The Road to Gandolfo: A Novel

  “Did the learned cardinal give his reasons? Or, as usual, did he commune with God all by himself and simply deliver the divine edict?” Francesco tried not to overdo his perfectly natural reaction to Ignatio Quartze. The cardinal was a loathsome fellow in just about every department. He was an erudito aristocratico from a powerful Italian-Swiss family, who had the compassion of a disturbed cobra. Looked like one, too, thought Giovanni.

  “He did, Holy Father,” replied the priest. And the instant he spoke, the aide was struck by a sudden embarrassment. “He—he—–.”

  “May I suggest, Father,” said the pontiff with graceful understanding, “that our splendidly berobed cardinal offered the opinion that the pope’s favorite dishes were less than impressive?”

  “I—I——”

  “I see he did. Well, Father, it is true that I subscribe to simpler cooking than does our cardinal with the unfortunate nasal drip, but it is not due to lack of knowledge. Merely lack of, perhaps, ostentation; not that our cardinal, who is afflicted with that unfortunate eye that strays to the right as he talks, is ostentatious. I don’t believe it ever crossed his mind.”

  “No, of course not, Holy Father.”

  “But I think that during these days of high prices and widespread unemployment, it might be a fine idea for your pontiff to outline a number of inexpensive, though I assure you, quite excellent dishes. Who is this journalist? A lady, you say? Don’t ever tell anyone I said it, Father, but they are not the best cooks.”

  “No, surely not, Your Holiness. The nuns of Rome are strenuous—–”

  “Galvanizing, Father. Positively galvanizing! Who is the journalist from this gourmet periodical?”

  “Her name is Lillian von Schnabe. She is American, from the state of California, married to an older man, a German immigrant who fled Hitler. As coincidence would have it, she is currently in Berlin.”

  “I merely asked who she was, Father. Not her biography. How do you know all this?”

  “It was in the recommendation from the United States Army Information Service. The military think highly of her, apparently.”

  “More than apparently. So, her husband fled Hitler? One does not turn away from such compassionate women. Coupled with the state of food prices—a number of inexpensive papal dishes is called for. Set up an appointment, Father. You may tell our resplendent cardinal, who suffers from the unfortunate affliction of a high-decibeled wheeze, that we truly hope our decision is not an affront to him. Viva Gourmet. The Lord God has been good to me; it is a mark of recognition. I wonder why its correspondent is in Berlin? There’s a monsignor in Bonn who makes an excellent Sauerbraten.”

  “I swear, you’ve got feathers in your teeth!” said Lillian as Sam walked into the room.

  “It’s better than chickenshit.”

  “What?”

  “My business contact had a strange method of transportation.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I want to take a shower.”

  “Not with me, honey!”

  “I’ve never been so hungry in my life. They wouldn’t even stop for a—what the hell is it? A strudel. Everything was ein, zwei, drei! Mach schnell! Christ, I’m starved! They really think they won the war!”

  Lillian backed away from him. “You are the filthiest, most foul-smelling man I’ve ever seen. I’m surprised they let you in the lobby.”

  “I think we goose-stepped.” Sam noticed a large white business envelope on the bureau. “What’s that?”

  “The front desk sent it up. They said it was urgent and they weren’t sure you’d stop for messages.”

  “I can only conclude your ex, the fruitcake, has been busy.” Devereaux picked up the envelope. Inside were airline tickets and a note. He didn’t really have to read the note; the airline tickets said it all.

  Algiers.

  Then he read the note.

  “No! Goddamn it, no! That’s less than an hour from now!”

  “What is?” asked Lillian. “The plane?”

  “What plane? How the hell do you know there’s a plane?”

  “Because MacKenzie called. From Washington. You can imagine his shock when I answered—–”

  “Spare me your inventive details!” roared Devereaux as he raced to the telephone. “I’ve got several things to say to that devious son of a bitch! Even convicts get a day off! At least time for a meal and a shower!”

  “You can’t reach him now,” said Lillian quickly. “That was one of the reasons he called. He’ll be out for the rest of the day.”

  Sam turned menacingly. Then he stopped. This girl could probably cut him in two. “And I suppose he offered a suggestion as to why I should be on that plane. Once he got over the shock of hearing your lovely voice, of course.”

  Lillian looked puzzled. It crossed Devereaux’s mind that the puzzlement was not entirely genuine. “Mac mentioned something about a German named Koenig. How anxious this Koenig was for you to leave Berlin—one way or the other.”

  “The less controversial method being Air France to Paris and from Paris to Algiers?”

  “Yes, he did say that. Although not in those exact words. He’s terribly fond of you, Sam. He speaks of you as a son. The son he never had.”

  “If there’s a Jacob, I’m Esau. Otherwise, I’m fucked as Absolom.”

  “Vulgarity isn’t called for—–”

  “It’s the only thing that is called for! What the hell is in Algiers?”

  “A sheik named Azaz-Varak,” answered Lillian Hawkins von Schnabe.

  Hawkins left the Watergate in a hurry. He had no desire to talk to Sam; he had absolute faith in Lillian, in all the girls, actually. They were doing their jobs splendidly! Besides, he was to meet with an Israeli major who, with any luck, could put the final pieces of the puzzle together for him. The puzzle being Sheik Azaz-Varak. By the time Devereaux reached Algiers a telephone call would have to be made. The Hawk could not make it without that final item which would insure the last of the Shepherd Company’s capitalization.

  That Azaz-Varak was a thief on a global scale was nothing new. During the Second World War he sold oil at outrageous prices to the Allies and the Axis simultaneously, favoring only those who paid instantly in cash. This did not make him enemies, however; instead, his policies engendered respect, from Detroit to Essen.

  But the war was ancient history. That war. It was Azaz-Varak’s behavior in a far more recent conflagration that interested Hawkins: the Mideast crisis.

  Azaz-Varak was nowhere to be found.

  While oaths were hurled across the lands of the Middle East, and the world watched armies clash against armies, and crisis-laden conferences took place, and outrageous profits were made, the greediest sheik of them all claimed to have a case of shingles and went to the Virgin Islands.

  Goddamn! It didn’t make sense! So MacKenzie went back into Azaz-Varak’s raw files and studied them with the eye of a professional. He began to find the pattern in the years between 1946 and 1948. Sheik Azaz-Varak had apparently spent a considerable amount of time in Tel Aviv!

  According to the reports, his first few trips were made quite openly. It was supposed that Azaz-Varak sought Israeli women for his harem. Thereafter, however, Azaz-Varak continued to fly into Tel Aviv, but not openly; landing at night in outlying private airfields that could accommodate his most modern and expensive private planes.

  More women? Hawkins had researched exhaustively and was unable to unearth the name of a single Israeli female who ever went back to the sheikdom of Azaz-Kuwait.

  Then, what had Azaz-Varak been doing in the state of Israel? And why had he traveled there so frequently?

  MacKenzie’s breakthrough came, strangely enough, from information supplied by naval intelligence on the island of St. Thomas, where Azaz-Varak had fled during the Mideast war. There, he tried to buy up more property than anyone wished to sell. Rebuffed, he became furious.

  The islanders had enough trouble. They did not need Arabs with ha
rems and slaves. Jesus! Slaves! The very idea sent the bureau of tourism into apoplexy; visions of all that kitchen help in revolt were positively nauseating. Azaz-Varak was systematically prevented from buying two buckets of sand. When it was suspected he was trying to negotiate through second and third parties, covenants were included that would have made Palm Beach green with envy and the ACLU purple with rage. Simply put: no fucking Arabs could own, lease, sublease, visit, or trespass.

  So in his frustration, the acquisitive sheik angrily, and hastily, brought in an American holding company called the Buffalo Corporation and tried to negotiate through it. There were laws and St. Thomas was a United States possession. And it did not take much research on Hawkins’s part to uncover the fact that the Buffalo Corporation—address: Albany Street, Buffalo, New York; telephone: unlisted—was a subsidiary of an unknown company called Pan-Friendship, main office: Beirut; telephone: also unlisted.

  Subsequent overseas calls to several Israeli clearing-houses made stunningly clear what Azaz-Varak had been doing during all those visits to the Jewish homeland. He owned half the real estate in Tel Aviv, much of it in the poorer sections of town. The sheik was a Tel Aviv slumlord.

  The Buffalo Corporation collected rents from all over the city. And if the Israeli major—who was in ordnance and supply—confirmed a report the Hawk had received from some old Cambodian buddies in the CIA, the Buffalo Corporation was also in another business. One that held most unfortunate implications for the owner of said Buffalo Corporation, insofar as he was the very Arab who scared hell out of the realtors in St. Thomas.

  The report was simple; all MacKenzie needed was one military official to corroborate it. For the CIA boys learned that a major expeditor of petrochemicals and fuel for the army of Israel during the Mideast war was a little-known American company called the Buffalo Corporation.

  Sheik Azaz-Varak not only owned half the real estate in Tel Aviv, but at the height of the conflict, he fed the Israeli war machine so the maniacs in Cairo wouldn’t damage his investments.

  It was the sort of information that simply demanded a long-distance call, thought MacKenzie Hawkins. To the sheikdom of Azaz-Kuwait.

  Devereaux appreciated the sympathy from the Air France stewardess, but he would have appreciated food more. There were no supplies in the galley of the 727, a conditiion that would be corrected in Paris. Apparently—and there was no way to be sure he understood correctly—the Boche catering trucks that serviced Air France had been tied up in a Russian-induced traffic jam on the autobahn, and what had been left in the galley had been stolen by the Czechoslovakian ground crew in Prague. And besides, the food was better in Paris.

  So Sam smoked cigarettes, caught himself chewing bits of tobacco, and tried to concentrate on the doings of MacKenzie Hawkins. His seatmate was some kind of Eastern religious, perhaps a Sikh, with brown skin tinged with gray, a very small black beard, a purple turban, and darting eyes that were as close as a human’s could be to those of a rat. It made thinking about MacKenzie easier; there would be little conversation on the trip to Paris.

  Hawkins had raised his third ten million. And now there was an Arabian sheik who was the fourth and final mark. Whatever it was that MacKenzie had culled from the raw files had the effect of thermonuclear blackmail. Christ! Forty million!

  What was he going to do with it? What kind of “equipment and support personnel” (whatever the hell they were) could possibly cost so much?

  Granted one did not kidnap a pope with a dollar and a quarter in his pocket, but was it necessary to cover the Italian national debt to do it?

  One thing was certain. The Hawk’s plan for the kidnapping included the exchange of extraordinary sums of money. And whoever accepted such sums were ipso facto accessories to the most outrageous abduction in history! It was another avenue he, Sam, could explore. And a pretty good one at that. If he could obtain the names of even a few of Mac’s suppliers, he could scare them right out of the picture. Certainly the Hawk was not going to say to someone: Yes, I’ll buy that railroad train because I’m going to kidnap this pope fellow and it’ll be a big help. No, that was hardly the way of an experienced general officer who had drugged half the pouch couriers in Southeast Asia. But if he, Sam, reached that same someone and said: You know that train you’re selling to that bearded idiot? It’s going to be used to kidnap the pope. Have a good night’s sleep—well, that was something else again. The train would not be sold. And if he could prevent a train from being sold, perhaps he could prevent other supplies from reaching the Hawk. MacKenzie was army; lines of supply were paramount to any operation. Without them whole strategies were altered, even abandoned. It was military holy writ.

  Yes, reflected Devereaux, gazing out into the German twilight from the foodless Air France plane, it was a very decent avenue to explore. Coupled with his first consideration—finding out how the Hawk intended to pull off the kidnapping, and the second consideration—finding out what specific blackmailing material MacKenzie held over his investors, the suppliers were a third, powerful ingredient. In preventive medicine.

  Sam closed his eyes, conjuring up visions of long ago. He was in the basement of his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. On the huge table in the center of his room was his set of Lionel trains, going around and around, weaving in and out of the miniature shrubbery and over the tiny bridges and through the toy tunnels. But there was something strange about the sight. Except for the engine and the caboose, all the other vehicles were marked identically: “Refrigerator Car. Food.”

  At Orly Airport, the passengers to Algiers were told to remain on the plane. For Devereaux nothing mattered once he saw the white truck pull up alongside the aircraft and men in white coats transferring immaculate steel containers into the galley. He even smiled at Rat Eyes beside him, noticing as he did so that his seatmate’s purple turban had slipped somewhat over his brown forehead. Sam might have said something—he’d learned long ago that even strangers appreciated it when you told them their zippers were open—but since several other turbaned acquaintances who’d boarded at Orly had come up to pay their respects and had said nothing, Devereaux felt it wasn’t his place. Besides most of the other purple turbans seemed a touch lopsided. Perhaps it was a custom indigenous to the particular religious sect.

  Regardless, all Sam could think about were the immaculate steel trays, now securely in the Air France galley broilers, sending out deliriously inviting wafts of escalope de veau, tournedos, sauce Béarnaise, and, if he was not mistaken, steak au poivre. God was in his heaven and on Air France as well. Good Lord! Devereaux vaguely calculated the hours since he’d eaten: It was nearing thirty-six.

  Unintelligible words droned over the cabin loudspeakers; the 727 taxied out onto the field. Two minutes later they were airborne and the stewardesses went about the business of distributing the most meaningful literature Sam could think of: menus.

  His order took up more time than anyone else in the cabin. This was partially due to the fact that he salivated and had to swallow as he spoke. There followed an agonizing hour. Normally it was not agonizing to Sam, for it was taken up with cocktails. But today he could not drink. His stomach was too empty.

  At length, dinner approached. The stewardess went down the aisle spreading the miniature tablecloths, placing the napkin-enclosed silverware, and reconfirming the choice of dinner wines. Sam could not help himself; he kept craning his neck over the edge of the seat. The scents from the galley were driving him crazy. Every odor was a banquet to his nostrils; the juices ran down his throat at each recognizable smell.

  And naturally it had to happen.

  The weird looking Sikh beside him lunged from his seat and unraveled his purple turban. Out of the cloth fell a large, lethal revolver. It crashed to the deck of the aircraft; Rat Eyes lunged down, retrieved it, and screamed.

  “Aiyee! Aiyee! Aiyee! Al Fatah! Al Fatah! Aiyee!”

  It was the signal; a screeching symphony of “Aiyees” and “Fatahs” could be heard behind f
irst class, throughout the tube of the long fuselage. From somewhere in his trousers, Rat Eyes pulled out an extremely long, murderous looking scimitar.

  Sam stared numbly. In complete defeat.

  So the man wasn’t a Sikh. He was an Arab. A goddamn fucking Palestinian Arab.

  What else?

  The stewardess now faced the murderous blade; the barrel of the huge pistol was jammed between her breasts. She did her best, but the terror could not be concealed.

  “On the wires! On the wires to your captain!” screeched the Palestinian. “This aircraft will proceed to Algeria. This is the wishes of Al Fatah! To Algiers! Only Algiers! Or you will all die. Die! Die!”

  “Mais, oui, monsieur,” screamed the stewardess. “The aircraft is proceeding to Algiers! That is our destination, monsieur!”

  The Arab was crestfallen. His wild, piercing eyes became temporary pools of dull mud, the frustration conveyed by the tiny dots of questioning chaos in the center of the mud.

  Then the eyes sprang back once more to the vivid, cruel, violent exuberance.

  He slashed the air with the huge scimitar and waved the pistol maniacally.

  His demonic, defiant screams were worthy of shattering the high-altitude glass, but fortunately did not.

  “Aiyee! Aiyee! Arafat! Hear the word of Arafat! Jewish dogs and Christian pigs! There will be no food or water until we land! That is the word of Arafat!”

  Deep within the recesses of Sam’s subconscious a small voice whispered: You’re fucked, babe.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The stage manager winced; two violins and three horns went sour during the crescendo of “Musetta’s Waltz.” The act’s finale was ruined. Again.

  He made a note for the conductor who he could see was smiling blissfully, unaware of the grating dissonance. It was understandable: the man’s hearing wasn’t so good anymore.

  As the stage manager looked out, he saw that the spotlight operator had dozed off again; or had gone to the toilet. Again. The shaft of light was angled down, immobile, into the pit—on a confused flautist—instead of on Mimi.