Voyage of Vengeance

  They had gone on to Napoleon’s summer resort, the Villa San Martino, four miles southwest of town where there was a museum of Napoleonic artifacts and paintings. Some exile! A palace and a summer resort yet! But the man must have been a complete psychotic to want to escape from all this. He should have seen Spiteos!

  It was too far to walk, I was not about to pay a fortune for a cab, so I idled around town and drank espressos. How calm, how soothing, to sit at a sidewalk table in the sun of early May, far from the travail and turmoil of Hellers and Kraks and Hissts and Burys.

  “Hello, Inkswitch.”

  I knew I shouldn’t have hit the hashish the night before. The hallucinogenic effects were obviously recurrent. I could have sworn that was Bury’s voice.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  It WAS Bury’s voice.

  I dared look to see if the hallucination was also visual. There he was, three-piece lawyer suit, snap-brim hat, drawing up a chair.

  He looked at me. “How are things going?” he said.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. Maybe the hallucination would vanish.

  “Oh, just seeing to an arms cache for Hatchetheimer. He had some idea of blowing up the Vatican and needed supplies. I came in by hydrofoil.” He made a gesture toward the harbor.

  I put it to the test. I could hallucinate Bury easily enough but not a type of vehicle I had never seen before. I craned my neck. Yes, there was an odd kind of vessel at the landing: it looked like an aircraft fuselage on stilts without wings. It had Octopus Oil on the side of it.

  “So, how is everything?” said Bury.

  “Oh, fine, fine,” I said, wrenching myself out of it.

  “That fellow with the fuel threat all handled?” said Bury.

  “Oh, yes!” I said. “Absolutely.”

  “That’s a nice yacht you have there,” said Bury, looking out to the anchored white and gold ship. “I haven’t seen the Golden Sunset since a conference the Man and I had aboard her with the Morgans. How’s Madison?”

  “Oh, he’s fine, fine,” I said. “Never better. Wrecking people’s reputations all over the place. Splendid man.”

  “And you handled the fellow with the fuel?” said Bury. He certainly was carping on it.

  “Utterly,” I said. “Smashed, mangled and dismembered. Incapable of even lifting his little finger.”

  “I see,” said Bury. He rose. “Well, I’ve got to be pushing off. Time, tide and court calendars wait for no man.”

  He gave his snap-brim hat a tug, looked at me and then walked off to the hydrofoil. Very shortly its engines started up. It moved away from the landing and then suddenly it surged forward in a cloud of white spray, stood up on its stilts and went skimming out of the bay at a hundred miles an hour.

  The thunder of its engines died and the town went back to sleep.

  I sat there with my skull spinning, my espresso long since cold. I couldn’t figure it out. Had Bury known I was here or had it just been by accident? He could have gotten a description at the harbor office—all Italians talk too much. There weren’t too many foreigners in town, for the season was quite early.

  Marseilles! I had identified myself to that port director as a Rockecenter Family Spi. He must have blabbed that I had been there in the Golden Sunset!

  The warm sun turned chill. I just then began to realize that I had told Bury an awful lie. Far from ceasing to be a fuel threat, Heller was more a menace than ever!

  (Bleep) Heller! He was always getting me in trouble. Intentionally and with malice aforethought!

  It was not duty alone anymore that dictated the necessity of getting rid of Heller. The universe was simply too small to hold the two of us!

  I consoled myself that Bury would not find out Heller was free as a bird now to wreak his evil will upon this planet. Bury would probably think that Madison and I were taking a well-earned breather. . . .

  And then it hit me. If challenged, we could say that if Heller raised his ugly head again, we were just doing research to find new ways to stop him.

  Yes, that was it. We could say that while we realized the man with the new fuel was, to our best knowledge, incapacitated, we also realized he could resurge and if he did, we must have ammunition.

  I wished I had thought of that while Bury was sitting there. But I had been too startled. One doesn’t think well when his heart is beating five feet above his head.

  Maybe I should send Bury a radio and say, “While to the best of our knowledge and belief the new-fuel man is out of the running, our dedication to duty is such that we are diligently pursuing new ways of blackening his name and impeding his progress. . . .”

  No, Bury might misunderstand. The right thing to do was get a grip on this: (a) to actually find data to help make Heller into an outlaw, and (b) think, think, think of some way to throw a terminal explosive charge into the heart of the Heller operation. Then if the matter came up with Bury, to be able to say blandly, “Oh, there was no reason to worry you: we have it all under control.” Yes, that was the best plan.

  I felt much better. I pushed any nagging doubts to the back of my mind and returned to the ship.

  I was even more relieved when a glance at the viewers simply showed Heller boning away for his exams: he was going over Army G-2 lecture notes about “Psychological Warfare for the Intelligence Officer.” The Countess Krak was out shopping—the condo butler, Balmor, in tow—apparently trying to find a graduation present for Heller and, amongst all the items offered, which she seemed to feel were “primitive artifacts,” not having much luck. No threat there.

  Teenie and Madison came aboard in time for dinner. All the exercise had made them very hungry and they were demolishing roast turkey au Philadelphia at an appalling rate but it didn’t detract from their intense interest in their day.

  “Actually,” said Madison, “Napoleon didn’t get very far at that. You can look from Elba, where he was exiled, straight over at Corsica, where he was born. He killed several million people and yet it only got him that short distance.”

  “Well, he wasn’t a real outlaw,” said Teenie learnedly, around a mouthful of turkey. “They didn’t hang him.”

  “I can’t really understand why he’s a national hero to the French,” said Madison. “He wasn’t French. He was a Tuscan, an Italian. But there’s something to be said in his favor. He sure was a great PR. Here he was, a foreigner, attacking the French from the inside while disguised as their general, killing millions of them, and they made him their emperor for it. Now that puts him up into PR ranks pretty high. What a genius to pull one off like that. I’m sure glad we followed this up. Gave me lots of data on what people will fall for.”

  Teenie had gotten a banana split and was attacking it. “So you think this was pretty successful, do you, Maddie? All right. You gimme your outlaw list and I’ll get right to work on it with my research staff.”

  I thought I had better get busy on this myself. It would look good when I next saw Bury. “I’ll give you a hand,” I said.

  “You sure will,” said Teenie. “In fact, you’re the research staff. Who the hell else knows big words like ‘exilated’?”

  PART FIFTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 7

  The next name Teenie chose was Spartacus. The man was a Roman gladiator who had headed up a revolt of slaves and had come within an ace of putting down the whole empire. She decided that there was not enough about him in the encyclopedia and that we had better go to Rome. It said that at the end of the revolt they had crucified six thousand surviving slaves all along the Appian Way.

  She called the captain. “Bittie,” she said, “how about sailing along this Appian Way so we can look at the bodies.”

  Captain Bitts smiled. “The Appian Way was a truck route. If you want to go to Rome, we have to stop at its port, Civitavecchia, which is just down the coast from here. It’s quite a ways from the city but there’s trams and things.”

  “They don’t give Spartacus’ address,” said Teenie
. “But maybe this guy, Crassus, that licked him, is still around. Do they have city directories in Rome where . . .”

  “Teenie,” I said, “Spartacus, it says here, died in 71 BC. That’s two thousand years ago. More. And it only mentions Crassus once. You’re dealing with ancient history.”

  “Oh, (bleep),” said Teenie. “The way people move around, you can’t keep track of anybody. I tried to locate an aunt in Chicago once and (bleep) if she hadn’t moved five times. I wouldn’t have run her down at all if I hadn’t seen in the papers they’d just put her in the city jail.”

  She looked at the globe, did some tracings with her finger and then said, “All right. We’ll go to Civita-whatchacallit and take it from there.”

  “We’ll be alongside at dawn,” said Bitts. “We’re cleared into Italy and all we have to do is sail. So I’ll up anchor and away. Have a good night’s sleep. When you get a look at Rome traffic, you’ll need it!”

  Well, I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. You would have thought all that walking would have tired Teenie out. But after two pieces of hashish candy and other things, I was giggling and doing other things until past midnight.

  True to his promise, when I awoke, Captain Bitts had us tied up alongside a dock in Civitavecchia. It was early. The steward had left a port open the night before and it was the din that had awakened me. I looked out. I had a vista of the dock, a forest of cargo booms and funnels and a locomotive stopped nearby which just then gave another blast on its whistle and almost caved in my eardrums. The Italians are an industrious people and especially when it comes to making noise.

  I was about to draw back when a flash of color caught my eye. It was Teenie in some scarlet running shorts and a bikini bra. She was at a peddler’s stand looking at guidebooks. She was apparently having an argument against his efforts to sell her lottery tickets.

  Once more I was about to draw back when I saw a shadowy figure beyond Teenie. A hand reached out and seized her arm.

  The black-jowled man!

  There he was in his three-piece suit!

  He glanced toward the ship and then he yanked Teenie into the dimness behind the booth. They seemed to be having an argument. He had his face very close to Teenie’s and he was scowling as he talked.

  Then she said something.

  He looked at her. And then he did an astonishing thing! He went down on his knees and raised his hands in supplication.

  She kept shaking her head. Then she raised a finger in admonishment. He looked at the ground under his knees in dejection.

  Teenie kept on talking. Then she started to walk away.

  The black-jowled man grabbed at her wrist. She stopped. She spoke.

  He looked at the ground again and then he nodded slowly.

  She walked back to the ship. The black-jowled man got up, staring after her. He dusted off his knees.

  Teenie yelled something to the port gangway sentry who yelled something up to the deck. Then one of our own sailors appeared and Teenie yelled something at him.

  She turned and went back to the black-jowled man and they went off down the dock and out of sight.

  At breakfast, I was astonished to find Madison. I should have thought he would be off to Rome. I said so.

  “Oh, Teenie has gone there,” said Madison. “She left word that she might be absent a day or two. I don’t think she’ll find much about Spartacus in Rome anyway. He was defeated way to the south, in Lucania, when he was attempting to cross to Sicily. Besides, I’ve got to get my notes together on Napoleon. What a man. He did such a thorough job, France has never amounted to a hill of beans since. Just a little foreign runt, too. What a PR triumph!”

  We saw nothing of Teenie for two days. She came back in a small truck. It was stacked with glittering trunks and luggage. She bounded up the gangway in a silver sequin hunting outfit topped with a plumed hat.

  I was on the deck and she bounced up to me. “Look at my silver boots!” she said, lifting one sideways so I could see it better. “Ain’t they the screaming most?”

  “Teenie, what on Earth is in all those trunks and bags?”

  “Oh, them,” she said, glancing down where the crew was bringing them aboard. “They’re mostly empty. I didn’t have anything to put my stuff in. A couple are full, though. That’s what delayed me: The (bleeped) modiste didn’t have a single model the same size I was and I had to stand around getting measured and measured and fitted and fitted. And she kept putting big hems in, saying how I’d grow. Well, maybe I will. Man, do they have great food in them deluxe hotels! I thought all wops ate was spaghetti and I haven’t even seen a strand of it! The greatest chow you ever chomped. Am I in time for supper? Boy, am I starved!” She started to rush off. Then she halted. “Those black grips are yours. You didn’t have any luggage either.” She rushed off.

  She appeared at dinner in a black silk evening gown, obviously created by one of Rome’s finest couturiers, the effect spoiled somewhat by the rubber band on her ponytail.

  “What about Spartacus?” said Madison.

  “Who? Oh, yes. Spartacus,” said Teenie. “Well, it seems we have to go to Naples to find out.”

  So I told the captain to sail for Naples, but Teenie didn’t seem to have her mind on outlaws. She came into my bed salon in a negligee of absolutely transparent sea green, put a new phonograph down in the middle of the rug and sat before it.

  “This is the greatest gadget, Inky,” she said. “It runs on batteries and it plays a record upside down or vertical or any way at all with a laser beam. No chance for a roll to slide a needle out of a groove. And now I can play my records without a single scratch.”

  It had two detachable speakers she set up some way apart. “I got some yowley new singles, too. Just wait until you hear this one!”

  She turned it on full volume. The drums pounded. The guitars yelled. The bass boomed. A tenor and a chorus sang:

  I’m sneaking up on you.

  I’m going to get you, you, you.

  You’re going to get yourself in my clutches!

  Look at these claws, claws, claws!

  Yay, yay, the trap is set, set, set!

  So stick in your foot, foot, foot!

  So stick in your neck, neck, neck!

  Stick, stick, stick in, stick in, stick in

  Your naked neck in, neck in, neck in!

  So stick in all of you! You! You! Woohooo!

  Oh, I’m going to get you, you, you!

  I’m sneaking, I’m sneaking, I’m sneaking

  Up on yooooooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuu!

  WATCH OUT!

  The last part of the song almost made me jump out of my skin.

  “Ain’t it flowy?” said Teenie with dreamy eyes.

  “It’s terrible,” I said. “It doesn’t even rhyme.”

  “Oh, but the sentiment,” said Teenie. “I just love a sentimental song. Here’s a bong I fixed for you. Have a puff.”

  I took one puff.

  Suddenly the whole room went up in a spiral of bright pink. As I tingled from head to toe, I still retained wit to ask, “What was in that pipe?”

  “Hash oil,” said Teenie. “The absolute jet plane of Mary Jane. It’s the very best in Rome. Fifty (bleeping) bucks a gram! And I got a whole bottle of it!”

  The sea-green negligee slid to the floor. I had enough wit to know what would happen now. But all I could do was giggle.

  And horror of horrors, the music did sound wonderful, even the shouted, “WATCH OUT!”

  Oh, Gods, if I only had!

  PART FIFTY-SEVEN

  Chapter 8

  In Naples, another teeming forest of cargo booms with tugs and trains running about under them like wild animals, we found no trace of Spartacus. But Teenie got on the trail there of somebody called Garibaldi who had helped wrest a lot of Italy from the age-long domination of Austria and gotten shot for his pains. And this took us to a place where he had once landed: Palermo, Sicily.

  Of course, in Palermo, one had access
to a whole island full of bandits and outlaws that not even the Italian government could cope with. This was the ancestral home of the Mafia. In a hired car, Madison, Teenie and myself drove all over that very extensive island. And one could imagine, from that rugged and sometimes barren terrain, how it could breed so many hit men. It was no surprise to be told that it had been largely settled by pirates.

  We even took an excursion to the eastern end of the island where Mount Etna smokes into the sky. The name itself means “I burn” and judging by the number of eruptions and lives taken by it, it is well named.

  The thought of driving the last twenty-one miles above the town of Catania just to get to the top made me quite dizzy and it took quite a few “grouches” and “spoilsports” from Teenie to get me up there.