Vera released the window button.
The hand vanished first, the Corsicans second. Where there was a sedan was now whistling air, and a moment later the sound of something falling very fast down the mountain side.
Vera picked up the .45 with her scarf and threw the gun out the window. It spun far down toward the trees. Then she sat back, looked at me and sighed.
“You’re very good. Raki. In every way. What I don’t understand is how we never heard of you before.”
“You’re not so bad yourself, Vera.”
She thought it over. My meaning was clear enough. There just was no way the Corsicans could have been on our trail without her leading them to us, and no way to dispose of their untimely appearance without murder.
Three dead men in three days. It was a Mafia daisy. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me.
The next petal might be me.
Nine
Saarguemines was French. On the other side was Saarbrucken, Germany. Dividing the towns was a river and a railway customs station.
“I don’t understand,” Vera said for the hundredth time. “If we’re not bringing the opium in by the railroad car, what is so important about a shipment of almond powder?”
“Vera, if I thought I should tell you, don’t you think I would have by now?”
“I m sorry.”
She stepped out onto the balcony. Our hotel room overlooked the river. In the twilight, the river barges floated by the way they had for centuries, their cabins lit by oil lamps.
“Sometimes, though,” she added. “I think this railway car of yours is nothing but a decoy. Is that the case, Raki?”
She turned to face me in the electric glare of the bare bulb in our room. Vera looked as if she were near tears, and she never looked more desirable. I desired her, to put it simply. Living with her, making love with her had become part of my life. It was a lie, and lies come to an end, but while it lasted I welcomed it.
“Without the almond powder, there is no shipment.”
I joined her on the balcony. In the gloom beyond the balcony’s marble rail, in Saarguemines’ twisting streets was probably a car of waiting men. If I told her now where the opium was, the men would come up, kill me, and feed what was left of me to the river’s eels. Of course, there might be no car of men. The last double murder might have ended all contact between her and the Corsicans. No matter what her status with the American Mafia was, it might be that she was as likely to be hit now as me. Or maybe she was so in love with a Turk named Raki Senevres that she only wanted to help him.
The last possibility was the least likely.
I took Vera away from the balcony to the bed. Lying down, her hair a gold fan around her face, she watched as I undressed her. Her breasts spread slightly, touching her arms. Her nipples were pink and erect. She raised her hips as I pulled her pants off. Glints of gold shone in the soft triangle of hair on the Venus mound. I dropped my own clothes in a chair. She spread her legs slightly as I joined her.
“So I should trust you,” she whispered against my ear.
“Like I trust you.”
At the same time, two border guards, one French and the other German, dipped cups into bags of almond powder at the Saarguemines-Saarbrucken crossing. Each would taste every bag, I knew, dipping their scoops at increasingly deeper levels to make sure that in the shipment of sweet almond dust there was no hint of opium’s dreamy alkaloid bouquet.
Vera’s eyes closed. Her tongue ran over her teeth. I plunged farther. Her stomach rose to meet me, then fell away as I came halfway out. Vera’s fingertips sank into the tight curls of her triangle and pulled the lips wide.
The customs guards would roll the last bit of almond powder between their tongues and soft palates, then wash out their mouths in comraderie with a shared bottle of local wine. Each bag would then be bound and its documentation slip stamped with the customs stamps of the Republics of France and Federal Germany next to the customs stamps of Portugal and Spain. The bindings of each bag would be sealed by wire and lead impressed with the S-S mark of the Saarguemines-Saarbrucken station and the code numbers of both the French and German inspectors. The bags would then be dragged out of the inspection shed, over the station platform, and into the car. During the night, the car loaded with almond powder would be switched with all other inspected cars onto the track heading over the bridge to Germany.
Our hotel room was quiet, locked into a moment of time. Vera’s mouth remained pressed to my cheek. The climax was spent, but I stayed inside her, still hard, still feeling as much a part of a woman as a man ever can.
A metallic cry broke the distant night.
“What was that?” Vera asked.
“It’s the switching yard. They’re assembling the train for the early morning run.”
“Where to?”
I could feel her pulse quicken.
“From here it goes to Hell,” I said.
The next day was bright, with a sky as blue as a Teuton’s eyes. No Corsicans from Action delayed us on the French side of the river, and on the German side we were welcomed like any other tourists. Our Mercedes purred up a clean German highway to Cologne. Cologne is an industrial center, and Vera thought she had the answer to the system.
“There are 50,000 Turkish workers in this area. You have them bring in the opium here and in Munich. You probably process the opium to heroin here. The almond powder was nothing but a ruse to keep the Corsicans watching you instead of the shipment. I still don’t see how that helps you get the shipment to New York, but Cologne is the key.” I didn’t bother to reply.
We drove through Cologne and on north. Vera’s theory fell further and further behind us.
“I don’t get it. Why are we still traveling?”
“Look,” I pointed out the window.
Over rolling farming land, set so far away it looked like a toy, was an old steam locomotive pulling a train.
“The train? We’re still following that? But we’re going to Bonn, there’s nothing there.”
Vera was almost right. Bonn is the capital of West Germany. Other than that, Bonn could be a forgotten country town. It is sleepy and bucolic, too dull even for German legislators who prefer to commute from homes in more cosmopolitan Cologne. Bureaucrats, who can’t afford such style, live well outside Bonn in tidily planned suburbs. The foreign diplomatic corps finds what excuses it can to travel to Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt or Hamburg, in short, anywhere but Bonn.
Nothing ever happens in Bonn, especially nothing like crime. Berlin has the spy business, and Munich has sex.
“Bonn,” I told Vera.
We got a motel room near the center of the capital. Vera fretted, looking out the motel window at a “Keep Off The Grass” sign. People in Bonn do keep off the grass.
“Take it easy,” I reassured her. “You look like you’re related to the Krupps. I look like a foreign diplomat. We’re not so out of place. Haven’t you ever been in Germany before?”
“Berlin, the Alps.”
“Ah, wherever the international set congregates. A skier?”
“I’d heard Bonn was dead, but I never knew it was this dead,” she avoided my question, turning her back to me.
“You’re wrong. This is just where it gets exciting.”
Vera had more than Bonn to be nervous about. Mafia influence is centered in the Americas and Mediterranean Europe. The influence fades the further from those centers you go. Munich, in the south of Germany, is the last outpost of any Mafia power. Cologne, near the middle of Germany, is the last contact point with Munich influence. Bonn, north of Cologne, is out of reach. We were now in No Man’s Land. Vera’s last options were dead; she was on my side now whether she wanted to be or not.