The Aztec Avenger

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I slept until the late afternoon, when an hysterical and terrified Susan aroused me by her frantic pounding on my door.

I stumbled out of bed and opened the door groggily. Susan was clad only in a bikini and a sheer beach jacket. Her long blonde hair cascaded in a tangle over her breasts.

“My father’s gone!” she cried out.

Fear was written in a pale wash across her features. Her eyes were an unfocused blank stare from the shock she was barely able to control.

When I finally calmed her down, I slipped into slacks, a shirt, and sandals. We went up to her suite.

I looked around the living room of the Dietrich suite. It was a shambles. Lamps had been overturned, the coffee table lay on its side. Ashtrays had spilled cigarette butts onto the floor.

I turned to the kitchenette. It was completely empty. Nothing remained of the retorts and tubing and other laboratory apparatus that I’d seen there only hours before.

“There!” said Susan. “See for yourself!”

“Tell me what happened.”

She took a deep breath to calm herself. “I awoke around ten-thirty this morning. Father was still sleeping. We’d gone to bed right after you’d left, but he was so disturbed that I made him take a sleeping pill. I called the airlines as soon as I was up and made reservations for us to leave this afternoon. It was the earliest flight I could get. Then I had a cup of coffee. By that time it was eleven o’clock. I wanted to get a little more sun and I didn’t think it would hurt if I let Father sleep as long as he could, so I went down to the pool. I was down there until just a few minutes ago. I came back to pack and — and found this!” She swept her arm around in a despairing gesture.

“Did you find a note or anything left here?”

She shook her head. “Nothing! Apparently, Father awakened and got dressed. He must have made breakfast for himself. The dishes are still on the table on the terrace. All he ever has is juice, coffee, and an egg.”

I looked around the kitchenette. “Did he clean up in here?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t last night. He was too tired. He said he’d do it this morning.”

“What would he have done with the lab equipment?”

“He’d told me he would smash it and put the broken pieces in the garbage pail.”

“Did he?”

Susan lifted the lid of the trash container. “No. There’s no glassware in here.”

“He told me that he’d made another forty kilos of heroin. Where did he store it?”

“In the cupboard over the sink.”

“Is it there?”

She swung open the cupboard doors so that I could see that the shelves were bare. She turned a baffled face toward me.

“Did he dump it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. He didn’t do anything last night except go to bed.”

“What about the concentrate?”

Susan looked around the kitchenette again. She lifted the lid of the trash container. “Here,” she said, lifting some used paper towels. She held up the plastic bottle. “It’s empty.”

“Thank god for that, at least.”

I walked back into the living room.

“Is he playing another of his games?” I asked Susan. “Has he gone after Stocelli?”

“Oh, my god!” she exclaimed, aghast “I never thought of that!”

“I told him he was playing with killers! What the hell did he think he was doing?”

Susan shook her head silently. Tears filled her eyes. She suddenly threw herself into my arms. Her long, blonde hair streamed down her back. I could feel the heat of her almost naked body against mine, her small, firm breasts pushing against my chest.

She made sniffing sounds against my chest, and I cupped her chin with my hand to turn her face up to mine. She closed her eyes and put her lips against mine and opened her mouth.

In a moment, she took her mouth away, but only a fraction of an inch.

“Oh, god,” she whispered, “make me forget! I can’t take any more of it Please, please… make me forget!”

And I did. In the wreckage strewn living room. In the shafts of light streaming through the windows. Somehow, we tore our clothes off and embraced each other, both of us finding forgetfulness and release from our own tensions.

Her breasts fitted the palms of my hands as if they had been molded to their shape. Her thighs spread and wrapped themselves around me. There was no teasing. Nothing but a sudden, furious taking of each other. She took me as much as I took her.

And, finally, engulfed in perspiration, slippery with sweat, pounding in a furious burst of sexual energy, she exploded in my arms, her nails raking at my back, her teeth biting into my shoulder, and her moans filling the room.

We had just moved apart, tired but replete, when the telephone rang.

We looked at each other.

“You answer it,” she said, wearily.

I crossed the room to the table by the window. “Hello?”

“I’m glad to find you there, Carter,” said the man’s voice, abruptly. “Senor Dietrich’s life is in your hands. The lady you have been dating will meet you this evening. Eight o’clock. The same place you dined with her previously. And make sure you aren’t followed by the police.”

The phone went dead in my ear, but not before I recognized the voice of Carlos Ortega, bland, suave, controlled, and with not the slightest hint of emotion or drama.

I put down the phone.

“Who was it?” Susan asked.

“Wrong number,” I said and went back to her.

We spent the afternoon in pleasant carnality. Susan burrowed into me as if to hide from the world. We went into her bedroom and pulled the blinds down and shut out the light and the honor. And we made love.

Later, much later, I left her to go down to my room to change.

“I want you to stay here,” I told her. “Don’t leave the room. Don’t open the door. No exceptions. Do you understand?”

She smiled up at me. “You’ll find him, won’t you?” she asked, but it was more of a statement than a question. “Father will be all right, won’t he?”

I didn’t answer her. I knew that there was no way at all that I could make her aware of the vicious brutality of the men among whom I prowled, or their callous indifference to another man’s pain.

How could I explain to her a world where you wrapped a chain around your gloved fist and smashed a man in the ribs again and again until you heard the dry, crunching snap of breaking bones and watched impassively as he began to spew up his own bright blood? Or laid his hands flat on a board and smashed a crowbar across his knuckles? And ignored the animal screams of pain that came out of his torn throat and paid no attention to the wracking spasms that wrung his body into limp muscle and ripped tissue.

How could I make her understand men like Carlos Ortega or Stocelli or Luis Aparicio? Or myself, for that matter.

With Susan in her present state of mind, it was best to say nothing. She was no Consuela Delgardo.

I kissed her on the cheek and went out, locking the suite behind me.

In my own suite, I immediately noticed the black suitcase that Herbert Dietrich had told me about Thirty kilos of pure heroin. Without opening it, I put the suitcase with mine. Jean-Paul’s body was another matter. If I could have called on AXE, it would have been a simple matter to dispose of it. But I was on my own, and it was a problem.

There was simply no way to get rid of it, and time was getting short I finally decided to delay taking any action. I unwrapped the body, then I lifted him in my arms and brought him out to the terrace, putting him gently down in one of the sundeck chairs. To any casual observer, he looked as if he were taking a nap.

I showered and changed quickly, then strapped Hugo to my left forearm and put on a low-slung shoulder holster. I checked the elbow-slide action of Wilhelmina. I took out the clip of 9mm cartridges, reloaded the clip, and snapped a round in the chamber before I set the safety.

I donned another lightweight jacket. In the daytime, I couldn’t have gotten away with it. A 9mm Luger is a big handgun any way you look at it and the bulge under the jacket would have given me away. But, in the night, I could get by with it. That is, if no one stared at me too closely.

When I was ready, I left my room and cut down the corridor to the service elevator, heading for the back exit.

In less than five minutes, I was out of the hotel, scrunched down in the back seat of a cab, heading for El Centro.

As soon as we’d gone a few blocks, I sat up. We were driving west along the Costera. The Costera is too open and has too many police cars on it for me to feel comfortable, so I had the driver turn off when we came to the Calle Sebastian el Cano. After three blocks, we turned left onto the Avenida Cuauhtemoc, which parallels the Costera almost all the way in to El Centro. Where Cuauhtemoc joins the Avenida Constituyentes, we turned left again. I had him stop at the corner of the Avenida Cinco de Mayo and paid him, watching him drive out of sight before I moved.

I was only two blocks away from the zocalo, behind the cathedral, whose graceful, blue-painted onion-bulb spires make it look like a transplanted Russian Orthodox church. I picked up another cab and had him drop me off several blocks away from Hernando’s. I could have walked the distance, because it wasn’t that far away, but I’d attract less attention driving up in a taxi.

It was eight o’clock exactly when I walked into Hernando’s. The piano player was playing soft rhythms on the piano with his large, black hands, his eyes shut, swaying gently back and forth on his seat. I looked around. Consuela was not at the piano bar. I walked through the dining rooms. She wasn’t in any of them.

I sat down at the bar to have a drink while I waited for her. I looked at my watch. Five minutes after eight. I got up and went over to the public telephone and called the hotel. They rang through to Suite 903. There was no answer. Apparently, Susan was following my instructions to the letter. She wasn’t even answering the telephone.

Consuela was standing at my elbow when I turned away from the phone. She put her arm through mine and kissed me on the cheek.

“You’ve been trying to reach Susan Dietrich at the hotel?”

I nodded.

“Then you know that Miss Dietrich isn’t in her room,” she said. “She hasn’t been there for at least half an hour. She left with someone you’ve already met.”

“Brian Garrett?” I said, with a sinking feeling.

Consuela nodded.

“I suppose he told her a story about taking her to her father?”

“How on earth did you ever guess? That’s exactly what he did. She made no fuss at all.”

“Why?”

“Among other things, to make sure you’d cause no trouble when I take you to meet Carlos later on.” Her face softened. “I’m sorry, Nick. You know I have to go along with them, even if it means hurting you. How much does this girl mean to you?”

I looked at Consuela, in surprise. “I just met her last night,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Somehow, I had the impression she was an old friend of yours.”

“Forget it. What’s the next step?”

“You’re taking me to dinner at La Perla.” She smiled at me. “We’re going to have a pleasant meal and watch the high divers.”

“And Carlos?”

“He’ll meet us there.” She reached up and touched my cheek lightly with her fingers in a gentle caress. “For god’s sake, Nick, don’t look so severe. I’m not so unattractive that you can’t smile at me, am I?”

We descended the narrow, stone steps built steeply into the innermost face of the Quebrada cliffs below the Hotel El Mirador. We’d eaten a light dinner at the El Gourmet restaurant on the Upper level, and now I followed Consuela as she picked her way down in the darkness to La Perla on the lowest level. She found a seat at one of the tables close to the railing that overlooked the narrow finger of the sea and the waves that came rolling in against the base of the cliff.

It was almost ten o’clock. Consuela had not tried to make small talk during dinner.

“How much longer?” I asked her as we sat down.

“Not long. He’ll be here soon. In the meantime, we can watch the high divers.”

By the time we’d finished our first drink, the divers had come out on the low, rocky escarpment to our left and climbed down to a ledge just above the water. There were three of them. One of them dove into the inlet from an outcropping of rock and swam across to the other side. Now, all the lights — except for a few spotlights — were turned off. The first diver came out of the water, his body glistening wet. The spotlights followed him as he picked his way slowly up the almost sheer face of the cliff from which he was going to dive. Toehold after toehold, fingers gripping the rock, he made his way to the top. Finally, he swung himself onto the ledge a hundred and thirty feet above the water of the inlet.

The young diver knelt briefly in front of a small shrine at the back of the ledge, bending his head and crossing himself before he rose to his feet again. He picked his way back to the edge of the cliff.

Now the spotlights went out and he was in darkness. Below us, there was the smash of a hard wave and the high toss of white spume against the base of the cliffs. On the opposite side of the chasm, a bonfire of crumpled newspaper erupted into flame, the glare lighting up the scene. The boy crossed himself once more. He stretched on his toes.

As the drums picked up a fast roll, he sprang out into the blackness, his arms whipping out from his sides, his legs and back arching until he was a bow in the air, falling slowly at first and then faster, dropping into the brightness of the bonfire light and finally into the great swell of a wave — his arms breaking the swan dive and coming up over his head at the last possible moment.

There was silence until his head broke water and then there were shouts and applause and cheers.

As the noise died away around us, I heard Carlos Ortega speak up from just behind me. “He’s one of the best of the divers.” He pulled out a chair next to me and sat down.

“Once in a while,” Carlos remarked pleasantly as he sat down and adjusted the chair, “they kill themselves. If his foot slips on the ledge as he jumps, or if he doesn’t spring out far enough to clear the rocks—” he shrugged. “Or if he misjudges a wave and dives in too steeply when there isn’t enough water. Or if the undertow sweeps him out to sea. A wave can smash him. against a rock. Angel Garcia died that way when they were filming a jungle movie here in 1958. Did you know that?”

“You can skip the sightseeing lecture,” I said. “Let’s get to the point.”

“You know that Senor Dietrich is my guest?”

“I managed to figure that one out for myself.”

“And you know that his daughter decided to join him?”

“So I’ve learned,” I said, unemotionally. “Now, what the hell do you want from me?”

Consuela spoke up. “Shall I leave you now, Carlos?”

“Not just yet.” He took out a small, thin cigar and lit it slowly. He lifted his eyes to me and said affably, “How would you like to go into partnership with us?”

I’d expected threats. I’d expected and thought about almost every eventuality but this one. The offer caught me completely by surprise. I looked at Consuela. She, too, waited for my answer.

Carlos leaned even closer to me. I caught the scent of his after-shave lotion. “I know about Dietrich’s formula,” he said, his voice barely loud enough to reach my ears. “I know about his conversation with you and what he can manufacture.”

“That’s quite a spy system you have at the hotel,” I commented.

Carlos ignored my remark.

“What Dietrich has discovered can make billionaires of us all.”

I leaned back in my chair.

“Why include me in the deal, Ortega?”

Carlos seemed surprised. “I thought it would be obvious to you. We need you.”

And then I understood it all. “Stocelli,” I muttered. “You need a distributor for the heroin. Stocelli would be your distributor. And you need me to get to Stocelli.”

Carlos smiled at me, a thin, malevolent grimace.

Consuela started to speak up. Ortega silenced her. “Perhaps you should leave us now, my dear. You know where to meet us — that is, if Mr. Carter agrees to join us.”

Consuela rose. She walked around the small table to my side and let her hand rest on my shoulder. I felt the tight pressure of her slender fingertips.

“Don’t do anything rash, Nick,” she murmured. “The three men at the next table are armed. Aren’t they, Carlos?”

“Esverdad.”

Consuela moved off in the direction of the steps. I watched her for a moment before I turned back to Ortega.

“Now that she’s gone, Ortega, what is it you want to tell me that you don’t want her to know about?”

For a moment, Ortega didn’t answer. He lifted one of our empty glasses and idly twirled the stem in his fingers. Finally, he put it down and leaned toward me.

“Do you think I don’t know that John Bickford is a Weakling who can be pushed around without much trouble? He thinks with his cojones. All that matters to him is that wife of his, that expensive puta. And Brian Garrett? Do you think I’m unaware that Garrett is no stronger than Bickford?”

Carlos was whispering now, his face only inches away from mine. Even in the darkness, I could see how his eyes had lit up With the intensity of his inner vision.

“I can be one of the wealthiest men in the world. But I cannot do it myself. Here in Mexico I have some influence. I have connections. But what happens when we move our operation to the States? There would be only Bickford, Garrett, and myself. Can you see Bickford standing up to Stocelli? Or Garrett? They would dirty their pants the first time they came face to face with him. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Yes. You’d get rid of Garrett and Bickford to team up with me on this deal.”

“Exactly. Now what do you say?”

“What’s the split?” I said, knowing Ortega would take my question as the first step toward my agreeing to go along with him, Carlos smiled. “Ten percent” I laughed out loud. I knew that Ortega expected me to bargain. If I didn’t he would be suspicious. Ten percent was ridiculous. “If I go along with you, then we split right down the line.”

“Fifty percent? Absolutely not.”

“Then get yourself another boy.” I settled back in my chair and reached for my pack of cigarettes lying on the table. In the flame of the lighter, I could see Ortega’s face regain its smooth, cold composure.

“You’re in no position to bargain.”

“Who says so? Look, Ortega, you need me. You just got through telling me that you can’t pull off this deal without me. Bickford and Garrett? Stocelli would eat them up and spit them out and come after you. Now, you listen. If you’re going to hold out a carrot for me to stretch after, you damned well better make it a fat, juicy one or I’m not even going to nibble.”

“Forty percent?” Carlos offered tentatively, watching me carefully.

I shook my head. “Fifty percent. And if I ever catch you trying to cheat me — even by a penny — I’ll come after your hide.”

Carlos hesitated, and I knew I had him convinced. Finally, he nodded his head. “You bargain hard,” he said, grudgingly. He held out his hand. “Agreed.”

I looked down at his hand. “Come on, Ortega. We’re still not friends, so don’t try to make me think I’m your buddy. This is purely a business deal. I like the money. So do you. Let’s keep it on that basis.”

Ortega smiled. “At least you are honest” He dropped his hand to his side and rose to his feet “Now that we are partners, shall we go, Senor Carter?”

“Where?”

“I’m a houseguest at Garrett’s hacienda. He’s asked me to invite you to join us there — if you decided to team up with us.” He smiled at the irony.

As we walked up the narrow stone and concrete steps that led up from the La Perla nightclub, I could see that we were followed by the three men who’d been sitting at the next table all evening.

A car was waiting for us at the circular, cobblestone drive at the top of the cliff. The chauffeur held the door open as we came up to it. Ortega got into the rear seat first, motioning for me to join him. As I settled myself, the chauffeur closed the door and went around to the front seat. He started up the engine and then turned to face me, his thick fist gripping the butt of a big Mauser Parabellum pistol, its muzzle aimed squarely into my face from only inches away.

Without moving, I asked, “What the hell is this all about, Carlos?”

“Your gun,” said Ortega, holding out his hand. “It’s been making me nervous all evening. Why not give it to me so that I can relax?”

“Tell him to be careful,” I said. “I’m reaching for it now.”

“By the barrel,” Ortega snapped. “If it comes out of your jacket any other way, he’ll shoot.”

I slid Wilhelmina carefully out of the holster. Ortega took it from me.

“Do you have any other weapons, Senor Carter?”

It took me only a fraction of a second to decide. I slid Hugo out of his sheath and handed the slim stilleto to Ortega. “Take care of them for me,” I said easily.

“Vamanos, Paco!” Ortega snapped out the words. The driver turned around and put the car into motion. He drove around the center island and down the hill.

We came slowly down the cobblestone streets from the cliffs of Quebrada and through the narrow streets of the older section of Acapulco. As we turned onto the Costera Miguel Aleman and drove eastward I could look across the bay at the lights of the Hotel Matamoros. Ortega caught my glance.

“It would be very bad for you to even think of going back to your hotel, Senor Carter,” said Ortega, drily.

“How do you figure that?”

“You might run into Teniente Fèlix Fuentes of the Federales,” said Carlos. “And that would have been a bad thing for both of us, como no?”

He turned his head to face me, his dark eyes glinting with malicious amusement.

“Did you think I didn’t know about Teniente Fuentes being here in Acapulco?” he asked. “Do you think I’m a fool?”