DeSantis fumbled for his cigarette case. He took his time lighting up, as if he were cagily stalling me.
“And how do you propose to get the hundred grand, Raki? Holding me while my boys go to the bank?”
“I’ll show you.”
It was four in the morning, but there are some banks in Beirut that never close. There are the casinos, naturally, but there are also very private money changers, men who are always available for the unannounced disposal of gold, uncut stones, or stock certificates. I picked up the phone, dialed, and spoke in Arabic, then switched to Portuguese when the changer himself came on the line. The Portuguese have been the world’s moneychangers for over five hundred years, and it took no more than a minute to explain everything I wanted.
“Now what?” DeSantis asked when I hung up.
“We enjoy each other’s company. Smoke or drink if you wish.”
“Thanks. You mean we just wait here?”
“There is a saying in Islam,” I explained to the consigliere. “It goes, ‘If Mohammed cannot go to the moneychanger, the moneychanger will come to Mohammed.’”
The moneychanger came in fifteen minutes. By then DeSantis’s bodyguards were off the floor and staring sullenly at me from the sofa. The talkative one bore a purple bruise over half his face, and the silent one kept wincing with pain. Actually, neither of them was very talkative anymore.
“I am Silvestro Boaz,” the Portuguese introduced himself. He was small and as neatly dressed and punctilious as a head waiter. He did not introduce his companion, an African with a shaved head and shoulders that nearly touched the walls. “You have all the necessary papers?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell is going on here?” DeSantis demanded.
The African put an attaché case on the coffee table, opened it, and counted out eleven packs of G-notes, ten in each pack — $110,000 American.
“You said $100,000,” the consigliere swore.
“$100,000 for me. The rest is Senhor Boaz’s commission,” I explained. I scratched my Astra where it itched. “Don’t you think you should start making out your checks?”
“As soon as you get this money you’re a dead man,” he hissed under his breath. I handed him his traveler’s checks which lay conveniently on the table.
“I don’t want you to get writer’s cramp. Just write your name and the date,” I told him.
Making out the traveler’s checks was a time-consuming transaction. Boaz had a rubber stamp for himself, a fact that seemed to gall DeSantis.
“That’s it, then,” he exploded as he handed over the last check.
“Not quite,” I answered, as I handed the moneychanger his $10,000 and took the attaché case and its contents for myself. “We might as well get the rest of the paperwork done now, too. After all, if I just walked off with your money, I could be called a thief.”
“I have the transfer papers all typed in triplicate, witnessed and stamped with the official seal,” Boaz assured DeSantis.
“Now what?” DeSantis stared past the Portuguese at me.
“Sign please, here and here and here,” Boaz unfolded the very official looking onionskin agreement.
“Sign,” I repeated and shifted the Astra in my hand.
DeSantis signed three times. Then he read the statement.
“This says I just bought 500 shares of what?”
“Of Hauffmann Ubersee Gesellschaft. A little German exporting company I happen to head,” I said. “And you haven’t bought the shares. You’ve only bought the right to sell that many shares within the next year. I congratulate you. You’ve made a sound investment.”
“Who ever heard of this company? The shares are worthless!”
“Such a hard bargainer,” I commented to Boaz. Then to DeSantis, I said, “Don’t make a fool of yourself. You have made a much better deal than you could ever understand. I am going with Senhor Boaz so you will not see me again for a week. By that time I will let you know where I am. I leave it to you whether you choose to be a sensible partner or remain foolish and angry and forfeit the contract you’ve made.”
“There’s only one contract I’m interested in,” the talkative bodyguard put in from the couch.
DeSantis put his hand up for the bodyguard to be quiet. The consigliere had had a minute to cool off and think.
“You say I can send a man to watch you operate. What if he gets word to me that he thinks your whole scheme is a bust, that it won’t work. What then?”
“Your money will be returned. But that won’t happen.” I leaned over DeSantis and dropped his bodyguards’ two unloaded guns in his lap. “If there’s one thing you should be learning by now,” I pointed to the hamper, “it’s that I deliver.”
Five
Izmir sprawls down from Mount Pagus to the sea in the sultry white heat. In Izmir your meal comes with a bottle of raki, vodka, or wine, a selection of East or West, and somehow that describes the rest of the city, too.
Beside a dusty palm tree will be a billboard for International Harvester tractors; next to a sixteenth-century mosque is a skyscraper, and on the other side of the skyscraper will be a Roman ruin. Swarthy Turkish men in cloth caps, sultry women in baggy pants and blouses, their hair festooned with braided ribbons, walk across Ataturk Square, while American pilots bargain with taxi drivers and vendors selling sweetcakes and soft drinks, or as the Turks call them, pasta and serbetler. The sweetcakes carry the promise of rich honey inside the way Izmir carries the promise of exotic encounters, heady and strong. Istanbul is Western by comparison. Beneath its polyglot, semi-modernized surface, Izmir is Asiatic.
Near the top of the mountain is an ancient fortress built by Alexander the Great during his conquest of the Persian empire. The fortress is nothing but ruins but it provides an adequate lookout. I sat on the stones and trained my binoculars on a small restaurant half a mile down the mountain. Diners ate on an open-air patio surrounded by bowers of grapevines. Through the kitchen window I could see the cook spooning out dishes of figs and tangy milk pudding. A shirt-sleeved waiter served beer to a middle-aged American couple. Two muscular men with thick, curly hair shared lunch at another table but they argued more than they ate, which meant they were ordinary Turks and not assassins. At the best table a girl sat alone, a model from her looks. Long reddish hair, beautiful oval face, incredibly long legs. French, I guessed, from her chic clothes. I forced my glasses away. I was looking for killers, not sex.
Two days previously, I’d wired DeSantis that he could send his representative to the restaurant. We would make our deal there or leave blood on the patio flagstones. By inviting the Mafia to Izmir, I was taking a chance on my identity, but I couldn’t afford meeting the Mafia on its own territory again.
There were still no signs of DeSantis’s man. I checked my watch. There were five minutes till the appointed time. And it would take me exactly five minutes to reach the peaceful-seeming restaurant.
I left the glasses on the rock for some lucky kids to find and started down the mountain. On the way through the crooked streets, children and young girls watched me from behind iron-railed stairways, but they watched with little curiosity. I was a Turk, until proved otherwise on a coroners table. I felt the snugness of the Astra in my jacket and the other added weight of the stiletto holstered on my left forearm and the four-ounce bomb taped to my ankle. The added weight didn’t bother me, not even in Izmir’s heat.
I turned off the street and climbed up to the restaurant patio. The middle-aged Americans had been replaced by some local teenagers and their transistor radio. The two big Turks had stopped arguing to begin a game of dominoes; they’d be arguing again soon enough. The restaurant owner, his belly trying to push his shirt out of his belt, his accent like Akim Tamiroff’s, welcomed me profusely and with much perspiration. Then I saw his eyes go past me.