The only things we’d learned twelve hours later was that the soldier was medium-sized, slightly plump, had a thick moustache, and curly black hair. Separate confrontations of Hitler with the three paratroopers had produced nothing except dirty looks in my direction. The paras were led back to their cells.
“What bothers me,” said Tama to Tamara and Charles Wentworth Payton that evening, “is that this soldier evidently took no steps at all to disguise himself. I’m afraid that it probably means he was simply another cut-out like this wretched Hitler, hired by the actual kidnappers on the basis of some story or other.”
Payton scowled. It was Tuesday evening, almost twenty-four hours after I’d watched a motorcycle drive up to a parked car in a hotel parking lot, and we were sitting in his library in Punaauia. Tama had come personally to deliver the bad news.
“In brief,” said Payton harshly, “you’re no closer now to finding my wife than you were two days ago. And her life has almost certainly been endangered. I see now why people with any intelligence don’t go near the police when there’s a kidnapping.”
Tama flushed angrily. “We still have Hitler, we have these three paratroopers, and we have the military authorities helping us in our hunt for the soldier in the bar. With their ties to the military, it’s no great surprise that the gangsters and their accomplices turned to the army when they needed a cut-out. Now it’s just a matter of hours before we find him. Once we have this missing link the chain will be complete. And at that point one of them, probably Luria, will crack, and we will retrieve Mrs. Payton.” He pulled his enormous bulk upright with the gracefulness that always surprised me, nodded curtly, and marched out. Payton made no move to call him back.
“Get your bags from the hotel and move in here,” he said without looking at me. “You’re running this show from now on.”
“If it isn’t already too late,” said Tamara dismally.
I studied Payton with exasperation while a dozen questions ran through my mind.
Did he or didn’t he believe that his wife had been actually kidnapped?
.…that her life was in danger?
.…that somewhere she was directing this extortion hoax and laughing at him and the police?
.…that the police were a liability?
.…that Alain LaRoche was an asset?
Payton stared back blandly. However ambivalent his own role, there was nothing to indicate he knew anything more than I did.
Which was nothing.
I stood up and left to get my stuff.
* * * *
The parking lot of the hotel was half-filled with cars, and I could hear music from the direction of the beachfront restaurant. It reminded me that I hadn’t had dinner. I looked at my watch. 9:27. Time to pack my one suitcase and still get to the dining room before it closed.
The pathway to my bungalow led past the building that housed the lobby and I stopped in to tell the clerk to prepare my bill. Instead, I found Bob and Susan West behind the counter, their blond heads huddled together, stacks of paper and accounting ledgers scattered around them. Susan was running an adding machine, while Bob stared pensively at his hand-held calculator. He looked up and smiled wearily.
“Know anything about accounting?”
I shook my head.
“Nuts. The accountant we pay money to has made some terrible mistake here somewhere and we’re trying to track it down.”
Susan twisted her mouth in disgust and slammed a ledger shut. “Screw it!” she hissed. “What’s the news about…? Nothing good, I suppose?”
I slumped wearily in a chair and told them about the Hitler fiasco. “The cops and the military police are shaking up the army and navy camps looking for this soldier in the bar, trying to establish some connection with your gangster pals.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I’m not so sure, though. Old army uniforms must be a dime a dozen around here.”
Susan sat up a little straighter. “You mean.…”
“…he might not be a soldier at all,” I said. “Tell me. In your…circle, I guess, is there anyone who’s not too big, a little plump, dark curly hair, a black moustache? It’s not much of a description, but.…” I spread my hands helplessly.
Bob tugged at the end of his nose. Susan stared down at the keyboard of her adding machine. “Not that I can think of,” said Bob slowly. “He sounds like an Italian barber, but it’s so vague it could cover half the Frenchmen in southern France or North Africa. And there are a lot of them here.”
I nodded and told them I was checking out. “I’ll walk on down with you,” said Bob. “I’ve got to check a leaky faucet in the bungalow next to yours.”
“The pleasures of owning a hotel,” I said with a tired leer in Susan’s direction. She smiled back without any great conviction.
There were only a few dim lights every five yards or so along the cement walkways that twisted in and out of the vegetation that choked the hotel gardens, and I’d occasionally wondered how everybody got himself back to the right bungalow on moonless nights. But maybe in romantic Tahiti they sometimes preferred finding the wrong bungalow. Bob and I made our way through the darkness shoulder to shoulder until we reached the path that led to my bungalow.
“I’ll meet you in the restaurant and we’ll have a farewell drink,” said Bob with a hearty clap to the shoulder that over-balanced me when my shoe caught the edge of the cement joint where the pathways came together.
It also saved my life.
Flailing my arms wildly I began to topple like a California redwood into the bushes behind me. I’d got a curse as far as my lips when I felt the rush of the first bullet whining past my nose. An instant later I heard the shot, and then another, and yet another.
By the fourth shot I was on my back deep in the middle of scratchy bushes and trying desperately to fight my way out to the other side. A moment later I was out of the shrubbery and on my feet and around the side of the bungalow. I peered back cautiously. The firing seemed to have stopped. The only thing I could see in the general darkness was Bob West in a circle of muted lighting. He was on his hands and knees in the grass on the other side of the path, his head swinging back and forth as if it were a pendulum.
Feeling horribly exposed, I ran across to the circle of dim yellow light and half-lifted, half-dragged him to his feet and back into the darkness. At least I couldn’t see any blood on him.
If he’d been in a state of shock, he suddenly came out of it, shaking himself all over like a wet dog and staring at me wild-eyed. “Those were bullets!” he muttered unbelievingly. “Those were bullets!”
“I know,” I said softly, although something about seeing him like this made me feel a little superior. I poked my knuckles into his shoulder. “You saved my life, pal, when you knocked me over. Thanks.”
“They…they were shooting at…you?”
“Why would anyone shoot at you?” I said over my shoulder as I began to trot cautiously across a clearing in the garden. I’d seen flashes of light in that direction at the time of the fusillade and dimly heard what might have been the noises of somebody plowing his way through the bushes and plants. I hadn’t gotten very far when a beam of light shot out of the bushes to my right, found my feet, and worked its way up. I was pinned like a butterfly.
“Jesus,” I whispered to myself. “Gunned down in Tahiti.…”
I gulped deeply and was about to make a last desperate attempt to outjump a bullet when I heard a feminine voice say in tones of astonishment, “Rocky? Is that you?”
Nothing ever sounded sweeter. I let out whatever air was left in my lungs and told the man down in the engine room to turn my heart back on.
“Susan? Susan?”
She ran up to me, the flashlight in one hand, and grabbed my shoulder. “Are you all right? Where’s Bob? I heard shots. Or I thought I did. My God, Rocky, where’s Bob?”
“Right behind you,” I said, just as Bob came panting up. She turned, startled, and I watched relief smooth out the tension in her face. “You heard shots,” I went on. “Did you see anything?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a ragged edge to her voice. “I heard all these shots and naturally I looked up and there was some movement outside the windows of the lobby, in those banana trees, like someone was going through them. But they’re not really lit up, you know, there’s just those little red and green spotlights at nighttime. I got the flashlight and shined it in there, but couldn’t see anything, so then I came looking for Bob. And you, of course,” she added politely.
“These banana trees,” I said. “They’re down that way, huh?” I pointed into the darkness and Susan nodded. “Once you’re through them you’d go past the back of the kitchen and come out on the beach, right?”
“Right,” said Bob weakly. He began to shake, and Susan threw her arms around him. “Jesus, we could have been killed!”
But I already knew that.
What I wanted to know now was why anyone would bother.
The three of us stared at one another in dismayed speculation.
None of us seemed to have the answer.