Operation Breakthrough Page 4

  I took another swallow of brandy before I sank back upon the couch, my eyes along with Candy’s upon the naked wrestlers.

  Erikson …

  I was going to have to do something about Karl Erikson.

  One of the girls on the mat squealed shrilly, reclaiming my attention.

  Then the nude wrestlers gradually went out of focus, and I didn’t see anything.

  I came to with a start.

  Hermione had returned to my couch.

  Her sleek nudity was plastered full length atop my own. I couldn’t imagine where my clothes had gone. My nostrils were filled with the commingled odor of hyacinth, sandalwood, perspiration, and woman.

  Hermione removed the empty brandy glass from my lax hand, then murmured something unintelligible as her fingertips traced the outline of the numerous scars on my chest from the skin transplants which had contributed to the remaking of my face. I reached down and secured a double handful of resilient gluteal amplitudes while Hermione continued to recline upon me. I kneaded her soft flesh until she turned her head with an impatient whimper and sank her sharp little teeth into my neck.

  I cuffed her, and she rolled off onto the floor, dragging me with her. Our positions were reversed, which she seemed to consider an improvement. I wasn’t so sure. The long night’s effort and the brandy had induced a lassitude which made me doubt my response.

  But Hermione had no doubts. Despite my weight upon her she performed prodigies of acrobatic movement with her pelvis as the fulcrum. She agitated me until a fleshy linchpin connected us, and her wide hips rose clear of the floor in her eagerness to meet and return each thrust.

  It seemed to go on for a long time. I had the feeling at times that I was riding out a storm. The girl was a natural force. In my alcoholic haze the eventual climax felt like jumping from the haymow in a tall, tall barn.

  I went plunging down and down and down and down.

  And out.

  I woke with a jerk and sat up abruptly.

  I was back on the couch in the exotically furnished room.

  Stubby candles still furnished the room’s only light, and the lingering odor of incense and marijuana still remained in the air. But there was no gymnasium mat in the center of the floor and no naked female bodies entwined upon it.

  And no Hermione.

  I wondered if I had dreamed it all.

  My mouth tasted foul enough from the brandy residue to make me feel that an alcoholic dream was far from an impossibility. But Candy Kane had been no dream. I was sure of that.

  The apartment’s airlessness, the brandy, and the uneasy sleep had combined to leave me well stewed in my own juices. I levered myself upright from the low couch and went in search of the bathroom from which I had heard the sound of running water.

  En route I padded barefoot to the nearest window and pushed aside the elaborate draperies. Bright sunlight blinded me momentarily while I fumbled for the latch on the steel frame casement windows. I shoved them open and breathed deeply of the warm, flower scented air.

  I squinted over the roofs of the single-story shops across the street and down the slope toward the waterfront. Just beyond Bay Street and Rawson Square I could see a huge white cruise ship moored against the Prince George Wharf, its gleaming superstructure in sharp contrast to the red tile roof of the customs building next to it.

  The sound of wheels drew my attention to the narrow lane below. A policeman in a white tunic, his brown face made darker by the shade afforded by the broad rim of his gold-spiked pith helmet, pedaled leisurely along the empty cobblestoned street. The red stripes running down the seams of his black trousers made psychedelic patterns as his polished shoes rotated to propel his bicycle.

  I drew back and pulled the draperies together.

  The sight of the policeman was sobering.

  I found the bathroom and turned on the shower. I soaped and rinsed myself several times to rid myself of accumulated skin film. But my thoughts kept returning to Karl Erikson incarcerated in a Bahamian jail cell.

  I had to talk to Candy Kane.

  THREE

  I DRIED myself vigorously with a coarse towel, wrapped its dampness around my waist, and went in search of Candy.

  Outside the bathroom door I almost ran into Chen Yi, the Chinese girl. It was something of a relief to find that at least her six-foot, four-inch presence had been no dream. She had on another high-necked garment of some gauzy material, barely opaque, but this one reached her ankles. “Good morning,” I said. “Or is it afternoon?”

  “Early afternoon,” she replied. “I’ve brought you a set of Candy’s underwear.” She removed it from her arm and handed it to me. I noticed for the first time that despite her size, her voice had a musical, little girl tinkle to it.

  “Just what I need,” I assured her. “I appreciate it.”

  She smiled, but her eyes were upon my body above the damp towel fastened at my waist. She made no comment about my body scars, though. “I’ve pressed your suit for you,” she continued.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” I protested halfheartedly. A freshly pressed suit would help a good deal in avoiding attention when I left Candy’s. I wondered if Chen Yi had noticed the lack of labels.

  I returned to the bathroom with Candy’s underwear. His choice ran to bold colors and wild patterns, but the fresh material felt welcome. I went back into the room I had come to think of as the Incense Room and found my freshly shined shoes at one end of the couch with a new pair of socks draped across them. My pressed suit rested on the back of the couch. The hospitality in Candy’s apartment almost was embarrassing in its thoroughness.

  I pulled on socks and shoes and sat down on the couch opposite the end marked by a slight lumpiness where I had hidden the canvas sack with the papers from the bank’s safe deposit boxes. If I followed the script, I’d get to the private airstrip and meet the escape plane. There I’d turn the canvas sack with its contents over to someone named Baker.

  I hoped that Baker knew me because I surely didn’t know him.

  I’d never learned which government agency employed Karl Erikson. There were times when I’d suspected he was a troubleshooter for more than one agency, doing special government jobs on assignment. The only other man who worked with Erikson who was more than a nameless face to me was Jock McLaren. He’d been with Erikson and me on the recovery of an AEC shipment, a job which used an import office on Fifth Avenue in New York City as a cover for the retrieval effort.

  But if I left the island now, there was Karl Erikson himself.

  Right now he was undoubtedly lodged in the Bahamian equivalent of maximum security. He had made a point of emphasizing, as he always did on these jobs, that we were strictly on our own if anything went wrong. Now that it had, no US consul was about to step around to the Nassau brig and inquire about Karl Erikson’s welfare.

  No one knew he was there except me.

  He had been emphatic about that contingency, too. “If only one of us makes it, there’ll be no looking back by the survivor,” he’d said to me on the darkened jet which had flown us from Andrews Field when the pilot began to circle the cluster of lights that was Nassau below us in the black water. “The whole purpose is to get what we’re after into the right hands.”

  Which was fine — business as usual — except that I recalled at least twice when he’d violated the rule himself. Once in Cuba he’d come back across an open space he’d successfully traversed to knock out an armed Castro militiaman who was preventing me from taking the same escape route.

  And once when he and Hazel and I were in the drink in the south Atlantic after a fishing cruiser had been shot out from under us, he’d tried to save Hazel at a time when he couldn’t reasonably have expected to save himself.

  I looked up as a sound from a corner of the room caught my attention. Candy Kane was standing in the doorway, his blocky body swathed in a bright purple robe. “Whooo-eee!” he exclaimed with every evidence of deep feeling. “Must’ve been quite a bash fr
om the way I feel.”

  “Your brandy is potent,” I admitted. He was eyeing my underwear. His underwear. “Chen Yi pressed my suit, too,” I added.

  He nodded. “The den mother,” he said with no particular emphasis. “What’d you think of Hermione?”

  “I was trying to make up my mind if I’d dreamed her.”

  Candy chuckled. “If you’d been goin’ to stick around for awhile, I wouldn’t have let her tie into you like that. She’s shacked up reg’lar with a muscle type, kind of a nasty job when he’s turned on. But Hermione enjoys a change of scenery.”

  “What happens if the muscle type catches her at it?”

  “He leans on her, but it’s never stopped her yet. I’d have to say the pair of them are well matched.” He rubbed his chin. “How long ‘d you say last night you wanted to stay?”

  “Three or four days. Maybe less.” I recalled that Erikson’s man Baker was only going to keep the Andrews Field rendezvous for three mornings. “Surely less.”

  “Seems to me you’d be takin’ your fences faster’n that with the bobbies lookin’ for you.”

  “There’s a problem. My partner was grabbed last night.”

  “He was? Where?”

  “On the roof of a bank building on Shirley Street.”

  Candy cocked an eyebrow in a skeptical expression I was beginning to recognize as nearly habitual with him. “You’re beginnin’ to sound like a real hot potato, Earl. I only get to run my game here on the strength of a couple of contacts an’ a little payoff. I can’t afford trouble.” He moved to the couch and sat down on the other end of it. The papers in the canvas sack crackled slightly under his weight, but he didn’t notice. There was a brooding look on his heavy features as his eyes met mine at the closer range. “You know what I mean?”

  “Why would anyone look for me here?” I asked in a tone of voice intended to sound reasonable. “There’s no possible connection. For the law to suspect, I mean. As for my partner, there’s something I’d like to ask you about — ”

  I broke off as Chen Yi reentered the room. The tall Chinese girl had my washed-and-ironed shirt in her hand. “Thanks again,” I said and stood up and began to slip into the shirt.

  “What about your partner?” Candy wanted to know. I glanced at the Chinese girl, but Candy waved an impatient hand. “She goes with the lease here. Speak up.”

  “I’d like to take him with me.”

  Candy stared. “Take him — ? You mean — ?”

  “It might not be too much of a job, depending upon the detention facilities,” I went on. “And I’d pay the right man well for a little help.”

  “I’m not about to get my black ass fussed up in no jailbreak,” Candy began, then paused. “You’d pay? For what kind’ve help?”

  “It shouldn’t take too much. And I’d expect to pay.”

  “I could sure use a fresh bankroll,” Candy said thoughtfully. “The dice turned real unfriendly since that Las Vegas disaster. Before that I’d been goin’ so good you wouldn’t believe it.” He shrugged. “That’s the way it goes. But this thing you’re talkin’ about — ” He was silent for a moment. “Well, how much of a payoff would go to this right man you mentioned?”

  I tried to make my tone impressive. “You name it.”

  He rubbed his chin again. “What kind of help ’d you say?”

  “I’d need to know a few things first. Where would he be held?”

  “Not at East Street, I wouldn’t think,” Candy responded immediately. “Cartwright Street more likely. It’s kind of an unofficial detention center. Prob’ly not more’n two hundred yards from where you say he was grabbed. Did you score with the bank?”

  I knew that my answer would have a lot to do with the price Candy set for his assistance — if he decided to help — and I had no cash to pay off at once. “I’m going to have to come back and retrieve it later when the heat’s off,” I said.

  The answer appeared to satisfy him. “Was there any rough stuff that would make the police hairy?”

  I thought of Karl Erikson’s thickly thewed body shedding police like pearls from a broken necklace strand. And the wallop I gave the sergeant. “Just a little scuffle on the roof. What kind of a jail is this one you think he’d be in?”

  “A bloody poor one, compared to US types,” Candy said. “Actually, it’s a place people are sometimes held before they appear before a magistrate. I don’t think there’s more’n half a dozen cells behind the bookin’ desk, but even at night there’s enough blokes around so no one walks in an’ out unless he’s got business there.”

  “Even behind a gun?”

  “Don’t talk no guns to me, mon. That’s out.”

  “What kind of a building is it?”

  “Old like most of the government buildings near Bay Street.”

  “No, I mean what kind of construction. Masonry? Steel and concrete?”

  “Let’s see now.” Candy’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember. “Seems to me it’s bricked over now,” he said finally, “but when I was a tyke it was a wood-frame-an'-lath affair and old even then. Why?”

  “If I can’t go in the front, maybe I can go in the back.”

  “Through the back wall, you mean?”

  “Correct.” A shaped charge would take care of the wall. Peel it right off like the top of a box of Crackerjack. If I could place such a charge one cell away from Erikson’s, he and I would be gone before the startled people in the front of the building had time to notice the brick dust settling on their desks.

  “Maybe I should have asked you your reg’lar line of business,” Candy said drily. Then he turned serious. “Listen, Earl. What would I have to do? Be right there with you?”

  “No,” I said. “Just pick up a few things for me ahead of time and furnish transportation for a local run afterward.”

  “I could really use a bit of financin',” Candy said. He rose to his feet. “Why don’t I dress an’ go downtown an’ make sure he’s where I think he is? Then we can haggle when I come back.”

  “Take a close enough look at the streets around the jail so you can draw me a map,” I countered.

  Candy slipped an arm around Chen Yi who had been standing silently near the end of the couch. He patted the Chinese girl’s right hip. “How about it, luv?” he asked. “Am I daft to get mixed up in this?”

  “Not if you aren’t actually present,” she said in her soft voice. “There can’t be many men in this man’s situation who would even think about trying to free a captured partner.”

  “Yeah, but if you’d seen him in action on that cruddy Las Vegas airplane you’d know he cuts more ice than most,” Candy returned. “I’ll get goin'.”

  He left the room, and Chen Yi and I were left together. “What would you like to eat?” she asked. “A steak?”

  “A steak sounds a bit heavy this early. Scrambled eggs? With bacon?”

  “No bacon, but we have sausage.”

  “Fine.”

  I completed dressing when Chen Yi went to the kitchen, then took the opportunity afforded by being alone to retrieve the canvas sack from beneath the couch cushion. I hung it around my neck again, flattened it against my chest, and buttoned my jacket carefully so that it didn’t show.

  I followed Chen Yi into the kitchen which I hadn’t seen before. It was well equipped. She had already plugged in a percolater. “How does a girl like you happen to be running a massage parlor in Nassau?” I asked her.

  “I was born in Taiwan,” she replied, cracking eggs into a blue bowl. “But in 1950 my father, a merchant, had the poor judgment to oppose Chiang Kai-shek’s move there. Our family barely escaped.”

  “And you came here?”

  “Not immediately. We lived in Bombay for a time. Then Istanbul, then Vienna. My father was a restless man. I learned the technique of therapy massage in London.” She smiled at me from the stove. “Although I seldom get a chance to practice the healing art here. Once in a while a ship’s doctor sends me a legitimat
e customer, usually with arthritis, but the majority of the people I see are expecting something quite different from me.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “What’s Candy’s background?”

  “He was born here.” She brought my eggs and sausage to the table and poured coffee from the percolater. “He is a poor organizer, a poor businessman. He is usually happy to let me manage most of his affairs.” Again there was the trace of a smile upon her beautiful face. “So long as I am careful not to give the impression of outright management. His machismo will not permit that.”

  Was she giving me a subtle warning about Candy’s unreliability? I began to eat while I considered it. I finally decided it didn’t make much difference. Candy might be a rusty tool — and I was only guessing about that — but he was all I had.

  I had three cups of coffee, the last one with a dark, tightly rolled cigarette Chen Yi gave me from a box on a shelf. “It’s not marijuana,” she said when she saw the caution with which I took my first drag. “Just Turkish tobacco. I learned to like — ” She paused with her head cocked to one side. “Can that be Candy at the door so soon? He’s hardly had time to — ”

  She didn’t complete it but hurried from the kitchen. I heard the sound of the heavy slide bolts being thrown back from the door, and then in what seemed the same instant Candy burst into the kitchen, his black face suffused with emotion. Chen Yi followed a few yards behind him. “Listen, you!” Candy growled at me harshly. “What kind of a mess are you tryin’ to get me into?”

  “Mess? No mess. I’m just — ”

  “I’m sure he has no intention — ” Chen Yi began in what was obviously intended to be a placating tone of voice.

  “Shut up!” Candy barked at her. “You know what this stupid bastard’s done? It’s all over the island that him an’ his crazy partner cracked a box in the bank that was loaded with syndicate papers, that’s what! The syndicate’s lookin’ for this guy twice as hard as the police are!”

  “The syndicate controls gambling among the little people,” Chen Yi explained, seeing my bewilderment. “Candy, I — ”