The Devil's Dozen

Five

Izmir sprawls down from Mount Pagus to the sea in the sultry white heat. In Izmir your meal comes with a bottle of raki, vodka, or wine, a selection of East or West, and somehow that describes the rest of the city, too.

Beside a dusty palm tree will be a billboard for International Harvester tractors; next to a sixteenth-century mosque is a skyscraper, and on the other side of the skyscraper will be a Roman ruin. Swarthy Turkish men in cloth caps, sultry women in baggy pants and blouses, their hair festooned with braided ribbons, walk across Ataturk Square, while American pilots bargain with taxi drivers and vendors selling sweetcakes and soft drinks, or as the Turks call them, pasta and serbetler. The sweetcakes carry the promise of rich honey inside the way Izmir carries the promise of exotic encounters, heady and strong. Istanbul is Western by comparison. Beneath its polyglot, semi-modernized surface, Izmir is Asiatic.

Near the top of the mountain is an ancient fortress built by Alexander the Great during his conquest of the Persian empire. The fortress is nothing but ruins but it provides an adequate lookout. I sat on the stones and trained my binoculars on a small restaurant half a mile down the mountain. Diners ate on an open-air patio surrounded by bowers of grapevines. Through the kitchen window I could see the cook spooning out dishes of figs and tangy milk pudding. A shirt-sleeved waiter served beer to a middle-aged American couple. Two muscular men with thick, curly hair shared lunch at another table but they argued more than they ate, which meant they were ordinary Turks and not assassins. At the best table a girl sat alone, a model from her looks. Long reddish hair, beautiful oval face, incredibly long legs. French, I guessed, from her chic clothes. I forced my glasses away. I was looking for killers, not sex.

Two days previously, I’d wired DeSantis that he could send his representative to the restaurant. We would make our deal there or leave blood on the patio flagstones. By inviting the Mafia to Izmir, I was taking a chance on my identity, but I couldn’t afford meeting the Mafia on its own territory again.

There were still no signs of DeSantis’s man. I checked my watch. There were five minutes till the appointed time. And it would take me exactly five minutes to reach the peaceful-seeming restaurant.

I left the glasses on the rock for some lucky kids to find and started down the mountain. On the way through the crooked streets, children and young girls watched me from behind iron-railed stairways, but they watched with little curiosity. I was a Turk, until proved otherwise on a coroners table. I felt the snugness of the Astra in my jacket and the other added weight of the stiletto holstered on my left forearm and the four-ounce bomb taped to my ankle. The added weight didn’t bother me, not even in Izmir’s heat.

I turned off the street and climbed up to the restaurant patio. The middle-aged Americans had been replaced by some local teenagers and their transistor radio. The two big Turks had stopped arguing to begin a game of dominoes; they’d be arguing again soon enough. The restaurant owner, his belly trying to push his shirt out of his belt, his accent like Akim Tamiroff’s, welcomed me profusely and with much perspiration. Then I saw his eyes go past me.

In back of me were four men in black suits and hats, their collars buttoned without neckties, each carrying a case for a musical instrument. They had come out of the house across from the restaurant. I slid my hand in my jacket and touched the Astras grip. The leader of the musicians opened his case and brought out a balalaika.

“Nervous about something, Mr. Senevres?” It was a husky voice, unmistakably female.

I turned around. The fashion model smiled quizzically, and for the first time I noticed that her table was set for two.

Obviously she wasn’t a model, but she was an unforgettably beautiful woman. In her early twenties, eyes wide set and dark in contrast to her golden hair, a high-bridged nose, full lips. Her Valentino dress clung to her full breasts and rounded hips. A sandal dangled from her tanned toes. Her smile grew and expressed amusement, intelligence, and eroticism.

I sat down and looked with frank amazement.

“You were expecting me, weren’t you?” she asked. Her accent was American, but with unusual poise, elegance, and a hint of Italian ripeness.

“I was expecting someone. Hardly you.”

“You don’t seem too upset, really,” she observed rightly. “I know how Turkish men are about women.”

“Do you?” I let that question hang in the air for a second, then added, “I also know how your people are about women. In business, I mean. I wonder if they are serious in sending you.”

She touched my hand lightly.

“My dear Mr. Senevres, do you think I would have come if they weren’t?” Behind us the musicians were tuning their instruments. “In fact, you can thank my interest that those men are carrying balalaikas instead of guns. Some of the people at the meeting thought you should simply be eliminated. What’s good to order here?” Her manner was smooth and confident.

I summoned the waiter and ordered stuffed grape leaves, white cheese, and a bottle of raki.

“Raki, that’s your name isn’t it? Or is it a nickname?”

“It’s what you can call me. What do I call you?”

“Vera Cesare.”

“Then I’ll call you Vera, like Americans do.”

“Oh, you’d never be American,” she laughed. “But I’ll find out what you really are.”

The grape leaves were tasty and tart, the cheese sharp, and the raki a powerful, licorice nectar. While we talked, the breeze picked up, ruffling the fine gold hair on Vera Cesare’s shoulders.

“There are some problems you may not be aware of. We will have to travel to different places, some large cities, and some small towns. There will be some labor and a small amount of danger. I had expected a man to be traveling with me, and it is too late to change plans now.”

“I assumed all that, Raki. The people who sent me assumed that, too. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of traveling with a woman?”

“I am afraid of weakness, cuteness, and stupidity. These are not necessarily female traits. But they are traits of most American women.” I watched her keenly for any blush of anger.

“You won’t have any cause for complaint,” Vera Cesare responded without a tremor in her voice.

The little band of musicians was in full swing now, serenading each table in turn. Miss Cesare and I might have been lovers. Only might have been. What we were discussing was a $20 million shipment of misery and death.

“And you can promise full delivery within two months, Raki? By boat or plane?” she pressed.

“You will see.”

“You don’t trust me, I can understand. But I must report something to the people who sent me. After all, you hold a $100,000 deposit of ours.”

“Not a deposit, payment for sale of shares, all very legal.”

“Shares in a little German company you use as your cover,” Vera corrected me. “We’ve checked into Hauffmann Ubersee Gesellschaft, of course. They sell gingerbread houses to the United States and South Africa. We aren’t interested in gingerbread houses.” There was an antique cameo ring on her left land. She rubbed her finger idly over it as she talked. “However, we understand how convenient a business cover can be, and we are willing to consider the $100,000 as a first installment on the $1 million we’ll pay you on delivery in New York. That’s quite an improvement on the $500 you’d get for 200 kilos here in Turkey, isn’t it?”

Beyond the beautiful face and body was the mind of an iron Mafioso. I’d see it many times later but this was my first experience.

“Vera, it would be a mistake to play games with me. I intend to put the Corsicans out of business, simply because I’m a better businessman. The price you’re proposing to give me is the price you pay for wholesale heroin in Marseilles. That price is doubled on delivery in New York. Your people will pay me $2 million, plus a bonus of another $100,000.”

“Why in the world should we do that?”

“Because I’m worth it. Because you have never had that much heroin brought to you in one shipment before. Because it is the best heroin. And because I’m growing tired of this awful music.”

We were surrounded by the four musicians plucking their instruments and wailing out of harmony.

“You don’t like Turkish music?” Vera Cesare feigned surprise.

“It’s only that the balalaika isn’t his best instrument.”

I reached out to the leader of the band and pulled his jacket back far enough to reveal the .45 in his belt. Then I stuffed a ten-lira note beside the gun and left more money on the table as I rose.

“Where are you staying?” I asked the girl.

She was taken aback but not dumbfounded.

“At the Buyuk Efes Hotel.”

“Be outside it in four hours with a nightbag, and be alone.”

“Raki,” she said as I started to leave.

“Yes?”

“I think we’ll work very well together.”

The band leader, in pulling out the money from his pants, dropped his balalaika. It made a mournful sound.

Four hours later I approached the expensive Buyuk Efes Hotel, off Ataturk Square. It wasn’t hard to spot Vera Cesare. Among the arguing cab drivers and pasty-faced tourists she stood out like Botticellis Venus. A Venus with a handgun, I mused, and I wondered what kind of ladylike weapon she carried, a Beretta or a Kit. With all the traffic, there was no point in my looking for unwanted company.

I brought my Citroën to a stop in front of her.

“Get in.”

She threw her bag onto the back seat and sat next to me. We pulled away from the hotel onto the modem sea-front boulevard that curves around the Gulf of Izmir.

“Where are we going? Or is that a stupid question?” she asked.

I gave her a look that said, “Yes.”

Occasionally, I glanced into the car’s side mirror. The roads of Izmir are like an automotive museum, except that all the old Buicks, Studebakers, Packards, Fords, and Plymouths are still rolling. A ’53 Olds goes for $3,000 in Izmir. The cab owners who drive them stuff so many passengers inside that Turks call them dolmus, the word for stuffed grape leaves. A dozen of the aged dolmus followed me, and it was impossible to make out any individual faces.

I drove for a mile along the boulevard before cutting through the gypsy section and heading for the mountain road. One cab peeled off from the others in my wake. We climbed past fig orchards and groves of wild azalea, with the cab still tagging.

“I thought you were coming alone, Vera.”

She looked behind.

“Damn. I told them to stay away,” she said with pique.

“They don’t take orders from you?”

“It would be a little hard to explain,” she sidestepped the question.

“I can lose them or hurt them. Make up your mind, Vera.”

The cab made up her mind for her. It was a vintage Buick, but someone had dropped a lot of new horsepower up front. The cab shot past us on the upgrade. Two guns hung out the window pointed at my head, and over the guns I recognized some former balalaika players. Once ahead of us, the Buick’s taillights lit up.

The Buick had the power, but the Citroën had a suspension like nothing else in the world. Without braking, I swerved to the left and passed. A gun came out of the Buick’s window but held fire for fear of hitting my passenger instead of me. A few seconds later, I could hear the Buick revving up to pass me again.

“You might as well stop,” Vera shouted over the sound of the engines. “You can’t outrun them.”

The road twisted over dusty hills like a snake. One hairpin turn followed another and as long as they did, the Buick had no chance of passing the Citroën. The French car slid easily around curves that had the Buick’s shocks in convulsions. I shifted up when the Buick’s driver had to gear down, and when Vera and I crested onto a straightaway, the Citroën was at sixty going on seventy.

The Buick crested half a minute later. We had disappeared. Ahead of the Buick was five miles of flat straightaway and no car to follow. The cab screeched to a stop. The Turks got out, lifting their caps to scratch their heads. A couple pointed to a farmhouse on the right side of the road. They all drew their guns and started walking toward it. A sleek rooster ran out of a cinder-block henhouse, gave one squawk, and ran off. There was no sign of life in the farmhouse.

“We’ll just have a small lead,” Vera whispered, though she needn’t have. We were on the side of the road opposite to the farmhouse with the Citroën hidden behind a high stack of alfalfa.

“Fasten your shoulder belt.” She did as I said without more than a lifted eyebrow. “Now give me your answer. Do I kill them or lose them?”

“You’re dead serious,” she smiled as I brought the Astra out.

“They’re your men, but they’re in my way. Answer!”

Calmly, she considered both options.

“Killing would complicate matters, at this point,” she said. “However, I would be curious to see how you discourage them.”

“Then hang on.”

I held the Citroën in neutral and gunned it until the tachometer needle bobbed into red. The last Turk in line in the farmhouse driveway was already hesitating and looking around for the origin of the engine’s sound. He started to call the others. By then it was too late.

The ground was hard and dry. Poor farming land, good drag strip. I hit twenty-five in first gear, fifty in second. By the time we reached the drainage ditch on the side of the road, the Citroën was moving at seventy in fourth. The wheel gave one last tremendous buck in my hand and then we were in the air, flying at an oblique angle, the rear end fishtailing behind us, the Buick directly in front.

Citroën and Buick met side to side. Side mirrors and door handles snapped off. The safety glass beside Vera cracked into spider webs. Not that I looked.

The Citroën was still moving at sixty, fighting to swerve off the road, its hydraulic suspension out of equilibrium, the Michelin X tires stuttering from one side of the road to the other. Down to third gear, correct the drift, don’t pump, feed power, correct again, more power, straighten out, brain, eyes, hand, and feet collaborated. And it was not a smooth collaboration despite the hours spent on AXE’s driving course. It takes split-second reaction and anticipation, and discipline over instinct. But the Citroën did straighten out.

Vera brushed glass crystals from her hair, stared at me, and then tried to roll down her window. The pulley had been crushed in the mangled door so she used her shoe to batter the honeycombed glass out into the wind.

“Their car is upside down in the ditch,” she reported when she pulled her head back in.

“I know.”

Vera was deep in thought for a minute. A tiny cut reddened on her cheek, and she dabbed the blood off automatically. When she lit her cigarette her hands were as steady as mine.

The shame of it all, I was beginning to decide, was that Miss Vera Cesare and I probably would work well together. Very well.