Death in High Places (A Renegade Western Book 7) Page 5

  Gaston grimaced and said, “Merde. Nothing could go with that parasol! But won’t she seem trés odd, sporting any kind of parasol after sunset? The night boat leaves on the nine o’clock tide, Dick.”

  Captain Gringo said, “I know. We want people to notice the funny hat and we want them to wonder why the hell she thinks she needs a sunshade under gaslight. The dame is kind of classy looking as well as an obvious gringa. We can’t make them remember her as a native, but if we tart her up enough they might remember her as a flashy hooker.”

  Gaston waited until the cantina girl had placed two steins of cerveza on the tin table between them before he opined, “I must say you look like a degenerate Texan. Did you notice the look that chica just gave us? I think she takes me for an elderly pervert picking up a blond. I have our tickets, and of course that machine-gun ammo is on its way to that hotel we stayed at, the last time we were in Panama.”

  “Good. I hope you booked us separate cabins?”

  “But of course. You said you and the girl would not travel as man and wife until we left a false trail north. And I am certainly not about to share a cabin with any man in high heels and a peroxide rinse!” He sipped his beer and added, “I may get lucky aboard the night boat, hein? One could hardly expect a lonely female traveler to respond with enthusiasm to the advances of a friendly older man who sleeps with swishy cowboys.”

  Captain Gringo chuckled, but said, “I want you to behave yourself until we get to San Salvador. It won’t kill you to sleep alone a few nights. But it could get us all killed if anyone gets interested enough in you to give an accurate description.”

  Gaston sighed and said, “You make such fatiguing plans. I suppose I could try celibacy, if only as a novelty, but is this just? It’s all very well for you to insist on my self-abuse, but

  “For God’s sake, can’t you last a couple of nights without jerking off?”

  “Certainly. That is why I shall feel abused. Meanwhile, you have the English girl to play with, hein?”

  “Don’t be stupid. In the first place, I just told you we’ll have separate cabins. In the second … Does that dame strike you kind of odd, Gaston?”

  The Frenchman shrugged and replied, “I have seldom bothered with one so tall. I have only had a few Englishwomen in any case. I find them trés confusing as lovers. Every English girl I have ever made the pass at has turned out to be either frigid or a total slut.”

  He took another sip of suds and added, “I would categorize Miss Smathers as the cooler of the two varieties, alas for you. As I said, she is too tall for me.”

  “Damn it, I’m not worried about whether she puts out or not. There’s something else about her. I’ve got a hunch Greystoke is trying to convince us we’re playing tic-tac-toe when the game is really poker. There’s more to that broad than meets the eye.”

  Gaston laughed. “I beg to refute that, mon vieux. If you ask me, there is less to Liza than meets the eye. Aside from being cadaverously thin, she is flat chested, and I would never call her a broad, even in jest. Merde alors, I am certain I have a broader derrière, and I have never been considered overweight.”

  Captain Gringo nodded and said, “Yeah, we’re going to have a mess on our hands if her lungs can’t take the thin air where we’re going. But I’m not talking about her health or libido. Like I said, I can take her or leave her as a woman. It’s her story that rubs me the wrong way.”

  “You don’t think Greystoke is capable of blackmailing a young lady into acting as a British agent? How curious. He’s never hesitated to blackmail anyone else I know of.”

  The big Yank nodded. “Sure, British Intelligence plays rough. But up to now, they’ve always played smart! They’ve tried to sell us the idea we’re delivering a courier agent. We get Liza safely up to Bogotá and her job is done. Does that make sense to you?”

  Gaston considered before he answered. “Hmm. Greystoke knows we intend to go our own way, once we deliver her. He was trés casual about how the poor child was to get back from the high country. But that is not our problem. Try it this way: Liza is to deliver something or tell something to other agents in Bogotá. After that, her job is finished and Greystoke lets her off whatever hook he has her on. She can wait until things settle down and perhaps make it down to the coast again with some other gallant type; or, should worse come to worse, it won’t really matter to them if she makes it or not, once her whatever has been completed.”

  Captain Gringo shook his head. “Sloppy. I’ve no doubt that Greystoke would let all three of us get killed, if there was any advantage to it for Great Britain. But we know the guy’s not a mindless sadist and we know he works neat.”

  “Very well. He has a plan assuring the girl’s safety. He hasn’t told us about it because we could be captured and talk. After all, we have not told them all our plans, hein? He learned we were going the same direction as one of his own agents. We have a certain reputation for survival. So he enlisted our aid in getting her there.”

  “Yeah, but why are they sending her?”

  “One must send somebody, non?”

  “Bullshit. British Intelligence has plenty of Latin Americans, male and female, on its payroll. Shit, they’ve got Indians working for the Queen. Why send a reluctant English girl, a reasonably pretty one who doesn’t speak Spanish, for God’s sake, just to make a dumb delivery or carry an oral message? Hell, Gaston, he knows he could trust either of us if it was a simple courier job. He could have slipped us an envelope or a coded message, since we were on our way anyway. Why ask us to drag along a hundred pounds of helpless female?”

  Gaston glanced up at the afternoon sun before he sighed and said, “We shall know soon enough, I fear. Unless, of course, you really want some advice from an old pro.”

  “I’m listening, Gaston.”

  “I doubt it. But very well. I still think we should take the money and run. Wait. I know your views on business ethics, but hear me out. The mission the U.S. State Department wishes to send us on makes a little sense, but not much, when one thinks about it. British Intelligence is obviously using us as some trés complex diversion. You remember how they tried to get us to be their red herring against those German agents. Greystoke likes to send a set of pawns into the enemy while his real mission is pulled off, discreetly, by another team. Think about it, Dick. You and I are not paid up members of either British Intelligence or the U.S. Secret Service. The girl too is apparently being forced into this mission against her common sense as well as will. None of us owes anyone anything. I don’t know what trouble Liza has gotten herself into, but you and I are wanted outlaws.”

  Gaston drained his stein, slammed it down, and added with a laugh, “Sacré, I would not be surprised if they were all expecting us to vanish into thin air with their money! Setting up a false mission, bound to fail, is a standard Machiavellian move for any spy monger. What do you say? We might be doing everyone an expected favor if we simply hop the night boat and just keep going, hein?”

  Captain Gringo frowned, finished his own beer, and said, “You may be right. But if we cut out, we’ll have to take the girl along. She’d never make it on her own, and she looks desperate enough to try.”

  Chapter Seven

  The reason everybody but the greedy Colombian political clique wanted to see the stalled Panama Canal completed was that it was a bitch to get across the Central American land mass any other way.

  Ever since Balboa had staggered over a hill, chasing gold and/or Indian slaves, his discovery of the Pacific Ocean had teased and taunted the mapmakers and seamen of the world with the seemingly infinitesimal land barrier between the vast and busy seas. In truth, the distance was greater than the few fractions of an inch on the map would indicate. At its narrowest, the wasp waist chosen for the canal route was over fifty miles as the crow flies, and a lot farther as a man or mule could walk. Less than ten percent of the country between the seas was suitable for agriculture or flat enough to build on. The rest was either a green hell of lowla
nd jungle and swamp or a maze of elbow-to-elbow volcanic mountains, racing one another for the sky as they grew inch by inch, belching ash and lava down their flanks. The often heavy rains of the tropics added to the mapmakers’ confusion by carving nameless gullies, canyons, and mangrove-haunted rivers in every direction. Balboa had been lucky. Many an explorer after him had simply vanished into the chaos, trying to take a short stroll to the other side. But there were a few natural passages, discovered at great cost, and hence bought or seized as private property by the monopolistic travel interests of the era.

  They had to get to the Pacific side, whether they headed for Bogotá – or, as Gaston suggested, Australia. Colombia had a Caribbean coast, subject to its next border dispute with Venezuela, but the route from the lowland seaport of Santa Maria to the highland capital of Bogotá was blocked by the vast uncharted Magdalena swamps. You could only get to Bogotá by rail via the Pacific port of Buenaventura. From there, a narrow-gauge railway might carry you up into the Andes, weather and bandits permitting. It probably wasn’t true that the Colombian highlands were as remote as Tibet. The clannish people who lived up there just acted like it was.

  The northbound night boat from Limón was a Vanderbilt passenger-freighter with its more luxurious cabins and promenade deck perched above the malodorous cargo holds. It would take them up the San Juan to Lake Nicaragua and Granada, from where they could catch a Vanderbilt train to Chinandega-Corinto and then either hop a Pacific coastal steamer, or travel by coach and ferry north to San Salvador. Captain Gringo figured that if they hadn’t lost anyone tailing them by then, they weren’t likely to. He was keeping an open mind about Gaston’s suggestions about Australia.

  Meanwhile, although he’d changed his name and altered his appearance, it had only been a short while since he’d visited Nicaragua, as a machine gunner for the losing side in the last revolution. So although he found it stuffy in his cabin, he decided to spend most of the trip there. The steamer had the new Edison lights and he’d brought along plenty of reading material. It wasn’t the usual escapist literature. He intended to use the enforced solitude to bone up on his geography and geology. He was pretty good at railroad bridges and dams. He hadn’t demolished many mines.

  Gaston and the English girl were less restricted in their movements. Nobody ever remembered the nondescript little Frenchman and Liza, of course, hadn’t been to Nicaragua in the past. So after supper together in the ship’s salon, Gaston escorted her around the promenade deck. It was cool and pleasant on deck with the steamer underway and they’d agreed that during this leg of the voyage everyone should remember a tall flashy tart traveling with a dapper little man old enough to be her father.

  Liza seemed as uncomfortable with the roll as she was with the polka-dot dress and egret-trimmed hat they’d made her wear aboard. She carried the flouncy parasol as they strolled the deck, but she refused to open it above her in the moonlight. She had taken Gaston’s elbow, but the Frenchman was intensely sensitive to the fact that she rested her gloved hand in the crook of his elbow with about the same enthusiasm he’d have displayed petting a cobra.

  Gaston found this more unusual than painful. Gaston Verrier was one of those rare fortunate men who faced his image in the mirror as the world saw it. He was shorter than average, but well-built for his age and not short enough to feel sensitive on the subject. He was past middle age, but still virile enough to be taken seriously by those women who liked the rest of the package. He was dapper and rather courtly. His sardonic weather-beaten features were neither ugly nor outstandingly handsome. He genuinely liked women as fellow human beings, and most women, sensing this, were comfortable around Gaston whether they wanted to go to bed with him or not. He was an ideal escort for a woman of the world who wanted a little time to make up her mind. Younger girls tended to see him as a father figure, or an amusing and protective uncle. Gaston tended to be as polite a gentleman, or as much a rogue, as his feminine friends seemed to require. Hence, if this stuck-up English child found him repulsive, it was her problem, not his. He’d already observed she had a skinny ass.

  As they rounded the stern of the promenade two men were lounging against the taff rail, smoking and apparently watching the phosphorescent wake of the steamer as it traced a ghostly pale streak back into the horizon against otherwise inky water. Liza waited until they’d swung up the starboard side before she whispered, “Those men are following me.”

  Gaston had noticed the loungers, of course. He said, “I fail to see how this could be, m’selle. We have passed them at least twice. They have not moved. So how could they be following anyone?”

  “I tell you, they are up to something. They keep looking at me!”

  Gaston laughed and said, “But of course they have been looking at you. There is no cinema aboard this vessel. What else is there to look at on a nearly deserted deck at night? They would have given you the eye had you had two heads. Sacré how long have you been wearing skirts?”

  She shook her head, swaying the egret feathers alarmingly, and insisted, “They weren’t looking at me like that. I can tell they’re up to something.”

  “I shall take you to your cabin if you feel uneasy.”

  “No, that’s even worse. I’d be alone there.”

  Gaston considered another suggestion, but he didn’t think she’d go for it. “Very well, we shall find a breezy spot along the deck and simply stand and watch the moonlight.”

  “But what if they come after us?”

  “Merde alors! Forgive me, but you are behaving like a maiden aunt at a Gypsy wedding! We are aboard a passenger vessel. Ergo there are other passengers. The last anyone heard of Jack the Ripper, he was still somewhere in London. Look about you. Do you see anyone creeping along the deck with a knife between his teeth?”

  Gaston found a space between two lifeboat davits and steered her to the rail as he added, “Here. We shall stand and die together, hein? Tell me when you see the first Indians on the horizon, hein? I am going to enjoy a smoke and then if we have not been murdered for your parasol I intend to say good night. It should be cool enough for sleep in the cabins now, and the doors lock from the inside.”

  On the far side, in his own stateroom, Captain Gringo lay naked atop his bed covers, propped up on pillows against the bulkhead as he read about something called Mineral Associations. He had no idea how it would help them put that mine in the highlands out of business, but the chapter was sort of interesting. The book said that mineral ores didn’t run together higgledy-piggledy underground. You’d find cobalt, chrome, or nickel mixed with iron. But never iron and gold. You could expect lead and tin mixed with silver, and silver could mix with copper, but copper was almost never found with lead and …

  When the stateroom door popped open, Captain Gringo instinctively put the book in his naked lap and looked up with a puzzled frown. He’d been sure the door was locked. But now a lady in an open flowered kimono seemed to be standing there.

  She looked as surprised as he was as her lush lips formed a rosebud O and she blushed becomingly, all the way down. She was a voluptuous brunette with henna red hair. He knew she’d henna-rinsed her hair because the kimono was open. She suddenly seemed to realize that as she hastily wrapped the loose cloth around her and stammered, “Oh, dear, I seem to be in the wrong cabin!”

  He said, “Not necessarily. Me casa su casa, but before we go any further, how the hell did you open that door?”

  The kimono-clad stranger raised the key in her free hand and said, “I just put it in the lock and … Oh, dear, I’m in cabin thirteen and this one’s seventeen.”

  He let that go, for now. Sometimes it paid to play dumb. So he didn’t ask how she knew the number of his cabin if she’d opened the door by mistake and had her back to it, now.

  He smiled and said, “Forgive me if I don’t rise. I wasn’t expecting company.”

  She stood undecided, staring at his bleached hair as her lip curled slightly. He said, “I wish you’d come in or go out, ma�
��am. Anyone passing that open door is liable to get the wrong impression.”

  She nodded, stepped inside, and closed the cabin door, saying, “My, this is a little awkward, isn’t it?”

  “Depends on what you came for. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, but it’s only fair to warn you that I don’t pay.”

  She narrowed her eyes dangerously and said, “That was a nasty thing to say.”

  He shrugged, patted the mattress beside him, and said, “Just like to get the record straight, right off. You’re too good to be true if you’re not a business woman. But sit down and we’ll discuss your problem.”

  She smiled, albeit uncertainly, and he noticed she’d forgotten to keep her kimono closed as she moved over to gingerly sit on the very edge. He stared soberly at the dark turgid nipple of the breast presented for inspection. She was either hot or excited about something else. He knew he was supposed to grab about now, so he didn’t.

  She licked her lips and lowered her eyes as she murmured, “You must think I’m awful.”

  He shook his head and said, “No, we both know you’re very good indeed. But what’s the pitch, doll?”

  “Well, I may as well confess. I saw you in the main salon before, and when I asked the purser, he said you were traveling alone, as I was.”

  He thought back to supper, drew a picture from memory, and said, “Yeah. I didn’t recognize you without the hat and Dolly Varden dress. I’m supposed to buy this as one of those passing shipboard romances, right?”

  “Please don’t be brutal about it, darling. I know I’ve started something on impulse that I’m already having second thoughts about and … well, you could be gentler with a foolish woman, couldn’t you?”

  He sat up straighter, uncomfortably aware that he was getting an erection under the heavy book across his lap. “I’m game for almost anything and you’re beautiful even with your clothes on. But if you really want to be friends with me, you’d better start by leveling with me. What’s this all about, red?”