Assignment - Palermo (7 page)

Thompson complained about his budget. “I don’t know where we can fit this into the expense records. The accountants will raise hell with McFee.”

“Put her under ‘miscellaneous,’ ” Durell said.

“And then what?”

“Pay her doctor and hospital expenses. Keep a man with her as long as possible. Threaten her with scandal if she opens her mouth. Tell her she’ll be sent home to her congressman uncle at once if she talks.”

“She’ll talk.” Thompson sighed.

“But maybe not too soon to hurt us.”

The doctor had taken Ginny in his own car to a shall, private clinic where she would be given a two-week rest under close guard. She would be all right when she was finally released. But nothing would ever be the same for Ginny Jackson again.

Now, with dawn light breaking over La Saleve above Geneva, turning Lake Leman to pure silver, Durell stood in the upper rooms above the bookstore on the Grand Rue that was K Section’s headquarters for Geneva Central. Thompson was yawning. He was a tall, spare man, almost bald, with a fringe of golden hair above his ears, a slow and easy manner that belied his quick intelligence and devious mind. He was more than competent, and Durell was grateful for his help.

Thompson had quickly encoded the list of sabotage targets Durell had obtained from O’Malley and used the small, powerful radio transmitter in the attic of the old Calvinist house to notify the London relay office and transship the information to Washington and General McFee. The answer came back at four in the morning. The fist checked out: places, dates, targets. A railroad bridge in Massachusetts on the New Haven line had mysteriously collapsed twelve hours earlier. Sabotage was suspected, and it was still being investigated.

The radio reply had a Triple-A urgent /priority tag. Durell was ordered to get more data. Get to the top man in the Fratelli. Smash the plot and do it at once.

Thompson’s heavily hooded blue eyes were sympathetic. “How? Where do you go from here?”

“I need O’Malley again. He bugged out and he knows more than he told me, I think. Two to five, as he’d say, he’s hunting for his girl, Gabriella Vanini. She’s his weak spot. He’s in love with her, and she’s connected to the higher-ups in the Fratelli, somehow. Kronin is certain to connect her to him and cut her out. O’Malley wants to protect her but he doesn’t quite trust me because I worked with Rand. O’Malley is a volatile, impulsive man. That’s how he got into this mess in the first place—out of anger, and outrage at finding domestic sabotage after he fought in Vietnam.”

“If that’s all he told you about Gabriella Vanini, then it’s impossible to find her.”

“We must,” Durell said. “Find her, find O’Malley. If I don’t get to her fast, Kronin will see to it that they’re never found again. We don’t have all the data we need, Arnie. But O’Malley and the girl could lead us to the top.”

“You need some sleep,” Thompson said.

Durell shook his head. “We’ll do it together.”

He called Lem Gray in London and asked him to check every telephone directory in every major city in every country in Western Europe. It was a long and tedious task, with only small odds for success, but the London office had an F-67 Whirlwind computer, the only one available. He also asked Lem to check with FBI documents for their records on O’Malley, Joey Milan, and Brutelli, using SIPP files—Search and Inquire, Photo Plastics records. Lem called back from London in twenty minutes. Durell could hear the whir and click of the computer working in the background.

“They’re feeling pretty shook back there, Sam. They don’t like the report on Amos Rand.”

“Did you get anything?”

“They got stuffy. They say it’s all classified.”

“All right. Get me Don Hine at Annapolis Street.” Hine was put to work checking stateside police blotters for data on O’Malley, beginning with Las Vegas, with emphasis on O’Malley’s girl friends. By this time it was clear daylight in Geneva, and' Durell suddenly realized he had eaten nothing since noon of the day before. His eyes were scratchy as he turned to the little kitchen in Thompson’s apartment and scrambled himself eggs and made a pot of coffee and swallowed a tumbler of Thompson’s best bourbon. He thought of the massive Brutelli’s passion for cookery. Maybe there was something in that; but he couldn’t think what it might be.

Lem Gray, using the overseas cable, checked a Major Keenan in the Pentagon for a rundown on O’Malley’s military record. “It’s better than clean, Sam. Wounded twice, awarded a Bronze Star, was a perfect liaison man with the Montagnards and Viets. They were proud of him. They wish they’d had more like O’Malley with Special Forces.”

“What about his payroll records? Any commitments back home?”

“Nothing, Sam. No wife, mother, family.”

“Any letters to girl friends, out of censor’s office?” “I asked. They don’t keep track of stuff like that.” “All right. Check back with Don Hine, right?”

The search of police blotters in the States showed no local records anywhere. Joey Milan had a count of three burglary charges, a one-year term in Idaho for breaking and entering, and disbarment from the Jockey’s Association for complicity in rigging a race at Aqueduct. Bruno Brutelli had done a two-year stretch in Sing Sing for manslaughter. The comments of the police chiefs were invariably bitter.

“They’re three of a kind, Cajun.”

“Is the name of Gabriella Vanini associated with them anywhere?”

“Sorry. Nothing, Sam.”

“Let Don Hine give it up, then,” Durell said.

Lem Gray was dry. “He has, old buddy, he has.”

The computers in London reported hundreds of Vaninis in the telephone directories, from Hamburg, Germany, to Catania in Sicily. So far there was nothing on a Gabriella Vanini specifically. Durell paced Thompson’s little apartment. The hours went by. He knew he was pushing himself beyond the edge of reasonable fatigue. He brewed more coffee and finished the bourbon. Then he got out maps of Europe and began checking bus, railroad, and airline schedules out of Lugano. But it was only a short jump from the lakes to Milan, in Italy, and it was like counting the holes in an enormous seive from there. O’Malley could be anywhere by now.

Noon came and went.

Lem Gray called back from London. “It’s hopeless, Cajun. The machine has given up.”

“All right, Lem. Thanks, anyway.”

At three in the afternoon Durell sat bolt upright out of a sound sleep. He had dozed in a chair beside the telephone. Thompson was downstairs in the shop. Traffic sounds came up from the narrow street below. Durell considered the thought that had wakened him for perhaps thirty seconds; then he made what he knew must be his last call and his last chance. If he failed, he would fall too far behind in the chase ever to catch up with O’Malley again.

Onan McElroy was the K Section resident in Naples Central. He was a little elfin man who had once worked with Colonel Mignon and knew more than most about Italian secret societies. The telephone rang four times before McElroy’s light voice answered in Italian. Durell identified himself briefly in code.

“For hell’s sake,” McElroy complained. “ ’Tis the leprechaun out of the bayous, himself.”

“Onan, it’s important. You’ve got to do it.”

“Do what, Cajun?”

Durell explained about Gabriella Vanini. “She’s just a name. She had to be in the States for O’Malley to have met her, because this is O’Malley’s first trip to Europe, so he didn’t get to know her here. She’s back in Europe now, because O’Malley is looking for her in this area. Maybe she’s in Italy, maybe not. But if she was in the States, there’s a chance she was traveling on business or work or something and not just a tourist, right? Can you check with Work Permit Records, Emigre Labor Certificates, that sort of thing? The Italian government licenses laborers to go abroad. The girl isn’t a laborer, of course, but there might be something like that in the records.”

“Cajun, it’s siesta time down here. Everything is closed. Maybe in a couple of hours—”

“I need the data now. You can do it, Onan.”

There was a long sigh, a yawn, a little grunt. “All right, will do. My taxi business will suffer, though.” “Hurry it up,” Durell said.

An hour later he had it.

“We have the record of the whole family,” McElroy said tersely. “The Vanini Family Circus.”

“The what?”

“A circus. A troupe of traveling acrobats. They claim to have been in the business for over a century. Performed for all the crowned heads of Europe and so forth. Come from Palermo. Everything in the files is clean.”

“Is a Gabriella Vanini registered with them?”

“Sure. A trapeze artist. Does a high wire act, a horseback riding act-—you name it, the gal does it. The troupe just got back from a three-month tour of the States.”

“Good,” said Durell. “Where are they now?” “France, somewhere. They registered the schedule with their agent’s office. Hold the line, Sam . . . Here it is. French Riviera. Cagne, yesterday. And a couple of other little towns farther down toward Nice.”

“Thanks, Onan. Thanks for everything.”

“You owe me something,” McElroy said bitterly. “What’s that?”

“An afternoon’s siesta.”

A LIGHT wind blew over the Cote d’Azur and smelled of the sea and pine woods and fish. The sky was filled with tumbling cumulus that sent long patches of shadow prowling over the fishing boats and the mountainous coast eastward toward the Italian border.

Durell had driven down from Switzerland in the Caravelle. He drove carefully, seeking anonymity in the thick traffic that crawled down from the Alps. The Vanini Family Circus had advertised itself with bright posters splashed along the highway from Cagne to Nice, and he simply followed the signs. He found the circus set up in an empty lot along the stone quai of a half-moon harbor, where bright Riviera yachts were berthed.

He parked nearby and got out. No one paid any attention to him. He looked tall in his dark blue suit, white button-down shirt, and dark knitted tie. The circus was a typical small-town operation, with two aged tents serviced by battered house trailers that had been altered to serve as ticket booths and dressing rooms for the performers. The signs in French boasted a century-old continuity for the “Flying Vaninis, Performers to the Crowned Heads Of Europe Since 1866.” The posters were garish and had been used too long. Everything pointed to slow decay and economic failure of the enterprise.

There was a large billboard that advertised: Gabriella, The Flying Ballerina. He doubted that the slim, silver-spangled girl with the long hair crowned with a diadem, shown flying between two trapeze bars and hanging by her teeth from a leather strap, resembled the real thing. The cool wind was filled with the sound of mauls pounding stakes, the neighing of a circus horse, the cough of a mangy, caged lion. Clothing hung from the trailers and snapped in the breeze.

“You like her?” Someone spoke in Italian-accented French behind him. “You come see tonight, eh? An artist, she is, our Gabriella.
Molte belle, signore
. She is my aunt.”

Durell turned to view a flash of white teeth gleaming under a bristly black moustache. The man was stocky, Sicilian, wearing a gaudy sport shirt and khaki trousers stained stiff with paint. There was pride and love in the fierce eyes that regarded Gabriella’s poster.

“Your
aunt?
”

The man grinned. “We have a very complicated family, signore. I am old enough to be her papa, I assure you.”

“From your advertisements it looks like she’s your whole circus.”

“No, no, signore. But she could be. She is a marvel, an angel, the way she flies. She is the bright spirit that gives us all our hope and courage.”

“I’d like to meet her,” Durell suggested bluntly. “Pardon, this is not permitted. You are a patron, she is the performer. In our family we do not encourage—”

Durell took out a wad of 100-franc notes and nodded to the big tent. “I won’t be in town this evening. Couldn’t I just watch her work out?”

The “nephew” eyed the money hungrily and brushed his fierce moustache. He looked sad. “I am sorry.” Then he brightened. “Unless, perhaps, you are—what do you call it?—a talent scout?”

Durell took the cue. “I understand a rival firm has been considering Gabriella for a cinema role.”

The man’s mouth opened. “I hear nothing of this, signore. It is impossible.” He shook his round head. “In any case Gabriella would never leave the family. Never!”

“No one else has inquired about her?”

There was a second’s pause that told Durell what he wanted to know. “No one like you, signore.”

“But someone has been here?”

“An old friend, only.” The man scowled. “A troublemaker who disturbs our angel’s heart and drives her to the wind and the sea.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She is not here now. She is out there somewhere.” He waved a thick arm at the blue Mediterranean. “She loves the sailboats and goes alone when she can. She will return only in time for performance tonight.” “You have no idea which way—?”

“None. And I think you lie and are bad man, not a talent scout. You are one of them who brings trouble to us. Perhaps police. I do not know. Today one cannot tell blacks from whites.”

Durell caught at a splinter of the man’s thought. “One of whom? Who do you mean?”

The man assured himself they were out of earshot of the laborers working around the tents. “Signore, I beg of you. If you are one of the Fratelli, leave us alone. We are not involved in your affairs. We interfere with nothing.” Fear glinted in his dark eyes. “We ask only to live in peace, eh? We wish to know nothing. Has not Gabriella made this clear? Vecchio Zio has given her a promise of protection—”

“What has she done?”

“Nothing!” The man almost shouted the word. “Is it her fault to be born a princess of the dark, this lovely angel who seeks only sunlight and the wind?” “Who else has been here?” Durell asked again.

“The Devil himself.” The man crossed himself and turned away. “Now I have my work to do.”

It could be Karl Kronin, Durell thought, as he surveyed the organized confusion around the circus tents. It all looked innocent. A fisherman’s diesel engine knocked at the wind. Traffic droned on the Lower Corniche road. Early tourists in bikinis walked by. All at once he smelled and tasted the danger here and he stared closely at the poster of Gabriella Vanini, with her slim, lovely figure and her dark flying hair. How close was she to O’Malley? Was it significant that she had gone sailing today? She had been disturbed. By O’Malley? Had she gone to find him?