“It would be a little hard to explain,” she sidestepped the question.
“I can lose them or hurt them. Make up your mind, Vera.”
The cab made up her mind for her. It was a vintage Buick, but someone had dropped a lot of new horsepower up front. The cab shot past us on the upgrade. Two guns hung out the window pointed at my head, and over the guns I recognized some former balalaika players. Once ahead of us, the Buick’s taillights lit up.
The Buick had the power, but the Citroën had a suspension like nothing else in the world. Without braking, I swerved to the left and passed. A gun came out of the Buick’s window but held fire for fear of hitting my passenger instead of me. A few seconds later, I could hear the Buick revving up to pass me again.
“You might as well stop,” Vera shouted over the sound of the engines. “You can’t outrun them.”
The road twisted over dusty hills like a snake. One hairpin turn followed another and as long as they did, the Buick had no chance of passing the Citroën. The French car slid easily around curves that had the Buick’s shocks in convulsions. I shifted up when the Buick’s driver had to gear down, and when Vera and I crested onto a straightaway, the Citroën was at sixty going on seventy.
The Buick crested half a minute later. We had disappeared. Ahead of the Buick was five miles of flat straightaway and no car to follow. The cab screeched to a stop. The Turks got out, lifting their caps to scratch their heads. A couple pointed to a farmhouse on the right side of the road. They all drew their guns and started walking toward it. A sleek rooster ran out of a cinder-block henhouse, gave one squawk, and ran off. There was no sign of life in the farmhouse.
“We’ll just have a small lead,” Vera whispered, though she needn’t have. We were on the side of the road opposite to the farmhouse with the Citroën hidden behind a high stack of alfalfa.
“Fasten your shoulder belt.” She did as I said without more than a lifted eyebrow. “Now give me your answer. Do I kill them or lose them?”
“You’re dead serious,” she smiled as I brought the Astra out.
“They’re your men, but they’re in my way. Answer!”
Calmly, she considered both options.
“Killing would complicate matters, at this point,” she said. “However, I would be curious to see how you discourage them.”
“Then hang on.”
I held the Citroën in neutral and gunned it until the tachometer needle bobbed into red. The last Turk in line in the farmhouse driveway was already hesitating and looking around for the origin of the engine’s sound. He started to call the others. By then it was too late.
The ground was hard and dry. Poor farming land, good drag strip. I hit twenty-five in first gear, fifty in second. By the time we reached the drainage ditch on the side of the road, the Citroën was moving at seventy in fourth. The wheel gave one last tremendous buck in my hand and then we were in the air, flying at an oblique angle, the rear end fishtailing behind us, the Buick directly in front.
Citroën and Buick met side to side. Side mirrors and door handles snapped off. The safety glass beside Vera cracked into spider webs. Not that I looked.
The Citroën was still moving at sixty, fighting to swerve off the road, its hydraulic suspension out of equilibrium, the Michelin X tires stuttering from one side of the road to the other. Down to third gear, correct the drift, don’t pump, feed power, correct again, more power, straighten out, brain, eyes, hand, and feet collaborated. And it was not a smooth collaboration despite the hours spent on AXE’s driving course. It takes split-second reaction and anticipation, and discipline over instinct. But the Citroën did straighten out.
Vera brushed glass crystals from her hair, stared at me, and then tried to roll down her window. The pulley had been crushed in the mangled door so she used her shoe to batter the honeycombed glass out into the wind.
“Their car is upside down in the ditch,” she reported when she pulled her head back in.
“I know.”
Vera was deep in thought for a minute. A tiny cut reddened on her cheek, and she dabbed the blood off automatically. When she lit her cigarette her hands were as steady as mine.
The shame of it all, I was beginning to decide, was that Miss Vera Cesare and I probably would work well together. Very well.
Six
“We have no reports on a Vera Cesare. First of all, there’s very little dope on Mafia women. Second, Cesare is not a Sicilian name. There are only one or two women in the whole international Mafia and none of any consequence.”
I listened to what had to be the least informative radio transmission AXE analysis had ever sent. Around me, noses twitched. Thousands of rabbits huddled in cages, peeking out of little beady eyes. The stench was tremendous, and my own nose twitched from time to time. It had been explained to me that since Turkey was on the Russian border and was the Eastern command post of NATO and since AXE transmitters didn’t dare send too strong a signal into the Istanbul radio net, our safe house in Istanbul had to have an oversized antenna. The whole rabbit warren was the receiver, which was a damn clever idea unless you were the person sitting in it and taking down a message.
“Computers and analysis disagree with your theory that she is a daughter of an important Mafioso. Mafia family women do not engage in business ever.”
I waited impatiently for the five seconds of radio wave transmission and computer decoding time to pass.
“Bull,” I finally exploded. “Women have been important advisers to a lot of Mafia families.”
Five seconds passed.
“Not as ‘soldiers,’ though,” the answer came. “Our estimation is that she is just a professional criminal hired for the job.”
Five seconds.
“Do you have any records, hearsay or gossip, about Mafia females at all? Anything that’s outside the usual run of adultery?”
Wait. Smell the rabbits.
“One curious story came in a few months ago,” the voice crackled. After a voice has been transmitted, scrambled and unscrambled, it is metallic, more artificial than human. “Do you remember Frank Musio, also known as Lover? A captain on the West Coast. His body turned up on Big Sur. Not drowned. Poisoned. Cantharidin. He’d been seen with a young woman. Hard to believe any woman would do that sort of thing, though. Anything else?”
I broke contact.
Outside the air was relatively fresh, wonderfully so, in contrast to the rabbit house. It was an experience I knew I’d recall the next time I ordered hare in a French restaurant.
Vera was in the Lancia we’d switched to after getting rid of the Citroën. I was sure the boys in the band had taken the Citroën’s license number, and even if we’d changed the plates, it was too easy to spot a sedan with one side crushed. So, in a suburb of Istanbul, Vera and I had stolen the Lancia, and she was as cool a thief as I’d expected her to be. Now she was catching a few minutes sleep while I called in. There was no way for her to follow me through the labyrinth of a Turkish ghetto and no phone near enough for her to call from. She would be getting the car seat cozy and warm.
Cantharidin, I pondered as I weaved through hovels back to the Lancia. Cantharidin is also known as Spanish Fly; in fact, it’s taken from a species of Spanish fly. Even high school kids talk knowingly about the incredible aphrodisiacal powers of Spanish Fly, how they heard about a friend of a friend of a friend who gave his girl Spanish Fly and the police had to pull her off the gear shift. As if that were a funny story.
Cantharidin stimulates the genitals all right. The sexiness comes first, then a burning sensation in the mouth, nausea, vomiting blood, difficulty swallowing, pain in the loins, blood in the urine, diarrhea, prostration, and coma. Twenty-four grains can cause death.