoped. Posturing, shouting, standing on the balcony of the Presidential residence on Avenida del Libertador General San Martin— he had learned the effectiveness of the balcony speech from Mussolini a long time ago—he made his bluff, screaming that he would resign his office if the people wished, if the people felt it would bring peace and prosperity. The expected cries thundered back from the mob below. No, no! Prefero El Presidente! Viva la Señora de la Esperanza! However the crowd had amounted to only about thirty thousand, which was disappointing, since the organizers of the descamisada, the shirtless ones, had worked like dogs and had been able to turn out but little more than half of the fifty thousand demanded of them. Also the wave of hysteria that swept the shirtless ones was neither violent nor long-lived.

The moment he got back from Miami, Mr. Hassam could sense a change in the people. He went to the bank at once. Not officially an officer of the bank, he had however access to its information pipelines, and the conclusion he drew was that the inevitable had come. He heard that two Catholic leaders, two prominent Bishops, had been tossed in jail accused of sex perversion. Mr. Hassam felt the bastard had made a real big mistake there. Rumors were tearing like sky rockets through the town, the main one a report that some of the army leaders had been unable to stomach the rank thing with the Catholic prelates, and had set up a clique among themselves.

Mr. Hassam had as yet found no reliable evidence that El Presidente had resigned. He wondered if the bastard was shacked up somewhere with one of his tarts and doing nothing about the situation, happy to fiddle while Rome burned. Mr. Hassam was fairly sure he had resigned, however, or was resigning—Miss Muirz had said so, and Miss Muirz was the one person El Presidente was likely to confide in.

The telephone rang in Mr. Hassam’s office and he jumped like a gazelle.

“My place. Right away. You took your time getting down here.”

Miss Muirz’s voice.

“On my way. Did my best.” Nervousness made Mr. Hassam just as cryptic as she.

Miss Muirz lived in a four-story house in Calle Corrientes, and this was Mr. Hassam’s first visit to the house. He expected to be impressed and he was; the luxury, the costliness of the furnishings, struck him as fantastic. Also the taste was far worse than he expected, so bad that he wondered if she had gone back to sleeping with El Presidente, although the way the grapevine had it, for two years this had not been the case. The garish display of gold bric-a-brac, tapestries and old masters was exactly the kind of rich foulness that appealed to El Presidente. Or maybe, Mr. Hassam reflected, Miss Muirz was keeping the awful decorative scheme intact as a shrine to her memories, in which case El Presidente must have been a better lover than anyone thought.

Doctor Englaster arrived shortly and was let in by the same unspeaking, dour-faced servant who had admitted Mr. Hassam. Miss Muirz had still not made an appearance. “Good afternoon, Achmed. You got the call also, did you?”

Mr. Hassam did not like to be called Achmed. It was his given name and it was also the name under which he had once been sent to prison. “Is it true, Doctor?”

“I am not sure. Rumors. Rumors everywhere, like buzzing hornets. Have you any facts?”

“I have seen no one who is on the inside.” Mr. Hassam waved a hand at the room they stood in. “I am surprised she has not loaded up a lot of this crap and dumped it in the river. I would if it was me.”

“The place is a bit of a circus ring, all right.” Doctor Englaster had found a cabinet which turned into a bar when one lifted the top. “I see we have potables here. What do you say we place a cushion, liquid form, under the shock I suspect we are in for.”

Before they could mix drinks, Miss Muirz appeared in the doorway. “I was on the telephone.” She poured the liquor for them. “Gentlemen, I offer you a toast.” She raised her glass to the level of her eyes. “A toast to the great and illustrious leader of our nation, the accumulator of certain funds cached abroad, who is on his way out. In other words, I had a talk with El Presidente this morning.”

Doctor Englaster nodded. “How did you catch his attention, disguise yourself as a high-school student?”

Mr. Hassam kept all expression off his face, but he wished he had said that to her, he wished he had had the guts. He did not like her. He did not like her smug way of knowing everything before anyone else knew it, which was her specialty. Also he did not like Doctor Englaster.

Miss Muirz sank lazily onto a chair. “Thank you, Doctor. You make it easier for me to spoil your day. As I have it, he has resigned.”

Mr. Hassam moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “But news like that is not out anywhere.”

“I don’t think he has resigned.” Doctor Englaster made liquor swirl around and around in his glass. “He lacks that much sense. What do you say, Achmed, does he have that much sense left?”

“Good God!” Mr. Hassam was feeling weak. “We do not have Harsh ready to take his place.”

“He has resigned.” Miss Muirz did not blink her eyes. “He told me so himself. This morning.”

“Goddamn!” Doctor Englaster began to look as if someone had shut off his wind. “You mean this is not a joke?”

Mr. Hassam looked at Doctor Englaster in surprise, realizing for the first time that the Doctor had been treating the whole thing as a joke because he actually thought it was one. Why, the overbearing fool, Mr. Hassam thought. How could he be so stupid?

“The clique who ousted him is keeping it quiet until they have full control over the government.” Miss Muirz was almost too calm to suit Mr. Hassam. “El Presidente is in hiding.”

Mr. Hassam put his glass down quickly. “You talked to him?”

“Yes.”

“In person?”

“Yes, this morning. This afternoon again, by telephone.”

“Where is he hiding?”

“I do not know.”

“But if you talked to him in person...”

“That was at the palace, before he resigned. He had his resignation in his hand, carrying it around with him as if it was a monstrous thing. The way he looked at the paper. I felt so sorry for him.”

“But where is he hiding now?”

“I do not know.”

“The situation is serious, anyway.” Mr. Hassam was watching Miss Muirz closely, for he was becoming puzzled by her calmness, or rather her appearance of calmness. He suddenly decided she was not calm at all. She was rigid with tension, that was what she was. She was far more affected than any of them.

Doctor Englaster gestured jerkily. “What is that rat bastard planning to do? Throw us out in the cold?” His right hand was wet with spilled liquor.

Miss Muirz’s eyes were strangely blank. “Doctor, you are spilling your liquor.”

“That dirty double-crossing rat.” Doctor Englaster clenched a fist. “He could not have put off going into exile until we were safely ready to kill the son of a bitch and put Harsh in his shoes.”

Mr. Hassam was watching Miss Muirz at the moment, and he learned something. When Doctor Hassam mentioned murdering El Presidente, there were signs of a suppressed inner convulsion apparent with Miss Muirz. Mr. Hassam was shocked. Good God, she still loves the scoundrel, he thought.

Miss Muirz addressed Doctor Englaster quietly. “Stop howling childlike remarks, Doctor. I called you two gentlemen here to tell you why El Presidente telephoned me. This is the reason. He wants us to take his personal possessions out of the country.”

Mr. Hassam was not deceived by her quiet voice. Inside she was very tense. When it comes time to kill El Presidente, Mr. Hassam reflected, we must arrange it so she is not in the vicinity and better still does not know about it until the slaying is an accomplished fact. He did not trust women with the temperament of Miss Muirz to withstand emotional shock in any predictable fashion.

“What property?” Mr. Hassam showed interest.

“Paintings and his late wife’s jewelry.”

Mr. Hassam nodded, for the oil paintings were very desirable items, several having been purchased from the late Hermann Goering collection at the time the Third Reich was a going concern and in need of El Presidente’s friendship, and bought at a terrific bargain, while the jewelry had been accumulated by El Presidente’s late wife prior to her death, and it too was fabulous for she had felt compelled to outdo all the family jewels in the nation.

Mr. Hassam smiled. “Good. If he wants us to get the personal stuff out for him, it shows he intends to join us later.”

Doctor Englaster groaned. “Goddamn paintings and goddamn jewelry, chicken feed.”

Mr. Hassam glanced at him. “He paid two million for the paintings. She paid five times that for the jewelry. I happen to know the appraisal six months ago was nearly seventeen million. What chicken did you have in mind feeding, Doctor?”

Doctor Englaster belched. Mr. Hassam abruptly realized he was somewhat intoxicated.

“The oil paintings, the jewelry, will they be difficult to assemble?” Mr. Hassam looked inquiringly at Miss Muirz.

“No trouble. Actually it is all in a room in this house right now. El Presidente himself brought it here.”

Mr. Hassam went to the portable bar and began mixing another round of drinks. So that was what had gotten her worked up; the old lover had come running to her in his moment of need, arousing her mother complex or something. He wondered what would be aroused when they actually got ready to assassinate El Presidente. Suddenly he suppressed a shudder.

“I can supply transportation.”

“Very good, Mr. Hassam.”

“Where is El Presidente now?”

“I do not know. I told you that.”

“Oh, yes.” Mr. Hassam doubled the amount of liquor in each glass in the drinks he was making. “He may lie low. That would be the sensible procedure, go into sanctuary until the storm subsides.” He noticed that his own hand was shaking. “They will clamor for his blood, and he will know that.”

“Where would the rat hide?” Doctor Englaster’s voice was fuzzy.

“Well, there are the traditional sanctuaries, the monasteries and churches.” Miss Muirz accepted a drink with a hand which was very pale but also very steady. “However, there is also a Uruguayan gunboat in the harbor and El Presidente may seek sanctuary aboard her. He would be safest there. A mob might storm a church, or soldiers also. But a gunboat is diplomatically the home soil of its own nation, and no mob is going to tackle a gunboat, nor soldiers either.”

“Jesus! That is where he is now, then!” Doctor Englaster jerkily wiped his palms on a handkerchief. “Give me one of those drinks, Hassam. God, I need it. I was half drunk when I came over here, feeling something like this was going to fall on us.”

Mr. Hassam handed him one drink. “I suggest we get busy. I have a standby plane for an emergency, one I never use, and which nobody is aware I own.”

Doctor Englaster spilled some liquor on his chin. “How long do you think we have?”

Miss Muirz replied with the same unalterable calmness that was like an over-stretched still wire. “I doubt El Presidente can leave hiding in under two weeks. Particularly if he is aboard the Uruguayan gunboat, which I expect he is, it will require two weeks to unwind the diplomatic red tape surrounding such a thing.”

Mr. Hassam took a deep breath. “We may be able to get our plan in shape in two weeks.”

“I predict we have two weeks.” Miss Muirz’s breathing was very deep and regular. Too deep and regular, Mr. Hassam felt.

“God!” Doctor Englaster gulped down the last of his drink. “Why couldn’t the son of a bitch have waited a while to resign? He never did a decent thing for anybody in his whole life.”

SIXTEEN

On the morning of the third day after Mr. Hassam had departed in such haste for South America, Walter Harsh was awakened by someone banging on his bedroom door. The sun was not up and the room was in pale darkness. Harsh switched on the light and looked at the door to see if the two chairs he had wedged there were still in place. He had formed a habit of wedging chairs against the door when he retired in order to keep out anyone inclined to visit him while he was asleep, anyone who might be after the wall safe key. The knocking came from the door again. Harsh rolled out of bed, crossed silently to the wall safe, rested his cheek on the wall to get an eye as close to the surface as possible, and squinted to see if the match head was still in place between the oil painting and the wall. It was. The fist hammered the door. Harsh turned. “Who is it? What the hell, it’s the middle of the night!”

“It’s nearly daylight. Rise and shine, boy.” It was Mr. Hassam’s voice.

Harsh removed the chairs and opened the door. “Hiya, Hassam. You sure came back full of bubbles. Trip must have agreed with you.”

There were dark fatigue circles under Mr. Hassam’s eyes.

“You been running into a little trouble, Mr. Hassam?”

“Well, Harsh, we do not really know how serious it is. We cannot tell. But it is trouble, yes.”

“Is there anything I can do to help you out, Mr. Hassam?”

“Yes, there is, Harsh. You see, we do not have as much time as we thought we would have. I was wondering if you would mind helping speed it up?”

“I don’t mind anything reasonable. What did you have in mind?”

“If you will work very hard, Harsh, I can cram the necessary Spanish into you in a few days, I believe. Would you try it with me?”

“Sure, why not? Anything to break the monotony around here. You know it’s kind of dull, with Vera Sue down on me, the servants afraid to talk to me, and me afraid to talk to Brother.”

“I’m sure you can do it, Harsh.”

“Like I say, anything for a change. All I been able to find to do is sit on the beach and watch the airplanes go past overhead and the boats fool around on the ocean.”

Mr. Hassam glanced at his watch. “Let’s go down to breakfast. The morning news will be on the radio in a few minutes. I want you to listen to it with me.”

“Yeah? Something special on the radio?”

“There might be.”

They had breakfast on the dining terrace. It consisted of ham prepared with maple syrup and sausages so highly spiced they made Harsh’s tongue tingle. Mr. Hassam sent the servant for a radio and had it plugged in and placed on the table at his elbow. Mr. Hassam tuned in a station where the weather was on.

Harsh listened to the exaggerated version of the northern weather the Florida station was giving. Sleet, ice, snow, blizzards in New York, blizzards in Buffalo, worst cold wave of the year in Boston, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Two deaths from freezing in Alturas, California.

“Hey, did you hear that, Hassam? In California—”

Mr. Hassam lifted a finger for silence.

The regular newscast had begun. They’d missed the beginning.

“—throughout South America today is one of tight lips and mystery, but there is no doubt of it, the most controversial political figure of the hemisphere has fallen. Known by his people as El Presidente, the dictator is believed to have fled for safety to a Uruguayan gunboat now at anchor in the harbor of the capitol he has ruled with an iron hand—many say a corrupt hand —for two decades. A provisionary government guided by a junta of the military has taken over. Censorship is limiting all news, but the pattern of events is clear. If El Presidente is on the gunboat, as rumor has it, his enemies will surely demand that he be turned over to them for trial. Representatives of the Uruguayan government have so far refused to comment on the matter, but if the history of close relations between the countries’ leaders is a guide, any demand to turn over the man under their protection will be refused. Predictions are that the gunboat will remain in harbor for as much as two weeks while diplomatic discussions are pursued, but sources say El Presidente is as safe within its bulkhead as he would be in a foreign country. As one former government official told us earlier this morning, ‘El Presidente has always been a man who could look after his own welfare.’ ”

Harsh watched Mr. Hassam take in a deep breath and let it out. “Well, Hassam? Is it bad news or good news?”

“If we could be sure he is on that gunboat, it would be just fair news.”

“He is on the gunboat, Mr. Hassam. The man just said he was.”

“He said it was rumored that he was. It does not mean a thing.”

“They sounded pretty certain to me.”

“Well, I do hope you are right.”

“Where do you think he might be, if he ain’t on the gunboat?”

“I wish I knew. Your guess would be as good as mine, Harsh. He is a clever devil, in spite of the mess he is in now. He might be anywhere, Switzerland, Spain, Panama. He might be right here in Florida keeping his eye on us.”

“Yeah? Watching us, huh? Why would he do that?”

“El Presidente has hidden a sizeable fortune in various foreign countries. We did the hiding for him, Harsh. We and El Presidente are the only ones who know where the money is. At a time like this, he might feel it well to watch us.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s what I would do if I was in his shoes, if I had been sucker enough to trust you people in the first place.”

Mr. Hassam smiled without much humor. “We spent years on it, Harsh. Building his confidence in us. Years, during which we never swindled him out of a cent.”

“I figured you had done something like that.”

“The reason I wanted you to hear the broadcast, Harsh, I wanted you to know we have no more than two weeks— if we even have that long.”

“Sure, I see that.”

“In no more than two weeks, you have to look, speak, think, act like El Presidente. You have to be him.”

“I see that, too.”

“Good.”

“There is one thing nobody has said much about.” Harsh cleared his throat. “I take it this El Presidente is not going to just step aside and let me masquerade as him. Okay, what makes him do it? What happens to him, and who makes it happen?”

“We will take care of that, Harsh. No need to worry.”

“I don’t know about that. It gives me the creeps, the way you people treat killing that guy like it was nothing. To say nothing of the way you casually mention a million bucks, just like it was an itch on the end of your nose or something.”

“Don’t bother yourself.” Mr. Hassam patted the air in front of him with both hands. “The way we will handle it, no one will ever know anyone was killed.”

“And I’ll tell you something else gives me the willies, Mr. Hassam. I think you’ve got people mixed up in this you can’t depend on in a squeeze. That Brother, that one is bugs. And Doc Englaster, going around with his nose in the air, I don’t think I would depend on him in a pinch either. You pile murder on that, and it gives me the plain goddamn creeps.”

Mr. Hassam leaned back and his face was wooden. “Cold feet, Harsh?”

“I’m just telling you.”

“Yes, I see.”

“And another goddamn thing is that fifty thousand dollars of mine, Mr. Hassam. I tell you flat, I don’t get that dough, there is going to be hell to pay.”

“You will get it.”

“I want it now.”

Mr. Hassam moved his hands wearily. “Impossible. No point in kidding around about that, Harsh, you get paid when you deliver.”

“In other words, you trust the hell out of me.”

“We trust you just as much as you trust us.”

“Yeah?”

“Isn’t that right?”

“I guess it is.”

The other three conspirators appeared for breakfast. Miss Muirz, Doctor Englaster, and Brother together. Doctor Englaster’s voice was shrill with excitement. “Did you hear the news on the radio, Achmed?” He had been drinking again. “I knew the bastard was on the gunboat. I knew it!”

The news broadcast on the radio had a strong effect on Harsh. It added another subject to the two about which he had been doing most of his thinking: the fifty thousand dollars and Miss Muirz. Now he was for the first time really convinced he was being groomed to be a double for a South American ex-president.

Harsh presumed there were similar news broadcasts of the event taking place throughout the country. On the Florida station, he thought, they had put it right after the weather, so that made it of prime prominence. It was an important piece of news. He was alarmed that it should be so prominent.

If it ever got out he was masquerading as that guy, Harsh thought, there would be a stink.

He tried to weigh some of the effects of such a thing by imagining he was taking the place of the President of the United States, but the idea was so preposterous he could not get any value out of the thought. But there would sure be a mess stirred up.

The thing he ought to do, Harsh decided, was haul ass out of here. It was getting about that time. Fifty thousand dollars or no fifty thousand dollars, he should get long gone from here.

It was a good sensible idea and he knew nothing would come of it because it was physically impossible for him to leave without that money. If he tried to make his legs take him away, he hoped his legs would have sense enough to drop off his body.

Walter Harsh was walking around the grounds trying to think of a way into the wall safe when he heard swishing and cracking and thudding sounds, then saw Miss Muirz. A day or two ago he had noticed there was a smooth panel insert in the wall on the north side of the grounds. The panel was several feet high and more than twenty feet wide, smooth and made of concrete. Miss Muirz had a long curved wicker basket strapped to one hand and was firing a ball at the wall and catching it on the rebound, using the basket. The ball traveled like a rifle bullet, and sounded like one whenever it hit the wall. It was almost too fast for the eye.

Miss Muirz was wearing tennis shoes, shorts, bra. She was trim and very athletic. She was about the best looking thing he had seen in a long time, Harsh thought. She stopped when she saw him.

“Say there, don’t stop on my account.”

“I was just getting a bit of exercise and letting off steam.”

“Don’t stop. I don’t know much about that game, but you must be pretty good. I enjoyed watching you.”

“I’m out of practice, I am afraid.”

“If that was being rusty, you must be something when you got the shine on.”

“Care to try it?” Miss Muirz tossed him a ball. He found it to be near the size of a baseball and hard as a rock. Miss Muirz stood beside him. “The glove on my cesta can be let out a little to fit your hand.”

“Oh, no, thanks. Not me. You know a ball like this could kill a man if he got beaned with it, which would be just my luck.”

“Do not be chicken.”

“Is that what you call the thing, a cesta?”

“Yes.”

“I bet it would be harder to learn to use than a snow-shoe.”

“You are chicken, aren’t you?”

“Nah. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He let her fasten the basket device on his right hand. She smelled faintly of perfume. His shoulder touched hers. She put the ball in the basket and he hauled off and let fly and missed the wall entirely. The ball disappeared. That ball went to hell and gone off into the mangroves, he thought, abashed. He indicated his left arm with a motion of his head. It still hung from its sling. “Bum arm overbalanced me, I guess.”

He watched her from the corner of his eye and saw she was not amused. She was not irritated either. She was just indifferent. He didn’t like that she was indifferent, he realized. He would like to do a little warming up there.

“You tried to overdo it, Mr. Harsh.”

“I guess. There’s more to this than a person would think, I can see that now. How did you get so good at it?”

“Once I was a professional.”

He looked at the ground, pretending his feelings were damaged. “Say, you set me up for a laugh, didn’t you?”

“I just thought you might like to try.”

“Yeah, I bet. You know how you made me feel? Like I had tried to show a fellow how to burn one across home plate, and the fellow turned out to be Dizzy Dean or somebody.”

She looked at him and he thought he detected a hint of something in her eyes, something that smacked of interest. Remember who you look like, he thought. She knows you’re not him, but that doesn’t mean she’s immune to whatever feelings the sight of him might stir up.

She spoke gently. “I am sorry to make you feel bad.”

“Oh, I’ll get over it. But seeing as how you made me feel about two inches tall, I think you ought to do something to raise me back to size. Something like riding into town with me and having dinner this evening.”

She shook her head quickly. “It is not wise for you to leave the estate.”

“Yeah, but you can’t leave me two inches high.”

She smiled. “No, I can hardly do that, can I?”

“We’re on, then?”

She shook her head again. “I don’t say I wouldn’t like it, Mr. Harsh. An evening away from here. From them. But no, we cannot leave the estate without a good reason.”

“Well, I got a good reason. You see, I got nothing to wear, no clothes for this climate, and certainly none for this part you people want me to play. I got to go into town and buy some stuff.”

“We can send someone to buy you clothes.”

“Not so as they’d fit properly.”

“They’d fit well enough.”

“For bumming on the beach maybe. But what about when you want to trot me out as your El Presidente? Did he go around in beachwear? Or suits that didn’t fit him just right?” He saw her nod slightly in agreement. “Anyway I’m damned if I am going to think of myself as a prisoner here.”

“You are not a prisoner, Harsh, but you do look exactly like a man who is being searched for all the world over. Really, it would be best if you stayed out of sight.”

“We could cover up my face. I could wear a scarf, a hat. Plus I’ve still got this bandage on, so you can’t see practically half my face. And I’d stay indoors most of the time, I wouldn’t be walking around on the street. It’d be quick, too—an hour, two tops.”

“I do not know that the others will have confidence that you would be so careful, Mr. Harsh, or so quick. Or, frankly, that you would necessarily come back at all.”

“But what if you went along with me? It would be okay with everybody then, wouldn’t it?”

She put one hand out, laid it against his chest. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Harsh. You let me talk to the others, and I’ll see what they think. Maybe it can be arranged. Maybe. However, if I do get permission to take you into town, you must promise to stay out of sight as much as possible. We would go straight to a men’s clothing store, then straight back, and no dining in public restaurants. If you want dinner with me, we shall have it here.”

“Say, now we’re getting somewhere.”

SEVENTEEN

When Miss Muirz came out of the house for the trip into Palm Beach, she wore a grey dress which made her look tall, a grey hat, plain grey pumps. The only things not grey were her belt and a big handbag, which were shades of brown. They took the limousine. She drove. The machine had a partition between the front seats and the rear section, so they both sat in front.

“Will you open the gate?” Miss Muirz pulled the car to a halt just shy of the metal gate separating the driveway from the main road.

“Glad to, if you give me the key.”

Miss Muirz shook her head. “You don’t need a key. They don’t keep it locked.”

Harsh didn’t say anything to that, just got out and opened it, then closed it after she’d driven through. He got back in the limousine. He would remember about the gate being unlocked, he thought. It would be important if he had to make a break later.

They followed a road that wound south about a mile through sand and mangroves. The sea was quite near to the left. In many spots sand had drifted across the blacktop. Other large estates began to appear near the road just before it swung westward and joined another road coming in from the south. They crossed a causeway, then a drawbridge, and fifteen minutes put them in Palm Beach.

The store where they stopped was expensive looking, a one-story cream-colored building with a simple neon sign saying LEON in script. “This is a very fine men’s shop.” Miss Muirz pulled up at a side street door. “Brother says so, anyway.”

They went inside and a salesman in a mess jacket and cummerbund and black trousers began showing them slacks and the trimmings. When the man first looked at him after Harsh unwound the scarf from the lower part of his face, Harsh was nervous about what his reaction would be. Would there be a look of recognition followed by a hastily made excuse for leaving the room, then the sound of a phone receiver carefully being lifted from its hook? But no—the man showed no sign of recognizing him at all. Not everyone listened to the radio, he supposed. Or maybe the newspapers hadn’t had a chance to put photos out yet.

The sales clerk gestured for them to follow him toward the back of the store. Looking at the clothing on the racks they were passing, Harsh could find no price tags. “Jeez, they’re afraid to let you see the prices in this joint.”

Miss Muirz whispered in his ear. “Don’t worry about it. It will go on the expense account. Anything you want.”

“Somebody got generous, huh?”

“You made a persuasive argument, Harsh. We need you to look the part.”

Well, what the hell, Harsh decided. He had better load up on clothes while the offer stood. Slacks and Bermuda shorts, sport shirts, a couple of tropical-weight suits, a summer tux, all the accessories. Trying the suit jackets on with one arm still in a cast wasn’t easy, but with help from the other two he managed to get them on halfway. He wound up with a pile of merchandise stacked in front of him. He made sure to work in some slacks and a sport coat which needed alterations.

For the alterations he was escorted into the tailoring room in the rear where the dressing booths were. The booth assigned him was near a window that gave a view of the side street where the limousine was parked.

“Hey, buddy, you got a telephone back here?” Harsh winked and jerked his head toward the front of the store where Miss Muirz had remained. “A private phone, if you get what I mean.” The clerk returned the conspirator’s wink and opened a cabinet on the wall between the window and a back door held shut with a hook-and-eye latch. Inside the cabinet there was a phone on a small shelf and a dog-eared Yellow Pages beside it.

Harsh went to the telephone. Before he picked up the instrument, he lighted a cigarette. He was very nervous and did not want it to be noticed. He wished he had been more subtle about getting to the phone, and had left out that remark about privacy. The clerk would remember something like that.

Suddenly Harsh also realized he did not recall the telephone number of the Security Locksmithing Company. He thought he had memorized the number until it would never go out of his mind. Damn! He picked up the directory and thumbed through it one-handed till he found the number, then discovered he was too nervous to trust himself to remember it long enough to dial it. So he wrote it on the front of the phone book in pencil. The window beside the telephone admitted blinding Florida sunshine, and he had to squint as he wrote. There was too damn much sunshine in Florida.

He dialed the number. Then he watched the people coming and going in the street below while the phone rang. He felt conspicuous in front of the big window. He noticed one tourist, a man with an enormously floppy straw hat and sunglasses, at an orange stand across the street, sipping something through a straw. It was hard to tell because of the sunglasses, but it looked like the man was staring this way. The hell with you, you curious bastard, Harsh thought, turning his back.

In his ear, the ringing stopped as the phone finally was answered. A gruff voice spoke. “Security.”

Harsh drew in breath. “Who is this?”

The voice answered wearily. “Goldberg.”

Harsh reminded himself to stay calm and not arouse anybody’s suspicions. “Mr. Goldberg, do you open safes?”

“Yes, that’s our business.”

“I mean are you the man who actually does the work on the safes, because what I want is some technical information.”

“I’m the only one here, mister. I do my own lock-smithing. What did you say your name is?”

Harsh kept his tone casual. “Fry. Edward Fry. Now here’s my problem, Mr. Goldberg. I have a wall safe in my house, see. One of them safes with an inner door that opens with a couple of keys at once. The problem is, I lost one key. The combination to the outer door and one key is all I got, which don’t get me in my safe. I was wondering, could you folks fix me up?”

“You want to open the safe, is that it?”

“Well, if it doesn’t run into a lot of expense. Could you give me an idea what it would cost?” Harsh felt that bringing up cost would keep Goldberg from thinking anything was shady.

“I would need more information about your safe before I could tell you much over the telephone.”

Harsh gave Goldberg the name of the safe company, Monitor Safe Corporation, Boston, Mass., and the number he’d found etched near the bottom of the safe door, which was 3A. Harsh then got out the key Brother had given him and read the tiny numbers stamped onto it, 3301-7-2. “Is that any help to you, Mr. Goldberg?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I think you have a rather simple problem, Mr. Fry. From those numbers we can make you a duplicate key. We won’t need anything else.”

“I don’t need a duplicate of this key I got. It’s the one I lost that I want replaced.”

“That’s what I mean. Notice the last figures in the key number you gave me, the figures seven and two? Well, those are guide figures, and from them, and from information we have in our files, we can duplicate the lost key for you.”

“Say, that sounds all right. But what will it cost me?”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

“Jesus creeping Christ, for twenty-five bucks I could buy a new safe, damn near.”

“You make some inquiries, Mr. Fry, and you will find our figure to be standard. We have our expenses, our bonding, and so on. We have many expenses you would not think a locksmith would have.”

“But Jesus Christ, twenty-five dollars.”

“Well, at the same time the price is only one dollar each for additional copies of the key, because we have our set-up made.”

“Mr. Goldberg, I was expecting maybe a couple of bucks for a key. But if you say twenty-five is reasonable, maybe we better go ahead and you make me the key. I’ll send you the twenty-five and you mail me the key, okay?”

“I am afraid it’s not that simple, Mr. Fry. I couldn’t mail the key.”

“How is that?”

“You will have to personally appear and sign an affidavit. Just a formality, but it’s the law.”

Here was where Goldberg was going to get suspicious if care was not used, Harsh thought. “Oh, well, sure. I didn’t know you had to have an affidavit. I can see reasons for that. I’ll be glad to sign your papers. When could I come around and sign it and get the key?”

“Any time after tomorrow noon, Mr. Fry.”

“After noon tomorrow, that will be fine, Mr. Goldberg. I don’t know exactly when it will be convenient for me to drop around, but you go ahead with the key and I will see you soon.”

Miss Muirz smoked her cigarette in a long holder. She had picked out for Harsh a large checkered cap, which she suggested that he try on, and which he felt made him look as if he was wearing the lid from a milk can. But standing beside him in the full-length mirror’s reflection Miss Muirz was very lovely and elegant looking. So the hell with what the hat looked like.

“I’m sorry it took them so long to fit me, Miss Muirz. I got a thin waist and they had to take in the stuff. God, do I have to say I like this cap?”

She said he did not have the Continental touch with clothes, then set the cap aside and gave him back the hat he’d worn into the store. He pulled it down over his brow while she went and paid the bill. He wondered what the Continental touch was. The bill came to over five hundred dollars. The salesman personally carried all the stuff out to the car in one medium-sized armload, all but the garments left for alterations. A clip joint, Harsh thought, but rather fancy at that. If he ever got the wall safe open, he might make a habit of such toggeries.

It was getting dark, becoming a beautiful evening. Everything glowed like satin from the twilight and the air was not as warm as it had been. The breeze was lazy and filled with the perfume of tropical blooms and the engine of the limousine ran quietly as if half-asleep. Harsh felt fine. “Where do we eat?”

“We do not go to a restaurant, Mr. Harsh. I told you that, and you promised.”

“Hell, I knew you weren’t serious. I knew that was just for the others to hear, and we were going to make an evening of it.”

She shook her head. “You did not know anything of the kind.”

“You are ruining my life, did you know that?”

She drove the big limousine expertly. The car turned south on a boulevard and passed small houses, service stations, drive-ins. The lights of a supermarket made a Christmas-tree-like display ahead.

“Oh my God, let’s be reasonable, Miss Muirz. Let’s at least stop and get a couple steaks at that place ahead. I can cook a fine steak on the beach, if you’re so afraid somebody will see us.”

To his astonishment she shrugged and turned in at the supermarket and parked in the rear where there were no other cars. “You must not get out, Mr. Harsh.” She went inside the supermarket.

Man oh man, Harsh thought, and he leaned back on the seat and felt of the left side of his face and the arm in its sling. Both felt all right except for some itching, which he supposed was a good sign. Man oh man, he was almost afraid to think how well the afternoon was going. The telephone call to the Security Locksmithing Company had come off perfectly. Miss Muirz was showing signs of cooperation. This could turn into one hell of a day, that was what it could do.

Miss Muirz purchased some steaks, romaine, frozen French fries, and a bottle of brandy. She showed him the steaks.

“Say, they make my mouth water.”

“Mine, too.”

Now she drove the limousine at greater speed. The wind, cool and hard as glass pressing against their faces, rushed in the open windows. They crossed the causeway and drawbridge over black water with winking buoy lights on its surface. The strong breathing of the engine, the lime whiteness of the headlights, gave Harsh a feeling he was in a detached and fast-moving world. Miss Muirz turned into the stretch of blacktop road which followed the beach back to the estate. Now there were no houses nearby.

Harsh reached over and turned off the ignition. He seized the wheel and steered the limousine to a stop at the edge of the road. There was an interval of silence after the car halted. Either Miss Muirz or the inside of the limousine smelled faintly of jasmine.

“Mr. Harsh, why did you do that?”

“I guess I was just overcome. You know what? You and I are going to park right here and take those steaks down to the beach and broil them on a driftwood fire. We are going to have us a picnic, that is what we are going to do.”

“I do not think we should.”

“Come on, come on. A fire by the oceanside, broiled steaks, a slug of brandy and thou, as the poet would say.”

“Mr. Harsh, we cannot do that.”

“Look Miss Muirz, you can see I’m easy to get along with. I wanted to eat out, hit a classy restaurant, but you said no, and I went along with what you wanted. I did that because I can see where you folks might not want me to be seen around too much. But this is different. Do you see any crowds around here? It’s a half mile to the nearest house. Who’s to see us?”

She leaned back. Her hands were resting on the steering wheel. “You know something, Mr. Harsh?” She cleared her throat. “You scared me badly when you stopped the car the way you did.”

“How was that?”

“There has been a car tailing us, and I thought it was closing in on us.” She brushed the hair back over her ears. “I thought we were going to have to get out of the car and run away in the darkness to save our lives.”

“Is that so?” Harsh did not believe there had been a car tailing them. “Is that so, now?” Harsh turned and looked back. He did not see any signs of another car. “You can think up a better one, Miss Muirz, can’t you?”

“I am very serious.”

She sounded convincing and Harsh turned around to stare backward a second time. “Don’t see anyone.” He realized she was reaching to turn the key in the ignition. “I thought so.” He put his hand over hers. “Now that was a schoolgirl way to act, Miss Muirz, kidding me along like that. What if you had scared me into having a heart attack?”

“But we are being followed.”

“Let ’em follow, let ’em come!” Harsh made a theatrical gesture. “Bring on the mystery enemy, I am prepared and without fear.”

Miss Muirz jerked her hand from under his. “Listen, you big ape! I would like to broil a steak with you on the beach. I really mean that. But we are being followed.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Harsh took hold of her hands in one of his, and the instant he had hold of them, he knew that they would or they wouldn’t and either way it was going to be exciting. Her hands were like warm excited cats.

“Watch out, Mr. Harsh.”

“That’s what I’m gonna do, baby. That’s what—”

Godamighty, there was a car behind! He lifted his head, looked back. The car, coming without lights, was almost on them. With an outcry from locked wheels, it came to a stop. It was a small convertible two-seater sports car which Harsh had seen at Brother’s estate. Mr. Hassam was driving. Brother stood up in the little car and jumped over the side. He had the shotgun in his hands.

Harsh shoved Miss Muirz, hoping to get her out on the driver’s side of the car, so he could leave by the same route. This would put him on the limousine opposite side to Brother, give him a chance for his life, he felt. But she didn’t move, and when he looked over at her he discovered Miss Muirz was holding a revolver, a big thing, a Magnum such as he had seen state patrolmen wearing. Miss Muirz let the gun rest on her knee. It was as ugly as a black hog. Brother jerked open the car door, the shotgun in his other hand. Harsh turned on the seat and brought up his legs and kicked Brother in the face with both feet. Brother fell like a quarter of beef. Harsh slid out of the car and he was groping for the shotgun when Mr. Hassam touched his shoulder. “What in God’s name did you do that for? Why did you kick him?”

“He was gonna shoot us, the son of a bitch.” Fright made Harsh’s voice quite hoarse.

“No, he thought you were in trouble.” Mr. Hassam sounded disgusted. “We saw your car stop and the lights go out, and we thought you were ambushed.”

“The hell!” Harsh leaned against the limousine weakly. “Why didn’t you say so?” His legs felt double-jointed. “I thought Brother was going to shoot us both. He has been pretty free with that shotgun once before, you know.”

Miss Muirz had gotten out of the limousine. She carried the big revolver lightly. “Hassam, was that you trailing us from town?”

“No. Not from town. We were parked at the road junction and we saw you pass, then we saw another car pass behind you. We decided it could be following you, so we fell in behind.”

“Where did the other car go?”

“It turned off on the beach, apparently.”

“We had better look into the matter of that car.” Miss Muirz sounded calm and deadly.

“I never saw anybody following us from town.” Harsh wiped his forehead.

Miss Muirz gave him a look. “You had something else on your mind.”

She walked back along the road and Mr. Hassam picked up Brother’s shotgun and followed her. Harsh fell in behind. The quick succession of events had shaken him, the way Miss Muirz had produced the big revolver shaking him as much as anything.

They walked some three hundred yards and found a parked car. It was a small sedan, and Mr. Hassam circled it cautiously, his feet noiseless in the sand. “No one here.” He put a hand on the radiator. “Warm.” The shotgun made an audible noise as he cocked it. “Shall we have a look at the beach?”

On the beach they saw several persons, a man and a woman who were sitting by a driftwood fire toasting something, other men fishing in the surf with casting rods.

They watched these people from cover for some time. Mr. Hassam made a disgusted sound. “We are not going to be sure of anything.”

“Maybe it was just some guy goin’ fishin’.” Harsh found his mouth was dry.

Miss Muirz put the big revolver away in her purse. So that was where it had come from, Harsh thought. Mr. Hassam dropped the shotgun in the crook of his arm after uncocking it. “If that bastard was not on the gunboat in the harbor at home, I know who I would suspect it was. But—well, it may have been a fisherman.” He turned and trudged off through the sand toward the limousine and the sports car. Miss Muirz and Harsh followed. The walk was silently thoughtful.

Brother had recovered consciousness. He had climbed into the back of the limousine and was leaning back holding a handkerchief to his mouth. He got out of the car shakily when he heard them coming, and seemed prepared for flight. He recognized them. He gave Harsh a wry look. “You pack a lusty kick, Mr. Harsh.”

Harsh was astonished by the man’s politeness. “I guess I picked the wrong time to let go with it.” Harsh felt almost apologetic.

EIGHTEEN

The sunrises and sunsets around here were some shows, Harsh thought as he stood looking out of his bedroom window the next morning at the purple clouds stacked in front of the sun, great mountains of them with the sun behind like a golden furnace reflecting rich yellow around the edges of the clouds and into the canyons between. The sea was serge blue and each wave bore a sparkling crest as it came in from the horizon. The waves dumped fifty-foot-wide sheets of foam on the sand around the feet of the tiny long-legged birds that ran up and down the beach.

He did some experimental exercises with his left arm and decided it did not feel bad. He could flex the fingers without pain. His eyelids were gummy and he picked at one of them with a fingernail and pulled cautiously at the sleep stuff that was stuck to the eyelashes.

He reviewed last night. He decided that no person or persons unknown had been trailing himself and Miss Muirz. That was baloney. Mr. Hassam and Brother had got their wind up, was all. There had probably been some guy and his gal in the car they had found with the warm radiator, but almost any time of the day or night you could hear people whooping it up on the beaches near the estate.

He wished Mr. Hassam and Brother had not shown up last night, because they had sure queered his plans for Miss Muirz. Why couldn’t the silly bastards stay away when they weren’t wanted, he thought.

He went to the wall near the safe and put a cheek against the plaster and looked behind the oil painting for the match head. It was still in place, so no one had tampered with the safe. He felt like laughing as he wondered if Goldberg was working on that key yet.

Then he thought of something that made him feel sick. Jesus, he was dumb! There last night he had walked off and left Brother alone unconscious, and Brother probably had the other safe key on his person at the time. Jesus, why hadn’t he thought of that, how stupid could he get? What a dumb thing, to go following Miss Muirz and Mr. Hassam off down the beach, taking a chance of getting his head shot off, when he might have stayed behind and filched the key off Brother while he was senseless.

He was disgusted with himself. He went to the portable bar and poured bourbon into a glass and drank it, and the liquor promptly tied his empty stomach in a knot and brought tears to his eyes. A guy as dumb as he had been last night deserved to choke to death, he thought bitterly.

When Harsh had dressed, he went down to breakfast, and found Vera Sue sitting on the dining terrace. When he saw her, it was too late to retreat.

Vera Sue planted her knife and fork on the table with a bang. “Walter, I think you are the biggest stinker that ever lived.”

He was somewhat relieved, having expected her to scream and throw something. “I guess you’re right, Vera Sue.”

“You know what I’m mad about, Walter?”

“Yeah, I guess I know.”

“You robbed me. While I was asleep, you took my money, didn’t you?”

“Well, I guess I must have. Anyway I found some dough in my pocket the next morning, and I didn’t remember where it came from.”

“Walter, I bet you split open your head trying to remember where you got the money. I just bet you did.”

She lit her cigarette with elaborate gestures which led him to suspect she had already taken a drink or two.

“Gosh, baby, I knew where it must have come from. But what could I do? I knew it was the liquor made me do it, you know how it is with me, I get to drinking. I pull some awfully hot ones. It was the damn Benedictine, I guess, I don’t know. Anyway, I still got it all and you can have it back if you want, but I wish you would let me have ten bucks temporarily, so I wouldn’t be flat. Or maybe twenty-five.”

“Damn you, you want to keep it all anyway, don’t you?”

The servant who was serving breakfast asked Harsh what he would have. Harsh told him anything would do.

When the servant left, Vera Sue sighed. “Walter, this is one peach of a place, but it gets me down. The servants, a regular goddamn mansion and all, I should have myself the time of my life. But nobody gives a hoot about me. They hardly speak to me, anybody, including you.”

“Vera Sue, I been afraid to say anything to you. I was afraid you would do exactly what you should do, pick up the first thing handy and whock me good.”

“Is that the only reason you ignored me?”

“Well, ain’t it enough? I been working like a dog anyway, of course. You may have noticed me and Mr. Hassam on the beach a lot. We really been going at it.”

Vera Sue jabbed her cigarette into her cup of coffee. “I noticed you went off with that Miss Muirz yesterday and didn’t get back until after dark.”

“Yes, we made a little business trip.”

“You mean a monkey business trip, don’t you?”

“No, absolutely not, Vera Sue. Straight business. Mr. Hassam and Brother and Doc Englaster and I been working like mad getting plans for the factory that is going to make my photographic film emulsion. Well, right now we got to a point where we need to send some telegrams to outfits who might be interested in building the factory, and I went into town to send the telegrams. Miss Muirz just drove the car.”

Vera Sue frowned. “How come I hear nothing about this photographic factory?”

“Why, it’s a big secret. I told you it was a big secret, didn’t I? Listen, you mustn’t say a word to anybody about it, because they’d have a green hemorrhage if they knew I told you or anyone else.”

The servant brought Harsh’s coffee. He arranged a plate and silverware. Vera Sue was eyeing the bandage on Harsh’s face thoughtfully. The servant departed.

“Walter, what happened to your face?”

“Huh? Oh, that, my face. Well you see I fell and cut my face, but it don’t amount to anything much.”

“I was thinking about that photograph I saw of the fellow who looked a lot like you, Walter, only he had a scar on his face about where that bandage is on yours.”

He laughed loudly at her. “Jesus, you get some tall ideas, don’t you?”

When Mr. Hassam joined them on the dining terrace, he gave Vera Sue a courtly bow and complimented her on how nice she looked. Vera Sue listened, but her rosebud mouth was pouting, and she decided to get even with Harsh. “Walter was just telling me that the photographic emulsion project is coming along fine.”

Harsh promptly kicked her shin under the table, causing her to jump. Mr. Hassam understood perfectly. He looked to Vera Sue seriously. “Well now, Miss Crosby, I would prefer no one discussed that.” He sat down and began to talk about the weather and that was the subject for the rest of breakfast.

“Thanks, pal.” Harsh was walking with Mr. Hassam to the beach cabana to resume Spanish instruction.

“What was she talking about, Mr. Harsh?”

Harsh told about the lie he had fed Vera Sue about the invention of a photographic emulsion. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt anybody. It was nice of you to pick up the cue. You are the one guy around here I feel I can halfway understand, Mr. Hassam. I respect you a lot.”

“I appreciate that, Harsh.” They reached the beach. Mr. Hassam seemed in no hurry to start on the Spanish. He picked up a stick and threw it out into the surf.

“Are you worried about something, Mr. Hassam?”

“Well, just the thing last night.”

“There was nothing to that.”

“Maybe. We can hope so, anyway.”

“Mr. Hassam, the next time you guys get a wild hair up your ass I wish you would do it when I am not making a play for Miss Muirz. You sure popped off some plans I had last night.”

Mr. Hassam grinned faintly. “I did not know we preserved your manhood as well.” He began to poke with another stick at objects which resembled small purplish balloons with roots hanging to them. These were floating in from the sea and the waterline was speckled with them. Mr. Hassam lifted one on the stick and suggested Harsh touch it, which he did, and his fingers tingled as if he had dipped them in a mild acid. Mr. Hassam threw the thing back in the water. “Portuguese Man O’War. Spectacular to look at, but another thing to fondle.” He looked thoughtfully at Harsh. “But you are the kind of man who likes to find out those things for himself. I do not suppose Miss Muirz will object to the explorations.”

“Thanks.”

“But there must be no more trips to town. Too risky.”

“Yeah? I don’t think so.” Harsh shook his head. “You are a nice guy and I don’t want to argue with you, Mr. Hassam, but I am not a prisoner here. I’m not in any chain gang. I tell you one thing for sure, I am going back to town this afternoon and get the rest of my new clothes, which I left at the place to be altered.”

“No.”

“Look, goddamn it, Mr. Hassam, what’s eating you? Are you afraid I’ll throw in with Miss Muirz instead of you? Is that why you don’t want me out of sight with her? Well, you’re wrong, old buddy, you’re wrong, and to prove it, I would rather have you ride into town with me this afternoon than her. How is that?”

Mr. Hassam thought this over. “What time will your garments be ready?”

“About three o’clock.”

“I will ride in with you then.” Mr. Hassam smiled. “I am taking you up on your bluff, you see.”

By three o’clock Harsh had worked out a plan, and although it would take some luck to make the plan click, it was the best thing he could think up, and he felt he would have to chance getting the break. He had most of the details clear in his mind, working them out during the rest periods in the Spanish instruction. The essence of the plan was that he would pick up the wall safe key from Goldberg without Mr. Hassam knowing.

When they arrived at Leon’s, Harsh indicated the side street where Miss Muirz had left the limousine yesterday, and Mr. Hassam agreed it was a good secluded spot for parking. Harsh wanted to smile. So far, okay. The limousine was out of sight of the salesroom when it was parked there, but in plain view from the fitting room window.

The next step, keeping Mr. Hassam from entering the fitting room with him, he arranged nicely by pointing out some fabrics to Mr. Hassam and saying how wonderful the fat man would look in a suit made of the cloth. That was enough for the salesman; he tied into Mr. Hassam, unrolling bolts of cloth for his inspection.

“I’ll try my stuff on, Mr. Hassam, while you’re looking over samples.”

“Yes. Very well.”

That got him back in the fitting room without Mr. Hassam, and he went to the telephone at once. With the phone number penciled on the directory cover, he didn’t even have to take a minute to look it up before dialing the Security Locksmithing Company.

“Hello, Security? Is Goldberg around?”

There was a pause. “Speaking.”

“Edward Fry here, Goldberg. I called yesterday about needing a key. You remember?”

“Oh, yes...Fry. We have your key here waiting for you.” The man’s voice wasn’t gruff this time, Harsh noted. No, when he had twenty-five dollars to collect he was all solicitous and honey-voiced, almost sounded like a different person entirely.

“Well that’s why I’m calling, Goldberg. The way it is, I’ve been tied up all day, and it doesn’t look as though I can get away for quite a while yet. I was wondering, could you deliver the key right away to me here in town, so I wouldn’t have to let go of this hot business prospect I’m working on? I’m trying to put the screw in the guy.”

“I guess I could do that, Mr. Fry, depending on where you are.”

“Do you know Leon’s, the men’s place?”

“Certainly. That’s only about four blocks from here.”

“Oh, that close. That’s fine. In the side street on the north side of Leon’s place you will find a large limousine parked. It’s my car, and I can see it from the window of this place where I’m tied up in conference. Suppose you come over in the next few minutes and bring the key. When you get here, sort of lean on the limousine and I’ll be watching and I’ll come down, get the key and pay you. Oh yes, and sign your paper. Bring your paper along. That way I won’t lose but a minute or two. Can you accommodate me that much, Goldberg?”

“Of course. I will be right over, Mr. Fry.”

Harsh hung up, went to the nearest fitting booth, put on one of the pairs of pants he’d left to be altered, and seizing the fabric of the slacks at the crotch, pulled a bag into the cloth. Then he walked out to show Mr. Hassam they were too full and put up a holler, demanding the slacks be fixed right now while they waited. That was to get him more time, time enough to get the key from Goldberg, and also make sure Mr. Hassam was not going to pop up looking to leave while he was down in the street getting the key.

Back in the fitting rooms, Harsh glued himself to the window. He unlatched the hook-and-eye keeping the back door shut and kept his hand on the doorknob.

Presently a solid-looking man about Harsh’s build wearing a gabardine suit and sport shirt came from the north and stopped walking when he saw the limousine. The man wore dark sunglasses and had on a large straw hat, and Harsh recognized him from the day before: the tourist, the one who’d been watching from the orange stand across the way. Goddamn it, of all the times for him to show up—

The man stopped beside the limousine, looked it over, then walked around to the back and glanced at the license plate. He wrote the license number in a notebook. Then he opened the back door and got into the limousine.

Harsh hurried out the side door and strode to the limousine. Some sort of cop, for sure. The regular sort or maybe a private cop, like the guy from Kansas City. Writing the license number down, the nosy bastard.

Harsh flung the car door open. “What the hell, get out of there, you. This is my car.”

The man was sitting on the long padded bench in the back of the limousine. Though it was dark inside he hadn’t taken off the sunglasses or the hat. He held up a key strung on a piece of twine. “That what you wanted?”

The honeyed voice was familiar to Harsh from the phone and the key looked like the one Brother had given him, the one he was now carrying alongside the money in his pocket. But this guy couldn’t be Goldberg. It was impossible. He’d spoken to Goldberg on the phone yesterday while this guy was at the orange stand, watching through the window.

But—

But he could have found out I called Goldberg, Harsh realized. It wouldn’t have been hard, if the cop was any good at his job. All he’d have needed to do was come into Leon’s sometime after Harsh had left, go back to the fitting rooms, take a look at the phone book, and there was Goldberg’s number penciled right on the cover. Hell, he might have seen me writing it, Harsh thought bitterly. And if he called the number and went over to Goldberg’s shop, forced Goldberg to tell him what the call had been about, waited there for Harsh to call again...

Harsh reached out and took the key. His hand shook.

The cop had a sour breath and he seemed to be panting gently. Something wrong with him, Harsh decided, maybe a little sick or something.

Harsh wondered how far the man would take the masquerade. “Okay...Goldberg. Give me your paper and I’ll give you the money.” Harsh held out twenty-five dollars of Vera Sue’s money which he had counted out and had ready. The man took it and handed back a printed form. Must’ve picked it up from Goldberg, Harsh figured, the same time as he picked up the key. Harsh scribbled Edward T. Fry at the bottom, on a line where there was a penciled X. “Well, Goldberg, I guess that does it. I’ll let you know if the key don’t do the job.”

The man spoke woodenly. “One more thing. May I see your driver’s license?”

“Huh?”

“Your driver’s license, please. Let me see some identification, Fry.”

I bet you’d like to see my identification, you bastard. “Look...Goldberg...I can afford a chauffeur to drive this car, so what the hell would I be doing carrying a driver’s license that I don’t need? I haven’t packed a driver’s license around with me in years.”

“But I need to confirm your identity. Some cards will do. Some business cards, no? Just show me something that says on it the name of Edward T. Fry.”

“Listen, my wallet is upstairs in the office and I am damn well not going to run up there and get it just because you want to see something that doesn’t amount to a damn anyway. The hell with you, mister, you and I are done with our business.”

Harsh started to get out of the car. The man seized him by the shoulders with both hands. The fellow was surprisingly strong. Harsh’s left arm twinged with pain beneath his grip. “We are not done. You will tell me who you are. That face of yours—”

“I’ll tell you just once, friend, take your goddamn hands off me. I don’t care who you are, cop or P.I. or what.”

“You will tell me, all right, but it will be what I want to know. Who are you and what are you plotting to do?”

The use of the word plotting put a coldness into Harsh’s midriff. “I told you to take your hands off me.” Harsh gave the man the edge of his hand the way they had taught him in the army, the edge of the hand delivered hard from a bent elbow against the man’s throat just below the Adam’s apple. The man fell down on the floor between the front and back seats. He lay at Harsh’s feet, not knocked out, but paralyzed with pain, unable to speak, barely able to breathe.

Now what happens? Harsh thought. Will a good kick or two in the gut send him away happy to leave me alone? Harsh looked down at the man squirming on the floor. Suddenly he saw the man tugging at a coat pocket. Oh Jesus, Harsh thought, a gun, a gun in his pocket. Harsh pulled back one foot and stamped on the man’s face, causing something to crush, a jawbone or something. He stomped again on the man’s belly, and this threw air out of the man’s lungs and a spray of blood and spittle across the floor carpeting of the limousine. He’s not so tough, Harsh thought. They used to make cops of harder stuff. It was not going to be difficult to render the man senseless, then drag him into an alley and leave him until Harsh could re-join Mr. Hassam and clear out of the vicinity. It would serve the fellow right to wind up in an alley. What else could he expect for being a nosy bastard?

Harsh realized he was feeling about the man the way he always commenced feeling about someone with whom he was in trouble. The first occasion he’d had such a feeling, and he remembered it very well, was as a kid in a fight with another kid, one of the earliest things he could recall, a fight with a kid eight years old, about his age, back of the outhouse in the country schoolyard near Novelty, Missouri. A fight with a kid who was a teacher’s pet, who had come upon Harsh getting an eyeful at a crack in the girls’ donnicker and yelled he would tell their teacher on him. Harsh could not remember who won the fight, which was rather odd; the only thing he could recall, and he recalled it vividly, was the feeling that came over him of nothing mattering except reducing the opponent to helplessness. It was not winning that was important, it was reducing the opposition to complete nothingness.

This was the feeling he had now. He was stamping the man with both feet simultaneously. The man’s right hand was still in his coat pocket groping about there, and Harsh became sure there was a gun in the pocket when he heard a metallic object strike the footrail. Christ! Harsh fell upon the man and seized the coat-pocketed hand with all his strength. He could feel the gun in the pocket. The cop was trying to shoot him with it. Harsh twisted the gun hand, bending it upward and trying to get the arm twisted against the small of the man’s back. If he could hammerlock the guy, Harsh felt, he could get the gun, and Jesus Christ he had to get the gun. Harsh strained every muscle he had, using his cast for leverage. The gun went off. The noise was a lot, yet not so much either for a gun, muffled because the gun was wadded in the coat cloth and Harsh lying on top of it. A big cough, a jolt against his chest, that was about all. But the cop’s legs shot out stiffly, his whole body gave a heave, then went limp.

The thing Harsh noticed now was a brassy taste in his mouth that came from straining with everything he had. Then there was the smell of the other man’s sour breath, the smell of powder, the sweetish digested smell of stuff that started coming out of the cop’s smashed and bloody mouth. There was a kind of ringing in Harsh’s ears too, and he had to listen through the ringing in order to hear anything. He listened and waited. He waited for someone to come and hoped no one would come, for he knew that what he was lying on was a dead man. And no one came.

He reached into the man’s pocket and took out the gun—a small gun, strangely flat, maybe a .22, it was hard to tell in the darkness. He jammed it in his own jacket pocket. He’d get rid of it later. The bigger problem—the thing that would be much harder to get rid of—lay at his feet.

There was a laprobe folded over a rail on the inside of the door, and he spread this over the cop, relieved that there was enough robe to cover the body.

Mr. Hassam was mildly irked with Harsh. “It took you long enough.”

Harsh turned around slowly before Mr. Hassam, showing off the pants he’d raced to put on the instant he’d gotten back into the store. “They got them altered, finally. How do you like them? I didn’t want to make any more trips to this place. Fit pretty good, huh?”

Mr. Hassam shrugged, for he had grown tired of the efforts of the salesman to sell him something, and the salesman looked discouraged also, so Harsh knew Mr. Hassam had bought nothing. But the salesman was very polite still, as they would always be in such a classy place; he helped them get together the boxes containing Harsh’s clothes, and he offered to carry them to the limousine. “Where is your car, gentlemen?”

“Never mind, I can carry the stuff.”

“But your arm, sir—”

“I said never mind.” Harsh did not want the salesman opening the limousine to put the package in and finding the body in the back seat. “I want to carry them myself.”

“Very well. I hope you find everything satisfactory. If not, we will certainly make it right.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

There were not too many packages this time for Harsh to manage with one arm. The salesman opened the shop door for them. Harsh and Mr. Hassam approached the limousine, and Harsh made his move to keep Mr. Hassam from opening the rear door or even looking in the back.

“Hey, how about me driving this pot back, Mr. Hassam? I bet it will do a hundred and twenty. How about you giving me a chance to try her out on that beach stretch?”

Mr. Hassam hurriedly got behind the wheel. Harsh sighed in relief. He had noted Mr. Hassam was a very cautious driver. Harsh piled boxes on the back seat. Under the laprobe the cop did not make much of a pile. Harsh slammed the back door, got in front with Mr. Hassam. “Okay. Home, James.”

The limousine was hardly moving before Harsh noticed the smell in the car, coming from the back. He hurriedly rolled down his window. Mr. Hassam glanced at him. “You feeling all right, Harsh?”

“Huh? Me, oh sure, I guess twisting around with this busted arm to try on them clothes got me sweating a little is all. Sure, I’m fine.”

At the supermarket where Miss Muirz had turned in last night, Mr. Hassam also stopped. “I have to pick up some groceries, Harsh.”

“Okay. Suppose I stay here in the car. No point in being seen around any more than necessary, is there?”

Mr. Hassam parked in the back about where Miss Muirz had parked the previous night. “This should take only fifteen minutes or so, Harsh.” Mr. Hassam entered the market. Harsh sat very still, thinking over what had happened. He was not sweating or shaking or anything. He wondered if anyone had noticed anything. He hoped not. Who notices a parked car on a city street, he thought, and the answer he gave himself was, nobody, mostly. The gun had not made much of a disturbance, and neither had the cop. Harsh felt pretty good about it as a whole. But he reminded himself he could be sliding over a detail and not know it. He kept thinking.

The printed form that said Edward T. Fry was the legal owner of the safe for which the key had been made, that was still in the cop’s pocket! Or was it? He had sure better find out—Edward T. Fry might be a made-up name, but it was signed in Harsh’s handwriting. He glanced about to make sure no one was in sight, then opened the sliding panel between the front of the car and the rear seat and leaned through to lift the blanket and put his hand in the cop’s pockets. He found the paper. He covered the cop again with the laprobe, drew back into the front seat, struck a match to the paper and waved it about to make it burn rapidly, then fanned the smoke out of the limousine interior.

Now what else? He was very alarmed. He felt he should not have overlooked the printed form, since it had not just his handwriting on it but his fingerprints, too. His fingerprints—Christ, his fingerprints might be on the twenty-five dollars! Did paper even take fingerprints? It did if you inked the fingers, that was for sure; and who was to say that sweat didn’t show up just the same as ink under some special light bulb the police had? He leaned back through the panel opening again and searched the cop’s pockets once more. He found the twenty-five dollars, which he folded and put in his pocket.

And as long as he was at it, he thought, why overlook any spare change the cop might have been packing? He found a large, new-looking folded wallet in the cop’s inside coat pocket and took it. He did not dare take time to look at the contents.

Now, anything more? When Mr. Hassam came back with the groceries, where would he put them? In the back seat? If he did, the moment he opened the door he would see the cop’s body. The thing to do was to get rid of the body, and fast—he might only have a few minutes left. Harsh glanced about the vicinity again and noticed a tall trash can sitting some twenty feet from the limousine. The can looked promising. It was a large one. Harsh slid over into the driver’s seat, started the limousine engine and backed the machine out, sliding it into a new parking spot alongside the trash can.

It should be no trick to put the cop in the trash can, he thought, and he looked once more for anyone who might see him. Two women drove into the lot, parked and went inside the market. Coast clear now, he decided, and he pulled open the back door of the limousine, seized the cop by the legs and dragged the body out until he could get a one-armed grip on it. He only needed to turn around and there was the can. He shoved the lid off the big can with his knee.

The can was full. Level to the top with trash, sweepings, mashed-down cardboard boxes from the supermarket. Harsh shoved the cop’s body back into the limousine, cursing. It was one of the swiftest acts of his life. He wondered if his hair had turned white.

Harsh had the lid to the limousine’s trunk open and raised and was standing by it when Mr. Hassam came out of the supermarket carrying two large paper bags. “Hey, put the groceries in here. I don’t want my new clothes messed up with the bananas. And how about me driving? I got behind the wheel while you were gone and I moved her back and forth a time or two. She is some boat.” Mr. Hassam shook his head and took the driver’s wheel rather hastily. “I have not seen a sample of your driving, but I doubt if it is my style.”

Harsh got into the limousine. He sat there thinking about how he had stood for a moment with a dead cop hugged to his chest and looked at the packed-full trash can. He shuddered violently, and Mr. Hassam glanced at him. “You couldn’t be cold, Harsh? It’s nearly ninety degrees.”

Harsh shook his head. “It’s your damn slowpoke driving. This rod can do a hundred and twenty and still be half-asleep. Why don’t you let me slide in behind the wheel, and I’ll show you how to let her out.”

Mr. Hassam was doing about forty. He cut it down ten.

NINETEEN

When they reached the estate, Harsh had another hard time of it. But by leaping out of the limousine the moment it stopped and getting his own boxes out of the back seat while Mr. Hassam got the sacks of groceries from the trunk, it went all right. At least the body was not found. This can’t last, Harsh thought, and he decided to get his money out of the wall safe at once and take off. He wanted out of here, and fast. Although his luck had been clicking, the trouble with a run of luck was that nobody can tell how long it will hang on, or how soon it will turn the other way with the bottom falling out of everything.

As soon as he was in his room, he locked the door, then ran to the wall safe. His first attempt at the combination was a miss. It must be because he was nervous, he reflected; he had opened the outer door with the combination numerous times before. He wiped the sweat off his hands and tried again, successfully this time. All right, now the keys to the inner door. The key Brother had given him and the key that Goldberg had made and the cop had so helpfully delivered. He had put Goldberg’s key in his pocket, alongside Brother’s. He reached in his pocket for them. His mouth suddenly tasted of brass.

He went though all his pants pockets, slapping, grabbing, finally turning the pockets inside out. Not a thing. Nothing in the way of a key in any pocket. No key. Nothing. Only a knocking that commenced on the door.

Harsh faced the sound of knuckles on the door. “Who’s there? What you want?”

“Hassam. Open up, Harsh.”

I got to let him in, Harsh thought, I got to act like nothing was wrong with anything anywhere. He closed the outer door of the safe and spun the combination, then he walked over and unfastened the door of his room. “I was getting ready to take a bath.”

Mr. Hassam entered bearing a tray holding two glasses and a martini shaker. “You looked as if you needed a drink, so I brought you one.”

“Jesus, yes, I can stand one.”

“I thought you might.” Mr. Hassam poured from the shaker into the glasses. His hand was plump and steady and he filled each glass until the liquid stood fractionally above the edge of the glass. “I saw you were jumpy. A little snort, I said to myself, is what friend Harsh needs. As a matter of fact, I wanted to thank you for being very cooperative on our trip into town.”

Harsh looked at the over-full glass. He hesitated to reach for it, feeling he was too nervous to keep from spilling it. However, when he finally picked up the glass and drank from it, he did not lose a drop. He was encouraged. “Say, that hits the spot, Mr. Hassam.”

“Too dry for you?”

“No. I always say just waving the vermouth cork over the gin makes it right for a Missouri gentleman.” Harsh sat down in an armchair and placed the half-emptied glass on the chair arm. He looked at his outstretched legs and got the odd impression they were encased in a strange pair of slacks of a pattern and color quite unfamiliar.

Now, a little bit at a time, Harsh’s stomach became cold. It was as if he was slowly swallowing ice water. It was coming to him that the slacks he now wore were the ones he’d had re-altered, not the ones he’d worn when he’d gone out to meet the cop. Now he knew where the keys were. When he had gone back into the store after killing the cop, he had taken off his trousers and put on the altered pair to show Mr. Hassam. That was it. The keys were in the slacks he had taken off. And those slacks should be in one of the boxes he had carried home from Leon’s.

He wanted to turn his head, look at the boxes. They were lying on the bed. It was an effort to look casually at the martini glass instead. He knew he could not stay in the same room with the suit boxes for long without betraying himself. He stood up, rubbing his stomach.

“Say, Mr. Hassam, when do you suppose they are going to feed us around here?”

Mr. Hassam put his head back to toss the last drops of martini down his throat. “That’s the other thing I came to tell you.” His eyes held regretfully on the empty martini glass upside down over his mouth. “Tonight Miss Muirz thought a cookout on the beach would be nice.” He lowered the glass. “I gather she feels you were disappointed over not getting to cook a steak on the beach last night. The others are already out there. She asked that we join them now.”

“Now?” Harsh couldn’t help it—he looked at the boxes.

“Yes, now, Harsh. Haven’t you spent enough time today trying on clothes? I thought you said you were hungry.”

Harsh had to force himself to follow Mr. Hassam to the door.

Miss Muirz was building up a fire on the sand, and Doctor Englaster and Brother were scouting firewood. Harsh nudged Mr. Hassam as they approached, figuring it would be best to keep up the appearance that nothing had changed. “Any chance, do you think, of getting some time alone with Miss Muirz? How do I get rid of all the damn chaperones?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something, Harsh. And be my guest, just so you wait until after a talk we are going to have sometime this evening.” Mr. Hassam’s voice was firm.

“A talk?”

Mr. Hassam nodded. “It’s time cards went on the table.”

“Hello, there.” Miss Muirz picked up a stick of driftwood. “This is the kind of firewood I want, firm and dry, short pieces.” She threw that stick down and showed Harsh another stick. “This kind will give off a stink that will make the steaks taste.”

She wore tan duck slacks and yellow Chinese sandals with the straps coming out between crimson toenails, and a yellow sheer blouse which reminded Harsh of a puff of sulphur smoke. Her eyebrows had a high thin arch that made them inquisitive, but not amused. Her hair was drawn tight her to her head so that it did not look like hair but like a different-colored skin, and it was fastened in the back with a jeweled comb large enough to be a peacock tail, emeralds and gold like the large earrings pendant from her ears. Her necklace was also emeralds, very large ones which Harsh did not believe were genuine, although he was wrong. She stood close to Harsh. “I thought you would want a steak cooked on the beach. You were so disappointed last night.”

The tips of Harsh’s ears, the ends of his fingers, felt warm. “I’ll help gather the firewood.”

They searched in the sand for fuel for the fire and Miss Muirz added it to a blaze under the wire grill. One of the servants brought down two baskets containing the steaks and pickles and silverware and bottles of brandy and glasses, and another brought a beach refrigerator containing cocktail shakers full of drinks already mixed. Both servants retired at once to the house.

Miss Muirz prepared the steak a way Harsh had not seen before. She cut it in thick strips and threaded these on iron rods in S curves with various other items—onion, apple, pineapple, assorted other fruits—then put on soy sauce and herbs. Mr. Hassam made the coffee and some of his ingredients were chocolate, butter, lemon rind, orange rind, cinnamon, bay leaves, Jamaican rum, and brandy. He told Harsh it was an old Arabian desert formula which he had learned before he was five years old. Doctor Englaster stood with his hands on his hips, helping little. Brother sat on the beach listening to a portable radio which he kept on his lap, tuning the radio continuously for news broadcasts.

The wind came off the sea with no more strength than baby breath. The waves arrived in vigorous succession, climbing up and up until there was a wall of water nearly as high as a man rushing up the sand, then falling apart and shooting a sheet of water across the sand under a frosting of bubbles. The bubbles slid about on the wet beach like ice skaters, then were left high and dry, and broke almost audibly.

“Psst!” Brother pointed at the radio he was nursing. “Listen! The news!” He turned up the volume. A commentator’s voice came out strongly with deep-throated, resonant tones.

“—demands for his return made by the junta which now controls the government, but these demands are being ignored by the Uruguayans. Unless they accede, El Presidente is safe on the gunboat. But in spite of his advantageous position, the deposed dictator has maintained complete silence. He has made no statement, seen no one, has not appeared publicly. No one we have spoken to in the Uruguayan government will even admit to having seen him, including officials who have made visits to the warship. The only report we have received, and we stress that it is as yet unconfirmed, indicates that the dictator may have sent a courier with a note to a young girlfriend. But there is no concrete proof that El Presidente is on the gunboat. All we know for sure is that the man is in hiding—somewhere. Meanwhile, in the streets of the capitol, a mob today burned thousands of photographs of the former leader and his deceased wife. The tremendous bonfire took place on the Avenida de Libertador General San Martin, the wind carrying the smoke to the harbor even while the shirtless ones trampled the ashes with bare feet. But El Presidente has the last laugh, one commentator noted, since the protestors do not even have shoes while the deposed despot is reputed to have looted millions of dollars worth of government funds and hidden the money abroad.

“Now from London, news of a royal romance...”

Brother shut off the radio.

Miss Muirz looked at Brother irritably. “Why not turn up the volume when the broadcast began? I have friends back home. I would like to know how things are going.”

Brother seemed not to hear her. There was a line of moisture across his upper lip and a tremor in his hands as he put the radio on the sand in front of him. “Is he on the gunboat? Is he? Do we know that?”

Mr. Hassam poured straight gin into a glass and handed it to Brother. “In every news report, they bring out that he is supposed to be on the gunboat, yet has not been seen there. I do not like it either.”

Brother’s teeth made a grinding on the edge of the glass as he drank the gin. He pushed the glass away and lay back on the sand. “I wish he would show up here. I have waited five years for it.”

One of Brother’s hands came up and wandered around on his chest until it found a shirt button. He unfastened the button, brought out a flat automatic pistol. Brother laid the gun down on his chest over his heart. He put his hand over it. His hand covered the gun completely.

“I will use this.” His voice was low and almost sweet. “Is it all right with everyone if I do?”

Doctor Englaster leaned forward. “Is that gun registered here in the States?” Curiosity arched his eyebrows.

“No. No, it is not.” Brother was suddenly watching Harsh. “Mr. Harsh—there something wrong with your eyes, Mr. Harsh?”

“Huh?” Harsh took his eyes off the hand Brother had placed over the gun. He’d been thinking it was about the same size as the one the cop had carried—the one still burning a hole in Harsh’s jacket pocket. Even looked like a similar make. Apparently his run of luck hadn’t ended just yet. “What was that? Nah, there ain’t nothing wrong with my eyes.”

Brother’s hand lifted a few inches, poised motionless above the gun on his chest, then fell back like a tan bird settling on its egg. “Your ears then, perhaps? You heard something that upset you?”

Harsh shrugged. “You trying to pick a fight with me, pal? If it is all right with you, could we wait until after I eat? I fight better on a full stomach.”

“What did you stare at, Harsh?”

“That’s a pretty nice little gun. Is there a law against looking at it?”

“No. No law.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to know where I got this gun, Harsh? It was once his gun—part of his collection. I have had it five years. When I took it, I told him why. I told him I was taking the gun to use later to kill him, and he thought it amusing. Do you suppose the bastard will be amused when I do exactly what I said I would do, shoot him with the gun I took for the purpose five years ago?”

Harsh shrugged. He had seen all he wanted to see of the gun. He leaned back. “Why don’t you knock it off, huh?”

Brother’s eyes fixed upward, staring ecstatically at the stars. “I hope blood comes out of him, I do want to see his blood. But with these small bullets, I do not know if there will be blood.”

“You’ve certainly got a problem there.” Doctor Englaster drank a glass of brandy in its entirety. “A good problem to discuss with our meal. Very appetizing.”

Miss Muirz took one of the rods off the grill, waved it around to cool the meat on it, then handed it to Harsh. Harsh took it, but he was not hungry. He pulled some meat off the rod and ate it, then ate the onion and pineapple.

Miss Muirz watched him. She seemed to have the best composure of any of them. It had a glassy quality. “How does it taste, Mr. Harsh?”

Harsh swallowed the meat in his mouth. “Okay. It does taste a little of the conversation, though.”

Brother put back his head and laughed weirdly. “Good. Very good, Mr. Harsh. Just like a dead body, eh? You have caught the spirit of our little group, Mr. Harsh.”

Doctor Englaster jammed the brandy bottle down in the sand beside him. “Stop it! That’s enough of that talk.”

Brother stood up and poured coffee in a cup. He tasted it. He poured the coffee out on the sand, and gave them a look of contempt. “Oh, you very normal people. I am going swimming.”

“Right after you eat?” Miss Muirz stared at him. “You will get a cramp.”

“I haven’t eaten, dear. Hadn’t you noticed? And I would certainly cramp if I ate anything you cooked.” Brother took off his clothes down to bathing trunks which he was wearing, folding each garment carefully and making a pile on the sand. In the pile between shirt and undershirt he placed the pistol. He walked across the beach into the surf and about thirty feet out took a graceful dive into a wave, beginning to swim lazily.

Doctor Englaster drank more brandy. “He is a little more nasty than usual tonight, isn’t he? I suppose he is beginning to feel all our waiting may not have been in vain, and perhaps that is good for his paranoia.”

They ate in silence.

From time to time Harsh glanced at the small pile Brother’s clothes made on the sand. “I wish he intended to use a bigger gun.” He reached out casually to lift the shirt and expose the small automatic. He inspected it a few moments. Then he took his handkerchief from his coat pocket and used it to keep his fingers from touching the little gun as he picked it up. “I sure wouldn’t want my prints on this thing.” Harsh turned the gun back and forth, looking at it. It really was quite similar, he thought, to what he’d seen of the cop’s in the back of the limousine. Not that he’d gotten that good a look in the heat of the moment, or a chance to give it a closer look since. “Twenty-five calibre, or twenty-two long rifle, one or the other. That shows how much I know about guns.” He knew Mr. Hassam and Miss Muirz were watching him with a motionless poised attention that had come over them when he picked up the gun. “Me, I would want it larger.” He put the gun back, picked up Brother’s shirt and dropped it over the gun, replacing everything the way he had found it, except for the fact that he had swapped the cop’s gun for that of Brother.

Harsh put his own handkerchief back in his pocket, Brother’s gun going with it. Mr. Hassam and Miss Muirz relaxed enough to resume chewing food. They had not noticed, he decided. He had gotten away with it. Mr. Hassam and Miss Muirz would have said something if they had noticed the switch of guns, he was sure.

Harsh removed his coat and spread it over the pile of unused firewood to make a backrest, careful not to let the gun in the pocket clank against the wood. “Grub made me drowsy.” He leaned back.

The two little automatics were remarkably alike. There had been no opportunity for a really close inspection to ascertain whether they were the same make, but they certainly looked similar enough to pass inspection at first glance.

And the important thing was, the one that could implicate him in a murder wasn’t in his pocket anymore. If it wound up implicating Brother instead, well, Harsh thought, like they say, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

The beach fire, down to coals, threw no more light than candles. Harsh wondered if it was enough light for Brother to notice any difference in the guns when he returned. He hoped not. But he could not relax, thinking of the risk.

Presently Brother came swimming in strongly from the ocean and ran to the fire, scattering drops of water. He put on his clothes over his wet body, breathing with deep animal-like regularity while he did so. He tucked the gun inside his shirt without more than a glance. Then he sat down cross-legged by the fire and began to eat ravenously.

Harsh looked at Mr. Hassam. “You said something about a talk.”

“We have had it.” Mr. Hassam sounded tired. “I merely wished to be sure you had grown more comfortable than the last time we spoke about it with the fact that there was eventually to be a murder.”

“Was that all?”

“Yes.”

Harsh stood up and stretched. “Then I’ll see you folks in the morning. Okay?”

Mr. Hassam nodded. “I hope we have not said anything that will keep you from sleeping soundly.”

“Don’t worry about that. You knock off whoever you want to knock off, just so long as I get mine.”

TWENTY

The whereabouts of the two automobiles was important. Harsh settled that point on his way to the house. The underslung sports car and the older station wagon were under the carport at the side of the house. He took a quick look at the driving controls of the sports car. They did not look complicated, he thought, but then Vera Sue wasn’t the experienced driver he was. He began to worry about it.

The limousine was parked before the leaded glass marquee at the front door. He did not look inside, merely noted its position. As best he recalled, it was left there at night.

If anyone had found Goldberg’s body, obviously something would have been mentioned.

The upstairs hallways smelled faintly of flowers, furniture polish. At the end of the hall the windows spilled rectangles of moonlight on dove grey carpet. The sound of a sob arrested him and he stood motionless, listening. Surf whispered distantly on the beach, the coyote sound of distant bathers was audible. Birds quarreled briefly somewhere in the shrubbery.

He opened Vera Sue Crosby’s bedroom door. “For Christ’s sake!” Vera Sue was lying on the bed with an arm over her face. She did not remove the arm when he sat on the edge of the bed. He leaned down, kissed her mouth, getting a slight taste of Benedictine off her lips. “What’s the matter?”

She lifted the arm from her face, made a fist of her hand, and shook the fist angrily. “Stuck-up snobs, dirty bastards.” Her face was puffy and her eye enraged. “Telling me I couldn’t go down on the beach to eat with them.”

“Say, did they do that? I didn’t know they did that.”

“Why don’t you stick up for me, Walter?”

“I have been honey, but I didn’t know about this.”

She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “You stick up for me, Walter? Crap.”

“Honey, I do. I’m always thinking about you, you know that.”

She sniffled moistly. “The way it looks to me, you do plenty of thinking about that Miss Muirz.”

“Vera Sue, you want to know something, I’m scared of that dame.” Harsh kissed her once more. This time she kissed back. “I’m getting scared of the whole bunch of them, if you want the facts.”

“You follow them around like their puppy dog.”

“I been playing them along. I thought I had them suckered into taking up my photographic emulsion idea and putting it over big.”

Vera Sue sat up suddenly. “Walter! What the hell, are you trying to say your plans blew up?”

“Worse than that. Jesus Christ, worse than that.” Harsh looked into the hall and closed the door before he came back to the bed. “You know what I found out tonight? These people are a bunch of crooks, that’s what I found out tonight. And not our sort of crooks either.”

“I ain’t surprised.” She was not tipsy in spite of the Benedictine on her lips. “I ain’t surprised the least bit.”

“Well, I was.”

“Walter, the whole thing was too screwed up to be on the level. Couldn’t you see that?” She peered at him intently. “Walter! My God, Walter, you are scared! I can see it on your face.”

He nodded.

“Why? What have they done, Walter?”

“It’s not what they’ve done, it’s what they’re planning to do. They’re fixing up to murder a guy, put me in his place, and embezzle the guy’s money. Damn right I’m scared. Wouldn’t you be?”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “We got to be careful. They know I’m wise to their plans, and I got a feeling they won’t want me walking out of here alive.”

“Well, by God, I’m getting out. They don’t think I know anything, do they?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t put it past them to knock us both off. They’re desperate characters. They ain’t like Americans.” He held his head in his hands, pretending to think. She was falling right in with his plans. “We got two handicaps, Vera Sue. No money. No transportation.”

“Couldn’t we take the limousine, then abandon it later, Walter?”

“Huh-uh, honey. No good. That little sports car could catch up with the limousine in nothing flat.”

“Well, then what’s wrong with taking the sports job?”

“Can you drive it?”

“I looked it over a few times, and once I sat in it. Yeah, I think I could handle it, Walter. But what the hell, you would be going along, and you could drive.”

“What I was thinking, baby, you could take off by yourself, and I would stay behind and fix the other cars so they wouldn’t run, then take off myself on foot. We could meet later.”

They were quiet. Harsh hoped the two servants were on the main floor in the rear where they usually were this time of the evening. He glanced out the bedroom window and saw Mr. Hassam, Doctor Englaster, and Miss Muirz still beside the beach fire with Brother.

“Walter. About the no money... ?”

“Yeah?”

“I want to show you something.” Vera Sue got off the bed and moved to the door. “Walter, do you know anything about jewelry, whether it’s worth anything or not by looking at it?”

“What are you talking about?”

Vera Sue beckoned. “Come on. That Miss Muirz brought some stuff with her when she came the last time. I been doing a little snooping on my own, Walter. Come on, I want to show you.”

She drew Harsh down the hall and opened the door of Miss Muirz’s bedroom. “In these two suitcases.” Her voiced was husky with excitement. “Goddamn, if they’re real, Walter, we could come out of this with a stake.”

The first suitcase she opened was packed with small objects wrapped in tissue and cotton. She tore away the wrappings, uncovering a necklace, several brooches, a crown-like tiara. Diamonds, emeralds, platinum, the stones all very large. Like owl eyes, Harsh thought.

“Jesus God, Vera Sue.”

She fondled the jewel pieces. “You think they’re real, Walter? The other suitcase is full of the same stuff, too.” Excitement made the muscles ripple in her throat. “Is it costume jewelry, Walter, or the real McCoy?”

“It’s real, baby.”

“How do you know?”

“It figures. It belongs to the guy they’re planning to kill. They already stole it from him, and he hasn’t missed it yet, and won’t ever miss it if they murder him. Yeah, it’s got to be real. Say, if we take it and return it to the owner, we would be in line for a big reward.”

“Reward? Return it?” Vera Sue looked startled. “Oh, well, sure, I see what you mean. Yeah, sure, Walter.” She took a deep breath. “We don’t have to hand it back to the owner right away, though, Walter, do you think?”

“No, of course not. We can keep it and negotiate with the owner, or his insurance company, so we don’t get screwed out of a reward.”

“Walter, how much reward do you suppose we would get?”

“Hell, how do I know? Maybe fifty thousand dollars. I don’t know.”

He saw her eyes turn all whites. He should not have mentioned a sum like that, he thought, remembering the effect fifty thousand dollars had had on him.

“Walter, get a bed sheet.” Two spots of apple red grew on Vera Sue’s cheeks. “We won’t take the suitcases, they’d maybe be missed. We’ll dump the stuff in a sheet.”

He went to the door, listened, went out into the hall and silently on to Vera Sue’s room, where he whipped the orchid sheet off the bed. He stowed it under his arm, ran back to join Vera Sue. She was on her knees beside the suitcase. “I just hope to Jesus this is not costume junk. My God, maybe it’s just a salesman’s sample case of cheap trash.”

“It’s real, I’m betting on that.”

She snatched the sheet from him and snapped it out shoulder height, guiding it to the floor with swaying motions of her upper body like a Bali dance. She dumped everything from both suitcases onto the sheet. Tissue paper, jewelry, cotton, everything. Her breath came and went in spurts past the tips of small white teeth. “I wish to hell we had something to stuff in the suitcases.”

Harsh shook his head. “There’s no time for that. They’re right on the beach. We can’t get much of a start as it is.”

Vera Sue nodded reluctantly. “The first thing this Miss Muirz is going to do when she gets back inside is open the suitcases to gloat over the jewels. I know bitches like her, and I know that’s what she’ll do. And when she does, she’s going to squall like a hill panther, and we had better be gone from here.”

“All right. Let’s go back to my plan. You take the sports car, Vera Sue. I’ll put the other two cars out of commission and knock out the telephone, then take off north. That will split them up.”

“The jewelry better go with me, Walter.”

He stepped to her and without warning swung his fist. It landed on the side of her face. She slid to the floor with one leg folded under her and the other stretched out in front of her.

Harsh leaned over her. “That’s to pay you for the goddamn greedy ideas I can see you’re getting. You listen to me, baby. You double-cross me, you just try it, and what you just got is not even a small sample of what you got coming.”

No more than the tips of small teeth showed between her lips. “It may be you just made a mistake, Walter.”

“Like hell I just made a mistake. You try to cut me out of this deal, and I’ll break your neck. Now listen. Go to a hotel in Miami. Register and wait for me. The way you pick a hotel, you look in the Yellow Pages. You look at the list of hotels and count down five from the first, and go to that one. If you can’t get a room there, you make sure you leave a note for me. Say in the note where you did get a room. Fifth hotel down in the phone book, register or leave me a note. Got it?”

She drew in the leg that was straightened out and put the tips of her fingers on the floor. “You brutal son of a bitch. What do you think I am, stupid? I’m smarter than you, Walter. Least I can read and write better’n a ten-year-old.”

“Okay. Okay, baby.” He seized the bundle made of the knotted sheet and jewelry. “You want to play that way, I can take this stuff myself.”

She jumped to her feet and snatched the bundle. “No, I’ll do it. You just distract their attention while I get away.” Her eyes glowed like angry garnets. “And I’ll settle with you later for slugging me.”

He opened the door and scouted the hall. “Come on.” They walked along the hall and down the stairs. Vera Sue hugged the bundle tightly. The jewelry made rich faint scratching noises inside the sheet as it rubbed together.

Harsh led the way to the front door. When he opened it a current of air came from under the leaded marquee bearing the fragrance of azaleas.

Moonlight was cream-colored on the driveway and black shadows lurked in the shrubbery. Their feet whispered in the cropped grass. The toes of their shoes became shiny wet with dew.

“You are sure you can drive this thing, Vera Sue?” The sports car was a low shape in the moonlight, a pale powerhouse, sleek and opalescent like a pearl. He pushed Vera Sue down alongside the car and crouched himself. “You wait here. Don’t let anybody see you sitting in the car. It will take a few minutes for me to disable the limousine and get that gate open. The gate will be the signal. When you see it open, take off. Cut loose and just keep going to Miami. I’ll handle the rest.”

“What about the station wagon, Walter?”

“I’ll fix it now.” He went over to the station wagon and opened the door and leaned inside. He did nothing but lean inside for a while, then went back to Vera Sue. “I tore the wires loose.”

“Okay. I’ll watch for the gate to open.”

He leaned over her. “A kiss for luck?”

“Yes, Walter, you do deserve something for luck.” She made a small hard fist of her hand and brought it against his nose, making the cartilage squeak like a pup’s rubber mouse. “There, you bully. With my compliments.”

He fell back and cupped his hand over his nose. “Okay. That’s the one shot you get for free, baby. You try to steal this jewelry, I’ll fix you good, Vera Sue. Let me be plain. You pull anything, you’d better sleep in a locked room every night after that, because the day you don’t I’ll find you and you’ll never wake up.”

“You’re a nasty son of a bitch, Walter.”

“You are so right. You just keep that in mind, baby.”

Harsh returned to the house. Instead of going upstairs, he entered the first floor study where there was a telephone. He held the instrument to his ear until he heard the dial tone to make sure it was an outside line, then he dialed the operator and told her he wanted the police. “The Highway Patrol. Emergency. Hurry, please.” There was a pack of cigarettes on the table and he shook one out of the pack and put it in his mouth, but took it out quickly when he heard a female voice on the telephone. That a woman’s voice should answer for the police surprised him. He was briefly confused, but recovered. “Highway Patrol?...Yeah, yeah, well listen. This is a tip-off. Two guys in a limousine. They got a body of a murdered man in the back. Black limousine, traveling south on the beach road right now. It will go west across the causeway, then south on U.S. 1. License plate’s seven-zero-F-eight-zero-one. A murdered body in the back. Get on it.”

“Who has been murdered?”

“He’s dead as hell.”

“Hold it a second.” Harsh could hear the woman relaying the information. “What is your name, please?”

“Never mind my name. You think I’m crazy enough to get mixed up in this?” Harsh dropped the handset on the cradle.

He wondered if, when he hung up at his end, that broke the connection in the dialing apparatus so the call could not be traced. He wished he knew. At the same time he hoped he’d never find out. The time had come to get that money out of the wall safe and haul out of here.

He left the study after a glance from the window assured him that Mr. Hassam, Doctor Englaster, Miss Muirz, and Brother were still on the beach. They were crouching around the portable radio with an attentive air, like setters on point. Listening to another news broadcast, no doubt.

He went to his room and closed the door. He ripped open the box which contained the slacks he had been wearing when he shot the cop and dug his hand into the pocket. He found the wall safe keys. The bits of metal felt strange in his fingers. He stood there a moment with the keys in his hand. He did not feel any immediate reaction to holding them the way he had supposed he would.

He went to the wall safe and swung the oil painting aside and worked the combination the first try. Got it first crack, what do you know, he thought, and he made a little celebratory ceremony of getting the two keys in the locks in the inner door before turning either. The inner door had no handle and the way it opened was by pulling on the keys after they were turned, he imagined. He turned the keys and tugged, bringing the door open. It was exactly level with his eyes. The money was there.

He was looking right at fifty thousand dollars, he thought, but he did not feel any particular elation. He felt very calm, except that his ears seemed to have started ringing. He drew out the money and divided it in two halves and put each half in a pocket, one half in one hip pocket and the other half in the other hip pocket. It was funny how calm he felt, except that ringing in his ears.

Suddenly he bent over so he could clamp the hand protruding from the cast to his left ear and his other hand to his right ear. That stopped the ringing, shut it out. The ringing was not in his ears. It was a bell somewhere in the house. A burglar alarm, he thought, and he looked in the safe and saw a little switch which closed a circuit when the safe’s inner door was opened. A goddamn burglar alarm.

He wheeled and ran out of his room, down the stairs, out of the house into the shrubbery. He tried to be silent in the shrubbery shadows. Back of him the house was huge and silent except for the alarm sounding. A breeze rustled the palm fronds and rubbed the leaves against the glass-crusted wall like insects running.

Harsh ran to the gate. Still unlocked, it swung open silently as he shoved at it.

Now another bell jangled. Louder, nearer. The bastards got everything wired with alarms, he thought, and he lunged into the shadows and began running toward the carport. Breathing hard made his nose hurt. The gate alarm was jangling, while the other had a muffled sound as though it was being swallowed. He brushed a palm tree, hurting his arm.

The sports car engine coughed and moaned and the gears made a noise like screen wire tearing. Its headlights thrust out white funnels of light, and these raced along the driveway pursued by the powerful snarl of the engine. The sports car shot past him and on through the gate. Gravel torn up by the tires and thrown in the air fell back on the driveway, grass, shrubbery.

Harsh reached the house. He saw Doctor Englaster, Brother, Miss Muirz, and Mr. Hassam all running toward him from the beach. Miss Muirz was well in the rear, although she ran easily with a long loping stride. Must’ve gotten a slower start.

Harsh cupped his hands to his mouth. “Hey, somebody! Vera Sue’s beat it!” He ran toward the four coming from the beach. “That was Vera Sue in the sports car. Who the hell told her she could clear out?”

Brother ran toward the limousine. “Come! We must catch her.”

Doctor Englaster piled into the limousine’s passenger seat, next to Brother, who’d pulled the pistol out of his shirt and was gripping it tightly it in one hand.

Harsh gripped Mr. Hassam’s arm. “Hold it!” He kept his voice low. “Don’t go with them, for Christ’s sake.”

For a moment, Mr. Hassam pulled against Harsh’s hand, turning to give Harsh a strange look. Suddenly he grunted in comprehension.

“You two go on!” Mr. Hassam waved at the pair in the limousine. “We’ll follow in the station wagon. We can search more roads with two cars.”

Miss Muirz arrived, and Harsh had the sudden feeling that she’d hung back on purpose, that she could have outrun any of them from the beach if she had wanted to but had held back out of caution. She was moving swiftly now toward the limousine’s rear door as it began pulling away. Moving even more swiftly, Mr. Hassam tripped her. She went down on the grass.

“Go on! Hurry!” Mr. Hassam’s bellow was directed at Brother and Doctor Englaster in the limousine.

The limousine had twin exhaust pipes. Blue smoke coughed out of both of these along with a powerful sound. The tires spun and shoveled gravel backward, and the limousine raced out of view through the gate.

TWENTY-ONE

Harsh watched the limousine vanish and inhaled with relief. Now if the Highway Patrol was on the job, the matter of the cop’s murder would be up to Brother and Doctor Englaster to explain. Brother was carrying the gun with which the cop had been killed and driving the man’s body down the highway at top speed. Even if Doctor Englaster was only mildly tipsy rather than out-and-out drunk, giving him better control of his faculties and his tongue, he wouldn’t have an easy time explaining the situation to the police, Harsh thought.

Miss Muirz, sitting on the grass, looked at Mr. Hassam, who was still eyeing Harsh curiously. “You tripped me.”

“Yes.” Mr. Hassam did not deny it. A thin line of blood was coming from his lower lip where a piece of driveway gravel must have hit it when the limousine was departing.

“Why?” Miss Muirz’s voice was bell clear.

Mr. Hassam started toward the carport. “If we are going to follow, we had better get going.”

Miss Muirz moved swiftly. She was the first one to the station wagon. “I’ll drive.” She started the engine. “Meanwhile, you can answer my question.”

She was a sharp one, Harsh thought, and a fast one when the chips began to fall. She knew something had gone wrong, and she was moving right to the front to find out what it was. Better stay close to this babe, he told himself, or she may manage to gum up the works.

He got into the station wagon and Mr. Hassam slid into the rear seat beside him, fell back with him against the cushion and struggled to get the door closed as the car got underway.

Miss Muirz was through all three forward gears before the station wagon reached the gate. “So. Why.” Her voice was even more calm, more bell-like. “Why did you stop me from going with Brother and Doctor Englaster?”

Mr. Hassam winced as they grazed the gate. “I was afraid to ride with Brother. I thought you would be also, if you had time to stop and think. Do you blame me?”

“You lie at the wrong times, Achmed.” Some distance ahead on the blacktop beach road there was a fast-moving bloom of light with two red taillights embedded in the lower center. “That was not why you tripped me, Achmed.”

The blob of light ahead suddenly skated right and left as the road made an S curve. “That was not why you tripped me, Achmed. Right?”

The ribbon of blood from Mr. Hassam’s lip reached his chin, a drop fell on his hand, and he looked down at it in amazement.

“Well, I had some advice.” He reached for his handkerchief and applied it to his mouth. “It aroused a cooperative feeling toward you, Miss Muirz. I hope I did not act in error.”

“Advice? Indeed?”

“Yes.” Mr. Hassam’s handkerchief muffled his voice somewhat. “It came from Mr. Harsh here. I presume you’d want to know that.”

“What?” Miss Muirz had not understood.

“Mr. Harsh told me to stay out of the limousine, and I included you.” Mr. Hassam lowered the handkerchief.

The station wagon negotiated the S curve and they were thrown to one side and then the other. “What are you pulling on us, Harsh?” Miss Muirz’s voice rang loudly.

“Jesus, slow down, will you!” Harsh had been weighing the quality of Miss Muirz’s driving, and he was sure they would hold their own with the limousine, if not overtake it. “You don’t want to catch that limousine.” If they came up with the limousine as the police stopped it, there might be complications. He shouted over the roar of motor and wind, “Slow down! For Christ’s sake.”

“Why?” Miss Muirz did not turn her head.

“I got a damn good reason.”

Ahead of them the limousine lights suddenly disappeared around a turn. Miss Muirz did not slacken their headlong speed. Harsh held his breath. He felt Miss Muirz would go into the turn wide open. Mr. Hassam thought so too, and he grabbed onto the door handle. “A turn! Watch it!”

Miss Muirz’s voice was too high-pitched, too composed. “I will do the driving.” She braked and went into the turn with all tires shrieking; in a moment they were straightened out, headed for the causeway and bridge.

“Oh, God.” Mr. Hassam had clamped his handkerchief over his forehead.

Harsh saw there was no question they were gaining on the limousine. Desperation made his mouth dry. He took out Brother’s automatic pistol and brandished it over the back of Miss Muirz’s seat. “Slow down, goddamn it, I don’t want to have to shoot anybody.”

Miss Muirz ignored the gun. “At this speed, shoot the driver? You are a fool, but not that big a fool.” She apparently had no concern about the gun.

Mr. Hassam, however, had plenty. His eyes flew wide and he clutched the door handle again. “Harsh! That gun! Where did you get Brother’s gun?”

Miss Muirz was crowding the centerline of the road. “Relax, Achmed. At this speed, he will not shoot anyone.”

“That’s not the point.” Mr. Hassam did not take his eyes off the little automatic. “That can’t be Brother’s gun. He had his gun in his hand when he got in the limousine.” Mr. Hassam’s voice rose. “But it looks exactly like Brother’s gun. How in God’s name, Harsh? What’s going on?”

“I took a gun off a guy who got killed.” Harsh’s voice shook. He was frightened by the insane driving. “I got the guy’s gun out of his pocket, swapped it for Brother’s on the beach.”

They were well out on the dike-like causeway leading to the bridge, with the moon-bathed water of the Indian River rushing past on either side. The limousine lights were still well ahead and beyond the bridge. As yet there was no sign of Vera Sue in the pearl-colored sports car.

“What guy, Harsh?” Hassam’s voice was frantic. “What are you talking about?”

And still Miss Muirz had not slowed down at all.

“You want to know what I’m talking about? There’s a corpse in that limousine. Do you hear me?” Harsh pounded desperately on the back of the driver’s seat. “This guy I killed, his body’s in the back of the limousine. The Highway Patrol has been tipped off to stop the limousine. Now, goddamn it, will you slow down? You want us all in jail?”

The bridge rushed at them like a mouth of steel girders preparing to snap them up. It was an old-fashioned bridge with a tall black mesh of ironwork and a slight rise in the pavement at the entrance. The station wagon took off from this rise with a jerk downward at their bellies, then a long sensation of flying in space, and the shock of landing. The bridge passed them with a coughing sound, spat them out on the other side.

“A body in the limousine?” Mr. Hassam gripped Harsh’s arm. “Man, are you making that up? Is it true?”

“It’s true.”

“Who did you murder, Harsh?”

“I didn’t murder him.” Far ahead Harsh could distinguish a cluster of lights that would be the U.S. 1 intersection. “The guy got killed, sure, but it was an accident. He was a guy who was snooping around the car—a cop, I think. I had this locksmith in town make me a duplicate key for the wall safe, and this cop somehow got wind of it. This afternoon I was supposed to meet the locksmith to get the key while you were looking at suits in Leon’s, but when I went outside, it was the cop waiting in the limousine. He was all bundled up to disguise himself but I recognized him from the day before. And to be honest, I think he recognized me, too—he seemed to know my face, anyway, and seemed sort of shocked to see it. And he was full of questions, like what were we plotting—that was the word he used—and when I wouldn’t answer his questions, he tried to pull his gun on me. Then we scrapped over the gun, and he got shot. I left his body in the limousine and took his gun, the one that killed him, and on the beach I traded it for the one Brother packed. The reason I swapped them, the guns looked a lot alike to me, that’s all. I figured it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Better Brother gets nabbed with the murder weapon than me, right? Then to make sure he did get nabbed, I fixed up the rest, tipped the Highway Patrol to grab the limousine. And that’s why I didn’t want you to get in that car. Not with a dead man in the back.”

Looking over, Harsh saw that Mr. Hassam had a horrified expression on his face. “Harsh, the gun Brother had in his hand just now, when he got into the limousine...it didn’t just look similar, it looked identical. And it’s not a gun you can buy just anywhere. It’s only made custom, for collectors.”

Suddenly the station wagon went nearly out of control. Two wheels left the pavement, and it rocked crazily, bounced off a curb, began to skate from side to side. Mr. Hassam yelled and flung himself forward, reaching over both the driver’s seat and Miss Muirz’s shoulders to seize the steering wheel and straighten them out.

Miss Muirz spoke over the roar of engine and tires. “Thank you, Achmed. Now I can handle it.” Her voice was even more odd than before.

The limousine, traveling very fast into the intersection ahead, now had all four wheels locked with the brakes, and it was veering slowly broadside in a skid. It was not out of control, however, because suddenly it shot south out of the intersection.

Harsh muttered close to Mr. Hassam’s ear. “What’s the matter with Miss Muirz? I thought she was gonna wreck us.”

“Don’t you know who you killed, Harsh?”

“Sure, some cop who was on our tail.”

“No.” Mr. Hassam shook his head heavily. “No, it was El Presidente.”

A Highway Patrol car moved southward out of a service station at the highway intersection, gathering speed, siren going, winking two red spotlights.

Moments later, the station wagon approached the intersection. There were four large gasoline service stations, one at each corner, each adorned with vari-colored neon lighting, and the effect was somewhat like plunging toward a miniature sunrise.

With a stomach-wrenching shock, Miss Muirz threw on the brakes and sent the station wagon into the same kind of skid the limousine had made. The car yawed wildly. Harsh and Mr. Hassam were pitched against the front seat, their breath driven from them. Harsh closed his eyes for the crash...

However the station wagon, with a hard thrust from the engine, recovered in the turn and veered south. Harsh got a glimpse of pale scared faces watching them from the service stations. The police car and the limousine were ahead. And he got, for the first time, a brief glimpse of the pearl-colored sports car farther on.

“Oh, Jesus!” Harsh pushed himself back on the seat. “I thought we were goners.” He tried to lick his lips and found his tongue felt numb. “What was that you said before we hit the corner?”

“You killed El Presidente, Harsh.” Mr. Hassam’s voice was shrill with shock and nervousness.

“Nah, it couldn’t be. I tell you it was a cop, some guy hired to snoop around.”

“No. I am sure. The guns are identical.”

“So what? Factories all make guns of the same model alike.”

“I tell you, these are custom made, the only ones of their type. I’d recognize them anywhere. They were a diplomatic gift to El Presidente years ago. His brother took one, but he retained the other. Both men have always kept them.” Hassam reached out a hand, palm up. “The Uruguayan ambassador had El Presidente’s initials engraved on the underside of the butt. Look for yourself if you won’t hand it over.”

“One of us is nuts.” But Harsh turned the gun in his hand, and with a terrible sinking feeling saw the monogram engraved on the bottom.

“Look!” Miss Muirz’s voice was a bell pealing out horror. “Gunfire!”

The Highway Patrol was traveling very fast. On the right side just under where the spotlight was mounted, muzzle flame from a firearm was winking redly.

Beyond the patrol car, the limousine veered slowly to the left and began riding the highway shoulder; it rode the shoulder a short distance. It had been hit by the gunfire. Suddenly, like a running animal scared off its path, it plunged into a field. The limousine abruptly vaulted into the air, swapping ends as it went, the headlight hurling bursts of brilliance about like lightning flashes. Then the headlights suddenly went out and it was dark in the field.

The Highway Patrol car overran the spot where the limousine had left the road. It went on about two hundred yards before it halted.

The pearl-colored sports car, ignored by everyone, went on and soon its lights were no longer discernible.

TWENTY-TWO

Miss Muirz brought the station wagon to a stop. It stood on the highway just about where the limousine had left to go tumbling into the adjacent field. A soft and fragrant breeze cooled their faces and around them it had become very quiet. The Highway Patrol car, which was backing up, seemed in no hurry. Harsh suppressed an urge to get out of the station wagon. Mr. Hassam was leaning back on the seat with his face upraised and his mouth wide open.

Miss Muirz’s hands moved slowly as if caressing the steering wheel rim while she stared straight ahead at nothing.

“Well, I guess we’re all in one piece.” Harsh cleared his throat. “I never thought we would make it.” He looked at the approaching police car. “You people are crazy to stay parked here, you know that don’t you?”

Mr. Hassam exhaled heavily and held out his hand again to Harsh. “Give me the gun. We must prevent El Presidente’s body from being identified.”

“Are you nuts?” Harsh pushed his hand away. “The cops got their eye on us right now. That’s why they’re backing up so slow.”

The Highway Patrol car swung sharply and came to a stop crosswise on the highway pavement a few yards ahead of the station wagon, blocking the way. There were two officers in the patrol car. One alighted, service revolver in hand, and approached carefully.

“You folks get out and lie on the ground.” The officer sounded very nervous. “Whoever’s in that car that just went off the road is armed. They were shooting at us.” There was the web-like pattern of a bullet hole in the Highway Patrol car windshield.

Harsh spoke quietly. “Okay, officer. We just stopped to see what had happened. We didn’t know what was going on.”

The patrolman stepped toward Harsh, his eyes narrowing. “Do I know you? Your face looks familiar.”

At that moment, the officer who had remained in the patrol car switched on a spotlight. It produced a long white rod of light with which he poked about in the adjacent field until he found the limousine. “Hey, Dick, look!” The wreck lay about sixty yards off the highway.

Everyone stared at the wreck. Harsh felt he would not have recognized the jumble of metal as the limousine had he not known better.

The patrolman standing beside the station wagon called out to the officer in their car. “Nobody in that thing is gonna do any more shooting.” He crossed the highway and went down into the grader ditch. He moved sidewise going down and dug his heels in so he would not slide. He jumped over some water in the bottom of the ditch and went on toward what was left of the limousine. The other officer followed him.

Harsh felt of his pockets, making sure he still had the money from the wall safe. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Before they come back.”

Mr. Hassam shook his head. “No. Not without the body of El Presidente.”

“You’re nuts, Hassam. That body is a cop. Maybe he got hold of El Presidente’s gun somehow, but it couldn’t be El Presidente. You heard the radio, El Presidente is on a gunboat in the harbor down there in South America.”

“A false scent.” Mr. Hassam’s voice was bitter. “He suspected us, and he came here to spy on us. You remember we thought a car was trailing you and Miss Muirz a few nights ago? Well, one was, evidently, and no doubt it was El Presidente.”

“How would he know where to look for you?”

“You think he couldn’t find out where Brother’s estate is? He must have been watching it for days, following us any time we went out.”

“Okay, but why would he jump on me, try to kill me? You four, sure, but me, I’m nobody to him.”

“Nobody is the last thing you were to him, Harsh—and if you’d looked in a mirror lately you’d know why. The first time he saw you he must have thought he was looking in a mirror. Even with that bandage on your face, he’d have immediately known something was up.”

Harsh frowned, then remembered something. “I know how to settle this. I took his wallet. The dead man’s. That’ll tell us who he was.” He felt hurriedly in his pockets. “I ain’t had time to look at it. Here.”

Mr. Hassam seized the billfold. “A passport case.” He ignored some paper currency. “Ah! God!” Mr. Hassam closed his eyes tightly. “It was El Presidente. It is his passport.”

“I don’t believe it!” Harsh seized the case and examined the passport. His hands began to shake. “Christ, let’s clear out of here. They find the body of an ex-president in that car, even a South American one, and there’s going to be a tall stink. What are we waiting on?”

A low mewing sound came from Miss Muirz. It startled Harsh, chilling his nerves, and he looked at her. But Miss Muirz had not moved.

The two Highway Patrolmen reached the wreckage of the limousine. They began shining their flashlight beams about in it.

Mr. Hassam started toward the spot where the limousine had careened off the road. “Come. You and I will get the body now.”

Harsh drew back. “The hell with you, buddy. I want out of here, is all I want.”

Mr. Hassam’s voice was soft, but suddenly very ugly. “Harsh, you have fifty thousand dollars in your pockets. I know, because I heard the alarm begin ringing when you opened the safe. I know that you feel you have a fortune in your pockets. But you listen to me, Harsh, listen closely. If you leave here now, you are running out on a chance to share in real money. El Presidente has nearly sixty-five million dollars on deposit in various institutions. You can impersonate him, and Miss Muirz’s handwriting has already forged his name on all the deposit documents. Can you conceive of the sum sixty-five million? You cannot, can you, Harsh? You really cannot. The piddling sum of fifty thousand made you sick at your stomach.”

One of the Highway Patrolmen got on his knees and threw his flashlight beam into the entrails of the wreck.

Harsh’s mouth had gone dry. “This is the first time anybody said anything to me about a share in sixty-five million.”

“Naturally. Why mention it when you were hysterically happy with fifty thousand?”

The Highway Patrolman put his flashlight on the ground and began to pull at something inside the wreck with his hands.

Mr. Hassam spoke grimly. “If that is El Presidente’s body he is pulling out of there, we are lost.”

“You think if we can keep the body from being identified, we can still grab everything?”

“Why not?”

The patrolman drew his hands out of the wreckage and hurriedly wiped them on the ground.

“All right.” Harsh hardly recognized his own voice. “Let’s get the body.”

Miss Muirz made the odd mewing sound again. As before, there was no indication she had moved.

“Jesus!” Alarmed, Harsh looked back at Miss Muirz, who still hadn’t gotten out of the station wagon. Her face was immobile and expressionless. The features could have been cut in glass. As he looked at her, her hands began to caress the wheel rim slowly, and he realized she had been doing that off and on since they had stopped. “What’s wrong with her, Hassam?”

“Let her alone.” Mr. Hassam leaned close to Miss Muirz. “We are going after the body, Mr. Harsh and I. Do you understand, Miss Muirz?”

A tremor went through her, but the even rhythm with which her hands stroked the steering wheel rim was not altered.

Mr. Hassam turned and crossed the pavement. “Come, Harsh.” He went down the embankment and hesitated at the bottom, frowning at the water in the ditch. “Footprints in the mud. We must be careful of them.” The ditch water was black in the moonlight.

Harsh jerked his head in the direction of the station wagon. “What’s her problem?”

“Shock.” Mr. Hassam prepared to jump the ditch. “El Presidente is dead. She was his mistress for twenty years.”

“Oh.” Harsh had not supposed Miss Muirz to be much more than thirty years of age now.

Mr. Hassam read his thought. “El Presidente always liked them young.” He sprang at the ditch, landing in the mud and water with a splash. He swore, kicked his feet to throw off the loose mud.

They climbed up a slope toward the wrecked limousine. The two patrolmen, intent on what the interior of the wreck held, did not notice their approach at first. One officer said something to his companion and both ran around to the other side of the wreck.

Mr. Hassam’s whisper was firm and unafraid. “I will tell the officers I am a doctor, and the body is alive, and must be rushed to a hospital. Using that excuse, we will make off with it.”

“I hope they fall for it. It’s a good idea.”

At least fifty feet away from the wreck the reek of raw gasoline was pronounced. Harsh stumbled over an object and looked down and saw the object was a wheel with the tire still in place on it, the wheel almost entirely embedded in the soft earth. At closer view, the limousine looked even less like an automobile than it had appeared from the road.

Nearby palm trees with tall silver trunks leaned forward like inquiring sentries.

“Dick, watch it!” One patrolman drew his revolver. “Oh, it’s the people from the station wagon.” He raised his voice irritably. “I thought I told you folks to stay on the road.”

Mr. Hassam strode forward. “I am a doctor. Someone here may need medical care.”

“Well, okay.” There was quite a lot of dark blood on the patrolman’s hands. “There’s three bodies in there, it looks like. But it’s a mess.”

Harsh tried to sound calm. “Doc and I will do what we can.” He peered into the tangle of steel, wishing he had a flashlight.

The reek of gasoline was overpowering. Harsh could hear it still trickling from a hole in the tank. He was appalled. He had not imagined an automobile could be reduced to such a shapeless thing—even D.C. Roebuck’s hadn’t been mangled quite this thoroughly. He thrust his right arm into what had been the rear seat section.

“If anybody’s alive, it’s in front.” The patrolman sounded impatient.

“I saw something move.” Harsh was lying. His groping fingers had encountered cold flesh that was firm to the touch. “Doc!”

Mr. Hassam got down beside him. “The body?” Mr. Hassam’s whisper was flat and without emotion.

“Yes.” Harsh decided he had hold of an arm. He pulled with all his strength. “Damn thing won’t budge.” He began to pant.

Mr. Hassam also seized the body’s arm, and they both tugged with all their might. The body would not move.

The patrolmen were working on the other side of the wreck. They were yanking and kicking at the twisted metal.

Mr. Hassam’s lips were against Harsh’s ear. “It’s wedged. A knife! Have you a knife?”

“No. Why?”

“I want to cut off the head and hands.”

“No, I ain’t got a knife.” Harsh’s stomach did not feel well.

Both the patrolmen abruptly stood erect. They were looking in the direction of the highway. One lifted his voice. “Hey, lady! Lady, you stay back. Don’t come down here.”

Miss Muirz was coming toward them from the station wagon. She had crossed the ditch and she walked jerkily as if propelled by clockwork. She was looking straight ahead as she came. Her trim legs wore their coating of mud nearly to the knees, like boots.

“Go back, lady! Stay away!” The patrolman waved both arms urgently. “This’ll just make you sick. Go back!”

Miss Muirz had both hands clasped together before her breasts, and Harsh suddenly realized she had a revolver in her hands. Mr. Hassam realized this also. The patrolman had not noticed the gun.

“Gotta stop her!” Harsh hurried forward, Mr. Hassam on his heels, and they put themselves between Miss Muirz and the officers before the latter could see the revolver.

Miss Muirz did not seem to have any awareness of Harsh and Mr. Hassam standing in her path. Her progress ended only when she collided with Mr. Hassam, and even then she continued to stare vacantly in the same direction she had been staring as she walked. Mr. Hassam gripped her shoulders and held them.

“Harsh, go back, use a piece of broken window glass, cut off the hands and head.” Mr. Hassam still seemed calm.

“Won’t work. The cops got their eyes on us.” Harsh’s teeth chattered together. “Listen, I got an idea. The whole wreck is soaked with gasoline. I’m gonna pretend to light a cigarette, drop the match. That’ll burn the bodies.”

Miss Muirz’s body was rigidly inclined against Mr. Hassam as if she were still trying to walk.

“All right, Harsh.”

Harsh ran back to the wreck. One of the patrolmen looked up from the wreck. “So you got the woman headed off? Good. This would be a bad thing for her to see.”

“Yeah. She’s okay.”

The beams from the flashlights the patrolmen held were glistening on gasoline wetness throughout the wreckage. Harsh thought the fuel tank must have split wide open when the limousine was somersaulting. “How are you guys making out?”

The patrolman shrugged. “Three of them. All dead, near as we can tell.”

“I’m gonna work on the other side, officer.” Harsh moved around the wreckage, feeling for a cigarette. Then he realized he had no cigarettes. However he had matches, and if the officers did not see him, he could claim he had dropped his cigarette in his excitement when the wreck caught fire. They might or might not believe that, but they’d have no way to prove it wasn’t so.

He found a match and struck it. The flame leaped with unexpected brightness in his face. The patrolmen were not looking. He dropped the burning match in the wreckage quickly.

A blast of flame enveloped him. His clothing was ablaze. He had, he realized with horror, underestimated the explosive violence of gasoline vapor. He stumbled back. He had also forgotten he had been squirming around in the gasoline-drenched wreckage trying to get the body out. Jesus, he thought, I’m burning like a torch.

Mr. Hassam turned his head when the wreckage mushroomed in flame, and he squinted into the enormous mass that was the wreck, then saw a smaller violently moving bundle of flames that he knew must be Harsh. The stupid fool, Mr. Hassam thought. He could see Harsh was clawing and slapping at the flames with his arms, both the arm in a cast and the one that was not. The cast itself was in flames, too, and so was the bandage on Harsh’s face, which fell off in cinders as he watched. Mr. Hassam suddenly felt tired. Everything had been working so perfectly; now it was in such a mess. Everything was black and white like that. With an impersonator to stand in for El Presidente they could have looted the hidden funds; without such an impersonator there would be no chance. A few hours ago Harsh had been in good condition and cooperating; now Harsh had stupidly thrown everything away. The stupid fool, the utterly stupid fool.

Also Mr. Hassam felt concern about Miss Muirz. He could tell she was in deep shock, her contact with reality badly disrupted. He was not really surprised; Miss Muirz’s emotional existence for some twenty years had been tied to the man she had suddenly learned was dead, his body now burning in the wrecked limousine. Mr. Hassam and Doctor Englaster had discussed Miss Muirz’s emotional ties with El Presidente previously; they had determined to insulate her as much as possible from the murder when it was done. But everything had gotten out of hand, thanks to the idiot Harsh. There was really nothing much he could do about it, was there?

It was then that Miss Muirz shot him exactly in the heart.

The two Highway Patrolmen had stumbled backward when the flame spurted and had turned and were running to get clear. They halted at the sound of the shot.

Harsh also heard the shot with which Miss Muirz killed Mr. Hassam. But he thought at first it was something exploding in the flaming wreck. Perhaps the bullets in the gun carried by Brother had started letting go in the heat. In a corner of his mind he wondered whether the heat would damage the gun barrel so the ballistics men could not verify that it had fired the bullet that had killed the body in the back seat.

He was rather proud of himself, being able to think out the matter of heat damage to Brother’s gun while flames were seething in his clothes. Didn’t they say a man always lost his head when he caught fire? Well, he wasn’t losing his.

The flames were not yet actually charring his clothing. They still fed on the gasoline vapor that came from the cloth, blue devils darting here and there. The heat, though, was almost unbearable. He kept beating at the flames, and he tried to brush off individual tongues of flame, but without much success.

He turned in the direction the sound of the gunshot had come from. He saw Miss Muirz, the revolver in her hand. She’d had a gun in that purse of hers, he remembered. She was coming toward him. She stumbled over something on the ground, but did not fall. She did not look down to see what had impeded her progress, although it was Mr. Hassam. In a moment flame and noise came Harsh’s direction from Miss Muirz’s gun. She had not aimed the gun, merely pulled the trigger. But the bullet barely missed him; he could feel it fan the side of his face. She held her gun out before her with both hands, still not aiming, but pointing more accurately. From the muzzle, flame, noise. Harsh stumbled back, not hit, dodging wildly. Half mad with pain he went for the automatic in his pocket. Miss Muirz came on. She measured her steps like a farmer pacing a field. He got the automatic out of his pocket. He shot her. Luck was with him. He got her almost exactly between the eyes, almost as precisely as a moment before she had placed her own bullet in Mr. Hassam’s heart.

Both of the patrolmen had by now circled the burning limousine and they rushed Harsh. One knocked Harsh down with a fist. The other kicked the little gun away. They tore off Harsh’s burning clothing in strips, cooling their scorched hands by slapping them against their thighs. They got the charred shirt off. Each officer seized a trouser leg. They pulled. Harsh was dragged a short distance, then the trousers came off. The moment the trousers were off, they blazed up furiously. The officer tossed them aside.

“Jesus Christ, save the pants!” Harsh struggled to reach the burning trousers. “My money’s in them pants, Jesus Christ!”

An officer kicked Harsh backwards and he fell to the ground. The officer put his foot on Harsh’s throat and leaned on it with most of his weight. He had his own gun drawn now and he aimed it down at Harsh. “You’re under arrest.”

TWENTY-THREE

After Harsh had been in the hospital nine days, he was removed from the hospital and placed in jail. The inquest had been held while he was in the hospital, and they had taken him somewhere on a litter for his share of that, but he did not remember much about it. Just some stuff about five people dead, an automobile crash and some shooting. Then some words he did not know, such as extradition. Harsh lay on the litter swathed in burn dressings. His mind was relaxed from the dope they had shot into him to ease the pain of the burns. He had not cared much what happened.

When he had been in jail three days, Vera Sue Crosby paid him a visit. With Vera Sue was a solidly built man with a heavy face and foxy eyes. He sat near Vera Sue back of the glass window in the interview room. There was no opening in the glass panel between Harsh and Vera Sue, only a mechanical diaphragm that passed their voices back and forth.

“Who’s this bird?” Harsh did not like the looks of the heavy-bodied man.

“This is Mr. Arnick, my attorney.” Vera Sue was wearing new clothes, a crisp grey tropical suit and she had a fresh permanent.

Harsh swallowed nervously. “Is he going to represent me, too?”

Lawyer Arnick shook his head. “I think not. Miss Crosby happens to be my client, and your interests and her interests are not exactly identical.”

“What does that mean, shyster?”

Vera Sue leaned toward the diaphragm in the glass panel which separated them. “You listen to me. I waited in that hotel in Miami. But you didn’t show up. Then I heard about Mr. Arnick being a good attorney from a fellow I had a few drinks with, and I went to see Mr. Arnick. We had a nice talk and I hired him.”

Harsh looked at her bitterly. “You split the jewelry with him to pay him for keeping you out of it. That right?”

Lawyer Arnick cleared his throat. “There was no jewelry.” His eyes glittered over a faint smile. “We never heard of any jewelry.”

Vera Sue nodded. “That’s right.”

“God almighty.” Harsh felt the life draining out of him. “You can’t do that, you got to help me, Vera Sue.”

She smoothed the new tropical suit with her hands. “From what I hear tell, nobody can help you. Not where you’re going.

“What do you mean?”

Arnick leaned forward. “Surely you must have heard. They’re going to extradite you to South America to stand trial in your own country.”

“My own—”

Arnick smiled smugly. “For crimes against the state and against your people.”

“My people! What are you talking about? Who do you think I am?” The answer dawned on him as he shouted the question. “No. No—I’m Walter Harsh. I’m Walter Harsh! Vera Sue, tell him. Tell him who I am!”

“Everyone knows who you are,” Vera Sue said. “It’s been on all the television stations the past two weeks. I don’t see how you could expect anyone to believe you’re someone else—your Excellency.” There was the faintest hint of a smile on her lips before she spoke the last two words, but she erased it as quickly as it had come.

“No, you can’t do this, Vera Sue. El Presidente’s body, it was in the car—”

Arnick cut him off. “Maybe you should ask them to bring you the newspapers for the last few days. Then you would know that all the bodies in the car were burned beyond recovery or recognition. Your own burns were quite serious, too, I understand—but not to a comparable degree, and they didn’t prevent your identity from being conclusively established. Your facial scar, fingerprint records, dental records, the passport you were carrying, the monogrammed gun. Even down to your blood type, O-negative—not exactly common, you know.”

Harsh felt his throat closing up.

“Don’t do this, Vera Sue. Don’t let them do this. You know who I am.”

She stood up. Her voice when she spoke was low and vicious. “Sure, I know who you are. You’re a nasty son of a bitch. How could I forget that?”

Harsh watched Lawyer Arnick take her arm and they walked away together. He was sure he would never see her again.

The cell window through which the intense South American sun poured in had four bars on it. But the figure four did not fit in with anything else. Harsh lay on the bunk and tried to associate the figure four with something, with anything, but without success. The digit did not fit in with anything, it did not fit in with fifty thousand dollars which had burned, nor with sixty-five million, nor did it fit with seven, the number of people involved, Mr. Hassam and Doctor Englaster and Brother and Miss Muirz and El Presidente and Vera Sue and himself. Ten persons if you counted D. C. Roebuck and the two house servants at Brother’s place, or twelve if you included the two Highway Patrolmen who had arrested him, thirteen if you threw in the judge down here who had sentenced him to hang. Thirteen was a hot number. He guessed he would have to throw in Attorney Arnick and make it fourteen. There, he finally had something with four in it.

One thing for damn sure, he thought, Mr. Hassam had been wrong. Mr. Hassam had told him that he could never grasp how much sixty-five millions was, could not grasp such magnitude. Well, Hassam had been dead wrong, because Harsh could figure out how much sixty-five millions was. He could do that, all right. If he paid out one dollar for each breath he took, that would be paying out about fifteen dollars a minute, wouldn’t it? He counted his own breathing through what he estimated to be one minute. He timed the minute by counting chimpanzees the way he did in the photographic darkroom, “One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee,” and so on. One minute, fifteen breaths. All the minutes in one hour were sixty, which times fifteen was nine hundred dollars an hour. That times twenty-four for one day, that was how much? Nine hundred times twenty-four was twenty-one thousand and six hundred dollars. That was one day. In dollars. All the days in the year were three hundred and sixty-five if you didn’t screw around with leap year, and this times twenty-one thousand and six hundred dollars per day was still only, what, seven or eight million? He lay back. His breath came and went with such dryness it parched his lips. So sixty-five million was all the breaths you could take in five, six, seven, eight years, with change left over. It was a lot of honey for no one to taste, ever. That was sure.

If he had it, maybe he could use it to buy those eight years. But he didn’t have it, not a penny of it, and he didn’t have any eight years either. Or eight months or eight weeks or eight days. Outside the cell window he heard the stamping feet of the descamisada, the shirtless ones. He remembered enough of the Spanish Mr. Hassam had taught him to know they were calling for his blood.

Eight minutes—how much would that cost? He counted desperately on his fingers. Hundred twenty dollars. It would take four or five sales calls with his camera to earn that. His camera. He wondered what had become of it.

Eight seconds? Could he even buy eight seconds more of life? It would only cost a dime or so. One thin dime. Surely he had that much on him somewhere!

He was still feeling of his pockets when they came to his cell to collect him.