Brett Halliday

Caught Dead

ONE

There was plenty of time before they had to leave, but the girl was so tense and jumpy she couldn’t respond. Tim Rourke continued stubbornly, breaking off only when the phone rang beside the bed.

“I’m sorry I’m such a zero,” the girl whispered. “I have too much on my mind.”

Rourke picked the phone off the cradle. “Who is it?”

An apologetic desk clerk answered. “You said no calls, Mr. Rourke. I am aware of this. But here is a colleague of yours, Mr. Larry Howe. He is very insisting.”

“Tell him I’m not in.”

“Yes, but you see—”

“Give me that,” a new voice said, and the phone changed hands. “Tim, are you on? We’ve got a small announcement, otherwise known as an ultimatum. O.K. to come up?”

“Who’s we and what’s this about?”

“Stu Wilke from Time-Life. And Noonan—you know, the AP guy. You must have a dim idea what it’s about—this exclusive interview of yours with Alvares.”

“I’ll be glad to discuss it, Larry,” Rourke said easily. “It’s nice of you to take an interest. But this wouldn’t be the best time. I’m right in the middle of something, and she’d be very cross with me if I stopped.”

Howe swore under his breath. “Can you wind it up in a hurry?”

“You never know, do you?” Rourke said cheerfully. “Now we’ll have to go back to the beginning and start over. George in the front bar makes a pretty good whiskey sour. I recommend it. I’ll be down in twenty minutes.”

“All right, but don’t dawdle, O.K.? And don’t try to sneak out the back door. We’ve got Menendez here, and they won’t let you into the prison without him.”

“Larry, that’s an insulting suggestion.” His face was serious as he put back the phone.

The girl said, “Something’s wrong.”

“It’s Howe, from UPI,” Rourke told her. “The resident press corps never likes to be stiffed out of a story, and it seems they’ve reached Menendez.”

“Who?”

“The government PR guy.”

“You gave him money, didn’t you?”

“I guess not enough. But don’t worry about it. So the story isn’t exclusive—that’s not the main thing.”

She brought herself against him with a wriggling motion and touched her lips to his shoulder. “Darling Tim. I’m really ashamed of myself for my lack of performance. I wanted this one to be tremendous for you, because you’ve been so exceedingly nice and obliging. My dear, lie down. Let me be the energetic one.”

Rourke grinned and reached for a cigarette. “Your mind wouldn’t be on it.”

“Perhaps not, but would it make that much difference?”

“To really work,” Rourke said, “everybody has to give a hundred percent. That’s my philosophy, anyway. We’ll bump into each other someday. After the revolution, maybe they’ll make you ambassador.”

“Tim, you’re so funny. What time is it?” She put on her glasses so she could read the numerals on her wristwatch. Glasses and a watch were all she was wearing. She was a lithe, good-looking girl, a little too thin, but then so was Rourke. She wore her black hair long, nearly to her shoulders—it was badly tangled now—with bangs hiding her forehead. She was probably no more than twenty-two, and her quick enthusiasms and ability to do without sleep had on occasion made Rourke feel comparatively elderly.

Her name was Paula Obregon. Her mother was American, her father Venezuelan. She had spent a year at the University of Miami, studying journalism and perfecting her English, and that was when Rourke had met her—very young, very earnest, full of indignation at the lies and distortions of the bourgeois press. Rourke, of course, was the chief investigative reporter on an eminently bourgeois newspaper, the Miami News. That title meant that he was given the crime and corruption stories. After a series he wrote about gambling payoffs to high police officials in Dade County, Paula sent him one of the few fan letters he had ever received.

He took her to lunch, and presently they were spending weekends together. At the end of the school year she returned to Caracas, where her father owned a department store. She sent Rourke a Christmas card, which he never acknowledged.

Three years later, Guillermo Alvares, the man to see in Venezuela for a decade and a half, was turned out of office by a coup led by Air Corps officers. Rourke was vacationing in Trinidad at the time. Regular passenger flights between Venezuela and the United States were suspended during the crisis. Rourke’s editor phoned him and persuaded him to charter a light plane and fly to the mainland to cover the story.

As he was preparing for bed his first evening in the country, Paula Obregon, looking as cute and serious as when she had been a student in Miami, appeared unannounced at his door to ask if he remembered her. The answer to that was that he remembered her very well. She had looked him up, she said, to find out if he was interested in authentic details about the urban guerrilla movement for publication in North America. Certainly, he told her; and if his paper didn’t want the story he could sell it to a magazine. But first things first.

They celebrated their reunion by going to bed. There they had been, except for a few intervals, ever since.

Paula saw him looking at her with a smile. She whipped off her glasses.

“I know!” she said guiltily. “This is our last moment, and I should be thinking about saying good-bye properly. But I can hear the clocks ticking. Twenty minutes, you said. Please—can we go over the timetable just once more?”

Rourke groaned. “I know it by heart.”

“Except that the last time we rehearsed it,” she said seriously, “you were still a little doubtful at one or two places—”

“I’m going to be ad-libbing most of the time.”

“Yes, of course, but at the key points, and in the timing especially, that all has to be letter-perfect or we will end up very much in the soup.” She pulled the sheet to her chin. “Darling, begin at the beginning. Not because there are lives involved. Because you like me.”

“That’s a good reason,” Rourke said.

He studied the burning end of his cigarette. Alvares had been expecting the coup that ended his long residence in the Presidential Palace. He had a private plane, a twin-engined Jetstar, waiting. He reached the airstrip well ahead of the armed detachment that had been sent to arrest him, but the plane crashed on takeoff. Alvares was pulled out of the wreck, unconscious but not seriously hurt. He was now being held in the La Vega prison in Los Carmenes, a hilly district on the outskirts of the city.

There were rumors that he had been roughly handled by the soldiers, that he was now being subjected to the same brutal third-degree the political police had used on the enemies of his own regime. Government spokesmen denied these rumors, but most people in the western hemisphere had stopped believing government spokesmen. Rourke, at Paula’s suggestion, demanded to be allowed to see the prisoner. After some hesitation, the new government, anxious for quick recognition from the United States, had arranged an interview.

“I walk in,” Rourke said. “I give him the cigarettes. I ask a few nothing questions and walk out. What’s hard about that?”

“No, Tim, listen. This gets dinned into our ears over and over in the movement. Needless to say, you can’t anticipate everything, but the more you can prepare for, the less chance something goes wrong. We know La Vega inside and out, enough of our people have passed through there. But Guillermo Alvares is a special prisoner, and they may use different procedures. If they want to take the cigarettes from you—”

“I’ll throw a tantrum. I can work that—I’ve had experience enough with cops back home. Those cigarettes come from his family, and unless they break both my arms I’m going to deliver them personally. They’re for one particular prisoner, not to be divided among the hacks. One thing I did forget to ask you—what if they want to open the cartons?”

“Let them. We have some talented people, and they did a very good professional job, I think. It’s broken into the separate packages, smoke in some, tear gas in others. Then there are two packs containing the explosive, just enough to blow the cartons open. The timing device runs off a mainspring. Tim, I can see why you worry. If they go further and open one of the packages—but they won’t, why would they—and if they discover that your present for Alvares is something else besides cigarettes—”

“Now how could I put together anything that fancy? I can’t even hit a nail with a hammer. Obviously some dirty dog like you planted it on me.”

“Yes, that must be your story,” she said, “but they will need X-ray eyes to see anything peculiar about those cigarettes. I would like to open the cartons and show you. They are Pall Malls, his usual brand. You will have them in your dispatch case, and with a little luck they won’t ask for it to be opened. The interview is to commence at ten, and to impress you with their efficiency, they will be prompt. There is a desk on the ground floor as you enter the prison. If you are to be searched, it will happen there. But a journalist—why should they search you? Then you will go up one flight of stairs to a waiting room. When they are ready you will be admitted for the interview. He speaks English, of course, but out of books. Now there’s a possibility, a very, very faint possibility, that if there has been any kind of delay the material will go off while you are still there—”

“Hey,” Rourke said softly. “That’s the first I’ve heard about that…”

“It will make no difference! The room is not locked. There will be two guards with you, an interpreter. As soon as the tear gas hits them they will be no less anxious than you to get into the open air. Now this is what I wish you to remember. At the bottom of the stairs, as you come into the main corridor, the lobby, don’t continue out the front door or you may be knocked down by our people coming in. Swing into a side corridor and out by another door.”

“Dodging bullets, no doubt.”

“No.” She sketched a design with her fingernail on the sheet. “Turn to the left into that corridor and go straight on. Notice the corridor when you come in. I am sure we will manage this without shooting. There are fifteen guards at the most. Another six or seven political police, a total of less than twenty-five. They will be in a panic, and we will have oxygen masks, keys. The leaders know the layout perfectly. The whole operation will be over and done with in the space of five minutes.”

“If everything works.”

“Which it sometimes doesn’t,” she admitted. “Let’s say the timing control breaks and the devices fail to go off. The first sign of smoke is to be the signal. If there is no smoke we will simply turn about and go home. You will have your interview at least, another series when you return to Miami, the kind of thing that could get you the Pulitzer.”

“And if I end up in jail, will you come in and break me out?”

“Darling, if you seriously think there’s a chance of that happening—”

He grinned at her. “An outside chance. There’s also an outside chance I’ll be mugged in the elevator.”

“Oh, not in the Hilton,” she said, smiling. “It isn’t permitted here. Look—we’ve done everything possible to lengthen the odds. We’re planning some fireworks downtown. A bomb at the Columbus monument. A raid on a bank in the Centro Bolivar. Every available soldier will be rushed into the center of the city, and we will have Los Carmenes to ourselves. Guillermo Alvares will be whisked out of the country. Our MIR comrades will rejoin the fighting units in the mountains. The new junta will shake and shiver. And Mr. Timothy Rourke will be even more famous than now, if such a thing is possible.”

She had been gesturing while she talked, and the sheet had slipped. Rourke laughed.

“Baby, they knew what they were doing when they gave you this assignment. You’re one hell of a sexy guerrilla.”

To his surprise, the serious, self-assured girl looked confused for the first time. “Damn it, Tim, I wish politics didn’t have to creep into everything.” She looked up at him swiftly. “Even in Miami, when I was chasing you around. That wasn’t because you were a bright, interesting-looking guy. You were a newspaperman with a byline everybody knew. I was always thinking of ways you could help us.”

“That’s always been one of my problems. Do they love me for myself, or because of the byline?”

“When I came to see you here, you know I’d almost forgotten how nice it was to have sex with you?”

Putting out his cigarette, Rourke came over to her under the sheet, and after a moment, he felt her relax.

“Do you think we really have time?” she said gently.

“Out of the question. You’ve got me thinking of timetables and tear gas.”

“That was part of my role as a revolutionary. I should do something now in my role as a girl.”

She guided him into position above her. “But I believe it’s not possible. We have done it so frequently, and you say you are thinking of bombs. I wish it could happen, because we won’t see each other for how long, but as a Marxist-Leninist I believe in facing facts.” She touched him. “It is possible, I see. And it would make you less nervous. I think it would be the best thing to do politically, don’t you agree?”

He kissed her gently to make her stop talking.

TWO

They dressed hurriedly.

Larry Howe called again from downstairs. Rourke, wearing only his socks, assured him that he was just that minute walking out the door.

“I wish there wasn’t this last-minute difficulty,” Paula said, zipping up her skirt. “But if somebody else goes to the interview with you, I don’t see that it changes anything.”

“If I was in their shoes I’d squawk, too. They don’t like somebody coming in from outside to grab off the big story.”

“So long as the cigarettes are delivered.”

“Count on it,” he told her. “I know I can make it stick.”

Paula ran a comb through her hair and checked her appearance in a mirror. She made a disgusted face, though Rourke thought she looked as splendid as usual.

“I’d better tell you,” she said nervously. “I didn’t want to worry you, but I think I spotted a policeman behind us when we went out near the prison this afternoon. But who cares? In one hour and a half you’ll be at sea and I’ll be holed up in a barrio, where they won’t dare to look for me.”

She put the two cartons of Pall Malls into Rourke’s battered attaché case, otherwise empty except for a ruled yellow pad, several soft pencils, and a pint of American whiskey. Rourke thrust his necktie into a side pocket. She came up to him, put her hands inside his jacket and hugged him hard.

“It’s been marvelous,” she said. “Now, speaking as a girl… do you think we’ll ever see each other again?”

“After you win.”

“Then I hope we win soon. Tim, I think I would have come to see you even if it hadn’t been for these cigarettes—”

“I doubt it,” he said, “but that’s all right. I never thanked you for the Christmas card you sent me.”

“Oh, well. I know you’re not the Christmas card type. Tim, will you be careful?”

“You’re the one who ought to be careful. You’re the guerrilla.”

She came up on her toes and pressed her lips against his briefly, then turned and went out, cracking the door first to make sure there was no one in the hall.

Rourke’s smile faded abruptly. He opened the dispatch case. Taking out the yellow pad, he wrote a quick note. He ripped off the sheet, folded it, and slipped it into an unstamped envelope addressed to his friend Michael Shayne, the well-known Miami private detective. The envelope already contained another folded sheet, torn out of a memorandum book or a diary. The phone was clamoring again as he went out.

He knocked lightly on a door near the elevators. It was opened by an American in a T-shirt and slacks. Rourke gave him the envelope and a $20 bill.

“You’re still going up on the early plane?”

“Sure, no change,” the man said. “But I was thinking… Why don’t I wait and give it to the messenger service at the Fontainebleau, instead of at the airport? It’ll get delivered faster.”

“Fine. Just be damn sure you don’t forget.”

“Hell, it’s the easiest twenty bucks I ever made.”

Larry Howe, a long way from his usual genial self, was facing the elevators in the lobby. He was an old Latin American hand, almost entirely bald, with a moon face fitted out with big glasses and a big cigar.

Rourke looked at Menendez, who shifted weight patches—competent, plodding wire-service copy, a dim reflection of Howe himself, who drank heavily, pursued girls, and had had many lively adventures which never made it to the UPI wire.

Two of the men with him were new to Rourke. The third, Menendez, the Venezuelan information man who had handled the arrangements for the interview, seemed to wish he was somewhere else.

“The Tim Rourke legend,” Howe said sourly. “Stories breaking all over town, and he’s sacked out with a babe. We’re a little late, so this has to be abrupt. Plans have changed.”

Rourke looked at Menendez, who shifted weight and continued to look uncomfortable.

“I am sorry, you know. There are sometimes things one cannot help.”

Howe broke in impatiently. “I’ll grant you, the interview was your idea, Tim, and as a new face in town you had the leverage to put it across. But is it fair to the rest of us?”

“Who said it had to be fair?”

“Or good journalism. The whole idea, the way Menendez got the junta to approve, was to quash the rumors about Guillermo Alvares being tortured.”

“Larry, let’s talk about it over a drink,” Rourke suggested.

Howe shook his head. “We aren’t negotiating, Tim. It’s an accomplished fact. We’ve persuaded Menendez that the interview will fulfill its purpose only if it’s conducted by someone who has seen Alvares in action over the years. He’s what—fifty-nine, and he’s been sick lately. I had a conversation with him ten days ago. Do you see what I mean? I know the shape he was in then, and when I report how he looks tonight, I’ll have something to compare it with.”

“Glad to have you along, Larry. Just don’t step on my heels.”

Again Howe shook his head. “He isn’t holding a press conference. It’s a one-man interview. All the resident correspondents got together and drew for it. I drew the long straw.”

Rourke said philosophically, “I never have any luck drawing straws, especially when the drawing takes place somewhere else.”

“We wrote up a list of questions, and if you’ve got anything special you want to ask, fine. Everybody gets a copy of his answers, plus my appraisal of his physical condition. You can file your own story.”

“Gee, Larry, thanks. Did you have a hard time persuading the information office?”

He was looking at Menendez, who shrugged and looked down.

“It’s the only sensible way to do it.”

“If it’s all sewed up,” Rourke said, “the only thing I can do is write a story about under-the-counter payments made by the dean of the local press corps to venal information officials—”

Howe peered at him narrowly over his black-rimmed glasses and the Venezuelan made a placating gesture with both hands.

Rourke went on. “Nothing personal, Larry, but if you come back with a story that criticizes anybody, your sources will dry up. You’re going to be here after I’m gone. You have to deal with the powers-that-be.”

“Don’t be a horse’s ass,” Howe said quietly. “I’ve been assigned here a long time. I’ll be goddamned if I like being frozen out of a story in my own backyard.”

“Let’s be broadminded and do it together.”

Menendez said unhappily, “I have not that authority.”

“It’s set up for one man,” Howe explained, “and they’re new at this so they tend to be a little rigid. We can wait till tomorrow and try, but by then they may be having second thoughts about the whole thing. Is it that important, Tim?” He added, “Because it is to me. I got caught in the mountains and missed most of the excitement this week. I’ve been getting some nasty queries from New York. I need to recoup.”

Rourke’s mind was racing. “Hell,” he said, with a brusque gesture. “I don’t like to sound like a prima donna. Use my personal dice or I won’t play. Just give me your personal assurance, Larry, that this isn’t a cover up.”

“Absolutely nothing of the kind!” Menendez exclaimed.

Howe said, “I’ll call it the way I see it, Tim.”

“Then O.K. Here’s the question I want asked. Does he have any statement about CIA involvement in the coup? How much money did they throw in, and did they sabotage the getaway plane?”

“Absolutely not!” Menendez said. “We can’t permit such questions.”

“Why do you think I wanted this interview?” Rourke said roughly. “So he could show me his bruises? If you don’t feel like asking that question, Larry, you can expect a major stink. And there’s one other thing. I said I’d take him in a couple of cartons of cigarettes. That’s a real commitment.”

“You can give them to me,” Menendez said.

“No, I guaranteed I’d deliver them personally, and I have good private reasons for doing it. Make me a solemn promise, Larry, that you’ll lay these cigarettes on Alvares and nobody else, and maybe I won’t feel so annoyed about the rest of this.”

Howe agreed to take over the commission. After some discussion they compromised on a milder version of Rourke’s CIA question. Howe put one carton of Pall Malls in each side pocket of his jacket and assured Rourke again that he wouldn’t surrender them to anybody but Alvares himself.

“It’s a nice touch, as a matter of fact. I remember noticing he smoked Pall Malls. I’d judge he’s a two-pack-a-day man, and when he sees what I brought him he’s going to feel grateful as hell.”

Howe rode with the Venezuelan. The other correspondents arranged to meet him afterward at the UPI office on the Avenido Andres Bello. Rourke had a rented Ford. Menendez suggested that he follow them out, in case the prison people raised any objection to the last-minute substitution.

The La Vega prison had been in continuous use since the earliest years of the Republic. A fortress-like structure, it had narrow slits for windows and a red tile roof within an adobe wall topped with triple strands of barbed wire. At one time it had been surrounded by open countryside, but the city had grown up around it. It was a high-security prison, used mainly for political prisoners and others awaiting trial for capital offenses. Confined here, in addition to Alvares himself, were a half-dozen prominent Alvaresites, high Army officers who had chosen not to join the revolt, and a number of leftists who opposed both the Alvares regime and the one that had replaced it.

Rourke had spent hours studying a street plan of Los Carmenes, but knowing his facility for getting lost in strange towns, he and Paula had reconnoitered the area that afternoon and worked out the routes he was to follow.

The Menendez car went through a gate into the prison compound. Rourke parked outside, rang, and was admitted. Menendez, facing a grim prison official, was talking and gesticulating. The prison authorities, it seemed, had not been notified that Lawrence J. Howe had replaced Timothy Rourke as the American who was being given the interview with their celebrated prisoner. Phone calls were exchanged. The appointed time, ten o’clock, came and went. Final approval came through at 10:15. Howe patted the cartons in his pockets and gave Rourke a reassuring nod. He and Menendez, with a three-man escort, went up the stairs.

Rourke returned to the street.

The area around the prison was brightly lighted with mercury vapor lamps. He had parked several blocks away, outside the reach of the lights. Before getting into his car he strolled casually to the next corner.

The sidestreet climbed steeply, twisting, into the hills. A few yards from the corner he saw a closed delivery van. Like all the other vehicles on the block it was parked with its two inside wheels on the sidewalk. This, he surmised, was one of the MIR trucks, loaded with armed men, waiting on streets leading to the prison. One of the detachments had a ladder and ropes to get over the outer walls and unbar the gate. The signal was to be a single pistol shot, fired by an observer posted in one of the apartments overlooking the prison as soon as the first sign of smoke appeared.

Rourke suppressed an idiotic impulse to rap sharply on the side of the truck, to startle the men inside. Throwing away his cigarette, he returned to the rented Ford, where he eased a little of the tension with a few gulps of raw whiskey.

He was putting the bottle back in the dispatch case when the opposite door opened, turning on the dome light. A squat dark man, hatless and needing a shave, in a short-sleeved shirt, looked in.

“Mr. Rourke, I will get into the car with you one minute with your permission,” he said in heavily accented English, and slid inside. He left the door slightly ajar, so the light would stay on, and showed the American a badge pinned to a leather folder.

“Pichardo, of the Caracas police.” Having made that announcement, he pulled the door shut. “I wish something explained, please. Do you understand my English?”

Rourke forced himself to reply evenly. “Barely.”

“I attended the school in Washington, District of Columbia, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, very interesting, very informative, but I have not many chances anymore to practice the language. I am in a”—he hunted for a word—“condition of questioning.”

“Maybe I can help you.”

“You were driving around in Los Carmenes this afternoon.”

“Do you have some kind of ordinance against sightseeing out here?”

“With a señorita,” the policeman continued. “A North American, I think, from her costume. I took a photograph of her with my zoom lens.”

“She was showing me around. You probably know I’m a newspaperman. I had an interview scheduled for tonight with Alvares. Didn’t anybody tell you that? I wanted to see the prison in daylight so I could describe it.”

With the light off, Rourke couldn’t see the dashboard clock. He lit a cigarette. As the lighter flared he saw that it was 10:35.

“I don’t know why all this concerns you,” Rourke continued. “There was a change in plans. Another guy is interviewing the colonel now. I have to file a story as soon as he comes out, and I’m trying to get the lead set in my head. So if you don’t mind—”

“I have reason to think the young lady of this afternoon has revolutionist connections. Are you aware of that?”

Rourke made a clucking sound. “Such a cute kid, too.”

“I thought so, indeed,” the policeman said. “But what is inside the head can be bad, although the outside face is good, and the body. She visited you in your hotel this evening. She came out by the kitchen entrance. I thought of following her, but as you see I am assigned to you.”

“Am I supposed to be a dangerous leftist too?”

Pichardo said, vaguely, “I am given my orders, which I do my best to carry out—”

And suddenly, without warning, a tremendous blast blew part of the roof off the prison.

The street seemed to lurch violently, and Rourke had the sensation that a cymbal player had just clapped his cymbals simultaneously against both his ears. His head filled with a crash of sound.

He felt stunned and tricked. He had been told that the guerrilla experts had placed a small explosive charge in the cartons, just enough to release the smoke and gas. But this had been something on an altogether different order of magnitude, the equivalent of a couple of dozen sticks of dynamite or a 3000-pound bomb.

Both men had frozen, but Rourke, who had been listening intently for a faint bang or a pistol shot, broke out of it first. He had turned toward Pichardo, his arm resting on the back of the seat. With the echoes still rolling, an instinctive reflex action brought his closed fist down sharply against the side of the policeman’s unshaven jaw.

Rourke knew himself to be one of the least athletic members of a sedentary profession. At six-feet-two, he weighed only 160, and not much of that was muscle. Almost his only exercise was tapping a typewriter with two fingers and fishing orange peels out of Old-fashioneds. He would occasionally lose patience with some right-wing idiot in a bar, to the point where he would throw a punch, but the person he hit rarely fell down. Tonight, desperation gave him strength and the unexpected blow stunned the policeman.

Coming around, Rourke hit him with a flurry of rights and lefts, and a hot flow of pain washed up his arm. Pichardo looked at him stupidly and made a faint sound of protest. Rourke felt to see if he was carrying a gun—apparently not. Feeling a sudden clutch of panic, he lashed out again with both fists, unlatched the door, and tumbled the half-conscious policeman into the street.

Probably no more than three seconds had passed since the explosion. Rourke thought he heard a faint patter, like falling debris. A black ball of smoke rose slowly above the prison.

“Jesus,” he said aloud, and hit the starter.

He was a half block away before he remembered to turn on the lights. If anybody was shouting after him, it was lost in the wild acceleration. He swung to the left at the first corner. The street map he had studied so carefully was gone from his mind. He turned again. Instead of running downhill as he had expected, this street ran up. Remembering that most of the streets around here came to a dead end in the hills, he went into reverse and backed down frantically. As he came around, he heard shouting from the prison, the shrill pipe of a whistle.

He found a main avenue, and this time he made what he was sure was the correct turn. He had been too insistent about those cigarettes. He was in trouble now, in serious trouble, probably the worst trouble of his career. His only hope was to get out of the country before he was picked up and asked to explain. He knew that no blast that great could have failed to kill somebody. Who was the target, why had Paula done this to him—all that would have to wait.

It struck him that he was calling attention to himself by the recklessness of his driving, and he slowed down. The plan—it had been Paula’s and he suddenly mistrusted it—had been for him to circle northward and turn west on the Avenida Liberator, skirting the center of the city. Now nothing looked familiar. Every light seemed to be against him. He tried desperately to think. There was more and more traffic. Halted for a red light, he heard the clanging of a bell, a siren.

When the light changed, he turned south to put the siren behind him and was stopped almost at once by a police barrier. A policeman with huge white gloves herded the traffic off the avenue, where again it clotted. Horns blared around him. He could hear more sirens, and they seemed to be coming closer. He stepped out onto the street and looked both ways. He was caught in a solid freeze of cars.

He checked, about to duck back into the Ford. He could hardly believe that he saw the policeman Pichardo, who should have been recovering consciousness in a gutter in another part of town, limping along the crowded sidewalk toward him. The policeman was shorter than he had seemed in the car and there was a bloody smear on his face where it had been scraped by Rourke’s fist. From the beginning of the headlong flight, there had been a steady procession of lights across Rourke’s rearview mirror, and it was a bad shock to discover that one pair of those headlights had hung behind him all the way.

His heart hammering unpleasantly, he slid across the front seat and out by the other door, leaving the lights on and the motor running. Bent forward with his shoulders hunched, he sliced between the stalled lanes, around a truck and across the sidewalk to the next corner.

Here he used a trick he had learned from his friend Mike Shayne. He bent to tie a shoelace, and when he straightened, stood quietly against the building. Pichardo reached the abandoned Ford. As he bent to look in, Rourke crossed the street and started back on the opposite sidewalk. Pichardo stepped up on another car’s bumper to get added height, but he was looking the wrong way.

Rourke passed behind him. He went with the crowd. His moment of invisibility passed, and he began to feel more and more conspicuous, much too tall, too American, wearing clothes that had been bought in another country.

He reviewed his situation and found it far from encouraging. His friends were all elsewhere. He was carrying only a few hundred bolivars, about $45, not enough for an airplane ticket. In any case, by the time he could reach the airport the police would be waiting for him. The MIR, Paula’s underground organization, had gotten him into this jam and conceivably they might be willing to get him out. But how could he reach them? All the contacts had been one-way.

He lost himself in a maze of streets, came out on a major avenue and saw a hotel. Entering through a cafe, he found a public phone.

It was one of several, in open alcoves in a corner of the main lobby. One of the few things he was able to do with his limited stock of Spanish was to make a phone call. He spilled a handful of coins on the shelf beneath the phone, asked for the overseas operator and gave her a Miami number. He wanted her to hurry, but he didn’t know how to say that in Spanish.

THREE

Michael Shayne and the girl had spent the day fishing off the Keys, had returned to the city late and were among the last diners in the restaurant. This was Shayne’s favorite restaurant in the area, an unpretentious seafood place in downtown Miami.

“I have a feeling they want to kick us out,” the girl said.

“What makes you think that?” Shayne said. “Just because he keeps hovering around winding his watch—” He grinned up at the waiter. “All right, Lou, stop giving us hints. Let’s have the check.”

“Take your time, Mike. Are you sure you don’t want another brandy?”

The manager came over from the cash counter, bringing a phone. “A call for you, Mike.”

He set the phone on the table and plugged it in. Shayne said hello.

Over a crackle of static and the sound of an operator completing another call, Tim Rourke’s voice said: “Mike. Listen carefully.”

There was a thump and the line went dead.

“Tim?” Shayne said, sitting forward.

He heard nothing but a slow crackle, a woman’s voice saying something faintly in Spanish. An instant before, Shayne’s rangy, well-muscled athlete’s body had been totally relaxed. Now he crouched forward, lines of concentration forming at the corners of his eyes.

“Tim, can you hear me?”

“Is that Tim Rourke?” the girl said as he clicked for the operator. “Isn’t he off somewhere in the Bahamas?”

“Trinidad, the last I knew,” Shayne said. “Drinking rum punches and talking about going snorkeling. He actually did some skindiving one afternoon about six years ago.”

He continued to rattle the disconnect bar. A moment passed before he could get the operator’s attention.

“Give me the supervisor,” he said curtly.

When that woman was on, he had her check her long-distance lines. She reported in a moment that Rourke had been calling person-to-person from Caracas, Venezuela. Shayne’s answering service had passed the call along to the restaurant. They had lost the connection, but if Shayne would hang up, undoubtedly his party would place the call again.

“No, let’s do it this way,” Shayne said. “The Caracas operator must have a record of the call. Ask her to check the number he was calling from, and get back to me. Can you do that? I believe it may be important.”

He hung up, frowning. “You never know when Tim’s after a story. If anybody gets in his way he tries to run over them, and you know Tim—he’s no bulldozer. All he said was, ‘Listen carefully,’ and we were cut off.”

“‘Listen carefully,’” she repeated.

“The connection was lousy. I don’t know, but it seemed to me he sounded”—he hesitated—“as though the roof was about to fall in. And God knows that kind of thing has been known to happen to Tim.”

“Venezuela. I think I read about some kind of trouble down there.”

Shayne shrugged. He had just come off a hard case and hadn’t looked at a paper or television for five days. He ordered another round of cognac and paid for it when it came, dismissing the waiter.

The phone rang. “On that Caracas call,” the supervisor said. “It was placed from a public phone, and the instrument appears to be out of order. The operator gets a busy signal. She’s cut into the line, but no one is talking on it.”

“O.K. If it’s an inside phone see if you can get the location. Maybe there’s somebody there who can tell us something.”

Shayne had time to finish his cognac before she came back.

“It’s a hotel, Mr. Shayne. They’re ringing.”

In a moment a desk clerk answered and he and Shayne had a puzzling, inconclusive exchange. Like most hotel employees in Latin America, the Venezuelan spoke English, but he couldn’t seem to put his mind on what Shayne was saying. There was a babble of voices around him.

“What’s going on?” Shayne said. “What’s all the excitement?”

“It is difficult to know, Señor. Pardon me. I must—”

He clicked off.

Becoming more alarmed, Shayne dialed the number of Rourke’s paper and asked for the night editor, a veteran newspaperman named Caldwell, who had frequently covered for Rourke when the reporter’s unorthodox methods made the management unhappy. Rourke had been in Caracas several days, he told Shayne, and had filed his first dispatch that afternoon. It would appear in the next day’s paper.

“Nothing new in the piece,” Caldwell said. “The dictator down there just got the boot—you probably read about it. Tim wrote it like a crime story. The capos didn’t like the way the boss was cutting up the melon, so they withdrew their respect. That made it an automatic hit and a contract was issued. But before the button men could reach him he tried to lam, cracked up, and the fuzz got him. It’s a typical Tim Rourke story and we’re giving it a good play.”

“It’s probably going to offend a few people down there.”

Caldwell laughed. “He’ll be out of the country before they see it. He’s due back in the morning.”

“Do you know how to reach him?”

“He’s probably staying at the Hilton. We’ve got a due bill there. Why?”

“He called a few minutes ago, but somebody pulled us out before he could say anything.”

“Let me try him from here.”

Shayne held on, drumming his fingers on the table until Caldwell reported that Rourke was indeed registered at the Hilton, but his room phone didn’t answer.

“What did he say to you, exactly?”

“‘Listen carefully.’ That’s all. I could hardly hear him. That could mean almost anything, but now the son of a bitch has got me worrying.”

“Listen carefully. I’m in a corner and need help. Or—listen carefully, I’ve just met a chick and you won’t believe these measurements. With Tim, it’s a tossup. But if somebody’s chasing him in Caracas, what can you do about it in Miami? I left word at the hotel for him to call the paper. If we haven’t heard from him by morning there are various things we can do.”

“Do something else for me,” Shayne said. “Watch the teletype, and if anything out of the ordinary comes in, let me know.”

The phone rang a little after two. Shayne was awake, smoking in the darkness.

He was still bothered by the odd little episode, although he had had many equally strange calls from Rourke, from stranger places. Having filed his story, Rourke would be out on the town. After a certain number of drinks, he always had a strong desire to telephone people.

On an impulse—obviously he wasn’t rushing off to Latin America on the strength of two words as innocuous as listen carefully—Shayne had phoned the Miami International Airport to check on flights to Venezuela. Plane service had been resumed, and the first was at nine in the morning. By that time Caldwell would have heard something.

Now he turned on the tight-focus lamp on the bedside table and spoke softly into the phone, trying not to awaken the sleeping girl beside him.

“Shayne.”

Caldwell’s voice was tight. “Well, he’s been busted, Mike, and needless to say, not for anything minor. Alvares and a couple of others have been assassinated, including an American, a UPI man. Tim had something to do with planting the bomb.”

Shayne swung out of bed. “Read it to me.”

“That’s the flash. The follow-up’s just beginning to come in.”

Shayne shook out another cigarette and lit it from the stub of the one he had been smoking.

“Larry Howe,” Caldwell said, “interviewing the ex-president in La Vega prison. Bomb exploded. Terrific force. Center of prison torn apart, killing Alvares, Howe, and a government official named Menendez. Calderistas demonstrating in downtown Caracas. Army mobilized. Students have taken over university. New junta seen endangered.”

The girl sat up in bed, pushing back her hair. “What is it, Mike?”

He shrugged and waited.

Caldwell continued. “General round-up of left-wing opposition. Yeah, here it comes. American reporter Timothy Rourke accused of smuggling bomb into prison inside cigarette carton. Slugged a cop, attempted to escape. Recaptured after automobile chase through downtown Caracas. That’s our Tim.”

“Is the News plane available?”

“As far as I know. I’ll find out.”

“If the paper wants to retain me to go down there and see what happened I can leave right away. It would help to represent somebody.”

“I know we’ll go along with that, Mike, but it may take a while to make it official. I’ll have to wake up a few people. The front office hasn’t been too enthused about Tim lately, but what choice do they have? He’s on our payroll, after all. ‘Listen carefully.’ I wish he’d finished that sentence. What do you think, Mike? Do you think he really had anything to do with this bomb thing?”

“Hell, no. He has romantic ideas about guerrilla movements, but not to the extent of helping them blow up people. He had to be conned, which means there’s a girl involved. See how much cash you can scrape up. I’ll need to buy some help after I get there.”

“How well do you know Caracas?”

“Not at all. I’ve never been there. And I don’t speak Spanish. So I want to be carrying plenty of cash.”

He dressed quickly. The girl was sitting up watching him, but the look on his face kept her from asking questions. He packed a small bag, including a fifth of cognac, a .38 revolver and a box of ammunition. After some hunting, he located his passport.

“You’ll need somebody who can translate for you,” she said finally. “Why not take me?”

Without replying, Shayne dialed the Washington, D.C., area code, and followed it with the unlisted phone number of one of the two Florida Senators, who had won re-election partly as a result of some last-minute help from Shayne.

The Senator’s wife answered.

“This is Michael Shayne. I’m sorry about the hour, but I need to talk to him.”

“Mike, damn it, he had trouble getting to sleep, and if you could wait till morning—”

The Senator took the phone. “At two-thirty I know it’s got to be important, Mike. What can I do?”

Shayne gave him a quick summary of the news from Caracas.

“Tim Rourke!” the Senator exclaimed. “Mixed up in an assassination? They must have the wrong man.”

“This was just the bulletin—there probably won’t be any more hard news till morning. If he’s in jail, here’s the problem. He doesn’t believe in telling cops anything but his name and address and sometimes not even that. But I know him well enough so that if I can get in to see him he may be able to pass on something. And then what do I do with it? All I can say in the Spanish language is ‘thanks’ and ‘how are you?’ Are you with me this far, Senator?”

“I think so. I’d say you have your work cut out for you.”

“But everybody will figure he told me something important, whether he actually did or not. That’s going to open up possibilities. What I want to get from you is the name of somebody in the Embassy who can give me some background without making a big official thing out of it.”

“I see,” the Senator said slowly. “Who can find out what the police are thinking, and can put you onto angles he can’t do anything about himself—”

“That’s it. Tim’s an American citizen, but they’ll want to know whether he’s innocent or guilty before they stick their necks out for him. I’m hoping to use the News plane. I can call you from the airport. If you can ask somebody in the State Department—”

“I can give you a name right now. It’s Felix Frost. I’ve read reports by him, and the man seems to be absolutely first class. He’s on the Embassy payroll, but I’m assuming he represents the intelligence community, in one way or another. Be discreet about that aspect, of course. He has good pipelines into all the various political groups and his connections with the new junta seem to be very good.”

“Will he cooperate?”

“I’ll suggest it to him, and inasmuch as I’m a member of the Armed Services Committee, I believe he’ll cooperate with enthusiasm. I’m not saying you can trust him fully. These fellows seem to get more devious year by year. But I know I don’t have to give you that warning.”

Shayne thanked him, and the Senator offered to do anything else he could to help.

“I like Tim, but don’t take too many chances, Mike. You know it’s no longer possible to send the Marines down after you. Those days are past, and on the whole I think it’s a good thing. Well, back to sleep, perhaps.”

Shayne hung up and told the girl, “Make a call for me. The man’s name is Felix Frost, in Caracas, and it may take a little time to get his home phone. Mention the Senator and ask him to have somebody meet me at the airport.”

“Mike, I really can speak Spanish. I could sit in a hotel room and take your phone calls.”

Leaning down, he kissed her forehead. “I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Get back in one piece, Mike, please?”

FOUR

The loading steps were wheeled into place. As Shayne came out of the plane, the hot rim of the sun was beginning to rise out of the Caribbean. A short, cheerful Venezuelan waited at the bottom of the steps.

His teeth flashed. “You are Mr. Michael Shayne,” he informed Shayne. “I am Andres Rubino, sent to meet you by Mr. Felix Frost, who regrets enormously that he cannot be here in person! Welcome to Venezuela!”

“Thanks,” Shayne said, taking his outstretched hand.

Rubino gave a little skip of pleasure. He wanted to carry Shayne’s bag, but Shayne shook him off.

“I think all is arranged with Immigration and Customs,” Rubino said, walking sideward. “One cannot be certain because of the change in regime. You bribe them one minute, the next minute they forget they ever saw you, but this time I trust that won’t be the case. I know all about you, sir! I admire you! We have great respect for honesty among detectives because there is so little of it among us here. Through this door, please.”

They were waved through the barrier, and Rubino took Shayne out through the deserted, echoing concourse. Weapons-carriers bristling with .50-caliber machine guns were lined up in front of the terminal. A Jaguar convertible, top down, was parked in a forbidden zone. Two armed soldiers, who had been looking into the car, backed away guiltily. Rubino released a flood of angry Spanish, and they moved away even further.

“A jewel of a car,” the Venezuelan said. “And because of diplomatic stickers one can drive like the wind and park where one pleases. Mr. Frost knows my weakness. I am willing to work for him for next to nothing, to have the privilege of driving about in such a car.” Having slid behind the wheel and snapped on the ignition, he said, “Mr. Shayne, may I speak a serious word if you please before we commence?”

“Go ahead.”

“Please notice the skill with which I manipulate the car. I am truly very professional, I believe. I would like to persuade you to employ me while you are here. I speak English with the utmost facility, as you see. I grew to manhood in the city of Caracas, and I know its ins and its outs, its barrios and its luxurious neighborhoods of high-rise apartments. Also the ins and outs of the shifting political spectrum. I asked Mr. Frost for permission to apply for the post, and he said he was neutral in the matter. So I plead my case.”

“Do you know why I’m here?”

“Of course, to defend your friend Mr. Rourke. To get him out of prison if possible. And people will attempt to swindle you by selling you false information. I am in that precise business myself, to a certain extent—I will protect you against them. There is hardly one single honest man in Caracas. I am sorry to say it, for it is my native place, but it is a city of crooks.”

“Did Rourke really have anything to do with planting that bomb?”

“Very much so. That is definitely established. But Mr. Frost told me to drive you and shut up about crime and politics. That is difficult for me because I have the name of a regular chatterbox. So I put the top down on the car and I will drive fast, and if I venture an opinion on some forbidden matter, the wind will carry it away. Mr. Frost will tell you I am reliable, less expensive than some. We’re off! Please fasten the seatbelt because I intend to eat up the concrete.”

He flashed his teeth, went into gear, and they shot away from the terminal, leaving smears on the pavement. Shayne adjusted the seatbelt and sat back.

A modern multi-lane expressway connected the big Maiquetia Airport on the coast with the capital in the mountains. Rubino drove carefully, but very fast. At sea level it was already hot, but the air cooled rapidly as they climbed. The new road was paralleled by a much older one, snaking down from the barren foothills in long, lazy loops. Rubino pointed toward it and shouted, “Off-limits! Bandits!”

He laughed, his long hair whipping. He swung out into the passing lane and roared around a straggling convoy of Army vehicles, rusty, poorly maintained jeeps and command cars. The soldiers yelled and made obscene gestures toward the millionaires in the elegant British car. Rubino sounded his horn derisively, his other hand raised in a one-finger salute.

“Desgraciados! Sheep-lovers! You smell of fat!”

Traffic thickened as they approached the city and he was forced to slow down. Soldiers were everywhere. Military aircraft zoomed overhead, much too low.

“It looks like something’s about to happen,” Shayne commented.

“I am under orders from Mr. Frost not to discuss it! And I’m a poor prophet anyway. I never guess right.”

He dropped off the highway on a curving ramp and crossed beneath it, heading north. Presently he slowed, pointing the Jaguar at a gate in a high wall.

“But I think I must give my opinion for what it is worth, which is nil. Don’t repeat it to Mr. Frost because he’s the unquestioned authority. I think nothing further will happen at present, until there is some shift in the balance, because nobody knows who blew up the Bull, you see, or for what reason.”

“That’s Alvares?”

“Known as the Bull, for his bravery and stupidity. No one is taking credit as yet for his death, so the people are uncertain about which way to move. There was much milling about on the streets last night but no signs of direction.”

“What’s your idea about who killed him?”

“Ah,” Rubino said. “So many stories are being told. Hire me as driver and interpreter for one hundred dollars a day, United States currency, and I will try to sort out the incredible from the credible.”

After a moment’s delay the gate swung open. The house was less imposing than its wall, a low stucco structure around an inner court.

An American came out to greet Shayne. He was short and heavy, with a damp handshake. His head seemed a size large for his body, and the features on it were tucked into too small a space. He squinted at Shayne through very thick glasses.

“I’m Frost. I suppose Andres has been lecturing you on the American role in Caracan politics?”

“He was driving too fast,” Shayne said, unhooking his belt.

“A competent man at the wheel of a car,” Frost said, and Rubino murmured, “Thank you, I agree.”

Shayne left his bag in the car. Inside, Frost suggested that he would want to join him for breakfast. He himself had been up all night, taking calls, but the Army control seemed to be firm, and he had just informed the Ambassador that in his opinion it was safe to relax. The banks would be opening as usual, always a good sign.

“But this Rourke business. I hope you can help us with that. He isn’t cooperating with the police at all.”

He took Shayne into the inner court, where a table was set with heavy embossed silver, linen napkins, and cut flowers. A surprisingly pretty dark girl in uniform was waiting to be sent to the kitchen for food. Frost suggested various options. What Shayne chose seemed to be important to his host, so Shayne told the girl exactly what kind of fruit he preferred, and how it was to be prepared, how he liked his eggs and coffee.

“I won’t bore you with trivialities,” Frost said abruptly after the girl departed. “To get down to business at once. What happens to Timothy Rourke is obviously your major concern, but to us he is only one thread in a tapestry. If it can be shown that he committed a crime he will be tried in Venezuelan courts and there isn’t much we can do for him.”

“That’s fair enough.”

“Officially all that’s happened so far is that he’s been brought in for questioning, and he isn’t answering questions. They won’t put up with much of that before they start knocking him around. If he doesn’t understand that, I hope you’ll tell him. How much do you know about last night?”

“Just what came over the AP wire. A cigarette carton was mentioned. Rubino started to tell me about it, but he said you wanted to give me the official version first.”

“There is no official version, because no one interpretation makes complete sense. There were two cigarette cartons.” He opened an envelope beside his plate and took out several glossy photographs. “If you look at these first, it may save us some time.”

Shayne flicked through the pictures while the maid poured coffee. There were four shots of the devastated room in the prison. A final picture showed Tim Rourke with a girl. Rourke was on the sidewalk, holding the door of a car, and she was getting out of the front seat.

“What legs!” Frost remarked. “My, my. You can almost see the young lady’s snatch. Her name is Paula Obregon. Her father owns a large store in the Plaza O’Leary. She spent a year at the University of Miami. Is it possible that you know her?”

Shayne said doubtfully, “I may have seen her with Tim. When was this taken?”

“Yesterday. She is affiliated with the MIR. Do you know these initials? Our local guerrillas, increasingly troublesome lately. She is generally used as a courier. She speaks English well, and can pass as a tourist.”

“All right,” Shayne said evenly. “Rourke was seen with a guerrilla with a good pair of legs. What else have they got?”

“Really very little. I showed you those photographs of the prison to make a point. A fire started after the explosion, and it burned rather intensely for a time. As a result no one can be sure exactly what kind of bomb was used, or where and how it went off. But the prevailing opinion is that it was introduced inside those two cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes carried by Larry Howe, the UPI correspondent, presumably as a present for Alvares.”

“What’s the tie-in to Tim?”

“I didn’t offer you sugar and cream. Or since both of us have been up all night, perhaps it isn’t too early for a drop of cognac?”

He sent the girl for a bottle. After adding a dollop to Shayne’s coffee, he poured some in his own.

“Ah, the tie-in to Tim Rourke,” he said. “Howe was a pool correspondent, representing the resident press corps. Rourke gave him the cartons, and the police have two witnesses—United States journalists—who say that he was strangely insistent on having them delivered by hand.”

“And the cops think Tim got the cigarettes from the guerrillas, through the girl?”

“That is the hypothesis they are working on.”

“As I understand it, Alvares was out of office, a has-been. Why would they want to kill him?”

Frost looked into his coffee. “To set up new tensions? To show that the junta can’t even guarantee security inside their maximum-security prison? Or perhaps it wasn’t their intention that the bomb should go off in that precise way. A half-dozen MIR leaders are confined in the same prison, and there have been rumors about a possible jailbreak. The Centre branch of the Guaranty National was robbed of four hundred thousand dollars last night during the confusion, and that had all the earmarks of an MIR operation—quick and controlled.”

Shayne considered. “Are they sure the cartons Tim gave Howe are the ones he carried into the prison?”

“When Howe left the hotel he had one carton of Pall Malls in each side pocket. When he arrived at La Vega he still had one carton of Pall Malls in each side pocket. He and Menendez, the PR man, drove there together. We can’t ask Menendez what happened on the way because he’s dead.”

He took another swallow of the loaded coffee. The maid brought in scrambled eggs, thin slices of fried ham and warm brioches. Frost tucked into the food with obvious pleasure.

“Suppose everything stays the way it is,” Shayne said, “and nothing new is found out. What can they do to Rourke?”

“On the basis of the evidence they have now,” Frost said, chewing, “my guess would be thirty years.”

“That’s not good,” Shayne said, scratching his chin. “How about the new government? What were they planning to do with Alvares if that bomb hadn’t gone off?”

“Put him on trial for stealing from the people. Which was something he unquestionably did over a span of years, on a gigantic scale.”

“Are they better off with him dead, or worse? How much popular following did he have?”

“Not that much. He’d been in office too long. What I’d better do is let you glance at some of my political reports so you won’t sound totally naive when you start talking to these people.”

“Which side are we on?”

He gave the question an edge, and Frost looked at him sharply, then laughed and forked up a mouthful of scrambled eggs.

“Nothing is ever that simple,” he said, his diction slightly blurred. “Alvares was a friend of ours to the end, but we felt he was becoming too greedy. Certain concessions were being renegotiated, and he had a fantastic idea of how much the traffic would bear. You’ll find this covered in my reports. So we weren’t overwhelmingly unhappy to see him removed. But you must be careful, Shayne, not to exaggerate our importance here. All we can do is give people an occasional mild nudge. But don’t think you have to become an expert on all this. We have far too many experts already. Your job is to make your friend Tim Rourke understand exactly how serious it is.”

“Are they going to let me see him?”

“I’ve already made the appointment. My suggestion would be”—he swallowed another forkful of eggs and washed it down with coffee—“that you reject the first arrangement they offer you, which will probably be the usual visiting room, with a glass barrier and guards in attendance. Object to this strongly, on the grounds that you have a right to confer with the prisoner in private. Demand a face-to-face confrontation, with no one present but yourselves. They will accede to this. The idea being that you will now assume you can speak freely, without being overheard—an assumption which will unquestionably be incorrect.”

He seemed pleased with the way he was handling his visitor. Shayne watched him stuff his mouth with a brioche coated with butter. This was his third. There were three more in the basket and given time he would undoubtedly work his way through them all. His chin glistened.

“And then what?” Shayne said.

“Then,” Frost said, swallowing, “you tell Rourke that he had better be perfectly candid unless he wants to spend the next thirty years in excruciating discomfort. Prison management in this part of the world is far from enlightened. Tell him we are washing our hands of him. No deal is possible, in my judgment. What can he tell the police except that he has been in contact with Paula Obregon, a fact they already know?”

“You said the room will be bugged. Tim may not know that. Do you still want me to persuade him to talk?”

Frost’s lips curved. Even with his mouth full he managed to look faintly roguish.

“I really do. This sealed-lips tactic is only making things worse for him.”

“I think I get it,” Shayne said slowly. “Tim and I have been working together for years. There are ways I can let him know we’re being listened to, without saying it. Then he can tell me something that’ll send the cops off in the wrong direction. Police translators tend to be pretty square.”

“That’s one way it might work.”

“But that’s on the surface. Meanwhile, he’ll be giving me a slant on what really happened. You’re my contact. I’ll consult you about it. If I don’t, your man Rubino will be driving me, and he’ll keep you up-to-date. What I want to know now is why? Thanks for the breakfast, by the way. Everything was very good. Are you acting for yourself or for the United States government? How much did you have to do with this revolt, or whatever you call it? All you do is nudge people—yeah. You’re in politics up to your chin and everybody knows it.”

“I fail to see—”

“If you were mixed up in this coup and Alvares could prove it, wouldn’t it be better for you if he was dead?”

Frost patted his lips. “Pour yourself some more coffee. I know you aren’t seriously suggesting we had anything to do with the bombing.”

“Stranger things have happened, and you people have been known to boast about some of them. Where could Tim Rourke get hold of enough explosives to do that much damage? How could he pack it in cigarette cartons so nobody could tell it wasn’t cigarettes? That came out of a pretty sophisticated workshop. It was planted on him. If you did it, get Tim out of the country and I won’t lean on it too hard.”

Frost said quietly, “If it had become necessary to kill Alvares there are less sloppy ways. As it happens, that kind of violence is usually counterproductive, believe it or not. Of course I’m interested in what Rourke tells you, or what he fails to tell you. I am primarily a collector of intelligence. What’s so sinister about that? Would you want your government to make policy in ignorance of the facts?”

“Who’s this Andres Rubino you’re trying to hang on me?”

Frost gave his rubbery smile. “A free-lance. But you’re quite right to be suspicious. Be suspicious of everybody. The situation is heavily booby-trapped. We all have different goals, different axes to grind. Of course I hope you’ll discover something I can use to our country’s advantage! And I trust that for a small fee Andres will keep us informed of your activities. But you could do much worse. Whoever you hire will be on somebody’s payroll. Andres, I’m sure, is on several. Which is part of his value.”

The maid had left the coffee and cognac, and Shayne refilled his cup. “You people—no kidding.”

“You do what you can with what you have—those are the rules. Andres is quick-witted, and good at milking the maximum dollar out of whatever comes along. A bit of a blackmailer, but that shouldn’t concern you.”

“Is there any way I can get in touch with these guerrillas?”

Frost wagged his head. He offered Shayne a box of long fat cigars and began preparing one himself, an elaborate ceremony which occupied him while he spoke.

“That is one thing I can’t arrange. Everyone of that persuasion is very far underground today. You’d like to talk to Paula Obregon. So would the police, both the political police and the criminal police. But the MIR is beautifully organized, highly efficient. Paula Obregon will come to the surface when they want her to, not before.”

Shayne asked several other questions while he finished his coffee. Frost went into another room, unlocked a wall safe and brought back onionskin copies of several memos on Venezuelan politics. He wrote an extremely dense prose that was occasionally hard to follow. Shayne read them in silence, nodded, and handed them back.

Frost gave him a card with a phone number on it. “Call me whenever you like. I may be napping but I’m a light sleeper.”

FIVE

Andres Rubino ground out his cigarette when Shayne appeared and threw open the door of the Jaguar.

“You have decided to hire me!”

“Let’s see how it goes,” Shayne said. “He doesn’t give you much of a reference. He says you’ll deal with anybody if the price is right.”

“But everybody knows that about me! Mr. Frost himself, for example, pays me occasional sums out of unrestricted funds. But if you have something you don’t wish me to tell him, say so frankly and we’ll discuss how much that will cost you.”

“It shouldn’t be too hard to collect from us both.”

“I try not to do too much of that,” Rubino said earnestly, “because it gets complicated and dangerous. And you and Mr. Frost are on the came side, no? I’m much better for you than some dull nobody you could pay to be loyal.”

He honked to have the gate opened. “First stop, the jail?”

“That’s right. Where do you stand politically, Andres?”

For the first time the cheerful Venezuelan looked indignant. The gate opened and he went out with his thumb on the horn.

“Politics. What does it matter to someone in my financial position which crook is in office? Of course,” he added, “in international politics I am very much pro-United States.”

“Of course. What do you think of Frost?”

“Mr. Frost is unquestionably number one on my list!” he said with sincerity. “Physically somewhat repulsive, but he has risen above it. Did you notice his maid? Elegant—elegant. His style of living. People in his line of work retire young, on three-quarters pay. He is now fifty-five. He could pull out at any moment, and from certain indirect signs I think he is planning to do so very soon. And then I will have to start over again with his successor—a dismal perspective, because Mr. Frost and I understand each other. But did he really describe me as that corrupt?”

“A free-lance agent and a blackmailer on the side.”

“He shouldn’t have said that!” Rubino cried. “How could I blackmail you? In what way does it apply?”

“He wasn’t telling me anything he didn’t want me to know.”

Rubino drove a block or so in silence, thinking.

“Well, he’s a clever man. I would hate to play chess against him. We’ve agreed on one hundred dollars a day? I’ll start at once to earn my money. Technically we are among the backward nations, we Venezuelans, but one exception is the police, who have modern listening devices. Very miniaturized, very delicate. So you must conclude that when you confer with your friend, other ears will be listening.”

Shayne didn’t interrupt, and listened to much the same advice he had already received from Felix Frost. He was watching the turns, getting the feel of the city.

At Police Headquarters, a forbidding fortresslike building on Avenida Universidad, Rubino again left the conspicuous car in a no-parking zone and came inside with Shayne.

Using Rubino to translate for him, Shayne rejected the first room he was offered. After a loud exchange in Spanish, accompanied by much sawing of the air, he was taken to another room where Rubino left him. This room was furnished with a simple table and two benches. While he waited for Rourke, he prowled around the room trying to spot the mike, but it was well hidden.

The door opened.

One of Rourke’s eyes was swollen shut and he had what looked like fingernail scratches on one cheek. His belt and shoelaces had been taken away, evidently an international police practice.

“Mike Shayne,” he said gloomily. “Well, well. I hope you brought me some cigarettes.”

“They tell me you’re smoking Pall Malls these days.”

“When I can get them.”

He accepted what he was given, a Camel. They sat down at the table and Shayne lit his cigarette for him.

“You didn’t waste any time, did you?” Rourke said, breathing out smoke. “Didn’t even stop to have breakfast, probably.”

“I had a very good breakfast with Felix Frost, do you know him? Sort of a creep, I thought, but I’m sure he’s good at whatever he does.”

“Good old Felix.”

While this exchange was taking place, they were communicating in other ways. Shayne’s first look had warned the reporter to look out; they were being monitored. Rourke had replied in the same way that he knew that much about the behavior patterns of law-enforcement officials. He also didn’t have to be told that his situation was grim, and Shayne would have to work an unusual kind of miracle to get him out.

“Who hit you?” Shayne asked. “Do you want me to get the Civil Liberties Union to complain?”

“I wish you would, man. Every little bit helps. Talk to me. Nobody around here wants to tell me what happened out in the real world. They want me to tell them. Did a bomb actually go off in the La Vega prison, or did my ears deceive me? And if so, how did you hear about it?”

“Caldwell called me from the paper when he got the flash. You really don’t know what happened? They have a pretty good body-count. Alvares, Larry Howe, a Venezuelan named Menendez.”

Rourke’s face had gone very still. “Alvares, Howe, Menendez. I’m sorry to hear it.”

“It seems there were these two cartons of cigarettes.” Shayne lowered his voice. “I think it’s all right to talk here, Tim. I’m going to need some leads.”

“They worked the handkerchief switch on me, Mike. The gypsy handkerchief switch. There were hints I might get a story out of it. The Pulitzer Prize was mentioned. And I went for it! Tim Rourke, the prototype fall guy, drunk and gullible.”

“Put it in English.”

“There was supposed to be a cyanide capsule in with the cigarettes. They were getting Alvares ready for a show trial, and some of the testimony would have tarnished our image, or that’s what they told me. A cyanide capsule, the way it happens in the movies. I’ve always said, if somebody wants to knock himself off, who am I to stand in the way?”

He added, “And they were torturing him, Mike. Cyanide is the only way you can beat that. I was operating in a heavy mist at the time. I’d been soaking up gin for a couple of days. I really blame it on the martinis.”

“They’ve got a picture of you with a girl named Paula something.”

“Yeah, I took her out a few times. I met her in Miami a year or two ago—nice kid. She had nothing to do with this.” The look he gave Shayne contradicted the words. “It was a guy. He came to my room in the Hilton. Mustache, shades. One of his shoes was built up in the heel—one leg must be shorter than the other. But you’ll never find him.”

“I’ll never find him if that’s all you can give me. Have you told the cops about this?”

“Mike, my act with these bush cops is strictly tongue-tied and stupid. I’m going to promise you one thing. Never again. I’m strictly a voyeur from now on. The goddamned handkerchief switch. I never thought they’d catch me with that one.”

“If I’m in a position to make a deal, will you tell them what you’ve just told me?”

“If I have to, but Mike, I’ll feel like such a schmuck!”

“Frost mentioned thirty years. Everything I hear from other people makes me think he was optimistic.”

“You have such a wonderful bedside manner. I know I’m in trouble. But I need time to think. They’ve been on top of me every minute. You know the technique, in shifts. Damn it, there has to be something I can dredge up, if they’d just give me a couple of minutes to brood about it. But no. It’s been hammer, hammer, hammer. You’re too early. It’s nice you’re here, I appreciate it. But I wish you hadn’t been in such a hurry. I might have had something to tell you. Now they won’t let me see you again till tomorrow.”

They were facing each other, Rourke’s foot against Shayne’s. He stepped up the pressure when he told Shayne he’d been in too much of a hurry. Now he didn’t seem to want to let the subject go.

“We’re thinking in terms of thirty years, for Christ’s sake. What’s half a day? Why the rush?”

“Take a minute now, Tim. If I’m going to get you out of here I’ve got to have somebody else to give them. You worked on the story three days. You must have some idea who wanted to kill Alvares and why.”

Rourke made a vague gesture. “My head’s not normal. Do you know why I really came to Caracas? I had a fight with a chick! If she hadn’t been so damn pigheaded, I’d be back in Miami right this minute, having my second cup of coffee and opening the morning mail.” His foot came down hard. “I’d be reading about it in the paper. Alvares hit—too bad, but he’s been asking for it for years. Do you mind if I get serious for a minute?”

“It’s a serious jam.”

Rourke’s face was troubled, but he was exerting no under-the-table pressure, indicating that what he was about to say was for their unseen listeners.

“I’m not completely stupid. I tried to protect myself, and if it hadn’t been for all that goddamn Tanqueray gin—Here’s the thing that’s been bugging me. Has anybody told you I was the one who was set for that interview? I was planning to carry in those cartons myself. I had nothing to do with the change in plans and there are two good witnesses who can testify to that. I went along with it. I had no choice. But if Larry Howe hadn’t been hung up on the status thing, if he hadn’t insisted he was entitled to the story, I’m the one who’d be dead now! I haven’t bothered to tell the cops. They’d just say the bomb went off ahead of schedule, or the guy who worked the switch wanted me dead so I couldn’t pull him out of a police lineup. They’ve got their victim, and I’m more or less ideal. So that leaves it up to you, baby, and I wish I had more confidence. If we were back home I wouldn’t worry. In Miami you know where the bodies are buried. Here you don’t know a soul. I can tell you one thing about Felix Frost, he won’t break his neck for anybody. So what are you going to do, stand out in the middle of the Plaza Venezuela wearing a name-tag and hope somebody comes up and whispers in your ear?”

“I’ll try that if you think it’ll help.”

“Aah,” Rourke said in disgust. “You’d get propositioned, that’s about all. They’re hunting for Paula, no doubt. Poor kid—just because she was careless enough to have dinner with me a couple of times. Cherchez la femme—it’s an old idea.”

“Cherchez what?”

“La femme. I know my French is lousy. Look for the female. But the hell with the female. Look for the male, Mike.” His foot hit Shayne’s. “The male.”

The door opened behind Shayne and a guard appeared. Shayne continued to watch Rourke.

“Time seems to be up,” Rourke said. “I doubt if you learned anything.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Think hard, man. Because while you’re outside having fun, I’m in here being grilled. Leave the cigarettes.”

Shayne stood up. “Next visiting day I’ll bring you some dynamite.”

“Yeah, this place could do with some livening up.”

SIX

Rubino, waiting in an anteroom, had a message for Shayne: the Chief of Police, Luis Mejia, wanted to see him. This wasn’t an order but it was a strong request, and Rubino’s recommendation was that Shayne should comply.

“Why not?” Shayne said. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

Rubino said carelessly, “Mr. Rourke didn’t succeed in conveying any information?”

“Mr. Rourke,” Shayne said angrily, “was being so goddamn careful I couldn’t make out what he was saying half the time. Do you want to know how he got involved with those cigarette cartons? He’d been drinking martinis for two days and he didn’t know what he was doing.”

“In my experience, North American newspapermen are heavy drinkers.”

“Tim hasn’t drunk gin for years. It makes him throw up. Tell Frost.”

“I think that’s hardly worth telling anybody. Is that all?”

“There was something about a cyanide capsule and a guy with one built-up shoe. That gives the cops something to work on if they believe it. It didn’t sound too believable to me.”

A creaking elevator took them up three floors where Rubino showed him the police chief’s door.

“I am to wait in the hall.”

“Doesn’t he trust you?”

“This far.” Rubino held up his thumb and forefinger, an inch apart. “That’s an honor—most people he trusts less.”

Mejia proved to be a middle-aged man in uniform, with a shaved head, a hard stare, and skin the color of cement. He must have been very strong when he was younger, and even now, with jowls and a paunch, he looked as though he could be dangerous. A detail map of Caracas hung behind his desk, which was large and solidly built, like Mejia himself.

There was a girl in the room, also in uniform. She was small and dark, in glasses.

“My English, you must forgive me,” the police chief said after shaking hands. “It is very little. I am for to try, and Sonia will help me sometimes. I know about Michael Shayne, your many successes.”

He offered Shayne a choice of cigars or cigarettes. Shayne took a cigar, much less aromatic than the one he had been given by Frost. He rolled it in his fingers.

“Did Rourke have those marks on him when he was brought in?”

Mejia’s eyes jumped to the girl. She supplied a word.

“I see,” Mejia said. “Was he beaten by us? No, no. While he was arrested, by the public. Here he is well treated.” He waved the cigar. “How does one say it?”

He spoke to the girl and she translated. “He says that the treatment of the prisoner by the police has been quite correct and O.K., and he wishes to ask if the prisoner has complained to you.”

“He complained of being kept awake.”

“We, too, have been kept awake,” Mejia said. “Being awake is nothing. I will ask you now what he said to you on the subject of the bombing.”

Shayne lit the cigar and waited till it was drawing evenly. “I understood that was a privileged conversation.”

“Oh, no. We have no such practice in Venezuela. I explain. There was much shouting and noise when he was arrested. It was considered by the public that he was a gringo spy. So he is frightened. He thinks he should keep silence.”

“Keep silent,” Sonia murmured.

“But that is foolish for him. Much foolish. Very. We have him in our hands. We take in many other suspicious persons, but no one in that class as Rourke. He knows, he can tell. The others who were with him in this, the guerrillas—they will go very fast. Vanish. They will vanish into air. So we must be quick. Rourke must talk to us.”

“Frost says you have a picture of a girl named Paula Obregon. You must be working on that.”

“We work on it hard. But he could tell us something would help find her, maybe.”

“Are you sure she’s still in the country?”

“In Venezuela, yes. In the barrios, the mountains. There are one and one half million persons residing in Caracas. They are careful in her sect. The people they live among, they are frightened from them.”

“Don’t you have any pigeons who can tell you where she is?”

The girl translated the word and he spread his hands. “Few. Not so good.”

“Is it absolutely definite that these guerrillas put her on Rourke? She’s a pretty girl, and he knew her in Miami.”

The police chief lifted his heavy shoulders. “We believe. Now I ask a question. Why did Mr. Rourke come to Caracas?”

Shayne looked at him carefully. “As far as I know, to cover a story. That’s what his editor told me, and I see no reason to think otherwise.”

“How far of a Communist is he?”

Shayne laughed. “Not far at all.”

“We have received a report from correspondents in the U.S.A. It is official, to be believed. It says he is—”

He tried to think of the right words, and asked the interpreter to help. She said, “In the dossier it says Rourke is strongly sympathetic to the Left. He wrote dispatches taking the side of the revolutionary government of Cuba—”

Shayne made a scornful noise. “Tim’s a crime reporter. A gambler who used to own a casino in Havana got him into Cuba to check on some diamonds the guy left behind. While he was there he reported what he saw. He doesn’t have any heroes.”

“Then he didn’t come to this country to interview Serrano?”

“Who’s Serrano?”

Mejia looked at the girl helplessly. She explained. “A leader of the MIR. He escaped from prison and has been at large and in command of fighting detachments for three years. I had believed the name was known in the United States.”

“I have all I can do to keep up with what’s happening in Dade County. Tell him he’ll be making a bad mistake if he tags Tim with any political label.”

“If he came for a story,” Mejia said, “what story did he want from Alvares?”

“Just getting in to see him would put it on the front pages back home.”

“The other correspondents say in their deposition that he told Mr. Larry Howe to ask about the role of your government, the famous CIA, in the change of regime.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Or about the Alvares money?”

It was asked casually, but there was a sudden change in atmospheric pressure. Mejia’s eyes bored into Shayne’s.

Shayne’s answer was made in an equally casual tone. “Alvares’ money. I suppose there must be quite a bit of it. They tell me there was a lot of stealing going on.”

“Monies disappeared,” Mejia said. “It is—traditional? Seventeen years in office.”

“How much?” Shayne said.

Mejia shifted. “Some say one thing, some another. But indeed, it must be very large. And the prisoner Rourke said nothing to you about any of this?”

“It’s not his field. Why do you think he’d know anything about it?”

The police chief rotated his cigar carefully. “The former President went on vacations to the south of Florida. It is supposed—” He stopped and began again. “When there is a bomb, one thinks immediately it is a political question, but—”

He gave up and said it in Spanish. The girl translated.

“The Police Chief is concerned about the bomber’s motive. Would the death of Alvares help the MIR? Only indirectly, to show their power to avenge themselves—and truly Alvares was very cruel and barbaric against the MIR. But as a political personage, he was no longer a factor. Death, imprisonment, exile—his three choices. But who will get ownership of his illegal estate? That is the unanswered question.”

Mejia spoke again, and she then went on. “Where it is located, what form it takes, this is unknown. But we assume it is liquid—gold or cash. We assume it’s in Florida. Mr. Rourke, a newspaperman, is widely acquainted in the world of politics, the world of finance, of crime, we are sure. So did someone from Florida send him to Venezuela to find out something, to communicate a message? He cleverly made arrangements to interview the prisoner. The Chief of Police suggests that his stated reason for desiring this interview was not in fact the real reason. Alvares was being questioned closely. His questioners wished to establish the whereabouts of his cache, the sum of money we speak of, before it became the knowledge of others.”

She looked at Mejia, who said in English, “The money is the property of the Venezuelan state. It was important to—”

“Forestall?” the girl suggested.

“To forestall. To reach it before others. And Alvares was about to say something on the subject, and then he was killed.”

“How rough were you being with him?”

“I am not afraid to speak words,” the police chief said steadily. “To find out things from a prisoner is easy. To find out fast, some methods are better. You have laws against this in your country. Here not. Electricity is often useful. Soon, I think, he would tell us. He was not good about pain. He shouted, he wept. He was born a peasant but he had too many years of pleasure.”

Shayne knocked the ash off his cigar. “If Tim knew anything about that, why didn’t he tell me? Let me be sure I have this. You’re suggesting that somebody brought him a proposition. Alvares had to be reached before you broke him. Some kind of message had to go in or out.”

“Yes. Or he was to be killed. Anyone who knew Alvares would know he could not hold out against bad pain.”

Shayne shrugged. “Try the theory on Rourke, and see what he says. Why ask me?”

“Because you are interested in your compatriot and friend. If he has such connections in Florida, you have those same connections. The arrangement I suggest is this. What can you discover here? Nothing, clearly. Go home in your own country, and find out something of value. Bring it to me and we will—”

He suggested a Spanish word to the girl and she said, “Negotiate.”

The police chief considered, and then spoke to her again. She rose submissively and left the room.

“A good girl, I think,” Mejia explained, “but she was a student and it is best to be careful. They are everywhere. I said to come back to me with information. We will talk. Not about a division of the money. That belongs to the government, to no individual person. We want facts to help us explain this terrible event. If they are important enough, our case against Timothy Rourke will be seen to melt away.”

“What you’re saying is that he’s a hostage.”

“Hostage?” Mejia said doubtfully. “You know about policemen—we need a criminal. We have Rourke. We keep him until you persuade us to not. One little advice. Mr. Felix Frost knows something about the money.”

“Are you sure?”

“It is the business of him. The movements of gold, hidden bank accounts, quiet arrangements. And he will not tell us. He is a tightmouth. With Felix Frost, he is the one who asks the questions. But someone named Michael Shayne, you can ask it through your Senator.”

They exchanged a look. There was no reason a police chief in Caracas should know of that connection.

“Is there any way I can get through to these MIR people?” Shayne said.

“Only if they come to you.”

Shayne stood up. “I want to be sure you understand what I’m about to say. I’ve got an interpreter outside, or call your girl in.”

Mejia’s gaze was hard and unblinking. He touched a button and the girl appeared.

“Right now I have nothing to threaten you with,” Shayne said. “Apparently we’ve stopped sending aircraft carriers to rescue Americans in trouble. For the time being, I’m staying in Caracas. It’s a hundred to one that I’ll find out anything, but I’ve been lucky at times. Nobody in the radical movement will talk to you. But maybe they’ll talk to me if I can think of a way to get in contact. And no negotiations are possible—I’ll repeat that—no negotiations are possible if you use electricity on Tim Rourke.” He looked at the girl. “Maybe I said that too fast.”

“I understand it,” she said quietly. “You are promising that anything you discover will be available to the police only on condition that the prisoner is well treated.”

“Tell him.”

She spoke to Mejia, who watched Shayne while he listened.

“For twenty-four hours only,” Mejia said. “And then, if necessary, we must.”

“Talk to me first,” Shayne said coldly. “Everybody else must be in as much of a hurry as you are, and if I can make myself unpleasant enough it may happen fast. What kind of dollar amount are you thinking about, a few million?”

“More.”

“How much more?”

Mejia’s tongue came out to touch his lips. “In the vicinity of twenty.”

SEVEN

As they entered the Jaguar, Rubino said, “I will be very much surprised and astonished if the police don’t follow us.”

“You’ve been telling me what a hot driver you are. Lose them.”

Rubino moved out from the curb and joined the traffic, watching the mirror.

“There they are. A black Chevrolet, and if it’s the car I think, it has a special engine, a double carburetor. Never mind, I can outrun them. But there will be a second car. At present I don’t see it.”

“Shut up and drive.”

While Rubino slipped smoothly from lane to lane, using his full range of forward gears, Shayne concentrated on the muffled signals he had received from Rourke.

“You’re too early. What’s half a day? Back in Miami, second cup of coffee, opening the morning mail. Tried to protect myself. That goddamn Tanqueray gin. The Pulitzer prize was mentioned. The hell with the female—look for the male. Paula Obregon, nice kid, but forget the female, go after the male.”

And then the pattern hit him. Not the female, the male. Male—mail. Back in Miami, opening the mail.

Rubino turned onto the curved freeway running between the twin towers of the Centro Bolivar. He was as relaxed as a cat, smiling slightly, holding the wheel with only his fingertips.

“I want a phone, Andres,” Shayne said. “I don’t want any cops crowding me.”

“Yes. I see the second car now. We’ll worry them a little first.”

He accelerated smartly, swinging into the oncoming lane, then back. He forced a taxi to veer away and turned a corner. A traffic policeman glanced at the Jaguar’s plates. Rubino waved, smiling, and turned again. He shot down a one-way street, up an alley, and emerged into another avenue.

“Walk in the building where I stop. There are phones by the elevators. I’ll circle to confuse them. When you are finished, walk through the building. Have you Venezuelan coins?”

He gave Shayne a handful of change, executed another quick series of linked turns and braked hard. Shayne was out of the car before it stopped rolling.

He entered an open arcade lined with specialty shops. The entrance to the elevator lobby, halfway through the block, was between a boutique and a shop selling Indian artifacts.

There were two phones. Shayne found the coin that would get him a dial tone, and dialed the operator. As soon as she answered he said, slowly and firmly, “Do you speak English?” He repeated the question twice more before he was switched to someone who could understand him. He placed an overseas call to his own Miami number.

When a girl’s voice answered, he identified himself and asked if she’d been able to get back to sleep after he left.

“Not a wink! Mike, how does it look?”

“Worse than I expected. Much worse. I’m just beginning to feel my way. Has the mail come in yet?”

“Not yet, but a messenger just brought an envelope for you and it’s on Hilton Hotel stationery—Hilton Hotel, Caracas. I couldn’t decide what to do with it.”

“Open it, for God’s sake.”

He heard the envelope being torn open. “It’s from Tim! And there’s something else, something in Spanish. Wait a minute.”

There was a brief pause. “You know what Tim’s handwriting is like—this is a real scrawl. I’ll try to puzzle it out. ‘Dear Mike, I’m onto something really hot. If it works biggest story of career.’ I think that word is ‘career.’”

She waited, and continued, “‘… Something… something risky. It could go sour on me, and if so I’m in bad trouble. It’s a jailbreak. Tear gas, smoke bombs—far out, man.’”

There was a pause. She went on haltingly. “Here comes a bad stretch. ‘Something the enclosed.’ I guess ‘Translate the enclosed. Something something to—whet? To whet my appetite. If you don’t hear from me by noon, get your ass down here. I’ll give you half the net. The magazine rights alone should be fantastic. Life, Playboy—they’ll be bidding like madmen. It’s Alvarez’ diary. First person account of everything that happened. About 35,000 words. If this page is a sample we’ll make the history books. His wife has the rest. Strategy: get the full diary and use it to blast me loose. You owe me this! Tim.’”

Shayne was scraping his jaw with his thumbnail. “All right, what’s the enclosure look like?”

“I was bragging about my Spanish, Mike. It’s not that good. And this writing is even worse than Tim’s.”

“All I want is the general idea.”

“It’s a sheet torn out of a book. It starts off in the middle of a sentence. The next entry is ‘Tuesday,’ in a different color ink. Let me see. I’ll just give you the words I’m sure of. Here’s a proper name. That’s easy—Felix Frost. CIA. An oil company, somebody else’s name. They’re paying—well. Let me skip this part. A cable from Washington. ‘Private payments to—’ Hmm. North American somethings off La Guaira. Submarines? I guess submarines. Commercial airline, fourteen planes ready to take off in Guatemala City—guns and ammunition, I finally have absolute proof of U.S. involvement in plot against me—”

“That makes the point,” Shayne said. “Now read Tim’s letter to me again. See if you can fill in the blanks.”

He listened carefully. She read it with fewer pauses, and was able to decipher one or two more words.

“O.K.,” he said. “This is going to put me one step ahead of the cops. Get a better translation of that diary entry if you can. I’ll try to call you later today.”

He broke the connection and dialed the number Frost had given him.

“What news of our boy?” Frost said cordially.

“He’s in fairly good shape. I had to talk with Mejia. He knew the Senator called you, by the way. Does that mean he has a tap on this phone?”

“That’s another number, not this one. I don’t mind too much. I have a tap on his.”

“He’s giving me twenty-four hours before he starts working on Tim. They have little tricks they do with electricity, he tells me. Is that the kind of threat he’s likely to carry out?”

“Oh, yes.”

Shayne’s lips came back from his teeth. “Twenty-four hours. I’ve already used up fifteen minutes. Mejia didn’t sound too interested in Tim. The big subject he wanted to talk to me about was the grease Alvares has been accumulating over the years.”

Frost sighed. “That old story.”

“Do you mean there’s nothing to it?”

“Something, of course. The Bull was, above all, prudent, and he must have known the cushy days wouldn’t last forever. He had an airplane ready to fly him to the States. I’m sure he had something laid aside to pay his bills after he got there.”

“Mejia thought you could be more specific.”

“In what way?”

“About how much and where. He said it’s the kind of information you like to collect.”

“How discerning of him. Yes, economic warfare is one of my things, perhaps because I’ve never been very good at the other kind of warfare, with fists. But I’m not omniscient. Alvares maintained several Swiss bank accounts for years. He closed them out some eighteen months ago, when he began to smell trouble. That much I’ve been able to discover. But the Swiss, as you know, are very chary with information. I pulled all the available strings, but I couldn’t come up with even an approximate evaluation of his holdings.”

“Will you explain that? Why did he close his accounts?”

“For one thing, those numbered accounts are no longer as sacrosanct as they used to be. The successor regime here might have been able to tie them up.”

“In his position, what would you do with the money—keep it in cash?”

“I’d put it in gold bullion, I believe. In retrospect, considering the recent changes in the price of gold, that would have been a clever move.”

“Wouldn’t there have to be records if he bought that much gold?”

“Records can be hocussed and faked. There are dozens of ways to cover your tracks if you buy enough of the stuff. Was Mejia willing to hazard a guess as to the amount?”

“He said in the neighborhood of twenty million.”

“The wrong neighborhood,” Frost said, laughing. “Much too high. It’s true the Alvares administration was notoriously corrupt, but he had to cut it up a number of ways to stay in power. How does this connect with the subject you were presumably discussing—namely, Tim Rourke?”

“It seems that Alvares spent his vacations in Miami—”

“Palm Beach, actually,” Frost said.

“Palm Beach, then. Tim has friends there. Maybe somebody who knows where the money is talked him into pushing for that interview, and then screwed him by giving him a bomb instead of Pall Malls. I said I doubted it very much. That’s when he said I had twenty-four hours to come up with a different theory.”

A soberly dressed youth walked quickly along the arcade, stopping a shade too abruptly when he saw Shayne. He came into the elevator lobby to look at the directory of tenants.

Shayne said, “I want to see what I can get from Alvares’ widow. Do you think she’ll see me?”

“You have to remember,” Frost said doubtfully, “that her husband was blown into little pieces last night. She won’t feel too happy about talking it over with a stranger. Still, you must run into that all the time.”

“It’s never easy. Were they happy together?”

“One doesn’t know. He was a typical Venezuelan. He had a succession of little mistresses, one or two of whom,” he added with a leer that came over the telephone line clearly, “were arranged for him out of this office.”

“What does the widow stand to inherit?”

“Virtually nothing. They lived in the Presidential Palace, the property of the nation. Her family has a little money. She lives on a farm west of the city, and that, I believe, is in her name. If not, it will undoubtedly be taken. She’s been a good friend of ours on occasion, and if she doesn’t want to be bothered today I hope you’ll respect her wishes.”

A second man, another obvious cop, came into the lobby and pretended to look up a number in the phone-book, one ear cocked toward Shayne.

“I seem to be surrounded here,” Shayne said. “I’d better find out how good they are. Stay on tap. I’ll be calling you again.”

He hung up. Before opening the folding door he lifted up on it hard, dislodging it from its overhead track. He beckoned to the man at the phonebooks.

“Come here a minute,” he said in English.

The man sent an uncertain glance at his partner and started toward Shayne, scowling. Shayne head-faked toward the street. His adversary had obviously never played one-on-one basketball. He went for the fake. Shayne caught him off-balance and pulled him into the empty phone booth. The second man reached inside his coat. Shayne feinted a kick, and when the cop doubled forward Shayne grabbed his hair in both hands. He pivoted, going backward. The first cop was trying to get out of the booth. The two Venezuelans collided, hard. Shayne gave the door a powerful yank and it jammed, shutting them both inside.

He grinned at the knot of people waiting for the elevators.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said pleasantly. “I do this sort of thing all the time.”

He walked out of the building.

EIGHT

The open Jaguar was cruising toward him. Rubino reached across to open the door. Shayne stepped in and issued a curt order.

Without hesitation Rubino wheeled about in a U-turn, using his horn to blast an opening. He swung right at the next corner, left at the next on a red light, and plunged into the older part of the city, a tangle of narrow twisting streets. A moment later they were edging into a fast-moving line of cars on an east-bound freeway. Rubino watched his mirrors.

“That gets rid of one,” he said triumphantly. “I used to live in that district, in my unlucky days. I know it like the inside of my pocket. But two pacos went into the building after you. I don’t see their car.”

“They’re trying to punch their way out of a phone-booth,” Shayne said. He took out a money clip and counted out five hundred-dollar bills. “This is an advance. Mejia’s giving me twenty-four hours, which means we have to keep moving. If I can get Rourke out I’ll ask his paper for a fifteen thousand buck fee. They’ll settle for half that. I’ll give you twenty-five percent on top of what I’ve just given you if you stick with me and don’t sell me out. That means no phone calls to Frost, Mejia, or anybody else.”

Rubino swept the bills out of his hand. “You’re a master of psychology, Mr. Shayne. You’ve won my allegiance! Where do you wish me to drive you?”

“Do you know where I can find Alvares’ widow?”

“Yes, but it is some miles away, on the road to Valencia. We can phone first, to make sure.”

“She won’t talk to me unless I walk in on her. Do you know if she speaks English?”

“A woman in that position, I believe she must. She would always be entertaining Yankee imperialists to dinner. And if she pretends she doesn’t, I will interpret for you.”

He circled the bullring and turned south. Presently the highway began to climb, and they left the city behind them.

Their destination, Rubino told Shayne, still called itself a farm, but though a large number of peasants seemed to be employed on it, their true function had been to bodyguard Alvares, who had spent as much time there as possible, preferring it to the stately and uncomfortable palace.

The countryside was rolling and rugged. Strips of mist lay in folds between the hills.

“This is Alvares land now,” Rubino said, “on both sides of the road. More or less worthless, because who in his right mind would wish to buy it?”

An occasional huddle of scrawny cattle grazed in the fields. They passed a group of farm laborers walking at the edge of the road—barefooted, in ragged clothes, with big hats and sheathed machetes. Rubino pointed and Shayne saw a kind of adobe fortress, reached by a dirt road between a double line of cypresses.

A car was being driven down this avenue, very fast, kicking up dust. It swung onto the paved road and passed them—a heavy green Olds. Shayne had a flash of a woman in dark glasses at the wheel, her blonde hair blowing.

Rubino’s foot lifted from the accelerator. He watched the rapidly receding car in his side mirror.

“Funny,” he said.

“What is?”

“That’s Alvares’ girlfriend. Lenore Dante. And she has been to call on the Señora. For what purpose, do you think?”

“You know more about it than I do.”

“Did you see the look on her face? She has the devil behind her, jabbing her with a pitchfork.”

After a moment he said slowly, “I think we should see where she goes in such a hurry. The Señora will still be here when we get back.”

“O.K.”

Rubino was still watching the mirror. “I don’t want her to see the brakelights if she looks. There is only this road. We can overtake her slowly.”

He swung into the cypress avenue, stopped, and then moved the switch that brought the top up out of the boot.

“If she noticed us pass, she saw an open convertible. Nov she will see a quite different car. I’m being clever today.”

He waited till the Olds was out of sight before backing out onto the road.

“Lenore Dante,” Shayne said. “What nationality?”

“A compatriot of yours, such a lovely one. An artist, her paintings have been seen on many walls in Caracas since Alvares became her protector. And now, I suppose, they will be hidden in the garages.”

“How old?”

“In her first thirties. Thin. Dashing. It is an arrangement of three years. That is a long time for a thing of this kind with Alvares. Formerly it was for short periods, and with a great effort to be furtive and secretive. Always Latin girls of bourgeois families. They would be given a check when he said good-bye for the final time. But he allowed himself to be seen openly with this one. He visited her in Palm Beach, in your country, where it is said she owns a busy art gallery that makes much money. Here a cooperative apartment has been taken for her in a good district. And she lived in it every year a little longer. With the regime ending there was less reason to be careful.”

The Olds ahead was still being driven at headlong speed. They had come over the rim of the plateau and saw the city stretched out below them. As they dropped, Rubino began closing the gap.

“I’ll tell you something. It is supposed that no one was with him in the plane when it crashed except the personal pilot, who is now in the hospital with a cracked skull and can say nothing. But I think Dante was with him. Before the police arrived she had enough time to dismount and disappear. I have a private piece of information that a woman walked rapidly away from the wreck, not his wife. I’ve wondered what I could do with this information. Probably nothing.”

When the Olds came up onto the city freeway he closed with it and hung just behind as it whirled across town in the high-speed lane.

“The autopista,” he said. “To the airport. Mr. Shayne, this presents a problem.”

The Olds leaned into the cloverleaf, taking the curve too fast. Rocking, it drifted off on the outside shoulder, swerved and recovered. Rubino dropped further behind as soon as the other car committed itself to the northbound lanes.

“Because at the airport,” he went on, entering the cloverleaf, “there will be police. I wish there was time to change cars. They know by now to look for the Jaguar.”

“Keep thinking about it. If they arrest us, there won’t be any more hundred dollar bills. What else can you tell me about this woman? Was she mixed up in politics?”

“Not at all.”

After another moment, watching Rubino carefully, Shayne remarked, “Mejia thinks there’s a sizeable chunk of money floating around.”

He saw Rubino’s grip on the wheel tighten. “This is not, as I told you,” Rubino said softly, “much of a spiritual city. Ninety-nine percent of Caracans are daydreaming about that subject.”

“Including you?”

Rubino laughed again. “Why else are we following?”

“Do you think you have a chance at it?”

“By myself, no. I am too small. But together with you, there are attractive possibilities.”

“This Lenore Dante must know something about it.”

Rubino laughed again. “Why else are we following her? Mr. Shayne, I am sure she knows a great deal about it. That relationship, on Alvares’ side, was becoming always more scandalous, more intense. She would figure in his future plans. And now what do you think? Should we overtake her here in the open countryside or find out first if she is meeting someone?”

“You decide.”

Rubino considered, squinting into the glare. He pursed up his lips.

“I think that first we establish if she turns to the airport. Then we can come up alongside and force her to pull over. We should seem cruel and merciless. I will conceal my ordinarily sunny nature. She was frightened leaving the Señora’s farm, we will frighten her more. If she decides to collaborate, to tell us all she knows about the bombing, about the money—fine. If not we will take physical possession and look for buyers. I think she will be in demand. We can be an excellent partnership. I with my knowledge of the Venezuelan mentality, you with your Embassy connection, the excuse of being interested only in getting Mr. Rourke out of prison—”

He broke off suddenly. “There are binoculars in the compartment. Look at that turning red light. A police car?”

Shayne found the binoculars. Bracing himself with his elbows against the dashboard, he moved the focusing knob and picked up a revolving beacon on the roof of a black sedan parked at the mouth of an exit ramp.

“Yeah, it looks like it.”

“At the airport exit,” Rubino said. “Damnation. They will be watching for Jaguars, certainly. If we had taken the trouble to borrow an anonymous car.”

He shifted down, rattling his fingers against the steering wheel. Shayne watched the car they were following. Its brakelights came on for the exit, but it passed the police beacon and continued another hundred feet to the next ramp.

“Going east!” Rubino said, his voice tight. “To a boat. But there is a roundabout way.”

He signaled for a turn, climbed the divider and headed back toward Caracas. Shayne said nothing. Rubino pushed the Jaguar hard, getting the maximum speed out of each gear. He darted down into the next exit.

“Hold on with both hands,” he advised. “This is shorter, more primitive. From an older century.”

The concrete ramp spewed them onto a narrow two-lane road, unpaved and rutted.

“Now you will meet Venezuela,” he shouted happily, “and if the axles hold—”

He hit a pothole and the rest of the sentence was jolted away. He stayed in third, avoiding the worst irregularities with subtle changes in speed and direction.

“Can you see the car?” he demanded.

The road here was depressed between high banks. Until it turned and dived downward, Shayne was unable to see the ocean. He located the coastal road, which hugged the shore in places but most of the time ran inland through dense undergrowth.

“Mr. Shayne,” Rubino said urgently, “do you have a gun?”

Shayne pulled his bag over from the back seat and took out his .38. Rubino snapped the catches holding the top in place and let it fly up and back.

“At the next bend. Show them the gun and fire once.”

Shayne still had seen nothing that required a gun. Rubino threw the wheel over and started into another long downward curve. The curve tightened. The road doubled back on itself and they went into their own dust cloud. At the bottom of the loop, an old flat-bed truck was parked so that it nearly blocked both lanes. There was a man on the runningboard with a rifle, two bandoliers of ammunition crossing his chest. In the shadow cast by his wide hat brim, he was faceless.

Shayne pulled himself up and brought the pistol to bear. The Jaguar fishtailed in the loose dirt.

The man on the truck watched without shifting the rifle. Shayne fired, and he dived out of sight. The Jaguar swerved while Rubino sawed at the wheel. For a moment they headed straight down the mountain. The rear wheels rode out of the rut. Rubino pulled the wheel sharply to the left, missed the edge by an eyelash and came back around the truck into the road. Shayne fired again, at the truck’s tire, but the bullet went into the dirt.

He sat down and refastened his seatbelt.

Rubino was very excited. “How they would love to get hold of this car. It would make their fortunes.”

The road’s surface improved as they came out on the flat. He stayed in third, watching carefully to avoid the frequent holes.

“I fear we are still bouncing too badly for binoculars.”

He glanced behind, then skidded to a stop and took the binoculars out of Shayne’s hands. He began panning from left to right, looking for the green Olds.

“Yes,” he said. “I was right. She is going to Macuto. She can charter a boat there. Do you see her at the end of the long cove? Keep your eye on her, please, while I pay attention to this wretched imitation of a road.”

Part of the next section had washed badly, and he slowed to a crawl. Shayne lost the Olds briefly, picking it up again as the road improved. Then all at once they were rolling on blacktop. It was pocked and broken, but a big change after the difficulties of the last few miles.

Seeing the main road ahead, Rubino slid to a stop.

“We are here first,” he announced. “Now we spring out at her as she comes past and give her a small heart attack, perhaps. She thinks she is almost safe.” He peered down the winding road. “She will appear in one moment.”

But he became impatient quickly. “There are so many places for boats! If she had one waiting, in two seconds she could lose herself on the Caribbean. And that would be too bad, after all the time we have invested. I think we should go meet her.”

When Shayne didn’t disagree, he turned out on the shore road in the direction of the airport. There was little traffic, an occasional truck, one or two small European cars. A distant tanker, a smudge on the blue water, headed west toward Maracaibo.

They found the green Olds after half a mile. No one was in it. It was pulled well off the road with the front door slightly ajar, the interior light burning. Rubino frowned and said something in Spanish as he braked to a stop.

It was blindingly hot. The undergrowth was very thick on the land side. There was a small cluster of shacks just ahead, a tiny store marked with a Coca-Cola sign.

Shayne stepped out. A dirt track ran down to the water where two fishing boats were tied to a rickety dock. Off shore, a 20-foot open-decked runabout rode at a mooring in a slow swell.

A barefooted Venezuelan girl appeared around one of the shacks. Rubino called a question, which frightened her back out of sight.

Shayne started toward the water, and suddenly a man materialized on the deck of one of the boats. He was wearing only bathing trunks. He was young, well-tanned and well-muscled, with a full mustache. He looked at Shayne, then whirled, scrambled to the rail and dived.

He came out of the dive with arms and legs pumping in a powerful crawl. Shayne ran toward the dock, reaching it an instant before the swimmer arrived at the mooring and flashed over the gunwale of the powerboat like a leaping salmon. Shayne had his revolver out, but didn’t fire. He glanced back at Rubino, who had stopped short, shading his eyes.

A motor roared and the moored boat jumped forward, snapping the line. Shayne crossed the dock to the fishing boat and stepped aboard.

There was a strong smell of fish and the decks were wet. He found the woman face down on the floor of the cabin, her white blouse slashed open and her back bloody.

NINE

She uttered a low sound and one arm moved. The knife that had been used on her lay under the wheel, bone-handled, with blood on the long blade.

Shayne called to Rubino, who was still on the dock, looking after the departing boat. “Get me some water. Move!”

The woman’s dark glasses fell off as he lifted her carefully. He maneuvered her through a doorway and down a step into a cluttered cabin, where he laid her, face down, on a narrow bunk. With color in her lips she would have been a strikingly beautiful woman. Her eyes were open, but wide and unfocused.

“Relax,” Shayne told her. “For the time being I’m friendly.”

He gripped her blouse in both hands and tore it all the way down. Her back was a mass of blood.

Rubino appeared in the doorway. “Ocean water. O.K.?”

“Fine.”

Shayne found a towel. The woman raised her head and said distinctly, “Don’t touch me.”

“Just a little first aid.”

He sponged her back gently. She had been stabbed twice. One of the wounds was a neat, almost surgical puncture. The other was long and ragged, and the blood was welling up out of the torn flesh.

She objected. “I don’t know who you are.”

“I know who you are,” Shayne said. “You’re Alvares’ ex-girlfriend and I have some questions to ask you, so try not to die right away. Andres, make yourself useful. There are a couple of shirts and a bottle of cognac in my bag. On the double.”

She said faintly, “Do you think I’ll die?”

Shayne continued to work for a moment. “No,” he said then. “But you need a doctor, and finding one may be a bit tricky. Does your head hurt?”

“Oh, yes.”

“He must have slugged you first. Did you see him?”

She moved her head slightly. “Everything exploded. You’re hurting me.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose. We’ve got to do some fast figuring. He hit bone both times. I don’t know what else he hit. If I take you to the hospital you’ll probably feel fine in a few weeks. But do you want to show up at a Venezuelan hospital? We chased you down from the mountains. You were moving fast.”

She said nothing, and he said sharply, “Are you listening to me?”

She said with an effort, “I’m trying to think.”

Shayne heard running footsteps on the dock, and Rubino jumped aboard.

“Everything still peaceful. But for how long? Mr. Shayne, we should quickly reach a decision.”

“The lady’s thinking.”

He ripped up one of the shirts and began to contrive a clumsy bandage, designed to stop the flow of blood from the longer wound. He soaked a small piece of cloth in cognac and told her to suck it while he cleaned both wounds. Her face worked, but she managed to say nothing. He fashioned two rough pads of clean cloth and pressed them against the wounds.

“Your name is Shayne?” she said.

“Michael Shayne. I’m a private detective from Miami. Tim Rourke’s a friend of mine. He’s in jail here, and I know you know for what.”

She spat out the rag and said excitedly, “A detective. I own this boat. Will you take me to—”

“No,” Shayne said, interrupting. “If you died on the way I’d have trouble getting back into Venezuela. I’m a stranger here, and I’m supposed to follow some of the rules.”

“Then—”

“I have a feeling Andres is about to make a suggestion which will cost me some money. Andres, you must know some unfrocked doctor.”

“Not precisely, but I think I could connect you with somebody. Yes, money would change hands. I think a thousand dollars.”

“That makes it too important.”

“One hundred for him, the rest for me. I take the risk.”

“That’s going to clean me out, but all right. Where does this guy operate?”

“In Caracas. A thousand dollars will really take the last of your American money?”

“Don’t forget you’re in for twenty-five percent of my fee.”

“But that is problematical, you know. This is definite, immediate. You need a place to take her, where she can recover her health, and that will require a further investment. Perhaps Miss Dante—”

He stepped into the wheelhouse and picked up her purse. After wiping off the blood he rummaged around inside it and found some American currency.

“Four hundred,” he said after counting it quickly. “O.K., I’ll do it for that. But considering the chances, you have a bargain.”

“This thing is turning into a gold mine,” Shayne remarked. “I’ve got to work out a way to make this bandage stay on. Get back up to the road and see if you can find out anything. Act like a cop.”

“But that would be the worst way to learn anything in this region.”

Shayne’s patient had turned her head so she could see his face. When Rubino’s footsteps sounded on the dock she said pressingly, “I want to hire you. I have to get away. Take me to Curasao. We can get a plane there. I’m really all right. I know it’s nothing serious—”

“Everything else is,” Shayne said roughly. “You won’t be better off in another country. Murder’s an extraditable offense.”

“I haven’t killed anybody.”

“I don’t know that. Drink some more cognac. It’s going to be a rough ride.”

She sat up with his help and he put the mouth of the bottle to her lips. She swallowed deeply.

“You’re going to exchange me for your friend.”

“I’m considering that. But they won’t buy a one-for-one deal. I’ll have to throw in some cash or information, something they can use to help themselves politically. That gives you room to swing. I’m open to any reasonable offer, but it has to include an exit visa for Rourke.”

He tightened the knot of the makeshift bandage. She drew a quick breath.

“If you’ll stop breathing,” he said, “this would have a better chance to stay on.”

“Who is this Andres?” she said faintly. “Do you trust him?”

Shayne laughed. “Hell, no, but he’s my pipeline. I think he recognized the guy who jumped you.”

She looked up quickly. “Are you sure?”

“I’m not sure of anything, but I think he’s trying to figure out a way to squeeze some money out of it. Who wants to kill you at this point?”

She sighed. “I’ll give you a list.”

“Are the cops looking for you?”

“I imagine so.”

“They can’t know about the Olds. We saw you pass a checkpoint without being stopped.”

“I borrowed it from a friend.”

Shayne hitched the bandage higher. “All right, that’s the best I can do. I think you’d better try to walk.”

He put his jacket around her, transferring his gun from the pocket to inside his belt. He gave her more cognac before helping her up. They moved slowly and carefully.

She groaned as the sunlight hit her, and started to fall. He swept her up in his arms and carried her up the track to the Olds. There was still no living person to be seen. Rubino came out of one of the shacks and walked rapidly toward them. He helped Shayne put the injured woman into the back seat of the green car.

“We’re taking this one?” he said. “Yes. But to get his Jaguar back, Mr. Frost will have to pay a ransom of half its value. Of course it is not his money, and the United States is the richest nation in the world.”

He locked the Jaguar and returned to take the wheel of the Olds. Shayne, in the back seat, was adjusting the bandage again.

“I think we can go by autopista,” Rubino said. “Faster and smoother, a better journey for Miss Dante. No one saw the man of the knife come aboard the boat. The speedboat was tied up already at daybreak, and they considered it not their business. But of course it is all probably lies.”

Each small bump in the road meant a stab of pain for Lenore, and Shayne kept feeding her cognac. They were given only a casual glance by the police at the cloverleaf. Rubino concentrated on getting the feel of the car. At any speed over sixty the front end vibrated badly.

“We’re taking her to my flat,” he announced after a time. “It is a terrible, terrible risk, but to involve other people would be riskier still. If you are ever interrogated, Mr. Shayne, I will ask you to say you forced me at gunpoint. Say nothing about money.”

“I doubt if they’ll believe me.”

“In any case,” Rubino assured himself, “everything will go smoothly. First the doctor.”

Leaving the highway at the outskirts of the city, he parked and made a phone call. He talked for some time, gesturing freely. Returning, he nodded to Shayne to indicate that the arrangements had been made. He drove from there to a hospital, a modern concrete building painted in red and blue stripes, where he picked up a pudgy young man in shades and hospital whites, carrying a medical bag. No names were exchanged.

Rubino lived nearby, in a high-rise concrete block with brightly colored awnings on each terrace, so recently built that the lobby was still not entirely finished. Shayne carried Lenore past a group of indifferent workmen and put her in the elevator. When he set her down, she swayed against him.

“I’m all right. It’s the brandy.”

Rubino’s apartment, on the top floor, was air-conditioned, furnished with blonde department-store pieces upholstered in bright colors, and except for the view of the mountains through large picture windows, it might have been located in Miami Beach. The other Venezuelan made an admiring remark in Spanish, and Rubino answered with a modest laugh and a joke. He spread a sheet on the sofa, and Shayne laid the woman on it.

The doctor went to work.

After a moment Rubino joined Shayne at the front window.

“An opportunity,” he said in a low voice. His back to the room, he traced a dollar sign on the glass. “The subject we were speaking about earlier, Alvares’ plunder—”

“There’s that,” Shayne said. “But we don’t want to rush it. How about this doctor? Can we be sure he’ll keep his mouth shut?”

Rubino nodded seriously. “He has reason to be afraid of me.”

Lenore called, “What are you two conspiring about?”

Rubino turned with his bright smile. “I am speaking to Mr. Shayne about your biography. I am happy to say I own one of your paintings!”

He showed Shayne a carefully constructed arrangement of overlapping geometric shapes, in blues and reds. It was signed L. Dante, and dated eight years before. Its creator was watching from the sofa, waiting for his reaction.

“Yeah,” Shayne said noncommittally.

The doctor completed his bandage. One breast was covered with gauze; the other had been left bare. Rubino brought a soft striped shirt from his bedroom and the doctor helped her put it on. She brushed her hair while the doctor spoke to Rubino in Spanish.

“The damage is not too bad,” Rubino translated. “Only one thrust penetrated deeply. The other was on the surface, through flesh and muscle, and he has taken care of it. She should not exert herself, remain quiet, et cetera, take aspirin tablets if the pain is bad, sleep as much as possible and be careful not to be stabbed again too soon.”

The doctor snapped his bag and went to the bathroom to wash.

“After you drop him off,” Shayne said, “I want you to take a message to Frost.”

“He can find a taxi,” Rubino protested. “We have so much to decide, what strategy to follow, ways and means—”

Shayne was writing on the flyleaf of a book he had picked off a side table.

Rubino persisted. “Frost is on the other side of the city. He has a telephone line installed by his own technicians; it is checked daily. You can speak on it with perfect security.”

“I need some cash,” Shayne explained. “I can’t operate without money in my pocket. Unless you’d like to advance me something?”

“That would be against my lifelong practice,” Rubino said stiffly.

Shayne ripped out the page. He had written: “I hereby acknowledge receipt of $2000 from Felix Frost, to be repaid promptly by money order on my return to the U.S. or to constitute a binding obligation on my estate if that’s how things go. Half American money, half Venezuelan. Michael Shayne.”

He handed it to Rubino. “He’ll want to know what’s happening. Tell him as little as possible. We want to keep Lenore a secret. You can say I haven’t been able to see the widow, but I’m still trying. Get back as soon as you can.”

Their eyes held for a moment.

“If he asks me a direct question about the lady, I’ll have to tell him, Mr. Shayne. I cannot afford to annoy this man.”

“Get in and out fast. As far as I can see now, she’s the only leverage we’ve got.”

“Yes, but how to employ it? This we need to discuss.”

The doctor came out of the bathroom. Rubino hesitated, then nodded to him and they went out together.

“Leverage?” Lenore said. “In just what way?”

“Don’t tighten up, baby, or you’ll start bleeding again.”

He went to the front window, and waited until Rubino and the doctor emerged from the building. Then he began to search the apartment. She watched him check the base of the telephone, underneath the tables, along the frames of the pictures and mirrors. She started to say something, but Shayne stopped her with a quick shake of the head. He was examining a large mirror over a teak sideboard.

“Yeah. Here it is.”

“Am I allowed to ask—” she began.

“No. See if you can stand up.”

He pulled her to her feet and put his mouth to her ear. “There’s a mike in the room somewhere, so take it easy. I want to show you something.”

Her eyes widened. He slipped his arm around her and walked her to the door, which he opened silently. He snapped the spring lock so they could reenter. At the door to the next apartment, he fished out the lock-picking equipment he always carried.

“I’m guessing on some of this,” he said. “But he lives in a high-rent building, by Caracan standards, and where does the money come from? He’s cleared about eighteen hundred bucks in the last couple of hours, but this is no ordinary day. Frost said something about blackmail. I don’t know if you know Frost.”

“By sight.”

“He’s using me to do some legwork for him. I think he was suggesting there might be ways I could use Rubino. The guy’s feeding information to various people, and the funny thing about that is that they all seem to know it.”

He gradually increased the pressure on his pick. When he felt it engage, he snapped it sharply and the bolt came back. He opened the door.

This apartment was a duplicate of Rubino’s, with the order of rooms reversed. It was only partially furnished, with no phone or kitchen equipment, no bed in the bedroom. Shayne opened the top doors in a carved sideboard against the party wall. Lenore gasped.

The back of the sideboard was cut away, and they looked into Rubino’s living room through a two-way mirror. On the shelf beneath, there was a small camera and a tape recorder. The recorder was voice-actuated, and the receiving switch was open. Shayne flicked it shut. Using the tiny screwdriver that was part of his lock-picking tools, he removed the top plate, exposing a printed circuit. He laid the screwdriver blade across the battery terminals. There was an impatient little hiss as the connection shorted out.

He put the top plate back and opened the switch.

“A nice little piece of equipment,” he said, and when the reels remained motionless: “O.K. Now we can talk.”

TEN

“How long will it take him?” Shayne said. “He’ll be driving fast because he won’t want to miss anything.”

“Twenty minutes at least, but can you be sure he’ll actually go?”

“I think so, to pick up the cash. He’s going to consider that two thousand bucks potentially his.”

He closed the doors of the sideboard and they returned to the other apartment, where Shayne rigged a simple device to let them know if anyone entered the apartment they had just left. He found a thin reel of picture wire in the kitchen, tacked one end to the inner side of the other living-room door, ran it beneath the door along the hall and under the door of Rubino’s apartment, where he anchored it to a tumbler in which he placed several coins. When the other door was pulled open, the glass would spill.

Lenore, meanwhile, was working on her appearance at the two-way mirror. She turned, and they looked at each other. The striped man’s shirt was just right for her. The nipple of her unbandaged breast pressed clearly against the cloth.

“How old was Alvares?” Shayne asked.

She moved her shoulders uncomfortably and sat on the sofa, knees together.

“Fifty-six when I met him. That was four years ago. I know what you’re really asking, and don’t think I haven’t asked myself the same thing, more than once. Well—he was a man of force, shall we say. I’d been painting and painting and painting, and getting nowhere. I literally wasn’t eating in those days except when somebody took me to dinner. I know that sounds ridiculous, in this day and age. But it’s true. I was sure I had talent. Sooner or later, I thought, someone would recognize it. And he recognized it. He really did, Mike, he bought one of my paintings before he met me. What he offered at first was a kind of scholarship, so I could concentrate on painting without worrying about bills. Of course it didn’t stop there. And after it really began with him I stopped painting, which may prove something about me. Heaven knows there’s no shortage of early Dantes.” She gestured ironically at the one on Rubino’s wall. “I am chic now. But in only two places, Palm Beach and Caracas.”

Shayne had left his cognac in the car, but he found another bottle in Rubino’s liquor cabinet.

“I think this really does help,” she said, accepting a glass.

“Twenty minutes isn’t much time,” Shayne said, moving a side chair so he could sit down facing her. “We’ve got a lot to cover. First I want to be sure you know where I stand.”

She stopped him. “I know. I thought about it on the autopista. Trading me for your friend Rourke isn’t really such a farfetched idea, is it? I have to persuade you I can be valuable in other ways, and to do that, I have to tell you the exact truth, as far as I know it. Maybe you’ll see something I’ve missed. Where do you want me to start?”

“Were you in Alvares’ plane when it crashed?”

“Yes, and I’ve got bruises to prove it. I hated to come to Caracas this time. It’s in the middle of my busy season in the gallery, but he wanted me here. He knew about the movement against him, but thought it would all blow over, somehow. It didn’t, of course. It got rapidly worse. He had his pilot on twenty-four hour notice. When he got word that troops were coming to arrest him, he phoned me. I met him at the airstrip. We took off and crashed. After I crawled out I decided there was no reason to hang around and wait for the soldiers. He didn’t make a popular move when he tied up with a gringo. I’ve appeared in political cartoons, I regret to say, the blonde temptress with a great dollar sign on my bosom.”

“How much money was he carrying?”

“Not a great deal. I took what he had, but it was barely enough to buy that boat.”

“I’ve been hearing he had a fortune in cash stashed away somewhere.”

She shook back her long hair. “Perhaps. I’m not exactly a giddy young thing, but should I be expected to know how much money he had in the bank, or in which bank?”

“People assume you do.”

“When he paid for something, he simply opened his wallet and took out some money. Is that the police theory? That I bombed him to death so that only I, in all the world, would know the location of his wealth? Mike, that’s so far from the truth—He was a real Latin male. His women were helpless creatures who couldn’t add up a checkbook.” She looked at him critically. “Are you believing this?”

“Most of it sounds pretty straight. What happened after you walked away from the wreck?”

“When I got back to the city I called my niece, a sweet girl named Paula Obregon. She found me a place to stay.”

“Frost snowed me her picture. Rourke was seeing her.”

“Then you know she’s a revolutionary, a fierce enemy of capitalist governments. But what a nice girl, all the same. She went to school in the States for a year, and she stayed with me part of the time. When she came back she plunged into the movement against my dear friend and lover, so of course I’ve seen very little of her since. I think she’s too smart not to outgrow those juvenile ideas, or that’s what I keep telling her parents. When I heard Guillermo had been taken to La Vega, I had an idea. This will sound romantic to you, but damn it, it really could have worked. These guerrillas have a fabulous organization, absolute discipline. All of a sudden, there they are. Look again, they’re gone. Several of their leaders were being held in that prison, and my idea was that if they could smuggle in some smoke bombs and tear gas, enough to confuse and incapacitate the guards, a relatively small force could walk in wearing gas masks and deliver everybody, regardless of politics.”

“In a couple of cigarette cartons,” Shayne said, scraping his chin.

“That’s the way we worked it out. They jumped at the idea. I went to Señora Alvares—”

“Just a minute. Did she know you were her husband’s girl?”

“After a while it wasn’t much of a secret. They’ve had no marital life, by which I mean sexual contact, for years. Divorce wasn’t possible. If I could visit my friend in prison there would have been no problem, but that privilege of course was reserved for the wife. It wasn’t easy for me to go to her. She was angry and suspicious but I managed to persuade her, finally. He was her husband, after all, and did she want him to spend the rest of his life behind bars? That was the sentimental side of the argument. The practical side was that if we could help him escape, he would continue to support her. She’s quite a self-centered bitch, as a matter of fact, and when she agreed to help I’m quite sure she was thinking of herself. But that’s unkind and probably unfair.”

“Did she know what was going to be in the cartons?”

“Yes, but her part in it fell through. She couldn’t get permission to visit him.”

“Which is where Tim Rourke came in.”

“Paula knew him from Miami. She was supplying material for a series on the guerrillas, and I believe she was staying with him at his hotel, so if he thought of any questions to ask in the middle of the night, she could answer them right away. He agreed to help us. He made himself such a nuisance downtown that they finally set up an interview for him. You know how the other correspondent was substituted at the last minute.”

“Did Tim really know what he was letting himself in for?”

“It wasn’t really that dangerous, Mike. The timing device wasn’t supposed to go off until half an hour after he left. Meanwhile, another MIR detachment would be making a diversion downtown, robbing a bank and so on. I didn’t see how it could miss.”

“Did you see the cartons being prepared?”

“That was done by Paula’s people, somewhere else. And it was honestly just a beautiful job. They looked absolutely genuine, and felt absolutely genuine.”

“Now tell me how you planned to leave the country.”

“I had a car, the same Oldsmobile. The boat was fueled up and ready. Tim was going to meet us there and go with us. I was at the room Paula found for me, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Two longs and a short would mean that the truck had arrived, bringing my friend in a wig and false nose. I waited and waited, and of course nothing happened. I didn’t dare leave for fear of missing the signal. I heard sirens, and shooting. I stayed up on the roof most of the night. I knew something had gone wrong, but what if they’d been attacked after they got the prisoners out, and he was in hiding? In the morning I bought a paper, and there it was. And the whole thing had been my idea, Mike! I got it started and kept it going, and somewhere along the way somebody used my plan to murder him. And I did a stupid thing—I went to the farm. I thought I could persuade her I hadn’t done it, and if we went to the police together and told our story—but the woman was insane! She said I killed him, she’d told them everything, they were looking for me, I’d be arrested and put to death. She screamed horrible things at me and tried to tear out my eyes. I ran out of the house.”

She shivered, looked into her glass and drank some more cognac. Shayne had listened intently to her story, and now he began to push questions at her. How long had Tim Rourke had possession of the cartons? She counted backward; less than half a day. She herself had had them overnight, and had returned them to her niece in mid-morning, after the Señora had been denied permission to visit the prison.

“All right,” Shayne said. “Now we’re going to talk some more about the money. Try to be a little more convincing. I’m calling it money. I don’t know whether it’s in cash or securities or gold or real estate. You were big enough in his life so he wanted you down here at a time when he knew trouble could start popping any minute. He had his getaway plans made. As far as anybody’s told me, he didn’t have any shoe-boxes full of thousand-dollar bills when he crashed. That means the thousand-dollar bills were waiting for him somewhere else. You seem to be a bright, cool girl. If you didn’t want to leave your gallery in the middle of the season, you could have told him so.”

“He bought me that gallery! If what you’re saying is that I didn’t love him, Mike—”

“That doesn’t interest me.”

“Well, I’m sorry! Of course I knew he was rich, and I must have assumed it wasn’t money he saved out of his official salary. But I didn’t know any details.” She added, “Maybe I was afraid to ask.”

“You understand I’m not talking about the money he took out of his pocket to pay waiters. I’ve heard various sums quoted, from twenty million down.”

She looked startled. “Twenty million dollars!”

“That’s only a skim of about a million and a half a year. But pick a number. It doesn’t have to be twenty. Ten million, five. Call it five million, and I take back what I said about thousand-dollar bills. Fifties are as high as he’d want to go and that many fifties would fill a couple of trunks. You can’t buy real property without leaving a trail of paper. Somebody like you, sleeping in the same bedroom, using the same phone, would have to know what he was doing. Don’t go on denying it.”

He looked at his watch. “Rubino’s on his way back, and I know from driving with him that he doesn’t pay much attention to traffic lights. We’ve got a pretty good situation here, if we can work out, a way to exploit it. I want him to sneak in next door and listen to us talking. People who depend on surveillance techniques usually believe everything they hear.”

“I’m glad you’re finally using the word we.”

“You’re in enough trouble so I think you’re about to start helping. I’m not the only one who thinks you know where that money’s buried. Or can you think of any other reason that guy was waiting to knife you?”

“He could think it and still be wrong, Mike. Find out for me! I still want to hire you, but I can’t be too free with my promises, or you’ll think I have keys to all his safe deposit boxes. I’m thinking of my skin!”

She forgot and took a deep breath. “Damn it, that hurt. I’m willing to play ‘let’s suppose,’ if you are. Let’s suppose there is such a cache of money and we find it, who would it belong to?”

Shayne smiled. “We can ask a lawyer.”

“Perhaps I’d deserve some of it. I’m in his will.”

Shayne’s smile broadened, and she said, “I know! If it gets as far as the lawyers, the new junta will simply gobble it up.”

“Somebody has to turn it in first. I don’t think that’s likely. Let’s name a percentage. If I get you out of the country and wind up this bombing so they don’t come after you with extradition papers, I think fifty percent would be about right.”

Her eyes changed. “Fifty percent of nothing would be nothing. Fifty percent of five or ten million would be damned high.”

He made a quick gesture. “Then it’s settled. We’re partners. Now give me a few dribbles of information.”

She drew her eyebrows together and set her lips in a thin line. But she forced herself to relax, and drank.

“Fifty percent of nothing would be nothing for me, too, so—” She hesitated. “I think I may know what you’re talking about, but it certainly doesn’t amount to anything like twenty million, or ten or even five.”

“Four?”

“Less than four. That doesn’t matter. I know exactly what the police will do if they get hold of me. We talked about it. Guillermo thought he could defy them for ninety-six hours. I couldn’t last ninety-six minutes. That’s why I’m so concerned about this Andres Rubino. What if he brings the police back with him?”

“He hasn’t decided yet whether or not that’s his best deal.”

“They’ll try to hang those three murders on me, won’t they?”

“On you and Rourke. You’re both Americans. Palm Beach and Miami are in the same part of the world. It stands to reason that you know each other, and have been working together all the way. If they can’t find Paula Obregon, you’re cooked, and everybody tells me she’s going to be hard to find.”

He stood up. “I’ve got something to do before he gets back.”

She sat forward, alarmed. “Mike, you aren’t leaving me.”

“Only for a couple of minutes.” He took out his revolver, snapped off the safety, and laid it on the sofa beside her. “If he comes in, shoot him.”

“I couldn’t!”

“Yes, you could,” he told her. “Wait till he comes around the end of the sofa. Point it at him and pull the trigger. I’ll clean up after you.”

ELEVEN

Shayne rode the elevator to the lobby and looked at the ladder of names in the vestibule. Half the slots were empty, designating unrented apartments. He rang two of the bells at random and waited. A moment later, hearing no answering buzzer, he returned to the elevator.

The first of the two apartments was still being painted. Open cans of paint indicated that the painters would be back. The second was ready for renting. Shayne was about to leave after looking it over when something pulled at his eye—a car turning off the elevated freeway, much too fast, taking the exit curve on the outside of its tires. It was Lenore Dante’s green Olds—Rubino, coming back.

Going out hurriedly, he snapped the lock so the door could be opened from the outside. He had blocked the elevator, and had already pushed the button for Rubino’s floor.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, snapping his fingers as the car responded at its usual pace to the electronic controls.

Lenore, on the sofa where he had left her, jerked around as he came in. One hand was out of sight. She seemed very pale.

“It’s you,” she said, relieved. “God, I was afraid I’d have to—”

“He’s just pulling into the parking lot. We don’t have time to rehearse. Take off your clothes.”

She looked at him blankly. “Did you say—”

“You heard me. He’ll have to go out to phone. As soon as you hear him leave, go down to Nine-C. Don’t forget that number. Nine-C. It’s an empty apartment and the door’s unlocked. Bolt it from the inside and wait there for me. It could be a long wait. It won’t be what you’re used to, but it’s better than jail. Damn it, get undressed! We’ve got about a minute and a half.”

He had kicked off his shoes and was unzipping his pants. Lenore began to fumble with her skirt. Leaving his clothes scattered about the rug, he went to help her.

“You can leave the shirt on.”

“Mike,” she stammered, “you—you mean we’re going to make love? With Rubino watching through the mirror?”

“No. It’s already happened, and it was terrific, as usual. We’re about to have an intimate post-sex conversation, and he’ll believe every word he hears.”

He brought a bath towel from the bathroom. She was still on the extreme front edge of the sofa, her nicely tanned legs stretched out, her hands folded in her lap.

“You look about as relaxed as a crowbar,” he said roughly.

“Mike, are you really sure what you’re doing?”

He gestured. She slid back into a reclining position, crossing her ankles. He arranged a pillow behind her and unbuttoned the striped shirt. The pose was right, but she was still semi-rigid. He moved the cognac and glasses so he could reach them from the sofa and lit cigarettes for them both.

“Don’t look at the mirror,” he said more gently, arranging himself beside her. “You’ve got thirty seconds to get in the mood. You enjoyed it.”

“I did not! Mike, you saw that camera. He’s sure to take photographs.”

“That’s right.” He put his hand flat against her stomach. “One way is to think about the jam you’re in and the other way is to forget about jams.”

Under his moving hand, she lost a little tension. She turned her head and kissed him lightly.

“I’ll try to trust you. I hope I can. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I’ll feed you the cues.”

He touched her unbandaged breast, and felt the nipple tighten. He gave her a long searching kiss, drawing away only when he caught a flicker of response. They settled against each other.

“I guess I did enjoy it,” she admitted. “How long have I known you?”

“Six months. And it’s been sweet all the way.”

He heard coins jangle in the glass as the door to the next apartment opened. Lenore stiffened. He put his hand back on her stomach.

“You’re doing fine.”

He reached for his cognac, a movement that had the effect of making her nakedness visible to the man who was undoubtedly in position now on the other side of the trick mirror. Her fingers tightened on Shayne’s shoulder. He finished the drink and poured himself another.

“Can you reach mine?” she said quietly. “Darling.”

He brought her glass up from the floor and passed it to her. Trying to drink without changing position she spilled some of the cognac, and laughed as she brushed the drops off her breast.

“We’d better think about putting ourselves back together,” Shayne observed. “That guy is a demon driver, and he’ll walk in any minute.”

“Not yet, darling. I know Caracas traffic. We’ve got ten minutes, even if he turned right around as soon as he got there, and Frost wouldn’t let him do that. It’s been ages since we had a chance to be alone. I think you’d better kiss me.”

She closed with him, and kissed him with surprising fierceness. He felt her teeth, then her tongue. She gripped him tightly when he tried to cut it short. The tables were turned now, and she released him only when she spilled more of her cognac.

“Poor Andres is going to murder us,” she said. “We’re wrecking his sofa. Darling, I have a smashing idea. Let’s do it again!”

“Don’t be silly. Come on, get dressed.”

“Do something unsensible for a change. You’re always figuring the angles. So cool. I want you inside me. Right now!”

“I know you don’t mean it,” Shayne said, reaching for his pants.

“Don’t I?” she said wickedly.

She followed him as he tried to get away, caressing him with both hands.

“Baby, think of the money at stake,” he said.

She let him go then, after putting her mouth to the side of his face and biting his earlobe very hard. “How could I forget about the money?”

“There’ll be other times,” he said. “All we need is a couple of small breaks, and we can buy an eighty-foot yacht and go around the world. And we’ll never have to do another thing we don’t feel like doing for the rest of our lives.”

“Heaven.”

Shayne swung his feet to the floor and began pulling on his socks. “I don’t think Rubino caught on, do you?”

“Goodness no, he hasn’t a clue. But, dear God, that was close at the boat. You have a genius for showing up at exactly the right time. Another minute—”

She gave a quick gasp of pain as she sat up. “I’m not sure sex is the best thing for stab wounds.”

“I didn’t hear you complaining.”

“Darling, you’ll have to help me.”

Shayne dressed hurriedly. “In a minute. We’ve still got things to talk about. It’s lucky he’s such a small-timer, Rubino. He’ll pass on everything I said to Frost, and I think I really convinced him that all I care about is springing Rourke.” He laughed shortly. “Tim made that bed himself, and he has to lie in it. If I grease the right wheels I can get him pardoned after a couple of years.”

“Unless it slips your mind.”

“No, he did what he was told. I consider it an obligation.”

After buttoning his shirt, he dried Lenore with the towel. “Baby, you’re a mess.”

She touched his face. “Where would I be without my dear, sweet sexy Michael Shayne?”

His voice hardened. “Keep telling yourself that and maybe you won’t be tempted to dump me.”

“I’m not totally out of my mind,” she said, surprised. “I know I need you.”

“You need me now. But after I get you back to civilization you may not feel the same pressure.”

“That’s a ridiculous statement,” she declared, playing to the menace in his tone. “The partnership won’t be dissolved except by mutual consent. I know what would happen to me if I tried to be too clever. Not only that, damn it, I love you.”

“Yeah,” Shayne said skeptically.

“All right, I’ll modify that. I have a much better orgasm with you than I’ve been able to manage with anybody else, and wouldn’t I be a fool to throw it away? Do you find that more convincing?”

“People have done dumber things for less money.”

“Now listen to me, Mike,” she snapped. “I’m getting more than a little fed up with these hints. It can cut two ways. I hope you aren’t getting any mad ideas about being able to swing this singlehanded because I can tell you right now—”

He grinned. “The orgasms have been mutual, kid.”

She laughed grudgingly. “Then we’ll keep right on watching each other, O.K.?”

She had trouble with the shirt, and Shayne buttoned it for her. “One character I know you won’t try anything with is Rubino. He doesn’t carry enough weight. But you’ll have to spend some time with him, so work out an attitude.”

“What am I supposed to say to him?”

“That I’ve gone out to see the widow. I know the way now. I don’t need him.”

“Why you want to go near that bitch—”

“To hammer a few final nails in a few coffins. I think she knows more than she’s telling people. Somebody like Felix Frost always looks for the money angle or the political angle. But ninety percent of the killings I run across are committed for the old-fashioned motives—hatred, jealousy, revenge. Don’t say anything to Andres about this because I don’t want him to get any more moneymaking ideas.”

“Mike, do we really need him?”

“Yeah, to carry messages. He’s my direct wire to Frost. And we may need Frost, if this other thing doesn’t pay off.”

He smoothed her skirt over her hips and gave her a critical inspection. “You’ve got lipstick on your teeth. And comb your hair.”

While she was working on that, Shayne knotted his necktie at the two-way mirror. He leaned closer, running his fingertips the wrong way along his stubbled jaw. His face was now only a few inches from Rubino’s in the other apartment.

“I shaved in too big a hurry this morning.”

“Don’t tell me,” she said, looking up from her pocket mirror. “You rubbed me raw in places.”

“You complain about the damndest things.”

“Mike, how is this going to work, or don’t you feel like telling me?”

“I’m playing it by ear, as usual.” He came back to rearrange the sofa cushions. “But it seems to me I’ve got a handle. It depends on how much power Mejia really has. He was trying to tell me this morning that he’s the man with the muscle. Maybe he is. I’ll have to go easy until I find out.”

“Are you planning to see him?”

“As soon as I get the widow to clear up a few points. It’ll take negotiating. We want safe conduct out of the country, and we want him to call off his dogs. If I can get Tim included, fine. If not, the hell with it. It seems to me I’ve got something to sell. I’m handing him half the MIR on a platter.”

He had picked a moment when she had her back to the big mirror. She sent him a questioning look.

He went on. “Combine what you told me with everything I already knew and I can knock those people down so they stay down for good. I’ve got names and locations, and if Mejia takes a few precautions he can wipe out their whole outfit in one raid.”

“He’ll love that,” Lenore said.

“I think so.”

“If you can give him Serrano and all the top leaders, you can name your own price. They’ll make you an honorary colonel.”

“But it has to be handled. It’s not a simple matter of turning off the heat and putting us both on an airplane. He has to lay off altogether. I was getting a strong smell of chicanery out of him this morning. I don’t think he’d mind cutting himself a small slice. That’s why I say it’s going to be delicate. I’ve got to have guarantees, not promises.”

“Baby, you’re beautiful,” she said admiringly.

He kissed her and gave her a quick mechanical caress. “I’m taking the cognac.”

“Leave me the gun?”

“No, I may need it.”

TWELVE

Passing out of the line-of-sight from the wall mirror, Shayne tightened the picture wire near the front door so the glass would fall over again and Lenore would know that the door to the next apartment had been opened.

Downstairs in the parking area, he found an unlocked Renault, with the starter on the floor. One of Shayne’s standard items of equipment was a short length of cable with a spring-clamp at each end, for bypassing a locked ignition switch. A moment later, he was moving.

He located the conspicuous towers of the Centro Bolivar and used them as aiming stakes. He drove east on Bolivar Avenue until he saw the bullring on his right and made the necessary turn to the south. The street he had picked looped back on itself. He returned to the avenue and tried another. This time he had found the road to Valencia.

He followed it into the mountains.

As he approached the farm he noted the pattern of roads and the arrangement of out-buildings. This was the hottest part of the day, and the fields were empty. He turned into the long cypress avenue. Halfway to the house he had to stop to open a stock gate. Then he came to the main wall, where he sounded his horn. A stocky peasant with two sidearms, a pistol, and a machete, came out to look him over from under a broken sombrero.

“I’m a detective,” Shayne said slowly. “Police. Policia. To see the Señora.”

Nothing changed in the man’s face.

Shayne motioned toward the house. “She wants to talk to me.” He pantomimed a conversation. “Very important. Norte Americano. Mejia sent me. The President of the United States sent me. El Presidente.” When none of this had any effect, he said more harshly, “Get out of my way, goddamn it, or I’ll run you down. Felix Frost sent me.”

Either the angry manner or Frost’s name worked. The man retired to open the gate. After getting out of the car, Shayne walked past a chained Doberman pinscher, which bayed at him furiously. He clanged an ornate wrought-iron bell at the front door and entered the building without waiting.

A uniformed maid was on her way toward him. He nodded and walked past, waving away the question she was asking.

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

She went with him, protesting, as he looked into the big front room, then into a formal dining room beyond. The furniture was dark and forbidding.

“Where do I find the Señora?”

The maid tried to hold him, but he brushed her aside. This building, like Frost’s, surrounded a central court. As he came out on one side of this court, a woman in black appeared on the other. The maid, waving her arms, shrieked something in Spanish.

Shayne crossed the courtyard on a raked walk. Señora Alvares was a severe woman, and somewhat on the plump side, tall, with her black hair pulled into a tight knot. She wore no makeup or jewelry.

“I hope you speak English,” he said, approaching. “I don’t seem to be coming across too well.”

“I speak a little English, badly. Who are you?”

She had a deep voice, a heavy accent that at first sounded somewhat Germanic.

“I’m Michael Shayne, a private detective from Miami. I’ve been retained by the Miami News to see what I can do about one of their reporters, Tim Rourke, who’s in jail here. I have some questions. I know it’s a bad time, but they can’t wait.”

“Questions,” she said, putting her hand to her face. “About the death of my husband.”

“And one or two other things.”

She looked him over deliberately, then, surprisingly, reached out to pinch the muscle of his right arm.

“You are a powerful, powerful man.”

She started carefully along the paved cloister. She was wearing high heels, but she was so tightly girdled that the jolts had no sensuous effect. She went in under a stone archway.

Shayne followed. It was a sitting room, as gloomily furnished as the other rooms at the front of the house, but with one splash of color—a geometric painting in light reds and greens. Even before checking the signature, Shayne recognized this as one of the works of her husband’s mistress.

“May I offer something to drink?” Señora Alvares said.

Without waiting for his answer, she drew an open split of champagne from a silver ice bucket and filled two glasses.

“Champagne. I am not celebrating the bombing apart of my husband; this is the only liquid the doctors have let me drink in recent years. To you, sir. That you remain in your present state of health.”

She seemed to want to clink glasses with him, but he avoided that. She lowered herself into a tall-backed chair.

“I see you looking at my painting,” she said. “And it astonishes you, because of the relationship between the painter and my poor husband. Have you met her? A cheap woman, with such fraudulent hair. Unquestionably a talented artist, however, would you not agree? I have owned this painting and others, and I thought to hang them, to show Caracas that for my husband to fall between this woman’s legs was of no consequence to me. But in the end I was too frightened! Until this morning, when I called my little servant and we hung this one, to remind me of my great cowardice. It is valued at twenty thousand bolivars, those few simple shapes. Do you believe it? Some people are taking their Dantes down since the recent events. As for me, I am putting mine up.”

She drank deeply, set the glass on a low chest and looked at him.

“You are the famous detective who always captures the ones who do the murder.”

“Some of the time,” Shayne said. “On this one I’ll settle for getting Tim Rourke out of jail.”

She reached for her glass and Shayne watched her drink. There were two more splits in the ice-filled bucket, and he saw two empties on the sideboard.

“I’ve been talking to Miss Dante,” he said. “She told me about the plan to rescue your husband. I’d like to get your version of that.”

She blinked. “On the whole I think I should imitate your friend Mr. Rourke and stay silent.”

“That’s your privilege. I think I have most of it already, but naturally she told it from her own point of view. I liked her. Very juicy, I thought. That doesn’t mean I believed every word she said.”

The Señora drank, emptying her glass. “Believe every third word. That would be my piece of advice.”

Shayne opened another split and refilled her glass.

“How long have you known about your husband’s association with her?”

“From its beginning, I think. That has no significance. He has announced for many years already that he would do what he pleased, in the matter of who shared his intimate moments. But to become so much in the clutches of a North American was a mistake. His people ask each other, are there no equally juicy Venezuelans?”

“How much of the week did he spend with you?”

“All! There is a mode of behavior to be observed in a Catholic country. So he was with me every day for either dinner or breakfast, rarely for both. Why do you think this important?”

“I’m interested in a diary he was keeping at the end.”

He had noticed that whenever a question bothered or puzzled her, she drank before speaking. She reached for her glass.

“What is meant by the word diary? Something that is written from day to day?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Then you should ask that question of his mistress. Here is where he had his clothes washed, where he read his mail.”

“You never saw him writing in a little book with lined pages?”

She lifted her face from the champagne. “No, Mr. Shayne. I know nothing of any such book of that type.”

“You didn’t give Tim Rourke a page torn out of it, to persuade him to carry in those cartons of cigarettes?”

“No, no. I have no meeting with that person Rourke. When you speak of a diary, I hear about it for the first time.”

“Will you look around the house and see if you can find it? I might be able to use it to buy Rourke off. Then I’d go home and you people could work things out without any more interference from me.”

“But why would I care if you stay or go?”

“It’s a funny setup,” Shayne said. “The minute I showed up everybody started telling me things. That doesn’t always happen. I think it was to keep me busy so I wouldn’t stumble on something I shouldn’t be worried about, such as money.”

“Money,” she said vaguely, and drank. “The odds and ends he was able to put aside. I have heard this mentioned, but who knows how much or where it is?”

“Somebody must. How much luggage did he have with him when he left for the plane?”

“None. Look here, will you open another bottle? Those tiny thin things are not adequate for two persons.”

Shayne popped another cork and more champagne fumed into their glasses. She drank greedily.

“I was with him when he received the phone call. I know now it was the one that said all was over, resistance was hopeless. He was calm. If he had packed a suitcase I would know he was leaving. I might demand that he take me to safety. He merely said he would go outside to smoke a cigar in the garden. In casual shoes, not even a necktie. Presently I heard an airplane motor. Soon after that, a smash.”

“What will you do now,” Shayne said after a moment, “go home to your family?”

“I will make them move me out of this house bodily! One of their tame judges is even now preparing such a measure. If I had that diary you speak about, do you know what I would do? I would sell it. I am not a wealthy woman, far from it. If my husband had other sources of financing, I never saw or touched any of that. He made me a miserable allowance to run the household, and I had to go down on my knees and beg for such things as a new dress, a color television.”

“Lenore says you agreed to help get him out of jail because you thought it would pay off financially.”

“I did it out of softness! Out of sentimentality! Perhaps it occurred to me to bargain a little—if we succeeded, I would expect one third of his property, and that would certainly be fair because I was the one who ran the danger—but it wouldn’t be dignified at such a time. If she told you I said one word to her about money or shares, she is lying in her teeth! I was carried away with the idea that a wife should assist her husband in times of trouble. That has always been the rule in my family.”

“How hard did you try to get permission to see him?”

“I went from office to office. I talked to Mejia, the members of the junta, the judges of the high court. I persuaded Mr. Felix Frost, the most powerful man in the North American Embassy, to intercede on my behalf. But they are inhuman, they wouldn’t grant a wife the favor of looking at her husband for the last time. Politics turn men into animals.”

“Maybe they were afraid he’d manage to tell you where the money was.”

“I’m sick of listening about this money. Don’t speak about it any more because it makes me physically ill.”

“Did you have any contact with Paula Obregon?”

“No, only with the girl’s aunt. I have knowledge of her socially, you understand. Her parents have been to my table. But on this occasion, the one who induced me to make that fatal commitment was the Dante woman, and how coarse, how degrading to me was the moment of weakness. I put my arms around her, we shed tears together as we agreed to conspire to save the life of the man we had in common. But not so much in common, when you think of it. She had the person, the future, I had the empty title.”

“Do you have any idea how I can get in touch with the Obregon girl?”

“One day she will take one chance too many, and she will be captured. But until then—” She waved. “If there is no more champagne in the bucket go to the door and shout. They will bring some.”

He opened the last split and poured. She was still very erect, sitting at the edge of the chair with her knees pressed together, but her color had risen.

“I think it was Dante who did the bomb. You know that it was her idea from the beginning, the minute she came to me! Do you think a woman of that sort would be very overjoyed at the scenery of spending the rest of her life with this poor grim Guillermo? Definitely not. This is a wild goose chase on my part… but if you knew him… She was a scribbling artist when he picked her out of the gutter, and the dear child slobbered with gratitude. He made her paintings fashionable. She has a certain foothold on the edge of Palm Beach society; she amuses them. And the price she had to pay was not too much… Thank you, a drop more… Two weeks annually, now and then a wild weekend. Sometimes she would be asked to come to Caracas and be available. He was nothing to sing about in that category of sex, I can tell you. Mediocre. He was in power too long, his human qualities suffered. And his ordinary conversation. He would look at you with sleepy eyes and defy you to entertain him. I am quite certain she killed him.”

“How could she put together that kind of bomb?”

She waved her glass airily. “I never deny that she’s intelligent. And the reporter Rourke would be blown into pieces by the same explosion, the only person who could give the police her name. That’s what makes me so bloodthirsty.” The word didn’t sound right. “‘Bloodthirsty’?”

“Yeah, that fits,” Shayne said. “I don’t know if you’ll let me get away with this question. We’ve been talking about your husband’s women. Fair’s fair. Do you have any men?”

She looked at him haughtily, her lips beginning to shape a chilling answer. Then she smiled.

“She is intelligent; so are you, Mr. Michael Shayne. I have had precisely the right amount of wine. There are those who have admired me, I believe, but it is a formidable thing, you know, to admit this to the wife of the president, who rules absolutely and has a sudden temper. Those conditions are no longer present. No, I will not return to my family in the provinces. I intend to travel. I wish I had that diary you speak of, then I could travel en luxe. But I am not on that account to be pitied.”

“How soon is the funeral?”

“They have not told me. It will be decided by the politicians.”

She sat back in her chair for the first time and looked at him over her raised glass. “You are a sudden man. I was speaking of my personal desires and you ask the date of the funeral. I wish to ask you how you find me. The wife of the president will always receive flattery she perhaps does not deserve, but you come into my house now when I am the wife of a dead president who no longer holds power. I can trust your opinion. Is life over for me? Shall I sit on a veranda drinking coffee with unmarried cousins?”

He let her drink before he answered.

“No, you don’t fit that scene. I could tell better if you weren’t wearing a girdle.”

Her lips parted. “Do you think, then, that I am asking to be embraced and handled? You are not such an intelligent man, after all.”

“What’s your guess about how much money your husband managed to get away with?”

“Impossible!” she exclaimed. “Now it is money again. We were talking about the fascinating subject of how I impress you, a sophisticated man from another country, and all at once, the dull matter of money. I am indifferent to money. Men don’t feel themselves drawn to women who talk always of money. Why do you think the not wearing of a girdle is so important?”

“It’s a symbol. Did your husband drink champagne?”

“Diet-Cola.”

“It must have been a pretty rough life for you in some ways.”

“Dreary, so dreary. I don’t bother about the insults, the humiliation. That is the lot of women in this world. But the endlessness. Do women tell you that you have a way of moving that draws the eye? In a film, you would fill the screen. You are the one that the audience would watch. My head is whirling, I think you are pressing me to drink.”

“It’s your champagne.”

“You noticed that I am confused by questions, so to keep my composure I drink before answering.” She demonstrated. “And you keep coming toward me with questions.”

“Did he tell you he’d closed out his Swiss accounts?”

She drank again. “What do you want from me?” She studied him, and it was clear that she was trying to make the images hold still. “You are mentioning my girdle, and yet I know you have no erotic plans. Why do you wish to disturb me—so the wine will take command?”

“I want to look through a few bureau drawers.”

She moved a hand in a gesture of permission. “I have hidden nothing. But I will warn you, he was careful about burning papers. It was his religion. Always, in wash bowls, in waste baskets, the servants and I found ashes. Look. Why should I be afraid from you? Before you go, move the champagne within my reach.”

THIRTEEN

Shayne called the maid and told her by signs to bring more champagne. She brought two warm splits. Shayne twirled them in the ice water and opened them both to make drinking less complicated.

“Did he have a room he used as an office?”

“You must find it by yourself.”

Her glass tilted. He straightened it for her and she repaid him with a lopsided smile.

He began checking rooms, trying to get an impression of the life these people had led together. At the opposite end of the cloister he found a room with an immense desk, its surface bare except for an elaborate cradle phone. A large portrait of the ex-president leaned against one wall. Another of Lenore Dante’s geometric oils had been hung in its place.

Shayne was going through the desk drawers when he heard a faint stirring within the phone. He lifted the handset gently. A man’s voice was talking in Spanish, protesting, explaining. Señora Alvares broke in. Shayne heard his own name spoken. He listened to the exchange until it ended. The woman was by turns hot and cold, plaintive and curt. The man was sulky. Shayne thought he heard the name Frost thrown up out of the torrent of unfamiliar sounds, but it flickered by too fast for him to be sure.

When good-byes were spoken, Shayne depressed the bar, waited a moment and then dialed the operator. After surviving the usual series of misunderstandings, he was connected with a voice that could respond in English. He asked for a number in Palm Beach, Florida.

While he waited he continued to open and shut drawers, finding nothing to change the impression he already had, that Alvares had been an orderly, apparently bloodless man. A snapshot of the dead president with Lenore Dante had been slipped under the desk blotter. She was in tennis clothes, holding a racket. Alvares, beside her, seemed to be trying to outstare the camera. There was a bulge in his pocket that could have been a gun.

The operator established the connection and a man’s voice said, “Katz Protection.”

“Sam? This is Mike Shayne.”

“Hey! What’s this thing about Tim Rourke? It’s all over the morning paper. Are they kidding?”

“They don’t seem to be. I’m in Caracas now, trying to find out. There’s a Palm Beach angle I’d like you to check out, if you’re not too busy.”

“Everything’s canceled, as of now. Go ahead, Mike.”

“It’s a lady named Lenore Dante. Do you know her?”

“Lenore Dante. It rings a sort of bell. Is she year-round?”

“She runs an art gallery there, and she used to be the girl friend of this Venezuelan dictator, the guy who got blown up in the bombing. I want to know if they’ve spent time together in Palm Beach, and if so, in what kind of style. What did it cost them? Were they asked out as a couple?”

“I know somebody who can tell me,” Katz said. “How soon do you want it?”

“Right away. The other part is harder. I want everything you can find out about her business and her personal finances. How much money has been going in and out? This is important. And if you have to spend money to get it, spend it. I want rumors as well as facts. Has Alvares invested any money in Palm Beach? Does he own any property there? Stay on it right through, Sam, and keep a line open because I’ll be calling you.”

He hung up and continued with his search of the house. He encountered two maids as he proceeded, and told them in English to go on with what they were doing. He worked his way around the square, ending where he had started.

The widow was asleep on a horsehair sofa under a black lace shawl. A lock of hair had been jarred out of the tight knot at the back of her neck, and lay along her cheek. She was snoring faintly.

She had finished another split of champagne. He filled his own glass from the last remaining bottle and sipped it, thinking. He worked his way through the cigarette without reaching any conclusions. Stubbing it out, he looked more closely at the overflowing ashtray, and picked a dead cigar out of the debris. He crumbled a piece of the wrapper and sniffed it. The smell was unmistakable. It was the same kind of excellent Havana Felix Frost had been smoking that morning.

He dropped it in the ashtray. Señora Alvares hadn’t stirred.

He encountered no one on the way out. As soon as he was back in the stolen French sedan the old man trudged out to open the gate for him. It creaked open. Leaning out, Shayne threw him a coin.

Since hearing his own name tossed back and forth between the Señora and the unknown man on the phone, Shayne’s internal radar had been emitting a steady series of blips. He didn’t need a reminder that he was not only a foreigner here, he was a foreigner who was asking unpleasant questions. He started the car rolling as the old man picked up the coin and moved out of the way. Shayne came down into second and hit the accelerator hard, exploding through the gate.

He spun the wheel, accelerating, and heard the shot as he came out of the skid with the gas pedal on the floor. It sounded like a high-powered rifle. His only weapon was a .38 revolver. The car’s inner wheels ran over a stone curb.

The second shot went into a rear tire. As the tire blew it threw the car back across the driveway where it caromed off a young cypress. Shayne shifted up even before he was sure he had control and began looking for cover.

The car was tossing violently. He was on a rough track leading to a cluster of out-buildings, but from the way the car was bucking he knew he had no chance of making it. In the outside mirror, he caught a flash of a white shirt and a slanting rifle barrel. The rifle came around.

Without hesitating, Shayne wrenched the wheel over, left the road and headed across a patch of cleared ground toward a clump of trees. For that first instant the corner of the wall screened him from the rifleman. The car went up a rise, and then the ground fell away sharply. For a period of time, short but definite, all four wheels were in the air. When they struck, another tire went.

Shayne unlatched the door and let the car shake him loose.

He rolled once and was up, racing for the trees. He held steady for three strides, then jumped. A bullet went into the ground near him.

He broke through the trees and without slackening speed raced down the slope toward the stone buildings. He reached them after a straight, hard run, rounded the corner of a blank wall and leaped into a stable.

There was one dirty window. Shayne scrubbed the accumulated dirt off one pane with his knuckles and looked out.

The Renault had ended up against a tree. The walled farm was now a quarter of a mile distant. Smelling Shayne, a horse snorted and stamped inside a stall. Nothing moved outside until a man carrying a rifle, crouching, ran toward the trees.

Shayne returned to the stable door. There was another silent building across an empty corral. He gauged distances, but he would be out in the open for five seconds, and it would be a long five seconds. Even if the rifleman held up in the trees before coming farther, he would have a shooting-gallery shot at forty yards. He had been high with his first, startled by the Renault’s sudden eruption through the gate. The second shot had been careful and good. Though he had missed with his third, that had been a difficult, hurried shot downhill.

Shayne picked up a clod of dirt and shied it across the corral. Watching the line of trees, he saw a glint of sun on the rifle barrel.

A farm worker moved slowly across a distant field. Work in the fields was about to resume. When it did, Shayne would be badly outnumbered as well as out-gunned. The horse behind him knocked against the door of the stall. Shayne heard the sound of a truck motor starting and decided he could wait no longer. He thrust his .38 inside his belt and let himself into the stall, telling the horse to hold still.

It was a gray stallion, enormously tall. He allowed Shayne to pat his flank and slide his hand along his head.

“I hope you understand English,” Shayne said, gentling the horse with both hands. “We’re going for a run and I want you to behave. If you see anybody with a rifle, stamp on the son of a bitch. That’s right, boy.”

The horse shook his head as the bridle came down and began to weave. Shayne talked him into taking the bit. There was no time to hunt for a saddle. He upended a feed tub. The horse shouldered him against the wall and Shayne cuffed him lightly.

“Easy, fellow.”

Somebody shouted in Spanish and the horse jerked back hard. Shayne mounted the feed tub and flung one leg over his back. The horse reared and came forward; the door sprang open. Shayne slid into place, well forward, and gathered the short reins. A sheathed machete hung from a nail outside the door and Shayne snatched it out of its sheath while the horse hesitated, turning.

The shout was repeated and the horse broke forward. Shayne dug in his heels and held on. They went out the door at a hard gallop, with Shayne in a tight forward crouch, his face against the rough mane.

The corral gate was closed. The horse checked and veered.

The man with the rifle had foolishly left cover. He tried to reverse himself and stumbled. The great gray, with Shayne clinging to his back, galloped at him.

Shayne saw a blur of a face, a streak of mustache, heavy black brows. The man coiled, swinging the rifle. Before he could set himself, Shayne threw the machete. The blade flashed as it revolved. The man gave a startled yelp and flung up both hands. The machete came down in front of him and stood quivering in the hard dirt.

A step away, the horse swerved, changing course so suddenly that again Shayne almost lost his grip.

Now they were galloping downhill through thin grass. Shayne had lost the reins. He gripped the mane with both fists—he was going wherever the horse wanted to take him.

For the space of perhaps half a minute he and the horse presented an excellent target. It seemed to Shayne that they galloped in slow motion. His face was spattered with flecks of saliva. There was a broad grassy ditch beside the road. An obstruction loomed ahead and the horse leaped. Shayne’s heels slipped and he went too far forward. If he had been thrown he would have floated down slowly to meet the ground as it rose slowly toward him. Then he was back in balance, the horse was running smoothly and time speeded up.

Once again part of the horse’s rhythm, he managed to glance around. They had the road to themselves. The farm and its outbuildings receded rapidly. The horse settled into a long reaching gallop, no longer excited but still completely outside Shayne’s control. Shayne fumbled for the reins, worked them up slowly, and was able to feel that he and the horse had again made contact.

Houses flashed past. The road forked. The right fork, which the horse chose, dropped into a shallow valley and climbed again to level ground. Gradually Shayne forced the horse to accept the bit.

They passed a group of peasants on foot, then a parked car. It was a green sedan, an Oldsmobile. By the time the color and the make had registered on Shayne—it was Lenore Dante’s borrowed car—the road had curved and it was gone.

To the left he saw two low buildings with tin roofs and a paved airstrip. Ahead, beyond the end of the runway, was a wrecked plane.

Shayne tightened the reins and sawed at the bit savagely. The horse fought for a time, then gave up abruptly and dropped into a canter. Shayne tightened his hold and forced the horse to stop and turn back. He walked the horse along the grassy strip at the edge of the road, stopping again when he came to a kind of bundle in the ditch.

Shayne slid to the ground. It was a man’s body. Crouching, Shayne rolled it over.

It was Andres Rubino, and he had been shot twice. The front of his shirt was clammy with fresh blood. Another bullet had caught him in the temple and blown a large exit hole in the back of his head. The lower part of his face, the mouth and the muscles around it, still seemed incongruously cheerful, as though he had been able to find amusement even in something as serious as death.

FOURTEEN

Three or four miles now separated Shayne from the man with the rifle, but he was not inclined to linger. He heard an automobile motor and drew his gun. He started for the Olds, but before he reached it an old Ford came out of the bend. The driver’s sombrero was tipped far forward. A woman in the front seat beside him held two chickens and the back seat was jammed with children.

The man saw the gun in Shayne’s hand and the Ford jumped forward.

Shayne returned to the ditch. Stooping, he ripped open Rubino’s shirt to look at the chest wound. It had been made by a high-velocity bullet, which had stayed inside the body. The car, the body and the wrecked plane were on a line. Apparently Rubino had parked and gone in to look at the wreck and had been fired on as he returned. The second shot, in the head, had been fired at close range.

The horse was grazing in the weeds near the paved airstrip. There was a routine to be followed in this kind of death, and it was probably much the same in Venezuela as in the United States. But someone else would have to do it for Rubino. Shayne went through his pockets, taking his keys, his wallet, and a bundle of American and Venezuelan bills, undoubtedly the money he had picked up from Frost.

He started the Olds, found the main Valencia-Caracas road, and drove down into the city.

Stopped by a red light, he flicked through Rubino’s wallet and dropped it out of the window after removing the money. The freeway carried him rapidly downtown.

He knew where he was now, but after leaving the freeway he was caught in a one-way pattern that carried him past the turn to police headquarters on Avenida Universidad. He came back and made the turn and then moved in fits and starts as though jockeying for a parking place. He checked the time. An hour and a half had elapsed since he let Rubino overhear him telling Lenore Dante about his plan to smash the guerrilla movement as part of an overall deal with the police. If Rubino had sold this information to the guerrillas, which was likely, they would be waiting here.

Moving into an intersection as the light changed he jammed on his brakes to avoid hitting a young woman who appeared suddenly in front of his bumper. He snapped off the ignition. As he came to a stop a slender dark youth opened the front door and slipped in.

“Turn to the left,” the youth said.

He had a knife at Shayne’s waist. Shayne looked down at the long blade.

“Turn to the left. Anything you say. But I think the damn thing is flooded.”

He went on grinding the starter with the ignition off. Horns were blaring all around them. The policeman at the intersection gestured.

The young man said urgently, “Be careful.”

He slapped Shayne’s hand away from the key and turned it on. The young woman who had got in his way pulled open the door on Shayne’s side and slid in. She had a small .25 automatic.

“She will drive,” the young man said.

“Hell,” Shayne said with disgust. “What a country. Right in front of the goddamn police station.”

The motor started at once.

“Are you Paula Obregon?” Shayne said.

“Be quiet,” the young man told him.

“This must be one of those MIR operations I’ve heard about. Very slick. I’ve got a gun inside my shirt. Better take it away from me so I won’t be tempted to use it.”

The youth gave him a narrow look. Reaching forward, he found the gun and removed it.

“We are to kill you if you give us trouble.”

“In that case I won’t give you any trouble,” Shayne said, “because I don’t want you to kill me. Nice of you to tell me in advance. Do I talk with you or somebody else?”

“Not with us. There is interest in what you are doing here, and we wish you to discuss it.”

“I’m not arguing.”

They drove for a few blocks in silence. The girl was small and intent, with olive skin, a nicely cut profile, a very good figure in a simple white dress. She had been wearing high heels, but she had kicked them off and was driving barefoot.

The young man said stiffly, “You have just come to Venezuela, I think. I would like to ask you. What do they believe of our movement back in your country—that we are simple puppets of the USSR?”

“You don’t want me to answer that.”

“Yes, I am interested.”

“Nobody’s heard of you.”

The young man drew back slightly. “If you choose to be offensive—”

The girl spoke quickly in Spanish and adjusted the rearview mirror. The young man craned about to look out the back window.

“Cops?” Shayne asked.

“It would seem so. Don’t count on being rescued. They will have to win the argument with us first.”

He brought a long-barreled Luger out of a shoulder holster. The girl veered to the right, accelerating, and put a truck between them and the following car.

“What is it, a Chevvy?” Shayne said. “I had a couple of guys tailing me earlier. It looked like a stock sedan, but I was told it had a beefed-up engine. This Olds is in sorry shape.”

His abductors conferred quickly.

The young man said, “Mr. Shayne, we are going to fool with them a little. Just remain still, take no part. We are quite serious about that. It is life and death.”

“In that case use your head. Your tip came from a guy named Rubino. He called you and said I had some dope on the guerrilla movement and I was going to turn it in. He collected some money from you, probably. Then he saw a chance of collecting again from the cops and he told them to watch out for a kidnapping. But these guys aren’t interested in me, they’re interested in you. They want to find out where you take me.”

“We know that! Please stay quiet.”

“I’m trying to be helpful. If you hope to outrun them, you’d better change cars. You have time. They’re in no hurry to grab you.”

The girl frowned. She waited till she had a free space ahead and tested the acceleration.

“That’s not the problem,” Shayne pointed out. “The front end is out of line.”

“Never mind,” she said grimly, “I heard all about you from Tim Rourke.”

“I thought you must be that girl,” Shayne said approvingly. “I knew she’d have to be terrific, to get him to do anything that dumb.”

She gave her head a quick shake, to show her opinion of compliments. “And one of the things he said about you was that you only fight your way out of something after you’ve made sure you can’t talk your way out.”

“I’m thinking partly about myself,” Shayne said. “If you hit a pole we’ll all go through the windshield.”

“I have no intention of hitting a pole,” she said coldly.

He turned to the young man. “Didn’t you have anybody covering you in another car?”

“No. That would double the risk. Your conversation is disturbing Paula.”

They approached the long Gothic front of the university. Bedsheet banners flew from the windows. There was a heavy concentration of soldiers and police, doing little except lounging around displaying their weapons. The big iron gates into the university grounds were slightly ajar.

The girl tapped her horn and continued past.

“In and out,” Shayne said judiciously. “Yeah, it might work. But when you hit fifty-five watch out for the shimmy.”

She circled a stadium and came back toward the Avenida Las Acacias. Choosing her moment, she shot into the traffic with her horn squawling and the emergency blinkers flashing. Shayne heard a clash of bumpers behind them. The big gate swung open. They passed through, crossed a paved courtyard and down a narrow alley, then on between more Gothic buildings, across another courtyard and out by a different gate, into the botanical gardens.

“Not bad,” Shayne commented. “With a different car I’d make you better than even money.”

She was cornering hard and accelerating hard. She kept glancing at the mirror. As she slowed for the exit from the gardens she gave an angry exclamation.

“They’re talking about us on shortwave,” Shayne said. “That makes the difference.”

Paula and the young man consulted across Shayne. Soon she turned north and began driving faster. Shayne gripped the dashboard with both hands.

“Fifty-three, fifty-four.”

“Stop trying,” she said shortly. “This is a perfectly good car. Enough power. Good brakes.”

“I hope so,” Shayne said, “because when you go off the road I want you to stop in a hurry.”

They headed into the hills. The road was beginning to wind. Shayne looked back. The police car, a nondescript four-door sedan with no markings, was hanging about fifty yards behind.

“What’s the strategy?” he said. “You can’t run away from anybody on this road, in this car. Have you got some kind of ambush set up ahead?”

“No.”

“I never had guerrilla training, but let me make a suggestion. I don’t know if you were in the States long enough to hear about the game of chicken. Here’s how it goes. Two cars come at each other head on, and the idea is to see which driver has the best set of balls. Usually one of the two cars gets out of the way at the last minute. It might work with these guys, if you can make a fast enough turn. I mean it. Come back down and blow them off the road.”

“That’s not one of our techniques.”

“Introduce it. You have a strong motive for staying out of jail. You’re the chick who gave Rourke those cartons, and they’d put you in a cell and forget about you for years. Whereas cops. They’re doing a job. They’ll have the same thing for dinner tonight even if you get away.”

She gave him a look and the young man beside Shayne said something heatedly in Spanish.

Shayne continued. “You must believe in something, or you wouldn’t be mixed up in all this crap. What do the cops believe in? In getting by, like most people.”

“You want me to turn around and head at them and force them off the road? What if they don’t choose to get off? You also will die.”

“I’m betting they’ll chicken.”

She shook her head. “It’s a stupid chance. We’re going up the mountain to the Hotel Humboldt. I know this road. We will beat them by two minutes. Then we come back into the barrios by trails. I first, you second; Julio third.”

As the houses dropped away on either side she built up her speed. The curves were sharper and tighter and the surface of the road deteriorated rapidly. Suddenly, as she came out of a curve, the car traveled sideward on loose pebbles and the front wheels began to shake. She attempted to break the shimmy by fighting up into a higher speed, but without success.

The road curved in and out of the creases in the dry slope, climbing toward the bent end of another long hairpin, where it would switch back on itself at a higher level. Above, it was lost in mist. Paula had her left knee braced against the wheel. A slight cross-ripple in the road added to the shake. The ground fell off abruptly to the left. The police car was almost directly below them now.

“There aren’t any side roads,” Shayne said. “They’re giving us room. You’ll have time to turn.”

The youth suggested something.

“Speak English,” Shayne said. “It was my idea.”

The exchange continued for a moment.

“O.K.,” the girl said. “We’ll do it. This is our fastest speed and it’s too slow. But I wish I knew what was in your mind.”

“I set this up, for Christ’s sake!” Shayne said angrily. “Don’t you realize that? I want to talk to you. Everybody said it couldn’t be done. It turned out to be easy. Use your head. How can I turn you in? I don’t know anything about you. I planted that with Rubino.”

She spared him one quick raking look before she went into the curve. The front end shuddered dangerously. She fed the motor gas and cut in sharply. The curve was poorly banked and she had to go to the brakes again as the car chattered toward the outer edge.

“You’ve got it,” Shayne told her. “Now kick her around.”

But she couldn’t correct in time and they rode up on the inner slope, striking a boulder. She braked hard and came back in a short arc, stopping a scant foot short of the drop. She hauled at the wheel. The road was barely wide enough to permit two cars to pass abreast. She went back, forward, and back, and on the next arc she was facing directly down the mountain. Her friend Julio had his Luger out the window. The other car could be heard laboring up toward them.

“Now,” Shayne said. “Pass on the outside and give them a chance to jump.”

She rapped the wheel for luck and shot back around the curve, gaining speed rapidly. The police car was now less than twenty yards away. Paula took the exact middle of the road. Julio waved the Luger and yelled.

“They’ll move,” Shayne said calmly. “Hang in there.”

They were in third, well short of the shimmy point, but apparently hitting the boulder had knocked the front wheels further out of line. The front end of the car was bucking like a jackhammer. Shayne grabbed the wheel, and was able to hold them straight for a moment. He had one clear glimpse of a frightened face at the wheel of the police car. Then something snapped in the steering linkage. They angled off the road and tried to climb the slope.

The police car slithered around them, brakes screaming. Magically, a single rubber-tired wheel appeared on the road ahead, rolling very fast.

Shayne felt the Olds starting to go. It fell over, hitting hard on its side, and slammed back onto the road with its three wheels in the air.

Dust rose around them. The sudden stillness seemed very loud.

Shayne and the others were tumbled together in a confused heap. The car was no longer moving, but he had the feeling that it was sticking over the edge, where a slight change in equilibrium would send it rolling and bouncing on down the mountain.

Withdrawing one arm, he unlatched the door carefully. It pulled out of his hand and banged back against the side of the car. He was relieved to find, looking out, that the car was securely lodged in the middle of the road, where it would stay until a wrecker came up from the city to get it.

“Well, you can’t win every time,” he remarked.

Julio was scrabbling for his Luger. Shayne crawled over him and out of the wrecked car.

The police car was backing toward them. It stopped, and one of the cops, swearing steadily and fiercely in Spanish, jumped out to cover Shayne and the guerrillas with a submachine gun.

“Watch it,” Shayne said. “The kid has a pistol.”

Either the cop understood English, or he picked up Shayne’s meaning from his tone. He approached warily. Reaching into the car, Shayne found the Luger, pulled it out by the barrel and tossed it at the Venezuelan’s feet.

“Some people are rats,” the girl said. “I knew it. I knew it.”

“I’m not the one who turned over the goddamned car.”

She was caught. He helped her pry herself free. Julio, holding one leg in both hands, was biting down hard to keep from making any sounds.

“This guy is hurt,” Shayne told the cops. “Hold it—here’s another couple of guns.”

He threw out his own .38 and Paula’s .25. Then he tried to help the youth. His injured leg was twisted beneath him, and Shayne saw a splinter of bone.

“It’s broken,” the girl said.

The doorframe had been forced violently inward, trapping the boy’s foot. Shayne tried to lever it back. He felt the bent metal give, very slightly. Pulling with his full strength he snapped at the cops to help. They worked themselves into position. Straining together, they forced the frame back so the boy could pull his foot clear.

Shayne was the first out of the car. He picked up the submachine gun, which the cop had put down, and backed off a step.

When the cop came out of the car he looked at Shayne in disbelief. He had watched Shayne being kidnapped, and at extreme bodily risk, after a breakneck chase, had saved him from the kidnappers. Surely this was a mistake.

He started forward, and Shayne fired a burst into the ground at his feet.

Paula and the second cop worked Julio out of the wreck. That cop said something to her urgently in Spanish.

She translated: “They both have children. They are sympathetic with our aims. They ask you not to shoot them.”

“Hmm,” Shayne said thoughtfully.

The two cops watched while Paula started the police car, reversed it in a series of careful maneuvers, and brought it abreast of the upside-down Olds. She helped the injured youth into the back seat. He was still managing to make no sound.

Picking up the Luger and the other guns, Shayne backed into the car. He continued to hold the policemen’s eyes as Paula went into gear and roared away.

FIFTEEN

“I think I can’t talk to you about that,” Paula said. “You have your own aims. I must make sure first if they contradict ours, and in frankness, right now I am in a state of confusion!”

They had come down out of the mountains and turned off on a rudimentary back road, leading south. The springs and shocks on the police car had not been designed for such a ride, and though she kept weaving to stay out of the worst ruts, she scraped more than once.

Each spokelike highway radiating up from the city ended in a ramshackle working-class neighborhood, spreading up into the dry gulches and along the slopes. These were the barrios, nearly unpenetrable tangles of shacks and lean-tos thrown together from odd scraps of wood and flattened metal. Paula skirted one such tangle and proceeded to the next.

She went on. “You have all the guns. You are clever enough and tough enough, certainly, to force me to drive you where you wish. And you haven’t done this. You cooperated in your own kidnapping. So you must want something of us, more than an explanation of a few things that perhaps puzzle you. And for that, you will have to talk to someone more important than me—I am very much one of the rank and file.”

“What’s your top guy’s name, Serrano?”

“Yes, and it’s possible you might be permitted to talk to him. Tell me on what principal subject.”

“You know the answer to that. Money.”

“You want to buy our collaboration?” she said skeptically.

“In a way.”

“I don’t follow you, still. If you think you can hire us to attempt another jailbreak, to rescue Tim Rourke—”

“God, no. That other one was mostly window-dressing, anyway.”

“You saw that? Then,” she decided, “I think it will be correct to talk to you, but only after I get the approval of the committee. We are nearly there. You will have to repeat the things you’ve told me about Rubino.”

“Does Serrano speak English?”

She smiled. “When it’s convenient to him.”

“One more question. What about Alvares’ diary?”

“The torn-out page I gave Tim? That was from Lenore.”

“He thought it came from the wife.”

“We decided there was no reason for him to know Lenore was so much involved.”

For a brief stretch there was pavement, then the road narrowed again and went back to dirt. She turned uphill, into another shantytown, no less crowded and fetid than the others they had already passed. When the street petered out abruptly Paula parked, and the police car was surrounded at once by a swarm of dirty, excited children and barking dogs. A man came out of one of the wretched structures and patted the hood of the stolen car with delight. He shouted congratulations at Paula, but his grin faded when he saw the youth in the back seat.

Others gathered quickly. The explanations were conducted in Spanish. Shayne was examined curiously when he came out into the sunlight with the submachine gun in one hand. Julio was unloaded and placed in a wheeled cart, which was pulled off along a narrow rutted path.

“The doctor is that way,” Paula said. “You and I go elsewhere.” Smiling, she took the submachine gun and the other weapons. “You are now my prisoner.”

Four or five young men accompanied them, and they were followed by a crowd of children. The smell of the North American stranger had sent the numerous skinny dogs into near hysteria. Paula leaped a trickling open drain and headed up a path that wound in and out, seemingly at random, among the flimsy shelters. One hard push, it seemed to Shayne, would send the whole improbable neighborhood tumbling to the ground, like a village of playing cards.

Much of the living and nearly all of the cooking was done in the open air. They crossed a larger ditch on a plank bridge, and at Paula’s direction Shayne ducked his head and entered a three-sided lean-to of flattened oil cans. They passed through into another, equally shaky, and finally into a third. There was a chair, a cot and a table, and Shayne was told to sit down. The floor was dirt.

Several young men remained with him, but Paula continued further. He offered the young men cigarettes, which they accepted.

Paula was gone for some time. When she returned, she brought an older man wearing a simple green uniform and tennis shoes. He was stockily built, with abundant graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses. It was clear from the way the others reacted that this was the chief.

“Here is Serrano,” Paula said, introducing them. “Mr. Michael Shayne.”

Another chair was produced and Serrano sat down. Paula had exchanged her torn dress for a pair of faded blue jeans and a cotton pullover. She also had a shoulder holster—the Luger in it was probably the same one Julio had carried in the kidnapping. She sat on an upended box.

“Do we want this many people?” Shayne said.

“Yes, they are to be trusted.”

“So you took their Thompson away from them and stole their car,” Serrano said, speaking rapidly but with a heavy accent. “I wish I had been there. Now. About Andres Rubino. When he informed us you were about to give the police information about us, he was lying?”

“He was quoting me,” Shayne said, “but I was lying. Have you been in his new apartment?”

The Venezuelan shook his head.

“I sent him off to pick up some money for me. He wouldn’t have gone for sandwiches, but he couldn’t resist going for money. I knew the place had to be bugged. I never did find the mike, but I found a two-way mirror. I had Paula’s aunt there with me. Lenore Dante. We set up a conversation he was sure to believe. When he came back on the other side of the mirror we ran it off, and apparently he believed it.”

“And he passed it to us,” Serrano said. “You think he also told the police.”

Shayne shrugged. “Maybe they just happened to be there when I was grabbed. Or maybe I arranged that, too, so you’d feel grateful after I got rid of them for you. Everybody’s got to keep an open mind.”

Serrano looked away after a moment, and then he and the others, in Spanish, discussed what Shayne had said.

“We’ll send somebody to ask Rubino,” Serrano said.

“He’s dead.”

He dropped this news casually, but he was watching reactions.

“Tell us,” Serrano said, his eyes narrowing.

“He was shot with a rifle.” Shayne looked at Paula. “Did you plant a guy on a fishing boat this morning to kill your aunt?”

“No!”

“She’s reasonably O.K., just cut up a little. I think the same guy shot Rubino and took a couple of shots at me. This was out by the farm, if that means anything.”

“I see that this won’t be disposed of in a minute,” Serrano said. “Are you hungry? Will you eat something?”

Shayne nodded and one of the young men went out.

“You must have a pretty good idea what I’m doing in Venezuela.” Shayne said. “I’ve been offered a couple of ways to make money, but my main problem is still Tim Rourke. He’s in on a bad rap. That charge should be simple stupidity. I’ve thought all along that my one chance of getting him out was to find them a replacement. Paula wouldn’t be bad, but she’s not quite big enough. You’d fit, Serrano.” He looked around the room, holding each pair of eyes for a moment before passing on to the next. “But from here I can count at least three guns, and I don’t think I could take you in. So we’ve got to work out a deal. I have a couple of proposals. Is there anything you want to have explained first?”

Serrano said, “Your remark to Paula that we had no actual plan to attack the prison.”

“I don’t know how much fire power you have available. But you didn’t do much when Alvares got the boot and the new guys were taking over, and that would have been a good time to make some noise. I understand you set up a diversion the night of the jailbreak. A bank robbery. How well did you do?”

“Rather well.”

“Yeah. Somebody told me about guerrilla movements once. At first it’s hard to tell the guerrillas from the bandits. You may have an interesting set of long range plans, but meanwhile you steal to stay alive. You wouldn’t risk an armed attack on a prison, just to spring a few people. Look around this barrio. There’s no shortage of people. Your shortage is guns and money. Paula’s aunt still thinks she sold you on the jail-break idea, but she doesn’t understand that you’re still at the bandit stage. How many people did you actually have out there, outside the jail?”

“One. To fire some shots. Does it matter?”

“Damn right it matters. Because if that was the diversion and the bank robbery was the real thing, all you needed was a couple of tear-gas bombs and a little smoke. You didn’t need to kill anybody.”

A woman came in with a platter which she placed in front of Shayne. Paula said, “In your honor, Mr. Shayne, the North American specialty.”

The meal proved to be hot dogs wrapped in corn leaves. Shayne took one, but waited to see what the others would do with theirs. They peeled back the leaves and dipped the hot dogs in a bowl of sauce. Shayne did the same, more cautiously. The sauce was fiery.

“Now can I ask Paula what was really inside those cartons of cigarettes?”

“I wasn’t careful enough,” she said. “Or I was careful in the wrong way.” She broke off to ask Serrano, “Can I say as a positive fact that when I gave my aunt the cartons they were exactly as specified? Tear gas. Smoke. A timing mechanism. A few cigarettes.”

The discussion became general, and Paula continued. “Yes, Mr. Shayne. There were several involved in the manufacture, the putting in packages. We have a small workshop. People are all the time coming and going—if one person made a change, and put in a bomb, the others would know. I gave them to Lenore to give to the wife. When she gave them back I gave them to Tim, who gave them to Larry Howe. At some point in this process the substitution was made. And that is all I can tell you.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“Perhaps Aunt Lenore,” Paula said quietly. “To have a relationship with such a man, I think she must be—how should I say it—a greedy person. I know she was once very poor. But there are other ways than to take money from someone so totally evil. Of course she claimed she was fond of him. But is it likely? Alvares?”

“And you think she killed him because of the money?”

“I don’t know. It sounds logical. To have it all.”

“She says you used to stay with her when you went to school in Miami. Did you ever see any gold bars lying around? Gold bars—that’s a figure of speech. A guy named Felix Frost tells me Alvares shut down his bank accounts a year and a half ago. We don’t know what he did with the cash.”

“Frost,” Serrano said with distaste.

“I wasn’t crazy about him myself,” Shayne said. “But he’s supposed to know what he’s talking about, and when he says the bank accounts were closed, I think that means they were really closed. He’s the one who suggested gold. Whatever it is, it’s illegal, not part of a formal estate, and so it’s more or less up for grabs. And the reason I went to all this trouble was to find out if you’d be interested in taking a shot at it.”

He swallowed the last bite of frankfurter and peeled another. After a moment’s silence several voices spoke at once.

Shayne stopped them. “Here’s the deal. However careful you are, you have to take a certain amount of chances to rob a bank. This could generate a lot more loot, with less risk. You must have ways to get in and out of the country without going through immigration, and that’s what I’m buying. I don’t have much to offer in return except a dim theory and a few guesses. But four people have died, and somebody killed them. Somebody switched those cartons, somebody knifed Lenore and shot Rubino. I think I know how I can break it open, if I can get you people to help. Is there anything to drink here?”

One of the young men quietly left the room.

Shayne continued. “At least two people knew what Alvares did with his money—Alvares himself and Lenore Dante. He’s dead and she’s pinned down and can’t get back to the United States without help. So there doesn’t seem to be any rush. But if everybody involved in this can be given the idea that I know where the money is and I’m on my way—”

“And do you know where it is?” Serrano said.

Shayne exploded. “I thought I’d made it clear that I’m working blind. I don’t even know for sure that there is any money.”

An unmarked bottle was brought in, containing a colorless, slightly oily liquid. Glasses were filled and handed around. Shayne raised his drink and knocked it back. It didn’t go off until it was all the way down, and then the explosion was considerable.

“It is called pisca,” Serrano said.

“Very smooth. All right. It’s a simple idea but I’ll explain it again. I can’t operate down here. Usually I don’t mind sticking my head up over the edge of the foxhole to see who takes a shot at me. But here I wouldn’t learn anything and I might not live through it.”

“You’ve done all right so far,” Paula remarked.

“I’ve asked some questions, and I’ve been given some conflicting answers. I keep looking over my shoulder to see who’s behind me. I wanted to see what you look like and how you handle yourselves. And to arrange something simple like that, I had to set up a complicated dodge with a two-way mirror, and I came damn close to getting five people killed in a head-on collision. Before I make any more of these great moves I want to be back where I speak the language. Palm Beach keeps being mentioned. It isn’t as good as Miami, but it’s good enough. The police chief there is a friend of mine. I keep coming across jewelry in Miami that’s been stolen in Palm Beach, and it goes back to the owners through the Palm Beach cops. So they owe me a favor. I know where to buy information and which streets run one-way.”

“You wish to transfer the entire matter to Palm Beach from Caracas,” Paula said, “like changing to a new scene in a film?”

“You make it sound complicated. All I have to do is persuade a few key people that the money is definitely in Palm Beach, and I know where it is, and I’m going after it with the help of my friends in the MIR, who’ve been cut in for a piece.”

“Then whoever tries to get to the money first—” Serrano said slowly.

“We bushwhack. We relieve them of the money and find out something. There are ways of doing it if you’re willing to think about it.”

Serrano looked at him carefully. “I’m willing to think about it. What means of transportation?”

“I have a plane at Maiquetia if you can get me aboard.”

“With some of our people, of course. To watch you when you count the money.”

“As many as you like. Paula ought to be one of them. I may need her to help identify faces.”

“But there are other parts to this idea. How will you make certain that the necessary ones are informed?”

“I want you to plant it with a pigeon, so it doesn’t come directly from me.”

“A pigeon?”

“You must have a word for it in Spanish. Somebody who reports directly to Mejia. Nobody in this room, I hope, but there must be somebody else here in the barrio. Let him overhear a couple of your guys talking. Michael Shayne, Alvares’ loot, Palm Beach, in a hurry. That ought to be enough.”

Serrano frowned. “You think Luis Mejia is connected with this?”

“I don’t know about connected. But after you talk to enough cops you begin to recognize the signals. He knows more about it than he told me, which wouldn’t be hard because he didn’t tell me anything much. Why should he? But in Florida he’ll be on the other side of the table. There won’t be any problem with Lenore. There was nothing phony about those stab wounds. The guy was really trying to kill her; he just didn’t know how. Then there’s the widow.”

Serrano and the girl exchanged a glance. Serrano said, “We have a connection to one of the people in the house, a maid.”

“What kind of connection?” Shayne said quickly. “Can you phone her?”

“No. But we can be in touch within one hour.”

“Can you find out if Frost was out there today?”

Serrano considered. “Is it important?”

“I think so. Frost’s people have a tap on Mejia’s line. Anything involving me will be passed on to Frost right away. And if he passes it on to the Señora, we’ve closed another circuit. The money’s very much on her mind. It wouldn’t surprise me if she changed out of her black dress and caught the first plane.”

Serrano said deliberately, “I think perhaps you’re trying to trick us. You want this money for yourself.”

“Do I?”

Serrano asked the girl’s opinion, and the discussion ran around the room. Shayne had another drink of the explosive liquor and waited.

He was asked questions from time to time, and again he explained the role he planned for himself. It was simply to convey the impression that he knew more about the money than he actually did, in the hopes of setting off a scramble.

At least two of the young men distrusted Shayne and wanted nothing to do with his proposition. Paula seemed to lean the other way. Serrano was in the middle. Shayne listened for a time, then asked the young men on the cot to move. He folded his jacket to use as a pillow, lay down, and fell asleep.

SIXTEEN

When he was shaken awake an hour and a half later, only Serrano, Paula and one other were in the room.

Serrano said quietly, “There is a difference of opinion among us. We must ask you more questions.”

Shayne swung his feet to the floor and lit a cigarette. “I thought we’d covered everything. Has anything new happened?”

“We have learned that the North American Frost did indeed visit Señora Alvares, and yesterday also. The lady today has had much to drink.”

“Does that happen often?”

“No, it is unusual. Our person there says she was unsettled by a visit from Shayne, the Yankee detective. We will receive a phone call if she leaves the house, but she is sleeping soundly now. Before we do anything further, we want to ask you two things. We assume Señor Rourke was unable to tell you any names, because surely a guard was present when you talked to him. How did you know about Paula?”

“Frost showed me her picture. They’ve been watching Tim, and they knew he was seeing her.”

“Lenore Dante.”

“She bolted out of the Alvares farm looking scared, with her hair flying. We followed her to the boat.”

“Where is she now?”

“I have her tucked away.”

Serrano nodded. “I think I understand you, your tactic in a matter that must present great difficulties for you. You stir things up, set one group against another, spread expectation. And the way we respond to all this tells you something. Of course you are manipulating us as well. What you say you want is not necessarily the truth. Now tell me what you expect to happen when you reach familiar surroundings, Florida. You will have Lenore Dante with you. Do you believe she will run directly to this money, to make sure it’s safe?”

“That depends on whether she knows who was trying to kill her. She claims she doesn’t.”

“If and when you find the money, what percentage will you allot us in return for our assistance?”

“There’s no reason to work it out in advance because it won’t be enforceable. I expect you to provide enough muscle so you can take it away from me.”

“But as you yourself point out, in Florida you have the advantage.”

“I’ll explain something. If I cut you out of the split you’ll have a legitimate beef. You can’t take me to court on it, but the next time I need some cooperation from somebody, they’ll say, ‘Why help this creep? Remember how he screwed those Venezuelans.’ Do you follow that? Hell, take a chance. What can you lose?”

“That,” Serrano said dryly, “is precisely what we are trying to determine.”

The rest of the afternoon passed. The bottle of pisca remained available and Shayne sampled it occasionally. He was brought an evening meal of beans and dry, unleavened bread. At one point he and Paula were alone in the room.

“Does Tim—” she began, and stopped. “Does Tim think I’m responsible for that bomb?”

“Probably.”

“Then I hope you find out who really did it. Some of our cadres have been drawn to the idea of selective terror—bombings, killings, to show our presence, and this might seem to be such a thing. So there is confusion among many who support us. I’ve been arguing on your side. I think you should be given the chance. But there’s the suspicion with some that you’re an imperialist agent, and this is all an elaborate deception.”

“If you can think of any safeguards, I’ll consider them. We ought to get moving fairly soon.”

“Not before dark.”

“I need to get a call through to the Palm Beach police chief I told you about, and this might be the night he goes bowling.”

Shayne’s hand shot forward and snaked the pistol out of her holster. Her hand fastened on his, but he held the muzzle of the long-barreled gun against her breast. Her pupils dilated.

“You can’t think you can get out of the barrio.”

“I can shoot a few people trying.”

Serrano came in, stopping abruptly. He was unarmed. Shayne twisted the gun viciously, bringing it around to cover the guerrilla leader.

“I’m beginning to wonder where we stand.”

Serrano’s hands had come out from his body, but he was otherwise motionless. He spoke quietly in Spanish to Paula.

“The answer to that,” Shayne said, “is yes, I’m just nutty enough to try it. You’ve had all afternoon to talk. I’ll stick the gun in your back and let you walk a half step ahead of me. I think I might make it. Of course somebody who doesn’t like you might take a shot at me so I’d be forced to put a slug in your spine. That’s a chance we’d both take.”

“I accept the chance,” Serrano said.

Shayne swore in disgust. Reversing the gun, he thrust it back hard into the girl’s holster.

“Come on,” he said angrily, “will you make up your goddamn mind?”

Serrano came into the room. “In fact, we have decided to do it. There is a waiter in a cafe who is sure to phone Mejia if the conversation is done with care. We must arrange the exact phrases he is to overhear.”

“Do you have a way to get us on the plane?”

“That can be done simply. It’s what is to happen after you arrive in the United States that we have been discussing. We risk three people.”

“All they can be hit with is carrying concealed weapons and coming into the country illegally. I’ll put up the bail money and the legal fees. A good lawyer can get them off with a five-hundred-buck fine and deportation.” He stood up. “So if you’ve decided to do it, let’s get the wheels turning.”

Fifteen minutes later, Shayne was in an outdoor phonebooth on the Avenue Mosquera, with a handful of coins. Paula, once again dressed as the daughter of a respectable businessman, placed the calls and stayed in the booth with him, to make sure he kept to the script they had worked out with Serrano.

His first call was to La Maquetia airport. He fed the phone twice while they located the pilot of the Miami News plane, who told Shayne he was ready whenever Shayne was. He had the feeling the paper didn’t want him hanging around in Venezuela indefinitely. He’d been ducking the editor’s phone calls. The police had questioned him at length about Shayne’s plans and he had given them an honest answer. He didn’t know a damn thing about Shayne’s plans. He believed, without being certain, that he was under observation at the moment.

Shayne told him to collect his crew and file a flight plan to Miami. If anybody asked, this was a Miami call, summoning him home. There was a good possibility that when Shayne arrived at the airport he would want to take off in a hurry.

The pilot laughed. “It won’t be the first time.” He lowered his voice. “Will Rourke be with you?”

“Not this trip. We’ll have to come back and get him. As soon as you’re ready, move out on a holding strip and stall the tower.”

The next two calls went to Palm Beach.

Howard Boyle, the chief of police there, a large, indolent professional cop who had been quoted as saying that he wished the taxpayers in his little fiefdom were less rich so they wouldn’t be such tempting targets for thieves, had just settled down in front of the TV to watch a hillbilly comedy.

“They’ll be telling the same jokes next week,” Shayne told him. “This could be a very big pinch. I thought of working it through the narcotics people, and then I decided it would be nice to let you have the credit.”

“And of course I ask fewer questions.”

“How long has it been since I wanted a favor? I can’t tell you much on the phone, except that both these people are big couriers, and they’re arriving separately. They’re heading for Palm Beach, but they’re likely to come in through Miami, and their credentials are going to be very good.”

“I don’t like the way that sounds.”

“The bigger the credentials, the better the story. You’ll be even more famous than you are now.”

“I’m not famous at all, and that’s the way I like it.”

“I’m taking the responsibility,” Shayne said. “If anything backfires, it’s my ass. They may do some yelling when you pick them up, but tell them the tip came from Mike Shayne in Caracas. That ought to quiet them down.”

Boyle said doubtfully, “And if we shake them down and don’t find anything—”

“You won’t. People on that level hardly ever get hassled. That’s the beauty of this. All I’m asking you to do is sit on them for three hours.”

“They’re entitled to a phone call.”

“Tell them I said to call this number.” He read off the number of the instrument he was using. “And if it’s busy tell them to keep trying.”

“Mike, I know that tone of voice. I think I’m beginning to worry.”

Shayne laughed. “If you can’t act dumb for three hours, you don’t deserve your badge. Get a pencil and paper. I’m going to give you the descriptions, and I want you to write them down. If anybody puts on a false mustache and sneaks past—”

“Mike, I wish they would! That would show they have something to hide, and I’d feel better about this.”

He gave Boyle a careful, detailed description of Luis Mejia and Felix Frost. His next Palm Beach call went to Sam Katz, the private detective Shayne had asked to check on Lenore Dante.

“She seems O.K., Mike,” Katz reported. “Nobody has a bad word to say against her, officially. But you said you wanted rumors.”

“That’s the main thing I want.”

“You mentioned Alvares. The story is that he owns her business. But that could be legit, because it makes money. You had the idea they had an affair going. I can’t confirm it. She has a condominium apartment at the north end. Whenever he was in town he stayed at the Colony, forty-three days in the last four years. And she went places with other escorts when he was in town—to balls and stuff. He’s been a moderately soft touch for charities. Nothing out of proportion.”

“How much of the year is she there?”

“Right through, but there’s a lot of traveling. You know the Worth Avenue galleries. Hers is one of the winners. She buys for some of our big collectors. She goes to auctions and so on, New York, Europe, wherever. If she and Alvares met for any length of time, that was where. I’ve got copies of a couple of news stories, about pictures she bought for Mrs. Phipps and the Kennedys. Some of them in six figures. As I say, they all seem to like her.”

“Which is the moneymaker, the gallery or the commission business?”

“It’s part of the same stew, Mike, as I understand it. She buys in the slow season. Like she knows in general what kind of thing a client is looking for, Americana, French Impressionists, you name it. If she hears something’s coming up for sale in a private collection, or in the settlement of an estate, she has authority to bid for it. I haven’t heard that she’s made any mistakes.”

“Any major romance?”

“We’re still working on that. She’s had men overnight at her apartment but nobody Alvares’ age.”

“How about bank accounts?”

“Nothing out of line. I don’t have profit figures yet but they’re coming. I’m glad you called, Mike. There’s a safe in her office, on the second floor of the gallery. It’s a five-cylinder wall safe, and if you’re under pressure I imagine I could peel it for you.”

“Let’s forget that for now. I’m interested in those profit figures and I’d like to get them tonight. Who are you working with?”

“She has a part-time bookkeeper. It really isn’t costing you much.”

“Does the bookkeeper have keys to the office?”

“I can get her in if she doesn’t. Do you want me to call you?”

“I hope to be up there in a couple of hours. I’ve—”

Shayne dropped the phone and came around fast. A police car stopped at the curb with a squeal of brakes, and two uniformed cops leaped out.

SEVENTEEN

“It’s O.K., Mike,” Paula said quickly.

Shayne recognized one of the uniformed men. He was a short, wiry guerrilla who had been sitting on the dirt floor across from him, his knees drawn up to his chin, most of the afternoon. The uniform was too large for him.

He seized Shayne roughly and made an announcement in Spanish.

“We are being arrested,” Paula translated.

Shayne reached back in the booth and hung up the phone. The second bogus cop put him in handcuffs. Shayne submitted after testing them to be sure they were unlocked. He and Paula climbed into the back seat with one of the cops.

“They’re going to be looking for this car if it’s the one we had before.”

“We changed the plates,” Paula told him. “We’ve been dying to get our hands on such a car.”

They dropped down to the Valencia road; their first stop was to be the Alvares farm. So far everything was working well. Two known MIR people had taken coffee in a restaurant where a man thought to be a police informer worked as a waiter. This man was permitted to hear them talking about how the well-known North American detective, Michael Shayne, had hired them, in a sense, to get him out of the country. The stake was enormous—the huge illegal fortune Alvares had accumulated during his years in power. Palm Beach, Florida, was Shayne’s destination, and if they managed to deliver him intact, and if he didn’t betray them the minute they arrived, the movement stood to gain a large sum in dollars, with which they could purchase weapons on the flourishing secondhand market. They finished their coffee and left. Another guerrilla, posted in the restaurant, then saw the waiter make a surreptitious phone call.

Meanwhile, nothing had been heard from Señora Alvares’ maid, which meant that the widow was still at the farm. Entering the cypress avenue leading up to the house, the driver turned on his siren. The old man who had charge of the gate was already looking out through his little wicket. Seeing Shayne, he shook his head.

One of the presumed cops yelled at him, and when the old man responded by closing the wicket, he drew his police revolver and fired a shot in the air. Shayne signaled to the driver to back off and ram the gate. The bolt tore out of the wood on the second try.

The old man was unchaining the watchdog. Shayne pulled the Luger out of Paula’s handbag and fired as the dog leaped. The bullet passed through the animal’s brain, and he was dead by the time he hit the side of the car.

Paula and one cop came inside with him.

“Find out if she’s had any calls,” Shayne said.

He found the widow in her bedroom, sprawled across the flowered bedspread, breathing heavily. She was wearing unbuttoned pajamas, and there was no doubt that she was actually asleep. A glass on the bedside table held a little dead champagne.

Paula came in behind him. “Yes, Mr. Felix Frost phoned about twenty minutes ago. That would be ten minutes after Mejia got his call from the cafe. She talked to him in English, but kept dropping the phone. The servants put her to bed.”

“Get some help.”

He found a last split of champagne in the kitchen refrigerator, brought it back to the bedroom and drank while Paula and a maid attempted to get some clothes on the woman. She moaned and pushed, without seeming to understand what was happening. Her pajama tops came off, then the bottoms. Realizing suddenly that a man was across the room, she screamed and tried to hide behind her hands.

“Perhaps you should wait outside, Mike?” Paula suggested.

“If she’s embarrassed about being naked, all she has to do is get dressed.”

Her eyes on Shayne, the Señora made the women work for each small success.

“Go away,” she said in English. “I don’t want you in the house. I was sleeping.”

She hit at the maid and knocked her over. The struggle continued. The black dress was so tight that Shayne had to be called on to help. He pulled her off the bed and forced her to stand. In a swift change of tactics, she flung her arms around his neck.

“I hunt and I hunt. For a man with strong muscles.”

Together they wrestled her into some kind of shape. Shayne put her over his shoulder and started out of the room. The old man was in the gallery outside, glowering at the cop, whose hand rested on the butt of his holstered gun. Señora Alvares waved an arm and gave a drunken shriek.

“They are about to rape me.”

“I’m not promising anything,” Shayne said. “We’ll see.”

Paula opened the rear door of the police car and they manhandled her in. She fell off the seat and Shayne put her back.

“Where are we going?” she said when the car started.

“We’re picking up your friend Lenore Dante.”

“Friend, not at all a friend! She robbed me.”

“You had a phone call from Frost. What did he tell you?”

“A disgusting person.” She toppled against Shayne. “I’m so lonely.”

When they stopped at the apartment building where he had left Lenore, the widow was asleep again with her head against Shayne’s shoulder. He freed himself gently and backed out.

He had to use his lock picks to get into the inner lobby. Upstairs, he tapped on the door of 9-C. The little peephole clicked. Then the door was thrown open and Lenore propelled herself into his arms.

“Mike, Mike.” She pulled him against her. “You were so long! I thought they’d killed you.”

Shayne eased out of her embrace and moved her into the bare, unlighted apartment. There was just enough light coming through the uncurtained front windows so he could see the outline of her face.

“I’ll explain later. I’m just coming off a long session with your niece and a few friends, and they’ve agreed to cooperate. I think I can get you included. But they’re going to want money, and like everybody else they have an exaggerated idea about how much is available. If I do the talking I think I can get you a better price. You’ve had the afternoon to think about it. A little honesty from you about your friend’s retirement fund would make things easier.”

She was standing close, looking up into his face. She shook her head.

“Mike, I don’t know anything about that. Won’t you believe me? Of course I’m willing to pay to get out of this mess. I can sell the gallery. Would seventy-five thousand—”

“They’re thinking about more than that and we don’t have time to haggle. Everybody’s in a rush to get to Palm Beach. The first person to make it is going to win the jackpot.”

She grasped his arms. “Everybody?”

“Well, not Rubino. Rubino’s dead. Say half-a-dozen in all, starting with Mejia and working down.”

Her grasp tightened. “What are the MIR offering, exactly?”

“I have a plane waiting, but I can’t just walk up and get on. One of the things I’ve done since I saw you was take a grease-gun away from a couple of cops and steal their car. I’ve also been shot at a couple of times, and that puts you and me in the same bag. Serrano has assigned a couple of men to cover me. If you want to buy in, I’ll see if I can work it.”

She drew a long breath. “How much do you think I should give them?”

“Baby, you know you’ve got a damn good reason for getting back to Palm Beach before anybody else. Stop trying to con me. Mejia won’t charter a plane. That’s too conspicuous. He’ll be taking the nine-thirty flight to Miami. We can beat him by going straight to Palm Beach.”

She pushed back her hair. “That’s one. How about the others? The widow.”

“She’s coming with us. I want to keep a personal eye on her.”

She breathed in and out slowly twice. Then she clenched her fist and struck Shayne in the chest.

“You bastard. You’re taking me anyway, aren’t you?”

Shayne laughed. “I thought I’d give you a chance to persuade me.”

“What a four-flusher. For a minute you had me convinced. But you’re damn right! I’d pay anything to get out of here, to a top of seventy-five thousand, which is all I have. So Rubino’s dead, is he? I don’t suppose he died of emphysema from all those cigarettes.”

“He was shot twice, in the head and the chest.”

“I’ve never seen any sense in being solvent but dead. Yes, I’ve been thinking. I’ve been sitting here on the floor with my back to the wall getting rapidly older. I knew you’d come back for me, and I knew you’d put together some kind of arrangement with somebody, because it’s too confining for you here. But Mejia—I didn’t even know he was a factor! And now he’s taking the nine-thirty plane to Miami. You’re transporting the widow personally. Who else?”

“We’ll call the roll after we get there. How about that diary of Alvares’?”

“You’ve been talking to Paula, of course. I tore out one page and she used it to motivate your friend, Tim. He seemed to think it was salable. I mailed it to myself at the gallery, airmail special. It’s probably on my desk right now with the rest of the backed-up mail.”

“I’ll take that in lieu of a fee.”

She peered at him, trying to read his expression. “No money? Don’t tell me you’ve finally begun to realize I’m not sitting on a trunkful of gold.”

“If the diary is hot enough I can trade it for Rourke. I don’t think I can buy him out with money.”

“All right, you can have it,” she said decisively. “I had a lot to do with getting him put where he is.”

He heard the blare of a horn from below and reached the window in time to see a police cruiser pull to a stop before the building.

“Mike,” Lenore said beside him, “are they looking for us?”

“I doubt it. I think they’ve found Rubino and they’re going up to check his apartment. Give them a minute to get to the elevator.”

Two policemen got out of the cruiser, and the casual way they were moving confirmed Shayne’s guess that they were homicide men assigned to Rubino’s killing, here on a routine check. He and Lenore left the apartment carefully and took the elevator to the basement. After leaving by a side door, she stayed in the shadows while Shayne walked past the police car. On the outside it was a standard sedan, but it had been rebuilt to carry prisoners. There were no inside handles on the rear doors, and a grill of woven wire separated the front seats from the back.

He signaled, and the other police car pulled out of the lot and drew up beside him. Señora Alvares was still asleep in the back seat.

“We’re changing cars,” he told Paula. “We’ve got too many prisoners for two cops.”

Lenore greeted her niece with a cool nod. “I thought Mike would want to include you. Your parents are worrying about you, by the way.”

“Nothing bad has happened to me yet.”

Shayne started the other cruiser with his ignition loop and climbed into the back seat with the three women. The Señora had been jolted awake as she moved from one car to the other. She looked miserable and sick.

“I drank too much champagne.”

The door slammed shut from the outside and they moved off. The two-way radio was crackling, but the driver paid no attention. He asked a question which Paula translated: “Should he turn on the siren?”

“Certainly.”

They bulled their way through traffic to the airport highway and descended to the coast at high speed, stopping only once to allow Señora Alvares to be sick in the weeds at the side of the road.

After finishing she pulled out of Shayne’s hands and looked at the police car and the uniformed men in the front seat. “Why are we arrested?”

“You must be feeling better.”

“Not that much. Answer my question.”

Shayne put her back in the car and they continued, accompanied by the high wail of their siren. She covered her ears and moaned.

“Tell them,” she said to Lenore. “I had nothing to do with the explosion. I asked for the interview but permission was refused.”

She leaned forward to look through the grating. “We are going toward the sea!”

“I think they want us to identify somebody,” Shayne said. “Cops don’t like to explain things. Take it easy.”

She sat back suspiciously, but when they took the ramp to the airport she sat forward again and exclaimed, “I will not ride in an airplane. I have never done so. I’ll bite. I’ll kick.”

“In that case,” Shayne said, “you’d better do it here in the car where you won’t attract attention. We want this to run smoothly.”

He pulled out his shirt-tail and tore off a long strip. She tried to move away. He rolled the cloth into a tight cylinder and whipped it around her head deftly. When she started to yell, he pulled the cloth tight across her open mouth. She thrashed about, making desperate gabbling noises, while Shayne doubled her forward, pinning her with his elbows, and knotted the gag. Then he let her go and tore off another long strip with which he bound her wrists.

“Now if you’ll listen to me I’ll tell you what we think is going to happen.”

She crouched away from him, her eyes wide in terror.

“I tried talking politely, and you may remember that didn’t work. Every time I asked a question you hid in the champagne bottle. We have a few things to talk about, and I want you to start being responsive.”

She managed to emit a choked sound.

“How can you be responsive with a gag in your mouth? You’ve got a point there. But I don’t like to repeat myself, and I want to get a few other people in on it before I start listing the things I want to know. Take a good look at these guys in front.”

He nodded to Paula, who said something in Spanish. One of the youths looked around.

“Does he look like a Caracas cop?” Shayne said. “He’s an MIR man. This is Paula Obregon. She and her friends like people who cooperate. If you understand me so far, nod your head.”

She stared at him, but finally nodded.

“Good. They don’t want to be pulled in by the real cops because they know they’d probably be shot. If they have to kill us to prevent that, you know they won’t hesitate for a minute. I tied you up because you may not realize how serious this is. If you make any noise or trouble, we’ll all get it in the neck. It’s a little unfair because I have an idea how crummy you must be feeling, but you’ll have a couple of hours to sober up. That’ll give you time to think up a story.”

She tried desperately to express herself. Shayne shook his head.

“Not yet. Work it out and polish it. I’m giving you a break. I don’t know why. After I came to see you this morning you phoned somebody, and when I went through the gate a guy was waiting outside with a rifle. But so many worse things have happened that I don’t really hold it against you. I’ll buy any explanation that sounds halfway believable.”

Wrinkles appeared at the corners of her eyes. She had heard at least part of what Shayne had said and was thinking.

“Oh, what a bastard,” Lenore said. “But dear God, are you good at it.”

“You be thinking, too, baby.”

“That won’t be necessary—I’ve been thinking all day.”

The driver cut his siren. The sound died as they turned onto the access road along the perimeter of the airport. Half of a big Cyclone gate stood open and soldiers with rifles were lounging on either side of the opening. The driver slowed. The soldier on his side glanced in at the prisoners in the back seat and nodded them on.

Shayne saw the Miami News Learjet among the other planes on the waiting and taxiing strips. Its two engines were alight.

“That one’s ours.”

“Police,” Paula said quietly, nodding to one side.

“I see them,” Shayne said after a moment. “Tell him to keep going.”

A rescue truck was parked alongside the main arrival building. The men in the front seat had made no effort to disguise themselves as airport employees. They were wearing business suits with city hats.

“We could come up behind and take them by surprise,” Paula said. “Because of the uniforms we could do it without shooting.”

“Let’s see how it looks.”

They continued around the arrival building, past two truckloads of soldiers. At the end of the paved area they turned and came back.

“One pass is all they’re going to let us have,” Shayne said. “They’re watching the News plane, and even if we can get aboard they’ll shoot out the tires. See that 707 loading. It’s ready to roll.”

“Why would they let us get off in that?”

“They won’t want to harm innocent people. In the News plane there wouldn’t be any. Tell him.”

She relayed what Shayne had said, and the guerrilla at the wheel glanced around, frowning. The mobile loading steps had been wheeled into place against the 707, and the first passengers were beginning to stream out of the lounge.

“That’s it,” Shayne said crisply. “Tell him to remember there are no handles on these doors. One of them go ahead up the steps, one behind. Don’t be too rough. We look fairly authentic. The Señora won’t give us any trouble, but if she does, we’ll slug her and carry her aboard.”

Paula murmured in Spanish. The driver asked a question, slowing, and checked the mirrors. He consulted with his colleagues.

“We like to rehearse these things,” Paula said, “to be sure of assignments. Will Lenore be quiet?”

“Lenore will certainly be quiet,” Lenore said fervently.

The guerrillas exchanged curt nods. The driver slid under the wing of a big passenger plane and came back toward the 707.

He stopped at the foot of the loading ramp, blocking the trickle of passengers. The other uniformed man opened a rear door and ordered the prisoners to dismount. Paula had her hand inside her big purse. Señora Alvares was too terrified to move without help. Using both hands, Shayne walked her forcibly up the steps.

He brushed past the stewardess at the top, who was trying to ask a question.

Inside, Shayne surrendered the frightened woman to Paula. He told the stewardess calmly, “There’s been an uprising in Caracas. Don’t do anything to attract attention. We have to get off immediately.”

Her professional smile had vanished. Giving her no time to react, he blocked her back into the airplane and pulled the door shut. He took Paula’s Luger and went into the cockpit.

The pilot was drinking coffee out of a plastic container. He dropped it when he saw the long gun in Shayne’s hand.

“What the hell?”

“Nothing to be nervous about. We’re just taking off a couple of minutes early.”

The co-pilot said, “Aren’t you Mike Shayne?”

“Yeah. Notify the tower you can’t wait any longer.”

“Hell, man—”

Shayne lifted the gun. “This can’t be your first hijacking. Follow company policy. They don’t want you to risk the airplane. I have four armed men in the first-class cabin.”

“How many?”

Shayne grinned. “Two, as a matter of fact, but they’re pretty excited. Plus a girl, who’s as militant as they are. If you try to get help, bullets are going to be flying around.”

The co-pilot said reasonably, “This is Mike Shayne. You know he’s got reasons. Let’s roll.”

The pilot swore under his breath and brushed the spilled coffee off his clipboard. He reached for the transmitting switch.

“All right, where to?” he said sourly. “Havana?”

“Palm Beach.”

EIGHTEEN

The plane had been cleared for the Palm Beach International Airport. It came in from the east, giving up altitude rapidly as it sliced across the narrow strip of sand between the ocean and Lake Worth.

Lenore Dante was in the cockpit beside Shayne, watching the approach. Suddenly she gasped and seized Shayne’s arm.

“Look.”

One of the business blocks on the main north-south avenue was on fire. Lenore’s face showed her consternation.

“Can you bring us around again?” Shayne asked the pilot.

He said sullenly, “After all the trouble I’ve already had from you guys—”

“Don’t let’s get chintzy at this late date,” the copilot told him.

The pilot sighed, and told the control officer they were having instrument difficulty. Receiving clearance to make another approach, he wheeled about slowly.

“My gallery’s on that block,” Lenore said quietly.

Shayne said nothing, watching her. She was gripping the back of the co-pilot’s chair. She turned her head slightly so Shayne couldn’t see her face.

On the next approach, the pilot brought them closer to the fire. The block was surrounded by fire apparatus, pouring plumes of water on the burning buildings. Flickers of flame could be glimpsed through the billowing masses of smoke.

“How fireproof is your safe?” Shayne said.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter. There’s nothing in it that’s important. A few papers.”

They flashed across the long sand-spit and the blaze passed out of sight beneath their wing. The blood had left Lenore’s face. When she turned to look at Shayne her eyes were unfocused.

“Too bad,” he said evenly. “But you must be insured.”

“But the pictures. The diary.”

She brushed past and entered the cabin, her walk very stiff. She sat in one of the many empty seats and fastened her seatbelt for the landing. Shayne continued to watch her. She was staring ahead fixedly.

They landed, rolled along the runway and turned to come back. The few passengers who had managed to get aboard before the abrupt takeoff were concentrated in the rear of the cabin; the plane’s destination had been New Orleans. Señora Alvares, alone in a row of seats, was looking better. She had borrowed lipstick and a comb from one of the stewardesses. Coffee and time had drawn the sting of the champagne. She was still an erect, handsome woman, but there was something crafty about the look she gave Shayne.

“I should warn you, I intend to ask for the protection of my Ambassador, who will provide me with the name of a good lawyer. You are back in your own country, where you can be sued.”

“For what?”

“Injury to my person and my sanity. Kidnapping and assault.”

“Throw in rape and you’ll get more ink in the papers.”

“Don’t try it,” she warned him. “Put one finger on me and you’ll know you’ve been in a real battle.”

The plane rolled to a stop, and a set of mobile steps banged against the door.

“Now we’ll find out if we were right to trust you,” Paula said.

Shayne grinned at her. “We all know this has to end in a deal. I always do my best to satisfy everybody.”

Shayne was first down the steps. Howie Boyle, the Palm Beach Chief of Police, was waiting at the bottom.

“You’re under arrest for stealing an airplane,” he said.

“Not just me, I hope,” Shayne said. “We all did it together.”

He introduced the others as they descended.

Señora Alvares said firmly, “I spit on you. They had to carry me on board, and I have witnesses who will testify to that—the stewardess, others.”

“The Chief’s going to hold you as a material witness,” Shayne said. “I’d hate to lose you at this point. You may not realize it, but your life is in danger.”

“My life is definitely and emphatically not in danger.”

Chief Boyle had brought two of his own patrolmen, and there were several armed men from the airport security unit, several more from the county Highway Patrol. The two Venezuelan guerrillas didn’t like it, but they were relieved of their guns.

“What about the two guys I told you to pick up?” Shayne asked Boyle as they moved toward the terminal. “Frost and Mejia.”

“I’ve got them, Mike. And you weren’t kidding, they have credentials. They’ve been doing some screaming. This Frost is some kind of CIA bigshot, the way he tells it, and I think I believe him. He may be carrying a fountain pen loaded with napalm or something. It wouldn’t surprise me. He came in on a government plane, and do you know I had to put him in restraint? He thinks he knows karate.”

“Where are they, here?”

“Waiting.” He was rolling along beside Shayne, carrying his two-hundred-seventy pounds in an easy bearlike weave, but Shayne could see the nervousness behind the placid façade. “I’m only a country boy, Mike, and this is fast competition. I’d be pleased to be allowed to back out at this point.”

“You can’t do that, Howie. You’re the law here.”

“That may be, but I don’t know a goddamn thing about anything, as you know, and Frost has been dropping remarks about how he’s going to nail my hide over the backhouse door. And he can do it, too, in my estimation, unless you’ve got some kind of slick little tactic up your sleeve.”

“We’re all going to talk about it. Is there a room we can use?”

“I put them in the pilots’ lounge because there are some comfortable chairs in there. But that Frost. That Frost. Get yourself up for him, Mike, because when that man lays eyes on you he—is—going—to—blow.”

“I’m looking forward to it. That looked like quite a fire on the Beach.”

“A real bad one, Mike, but the boys have confined it. Nobody hurt, as far as I’ve heard.”

“I have to make a phone call. Get everybody together and let them order drinks. One man from Highway Patrol and one from the airport. No reporters.”

“Don’t forget you’re under arrest,” Boyle reminded him.

Shayne peeled out of the formation as they passed a line of public phonebooths, and then had to come back and panhandle a coin from one of the security cops, as all he could find in his pocket was Venezuelan money. Sam Katz, the private detective, answered promptly.

“Well, the goddamned place burned down on us, Mike,” he said in a disgusted voice, “so I can’t tell you a thing. The lady was just starting on the books when we smelled smoke. I’m the one who pulled the alarm.”

“Any idea how it started?”

“No, and it’s a real hot fire. If it was set I doubt if they’ll be able to prove anything.”

“Never mind, Sam. These things happen, and it tells me something.”

“Wait a minute, that’s not all. I took a wild gamble, for no reason at all—pure hunch. We had a little crowd waiting for the equipment to get there. A dozen or eighteen people, all told. And there was a kid in the crowd. Or not exactly a kid, either—he could be twenty-one, twenty-two. And he had a glint in his eye. I can’t tell you any more than that. Just an expression, but I think it would have hit you the same way. You know—he shouldn’t be that interested in somebody else’s fire.”

“Have you got him?” Shayne asked quickly.

“Yeah. He didn’t want me to bother him so I decided to lean on him a little. He spoke with a Latin accent, which isn’t such a big deal around here, but I asked him where he came from and he said Caracas, Venezuela. That was where you called me from, Caracas, Venezuela. So I put the two things together and when a cop got there I had him bust the kid on suspicion of arson. He’s at the precinct now, and he’s being very quiet.”

“Sam, you earned yourself a bonus. Get over there fast and be sure they don’t make a mistake and turn him loose. What’s his name?”

“Jaime Mercado.”

Shayne hung up whistling. He found the pilots’ lounge. Felix Frost jumped to his feet as Shayne came in and started sputtering demands and objections. Shayne knocked him down with a hard shot to the jaw.

Frost’s glasses flew off. He blinked up malevolently from the floor.

“And you may be able to get my license for that,” Shayne said. “It depends on what happens in the next few minutes. Everybody else has had an interest in this pot and now I seem to have one, too. Get up.”

Frost retrieved his glasses and put them on. One of the thick lenses was cracked across.

“Threats would be out of place,” he said thickly. “But consider yourself threatened, Shayne.”

“Sit down. First we’re going to establish who knows who, and after that, who did what. Do you know Señora Alvares?”

“I know Señora Alvares,” Frost said icily.

“Did you see her today and phone her before you left Caracas?”

“I saw her today and phoned her before I left Caracas. So?”

Shayne exhaled. “How sweet it is to be back in a country where people answer questions.” He looked at Chief Mejia, who was planted stolidly in a plastic armchair smoking a heavy-bowled pipe. “Glad you could make it, Chief. I hope nobody’s tortured you yet. I’ll be needing you in a minute. You saw my problem right away. Why would anybody talk to me in Caracas unless they had to? I don’t carry anything but a private detective’s license and that’s no good outside the continental limits of the United States—not that it’s too good inside the continental limits. I’m afraid I had to stretch the truth in a few places. You got a hot tip from a waiter to the effect that I know where the dough can be found. That’s not quite accurate. All I have is a theory.”

“Why are we detained here?” Mejia said.

“Nobody’s being detained,” Shayne told him. “This is what we call a pre-arraignment hearing. We want to straighten out a few things so Chief Boyle can decide what he can hit us with. You’re free to leave at any time.” He added, “But don’t try it. Does anybody recognize the name Jaime Mercado?”

He got no response and shrugged. “Maybe it’s a pseudonym.”

He took Chief Boyle to the door and asked him quietly to send somebody across to Palm Beach to bring back the young man by that name.

Returning, he asked, “Did anybody think to order me a drink? Never mind, this won’t take long. Everybody’s been interested in the goddamn money, so let’s get that out of the way first. Lenore is the one person who’s really in a position to know about it, and she keeps denying it exists. I can sympathize, because there would be all kinds of tax and legal problems.”

He planted himself on an arm of a long leather sofa and continued easily, looking at Lenore. “When he closed out his Swiss accounts he gave you the cash and you bought pictures with it.”

She was staring straight ahead. A muscle flicked in her cheek.

“We can talk about it now,” he said. “Look at me.”

She turned. Her expression was as frozen as it had been since she looked down at the burning block.

“I hired a guy to check your business. He tells me one of the things you do is buy for clients on commission. Some of the auction prices lately have been fantastic. You read about them in the papers—two or three million bucks for one picture. But those are the ones that get press coverage. You can’t buy a Rembrandt and then go someplace and hide. But if you move down to the half million level, maybe you can buy a few of those and stay fairly anonymous. There are private sales. Now and then a stolen painting is put up for sale. I’ve heard that some of the Nazi loot from that old war is still floating around in a very private market. For somebody who’s looking for a way to beat inflation, it isn’t a bad place to put cash.”

“I won’t dispute you on that,” Lenore said, biting off the syllables. “It’s one of the ways I make my living.”

“Is there any reason you can’t tell us about it? I know you didn’t murder those three people. But you were in on the beginnings, and if it ended up in murder it doesn’t matter legally that you were as surprised as anybody. It isn’t quite time for the lawyers. But when they come in they’ll advise you that you can go down for conspiracy to commit murder, and that’s one of the worst raps we have. Larry Howe! The original innocent bystander. You don’t have any incentive to tough it out. Clear up this painting business and I think I can help you.”

She waited, and it was clear from her expression that she was still seeing flames.

“What do you want to know, their value?” she said in a dead voice. “We spent four million on them.”

“Only four?”

“Almost to the penny. There was a lovely, lovely Watteau and one of the really good Picassos and a Van Dyke that would break your heart. Six in all. I worked through two sets of dummies. Actually it wasn’t difficult at all.”

“Were you really his mistress, Lenore?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “Did you doubt that?”

“People in town here weren’t sure.”

“We took a few precautions.”

“All right, four million dollars. We’ve got a solid figure, finally. I’ve heard up to twenty, but we all know about street murderers who killed somebody for as little as forty-nine cents and a pair of shoes.” He turned to Frost, who was trying to steady himself by smoking one of his superlative cigars.

“While you’ve been sitting here have you noticed a smoky smell? I don’t mean cigar smoke.”

“No, I haven’t noticed a smoky smell.”

“Maybe it hasn’t got out here yet. Lenore took those four-million-dollar pictures out of their frames and stored them in a back room of her gallery. What else could she do with them? The whole point was to be casual about it. To take out insurance on them, to store them in a fireproof vault, she’d have to admit they were hers. Didn’t you even hear the fire sirens? The gallery just burned down. Anybody ready for another drink?”

There wasn’t much breathing going on among the principals in the room. Howie Boyle had finally become interested in what Shayne was saying.

Shayne looked at Paula. “You’ve stayed with your aunt. Did you know about these paintings?”

“No.”

“Mejia?”

“I—no.”

“Señora Alvares?”

“No, no, how should I?”

“Frost?”

“No, I did not know about these paintings.”

“Somebody’s lying,” Shayne said. He waited a tick. “And it’s you, Frost.”

NINETEEN

“For God’s sake,” Shayne burst out, “what kind of imbecile do you take me for? This whole thing turns on those cigarette cartons. I’m supposed to know my way around. I know where to buy dynamite and TNT, and I could make a pretty effective homemade bomb out of gunpowder and primer cord and a piece of pipe. But plastic? Inside a cigarette carton so nobody’d know the carton had been tampered with? And wire it to go off at exactly the right time? I’m not that good. But you’ve spent years in the black end of American intelligence. I’m sure you’ve taken a course. Not only that, you probably have access to laboratory materials. Could Lenore fake up that kind of package? Could Alvares’ wife?”

“Black intelligence,” Frost said with scorn. “Bomb laboratories. You’re a romantic.”

“You people used to brag about that cloak-and-dagger stuff,” Shayne said. “Now I’m going to make up a scenario. Scenario—that’s another one of your words. Let me know if it fits. You were probably a bright boy, Frost, all A’s in school. But in a lot of other ways you’ve always been a mess. What do you look like naked? I’m embarrassed to think about it. You never married. Until lately I think you always used whores. Whores and maids.”

Frost had gone rigid, squinting against the cigar smoke and holding his knees.

Shayne said more softly, “You served your country quietly and secretly. Whenever you managed to upset a government or buy a newspaper editor or steal some industrial secret in a brilliant way, nobody knew about it except a few of your fellow jerks in Washington. And you didn’t even earn very good money. Soon you’ll be ready to retire, and what are you going to do with yourself? Buy a four-room house on a St. Petersburg sidestreet and sit on the front porch watching the seagulls? That’s all you can afford on your government pension. I know from the way you chew those expensive cigars that you’ve been looking for a moneymaking gimmick.”

“I have not been looking for a moneymaking gimmick,” Frost said. But this denial was made with more difficulty than the others.

“It’s understandable that you’d want to find out about Alvares’ financial plans. Unlike you, he managed to put a little aside for his old age. He closed his bank accounts, and I think that must have been about the time you and the Señora started having sex.”

He waited for Frost’s sarcastic denial, but this time Frost was unable to speak. Shayne was playing him carefully, because people in Frost’s line of work tried not to make the ordinary human mistakes.

“And the Señora,” Shayne said, looking in her direction, “had exactly the same worries. After switching around for years, her husband had finally made a stable connection with an intelligent, blonde American who had the kind of figure that seldom goes with her kind of brains and talent. The Señora’s future was bleak. Alvares was sure to get kicked out of his job sooner or later, and when he could stop thinking about keeping up his political image, the son of a bitch might even divorce her. Frost might be creepy looking, and I’m sure he couldn’t be anything but mildly disgusting in bed—”

“You think you know so much—” she began.

“Augustina!” Frost snapped, glowering at her.

Shayne grinned. “Lenore thought she was hiding those purchases, but for a professional intelligence agent like Frost, with a worldwide network of sources, it must have been easy. And now Frost had one of his logical ideas. This was stolen money to begin with. Why not steal it back and retire to some suitable spot like the south of France? But time was passing, for both Frost and the Señora. They couldn’t move while Alvares was alive and in power. Now we’re coming to the murders.”

“They sabotaged the plane!” Lenore exclaimed.

“I think so, but not very well. Mejia may be able to confirm some of this. Is it true that Frost gave the new junta money and backing, and encouraged them to take over?”

Mejia said, “I am simply a policeman. But yet, it is known, he did some things.”

“That may seem like an elaborate way to commit murder, but that’s the way people like Frost work. Of course he had to sell Washington on it, and he must have been able to make out a pretty good case. The motive was simple—money. The Señora was thinking of money, too, but also of something else. At the end, her husband had the gall to bring his blonde girlfriend to Caracas and set her up more or less publicly in a rented apartment. It’s an old-fashioned situation, and she had the old-fashioned reaction—she wanted to kill them both. Frost is a professional conspirator and he was probably careful, but we’ll turn his own department loose on him, and I think they’ll be able to fill in some of these details.”

“Such as,” Frost suggested.

“Such as how much the Señora helped in the change of regime. You needed somebody on the inside, who knew his plans and when he was likely to be vulnerable. Probably you could have arranged to have him shot during the revolt, but she wanted his girl included in the same action and so she had somebody tamper with the getaway plane. You don’t need to know much about airplanes to cut an oil line.”

“You don’t know this,” Mejia pointed out to Shayne.

“Right, it’s still the scenario. When we talked this morning she asked me to tell her future. Her prospects have improved in the last couple of days. Because if Alvares had succeeded in getting off in that plane, he wouldn’t have sent her one penny from the sale of those valuable paintings. And she’s too young to stop living. If she could manage to lose a little weight she would still be an attractive woman. A fairly attractive woman. Some people don’t mind flab, when there’s money attached.”

The widow Alvares looked as though she wished she could strap Shayne into an airplane about to crash.

“Now let’s shift to the present tense,” Shayne said. “So far Frost hasn’t done anything really serious, spent some government money and handed out a few mild nudges, as he calls it. But Lenore and Alvares survived the crash, and Lenore has a scheme to get Alvares out of prison. Paula Obregon and the MIR people agree to go along with it for reasons of their own. And here the Señora gets her great idea. Why not substitute some lethal high explosive for those harmless smoke bombs and finish off what they started? Frost thinks of all the zeroes in ten or twenty million dollars. Alvares is not only still alive, he’s in prison, and Luis Mejia here is running the interrogation. Given time, Mejia might persuade him to talk about what he did with the money. He attaches electrodes to various places and wires people to a dry-cell battery, I understand, and this might have worked on Alvares. After going to all that trouble, Frost doesn’t want a crooked cop to walk off with the prizes.”

“I will not speak,” Mejia said.

“So Frost shuts himself up and makes the bombs,” Shayne went on. “Now let’s nail it down. Lenore, Paula. You’ve both been thinking. When did Frost make the switch?”

“During the afternoon,” Paula said. “Tim and I went out to reconnoiter the prison. I think probably then.”

“For Frost, a hotel lock would be easy,” Shayne said.

“It seems to me—” Boyle put in. “Am I permitted to interrupt?”

“Go ahead.”

“I probably don’t understand it—I know I don’t understand it—but in my experience, when there are two people with a piece of illegal money and one of them dies it’s usually the other one who did it.”

“You mean Lenore. But if she made the switch, she would have been out of the country by the time the bomb went off. Instead, she hung around all night, getting hotter and hotter. And not only that, she’s a nice girl. The idea would never cross her mind.”

“Thanks, I think,” Lenore said. “Mike, the man who was waiting on my boat—”

“I’m coming to that. Even if you slipped past the cops and got back to Palm Beach, you’d have no reason to move the paintings or put them on the market. Frost and his overweight lady-friend could steal them after the dust settled. But remember the Señora had that other motive.”

There was a sound at the door and Sam Katz looked in. “Do you want us yet?”

“Hold it out there, Sam,” Shayne told him. “I’m working up a surprise.”

The others looked back at him as he went on. “Lenore was planning to take her man out of the country on a fishing boat. The Señora knew that and hired somebody to wait there with a knife. But Lenore didn’t make it last night. This morning she went to tell the Señora how sorry she was and the Señora announced that she’d told the cops all about her. Mejia?”

“We have had no message of that kind.”

“This is all guessing and lying and vicious talk!” the Señora said. “I suppose she gave you her version, but the truth might be very different.”

“However it happened, Lenore fled to her boat and got herself knifed there,” Shayne said. “Take off your shirt, Lenore, and show the people your bandages.”

She put her fingers obediently to the button at her throat. “Do you mean it?”

“Never mind, I just happened to remember how good you look with your shirt off. The guy probably never stabbed anybody before and he bungled it. A little later, he took three shots at me with a rifle, and missed them all. Of course I was riding a runaway horse for some of that time. The one thing he did that worked—did you get a report of a homicide out near there, Mejia? A guy who was working for me, named Andres Rubino.”

“I know about that. His money was taken. Robbery, I think.”

“I’m the one who took the money. Most of it was mine, anyway.”

“And did I do this shooting,” Frost inquired, “along with everything else?”

“No, it wasn’t your kind of thing. To stand out in the open and take a shot at somebody? I hope not. I’d have to change all my ideas about you.”

“Then why did it happen?”

“He tried one pitch too many,” Shayne explained. “He got a good look at the guy who knifed Lenore and I think he recognized him. He was a pretty knowledgeable character, Rubino, as you told me yourself. He closed the connection with the Señora and made a couple of quick jumps. If she was sending people to kill her husband’s mistress, maybe she also had something to do with killing her husband. The police had no reason to look closely at that wrecked plane. But if Rubino could find some sign that it had been fooled with before it took off he could squeeze the Señora for real money. Here I’m guessing again. But maybe she realized the danger of that wreckage, and sent her boy to set it on fire. And he met Rubino, walking back with a smirk on his face.”

Mejia commented. “True, this plane was burned this afternoon.”

“I forgot to ask what you’re doing here, Chief,” Shayne said, his voice suddenly ugly.

The Venezuelan looked around. “I have information—”

“You thought you could beat the rest of us to the money,” Shayne told him, “and that’s so goddamned obvious it could get you in trouble. Other people in the government might think they have a better claim. Be thinking about what you can do to make me feel friendly.”

He strode to the door and called Sam Katz and the youth who had set fire to the Worth Avenue block. “Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jaime Mercado.”

Señora Alvares said something quickly in Spanish. Shayne looked at Paula for a translation.

“To be silent.”

Shayne looked at the youth, who seemed more ill at ease than frightened. He was younger than Shayne had thought the other times they had encountered each other. He was short and dark, with a line of even white teeth below a well-tended mustache.

“You son of a bitch,” Shayne said, “you’re a rotten shot with a rifle and not much good with a knife. You did a lousy sabotage job on that airplane and you can’t even burn down a building without getting caught.”

“I wonder if he understands English,” the Señora murmured.

Shayne laughed and turned his back on him. “He’ll have time to learn it in jail. I’m curious about you, Frost. Have you ever seen him before?”

Frost shrugged. “A common type.”

“I can hear that brain of yours clicking,” Shayne said. “All A’s. Phi Beta Kappa. Of course it adds up.

“This is the Señora’s special boy. Notice the bulge inside those tight pants. Not too smart, but young. Young. You know her. You must catch glimpses of yourself a couple of times a day in the mirror. You know now that she was stringing you along.”

“I won’t dignify that with a comment.”

“She needed you, Frost. Your brains and your confidential money and your high explosive. But that’s all she needed. She hasn’t had an easy life and as a matter of fact I’m a little sorry for her. But now that she’s free of Alvares why should she tie herself to somebody like you?”

“Shayne, I warn you—”

“Your warning days are over, Frost. I’ve got a page from Alvares’ diary. I wish I had the whole thing but that page is going to make the papers. It’s enough to get you canned. They don’t care what you do in secret, so long as it stays that way.”

“I don’t know this man. Whatever he’s done—”

“He burned down the Dante Gallery, for one thing. And if there were four million bucks worth of paintings inside and the Señora knew it, why would he do that?”

Frost’s eyes darted to the youth’s impassive face. Shayne said, “You’ve figured it. That was fast. Yeah, she crossed you. She never had any intention of selling those paintings and splitting that money with you. This kid is her style. If he goes to jail there are plenty of others to take his place. The minute she heard that everybody was converging on the gallery to grab the pictures, she sent him ahead. Then she got drunk, and when you called her she couldn’t talk, let alone meet you at the plane. You’re the mark, Frost! She had a deal with you, but with the gallery burned she wouldn’t have to go through with it. As soon as she was out of mourning she’d start spending money on boys.”

“On boys,” the Señora said haughtily.

Shayne turned to her. “However this turns out, there’s one good thing. You won’t have Frost around your neck from now on. I think he’s losing some of his illusions.”

For a moment Shayne thought he had overdone it. Frost was stiff and awkward, but he seemed to have himself in full control. He was still puffing on his cigar, but suddenly his face suffused with color and he shouted, “You bitch, you’re as bad as the rest!”

Howie Boyle had been joking when he suggested that Frost might be carrying an unconventional weapon, but that, after all, was the business the diplomat was in. Frost snatched out a cigarette lighter, snapped it open and fired twice.

The separate shots were sharp and distinct. His cigar was smoldering on the rug.

The woman looked at him in stupefaction. One of the .25 caliber bullets had hit her in the neck, the other in the chest. She said something in Spanish before she fell cut of her chair.

Now Frost’s hand slipped into his side pocket, but Shayne seized his wrist, pulled out the hand, and forced it open. A capsule spilled to the floor.

Boyle took over while Shayne recovered the capsule. Frost’s pudgy features were working uncontrollably, and his eyes were almost closed behind the thick glasses.

“A mark,” he said bitterly. “And not for the first time in my life, Shayne. Not by any means for the first time.”

The others stayed in the lounge after Boyle went off with Frost. The Señora, unconscious and breathing raspily, was rushed out on a stretcher.

Shayne ordered a double cognac. He drank it quickly and asked for another. Two men from the Broward County sheriff’s office arrived. Shayne waited for the rest of the officials to gather before he commenced the long tedious explanations.

Paula said, “Did you have to do it that way, Mike?”

“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “All the murders took place in Venezuela. What’s the law on conspiracy down there? I didn’t have time to find out.”

Lenore said, “My head is so numb. I can’t make sense out of it. You convinced Frost that she betrayed him. But I don’t see how.”

“How long have you been in Caracas?”

“Three weeks.”

“She and the kid might have stolen the paintings sometime during those three weeks. It’s about the only thing he did right.”

She hesitated, and said in a low voice, “And if she dies, I suppose there’s no way to find out what she did with them.”

“You gave them up twenty minutes ago, when you thought they were burned.”

“But I do remember you said something about a deal, Mike—”

“The deal was to get you out of Venezuela. I did that. Besides, you’re all right, baby. You’ve got rich clients. Even if the insurance doesn’t cover the real losses they’ll loan you money to open up somewhere else. Maybe you can find an old man who’ll buy you another Watteau, whatever the hell that is.”

“That’s a cruel thing to say,” she said coolly.

Shayne gathered himself to wind up a few loose ends. Mejia sat forward, but Shayne put his hand on his knee before he could get up.

“Tim Rourke’s still in jail.”

“I think in the trial they will say—innocent.”

“If Tim Rourke goes on trial,” Shayne said evenly, “I’ll come back to Caracas with an interpreter and tell everybody who’ll listen why you rushed off to Palm Beach without telling your bosses where you were going. Maybe you could squeeze through, I don’t know. Here’s an alternative. Those paintings are really the property of the Venezuelan people. With some fast footwork and a little help from your friends, Michael Shayne and Tim Rourke, you managed to get them back so they can be hung in the National Museum.”

“Mike,” Lenore said angrily. “If they exist they’re mine. I have the necessary papers.”

“Six great paintings,” Shayne said, continuing to work on Mejia. “Picasso, Watteau, Van Dyck—”

He paused. “Rousseau and two Del Sartos,” Lenore supplied.

“And as soon as the Museum gets them, Tim Rourke will be quietly released. The MIR prisoners now in the La Vega prison will be put on a plane for Mexico City.”

“Blackmail,” Mejia declared.

Shayne said nothing. The County Attorney came in hurriedly, but caught the tension and didn’t interrupt.

Mejia said heavily, “It will be hard.”

“You’re wrong. It’ll be easy.”

“It would be—good propaganda for me. But I do not trust.”

“Tim Rourke, one painting. One guerrilla, one painting. A second guerrilla, another painting.”

“Bandits. Why do you care about this scum?”

“Their group did me a small favor—they hijacked an airplane for me.”

Mejia knocked out his pipe into an ashtray. He looked at Shayne, then at the other faces around him.

“Yes,” he said, shrugging. “I will return to fix.”

Again he started to get up. Shayne summoned the County Attorney.

“This man is Luis Mejia, Chief of Police in Caracas. He’s interested in the way we handle murder investigations. Is it all right if he hangs around for a day or so and looks over your shoulder?”

“Are you telling me something, Mike?”

“Not at all. Give him an escort to answer his questions and don’t let him out of your sight, because somebody might mug him, and we wouldn’t want that.”

Mejia protested, “Pleasant, but there is so much to do at home—”

“I insist. You can phone from the hotel and make the arrangements. One guerrilla, one picture.”

“A hostage,” he said, using a word he had learned when Shayne applied it to Rourke.

“Certainly not. My guest. But make those phone calls collect. It may take some time to talk your people into it.”

Shayne dismissed him with a nod.

“Now, Mike…” the County Attorney began.

Shayne stood up. “We can talk on the way to Miami. I’ve got to catch a plane back to Caracas.”

“Caracas!” Lenore exclaimed. “After everything you went through getting out of Caracas—”

He grinned. “I have to steal some paintings.”

Her mouth opened and closed.

“I don’t think you saw them. That was one of the reasons she was so anxious to get you out of the house. She hung one in her sitting room and another in Alvares’ office. The other four are probably in closets—paintings by L. Dante, dated last year and the year before. You told me you gave up painting when you opened your gallery, and that was longer ago than that. You couldn’t stick those expensive paintings in a storeroom and hope people would think they were copies. You put on a coat of—what’s the stuff called?—white gesso? and painted over them. You could take off the modern paintings later with rags and chemicals. Frost got in some night with a fluoroscope and identified the valuable Dantes, but if he’d stolen them then you would have known they were gone. He wanted to do everything quietly and professionally, with a minimum of risk. Then the widow beat him to it and shipped them back to Caracas, where there were already dozens of Lenore Dantes. Of course the reason she had to burn the gallery was to hide this from Frost and it had to be done before he got here.”

“Damn it, isn’t there anything else you can trade for Rourke? Let me come with you. If it works out, you and I could—”

He touched her cheek. “I want you to stay here, Lenore. Get somebody to look at those stab wounds. If you charter a plane and try to beat me, there’s a good chance you’ll be arrested, and this time I won’t be able to help you.”

“Heavens, I wouldn’t try anything like that.”

But he could see that she was thinking.

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