The Devil's Dozen

Seven

Dozens of sunburned bodies bobbed in the surf. They were not the survivors of some shipwreck but English tourists doing what English tourists do when they reach the Mediterranean.

The surf and beach were Portuguese in front of the resort town of Albufeira. Twenty years ago, Albufeira was a fishing village. Now the fishermen sit on their high-bowed, brilliantly-painted boats and shake their heads at the hysterically vacationing strangers and at the enormous stucco and whitewashed resort hotels that dot the rugged coastline like fat dollops of whipped cream.

One thing about resort hotels, though. They aren’t scandalized by unmarried couples like Raki Senevres and Vera Cesare. The maid who brought drinks to our balcony hardly noticed that we were making one pair of pajamas serve for two people.

“Vodka and lemon juice for breakfast. I’ve never had that before,” Vera sipped from her glass. She wore the top half of the pajamas, and that was purely for decorum.

We were three days out of Istanbul, and we’d gone a lot further than just miles. I was getting used to having Vera near me, and I could feel the same thing happening to her. It was one thing to be lovers, another to find someone who could be both lover and partner. And like vodka in lemon juice, Vera had an added kick: she might be my executioner, too.

“It’s so you’ll get all the vitamins you need. I know how Americans want their daily vitamins.”

She smiled, but her eyes kept returning to my bare chest. Special Effects did what it could about battlescars, but there’s only so much that can be done with skin grafts. The muscles of my shoulders bore enough stripes for a master sergeant.

“You know all about Americans,” Vera said. “I don’t know anything about you. Could you tell me anything?”

“There is very little to tell.”

I shrugged her question off because I had no taste for any lying that wasn’t absolutely necessary.

“You’re trying to be mysterious and romantic,” she pressed.

“Not at all. I’m a very practical person, anything but romantic.”

“Your English is very good. Where did you learn it? From a rich American lady?”

“Vera, anyone who wants American money must speak English.”

“And you want money. Or is it the thrill of getting the money?”

I downed the last of my vodka and lemon juice.

“I tell you what, Vera. Let’s just go get the money and see how many thrills we have.”

We had a Mercedes 220S now, and an hour later we were driving it up through Albufeira’s twisting streets, past postcard stands and shop windows of Madeira lace. The coastal road was bordered with white and blue irises, a typical Portuguese touch. We zipped around horsedrawn wagons painted with symbols for protection against the Evil Eye.

On a side road, we passed a bullock market and rice fields of women working in rows carefully pulling up the crop by hand. We were back in the eighteenth century. Pastel flamingos balanced on one leg and searched for frogs in the shallow water.

We climbed steadily until we were above the marshlands into rolling, arid hills, the most typical Iberian landscape. Twisted cork trees cast sharp, garish shadows over the gray-green earth. Vera exclaimed, looking in the distance.

“Is that snow?”

On the far mountain was a blanket of white shimmering under the summer sun.

“There’s an old Moslem story,” I said. “When Spain was ruled by Arabs, an Arab prince married a Viking princess and brought her to Spain to live. She grew increasingly sad, and, when he asked her why, she said she missed the sight of Northern land, especially the snow. He couldn’t bear to send her back, so he planted Spain with almond trees, which covered the country with white blossoms like snow.”

“Almond trees,” Vera echoed softly.

The Mercedes hummed, and we climbed up toward what first seemed like a mirage or a magical glacier. Then we’d reached the orchard, and we were surrounded by a sea of shivering, pure white petals.

Almonds. The crushed kernels are the base of amygdalin, otherwise known as cyanide. But Vera looked particularly beautiful against a background of treeborne snow.

After mile upon mile of almond orchards we reached a complex of buildings: a garage, a mill, silos, and an office. We parked and entered the office. An old man in wellworn tweeds greeted us with a military snap of his heels.

“Herr Hauffmann?”

“No, I am Senhor Senevres. I am from Hauffmann Gesellschaft. Do you have our order completed?”

The old boy was disappointed, and I guessed why. He was German, very likely a war criminal gone into hiding like so many others who arrived in Spain and Portugal in ’45. Now he was desperate for a touch of the homeland, poor fellow.

“Yes, yes, all ready.”

“Here is a cashier’s check drawn from the Banco do Lisboa for one rail-car-load of almond powder. I would like to see the powder now.”

“Very well.”

The three of us strolled over to the silos. A truck had been backed up to one, and our guide pointed to some half-filled cardboard barrels. The almond powder inside was an aromatic ivory dust. I couldn’t see it but I could feel Vera’s appreciative look. Except for the aroma, there was no apparent difference between almond dust and opium.

“You might as well give me back the check. I’m not taking this powder,” I told the old man.

“What do you mean?” he was startled out of his disappointment.

“We intentionally sent you large, transparent plastic bags to ship the powder in. If you pack the powder in barrels, customs at each border will tear the barrels open until we’ll lose ten percent just by contamination.”

“Customs will open the bags anyway,” he protested.

“That’s why the bags were supplied with elastic bands. That is the way Hauffmann Ubersee Gesellschaft operates. You should understand.”

Abruptly, he summoned workers and demanded they search for the plastic bags. In a few minutes the bags had been found, and the powder was transferred from the barrels.

“The freight car is waiting in the Albufeira yard. I expect it to leave on tonight’s train so you should load today. Hauffmann Gesellschaft will have much more business to give you if this shipment is handled correctly.”

“As you say,” the old boy nodded energetically.

“Wonderful,” Vera kissed my cheek as we drove down the mountain. “Almond powder is a perfect match. But I don’t understand how you’re going to do the switch. You were right when you said that border inspectors would check all the bags. They’re on the lookout for opium, and they’ll take samples from every bag.”

“Right. I want them to.”

“Well, where are you going to hide the opium then?”

“I’m not.”

We drove in silence through the almond orchard for a minute before the thought occurred to her.

“You mean, we’re not bringing the opium through Portugal?”

“I never said we were.”

“But, I assumed...” Vera frowned. Wind tugged at her long gold hair. “Then why are we here at all?”

“What do you have against almonds?”

She rubbed her cameo ring nervously on her chin and reached for a cigarette. When we stopped for a lunch of grilled sardines and green wine, she was still relatively silent.

“What’s bothering you? You seem unhappy.”

“Not unhappy,” she reached for my hand. “It’s just that you scare me sometimes. If DeSantis knew that he had $100,000 in almond powder and nothing else, he’d be very upset with you. I’d feel better if you told me at least how you’re bringing the opium in. After all, I have a stake in this now, too.”

“Vera, if you want to feel better you should drink more wine. As for the system, don’t worry. Everything is going as well as it could.”

“You sound so confident.”

“Salud,” I touched her glass with mine.

It was early afternoon as we got back to the hotel. The sun was a golden ball in the center of the sky, and we decided to get our swimsuits and find a nice private cove up the coast.

“Just give me a chance to wash up,” Vera said as we walked into our room.

I yawned the yawn of someone who’s had a bottle of wine and laid down on the bed. If only the Commander could see Nick Carter now, I thought, he would go through my expense account for the past ten years. It was a perversely satisfying daydream.

A pop with the same resonance of a champagne cork but ten times louder came from the bathroom. I was off the bed and drawing the Astra. The bathroom door opened, and a man plunged face forward onto the wall-to-wall carpeting. In his hand was a large caliber revolver. In the middle of his back was a powder burn and a small black hole.

Vera stepped out of the bathroom. Her hair was disheveled and her lipstick smeared. She still held a Beretta .22, obviously part of her toilet accessories.

“Who is he, Vera?”

“I don’t know. He was waiting behind the shower curtain.” She knelt by the dead man and hoisted his head up by the hair. The face was square and swarthy, the eyes bulged in shock. “Corsican. I’m afraid your competition has heard about you.”

“It looks that way. I guess you saved my life. That was some shot.”

And the Corsican must have been pretty dumb to let anyone but a friend put a gun on his spine.

“We’d better get out of here right away, Raki.”

“First, we’ll take care of the body. I’d rather not have the police on top of us, too.”

The dead man oozed rather than bled, and the slug never made it out of his chest. I didn’t worry about the sound of the shot. One person out of a thousand recognized the report of a small-caliber gun.

“Get that terry cloth beach robe from the closet. I’ll call room service.”

I ordered drinks for three and a wheelchair.

“What are you doing?” Vera brought me the robe. “He may have friends waiting for him.”

“As long as you’re my friend, what have I got to be afraid of?”

We had the robe on the Corsican when room service came. A few minutes later, we had the dead man belted into a sitting position in the wheelchair. I began prying the unfired gun from his hand.

Criminals sometimes try to make a murder look like a suicide by putting their gun in the victim’s hand. The reason police aren’t fooled is that the gun falls out of the corpse’s hand as soon as the body’s lifted. The gun won’t fall out if it was held in the hand at the moment of death. Then the muscles of the hand contract like steel.

I forced the death grip just open enough to free the gun and slip a glass into the hand.

“Now what?” Vera asked nervously.

“We wait.”

Eight hours is the usual time for rigor mortis to set in, but the hot Portuguese day speeded the process along. Within six hours our visitor had stiffened appreciably.

Vera paced from one end of the room to the other, occasionally flinging herself in a chair to smoke and flip through a magazine, but always getting up to pace again. I lay in bed with my gun in my lap and watched the door and balcony. It was, as she said, possible that another visitor might try barging in. But the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed.

“It’s dark. Can’t we go now?” she asked finally.

I undid the belt that had supported the Corsican’s torso. He stayed sitting up smartly. I replaced his shoes and socks with slippers and rolled his pant cuffs up, then did the same with his jacket cuffs. As a final touch, I refreshed the drink in his hand with new ice cubes and pulled the robe’s hood as far over his head as I could.

Whatever attack of nerves Vera had been having was over. Suddenly, she was as cool as the ice cubes.

We began our promenade.

Down in the elevator and through the lobby we rolled our rigid friend. Tourists on all sides exchanged tips on sunburn lotions. A maitre d’hotel stopped us to ask whether we’d be dining in. All the while, Vera and I kept laughing and joking, occasionally making a point of including the man in the wheelchair in the conviviality.

Outside it was dark. Vera opened the back door of the Mercedes, and I carefully lifted our friend into the car. I put the wheelchair in the trunk, and we got in front. No one tried to stop us.

No one followed us out of Albufeira, either.

Twenty miles west, I cut the lights and drove the Mercedes out onto a cliff. I removed the convalescent’s robe and slippers and put back the shoes and socks and rolled down the cuffs. It was impossible to get the glass from his hand so I smashed the glass with a rock.

“If you cut the stomach open, gas can escape, and he won’t float,” Vera suggested.

In the moonlight her face was soft and delicate, a complete mismatch to her words.

“Let him float.”

I dragged the body to the edge and looked down. Surf pounded into the cliff’s ragged skirt of rocks. The tide was rising, and water hissed over razor-sharp barnacles. Within minutes the dead man would be slashed past recognition. I pushed my foot forward.

A black form dropped onto the foaming rocks. A wave dashed over the boulders, and the form was gone.

“That’s it. He’ll turn up in a fishing net a day or two from now. If anyone thinks of us, we pushed a laughing, drinking, live man out of our room.”

Vera smiled, almost glowed.

“Raki, you’re a very smooth operator.”

“Vera, not as smooth as you.”

She faltered.

“What do you mean?”

“Why, I only got rid of him, Vera. You killed him.”