The Aztec Avenger

CHAPTER EIGHT

I was at the pool the next morning when Consuela Delgardo came down the steps and walked across the grassy area surrounding the pool to join me. I was surprised to see how much more attractive she was in the daylight. She wore a loosely-woven, light beach coat that ended just below her hips, showing superb legs that swung in a rhythmic, lilting walk as she came toward me.

“Good morning,” she said in her pleasantly husky voice as she smiled at me. “Are you going to invite me to sit down?”

“I hadn’t expected to see you again,” I said. I pulled out a chair for her. “Would you like a drink?”

“Not this early in the morning.” She took off her beach coat, draping it across the back of a lounge chair. Underneath, she wore a dark blue maillot bathing suit, almost transparent, except at the breast and crotch. It looked as if she were wearing a finely meshed net body stocking over a minute bikini. While it covered more of her than a bikini would have, it was almost as revealing and was certainly much more suggestive. Consuela caught me looking at her,

“Like it?” she asked.

“It’s very attractive,” I admitted. “Few women could wear it and look as good as you do.”

Consuela lay down in the lounge chair that I’d pulled out for her. Even in the harsh direct sunlight, her skin showed up smooth and taut.

“I told them I was your guest,” Consuela remarked, “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. But why? I’m sure this isn’t a social call.”

“You’re right. I have a message for you.”

“From?”

“Bickford.”

“About the bullfight at El Cortijo? I got the message last night.”

“I’ll be going with you,” said Consuela.

“So they’ll recognize me?”

“Yes. I hope you don’t mind taking me out so often,” she added, amusement in her voice. “Most men would love to “

“For chrissake!” I said, irritably. “Why can’t they just give me a simple yes or no? Why all the rigamarole?”

“Apparently, you told Bickford something last night about what you knew of their operations. It shook them. They didn’t think anyone knew so much about the operation they’re running. I think you’ve managed to frighten them.”

“And where do you fit into all this?” I asked her, bluntly.

“It’s none of your business.”

“I might make it my business.”

Consuela turned and looked at me. “Don’t I’m not important in the operation. Just take me at face value.”

“And what’s that?”

“Just an attractive woman to escort around town every once in awhile.”

“No,” I said, “you’re more than that. I’m willing to bet that if I were to look at your passport, I’d find it filled with visa stamps. Eight to ten trips a year to Europe, at the very least. Most of the entry stamps wouId be for Switzerland and France. Right?”

Consuela’s face froze. “You bastard,” she said. “You’ve seen it!”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It stands to reason. There’s a lot of cash involved in your business. They can’t let it float around here in Mexico or in the States. The best place to tuck it away is in Switzerland — or the Bahamas — in numbered accounts. Someone has to carry the money from here to there. Who better than you? An attractive, cultured, elegant woman. You’re an odds-on bet to be the courier for them, the one who makes all the lovely trips and who smiles so pleasantly at the Customs people as she passes into the country, and who’s known by half a dozen bank tellers in Zurich, Berne, and Geneva.”

“What else are you so sure of?”

“That you never carry narcotics. They’d never risk your getting picked up for dope smuggling. Then they’d have to find another courier they can trust with cash the way they now trust you. And that’s hard to do.”

“You’re damned right!” Consuela was indignant “They know I’ll never carry drugs.”

“Does it make you feel better to think you’re only carrying money?” I asked her, with the faintest tinge of sarcasm in my voice. “Does that make it all right? It’s heroin that brings in the cash, you know. If you’re going to be moral, just where do you draw the line?”

“Who are you to talk to me like this?” Consuela demanded, angrily. “Whatever you do won’t stand up to inspection, either.”

I said nothing.

“We’re not so different,” Consuela told me, anger coating her voice like blue-white midwinter ice sheathing a rock. “I learned a long time ago that it’s a tough life. You make out the best way you can. You do your thing and let me do mine. Just don’t pass judgment on me.” She turned her face away from me. “Take me for what I am, that’s all.”

“I make very few judgments,” I told her. “And none in your case.”

I reached over, catching her chin in my hand and turning her face to mine. Her eyes were chilled with the deep frost of resentment. But below the thin glaze of repressed fury, I sensed a maelstrom of churning emotions she was barely able to control. Inside, I felt a surging response to the sudden, sensual feel of the smoothness of her skin against my fingers, and an overwhelming need arose in me to unleash the turmoil that stormed within her.

For a long, interminable minute, I made her look at me. We fought a silent battle in the few inches of space that separated our faces, and then I let my fingers move slowly across her chin and slide across her lips. The ice melted, the anger went out of her eyes. I saw her face soften, thawing into a complete and utter surrender.

Consuela opened her lips slightly, catching at my fingers in gentle, nipping bites with her teeth, without once taking her eyes from mine. I held my hand against her mouth, feeling the sharpness of her teeth against my flesh. Then she let go. I took my hand away from her face.

“Goddamn you,” Consuela said, in a hissing whisper that barely reached across to me.

“I feel the same way.” My voice was no louder than hers.

“How do you know how I feel?”

The anger was now directed against herself for being so weak and for letting me discover it.

“Because you came here to see me when you could have telephoned just as easily. Because of the look on your face right now. Because it’s something I can’t put into words, or even try to explain.”

I stopped talking. Consuela got to her feet and picked up her beach robe. She slipped it on in one lithe movement. I stood up beside her. She looked up at me.

“Let’s go,” I said, taking her by the arm. We walked around the edge of the pool and along the gravel path, up the several flights of stairs that led to the terrace and to the elevators that would take us to my room.

We stood close together in the dimness and the coolness of the room. I had drawn the drapes, but light still came through.

Consuela moved into my arms, pressing her face into my shoulder, close to my neck. I felt the softness of her cheeks and the wetness of her lips as her teeth nipped gently at the tendons of my neck. I pressed her closer to me, the heavy fullness of her breasts soft against my chest, my hands gripping the firmness of her hip.

Now, as she moved her face urgently up to mine, I bent down to meet her. Her mouth began an angry, insistent, relentless search for my lips and mouth. I took off her beach coat, slipping the straps of her maillot off her shoulders, pulling the suit down to her hips. Her breasts were incredibly soft — silky skin against my own bare chest

“Oh, wait,” she said, breathlessly. “Wait.” And she moved out of my arms long enough to pull the suit down past her hips and to step out of it. She threw the handful of net onto a chair and reached for the waistband of my swimming trunks. I stepped out of them, and we moved together as instinctively as if we had performed this act so many times before that it was now second nature to us and we did not have to think what to do next.

We moved over onto the bed. I reached for her again and was very gentle with her and very insistent until she came achingly alive in my arms.

She said, once, gasping, “I didn’t think it was going to be like this. God, it’s good.”

She shuddered in my arms. “Oh, god, it is good!” she exclaimed, breathing her warm, moist breath into my ear. “I love what you’re doing to me! Don’t stop!”

Her skin was fine and soft, slick with the thin sheen of perspiration, smooth with the ripeness of a woman’s body swollen with excitement. Her lips were warm and damp, clinging moistly to me wherever she kissed me. She moved slowly in response to my stroking fingers until she became wet and full and could not help twisting herself urgently against me.

In the end, we came together in a frantic outburst, her arms clenched around me, her legs entwined with mine, pressing herself upward against me as hard as she could, pulling me into her with her arms, her throat making little high-pitched sounds that grew into cat growls of sheer, helpless abandon.

At the final moment, her eyes opened and stared into my face, only a hand’s breadth away from hers, and she cried out in a torn voice, “You goddamned animal!” as her body exploded against mine, her hips beating against me with a fury she could not control.

Later, we lay together, her head on my shoulder, each of us smoking a cigarette,

“It doesn’t change anything,” Consuela said to me. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. “It was just something I wanted to do—”

“—we wanted to do,” I corrected her.

“All right, we,” she said. “But it doesn’t change one thing. Get that straight in your mind.”

“I didn’t think it would.”

“It was good though,” she said, turning to smile at me. “I like making love in the daylight.”

“It was very good.”

“Christ,” she said, “it was so nice having a man again. Not someone freaked out. Just straight,” I tightened my arm about her.

“It’s crazy,” Consuela mused. “It’s not supposed to be that good the first time.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“I think it would be good with you every time,” Consuela said. “Only it doesn’t pay to think about it, does it? We don’t know if it’s ever going to happen again, do we?”

She turned against me so that she lay on her side and put one leg across mine and pressed herself against my body.

“Listen,” she said, in an urgent whisper, “you be careful, will you? Promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

“That’s what they all say,” she said. Her fingers touched the scars on my chest. “You weren’t so careful when you got these, were you?”

“I’ll be more careful.”

Consuela flung herself away from me and lay on her back.

“Damn it!” she said, in her husky, ripe voice. “It’s hell being a woman. You know that?”