Operation Breakthrough Page 3

  Duke Conboy, my sponsor on the flight, explained that the man’s accent was due to the fact that he was from Nassau in the Bahamas. And here was I in Nassau in the Bahamas.

  But what was the man’s name?

  I couldn’t remember.

  I stepped into a doorway while I tried to think. The first name had been a nickname, I was sure of that. But what? I recalled his rugged-looking, black features perfectly. When our plane was hijacked by three hophead Palestinian Arabs, I had been able to get out on a wing following a near-crash landing and shoot down two of them. It hadn’t prevented a third from departing with our cash in a private plane stationed at the hijack spot for that purpose.

  The Arabs had killed the plane crew after the hijack, including the stewardess. One of the men I shot was dead when the enraged gamblers poured out of the grounded plane. A slashing razor in the hands of the black man had seen to it that the second Arab didn’t survive long.

  But what was the black man’s name?

  I stood there in the shelter of the shop doorway while the sunlight crept down the building fronts across the street, trying to recall the details of Duke Conboy’s introduction of me to the black man at Kennedy Airport just before we boarded the ill-fated 727 gambling flight. And then the image of Duke’s middle-aged choirboy features with a cigar stub set firmly in the center of his cherubic countenance brought the incident swimming up from my subconscious.

  Kane.

  That was the name.

  Candy Kane, gambler deluxe from Nassau.

  And if I could locate him, I might still have a chance of pulling off this project.

  I inspected myself in the shop window which served as a mirror. The suit was badly wrinkled after the night’s activities. The hair was no problem since it was a wig. An expensive wig. My beard has never been a problem since I spent a year undergoing plastic surgery after an automobile gas tank blew up in my face while I was standing off a bunch of sheriff’s deputies. My beard doesn’t grow now. On the whole I didn’t think I looked too much worse than any male tourist who might have intentionally strayed from travel-agent-recommended channels to find a little excitement on his own.

  I moved out of the doorway and down Bay Street. One of the hotels would do for a starting point in the search for Candy Kane — any of the larger ones. I angled back toward the beach and turned in between the impressive white pillars of the Anchorage.

  The lobby was enveloped in an early-morning hush. I went to a bank of public phones and turned to the Ks in the directory. There were seven Kanes, but no Candy. No first names of the Kanes that began with a C, even. But then would a man in Candy’s line of business be listed in the phone book?

  I closed the phone directory and started across the lobby. “Sorry, sair,” a white-jacketed black bellboy called out to me as my heels click-clicked on the tiles. “The coffee shop won’t be open for anothair hour.”

  I headed toward him, fingering a bill loose from the folded-over roll in my pocket. I withdrew my hand and gave the boy a flash of the green in it before I spoke. “I’m trying to locate a friend,” I said. “His name is Candy Kane.” The boy said nothing. “He’s been known to do a little gambling.”

  That broke the ice. “He has indeed, sair, if we are speakin’ of the same mon.” The bellboy sounded amused. “But the Candy Kane I know is — ” He hesitated.

  “Black,” I supplied. “Rugged. Five ten. Two hundred pounds.” The boy nodded at each item. I held out the bill to him. “What’s Candy’s address?”

  He made no move to accept the bill. “I can tell you where to reach Candy, sair. Then if he wishes to give you his address, that’s his business.”

  “Fair enough. Where do I reach him?”

  The bellboy lifted the back of his white jacket and removed a wallet from his hip pocket. From it he extracted a white card which he handed to me. The card was a cheaply printed rectangle with the edges of its black lettering smudged. Large letters in the center said CANDY KANE. Smaller letters in the upper left corner said ROY. In the lower left corner it said GAMES OF CHANCE, and in the lower right corner was a phone number.

  “I’m Roy,” the bellboy offered.

  “Fine, Roy,” I said and completed the transfer of the bill to his hand. I didn’t know if I’d been lucky enough to stumble onto one of Candy’s steerers, or whether he had his cards in the wallets of all black hotel employees on the island. I didn’t care.

  I went back to the public phones and called the number on the card. There were five or six rings before anyone answered. “Yes?” a feminine voice inquired in a drawn-out note of inquiry.

  “I’d like to speak to Candy Kane.”

  “Tell him we’re closed, baby,” a rich baritone voice that I recognized said in the background.

  “Tell Candy that Earl Drake wants to speak to him,” I urged.

  There was a short silence, and then the baritone reverberated in my ear. “Do I know an Earl Drake?”

  “You do.”

  “Where’d you get this number?”

  “From Roy.”

  “Where’d I know an Earl Drake?”

  “You remember him from a plane flight to Vegas. He was with Duke Conboy.”

  The baritone soared. “Oh, mon, do I remember! Do I ever remember! I ain’t been well financially since. You heah for long? You want to come over tonight for some action?”

  “I want to come over right now.”

  There was another silence. “Your clock’s all turned around, Earl. The action broke up heah two hours ago. We’re jus’ partyin'.”

  I had already detected a thickened syllable or two in Candy’s speech. “I don’t want to party, but I do want to talk to you. Right now. Alone.”

  “Well — ” The baritone sounded undecided. “Where you at?”

  “The Anchorage.”

  “Oh, yeah. You did say Roy. Well, if you don’t mind walkin', chappie, it’s a dozen blocks. I don’t care to have no vee-hickles pullin’ up in front in daylight, okay? It’s 325 Eurydice Street. Roy will tell you how to get here. Second floor up. Ground floor’s a massage parlor.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said and hung up the phone.

  Roy was at my elbow when I turned away from the booth. “It’s off Elizabeth Avenue near the Queen’s Stairway,” he explained and added detailed directions. I laid another bill on him and left the lobby of the Anchorage.

  The sun was already high enough to be inching the temperature upward toward its daily average of seventy-eight degrees. I held my pace down to avoid calling undue attention to myself among the easy-striding Bahamians. If I could just get under cover at Candy’s until Erikson’s scheduled plane was due to arrive at the private airstrip, I felt I had it made.

  Eurydice Street was a narrow lane lined with small shops, most of them with whitewashed fronts. I found the place without difficulty. A sign on the small ground floor window said CHEN YI’S MASSAGE PARLOR in red-and-gold lettering. A line below it said BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. The door was locked, but to the right of it was another door in the same building. It opened when I tried it, and I looked up a flight of narrow stairs.

  The stairwell was considerably cooler than the street outside. At the top of the flight I was confronted by another locked door. It felt solid when I knocked upon it. There was a momentary delay while an inside panel slipped open and someone examined me through one-way glass as I stood on the shadowed landing. Then I heard the sound of bolts snicking from their sockets before the door opened wide.

  Candy Kane grabbed my right hand in his powerful one and practically dragged me inside. There was little light in the tiny entranceway, and it took me a second to realize that Candy’s muscular body was attired solely in a casually draped towel. Sweat glistened upon his ebony skin. “Hey, mon!” he exclaimed exuberantly with the island’s all-purpose greeting. He gave every indication of enthusiasm despite my having forced myself upon him. “You’re lookin’ fit!”

  “Can we talk here, Candy?”
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br />   “Jus’ soon’s I take care of this,” he said promptly. He slammed the bolts back into position after closing the door. I could see that the door itself was three or four panels thick and had metal plate screwed to the inside. “Like to be able to control who walks in an’ out’ve here of an evenin',” Candy continued with a wink.

  His eyes were red rimmed, and he wasn’t articulating too well, but he didn’t sound drunk. From somewhere in the background my nostrils picked up a trace of the sweetness of marijuana. Candy leaned back until his broad shoulders were resting upon the closed door. He wasn’t tall, but he was remarkably thick through the body without being at all fat. “So?” he said expectantly.

  “I need a place to stay. Unofficially.”

  There was no change in his expression, but the red-rimmed eyes examined me more carefully. “How long?”

  I had been about to say twenty-four hours. The sight of Candy’s security arrangements, though, had triggered a new line of thought. “Not more than three or four days.”

  “What you runnin’ from?”

  “The law.”

  “Mainland?”

  “Local.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “How’d you git crossways locally? Well, never mind. How you gonna git off the island?”

  “It’s all arranged.”

  He considered the implications of that for a moment, sucking air through a gap in his strong-looking white teeth. “It don’t seem to be a real problem,” he said at last.

  “You hold your games here?”

  He nodded. “But I’ve an extra room I can slip you into, an’ nobody’ll know you’re around. Nobody that’d bother you.”

  “You don’t sound as British as some I’ve heard around here,” I suggested. “Roy, for instance.”

  Candy grinned again. “I worked six years in Miami. Stick man for a casino crap game.”

  “Why don’t the police bother you here?”

  He rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. “Baksheesh. It gets me by so long as I don’t go after the high rollers headin’ for the casino.” He moved away from the door. “C’mon inside an’ meet the girls.”

  “Girls?”

  But he was already beyond the entranceway and striding into the room beyond.

  I followed.

  It was like another world.

  The room was large, and it gave the immediate impression of being one into which sunlight never penetrated. Heavy draperies shielded all the windows. Flickering candles in ornate holders supplied the only light. Joss sticks burned beside the candles, and the odor of incense eddied through the room, combined with the aroma of pot.

  Low couches displaying pastel fabrics were the room’s predominant items of furniture. There were no chairs. Lacquered screens were set carelessly at odd angles. The rug was deep pile, and in the center of the surprising room, incongruously enough, was a full-sized gymnasium mat of the type used by wrestlers.

  “This chappie is a friend of mine, girls,” Candy announced. “His name is Earl. Say hello, Chen Yi.”

  A girl rose from a petal-pink couch. And rose and rose and rose. She was barefooted but still towered six inches above Candy and me. She was Chinese with long, straight, black hair framing a beautiful face. There is nothing in the world as black as a Chinese girl’s hair.

  There was a lot more of the girl bare than her feet, because her costume consisted solely of a choke-collared, Russian-style blouse that ended at her waist. I looked at her, looked away, then looked back again. Her body was spectacular. “Hello, Earl,” she said softly.

  “Hi,” I returned weakly.

  “An’ this bit of fluff is Consuelo,” Candy went on. He pointed to another couch where a brown-haired girl was reclining. She was smoking a water pipe, and her pupils were dilated. Consuelo was almost as Spanish looking as her name except that her eyes were slanted like a Polynesian’s, and her skin tone was almond rather than café au lait. It wasn’t hard to make the analysis since her attire consisted of one hundred percent less material than that of Chen Yi, the Chinese girl. Consuelo waved languidly from her couch. I waved back.

  “An’ Hermione,” Candy said, pulling aside a lacquered screen. A third girl stared up at me from a supine position on a third couch, her doe eyes glazed with a marijuana euphoria. She was a flaxen blonde, a butterball of a girl with the high facial coloring and flawless pale skin associated with English mists and moors. She was wearing a terrycloth towel like Candy’s and a dreamy smile. Her taut nipples were strawberry splashes against the creamy expanse of her tip-tilted breasts.

  “How about a spot of cheer?” Candy asked me.

  I started to refuse, then thought better of it. A cold-sober approach to life seemed too wildly at variance with the relaxed attitudes in this extraordinary room. “Brandy, if you have it. And thanks.”

  “Chen Yi,” Candy said.

  The tall girl went to a cabinet near one wall and took down a bottle of brandy. I estimated her height at four inches above six feet. I could see that the brandy was Metaxa. Chen Yi poured liberally into a bell-shaped snifter. I couldn’t remove my gaze from the broad acreage of her fully disclosed ivory buttocks.

  “A joint?” Candy inquired.

  “Not right now,” I evaded the issue. So far I’ve managed to get my kicks in life without employing Mary Jane.

  “We were jus’ workin’ out,” Candy continued with a nod at the gymnasium mat. “Burns out the poisons. Slide onto a couch. We’ll talk more later. C’mon, Chen Yi.”

  Hermione, the blonde, patted the couch beside herself invitingly. I sat down, lowering myself cautiously until I found myself barely a foot above the luxuriant carpeting, careful not to spill the fine Greek brandy. At the first sip its warmth traveled from my throat to my stomach so rapidly it reminded me it was quite a few hours since I’d eaten.

  Candy stepped onto the gym mat wearing only his loosely knotted towel. Chen Yi advanced to meet him, still clad in her abbreviated high-necked blouse. Candy was a bear of a man, built close to the ground. He faced the girl with his legs apart in a semicrouched position with his weight on the balls of his feet. His hands rested lightly on his thighs. I had taken judo instruction once, and I recognized the stance as judo’s main defensive posture, the jigo-hontai.

  The Chinese girl confronted Candy drawn up to her full height, her arms slightly away from her body. This was the shizen-hontai, judo’s so called natural posture. She charged Candy suddenly, attempting to unbalance him, but he took her down with a classic knee wheel that rolled her completely over.

  While on the mat she did something with her feet, too quick for me to follow anything except smoothly rippling muscles in thighs and buttocks. Candy sprawled heavily beside her, and they both sprang to their feet and faced off again in reverse postures.

  A touch on my thigh brought my head around as I took another swallow of brandy. Hermione’s towel had disappeared completely, and she was snuggling closer to me. I slipped an arm around her, and the silky skin of her waist titillated my fingertips. The bushy triangle of her body hair was as blond as her head. “Where are you from?” she asked drowsily.

  “Washington,” I said. It was the first thing that came into my head, and it was true enough since Erikson and I had taken off from Andrews Field.

  A thudding sound drew my attention to the mat again. I drank brandy and watched the strange contest. Candy and Chen Yi took turns on offense and defense. He may have been stronger, but not by much, and she was quicker. She appeared to have enormous strength in her hands and upper body. She was even better at the hiza-guruma, the knee wheel, than Candy was. Both worked hard at attempting to get the opponent off-balance before trying to apply their own holds. The flying black and yellow bodies crashed to the mat in almost equal ratios.

  I knew the brandy was getting to me when the ebony-and-gold ballet on the mat started to blur at the edges. And the conditions of the contest seemed to have changed. I leaned forward to see better. Instead of judo’s freewheeling throws
Candy and Chen Yi were working in close to each other. Arm movements were short and choppy, and both seemed to be holding back. I had never seen anything like it before.

  I felt a tugging at my waist. I had slumped back without realizing it, and Hermione had my shoes off and was working on my pants. I felt marvelously relaxed, but then a slight crackling sound beneath my jacket reminded me I still had Erikson’s sack. I set my snifter down on the floor while I captured Hermione’s roving hands. She pouted attractively and after a moment left the couch.

  Chen Yi appeared beside me and refilled my brandy glass. She was slick with perspiration, and her heavy breathing agitated the full breasts — much fuller than Hermione’s even — beneath her blouse. When I started to speak to her, I found I had to shape the words carefully. My lips felt slack. “What was that you two were doing at the end, Chen Yi?”

  “That is gung fu,” she answered. “It is not play.”

  I had never heard of gung fu, but I made a mental note to learn more. Chen Yi departed. Somewhere in the background I could hear a shower running. I picked up the brandy snifter and sampled its contents again, savoring the quick spreading warmth.

  Muffled giggles drew my attention to the wrestling mat again. Consuelo and Hermione, both nude, were wrestling in one corner of it. There was no science to it, merely kittenish exuberance as the soft bodies writhed and strained together. The emphasis was purely sexual. Or impurely.

  Candy Kane had materialized again. He sat cross-legged at the edge of the mat, a brooding black figure with a haze of marijuana smoke wreathed around his head. I could see white scar ridges on his powerful looking forearms that could have been nothing except the residue of knife fights. Chen Yi was nowhere in sight.

  For the first time since I’d been in the room no one was paying any attention to me. I unbuttoned my jacket and lifted off the cord to the canvas sack from around my neck. I quickly stuffed the sack under a couch cushion. It was so far from being bulky that I wondered again if Erikson had really obtained his goal.