In the House of Secret Enemies Read online

  “Signor, you are under arrest for possession of heroin and for the murder of Thomas Barrett.”

  Costello came for me and I reacted instinctively, trying to imagine myself back in the center ring, where the punishment for bad timing might be a broken bone or the mocking laughter of the crowd, but never a bullet in the brain.

  I drove the point of my shoe into Costello’s shin, then leapt forward, tucking myself into a ball, rolling, then exploding into the side of Abbott’s knees. Abbott crumpled over me, shielding me for a moment with his body from the death in his partner’s hand.

  I didn’t stop. I used the momentum from my first rush to carry me over into another roll, then planted my feet under me and leaped head first for the window, closing my eyes and balling my fists to minimize any injuries from the flying glass. I opened my eyes just in time, reaching out and grabbing the edge of the steel railing on the fire escape outside the window. That saved me from a five-story fall.

  I broke my reverse swing by shortening the extension of my arms and using my right hip to absorb the shock of my body falling back against the railing. Glass was showering all around and I could smell the odor of my own blood.

  There was the ugly sound of a gunshot, then the whine of steel striking steel. It was still Circus all the way. There was no time to climb down, so I dropped; story by story, breaking my fall at each level by grabbing at the railings.

  My left shoulder went on the last level, yanked out of its socket. I hit the sidewalk in free fall, immediately flexing my knees and rolling. After what seemed an hour or two of rolling around like a marble I came to a stop in an upright position against a garbage can that must have been filled with concrete.

  Abbott was leaning out the window of my room, peering down into the darkness. My left arm with its dislocated shoulder was useless, and my legs hurt like hell, but I could tell they weren’t broken. I allowed myself a small smile of satisfaction.

  I wasn’t dead, which meant I must have made it. I got up, ducked into an alley, somehow managed to climb a fence and kept going, keeping to the alleys.

  A half mile away I sat down to rest and think.

  Mongo the Magnificent? Mongo the Village Idiot. I’d been had. And now I was a fugitive. I tried to rationalize why I had run, reminding myself that my frame was being nailed together by a master. That was true enough, but the real reason was pride.

  Pride? A foolish thing, perhaps, to risk one’s life for. Still, for me, pride was my life—or the only thing that made life worth living. Pride was the stuff oiling the gears that kept me going in a giants’ world.

  Pride made me care. The matter might have been cleared up while I was in custody, but it would have been done by somebody else. I would leave my prison cell a miserable, stupid dwarf who had been used as a pawn, a little man who had been made a messenger of death. I wanted to know who had involved me in Tommy Barrett’s death. And why. I wanted to find out for myself.

  The fact that I had run would be taken as conclusive evidence of guilt, and I could probably expect to be shot the next time around. Given my rather quaint physical characteristics, I figured I didn’t have too many hours of freedom left.

  I needed a phone. I knew where there was an American Express office open twenty-four hours a day and I hurried there. I knew it was risky to put myself inside four walls, but I couldn’t see where I had any choice, not if I wanted to do something with the time I had.

  I tried not to think of the surrounding glass or the fact that the office only seemed to have one door as I entered and walked up to the clerk on duty.

  I gave him the number I wanted to call. The lines were free and it took him only a few moments to make the connection with New York. He motioned me to one of the booths lining the opposite wall. I went into the booth, closed the door, and squatted down on the floor, bracing my back against the wall.

  “Garth?”

  “Mongo! What the hell are you doing waking me up in the middle of the night?! And what’s the matter with your voice?”

  “Listen, big man, you’re lucky I can talk at all,” I said. I tried to sound nasty so we could continue playing our family game, but I couldn’t. His voice sounded too good. “Garth, I’m in trouble. I need your help.”

  “Go ahead,” Garth said. I could tell he was wide awake now. His voice was deadly serious.

  “I need information on a man who may or may not be named James Barrett. It’s probably an alias, but I want you to check it out for me anyway. Find out if there is a James Barrett with a record, and get back to me as soon as you can. I’ll give you a number where—”

  “I just left one James Barrett about four hours ago,” Garth said. He sounded puzzled. “Jimmy Barrett is my partner.”

  “Describe him.”

  “About five foot eight, eyes: blue. Hair: none. He’s pushing retirement. Part of his left ear lobe is missing—”

  I suddenly felt very sick and my arm was beginning to throb.

  “And he has a son,” I finished. My voice was barely a whisper.

  “Yeah,” Garth said. “Tommy. Nice boy. Barrett says the kid’s an artist, apparently pretty good. The last I heard he was spending the summer in Italy. What does that have to do with you?”

  “He’s dead,” I said too loudly. “What it has to do with me is that I helped kill him.”

  There was complete silence on the other end of the line. Slowly, my voice stretched thin by pain and fatigue, I filled Garth in on where I was and what had happened. My own words seemed alien to me, a shrieking whine emanating from some broken tape recorder inside my soul. The words hurt, and I used that pain to lash myself for my own gullibility and incompetence, for not smelling the set-up earlier and maybe preventing the death—or deaths—that had occurred. Finally it was over and Garth’s voice came at me, soft but laced with rage, punctuated with heavy breathing.

  “All right, Mongo, I know who the man is from your description. His name is Pernod, Vincent Pernod, and he’s one of the biggest drug men around, a contractor for the Mafia. You’ve just had a taste of Pernod’s sense of humor and style of revenge.”

  “Why Barrett, and why me? And what’s the connection with the girl?”

  “Jimmy and I have spent the last eighteen months trying to run Pernod down, which means building a case. The pressure was building on him to the point where New York, his most lucrative market, was being taken away, and it was only a matter of time before we nailed him.

  “Pernod doesn’t take kindly to that kind of treatment and obviously he decided to do something about it. Killing Tommy Barrett was his way of getting at my partner; destroying you in the process was his way of getting at me. Add to that the fact that Elizabeth Hotaling is, or was, Pernod’s ex-mistress and you begin to get a picture of how dirty the water is that you’ve been swimming in.”

  My knuckles were white where I had gripped the receiver. Pernod had had me pegged perfectly. He’d been sure I wouldn’t contact Garth until it was too late, and he’d been right.

  “Tommy met the girl down at the precinct station. He’d come to see his father about something and Elizabeth Hotaling was waiting while we grilled her boyfriend. You saw the results.”

  My brain was beginning to play tricks on me. I was having acid-flashes of memory; Pernod in my office, the man and woman in the pallazza, the sapper bouncing off my skull. My rage was growing, exploding hot splinters of hatred.

  “He has Italian help,” I said, thinking of the two men I’d run into.

  “Sure. He has a farm outside Rome, somewhere near Cinecittà,” Garth said absently. “There’s a small airstrip there, and we think that’s how he gets his drops.”

  “Drops?”

  “Drops—drug shipments. They bring the raw stuff in by plane from Lebanon and Turkey, then—”

  “I’ve got it,” I said. That explained the grain on the suit of the man who’d been following me.

  “Now listen, Mongo,” Garth continued evenly. “You haven’t killed anyone, exce
pt maybe yourself if you keep running around loose. I have contacts there, and I know the department will put me on the first plane out of here. When the Italian authorities find out you’ve been messing with Pernod they’ll more than likely give you a medal. I don’t want them to give it to you posthumously, which means you turn yourself in now. Do I make sense?”

  He made sense. I told him so and hung up. I was dialing the local police when I happened to glance in the direction of the clerk. I hung up and stepped out of the booth.

  “Excuse me,” I said, pointing to the calendar on the wall, “what’s today’s date?”

  The clerk glanced up at the calendar, then ripped off the previous day’s sheet.

  “August twenty-third, signor. I forgot to change it.”

  I mumbled my thanks and headed out the door. The clerk yelled after me, asking something about my arm. I ignored him. August 23rd: 8-23. Now I knew why they’d wanted the notebook back. 823drop10. Pernod was expecting a drop this day, either at ten in the morning or ten in the evening.

  I planned to do some dropping myself.

  I found a DKW I could drive, crossed the wires, and was off, heading for the open country southeast of Rome. It would take some fast driving over rough terrain, but I figured I could make it if I didn’t slow down for the towns.

  I was well beyond any limitations imposed by pain, hunger or exhaustion. My mind and senses were very clear, and I was running on the most efficient fuel of all: high-octane, one-hundred-proof hate. That hate made it a personal thing, a demand that I be the one to put Pernod away. Pernod had used me to kill another human being, and that act required a special kind of payment that only I could collect.

  Garth’s unintentional directions were right on the money. It was 8:30 when I finally spotted Pernod’s ranch from a bend in the road at the top of a hill, about twenty minutes outside Cinecittà. It was a spread of about one hundred acres or so, and the air strip ran right up to the rear of the wood and brick farmhouse. The fields of grain glowed golden in the morning sun. It would have made an idyllic scene were it not for the electrified wire surrounding the whole, and an armed guard at the only gate.

  I drove the rest of the way down the hill, past the gate. I waved to the stony-faced guard, who stared right through me. I drove around another bend, pulled the car off to the side of the road and sat down in the grass to think.

  If there was a drop coming in, I was sure Pernod would be in the house waiting for it. The problem was getting to him without getting myself killed. The fence was about seven feet high, with an additional foot of barbed wire crowning the top. With two good arms I might have tried to fashion a pole and vault it. In my present condition there was no way. I would have to meet the guard head on.

  The area in back of me was wooded. Using my belt, I strapped my useless left arm in close to my body, then stepped back into the trees and made my way back toward the guard. I stopped when I was about twenty yards away, picked up a stone and hurled it at the fence. The wire greeted the stone with a shower of electric sparks and a high-pitched, deadly whine. The guard came running down the road.

  He was carrying a sub-machine gun, Russian made, which meant it had probably come from somewhere in the Middle East along with a shipment of drugs. It also meant to me that I was right about the drop that morning. Nothing else would justify the risk of arming a roadside guard with such a weapon; a man standing by a gate with a sub-machine gun would be sure to arouse suspicion, and could blow whatever cover Pernod maintained. No, something—something very big—was coming in, and I suspected it could be Pernod’s retirement nest egg.

  I had to get close to the man, and the gun in his hand meant I had very little margin of error. I doubted that another ruse would work; any sound from me and he’d simply spray the trees with machine gun fire. I would have to go to him.

  I waited until he was about fifteen yards beyond me, then took a deep breath and exploded from the line of trees. Suddenly, the scene seemed to shift to slow motion inside my brain. I was running low, my right arm pumping wildly, my eyes fixed on the spot at the base of the man’s skull I knew I must hit if I was to get him before he got me. But he’d heard me, and his finger was already pressed against the trigger of his weapon as he began to make his turn.

  The muzzle of the gun described an arc, bucking, firing a shower of bullets that kicked into the trees, the circle of death coming closer and closer. The muzzle finally zeroed in on me and I left my feet, arching my back and thrusting up my arm in a desperate effort for height. An angry swarm of steel whirred by beneath me, and then I was at his head. There was no time to do anything but aim for the kill.

  I twisted my body to the side, tucked in my left leg, then lashed out, catching the point of his jaw with my heel. The man’s head kicked to one side and I could hear a dull click. He fell as I fell.

  I landed on my left side and was almost swallowed up by a white hot flash of pain that must have ascended all the way from hell. Somehow I managed to get to my feet, crouched and ready to move in case I had missed. I hadn’t.

  The hot barrel of the gun had fallen across the man’s arm and was scorching his skin, but he didn’t move. The click I had heard had been the sound of the man’s neck breaking.

  I turned and glanced in the direction of the farmhouse. Two figures were running toward the road. Both carried machine guns. I grabbed the dead man’s weapon and sprinted back to the shelter of the trees.

  They wasted no time examining the body of their dead comrade. The moment they saw him they dropped to the ground on their bellies, their guns pointed into the woods. My mind told me they couldn’t possibly hear me breathing; my fear insisted I take no chances. I held my breath. It was like Old Home Week; one man was the one who’d been tailing me in Rome, the other the one who’d slugged me in Venice.

  They were patient. It was ten minutes before the older man finally signaled the younger to move out. Both rose to a crouch and began moving off in opposite directions, still keeping their guns trained into the woods on the left and right of me. I crawled forward on my belly up to a large oak at the very edge of the road, then straightened up and flattened myself against the trunk.

  I was not at all sure I could even fire the gun with one arm, at least not with the accuracy I would need. Add to that the fact that any move I made would require exquisite timing and you come up with a situation that was not exactly favorable. Still, my adrenaline was running low and I had no desire to simply pass out at their feet. Besides, I hadn’t come this far to fight a defensive action.

  Now the men were about twenty-five yards apart, on opposite sides of the tree, and still moving. In going for an attacking position, I had crawled into a cul-de-sac; sooner or later the angle would be reduced to the point where one of the men would spot me. It was time to make my move.

  I knew if I swung on one man the tree would protect me from the other, at least for a few seconds. I decided to go after the older, more experienced man first. He was the most dangerous. I braced the gun on my hip and swung to my right.

  “Freeze! Both of you! Freeze, or this man dies!”

  Of course, they were going to hear none of it. Bullets beat an obscene tattoo on the trunk behind me while the man in front of me tried to drop to one side.

  I had anticipated it. I cut loose with a quick burst and the older man’s body danced in the air like a bloody rag doll.

  Immediately I pressed back against the tree, counted to three, and rolled around the back to the opposite side. The other man had done exactly what I had expected, running down the road to the other side of the tree. I stepped out on my side and pressed the trigger, catching him in the belly, blowing him backwards.

  He was dead before he hit the fence but that didn’t soothe my sensibilities. I shielded my eyes from the twitching figure stuck with electric glue to the deadly wire mesh.

  It occurred to me that I had killed my first man—plus two others for good measure—in the space of the last ten minutes. Oddly enou
gh, I felt strangely unaffected by the blood and death around me; I kept thinking of a young man struggling for life while a man plunged a needleful of eternity into his veins.

  I figured the odds were better than even that one of the men I had killed had held that needle; the other two had probably held Tommy Barrett down.

  But the man responsible for it all was still alive and free. I glanced in the direction of the farmhouse; it was perfectly quiet. I looked at my watch and found it had been shattered. I figured the time at around 9:30, which meant I had only a half hour before the plane landed. I had to get to Pernod before help arrived.

  I reloaded one of the guns from ammunition I found in the older man’s pocket, then went through the gate. I knew it would be safer to work my way down through the grain fields, but I figured I couldn’t afford the time.

  Keeping low, trying to ignore the pain in my left arm, I zigzagged down the rutted road to the house. I expected to hear—or feel—a volley of shots at any moment, but none came; there was only the lazy singing of crickets. I reached the house and came up hard against the side, just beneath a window. I rested a few moments, sucking air into my lungs, trying to right the landscape around me, which had a maddening tendency to spin.

  I suspected a bullet between my eyes might be the reward for looking in that particular window so I resisted the impulse and crept around to the other side of the house.

  There was another window. I counted slowly to one hundred, then looked in.

  Elizabeth Hotaling was tied to a chair, a gag in her mouth. Her face was very pale, her eyes wide and red. Pernod was standing over her, a knife pressed against her throat. It looked as if the arsenal had been depleted.

  “I’m here now, Pernod,” I said quietly. “I just killed off your zoo.” I kept the gun out of sight. I was curious to see if Pernod would move away from the girl. He didn’t.

  “Get in here, Frederickson,” Pernod said tightly. “I want to see the rest of you. If I don’t, I kill the girl.”

  “You’re an idiot, Pernod,” I said evenly, allowing myself a short laugh for effect. I cut it off quickly as I felt it building to hysteria. I didn’t look at the girl. “That girl is the only reason you’re alive right now. Besides, she’s your girl friend, not mine. Chop her head off if you want. In any case, the second her blood spills, you’re dead.”