“Oh?” DeSantis asked with faint interest, “who for?”
He had assumed I was a messenger, perhaps even double-crossing a supplier. The night stand had a bottle of scotch and two glasses. I poured two shots in each glass and offered one to him. He waited until I drank before he sipped.
“Myself, Mr. DeSantis, only myself.”
“Really?” He looked around the cheap room. It didn’t fit with a $20,000 calling card. “And how big a shipment are you going to carry?”
“A hundred kilos, Mr. DeSantis.”
I had to give him credit — he didn’t spill a drop of scotch. But the pupils of his eyes widened a few centimeters.
“A hundred?”
“That’s right. In the first shipment. About $20 million in end product.”
“The first shipment?” DeSantis took a heftier sip and laughed softly. “You talk awfully big, Mr. Senevres. If you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t know whether I can believe you. I made a few calls today. No one’s ever heard of you.”
“None of your regular suppliers.”
“Exactly.”
“Good,” I answered. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Hardly,” DeSantis shot back. “Before we deal with anyone we demand references.”
“My calling card is my reference.”
“Also,” DeSantis went on, “it’s impossible to bring in a hundred kilos of dope in a single delivery. It can’t be done.”
“I can do it. The second shipment may be double the first. Let me make it clear to you so there are no misunderstandings. No matter what you believe can be done, I am bringing this shipment to New York. I am giving you first bid. If you are not interested I will simply go to another family when I reach New York.”
“I am interested. What’s your first name?”
“Raki. R-a-k-i.”
“How about that? Like ‘Rocky.’ Well, Raki, I’m certainly interested.”
“But it’s too much of a good thing, you’re thinking. You look at me and say to yourself, here is a Turk with a deal that’s too good to be true. Let me define the real problem. I can buy the opium — anyone who knows the hills of Turkey can. The suppliers you called don’t know me? Fine, it would be stupid of me to announce my plans to my competition. Or,” I gestured at the room, “to live in such style as to draw attention to myself. No, the real problem is whether I actually have a system of delivery. I agree, you would be foolish to take me at my word. On the other hand, I would be insane to tell you my system in advance. But I do have one.”
DeSantis drained his glass and set it on the table.
“Everybody has a system, Raki,” he got to his feet and waved the bodyguards to the door. “Well, like I said, you interest me. If you ever get to New York, look me up.”
“I don’t think so,” I walked him to the door. “It wouldn’t be worth my while by then. Good night.”
I was alone.
My warning hadn’t been just petulance, and DeSantis knew it because as consigliere it was his fob to size up competition. The first influx of big narcotics money in the United States meant an earthquake in the American Mafia. Many powerful old families that had refused to deal in dope had collapsed. Many smaller families, buying armies of “soldiers” with their drug profits, grew great. Any family that could bring in a guaranteed hundred kilos at a time could become predominant in the whole nation. DeSantis just couldn’t take the chance of loosing a killing, even on the word of a stranger.
I made a man-sized shape under my blankets with a roll of clothes. The bodyguard who found my gun had emptied it. I carried extra bullets, and after I reloaded I wrapped the Astra with a towel. Then I turned the lights off, sat in a chair, and waited.
Two hours later, the knob of the door began turning. DeSantis had “bought” another key at the desk, as I expected. A bulky form slipped into the room. In his hand was a gun with the extra five inches of a silencer. He crossed to the bed, pointed the barrel at what was supposed to be my chest, and fired five times, five muffled coughs for five heavy caliber slugs. Satisfied, he turned for the door and walked into my fist, which wasn’t traveling as fast as a bullet but carried the padded butt of my gun.
I caught my assassin before he hit the floor and laid him neatly down. I stuck the Astra in the band of my pajamas, wound the towel into a cord, and held it between my two hands. I waited again by the door.
The door opened.
“Hurry up, Al...” the second bodyguard started to say. He said no more because my towel was looped around his neck.
I pulled tight, yanked him off his feet into the room, and swung his head full force into the wall. Just in case, I swung him into a second wall. He twitched a little on the floor, but it was just short-circuited nerves. He was out.
I emptied both their guns. The laundry hamper they’d planned to roll my body away in was in the hall. I brought it into the room and dressed, filling my jacket with their guns and keys. The boys gave me no trouble as I stuffed them into the hamper like overgrown baby twins into one bassinet. The dirty sheets made an appropriate blanket.
DeSantis had a top-floor suite. I rode up in the service elevator with a wide-eyed busboy who seemed to guess what made my jacket bulge. Before he got off on the floor below DeSantis’s he grasped my arm.
“I, too, am a guerrilla fighting for the liberation of Palestine,” he announced, and as the elevator doors closed between us, he gave me the salute of a closed fist. Which is one example of the difference between a Beirut’s hotel and the Biltmore. New York busboys never get involved.
I checked the Astra as I rose to the top floor. The Spanish gun fit better with my new identity than my Luger, and it wasn’t a bad firearm. The Astra factory imitates Colts and Walthers, and you can’t go far wrong that way. The .32 would hit what I wanted within a hundred yards, and no hotel room was that long.
Four
“It’s Al,” I whispered through DeSantis’s door.
As soon as he cracked the door, I gave the hamper a kick, slamming the door open into DeSantis’s face. The hamper shot across the room, caromed off a coffee table, and spilled laundry and killers over the floor. My hand was on the consigliere’s chest, my gun nuzzling under his chin, and I pushed him gently into an easy chair.
“All right. We’ve been through the part where you’re not interested and the part where you murder me. Now, let’s be serious, Mr. DeSantis.”
He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple throbbed close to the Astra.
“Sure, Raki.”
“Serious means you give me a deposit of $100,000 as an option on my services. That’ll make us even.”
“What did you give me?” he worked up the nerve to ask.
“You will take my calling card.” I stuffed the plasticene bag of dope into his pocket. “I am also giving yon three lives. Don’t play stupid. Just look around the room and count.”
“You won’t get away with this.”
“If I wanted to get away I would not have come up here. After I leave here, I want you to find me. In fact, I will tell you exactly where I will be so that you can send a representative, someone you trust who can watch how I make the shipment. If you send someone to ‘hit’ me, then I will kill him, and you forfeit your deposit.”
I moved the gun about a foot. His neck was red where the iron had burrowed in.
“You should have run, Raki.”
“Turks are an honorable people. Not like Corsicans, who have been taking all the profits in Turkish opium for too long. I said I was willing to make a deal with you. I still am.”