The Big Bite Page 2

  The bellboy chewed on the English for a moment and replied, “A woman, perhaps?”

  Knox lowered his voice. “Can I bring a woman here?”

  “But certainly. What is a hotel for?” A pair of dark, liquid eyes followed Knox’s hand as it went into his pocket and withdrew a billfold. “I know many nice women who like Americans, huh?”

  Knox let it pass. “I have an address,” he mumbled, and looked embarrassed.

  “Ah, your own woman! I shall tell them at the desk.”

  Knox parted with a good-sized bill and added a smaller one. “Some good wine, perhaps?”

  When the boy had gone, he sat down to wait for his contact. The name Santos had used—Murello—was not a name at all but a World Circle term for the fact that the contact would be female and would be made clandestinely. Knox had no more idea who Murello would be than he had where he himself would be tomorrow at this time.

  The telephone rang. Knox let it peal twice and then answered. The voice was dulcet and spoke a soft, lisping Spanish—a language at which Knox was adept.

  “Would you like to take me to dinner?”

  Knox grinned. “I’d rather give you dinner here. This is a very nice hotel.”

  “With champagne?”

  “If you like. I prefer a good Moselle myself.”

  “One bottle for each of us,” the voice said. “I would like a steak, please. In one hour?”

  “In one hour,” Knox said. “Room eight-fourteen.”

  There was a click. Knox hung up, wondering what the owner of the voice would look like. Once he had been particularly taken by a voice and its owner had turned out to be possessed of two hundred muscular pounds, a downy mustache, and contempt for the entire male sex. But he still hoped.

  He ordered dinner and had a whisky and water sent up for himself. He studied the plan of the room, rejected the romantic but impractical idea of dining by the French windows that opened onto the balcony, and had the table set opposite the false fireplace. By the time the whisky and water was gone, he decided that the owner of the voice must look as interesting as it had sounded and had flowers sent up. Precisely an hour after the telephone call, there was a knock at his door.

  Knox opened the door, looked once, blinked. Before him stood a brassy-haired blonde, teetering on four-inch heels with straps wrapped around slim ankles. She wore a cheap imitation of a gold lamé evening gown into which, obviously, she had girdled herself carefully. She bulged frighteningly at the bosom and at the hips. A pair of heavily mascaraed eyes gazed unwinkingly at him and two very red lips, painted distinctly off center, twisted in an ingratiating smile.

  “ ‘Alio.”

  Knox let her in. “How do you do, señorita?”

  “Bianca corno la nieve,” she said.

  “Is that your name or information as to your purity?” Knox asked. “White as snow, hell!”

  She grinned, showing him stained teeth. “The champagne?”

  He was reminded that the identification over the phone still had to be carried to its conclusion. He said, “The name is Murello.”

  “The champagne?”

  “I ordered Moselle.”

  “Cheapskate,” she said in clear English.

  Knox watched her teeter to the divan and plop herself down. One leg went across another, exposing a lot of quite good-looking leg. He said, “Why so much disguise?”

  She was fishing in a gold-net handbag and finally came up with a cigarette. Knox lit it for her. She blew smoke at him. “What makes you think it’s a disguise?”

  Knox was staring at the hand holding the cigarette. It was bare of ornamentation—there were no rings, no bracelets, none of the junk a woman of this type would have bedecked herself with. But there was something else—the manner in which she held the cigarette. He let his eyes drop down to the edge of the skirt where a pair of knees showed.

  “Well, well. You really did yourself up brown, didn’t you? What the hell’s the idea?”

  She threw the cigarette into an ashtray and looked aggrievedly at him. “I didn’t fool you?”

  Knox sat down beside her and took her hands. “If your face wasn’t so damned messy, I’d kiss you, you—”

  She said softly, “Hello, Paul. Go ahead and kiss me. This is supposed to be an assignation, isn’t it? Give the waiter a thrill; smear some lipstick on you.”

  “You couldn’t thrill these waiters with anything but money,” he said, and got up. It hurt to be so close to her. “Damn it, Nat—how did you get here?”

  Natalie Tinsley smiled, and it was a beautiful smile to Knox. “I came in a taxi,” she said, “and I argued with the driver over the fare. And don’t look so upset. Isn’t this the way a girl who comes to a man’s hotel room should look?”

  “You idiot.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Knox sighed. “All right. I’ll have dinner sent up.”

  When the dinner was served, he directed the waiter not to return, and as soon as the door shut, he took Nat and steered her into the bedroom.

  “This,” he said, indicating a doorway, “is the bath.” He laid his newest silk dressing gown on the bed. “This is to wear. Now go scrub off that face paint and that perfume. Can you do anything about the hair?”

  Reaching up, Nat ran her fingers into the hair and pulled it loose. Her own black hair with its boyish cut tumbled into view. “Better?”

  “It’s a start,” Knox said. He retreated into the living room and stood looking down at their dinner slowly growing cold.

  CHAPTER III

  The dressing gown was much too large, but even so Natalie Tinsley was something to see inside its clinging yellow folds. Finishing the last of his steak, Knox reached for the brandy bottle.

  “Yes,” she said. She worked a last piece of asparagus into her mouth, chewed quickly, and sighed. “Lots of brandy.”

  “Not tonight,” Knox said. “I’m here for a purpose.”

  “Uhm. To find me. Well, I’m found.” She gave him a smile. “Now we can celebrate.”

  “I have a lot of questions,” Knox said. He poured the brandy.

  “I have a lot of answers,” Nat said. She wiped her mouth and sipped her drink. “I’m going to use them to bargain with.”

  Knox’s eyebrows went up, but he made no comment. Nat rose and turned off the lights. She then went to the French windows and threw them wide. The bright lights of the city swam up from below, filling the room with a gentle radiance. Together, they looked down on the wide boulevards with their marble-fronted shops over to the great wall of the old town which rose up from the bay in warrens of narrow streets and tightly packed houses to the Casbah on the top of the slope.

  Taking Knox’s arm, Nat put it about her waist. His fingers closed gently on her flesh, vibrant beneath the thin silk. The air coming through the French windows held a warmth and a perfume as though on its way here it had blown gently across the gardens!….

  • • •

  The breeze coming through the French windows had grown chill. Knox closed them and returned to where Nat lay on the floor, her back propped against a large Moorish pillow.

  “Turn on a nice soft light,” she said. “Is there any brandy left?”

  “Lots. You forgot to drink your first glass.”

  “Now I want it.”

  He brought it to her, along with cigarettes. They lay quietly, smoking and sipping brandy in a light so dim that the glowing tips of their cigarettes could be seen.

  Nat sighed. “Now,” she said, “for the answers. Who starts?”

  “You do—from the beginning.”

  “When I left you last year? All right.”

  He listened in silence. She had gone from Seattle back to Europe. With her father dead, she was at loose ends for something to do. Despite her father having broken their code by seeking to make money out of the weaknesses of persons other than the rich, she missed him deeply. He had died because of Paul Knox and she should have hated Knox—yet she could not forget him.
/>
  “After about three months of it,” Nat said, “I got fed up with myself. I heard that one of Dad’s old gang was here and I came, thinking we might get together and start another organization. Maybe do some smuggling.”

  “That would come to your mind,” Knox said.

  “Well, I was almost broke. I still am,” she said. She poured herself a little more brandy. “I found my man, all right, but it took him a while to believe I was myself.”

  “Were you in that disguise?”

  Nat snorted. “No, nor in any other. But the rumor was out that I was in Mexico building up an organization. The call was out for all of Dad’s old-timers. There were two left. One had gone and no report had come back. The other, my man here, was trying to get the money to go.”

  Knox said, “What kind of gag was it?”

  “No gag,” Nat said. “There is a woman in Mexico who calls herself Natalie Tinsley. She has a couple of hard-cases for playmates. I saw her and them,” she added.

  “Here?”

  “No. After my friend here told me about her, and told me that she, and later some others, had been doing a lot of buying of gold with various currencies, I decided to go to Mexico with him.”

  Her voice dropped, taking on the note that always hurt Knox because it seemed to him like the plaintive cry of a small child. “He was killed. They said it was an Arab fanatic and he was in the old town, down on the street of the money-changers—the street called Siaghins. But he was too old a hand to give an Arab a reason for attacking him. There was someone else behind it, Paul—and even then I felt it was someone big.”

  “Big—in what way?”

  “Let me tell it my way,” she asked. “I went to Mexico then—in my disguise, as you call it—to see this woman for myself. I had a lucky break on currency and made enough money to last me a while. I saw her, and I recognized her. Dad and I tangled with her once in Budapest. I was pretty young then, but I knew I’d never forget her. She was so beautiful to a teen-aged kid. She still is,” she added. “Beautiful, I mean. She’s tall and dark.. Quite a figure, too. She’s probably eight or ten years older than I am, but she doesn’t show it a bit.”

  “You don’t have to hide her name, you know,” Knox said. “You aren’t protecting her.”

  Nat grinned. “Sorry. Habit. It’s Nat, all right. Natasha, to be exact. I don’t know what her last name is; she’s had a dozen off and on.”

  “Russian?”

  “Partly—a sort of mixture. When we met her, she was busy in Hungary helping the Communists come in and at the same time selling them out to all the other sides that were there at the time. She had a good thing going when she crossed Dad, who was trying to get some friends of ours out of the country. To save our friends, he exposed her and she had to run. She swore she would get him, but she never did.”

  “Except now—through your name.”

  “I suppose,” Nat said. “Anyway, I went to Mexico. She has a place on an island in the Gulf off a small fishing village called La Cruz. It’s between Tampico and Vera Cruz, in a rather unpopulated section. Her two men are an English renegade called Nigel Forrest—whom I swear I’ve seen somewhere before—and an American-German called Tiber.”

  “New boys to me,” Knox confessed. “So is she. What’s the game, by the way?”

  She grinned at his dry tone. “I wish I knew,” she said, no longer smiling. “But it is something big, Paul. Dad’s man who went there just disappeared. No trace of him. The natives say he went fishing and got too close to Fog Island—a grisly hunk of rock and swamp—and was killed by evil spirits.”

  “Obviously,” Knox said, “she was making sure that all your father’s old group who might be able to identify her were eliminated. How does that make it big?”

  “Wait,” she said. “I came back here and I started checking around. I learned that after she did some gold buying, a regular run took place. The gold was bought with currencies of all kinds but mostly dollars and Cuban pesos.”

  “Oh, oh,” Knox said. He sat up and reached for the brandy bottle.

  “I had the same reaction,” she said. “And I’ve come up with this much. Now that Batista, the Cuban strong man, is threatening to retire, there’s bound to be unrest. In fact, last spring it began. Our Iron Curtain friends seem to be trying to take advantage of the situation and, when it breaks, step in and make another Guatemala out of it. In the guise of ‘doing something for the people,’ an old-line puppet government will be set up.”

  “But why the gold buying?”

  “Because,” Nat argued, “it will be strictly a homegrown revolution to all appearances. That means any obvious financing will have to come from the Cuban revolutionaries themselves. So when the time is ripe they appear—with a treasury full of gold. The fact that the money is Iron Curtain money won’t be apparent.”

  “Very neat,” Knox said. “Have you given this ta the authorities?”

  Nat looked at him as though he had turned simple. “Hardly, Paul. They’d think I was trying to grind my own axe because the woman has taken my identity.”

  It was not only reasonable, it was damned well true, he knew. “How did you make contact with me—as one of our agents?”

  “One of your agents,” Nat said sadly, “was a rather greedy young woman here. She didn’t get greedy until she fell in love with a man who had been with Interpol but had succumbed to a pay-off. The two decided to pool the knowledge they’d got while legal—and go into smuggling. She needed ready cash; I supplied it for the code. That’s all.”

  “I’m glad we’re rid of her,” Knox said. When anyone defaulted in that fashion it always meant trouble. More than one operative had “disappeared” for the good of the Agency. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Nat said. “I saw her before she sailed today. There was a message for you.” She shut her eyes and quoted: “ ‘Get to La Cruz, Mexico. Tinsley raising hell. One of our men, Orvil Curtis, has disappeared down there. Details to be picked up usual place.’

  “Apparently,” Nat said, “World Circle heard I was in Mexico recently.”

  “And sent down Orvil Curtis—whoever he may be—and he disappeared.” Knox thought of Tinsley’s old crew, one dead here and one disappeared in Mexico—and of Orvil Curtis.

  He said, “Where do we go from here?” He poured the last of the brandy into their glasses. “I can go down there openly and claim I’m on a missing person’s case for an insurance company. But what about you?”

  Nat tossed off the brandy and let the glass roll across the rug. “Let me figure that out,” she said.

  CHAPTER IV

  Knox hadn’t been in Mexico for some time, and never in this part—along the coast between Tampico and Vera Cruz. He was bouncing over a road that had obviously been built for especially trained mules. Some distance back a sign saying “La Cruz” had turned him from the narrow, roughly paved main road. By now, he thought, he should be very close to the Gulf of Mexico.

  It appeared without warning. He nosed over the top of a rise and there was the amazingly blue water spread out in magnificent panorama. At the foot of the hill lay a clustered handful of adobe huts. Knox was a little disappointed in La Cruz, but he had to admire the bay, with a tall, graceful line of palms dipping out over the water and a strip of shining sand curving up almost to the first buildings. The continuation of the hill he had just come over made one arm of the bay; a jetty to which a number of fishing smacks were tied seemed to be the other.

  Farther out, Knox could see long, narrow Horsetail Island, and south and somewhat west of it, the fantastic upthrust of black rock that looked as though it were on fire with the plume of fog mushrooming from it. Even in the bright afternoon sunlight, the little island had a foreboding air about it.

  Knox wrestled his car down a sandy track toward the town. At the base of the hill, the road branched, going to the left into La Cruz and to the right up the slope again. At the junction was a brightly painted arrow and beneath it, a sign: VIEWHO
USE. THE FISHERMAN’S HOME AWAY FROM HOME. A man in the pajama-like native costume was draped languidly over one corner of the sign. As Knox slowed the car, he straightened up and came forward.

  Knox was surprised to see him move. This was the siesta hour, and even so close to the ocean, the air was hot and heavy and the sun scorched down. Knox’s summer suit was plastered to his lean body and he had given up smoking some distance back.

  Taking off his sunglasses, he examined the man now leaning in the car window. He was young, although a fierce black mustache gave him a fairly mature appearance. He appeared slim and wiry, a man in his early twenties with good features, large dark eyes, and a thick head of black hair neatly plastered into a ducktail.

  “Hi,” he said. “There’s no place to stay in town. We got lots of room at the Viewhouse.”

  A shill, Knox thought. A barker, a come-on man for a tourist trap on the edge of nowhere. He looked toward the town and decided that the boy might be right. There was no place to stay, unless he could count the lone two-story building on which was painted faintly: CANTINA. ROOMS.

  “What is this Viewhouse?” Knox spoke Spanish with ease, but he saw no reason to advertise the fact. Besides, the boy spoke English with a strictly American accent.

  “It’s a real joint,” he said. “Brand new. Lots of class.” He was grinning, but his eyes were shrewd, obviously measuring Knox’s expensive suit, his ten thousand dollars’ worth of foreign automobile, and Knox himself. “They got everything you want.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  The boy went around the car and opened the door. Before he let himself down on the hot leather of the seat, he politely kicked dust from his rope-soled sandals. “Nice,” he said, looking admiringly at the intricate dashboard.

  The rough track took them around the brow of the hill. After a brief climb, Knox saw Viewhouse. He stopped the car to gape. Out of sight of the village, but with a sweeping view of the bay, the islands, and a good deal of the Gulf of Mexico, was a dazzling white stucco building. It clung to the hillside, so new that the dirt pushed about by the bulldozers was still raw. A few dusty palms drooped over the largest part. On second look, Knox saw that it was actually a separate building, connected to others behind and above it by roofed walkways, and so set that although it was two stories, the line of buildings above it did not have their views obscured.