The Spanish Connection

Fifteen

We were the first ones down for breakfast next morning. In spite of Juana's glowing look, she was spiritually depressed. I laid it to the fact that we had botched our assignment.

We had a Continental breakfast and sat in the bright light of the sunshine eating it. I suggested a morning of skiing before departing from Spain, but she demurred.

"I just want to pack up."

I nodded. "I'm going up to the Veleta and do a run or two."

She nodded, her thoughts far off.

"A penny?"

She failed to respond.

"Two pennies?"

"What?"

"For your thoughts. What's the matter?"

"I guess I was thinking about the waste of human life. Tina Bergson. Barry Parson. The Mosquito. Rico Corelli's first double. And even Elena Morales — wherever she is."

I reached across and gripped her hand. "It's the way of the world."

"It's not a very nice world."

"Did someone promise you it was?"

She shook her head sadly.

I paid the bill and went out.

It was cool but very still on the Veleta. The sun shone brightly. There was a good covering of powder on the surface of the run. I got my binocs out and scanned the slope. As I explained once before there were two runs from the top of the Veleta.

I decided to take the longer run this time, the one that branched out to the left as you went down. I was just putting my glasses back in their leather case when someone climbed over the rocks from the cable car turn-around and came toward me.

It was Herr Hauptli, and — for once — he was alone.

I waved. "Good morning, Herr Hauptli."

He smiled. "Good morning, Herr Peabody."

"I missed you yesterday, or whenever it was we were going to ski together."

"Pressure of business, no doubt," he said pleasantly.

"Yes," I said, glancing quickly at him. But he had turned away to gaze down the slope.

"And where is your lovely wife?"

"Packing."

"Then you are leaving?"

I nodded.

"Pity. It's been such a good run of weather."

"Indeed it has."

He smiled and sat on a rock outcrop near the top of the run. I joined him while he laced his boots tightly and started to wax his skis with blue wax.

"Where are your friends?" I asked him as I sat down next to him. What the hell, I had nothing else to do at the moment.

"They are at the hotel," he smiled. "They did not seem too eager to join me today. A late night at the Bar Esqui with lumumbas running out of their ears."

"You usually are inseparable."

"That is the way with money. It attracts like a magnet." He smiled again, the crows' feet at the corners of his eyes deep and shadowed.

"You are a cynic, Herr Hauptli."

"I am a realist, Herr Peabody."

He picked up the first ski and began to apply wax to the bottom carefully. He was a meticulous, methodic worker, exactly what you would expect of a good German.

"Fraulein Peabody reminds me of someone close to me," he said after a moment.

"Indeed?"

"I had a daughter, you know." He glanced up. "Of course, you did not know. Sorry." He continued with his waxing. "She was a most beautiful girl."

"Was, Herr Hauptli?"

He ignored my interruption. "She was nineteen and away at the University," he went on. "My wife — her mother — died when she was a small girl of five. I am afraid I was never able to give her the proper guidance in growing up. You understand?" His eyes rose and met mine.

"I have never been a father, so I cannot truly know, Herr Hauptli."

"An honest answer." He sighed. "Whatever it was — parental neglect, or misguided lavishment of material possessions on her — when she went away to the University we lost contact."

"It happens these days."

"In her case, the very worst things happened. Her companions were very much into the drug scene." He glanced at me again. "And she became involved with this group to an extent that I could not cope." He continued waxing. "She became addicted to heroin."

I stared at Hauptli.

"One year after her addiction she died of an overdose." He gazed out into the distance over the Vega of Granada. "Self-administered."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"There is no use to waste your sorrow at this late date," said Hauptli with a harsh sound to his normally pleasant voice.

"It's the waste of human life I deplore," I said, thinking of what Juana had said at breakfast.

He shrugged. "In a way, I blame myself. I had evaded the responsibility of a father. I had taken up with other women — not one, but many — and had neglected my daughter." He thought a moment. "And she suffered my neglect, reacting in the only way she could. By rejecting herself in exactly the same way I had rejected her."

"A shrink might tell you differently," I said warningly. "Self-analysis is a dangerous game."

"It wasn't only the women I took up with. It was the business I was in."

"Every man must have a profession," I said.

"But not the one I had."

I watched him, knowing what he was going to say.

"The drug business," he said with a bitter smile. "Yes. I had quite probably supplied the heroin with which my only child had killed herself. How does that sit with your morality, Herr Peabody?"

I shook my head.

"It sat badly with mine. I began to analyze the business I had always been in. I began to think of its effects on the human race. I did not like what I saw."

He selected another ski and began waxing it.

"I decided that it was time to get out of the business and begin making amends for my years of evil-doing."

There was nothing I could say. I waited.

"They told me what would happen if I left the organization. I would be searched out to the ends of the world. And killed." He smiled mirthlessly. "You understand that?"

"Yes, Signor Corelli."

"Enrico Corelli," he said with a half-smile. "Rico Corelli, And you're Carter. They tell me Nick Carter is the best."

I nodded. "Usually. Not always. But usually."

"I tell you, this has been an administrative problem from the beginning. A simple meeting, no? A meeting in the snow — to deal with snow!" He laughed, his strong teeth showing. "A joke, Mr. Carter! A joke."

"Yes," I acknowledged.

"It seemed simple enough. I leave Corsica on the Lysistrata and I meet you in the Sierra Nevada."

"Of course."

"From the beginning there was trouble. The Capos got wind of my scheme. Someone close to me had guessed the truth. Or had eavesdropped. The Mafiosi put out a contract on me."

"The Mosquito."

"Yes. To forestall such a hit, I persuaded my old colleague, Basillio Di Vanessi, to pose as me on my yacht. And the very lovely girl I was sleeping with went with him to make the characterization real."

"You set your own man up?" I said softly.

"Without knowing there would be a successful hit," Corelli said. "Essentially, I did what you say I did. But I did not really think The Mosquito would secceed. I had hopes that the meeting between Basillio and you would go off without a hitch and a real meet between you and me could be arranged."

I sighed.

"But there is more. Just before I left the yacht at Valencia, I discovered that my beautiful Swedish nightingale was scheming to rid herself of me!"

"Tina Bergson?"

"Yes. She wanted me dead. She had put out a contract herself on me." Corelli smiled sardonically.

"Was there any reason?"

"I was as curious as you, Mr. Carter. You must understand Tina a little more clearly."

I understood her quite clearly, but I did not say anything.

"She is a nymphomaniac, Mr. Carter. I think that is no surprise to you. But perhaps her reason for developing into such a Freudian symbol is as interesting as the fact of her obsession."

I looked at him curiously.

"She was raped at the age of fifteen by a Swedish farmhand. She became pregnant. The abortion was successful, but developed sepsis. She underwent a hysterectomy at the age of fifteen. This sterile, beautiful, intelligent creature then became obsessed with her destroyed womanhood, with her inability to be a mother. Since she was neither woman nor man, she became what she must become — a super-human! With that beauty, and that intelligence — I assure you that her intellect is boundless, Mr. Carter! — she decided that she would take over the little empire of which I was master."

"The drug chain," I said.

"Exactly. I am now speaking of her ambitions after I had decided to destroy the chain and reveal its innermost secrets to the United States Narcotics Department."

I nodded. "And that was the reason she hired Parson to kill you!"

"That is correct. Luckily I interpreted her first shocked reactions to my decision to dismantle the chain as suspicious, and kept my eyes open. Although she promised me she would remain faithful to me and accompany me to America, I guessed that she might be lying. So I put a tap on her phone — our villa in Corsica is a large one and each of us has a great deal of freedom — and finally heard her making a deal with Barry Parson in Malaga. Interesting?"

"Most interesting."

"My next move was to put my own spy on Parson. I believe, incidentally, that you'll find Parson listed in Interpol files as Daniel Tussaud, late of the French Underground. He was a child of ten at the time of World War Two, and grew up to a life of espionage and murder."

"He is dead now."

"I suspected as much." Corelli shrugged. "I heard about your exit from the discothèque with your Malaga contact."

I smiled. "Not much escapes you."

"Enough," sighed Corelli. 'Well, Elena Morales did keep a close watch on Parson, after letting him pick her up in a bar in Torremolinos. And it was she who warned me that he had come to Sol y Nieve here to find me and kill me. For that reason I did not meet you at the Veleta."

"I had reasoned that out."

Corelli nodded. He had finished with his skis. "I hoped that perhaps Tina might be killed on the yacht Lysistrata if anything happened there, but she escaped serious injury, as you know. Even though the Capos had planned the execution nicely. That meant that I must keep a weather eye out for not only the Capo's assassin, but for Tina's hired killer as well! The Mosquito. And Parson. So I simply became Herr Hauptli, having hired several out-of-work actors in Valencia to play the part of my supposed sycophants."

I laughed. "You re a most resourceful man, Mr. Corelli."

"I have lived a long life because of my resourcefulness, in a very dangerous profession." He frowned. "Not profession. That desecrates the very meaning of profession. In a very dangerous racket. A good word. Harsh. Flat. Unromantic. Racket."

I nodded.

"I have watched you at some length with admiration." Corelli smiled. "I knew instantly that you had killed The Mosquito. And I predicted that you would kill Parson as well. The death of Tina is a surprise to me. I do not think she committed suicide, as they are saying around the Prado Llano. But I think she must have lost control of that car after quite possibly finding that Parson was dead and figuring that I knew all about her and would kill her."

I said, "In which case she decided to run away before you found out she was here."

"Exactly."

"She's dead. That's all there is to it."

Corelli nodded. He tightened the cable bindings on his skis, fitted his boots to them, then slipped the clamps on. He stood and flexed his knees.

I began to put my own on.

"Care to do the slope with me?"

"Beautiful."

He grinned. "Before that, Nick, I'd like you to take possession of this."

I looked down. He was holding out an envelope. It had a bulge in it. I opened the envelope and saw a familiar-looking roll — microfilm.

"It's just what you think it is. Names. Places. Dates. Everything. All the way from Turkey through Sicily and the Riviera and on to Mexico. You can't miss a thing or a person if you follow the facts. I want that chain destroyed so it can never be put back together again. For Beatrice's sake."

Beatrice. His daughter. And wasn't that Dante's dream image of womanhood?

"Okay, Corelli," I said.

He slapped me on the back. "Let's go!"

He began a slow traverse against the fall line, and then cut across the slope and schussed down toward a curve in the run. Then he turned back in a nicely executed christie, and went around a pile of rocks.

I tucked the microfilm into an inside pocket of my ski jacket and began my run behind him. The snow was packed just right. I could feel my skis biting into the powder with a good springy bounce.

There was Corelli below me as I came around the curve of rocks. He executed a few turns, went into a wedeln, and then turned into a very wide traverse across a flat angle of the run.

I came down behind him, making a few turns and shaking the kinks out of my body. It was at the end of my run and just into the traverse that I saw the third skier on the alternate route.

The slopes were such that the alternate runs kept rejoining at intervals, somewhat like two wires that had been twisted loosely together at certain points.

It was a young man in brown togs. He seemed to be a teenager; at least he had that wiry, slender build. Whatever his age, he was an excellent skier. His skis bit into the snow and he was expert in turning and in drifting down the run.

At the portion of the slope where the two runs came together, the young skier cut back into his side, and went down slowly in a series of flat traverses. He was out of sight behind the backbone of rock that separated the two runs as I came up to Corelli.

"Beautiful pack," I said.

He nodded.

"When you come to the States, I'll take you up to Alta and Aspen. You'll love them!"

He laughed. "I may take you up on that!"

"Good deal," I said. "Go on. I'll follow you down to the next stop."

He grinned and started off.

I came a few moments after him. My right ski had been lagging a bit, and I tried to adjust my stance for better bite.

I moved along the steeper drop, slowing down with a snowplow because the neck between the two rock outcrops was too narrow for graceful maneuvering, and then came to a wide glade of snow and ice that looked like a picnic ground for any skier. I saw Corelli at the far end.

I started down, following Corelli to the left, and it was at that moment that I saw the young boy again.

He had gone down faster than the two of us in the alternate run, and was now approaching the cross-lanes of the two runs at the bottom of the wide, sloping field.

For a moment I drew up, cutting into the snow in an ice-hockey stop and just stood there. The powder was good. The snow beneath seemed solid. But I did not like the angle of the field. I mean, it was steep and it was almost flat, but there was a concave slope to it at the top that I did not quite like the looks of.

Yet Corelli was moving along it halfway down without any trouble. He was skiing from my left to right, and as I watched, he went into a lack turn and came back from right to left. Beyond him I saw the young man in the other run nearing the rock spine that separated our run from his.

I was just about to move out when I caught a warning flicker out of the corner of my eye. I lifted my head again, squinting against the glare of the sun. Had my eyes played tricks on me? No!

The kid held something in his right hand, and was clutching both ski poles under his left arm. He held a weapon of some kind — Yes! It was a hand gun!

Now the kid stopped and crouched in the snow. He was behind the rocks now, and I could not see what he was doing, but I knew instinctively that he was aiming the piece at Corelli who was skiing away from him, unaware that he was targeted in the gunsights.

"Hauptli!" I screamed, using his cover name just in case I was being tricked by some kind of optical illusion.

He turned his head quickly, looking up the slope at me. I waved my arm toward the young man. Corelli turned and could see nothing from his angle. I waved frantically, warningly. Corelli understood something was wrong, and reacted. He tried to change his line of run, but lost his balance and went down in a bad front fall. But he controlled himself and hit on his hip, then started to slide.

I jumped on the skis and slammed down on my poles, schussing straight down toward the rocks behind which the youth was crouched. I tucked both ski poles under my left arm and got out the Luger.

The mogul came up out of nowhere. I was watching the rocks for the kid's head, but I could see nothing of him. The mogul took me midway between knee and ski clamp and threw me flat on my face in the snow, ripping one ski completely off as the safety grips loosened, and sending it sliding down the powdery field. I slid and finally came to a wrenching stop. The other ski lay next to me. I do not even remember its coming off.

Corelli pushed himself up out of the snow, turning now to look at the rocks.

The first shot came. It missed. Now I could see the youth coming up out of the rocks, moving forward. I aimed the Luger at his head and squeezed the trigger. Too far to the right.

He turned quickly and saw me. His cap fell off. Golden hair flowed out around his throat.

It was Tina Bergson!

I was so stunned I could not think.

But then my brain recapitulated the entire story without any prompting.

Tina!

It was not her body in the red Jaguar.

It had to be Elena Morales's. I saw it now. I saw Elena go into Parson's room, and find Parson's dead body where we had left it. And I saw her inside the room — with Tina Bergson already there! Tina had come up to Sol y Nieve to find Parson and direct him to Corelli to kill him. And she had found Parson dead — before Elena came up to the room. So she had called down to the lounge to bring Elena up. And Elena had come, directed by the message.

Tina had forced Elena out onto the balcony and down to the red Jaguar — because now she knew that Elena was Corelli's eyes and ears. She put her in the Jaguar and killed her. In the horseshoe turn, out of sight, she placed Elena behind the wheel, started up the Jaguar with a ski boot or something heavy holding down the gas pedal, and jumped free herself.

And escaped in the dark even though I had come along right after her.

And now…

Now she had come to kill Corelli and take over the drug chain herself — as she had always wanted to do!

I saw Corelli rise again and stare at Tina. Tina fired once again at me. I returned her fire. I was too far away to do any good.

She looked at me, and then at Corelli, and then started on foot across the snow toward Corelli. He was frantically trying to get himself out of the snow and down the slope. Like many men involved in extremely dangerous professions, he apparently did not like to carry a weapon on his own person.

She floundered purposefully toward him in her ski boots, holding her weapon poised high in the air.

The snow was frozen hard around the mogul. I could see it crackling with tension at the top of the slope that formed a rounded contour, slanting down toward the bottom of the field.

I moved back and aimed the Luger down into the snow and fired once, twice, three times. The shots echoed in the air. The snow flew in all directions. There was a splitting crack, and the entire slab of snow and ice began to go — parting company with the upper half of the mogul that had grounded me.

It moved fast once it started. Slide!

She saw it coming but she was unable to escape it. She fired at Corelli two times and then started to run toward him, out of the way of the snow slide, but it caught her and carried her on down with it. I saw her yellow hair vanish in the stuff.

Then the snow piled up and began to disintegrate against the rocks of the spine as it came to rest with a smash and a roar.

I got my skis together and moved slowly down to Corelli.

He was lying on his side bleeding in the snow.

I came up to him. His face was white with pain and his eyes were unfocused. He was going into shock.

"Destroy the chain!" he whispered to me.

I lifted his head out of the snow. "I will, Rico."

It was the first time I had called him by his first name.

He slumped back, a faint smile on his lips.