Operation Breakthrough (3 page)

And then through the crack I saw at the farthest perimeter of the roof a dark face appear suddenly in the quick glow of a lighted cigarette held in a cupped hand.

I
DROPPED
down inside the shaft, then bent nearly double on the ladder to get closer to Erikson. “They’re on the roof!” I whispered. “Give me the gun!” His response was to remove my .38 from a pocket and drop it down the elevator shaft. I heard the dull thud of its landing on the roof of the elevator. “Goddamnit, Karl — !”

“Shut up!” His response was more rasp than whisper. “We’ve got to get clear with this sack. Here. You take it.” He thrust it at me. “I’ll meet you at the airstrip rendezvous this time tomorrow morning if we become separated. If only one of us makes it, remember the name
Baker
at Andrews at eight
A.M.
Now change places with me. I’m going out first.”

“What the hell difference does it make who goes out first? Climb back down and get my gun, and I’ll — ”

“Shut up and do as I say!”

We changed places on the ladder in a grisly ballet of sweaty, grasping hands and bumping bodies. Perspiration was crawling down my back by the time Erikson scrambled past me on the narrow ladder. I made a loop in the cord around the neck of the sack and hung it around my neck after ripping off my tool-carrying vest and dropping it into the elevator pit. I held onto the ladder with one hand while I buttoned my jacket over the sack with the other. Its bulk didn’t seem too conspicuous, and it left both my hands free.

Erikson pulled himself upward until he could straddle the opening in the floor. Then he burst through the door and went out across the roof in a bulllike rush. I was still trying to pull myself up through the hole when I heard excited shouts and the sounds of heavy bodies colliding violently.

Bobbing flashlight beams played upon a totally disorganized scene when I reached the doorway. Erikson’s initial charge had taken him nearly to the edge of the roof, opposite the way we had gained it. He was enveloped in a cloud of men, but his muscular body kept shedding them like a dog flinging off water drops.

All attention was fixed upon the melee. Men in uniform danced around its edges, trying to get into the action. I knew that I was supposed to take advantage of Erikson’s delaying action. I eased out the door and started across the roof toward the open space between the buildings.

A hand clutched my arm tightly as I approached the roof’s edge. I hadn’t even seen the man until I felt the hand, but I caught a glimpse of a uniform sleeve with stripes on it. “Follow me, Sergeant!” I got out in as much of a tone of command as I could muster. “There’s another one on the next roof!”

The hand fell away. I didn’t look around. I took two long strides followed by two loping ones, then leaped across the gap. My challenger landed almost on my heels, but I was ready for him. I hand bladed the back of his neck solidly as he came down in a half-crouched position. He grunted heavily as he plowed up the roof’s tarred surface with his face, rolled over, and then collapsed motionless.

There was no one on the second roof. I trotted down the rear fire escape while the sounds of battle from the roof of the bank building echoed clearly in the predawn stillness. My conservatively cut business suit had passed me at first glance, but I knew I couldn’t stand a close inspection. I might not look like a bank robber, but I surely resembled a man who had had a long, hard night.

Just before I dropped down from the final section of fire escape into the littered alley, the sounds from the roof of the bank ceased. I knew that Karl Erikson wouldn’t be meeting me at the airstrip rendezvous the following morning.

And I knew I wasn’t in much better shape myself.

I had to find someplace to hide for twenty-four hours until Erikson’s pilot made the rendezvous. I had to hide while every cop in and out of uniform shook down the tiny island looking for me.

I moved along the alley for three-quarters of a block, remaining in the deeper shadow of the building walls. I turned into a narrow side passage and hurried to Shirley Street. I stopped just short of the sidewalk and looked up the street. In front of the bank police cars and jeeps were parked at odd angles with red and orange spinner lights flickering like a kaleidoscope gone mad.

I left the security of the alley entrance and walked in the opposite direction as leisurely as my hard-pumping adrenalin gland and perspiration-itching scars would permit. I was trying to hold down the surge of bitter anger at the thought of a single mistake that had blown a perfect job. Anger wouldn’t solve anything. Because of the mistake Karl Erikson was in custody, and I was going to be hard put not to join him.

I couldn’t stand any sort of inquiry. Passports and visas aren’t required in the Bahamas, but proof of identity in the form of a birth certificate or something similar is a necessity. Neither Erikson nor I had anything of the sort, of course. We had stripped ourselves of all possible means of identification. We had even removed clothing labels.

I was automatically in trouble the first time I couldn’t produce proof of identity for anyone requesting it. I had to get off the street at the earliest possible moment, and I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t check into a hotel without identification, and dressed as I was, I could hardly go to the beach. The stores wouldn’t open for another three or four hours, and the gambling casino on Paradise Island didn’t open until midafternoon.

I zigzagged away from the trouble spot, turning onto Victoria Avenue from Shirley Street. I passed Dowdeswell Street before reaching Bay, where I turned east. Another two blocks brought me to Rawson Square, one of the centers of business activity.

I stood indecisively in the square near a carriage stand under a mango tree. An increasing number of early-morning risers proceeding along the sidewalks kept me from feeling quite so noticeable. Smiling black men on bicycles, wearing white uniforms with open-throated white shirts, hailed each other in soft Bahamian accents. They were apparently hotel employees on their way to work. “Hey, mon!” one called cheerfully across the street to a friend. “See you at the party tonight, righto?”

The clipped British-sounding voice reminded me of something. When I had recently been on a chartered flight to Las Vegas for professional gamblers, one of the more prominent crap shooters on the plane had been a stocky, smiling black man in a lime green suit, lime green suede shoes, lime green derby hat, and a pink ruffled shirt. And the black man had spoken in just such a clipped British-sounding inflection.

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
K
s 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 C
ANDY
K
ANE
. 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 C
HEN
Y
I
’
S
M
ASSAGE
P
ARLOR
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!”