The Scorpio Illusion: A Novel

  “Where?”

  “How do I know? Let’s go!”

  “Wait a minute!” whispered Poole. “I know this glass, this window. It’s a dual pane with a vacuum in between, and once the vacuum is filled with air, you can break it with a heavy elbow.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Our guns have silencers, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when a slot machine pays off, bells ring, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “We wait till we see he hits a big one, then poke two holes on either side and break the damn thing in.”

  “Lieutenant, you may be a genius after all.”

  “I’ve been tryin’ to tell you that but you won’t listen. You hit the low right corner, I hit the low left. We give the glass a couple of seconds to fog up, then smash it in. Actually, with a cushion of air it should make less noise than a regular window.”

  “Whatever you say, General.”

  Both men stripped open their Velcroed holsters and whipped out their weapons.

  “He’s hit one, Tye!” cried Poole as the old man inside began waving his arms in front of the blinding lights of the blinking, glittering slot machine.

  Both fired their weapons and pushed up the exterior shutters as the mistlike vapor filled the glass, then crashed through the window while the slot machine was still blinking and spewing out coins, its bells clamoring, echoing off the marble walls. Amid the shattered glass they crouched on the floor as the stunned guard spun around and reached into his belt.

  “Don’t even try it!” Hawthorne said in a strident whisper as the deafening slot machine grew silent. “If either one of you raises your voice, it’ll be the last sound you make. Trust me, I really don’t like you.”

  “Impossible!” screamed the old man in the wheelchair, in shock at the sight of the two invaders in their black wet suits.

  “Oh, it’s real possible,” said Poole, getting to his feet first and leveling his gun at the invalid. “I speak a little Italian, courtesy of a guy I thought was my friend, but if you and he had Charlie killed, you’re not gonna need that wheelchair a second more.”

  “We want him alive, not dead,” broke in Tyrell. “Cool it, Lieutenant, that’s an order.”

  “It’s a tough one to obey, Commander.”

  “Cover me,” said Hawthorne. He approached the blond guard, yanked up his guayabera, and slipped the revolver out of his belt. “Get by the side of the archway, Jackson, and hug the wall,” Tyrell continued, his concentration on the now furious, agitated guard. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,” he snapped at the man, “reevaluate. I said I wanted Methuselah here alive. You I couldn’t possibly care less about. Move between those two slot machines, now. And don’t figure you can risk jumping me. Thugs don’t interest me; they’re expendable. Move!”

  The huge guard squeezed between the lowered machines, sweat rolling down his forehead, his eyes on fire. “You don’t get outta here,” he mumbled in broken English.

  “You don’t think so?” Hawthorne walked rapidly to the side of the adjacent slot machine, switching his weapon to his left hand and removing the radio from his pouch. He snapped on the transmitter, brought the instrument to his lips, and spoke quietly. “Can you hear me, Major?”

  “Every syllable, Commander.” The female voice that issued out of the miniaturized speaker astonished the guard, and for an instant infuriated the helpless old man in the wheelchair, whose whole body suddenly trembled with anger and fear. Then, as quickly as his fury had been summoned, it disappeared. Instead, he stared at Hawthorne and grinned; it was the most malevolent smile Tye had ever seen, for a moment transfixing him. “What’s your status?” asked Neilsen over the radio.

  “A home run, Cathy,” replied Hawthorne, taking his eyes off the disturbing face of evil incarnate below. “We’re inside the first cousin to Hadrian’s villa. We’ve got two of the residents and we’re waiting for a third. Who else is here, if anyone, we don’t know.”

  “Should I radio the Brit P.T. with your findings?” Hearing the words, the old man bolted forward in the wheelchair, his hand clutching an instrument in the padded arm, his fury returning. He was stopped by Poole’s foot, his hand fell away, grabbing a spoke.

  “It’s beyond your military-direct, isn’t it?”

  “True.”

  “Then wait until Jackson has studied whatever equipment is here. I wouldn’t want specifics picked up from the ether. But if by some chance we go out of contact, then make that call quickly.”

  “Keep your radio on.”

  “I intend to. It’ll be muffled in the pouch, but you’ll hear enough.” Footsteps! From an outer area, heels against hard marble. “I’m off, Major,” whispered Tye. Hawthorne replaced the radio, switched his weapon, and pointed it at the head of the blond giant three feet away above the next slot machine.

  “Arresto!” shrieked the old Italian, suddenly propelling his chair forward toward the archway. As he did so, the blond guard crashed his immense bulk into the slot machine on his left, hurling it into Tyrell’s body with such force that it sent Hawthorne to the marble floor, machine and man instantly on top of him, his right arm pinned, his weapon useless. Simultaneously, there was the smashing of china plates beyond the arch. As the blond giant’s fingers dug into the flesh of Tyrell’s throat, choking off all air, a silenced gunshot pierced the space above Hawthorne, blowing apart half the guard’s head. He fell away as Tye wrenched his arm from under the massive, blinking, silent slot machine, and sprang to his feet only to observe Andrew Jackson Poole V subdue the third man with a series of punishing blows, delivered by flying feet and flat hands until the second guard staggered out of control. The lieutenant grabbed him and threw the man’s dead weight across the frail back of the invalid, stopping the patriarch in mid-flight.

  “Hawthorne?… Jackson?” Catherine Neilsen’s voice shot out from the pouch-encased radio. “What happened? I heard a lot of noise!”

  “Hold on,” said Tyrell, breathless, walking to the nonproductive one-armed bandit, leaning down and pulling the plug out of the wall. The maniacal blinking stopped; it was both calming and ominous. The old man struggled under the weight of his guard’s unconscious body until Poole removed it, letting it crash to the floor, the skull thumping onto the marble. “We’re back in control,” Hawthorne continued into the radio. “And I’ll insist on nothing less than the rank of general for an under-thirty lieutenant named Andrew Jackson Poole. Christ, he saved my life!”

  “He does small favors. What now?”

  “We’ll check out the premises and then the equipment. Stay on.”

  Tye and Jackson gagged and tightly strapped the guard and the old Italian, hands and feet, into the chairs, lashed them to the upturned slot machine with clothesline they found in a kitchen cabinet, and proceeded to search the house, then the estate itself. They crawled around the grounds southeast of the fenced kennels, which were barely forty yards from the main house, until they spotted a small all-green cabin, large palms surrounding it, with a dim pulsating light from a very small window. They crept up to the sheltered glass; inside was a figure on a reclining chair, large flowering plants all around him, staring at a television screen and punching the air with his fists at a sequence of cartoons.

  “That boy isn’t playin’ with a full deck,” whispered Poole.

  “No, he’s not,” Hawthorne said, “but he’s still another body capable of being ordered to do something we wouldn’t like.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “The door’s on the other side. We’ll break in, tie him up, and you do one of your things that puts him out for a couple of hours so he can’t interfere.”

  “A simple spinal chop,” the lieutenant said.

  “Right.… Be quiet! He hears something; he’s going for a red box on a table across the room. Let’s go!”

  The two black-suited figures raced around the camouflaged cabin, broke through the door, and confronte
d a bewildered man who did nothing but smile at them as he turned off the screeching machine on the table. “That’s my signal to release the dogs,” he said hesitantly. “It’s always the signal,” he added, reaching for a lever against the wall. “I must do it immediately.”

  “No!” shouted Hawthorne. “The signal was wrong!”

  “Oh, it’s never wrong,” said the gardener dreamily. “Never, never wrong.” He pulled the lever. Within seconds the vicious howling, screaming sounds of attack dogs were heard racing past the cabin to the main house. “There they go,” said the half-witted man, smiling. “They’re my good boys.”

  “How did you get that signal?” demanded Tyrell. “How?”

  “It’s on the padrone’s chair. We practice a lot, but, you see, the padrone will now and then set it off when he has wine and his hand touches the button. I heard it a few minutes ago, but it stopped very quickly, so I believed the great padrone made a mistake and his guard corrected it. But not now, not a second time. He means it, and I must go and be with my friends. It’s very important.”

  “One of his oars is out of the water,” said Poole.

  “Maybe both, Lieutenant, but we have to get back there.… Flares.”

  “What?”

  “Next to scent, dogs will go after light—explosions of light. Take out a couple of flares, stick one of them under your wet suit, and rub it back and forth through your armpit. Rub it thoroughly, and trust that your not having a bath in two or three days will do it!”

  “This is most embarrassin’,” said Poole, following orders.

  “Do it!”

  “I’m doing it!”

  “Light the other one and throw it out the door to the left as far as you can. Then the second unlit one.”

  “Here they go.” Within seconds the dogs raced by the cabin after the arcing flare in search of the sudden light. The barking was maniacal as the dogs huddled around the sizzling tube, picking up the human scent from the unlit one and snapping at one another in frustration.

  “Listen to me, sir,” said Hawthorne, turning to the mentally enfeebled guardian of the dogs. “This is all a game—the padrone likes games, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, he does! Sometimes he plays all night in his parlor.”

  “Well, this is just another game, and we’re all having fun. You can go back to your television.”

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.” The man sat down, laughing at the cartoons on the screen.

  “Thanks, Tye. I don’t relish choppin’ old guys like that—”

  With an impatient shake of his head Tyrell signaled the lieutenant to follow him as he raced back to the mansion, shutting the doors and confronting the withered old man in the wheelchair beside his unconscious guard. “All right, you bastard!” shouted Tyrell. “I want to know what you know.”

  “I know nothing,” rasped the elderly Italian. The malevolent grin returned. “You kill me, you have nothing.”

  “That could be a wrong assessment, padrone—it is padrone, isn’t it? That’s what the poor half-wit in the cabin called you. What did you do, have a lobotomy done on him?”

  “God made him the perfect servant, not I.”

  “I have an idea that in your vocabulary, you and God are pretty closely related.”

  “Blasphemy, Commander—”

  “Commander?”

  “It’s what your colleague and the woman over the radio called you, is it not?”

  Hawthorne stared at the satanic cripple; why did he think he should know him? “Lieutenant, check out the room with all that electronic equipment you know so much about. It’s over there by—”

  “I know exactly where it is,” interrupted Poole. “I can’t wait to program a few memory banks. That stuff is top of the charts!” The air force officer moved rapidly toward the padrone’s study.

  “Perhaps I should tell you,” said Hawthorne, standing in front of the old man. “My colleague is our government’s secret weapon. There isn’t a computer made he can’t break into. He’s the one who found you, found this place. From a beam in the Mediterranean bounced off a Japanese satellite.”

  “He’ll find nothing—nothing!”

  “Then why do I detect a pinch of doubt in your voice?… Oh, I think I know. You’re not sure, and that scares the hell out of you.”

  “This is a meaningless conversation.”

  “Not really,” said Tyrell, taking out his gun from the Velcroed holster. “I just want you to know where you stand. What I’m going to say now is very meaningful. How do we get the dogs back into the kennels?”

  “I have no idea—” Hawthorne squeezed the trigger of his weapon, the spit electric, the bullet grazing the padrone’s right earlobe, the blood coursing down his neck. “You kill me, you have nothing!” shouted the old man.

  “But if I don’t kill you, I still have nothing, isn’t that right?” Tyrell fired again, this time creasing the padrone’s left cheek. The blood splashed over his face and across his throat. “You’ve got one more chance,” Hawthorne said. “I had a lot of practice in Europe.… Dogs that can be released on command from a kennel can be returned to a kennel by a second command. Do it, or my next bullet goes right into your left eye. Il sinistro, isn’t that the term?”

  Without speaking, the invalid awkwardly, strenuously, moved his strapped right arm, manipulating his trembling fingers over the side of the wheelchair, where there was a panel of five buttons in a semicircle. He pressed the fifth. Instantly, there was an animal chorus of wild howls and harsh barking, the sounds receding until there was silence. “They’re back in the kennels,” said the padrone, his eyes hard, contempt in his voice. “The gate closes automatically.”

  “What are the other buttons for?”

  “They’re of no concern to you now. The first three are for my personal maid and my two attendants; the maid is no longer with us, and you killed my head attendant. The last two are for the dogs.”

  “You’re lying. One of those signals reached that quasi-vegetable in the cabin. He released the dogs.”

  “He receives the signal wherever he is, and if there are guests or new personnel on the island, he must be with the dogs, for he can control them. Frequently, men with lesser intellect speak to the animals far better than we of higher intelligence. I believe it’s a matter of more mutual trust.”

  “We’re not guests here, so who’s new?”

  “My two attendants, including the one you murdered. They’ve been here less than a week, and the dogs are not yet accustomed to them.”

  Hawthorne leaned over and unstrapped the old man’s arms, then crossed to a low marble table where there was a gold receptacle for facial tissues. He picked it up and carried it back to the padrone. “Dry your cuts.”

  “Does the sight of the blood you drew disturb you?”

  “Not one bit. When I think what you’re into—when I think of Miami and Saba and St. Martin and that psychopathic bitch—the sight of your corpse would be a distinct pleasure.”

  “You do not know that I am involved in anything but prolonging the life of this wretched body,” said the old Italian as he blotted his right ear, then held a wad of tissue against his left cheek. “I am an invalid living out my final years in the isolated luxury I so richly deserve. I have done nothing remotely illegal, I have merely entertained a few cherished friends who reach me by satellite telephone or fly in to visit me.”

  “Let’s start with your name.”

  “I have no name, I am only the padrone.”

  “Yes, I heard that in the cabin—and once before on Saba, where two mafiosi bribed the crews on the waterfront and tried to kill me.”

  “Mafiosi? What do I know of such things as the Mafia?”

  “One of those two hit men, the one who survived, had a lot to say when he was faced with the prospect of swimming among sharks with a bleeding shoulder. I have an idea that when we circulate your fingerprints, including a set to Interpol, we’ll learn who you are, and I doubt that
it’ll be a sweet old grandfather who likes to play slot machines.”

  “Really?” The padrone put down the tissues, smiling his ugly, arrogant smile at Hawthorne as he turned over both hands, exposing the palms. Tyrell was both repelled and stunned. The ends of each finger were pure white; the flesh had long ago been burnt off, replaced by a smooth, flat substitute, the fused shavings of human or animal skin perhaps. “My hands were scorched by a burning German tank in the Second World War. I’ve always been grateful to the American army doctors who took pity on a young partisan who fought with their troops.”

  “Oh, that’s beautiful,” said Tye. “I suppose you were also decorated.”

  “Unfortunately, none of us could permit that. The more fanatical of the fascisti were known to take reprisals. All our records were destroyed to protect us and our families. You should have done the same in Vietnam.”

  “Really beautiful.”

  “So you see … nothing.”

  Neither Hawthorne nor the old man was aware of Poole’s lean, black-suited figure standing in the archway. He had approached quietly and was watching, listening. “You’re almost right,” said the lieutenant. “There was almost nothin’, but not all the way to zero. Your system’s terrific, I’ll say that, but any system’s only as good as the person using it.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Tyrell.

  “This equipment can do everything but make moonshine, and it’s been used by someone who knows how to erase the memories on the first and second recalls and did just that. There’s zilch on every disk except for three printouts near the end of the last one. Whoever used it then must have been someone else, because the delete-memory wasn’t touched.”

  “Would you mind speaking English, not computerese?”

  “I pulled up three telephone numbers, area codes and all, then checked the destinations. One was to Switzerland, and I’ll bet my hush puppies it’s to a bank; the second was to Paris; and the third to Palm Beach, Florida.”

  11

  The white limousine drew up to the canopied entrance of The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach and was immediately surrounded by the gold-braided doorman, the assistant doorman, and three red-uniformed bellhops. It was a scene reminiscent of a modernized Belle Époque, masters and servants knowing their places, content with their privileges and enthusiastic in their servitudes. The first to emerge was a full-figured, middle-aged grande dame dressed in the finery of the Via Condotti, Rome’s avenue of high fashion. Her wide-brimmed hat above the flowered silk dress cast shadows across a tanned face that bespoke generations of aristocracy. The features were sharp and harmonious, the skin smooth, what lines there were more imagined than seen. Amaya Bajaratt was no longer a wild, unkempt terrorist on a raft or a boat at sea, or a uniformed fighter from the Baaka Valley, or a frumpish ex-pilot for the Israeli Air Force. She was now the Countess Cabrini, reputed to be one of the wealthiest women in Europe, with an industrialist brother in Ravello who was even richer. She threw her head back gracefully and smiled as the tall, extremely handsome young man stepped out of the limousine, resplendent in a crested navy blue blazer, gray flannels, and patent leather Imperiale loafers.