Ruby Red Death

Eight

It was still dark when Carter checked out with his small flight bag and took a taxi to the Yum-Yum Club. In the rear of the club he found the motorbike, a big BMW.

One light rap on the door of the club and it was opened by the bulky Chinese. Wordlessly, Carter was handed a set of leathers and a helmet. He changed right there in the tiny hallway and stuffed his clothes in the bag. As he was leaving, he traded the bag for a long, leather-covered case. This he strapped to the BMW and kicked it into life.

Minutes later he was in the western part of the city fighting a slight drizzle and heavy fog. The fog, he thought, would be both good and bad. Hopefully it wouldn’t deter Huzel from talking to his Momma.

In Ijmuiden, he located the long-term parking lot and fed coins into the meter until he had enough slips for a week’s parking. Back on the bike to the cemetery and church.

Everything was quiet and there was no light on in the caretaker’s cottage. He went directly to the spot he had picked out, and hid the case containing the air rifle and the case among the stones. Then he jogged around the perimeter to the two rear entrances. As quietly as possible, he closed the gates and hung the No Admittance signs on both of them.

The fog was still heavy but the gray light of dawn was valiantly trying to penetrate it as he rode back to the village of Ijmuiden. He located a small roadside café and sat at a front table by the window and had breakfast.

He was on a second cup of coffee when he spotted the ambulance go past. His watch said a little after nine o’clock.

He paid for the breakfast and rode the bike back to the cemetery. At the main entrance he saw no sign of the ambulance, but Mortimer, in a pair of blue coveralls and a heavy jacket, was moving litter around with a rake.

Carter rode on through the cemetery to the caretaker’s cottage and honked twice. The door opened and Lorena’s head popped out.

“Done,” she murmured.

Carter nodded and wheeled the BMW around to a lean-to in the rear of the cottage. He killed the engine and jogged through the stones to his place of concealment.

When he had the air rifle out of its case and assembled, he lifted one of the two darts that Mortimer had supplied and pulled off the plastic cap over the point. Then he crimped the fine plastic flanges and slid it into the firing chamber. Next came the CO₂ cartridge. When its head was pierced, he heard the slight whoosh of air release that would fire the dart. Carefully, he removed the second dart’s tip and set it on the gravestone beside him. With the scope sight and the short range, he was sure he wouldn’t need it, but it was there just in case.

Then, resisting the desire for a cigarette, Carter wormed his way down between the stones to wait.

The moment he heard the car the Killmaster became instantly alert. Through the stones he could see the Opal moving through the fog. It turned into the gate, passing Mortimer without slowing. About thirty feet from the tomb the Opal stopped and Huzel got out.

He was a handsome devil, Carter thought, if you liked them mean. He would be a great success with ladies who preferred their sex swift and brutal.

Huzel paused beside the car, his eyes taking in every tree and stone. He took a cigarette from a black case and lit it.

The man, Carter thought, was like an animal, always wary, alert, sniffing the air for danger.

At last Huzel was apparently satisfied. He moved forward.

Carter’s eyes drifted from Huzel to Mortimer. He had abandoned his rake and was closing the gate. He hung the No Admittance sign and was gone. With the fog it was doubtful that they would have any more visitors, but the closed gate would provide some insurance.

Huzel was almost to the tomb now, a ring of keys in his hand. When he reached the iron gate of the tomb’s door, he stopped and slipped one of the keys into the lock.

Carter put the man’s neck in the cross hairs of the sight. He wasn’t moving. It was the simplest shot in the world.

He squeezed the trigger.

The little dart entered the side of Huzel’s neck and hung there like an enlarged bee sting.

The carotid is the principal artery of the neck; it is as thick as a garden hose. As Huzel felt the sting he jerked his head back. His hand moved toward the holster, and his heart pumped with dispassionate efficiency. Arteries carry blood from the heart to the tissues. This one went straight — that critically short distance — to his brain.

The Killmaster was reaching for the second dart, when Huzel pitched forward. He had barely hit the ground when Carter whistled.

Everything had been coordinated.

Lorena sprinted from the caretaker’s cottage. She opened the front gate just as Mortimer, in the ambulance, drove out of the trees. Lorena didn’t pause but ran right to the back gates and opened them.

Carter methodically went through Huzel’s pockets, transferring everything he found to his own.

“One shot?” Mortimer asked.

“That’s all it took,” Carter grunted.

Together they hefted Huzel to the rear. When the doors were open they sat him up and undressed him. When he was dressed again in a hospital gown and a heavy terry-cloth robe, he was strapped onto the gurney and covered.

Lorena appeared at the rear of the ambulance. “Caretaker’s still out, no cars on the road.”

Carter produced the two rings of keys he had taken from Huzel’s pockets. The larger ring held the keys to his flats and house and probably his shop. Keys on the smaller ring belonged to the fleet of cars he used.

Carter passed the car-ring to Lorena along with the parking lot stamps, and then turned to Mortimer. The man had already peeled off the windbreaker, flannel shirt, and coveralls. Beneath them he wore the white smock and pants of a driver or orderly.

“Drive to the café behind the church and have coffee,” Carter instructed. “Lorena, as soon as you leave Huzel’s car in the parking lot, head for the ambulance.”

They both nodded.

“Now,” Carter said, “where do we rendezvous?”

“At Weesp, in the parking lot of the school,” Lorena answered.

“Good enough,” Carter said. “Let’s move!”

Mortimer headed back toward the village first. Two minutes later, Lorena followed in Huzel’s car. Two minutes after that, Carter fired up the motorcycle and headed for Amsterdam.

Carter felt a clammy sweat roll down his back as he parked the bike and slung the courier’s bag over his shoulder. It was just past noon. He had already gone through Huzel’s country house and one of the two flats in the city. He hadn’t found what he was looking for in either place.

Did Huzel keep the records of his foreign customers in his head? Did he memorize every address, contact method, the telephone number of everyone he bought and sold from?

Carter hoped to strike pay dirt here, in the second flat.

The houses were all in a row, exactly alike, stretching from one canal to another. He located the number and entered the hall. Cooking smells assailed his nostrils and somewhere a radio played jazz.

He took the steps to the third floor two at a time and attacked the lock. The fifth key on the ring opened the door.

The drapes were closed. Carter found the light switch by feel and flipped it. He was in a rectangular room with windows on both sides. Scatter rugs partially covered the bare wood floors.

He lifted each of the rugs. No safe.

There was a cluttered desk in one corner. It took him five minutes to go through the papers on top and rifle the drawers. He found nothing that would help him down the road.

The bedroom was nearly square in shape, with an alcove that held a stall shower but no tub. A double bed with no footboard stood against one wall, a mahogany highboy against another. A small mirrored vanity occupied part of the third wall. Above the vanity mirror was another, square mirror, slightly recessed into the wall.

Carter went through every drawer and lifted the paintings on the walls.

Nothing.

The kitchen, which was entered through the second living room door, was just a kitchen, rather long but narrow, and had no outside door. The sink was yellow-stained and chipped, with an open space and a garbage pail below, and cabinets above. The stove was a three-burner with a small removable oven; the refrigerator was ancient-looking and noisy.

Back in the living room office, Carter lit a cigarette and made his mind work. It was possible that Huzel kept his illegal records in the safe of his legal shop in the old town.

Possible, Carter thought, but not probable.

If the man was so wary about everything else, he would be especially paranoid about anything on paper that might send him to jail.

And the jewels.

The illegal jewels he was fencing had to be somewhere. Lorena had said that Huzel had made five pickups in the time she had followed him. He would not have had the time to resell those pickups.

Carter wandered back into the bedroom.

Then it hit him. The mirrored vanity. Why a second mirror, and why was it recessed into the wall?

He used a nail file from the vanity on the crack around the mirror. Near the bottom right-hand corner, he hit an obstacle. He heard a click as he pushed harder, and the mirror swung outward.

Carefully, he inspected the safe.

He found the maker’s name, and closed his eyes for a moment while he dusted off the files of his memory. He recalled the system and it took his trained fingertips fifteen minutes to find the combination.

The opening wasn’t large but the safe was deep and the whole of the back was filled with neat packets of currency bound together with paper strips. And if the new one-hundred-dollar bill on the top of the brick Carter lifted out was an indicator, he estimated that, give or take a few grand, he was looking at fifty thousand dollars.

That figured, Carter mused. Huzel was in a cash business.

Underneath the bills, he found a tray of diamonds and two velvet bags of miscellaneous jewels.

Now the safe was empty and he had still struck out.

Then he remembered the manufacturer and a particular added attraction to this model.

Five minutes later he located the pull release that opened a panel in the back of the safe. In the indentation behind the panel was a flat logbook. One glance and Carter knew he had what he wanted. It was all in coded symbols, but easy to decipher if the person doing it knew Huzel’s business.

The jewels and cash he put in a pillowcase. It and the book went into his courier bag. He closed the safe, made sure everything was in place, and moved quickly back to the street.

He rode to the Yum-Yum Club and entered through the rear door. The beautiful Oriental girl was in her office on the second floor. Carter dropped the pillowcase on the desk.

“Put this away for Mr. Potts. He’ll be back in a week or so.”

Back on the bike, he wound his way through late-after-noon traffic to the southern edge of the city. Fifteen minutes later he was coasting through the small village of Weesp. He was just past the old school when the ambulance pulled from the parking lot and fell in behind him.

A mile outside the village he turned left into a narrow tractor lane. Two hundred yards in front of him he could see the Amstel River.

He speeded up and pulled his feet up until he was standing on the seat in a semi-crouch.

Ten feet from the riverbank he jumped straight into the air.

The bike sailed out over the river for several feet before it fell into the water and sank out of sight.

Carter came to earth and rolled to his feet. Lorena had the rear door of the ambulance open. He piled in and at once began peeling off the leathers.

“You found it?” she asked.

Carter nodded. “Yeah. Mortimer?”

“Eh?”

“I’ve just made you a moderately wealthy man.”

“Music to me ears,” the man chuckled, and moved the van back toward the highway.

The road switchbacked for about eight miles and then the lights of the frontier posts gleamed through the fog. A long straight street led directly to the Dutch side. Potts dimmed his headlights and joined the line of vehicles waiting to be processed.

The Dutch border guard barely glanced at Potts and waved them through perfunctorily.

It was a different story a hundred yards farther on at the German gate.

A stern-looking border guard poked his head through the window. “Papers.”

Potts handed over the medical papers and their passports. The guard carried the documents to a lighted window where a colleague sat.

“Don’t sweat it if they check us,” Mortimer murmured. “Dope flows like the river Nile the other way into the Netherlands and Amsterdam, but from Amsterdam into Germany it’s another story.”

He was right. A minute later they were bundled out of the ambulance and it was searched. They and the medical bags were searched.

“You are the doctor?”

“Yes,” Carter replied.

The guard gestured toward Huzel’s blanket-covered form on the gurney. “What is wrong with him?”

“A severe case of hydroxia pormangalia.”

“Eh?” the man said, taking a slight step backward. “Is that a communicable disease?”

“Not at all,” Carter replied. “He needs rest and constant supervision. We are taking him to the clinic in Essen.”

“Ah.”

The papers were handed back to Potts, the gate was lifted, and they were waved through.

On the other side, Lorena tapped Carter’s shoulder. “What is hydroxia pormangalia?”

“Damned if I know,” Carter chuckled.

There was no speed limit on the German side even though they were traveling a secondary road and not on the autobahn. In spite of the slippery road conditions, car after car, usually German, sped past them. Carter shook his head. He was forced by circumstances to take so many chances, he couldn’t understand anyone taking risks who didn’t need to.

The German department of highways had apparently never heard of rock salt or didn’t believe in using it. Although the roads were plowed, only the top layer of snow was off, and the surface was covered with a thick, rutty layer of ice and hard-packed snow.

“Bloody idiots,” Potts groused as a big Mercedes flew by them, fishtailing, the driver nearly losing it.

“It’s getting close,” Carter said. “Not much over a mile.”

It was exactly a mile. Carter pointed and Potts spun the wheel.

“My God,” Lorena exclaimed, her eyes peering upward through the windshield. “It looks like a Gothic movie set!”

Carter chuckled. “It does at that, doesn’t it.”

Potts wasn’t happy. “I got to stay there? The place is probably bloody haunted.”

Otto Krumm opened the massive oak door just as Carter stepped from the rear of the ambulance with Lorena close behind him.

But it was a new Otto. His hair was silver and his face was perfectly aged, with sunken eyes and wrinkles over wrinkles. Even his posture was different, his usually erect body seeming to be shrunken inside his clothes. The voice when he spoke was wheezy, asthmatic.

“What do you think?”

“Fantastic,” Carter replied, nodding his appreciation of the total make-over.

Von Krumm put out his hand. “So glad you had a safe trip, Herr Huzel. Allow me to introduce myself. SS General Erwin Bittrich. I thought it best that I outrank the alias of our prey.”

Carter smiled. “A wise decision, General.” He nodded to Lorena. “Your daughter.”

Von Krumm turned to the woman and extended his arms. “Magda, my darling,” he cackled, “it’s so good to see you again after all these years!”

“When yer bloody family reunion is over,” Mortimer Potts said from the rear of the ambulance, “how about a hand with this garbage?”

When Huzel was established in the dungeon room that had been prepared for him, the four of them returned to a small study on the first floor.

Von Krumm explained the arrangement to Potts. “He has everything he needs down there. You can feed him via the dumbwaiter, and communicate with him on the intercom.”

“He never has to see my face, then?” Potts asked.

“Never. There are three phones in the house, two in the upstairs bedrooms, one here. Nick can reach you direct if he has need of more information.”

“I can also use you as a dummy,” Carter added, “if I have to make Glaskov think I’m getting prices.”

Potts frowned. “How do I get the bloke to talk?”

“Easy,” Carter replied. “Give him a choice... talk or starve. I go up to Frankfurt and fly out tomorrow. You two follow on the day after. Otto, can you have papers ready for Lorena by then?”

The count shrugged. “No problem. We’ll be traveling with Swiss passports, a professor of law and his daughter.”

Carter stood, tapping the book he had taken from Huzel’s safe. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of deciphering and memorizing to do.”

He left the room. Mortimer returned to the ambulance to fetch their bags. Von Krumm turned to Lorena and put his hand on her knee.

“You are remarkably beautiful, a very sensuous woman, my dear. I’m looking forward to the next week. I am sure we shall get along fine.” His voice no longer creaked with age.

Lorena lifted his hand and placed it on his own knee. “I’m sure we will, Count von Krumm, if we both remember who we are... Daddy.”