Between him and the hotel were four wide apartment buildings. There was no way he dared walk boldly through the hotel lobby by himself up to Louisa's room. There were only two ways: over the roofs or with Louisa's help.
He decided to try the latter first and crossed the street to a cellar beer garden. Just inside the door was a narrow hall with coats lining the walls on both sides.
Carter fingered through them until he found a high-collared topcoat approximately his size. He tugged it on and pushed through the door into the main room.
It was full, mostly youths around long, bare wooden tables. There was much laughter and clanking of heavy beer mugs as Carter pulled the fur collar up around his mutilated face and made his way through the tables toward a sign marked Teléfono.
It was perfect: a wall phone near a rear exit.
He dialed the hotel, and a sleepy-voiced concierge answered on the eighth ring.
"Señorita Louisa Juaneda, por favor."
"Uno momento".
Carter fidgeted as the phone in Louisa's room rang. Twice, men passed within three feet of him on their way to the john.
Tonight, Carter thought, it would be just his luck that the real owner of the coat he wore would have bladder problems.
"There is no answer, señor."
"Gracias."
It took him another two minutes to find the number of the club.
"Cabaret Amour."
"Si, I would like to speak to Señorita Juaneda, por favor."
"Employees cannot receive calls."
"This is important… an emergency."
"She is onstage."
"Can you give her a message?"
"I have no pencil."
Carter's fingers tingled. He could feel them curling around the man's neck.
"I told you, this is an…"
The line went dead.
Carter cursed and checked his watch.
It would be at least another two hours, maybe more, before Louisa would leave the club.
He couldn't be on the streets for two hours, particularly in this cold with his head swimming.
He had to get under cover, and quick.
Not wanting to expose himself in the cellar room again, he darted through the rear exit door and skirted the building until he was back on Avenue el Pico.
Slowly he lit a cigarette and cupped it in his hands as he carefully studied the four buildings leading to the hotel.
If he could only get one of those roofs…
"Perdóneme."
Carter had been standing directly in front of a bakery shop door. He moved aside as a bent old woman passed him. A set of keys jingled in her hand, and three sacks of groceries were cradled in her arms.
She was halfway up the stoop of the end apartment house when Carter sprinted after her. By the time he reached her, she had unlocked the door and was struggling to tug it open.
"Allow me, señora."
She stepped through without a word. When Carter offered to step in behind her, she whirled in the threshold, belligerently blocking his way.
"Mi amigo…" Carter said, gesturing up the stairs.
She growled back at him in a guttural speech he could not understand and gestured toward a bank of buzzers head-high outside the door.
When he smiled and started in anyway, she placed a well-aimed kick at his shin and pulled the door closed behind her. A finger, prominent with swollen knuckles, pointed again at the buzzers, and her seamed face glowered at him through the glass.
"You are a nasty old bitch," Carter whispered.
She nodded, turned, and began hobbling up the stairs.
Carter waited until she was out of sight, and then began randomly pushing all the buttons.
Nothing.
He moved back to the sidewalk and up the street to the next apartment house.
This time he got several vocal replies.
"It is I, José Cartero. I am so sorry, but I have left my key in my flat again. If you would…"
The door was still buzzing angrily as Carter hit the stairs four steps at a time. There was a pull-down trapdoor above the top-floor landing, complete with a narrow ladder.
In no time he was back in the snow, sprinting across the roofs.
The hotel was a floor taller than the roof of the last apartment, but it was equipped with an old-style, pull-down fire escape. It was the way of European buildings built close together. You could go from building to building, but not down the front or rear on the outside.
The trapdoor ladder was the same in the hotel. From the top floor, he avoided the elevator and took the stairs. On the third floor he searched for 312 and quickly found it.
There were two locks. One was a turnkey beneath the knob, and the other was a newly installed deadbolt in the panel above it.
Carter ran Hugo's blade through the crack and down. The deadbolt had not been locked. The bolt on the turnkey responded to a gentle shaking of the door. Slowly he was able to inch it open with the blade of the stiletto.
Once inside, he closed and, with a sigh of relief, locked the door behind him.
There were two rooms: a living room and a tiny bedroom alcove behind a set of bedraggled, tattered curtains.
Shunning any light. Carter searched until he found a bottle and a glass. It was gin, but at that moment he couldn't have cared less.
The radio was in the alcove on a tiny stand. He whirled the knob until he found Radio Andorra, poured a full glass of the gin, and sprawled across the bed to wait.
"Nick! Nick!"
The voice oozed down to him, and mentally he tried to swim up to meet it. It was difficult, very difficult. His arms didn't seem to want to swim, and his mind was in a fog.
Again the voice, oddly familiar, tried to reach him. But only when it was coupled with an iron band gripping his left arm did he respond.
Like a shot he came to an upright position, at the same time Hailing out with his arm. This lasted for a few seconds, until a bolt of pain flew from his left arm clear across his body to the fingertips of his right hand and back up to numb his brain.
Like a deflated balloon he crumpled back to the eiderdown quilt and struggled to lift his eyelids.
Louisa Juaneda's dark, flashing eyes and smoldering features came into focus above his face.
"Jesus, I didn't know it was you. I almost skewered you with this before I realized!"
Carter blinked once and saw what could have been Hugo's gleaming twin in her hand.
"What happened?"
"It's a long story. Where's the bottle of gin?"
"You spilled it all over the bed. I have another." She moved quickly across the room and returned, pouring. "Here."
He took half the glass in one swallow, allowed the liquid to burn away the pain in his arm, and then again found her face with his now focused eyes.
"Armanda…"
"I know. It's on the radio and all over town."
"And the country." Carter shrugged, drinking again. "It's a small country. Are they looking for me?"
"In every trash can. What happened?"
Briefly, in short, staccato sentences, Carter relayed the night's events, not leaving out a single, gruesome detail.
To Louisa's credit, she listened raptly and did not blink even when he described the picture of Armanda de Nerro being blown apart right before his eyes.
"Are you sure it was de Varga?"
"It stands to reason. It couldn't be anybody else. And the face I saw in the doorway looked like it was a refugee from a burning building."
Carter tried to rise, and again the pain held him motionless a few inches off the bed.
"What is it?"
"A slight hole, somewhere in there," he replied, vaguely pointing with his right hand toward his left arm.