It was the Day of the Dead. So all day the narrow streets of San José had been crowded with noisy Costa Ricans living it up. Tin horns were still honking, strings of firecrackers were still going off, and señoritas were still screaming as mysterious strangers in skeleton masks felt them up.

The rather grotesque religious holiday was supposed to last all day and it would, even though by late afternoon the festivities were becoming a bit forced and the wiser heads in the crowd were starting to drop out. Little kids who’d been eating candy skulls and swilling soda pop all day were beginning to puke on people’s rented costumes. Bigger kids who’d been swilling stronger stuff were threatening to become fighting drunks, and, naturally, as the shadows lengthened, the resident robbers and pickpockets would be crawling out of the woodwork.

And so, in his furnished room on the second floor of La Posada Dulce, Captain Gringo was celebrating the Day of the Dead more sedately with his landlady and current paramour, a pleasingly plump brunette named Lucita. He’d have enjoyed Lucita’s ample charms more had they been able to shut the grilled window above the big brass bedstead. But when two consenting adults find themselves in bed together on a tropic afternoon they need all the ventilation they can get, even if it stinks.

The faint sultry breeze blowing across the big blond Yank’s bounding buttocks as Lucita moaned in ecstasy reeked of spent fireworks, puked sugar candy and rum, red pepper, and frying grease. None of which went with Lucita’s rather cloying violet perfume and more earthy body odors. But a man had to do what a man had to do. So maybe if he slid another pillow under her Junoesque bare rump ….

“Por favor, querido,” Lucita said, sighing as he reentered her from a more inspiring angle, “what you are doing to me feels most delicioso. But this is not what I came up here for and, en verdad, you have placed me in a most awkward position, Deek.”

He smiled down fondly at her and asked, “Don’t you like it with two pillows under you, my little propietaria?”

She sighed and spread her soft thighs wider as she dug her nails into his buttocks and replied, “You know all too well how much I like this position, you muchacho malvado! I was speaking of the position you have placed me in with the owners of this posada. As I was trying to tell you when you started tearing my clothes off just now, I do not own this place. I only manage it for most-greedy people who do not understand my warm feelings for you.”

He said, “Speaking of warm feelings, it’s just too damned hot in here for this old-fashioned stuff. Let’s try it dog style.”

Lucita didn’t argue about that. But as he rolled her over on her hands and knees she insisted, “I have to tell them something, Deek! You know if it was up to me alone, you and your little French friend could stay here forever without paying rent. But unless I can give the owners some idea when you and Gaston can pay ... Oh, that feels so glorioso, querido!”

That had been the general idea. He had to stall their landlady at least until his sidekick, Gaston, got back with news of a job or, at worst, another place they could hole up, free, until they got one. As he stood with his bare feet on the rug and his organ grinder in Lucita’s big bare rump, thrusting with more skill than enthusiasm, Captain Gringo tried to figure out where the money from that last soldier-of-fortune job had gone. He and Gaston had been living pretty discreetly since making it back to the only country in Central America where they weren’t wanted for everything but the common cold. But the one worm in the apple of Costa Rica was the simple fact that a working democracy with a free and easy popular government just didn’t offer steady employment, or any employment at all, for professional fighting men. And despite its being an inexpensive place to rest up between jobs, a knock-around gent was expected to pay something for his bed and board even when he got to lay his landlady.

Great minds appeared to be running in the same channels that afternoon. Even as Lucita arched her back to take it deeper she said, “I have to tell the owners something when I see them later this evening after the fiesta. When can I assure them they can expect at least part of the money you owe them?”

“Don’t talk dirty while you’re fucking,” he growled, pounding her harder to change the subject to more pleasant matters. It only kept her quiet until she’d climaxed and fell forward across the crumpled sheets, sobbing how much she loved him. But the trouble with women was that they could be so ungrateful, as soon as they calmed down a bit. He’d just snuggled down beside her and lit a smoke when she said, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to speak to you about those expensive cigars you keep charging at the cantina downstairs, Deek. Honestly, don’t you and that little Frenchman ever pay for anything!”

He put his free hand in her fuzzy lap to gain such advantage as he could before he sighed and said, “All right. I don’t need a brick wall to fall on me. I can take a hint. As soon as Gaston gets back we’ll be checking out.”

It worked, for a moment. Lucita put her own hand on the back of his to encourage his soothing motions as she spread her thighs wider and said, “Don’t be so sombrío. I never said I wished for to throw you out, querido. I only said I had to promise the owners something this evening. Suppose I tell them you promised to pay by this time next week? Surely the check Gaston assured me was in the mail will have arrived by then, no?”

He sighed and said, “Gaston shouldn’t have told you that, Lucita. We’re a couple of bums. But I pride myself on being an honest bum. There isn’t any check in any mail. I hope nobody who’s at all interested in us has this address.”

She began to fondle him, too, as she snuggled closer and said, “In that case I shall just have to lie for you, I fear. It is not easy for to get such a good job in San José, and they are sure to fire me in any case, once they discover I let you check in without any luggage or money!”

He snubbed out the smoke and kissed her before he said flatly, “You’re not going to get fired, Lucita. That’s a promise. So what say we drop this tedious business talk and get down to business again with that sweet little tamale you’re twitching at me?”

Lucita giggled and said he was just awful as he remounted her and hooked his elbows under her knees to put it to her deep, the way he knew she liked it. But even as she responded to him passionately, the saner corner s of her mind were still stewing about what on earth she’d ever tell the owners. He kissed her hard to shut her up. And to shut himself up, too. It was hard to keep from reassuring a worried friend at such a time. But he couldn’t tell her, until Gaston agreed, how they’d been holding out on her.

They did have a little money left. The trouble was, they didn’t have enough to pay their bills and still have enough left over to get anywhere else. But he’d meant what he said when he’d promised Lucita her job was safe. So if Gaston came back from that meeting to say the deal was off and they weren’t getting any front money after all, he’d just have to rob a bank or something, right?

~*~

Captain Gringo had meant it seriously when he told Lucita he hoped nobody at all interested in him had his current address. But even as die renegade soldier of fortune was enjoying his landlady’s ample charms, a U.S. secret-service agent named Rumford was pinpointing the posada for his superior, Agent Purvis, on a wall map at the U.S. consulate across town.

Rumford said, “The renegade’s there now. That little Frenchman he runs with left the posada a good three hours ago and our tails lost him in the fiesta crowd. I’ve got a team staked out around their hideout. We’re ready to move in anytime you say, Chief.”

Purvis looked pained and said, “Let’s not be hasty, son. We’re Secret Service, not Justice or War. So leave us not be jumping any guns until we find out just what old Richard Walker, alias Captain Gringo, is up to here in San José.”

Rumford, newer to the bananalands than his older and wearier-looking boss, frowned and said, “He can’t be up to anything here in Costa Rica, sir. He hides out here between jobs for the same reasons the intelligence community uses Costa Rica as a safe place to keep the files. Nothing too dramatic ever happens here.”

Purvis turned from the wall map, went back to his desk, sat down, and opened a tobacco humidor on the green blotter as he chuckled dryly and said, “Yeah, the Spanish Empire sure screwed up Costa Rica when they were still running things. Sit down and have a smoke.” Rumford did as he was told and waited until he’d lit both their Havanas politely before he observed, “I’d hardly say the Spanish left this particular ex-colony in a mess, sir. It’s the only real working democracy down here. Except for the lingo and hot peppers, Costa Rica reminds me of Switzerland in some ways.”

Purvis nodded and said, “You’re learning, son. Like I said, they screwed up. Spain’s colonial policy was divide and conquer. So even after Latin America got rid of Spanish rule, most of ’em were left in one hell of a mess. It’s the class and racial hatreds fostered by the old Spanish rule that make life so dramatic down here. But I guess they just weren’t paying attention when they got around to settling Costa Rica. The name itself was a Spanish sarcasm. There were no riches here at all when they found the place. No gold or silver. Not enough Indians to bother saving and enslaving. In the end they used it as a dumping ground for cheated Spanish veterans. Giving a retired soldier or sailor a homestead in unmapped and unwanted jungle sure beat giving him a pension for life back in Spain.”

Rumford looked puzzled as he said, “The Costa Ricans I’ve met so far don’t seem very militant to me, sir.”

Purvis smiled fondly and said, “Yeah, they’re pretty nice guys for the most part, arid the girls are the prettiest in Central America. You know why? Good breeding, that’s why. The people running the old and current Spanish Empire were and are a bunch of inbred jerk-offs. But the average enlisted vet with an honorable discharge tends to be a decent guy no matter who he works for. So as Spanish vets brought their white Spanish peasant wives over here to settle on their modest land grants, Costa Rica wound up decent too. Nobody wound up all that rich or all that poor. There weren’t enough Indians to produce a sullen class of mestizo peones. The original settlers didn’t have enough to import slaves. They just buckled down, got to work, and wound up with a mighty nice little country here. They say Switzerland was an accident too.”

Rumford repressed an impatient grimace as he said, “I’m sure that’s all very interesting, sir. But may I ask what it has to do with that renegade, Walker?”

Purvis shrugged and said, “For one thing, Costa Rica doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the States. Walker and that little legion deserter, Gaston Verrier, know it. So they’ve been very careful about busting any local laws.”

Rumford said, “We wouldn’t need help from the local police, sir. He’s alone at the posada right now and we have him boxed, so—”

“I hope you left orders nobody’s to move in without my approval?” Purvis cut in with a worried frown. When Rumford nodded, he relaxed a bit but still looked annoyed as he said, “I keep telling people around here, but nobody listens. This is the U.S. Secret Service, Rumford. You don’t keep secrets by holding public shootouts in the streets of a friendly power without letting their authorities in on it. You don’t keep secrets by telling said authorities of said friendly power that you’re a secret-service agent. Am I talking too fast for you, son?”

“Nosir. I understand secret service reports only to Washington. But we have to do something about that goddamn Captain Gringo!”

“Why?” Purvis asked calmly.

Rumford blinked in surprise and gasped. “Why, sir? The son of a bitch is a U.S. Army deserter wanted for murder, grand larceny, and God knows what all by now! Aside from the U.S. government, Mexico and half a dozen other greaser governments have reward posters out on him and that murderous little frog he runs around with!”

Purvis shrugged and said, “Some say Walker was framed on a bum rap. But that’s neither here nor there. Like I said, our job is to gather intelligence, not bad guys, and those two soldiers of fortune aren’t the only bad guys in this neck of the woods. I asked you to see if you could get a line on one Sir Basil Hakim, British subject, possible German agent, and all-around prick. So where is he right now?”

Rumford looked uncomfortable and said, “We know his private yacht’s moored down in Limón, sir. If he’s here in San José, he’s holed up pretty good. We naturally checked all the better hotels in town, but—”

“Jesus,” Purvis cut in with a groan, adding, “I don’t know how to tell you this, son, but master criminals seldom check into hotels of any sort. Hakim’s so fucking rich he doubtless owns one or more private houses in every town from here to Constantinople. Okay, so much for Hakim. How about that military attaché, Jager, at the German legation?”

Rumford brightened and said, “Oh, he was easy to tail, sir. Right now he’s at the Spanish embassy. Been there all day, as a matter of fact. We spotted some British agents tailing him, too. So there must be something to that rumor about the young Kaiser and His Most Catholic Majesty being up to something.”

Purvis drummed on his desk blotter thoughtfully as he stared at his telephone. Then he shook his head and told himself, aloud, “No sense calling Greystoke of British intelligence. That wise-ass lies to us when the truth is in his favor. We’ve got him under surveillance, too. So, okay, we’ll just sit tight and see who contacts those soldiers of fortune first.”

Rumford tried. He was learning how sneaky his older boss was. But he knew he’d never get any sleep that night unless he asked. So he asked what on earth anyone would want with scum like Captain Gringo and Gaston Verrier.

Purvis said, “Something calling for the services of real professionals, of course. Something’s up. Something big. Ever since that last hurricane, all sorts of strange bedfellows indeed have been running about like a mess of very sneaky alley cats with red ants under their tails. Our naval intelligence picked up some waterfront talk about some vessel, an important one, going down in that storm. Obviously the Brits, the spicks, and the square heads know more about it than we do. Hakim could be working for still another side, for all we know. He sure didn’t come here to bid on coffee or bananas. Have you ever had the feeling you’re the only kid on the block who doesn’t know if that redhead on the corner puts out or not?”

Rumford grinned like a mean little kid and said, “I get it. Whatever may be up, it’s safe to assume the Brits and Germans can’t be in on it together. So one side or the other may want to hire Walker and the Frenchman to murder someone on the other, right?”

“Close enough, though they say Captain Gringo doesn’t sign contracts like that. What they might want him for is unimportant. What’s important is that we have him under surveillance. So when and if someone approaches our soldiers of fortune, we’ll have them under surveillance, too! Get enough tails on enough people and we have to find out just what in the hell is going on.”

He reached for the phone as he added, “We’re going to need more field agents on this can of worms. I’d better have Limón and Puntarenas send us all the guys they can spare.”

Rumford asked, “What happens to those two hired guns once we know who they’re working for, sir?”

Purvis asked the consulate switchboard operator to connect him through to the secret-service office in the coastal port of Limón and, as he waited, told Rumford, “It depends on who hires them to do what, of course.”

“And once we know that, sir?”

Purvis shrugged and said, “I told you why I didn’t want them hit here in San José. Once they’re out of Costa Rican jurisdiction, you can shoot ’em, stuff ’em, or eat ’em for supper for all I care.”

“But what if they don’t leave San José, sir?”

“They will. Nobody ever hires Captain Gringo just to mind the store.”

~*~

Secret-service agent Purvis was right. In yet another part of San José, two gray but very dangerous men regarded each other with mutual distaste as the sun went down outside. The sunset could not be seen from Sir Basil Hakim’s inner sanctum. Oriental rugs and drapery worth a king’s ransom covered every inch of the walls, floor, and ceiling. Perfumed candles provided dim illumination but failed to mask the scent of hashish and messy sex that haunted Sir Basil’s office, harem, or whatever he chose to make of it. At the moment Sir Basil reclined on a mass of silk pillows, wearing blood red silk pajamas stained here and there with dry semen. He was just too tall to qualify as a dwarf. His oversized head was about as satanic as one might expect, considering the gray Satanic beard and his record. Sir Basil Hakim was said to be either a Turk, a Russian, a Jew, or a Greek, depending on which group one’s informant hated most. Born in Constantinople, or Alexandria, or wherever, Sir Basil was a British subject who’d been knighted for doing certain favors for people in London who were probably still paying blackmail to keep him quiet. One of the nicer things anyone had ever called Sir Basil was the Merchant of Death. In addition to his other vices, he sold arms to one and all in a truly democratic manner.

His unenthusiastic guest was Gaston Verrier, late of the French foreign legion, or any other army that would hire him. Although taller by far than his host, Gaston was one of those small gray men people fail to notice until too late. He’d killed his first man in the slums of Paris before he started shaving, and after a long hard life was cheerfully willing to concede that he was a very dirty old man. But he still thought he was a lot nicer than his host, and, in truth, few who knew Hakim would disagree. Gaston was fully dressed in tropic linens and was not sprawled across pillows like a lazy cat at the moment. He was seated on a hassock, albeit staring a bit like a cat, himself, as he waited for the shithead in the red pajamas to say something.

Hakim yawned and said, “It was so good of you to drop by, Old Bean. I have a little business proposition that might interest you and your friend, Dick.”

Gaston grimaced and said, “I did not drop by. I was frog-marched here by two of your trés grotesque hirelings, and I am so ashamed of myself I could spit. But merde alors, how was I to expect two six-year-olds in skeleton masks to pull guns on me in that adorable alley?”

Sir Basil chuckled and said, “They weren’t children. They were midgets. I enjoy towering over my help, when I can, and you must admit my trap was rather ingenious, eh what?”

“Eh bien, I said I was too sentimental to shoot children on sight. But you and your adorable fellow dwarves kidnapped me to no purpose. I don’t have any money at the moment, and not even my dear old mother would pay ransom for my somewhat battered body, if that is your new game.”

Hakim said, “Dick’s right about you, you know. You love to talk but you never listen. I said I had a deal to offer you lads. A thousand each, up front. A thousand a week until the job is done to my satisfaction. How do you like it so far?”

Gaston snorted in disgust and said, “With anyone else, for a thousand dollars, I might drop my pants and bend over. But knowing you, it has to be something dirtier. Knowing my comrade, Dick, he will no doubt wash my mouth out with soap when he hears I have been talking to you!”

Sir Basil scratched his balls absently and said, “At the moment the notorious Captain Gringo is surrounded by secret-service agents and under surveillance by both British and German intelligence. The Germans are working with the Spanish, of course, so we don’t have to worry about them, eh what?”

Gaston didn’t answer. So Hakim knew he had his undivided attention as he nodded and added, “Naturally my own people are watching all those other people from surrounding rooftops, with scoped rifles. I don’t think anyone’s about to take our young friend without my full approval. But on the other hand, if we’re not friends anymore ...”

“What’s the job, mon ami?” Gaston asked flatly.

Hakim chuckled and clapped his hands twice. Two naked girls came through a slit in the drapes carrying a moving-picture projector between them. Neither was older than eleven or twelve, but their painted faces were world-weary and their eyes were the eyes of old whores. One placed the projector on a pillow and angled it in position before crawling to the wall on her hands and knees to plug it in. Hakim noticed the bemused expression on Gaston’s face as he stared at her immature but shapely rump and asked, “Would you like some of that, Gaston?”

Gaston looked away, scowling, to see the other naked child moving drapes away from an expanse of whitewashed bare wall. Gaston said, “Eh bien, are we to have our very own cinema this evening?”

Hakim nodded and said something to the girls in a language Gaston didn’t know, and he knew lots of languages. As one of them blew out all but one candle, the other put a reel in place and flicked on the projection bulb before she began to crank the machine.

Gaston watched the improvised movie screen with interest as the flickering image of a very blond little girl sucking off a very black gentleman appeared. He grimaced and observed, “I knew it would be something dirty.”

Hakim sighed and said, “Wrong reel,” before cursing or ordering his young projectionist in that same odd tongue. The girl calmly changed reels, and this time the image was that of what looked like an old Monitor-class gunboat moving across the calm waters of some bay or inlet. Hakim said, “My people didn’t take these. They bought them from a German naval officer who finds it difficult to keep a wife and two mistresses on a lieutenant commander’s salary.”

Gaston frowned and said, “The vessel would seem to be sinking, non?” But as the image on the wall kept dropping deeper in the water, Hakim said, “It’s not sinking. It’s a submarine. Young Kaiser Willy’s stolen the American Holland boat design, improved it, and has his engineers designing around Edison’s patented storage batteries. This particular tub was running on out right copies of Edison’s patent. No doubt the Germans would have some explaining to do if the Yanks found out about it, eh what?”

Gaston waited until the submersible flickered all the way under, save for the periscope he’d assumed up until now to be a flagstaff. Then he shrugged and said, “Everyone knows Der Kaiser likes new toys. Who built that trés soggy gunboat for him, you?”

Sir Basil looked pained and replied, “As a matter of fact, my Woodbine Arms, Limited, did bid for the contract. We were underbid by a German firm I’d never heard of. I’d most certainly like to find out how they did it. We bid as low as we could, assuming, of course, that once we had the contract we’d be able to work in the usual cost overruns. But those sons of bitches from Linke-Stettin promised to build submarines for the price of tugboats, and, worse yet, as you see, they seem to be building them!”

“Ah, but of course, once they began, a few unforeseen expenses cropped up, hein?”

“No, God damn it! Linke-Stettin brought the fucking submarines to completion on time and to specs! It’s impossible to build a seagoing submarine that cheaply. But they did it, and I have to know how!”

Gaston shrugged and said, “Do not look at us, then. We are soldiers of fortune, not naval architects. Dick is trés good with a machine gun and I, in all modesty, can be formidable with artillery ordnance. It would appear you are more in the market for a pair of slide-rule types, non?”

“I have all the naval architects I need. I need you and the notorious Captain Gringo to get them within reach of that bloody underwater gunboat.”

“Merde alors, in Germany?”

Hakim laughed harshly and said, “Closer than that,” before he indicated to the naked girls that the show was over. As they put away the gear and vanished back into the drapery again, Hakim told Gaston, “Everyone who subscribes to the Hearst newspapers knows the Yanks are spoiling for a war with Spain over Cuba. Everyone who knows the Spanish navy knows a determined Irish drunk could sink it with a hod of bricks. Der Kaiser didn’t vote for Cleveland, and just signed a treaty with his chum, the king of Spain. In exchange for Spanish neutrality in any future war with France, the Germans have been beefing up the Spanish military forces with smokeless powder, armor plate from Krupp, and some submarines from Linke-Stettin. Need I say more?”

“Oui, even the troublemaking Kaiser has to know a few unproven weapons can’t help the tottering Spanish Empire at this late date. The U.S. isn’t going to hit them with drunken Irishmen. They just built a trés moderne navy of their own!”

Hakim shrugged and said, “True, but young Kaiser Willy would doubtless like to see how some untried ideas work before he uses them himself in the big war he seems to be planning. His motives are neither here nor there. The point is that the Germans delivered a sister ship to the one I just showed you on film. It was last seen by my own agents in the Spanish port of La Coruna. My engineers assured me no submarine built to the current state of the art can cross the Atlantic under its own limited power. But a few weeks ago, just after that hurricane, a Honduran patrol boat picked up a Spanish sailor adrift in a life raft near the Bahia archipelago. He was in bad shape when they found him and died a few days later. But not before he told them he’d been an engine wiper on a Spanish submarine driven on the rocks of the Bahias during the storm. The Hondurans had a look. They failed to spot any sign of a stranded anything. So it’s on the bottom, in shallow water, somewhere off the Bahias. You know the Bahias, of course?”

Gaston made a wry face and replied, “I try to avoid them at all costs when forced to pass near. None of them are too civilized, and the Black Caribs inhabiting some of the smaller Bahias are still trés savage.”

Hakim reached under a silk cushion as he nodded and said, “That’s where you and Captain Gringo come in. I’m sending a clandestine team to locate and salvage or at least examine that Spanish vessel. If it is a submarine and not the ravings of a dying man, Woodbine Arms is in an awful mess. I know what they say about me, but I do build pretty good weaponry. I have to know how Linke-Stettin not only underbid me but built a better sub than anyone working for me can.”

He handed Gaston a perfumed envelope and added, “There’s two thousand U.S. worth of local currency in here. The arms and ammo you lads will need to act as security for my engineers will be aboard the Greek sponge schooner you’ll all be using as a front. Go back to the posada, tell your friend about the deal and give him his half, then wait for further instructions. My people will give you your .38 and dagger back as you leave.”

Gaston took the money, of course, but said, “Mais you just told me the adorable posada is surrounded by trés fatigué secret agents avec guns, non?”

Hakim shrugged again and said, “A mere detail. Let me worry about it. You just worry about convincing Captain Gringo his bread is buttered on my side, for now.”

Gaston sighed and said, “That may not be easy. Dick is not what one could call an admirer of yours, hein?”

Hakim said, “Tell him it’s his patriotic duty. I know he was treated rather unjustly by the U.S. government. But surely he can’t want the U.S. Navy steaming into a death trap in the near future. I still have a few bones to pick with you lads, too, you know. But for once we seem to be on the same side. I don’t want Spanish submarines complicating the Cuba Libre movement, either.”

Gaston grinned crookedly and replied, “Mais non, not unless Woodbine Arms gets to sell them to Spain, hein?”

Sir Basil Hakim scratched his crotch again and said calmly, “Well, business is business. But if I can convince Der Kaiser and His Most Catholic Majesty that I can build subs better, they’ll probably scrap the ones Linke-Stettin built, and, well, I doubt if even I can replace enough subs to matter in time, if the Yanks will just shake a leg.”

He yawned, clapped his hands again, and, as the two little naked girls came in to rejoin him on the pillows, added, “You’d better go now. I’m getting an erection. You have your orders. You know what will happen if you mess the mission up.”

~*~

Back at the posada, Captain Gringo didn’t like the idea at all. Lucita had left him alone and well sated by the time Gaston arrived to hand him a thousand and suggest he put on his pants. The tall Yank went along with Gaston at least that far. He even put the welcome funds in his money belt. But then he said, “Before you suggest it, I agree, this time, a double cross is our best bet. We don’t owe Hakim anything but a hard time, and that story has to be a lie.”

Gaston said, “True, but at the risk of sounding soft in the head, I suggest we go along with him at least until he gets us out of here!”

Captain Gringo finished dressing, blew out the lamp, and moved to the grilled window as he growled, “Shit, that story about this place being surrounded could be just a ploy to keep us here until he’s ready to send for us.”

“But what if it is not, my old and cynical?”

Captain Gringo peered out through the grille. A couple of drunks in skeleton masks were reeling down the otherwise deserted street. Another grille much like this one overlooked the same scene from across the way. Anyone staring out through it was of course as invisible to him as he hoped he was to them. He swept the roofline above it with more interest, muttering, “The trouble with Hakim is that he lies so cleverly. I don’t see shit. But that still works two ways.”

Then an evening star hanging just above the tiles across the way winked off and on again. Captain Gringo swore softly and added, “God damn it to hell, there is something pussyfooting around over there. Could be a cat, of course.”

Gaston asked, “Do you really think we should bet our adorable asses on it being a pussycat instead of a pussyfoot, avec a gun?”

Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “We’re better off staying forted up behind these thick walls for now. But I’m missing something here. If someone has us boxed, why haven’t they moved in before this?”

“Perhaps they don’t like noise? You have the reputation of being trés rude to people who burst in on you uninvited, non?”

“Maybe. But just a little while ago you were gone and they could have literally caught me alone with my pants down. Did Hakim say who the hell those guys are?”

“Oui, spies, not lawmen. One gathers the reason they see no need to move in is that their orders are to follow us, not shoot us, hein?”

“Okay, so why don’t we just cut out and let ’em follow us? How far can anyone tail a couple of guys through the dark streets of a town they know? Remember that cantina with the unlocked skylight over the men’s room?”

Gaston nodded but said, “The secret agents are not the only problem, Dick. He ordered us to stay put until he sends for us, and his people won’t try to follow us if they observe us crossing Hakim double with his money on us, hein?”

Captain Gringo sat on the rumpled bed and lit a smoke. Then he shrugged and said, “Well, we have a whole night ahead of us and nobody can shoot us in here without giving us at least an even chance at ’em. Tell me some more about this Bahia archipelago.”

Gaston found a bentwood chair, lit his own claro, and said, “Oh, I agree we have to desert the mission before it reaches the Bahias! The species of perversion only gave us two lousy thousand, and I would not go there for ten! The Bahias are a chain of reefs and islands great and small off the northeast coast of Honduras. Honduras owns them, on the map, but does not really govern them, since governing the Bahias is not possible. The larger Bahías are inhabited by white or mestizo wreckers and occasional fishermen, descended from pirates or fugitives from justice. The smaller islands are inhabited by Black Caribs descended from runaway slaves and unreconstructed Carib Indians. You know, of course, what Carib means in Spanish?”

“Sure, ‘cannibal.’ But none of the Caribs I’ve met so far seemed to really want to eat me. I think they were just after my shoes.”

“Oui, they’ve picked up a bit of culture since Columbus met and named them. But they are still coastal pirates who make the adorable sea rovers of the Barbary Coast look like sissies. Black Caribs are, if anything, more savage. The original tribe was simply truculent and interested in loot, or perhaps fresh meat. The runaway slaves they mixed with were bigger, given to strange African religious notions and instilled with a blind hatred for their former masters, or anyone with the same complexions.”

Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “They still have to be nicer guys than anyone who’d work for Hakim. He said we’d be working from a ship, right?”

“Oui, but what of it? If the vessel he wants salvaged is in water shallow enough to find, it has to be within reach of Carib sailing canoes from the Bahia shores, non? Hakim said he was sending a mere schooner. A schooner moored alone in Carib waters is just what they consider meat on the table. Unless you have some mad desire to try your shooting skills on trés dark targets paddling silently in the dark, I suggest we cross Hakim double somewhere between here and the coast. I know a house of ill repute in Limón with a, secret passage for the use of discreet married clients.”

Captain Gringo said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We’ve got to get out of here alive first.”

Then he stiffened as they both heard a firm knock on the locked door. '

Captain Gringo rose, drawing his .38 from its shoulder rig as he stood out of line with the thin wood panels and growled, “¿Quién es?”

A feminine voice on the far side replied in English, “Hakim sent us. Let us in.”

Gaston had risen to cover the door with his double action revolver. So Captain Gringo opened the door from the far side and two women dressed in fiesta costume came in fast, slamming the door after them. They both wore their skeleton masks pushed up on their scalps to expose their faces. In the dim light it was still tough to judge what they looked like. Captain Gringo asked, “Aren’t you girls out a little late, even for the Day of the Dead?”

The one closer to him said, “A few natives are still wandering about dressed like this, hoping their luck will change. The chaps surrounding this place no doubt took us for a pair of whores checking in. This is a public inn, you know.”

Captain Gringo nodded but said, “I get your disguises. But how often does one puta check into a posada with another, Miss, ah ...?”

“Call me Vera, and this is Sarah. We didn’t just check in as two women together, of course. We came in with a couple of Hakim’s trigger men. Take off your clothes. Both of you.”

Captain Gringo laughed incredulously and asked, “Just like that? I don’t even know if you’re pretty, but even if you are, this is a mighty dumb time to play slap and tickle!”

Vera stamped her foot impatiently and threw a bundle he hadn’t noticed before past him onto the bed as she insisted, “Hurry! The other two men are just down the hall in their underwear. Naturally one is tall and the other short. I’m sure their costumes will fit you both.”

Captain Gringo caught on, laughed, and said. “Gotcha. Can we keep our own underpants on, if you have to watch?”

Vera told him to stop screwing around. So he moved to the bed, untied the loosely bound bundle, and held the clown costume up to examine. He laughed again and said, “This one’s your size, Gaston. It looks like I get to be a full skeleton and, yeah, here’s the two masks. Pretty slick.”

The two soldiers of fortune started undressing as the two women fussed at them to hurry. When they got down to their shorts and guns, Sarah grabbed their linen suits and planter’s hats to tear out of the room.

Captain Gringo said, “I don’t see what’s the hurry, Vera. If this works, this works. If it doesn’t, what’s the rush?”

Gaston added, “True. My mother always said that there was no sense in rushing to one’s execution.”

Vera said, “You lot won’t be going anywhere for some time. We have to let your doubles lead everyone surrounding this place on a wild goose chase, and the German agents are rather thick. So they’ll have to move out slowly.”

Captain Gringo sat back down on the bed in just his boots, shorts, and shoulder rig as he said, “Right. The costumed guys who checked in here with a couple of pickups shouldn’t leave in less than an hour or so, unless they want anyone watching to think they’re undersexed.”

Gaston had moved over to the window in his own underwear and gun rig. So he suddenly laughed and said, “Mon Dieu, when Hakim tells people to move they most certainly move fast! Come have a peek, Dick, this is trés amuse!”

Captain Gringo joined Gaston at the grille, with Vera trailing behind, just in time to see one tall guy in linen and a planter’s hat whip around the far corner with a short guy dressed the same. A few moments later a door across the way opened and three other guys dressed a bit more native popped out to stroll casually after the decoy Captain Gringo and Gaston.

Captain Gringo grinned and turned to ask Vera where their doubles were going. He could see her face now, and it wasn’t bad, as she replied, “Railway station. They’re to catch the night train to Puntarenas, on the west coast. Two more of our people will board the train with them to supply them with fresh costumes in the men’s room. Then all four of them, complete strangers to the agents tailing you and Gaston, will simply enjoy a quiet trip to the west coast, catch a few winks, and ride back again.”

Gaston said, “I like it. Where is your companion, the mysterious Sarah, m’mselle?”

Vera said, “In your room, next door. Covering the alley to the rear. Your own window overlooks it, you may recall.”

Gaston said, “Oui, I think I shall join her, then. I too find the sight of Boche creeping down dark alleyways trés amuse.”

Suiting actions to his words, Gaston scooped up his costume, mask, gun, and money belt to leave Captain Gringo alone with Vera.

Vera asked, “Do you imagine he’ll get fresh with poor Sarah, Captain Gringo?”

“Call me Dick. He might. How poorly Sarah feels about it depends on how she feels about distinguished older men. Is it true all you girls who work for Hakim have to apply for the job in his bed?”

She sniffed and said, “Don’t be disgusting. Sir Basil pays well, but not that well. You may as well put your new pants on, too, by the way. I’m not paid to go to bed with anyone.”

He chuckled and moved over to the bed by himself. The he rummaged through the suit-pocket contents he’d dumped on the bed for a light and relit the oil lamp on the bed table as he sat back down. Vera asked what he expected to see as she stood near the foot of the bed, hands on hips. He looked her over and said, “Not bad. I admire redheads no matter what color hair they have. But I really need some light on the subject because I have to write a note for my landlady.”

He found an envelope in the drawer of the bed table. He opened his money belt and counted out the rent he and Gaston owed and them some. He stuffed the cash into the envelope, picked up a pencil stub, and wrote on the envelope, explaining how something unexpected but profitable had just come up in El Salvador. Then he sealed the envelope, placed it by the lamp where Lucita would be sure to find it, and told Vera, “I don’t expect my landlady to go to the police about us checking out so suddenly. But if she does, my white lie will fit our heading for the west coast.”

The redhead shrugged and said, “I suppose so. But why do you have to leave any money if your landlady isn’t here?”

He smiled up at her crookedly and observed, “I see you’ve been working for that creep, Hakim, for some time. Don’t try to figure it out. Us human beings don’t understand your kind, either.”

She sniffed and said, “Thank you. Hypocrites like you make me sick, too. What time can we expect your landlady to burst in here? Nobody told us the two of you got on so well, and we were naturally expecting her to return to her own quarters down by the front door.”

He glanced sheepishly at the envelope by the bed lamp and said, “You’re a pretty good detective, Vera. I don’t know when she’ll be back. She didn’t say.”

Vera frowned thoughtfully as she ran her wide-set hazel eyes over Captain Gringo’s naked chest and shoulders. Then she said, “She’ll no doubt get back as soon as she can manage. Put on your costume. We’d better get out of here a little sooner than planned. I don’t like killing witnesses if it can be avoided.”

That sounded reasonable. So Captain Gringo slid on the black sateen costume with white bones painted down the front and back, put on the papier-mâché skeleton mask, and said, “Boo.”

Vera didn’t laugh. She pulled her own mask down over her face and turned to open the door, looking like Death dressed up flamenco. Captain Gringo filled the handy side pockets of his costume and rose to follow her, casting a last wistful glance at the rumpled sheets he’d never get to rumple again.

They went next door and rapped on Gaston’s door. They heard a girlish giggle and then Sarah said they’d be with them in a minute. Gaston didn’t say anything. His mouth was probably too busy. Vera knocked again and snapped, “Right now, God damn it!” and the girl on the other side answered, “Spoilsport!” but came out a moment later with Gaston following her, buttoning up his clown costume. As they all went down the dark back stairs together, Sarah whispered to Vera, “It’s true what they say about Frenchmen. How did you make out, Vera?”

Vera told her to shut up. As she was about to open the back door, Captain Gringo said, “Hold it. Bad move,” and the redhead snapped, “We have to get out of here, dammit!”

He said, “Sure, but we’d better do it right. Someone could still have the place staked out. If they do, they’ll be expecting those two whores and their customers to leave by the same door they came in, right?”

Vera told him to watch who he was calling a whore, but led the way along the downstairs corridor toward the front as Sarah whispered, “What do we say at the front desk?”

Gaston took her arm and answered, “Nothing, assuming you and those other gentlemen paid in advance for the temporary use of some bed linens. Who has the keys?”

Vera said she did. Captain Gringo took them from her and muttered, “Gaston’s right. Put a little wiggle in your walk and I’ll just drop the keys on the desk without stopping.”

It worked. Lucita’s night clerk was reading a magazine and barely looked up as they passed, dropping the keys on his desk. With luck, he might not even tell Lucita about two guys and two putas checking in for a quick roll in the feathers upstairs.

Out on the dimly lit street it got more complicated. As the four of them moved down the posada steps, a hansom cab pulled to a halt in front of them and Lucita, of all people, got out!

She looked a little startled, too, to see four skeleton masks staring at her. But she must have been eager to get back upstairs. So she asked if they were waiting for a cab and, when Vera said they were, politely left the cab door open for them, wished them well, and almost ran for the door.

Vera gave the driver an address and the four of them piled in. As they drove away, Gaston laughed and said, “Eh bien, it’s about time things went right for a change. I could not have planned it better with a stopwatch!”

“Utshay upshay,” muttered Captain Gringo, pointing up at the open hatch in the roof of the hansom. So as the steel-rimmed wheels rattled on, Gaston and Sarah snuggled on the jump seats facing Vera and Captain Gringo, and proceeded to feel each other up some more. Vera sniffed and turned her gaze from them to ask Captain Gringo if that had been his landlady back there. When he nodded, she sniffed again and muttered, “I might have known. A woman can always tell when another’s in heat. Wasn’t she a little fat for you?”

He shrugged and said, “ ‘Pleasantly plump’ might describe her more politely. What’s it to you? Have you got something skinnier lined up for me?”

She swore under her breath and said, “Not bloody likely. I’ll be only too happy once we get you to your new address and I’ll have seen the last of you!”

She must have been even more pissed off than she let on. For it was little blond Sarah, of all people, who spotted a passing street sign over Gaston’s shoulder as they passed it and murmured, “Coo, that’s odd. We’re supposed to be going the other way, aren’t we?”

Vera glanced out on her side and said, “I’m not sure where we are at the moment. One stucco wall looks much the same as any other, and I confess I haven’t been paying attention as we’ve swung a few corners. One assumes that when one gives a cabdriver an address, that’s where one is going, what?”

Captain Gringo murmured, “Gaston, start telling us a dirty story, loud. Do I have to say why?”

Gaston replied, “Mais non. Have any of you heard the one about the mother superior and the nearsighted young priest?”

Captain Gringo had, but he wasn’t listening as Gaston made it sound as if four innocent lambs were going quietly to the slaughter, sharing dirty stories and sniggers. Sarah sniggered good. Vera watched, tense and silent, as the tall American drew the .38 from under his costume and pulled his mosquito-booted feet up on the leather seat between them. He waited until the driver swung yet another corner into a darker and narrower street. Then he shot up to his full height, with his head and shoulders out the open roof hatch, and said, “Boo!” as he shoved the .38 muzzle almost up the nose of the driver perched behind the flat-topped hansom.

The driver reined in, gasping, and said, “¡Nombre de Dios, señor! For why are you pointing a gun at me?”

“I’ll ask the questions, amigo. Who are you working for?”

“Working for, señor? I work for nobody but myself, and my customers, of course. Is this a holdup, señor?”

“Not yet. Who’s laying for us at the end of the line, holdup men or someone who may have paid you more to deliver us? Take a deep breath and think before you answer. I shoot people who lie to me.”

The driver said, “I know, you have been drinking all day and now you think someone’s after you, eh? I swear on the grave of my sainted mother that I have no idea what you are talking about, señor.”

So Captain Gringo shot him, grabbed the reins with his free hand, and was out of the hatch and in the driver’s seat before the driver’s body made it to the cobbles with a dull thud.

Down in the cab, Vera shouted, “Have you gone crackers?” as Captain Gringo wheeled the cab around and whipped its horse to a run with the slack in the reins. Behind them, back the way the treacherous driver had been taking them, someone shouted. He knew it wasn’t their driver. Nobody ever shouted once he’d been shot between the eyes.

The sounds of running steel-shod hooves and steel-rimmed wheels over cobbles popped doors and windows open with monotonous regularity as Captain Gringo raced for the darker parts of San José. He swung into a narrow street with no lights at all, slowed to a walk, and drove two more blocks before he reined in and called down, “Okay, everybody out!”

He climbed down himself and proceeded to tether the reins to an old pepper tree as Gaston helped the girls out, asking, “Was this trip really necessary, Dick?”

Captain Gringo said, “It was. You know this town better than I do, Gaston. So are we lost or not?”

Gaston looked around and said, “Merde alors, I, Gaston, am never lost. What was that address again, Vera?”

Vera gave it to him, adding that both of them were obviously mad, and Gaston said, “Eh bien. Follow me, my children. It is not too far to walk, and, from the way my adorable young speed demon just acted, one gathers we had better start walking, hein?”

Captain Gringo said that was for damned sure as he took Vera’s elbow and fell in behind Gaston and Sarah. The redhead snapped, “I can see well enough, dammit,” but he said, “ We’re supposed to be a couple of gay caballeros walking our girls home from the fiesta. So shut up and look happy; dammit!”

She snuggled closer, but asked, “What was that all about back there? Do you think that driver was setting us up for a robbery or worse?”

He said, “Worse. I know you didn’t think much of Lucita, but if the game had been robbery or rape, that driver never would have brought her back to her posada safe and sound. Somebody who knew she was my landlady tailed her to the home of her employers. Then they set it up so one of their confederates would be driving the first cab out front as she left. They weren’t after Lucita. They were after Gaston and me. They probably gave the driver orders to deliver anyone who matched our description at all to whatever reception they had planned down that dark street on the wrong side of town. So don’t ever call Sarah dumb again. She may be warmer-natured that) some people I know, but she’s got good eyes, and she saved our necks back there!”

Vera sighed and said, “I’m the one who was too stupid to look where we were going. But what could have gone wrong with Sir Basil’s plan? Everyone was supposed to follow our confederates wearing your clothes!”

“Some of them may have,” he soothed, adding, “Hakim told Gaston we had more than one bunch to deal with. Some knock-around guys are smarter than others or, hell, they may have just been covering all bets. Knowing we were holed up at the posada, they may have just decided not to let anybody get away, see?”

“They sound rather ruthless, don’t you think?”

“It’s a ruthless game. What do you call the guy you work for, Santa Claus? I must say it’s getting sort of interesting, though. If there wasn’t something to that crazy story about a German-built Spanish sub, they wouldn’t be playing so rough!”

Gaston led them around a corner, through an alley black as the pit, and back to another street with better lighting albeit cinder pavement. He said, “This calle runs in line with the much nicer one you adorable creatures seem to have rented quarters on. Let me see, there should be a slit between the walls along in here somewhere—a man who sometimes finds himself far from home with a mad desire to urinate has to keep such details in mind—and, voilà, I told you I am never lost!”

The rest of them had to take that on faith as Gaston led them through a crooked, dark, and seemingly endless passage between rough stucco walls that smelled of stale piss and worse. But when he finally led them out to a paved street again, Sarah marveled, “Oh, how clever! That’s our place, over there on the far side to the left!”

Both girls started forward. But Captain Gringo stopped them and said, “Hold the thought. Is there a back entrance to that courtyard over there?”

They told him there wasn’t. So he said he guessed they’d just have to chance it as he removed his mask and held it over his cocked .38.

But nothing happened as they cut across, entered the open gateway of the court, and waited until Vera unlocked a massive oak door and led them into pitch blackness. Captain Gringo stood well clear of her, gun in hand, as she struck a match and lit a hall lamp. Then he picked it up and said, “Stay here. I’m going to toss the premises before we sit down to toast marshmallows.”

Gaston and Sarah did. But Vera insisted on following him, fussing, as she insisted that each and every room he entered, armed and dangerous, was secure. When they got to the crapper, he said, “Well, when you’re right you’re right. But you sure are a trusting soul, considering the business you’re in.”

Vera’s hazel eyes blazed as she spat back, “There you go with sarky remarks again! Sarah and I are troubleshooters for Woodbine Arms, not hired guns! You’re the one who murdered that poor driver back there!”

He said, “Touché, but he wasn’t a poor driver. He was a big fibber, and he had to go because you’d given him this address. Assuming you haven’t given it to anyone else we have to worry about, what happens now?”

She said, “You’re to stay here until other Woodbine people come for you in the morning. Hopefully early. They’ll have tickets for you and Gaston on the morning train to Limón. It should be safe for you to move out by then.”

“In this skeleton suit?”

She laughed despite herself and said, “Naturally they’ll bring another change of costume. Shall we rejoin the others?”

He said, “May as well; I don’t need to use this crapper at the moment.” So they moved down the long narrow hall to where they’d left Gaston and Sarah. They weren’t there. They’d moved into the small front parlor and were on the settee by the fireplace. They were not toasting marshmallows.

Captain Gringo said, “Cut that out, Gaston. This place checks out okay. It’s laid out something like a New York railroad flat. Long hall to one side running front to back with the rooms lined up along it. The crapper’s at the end of the hall. Narrow ventilating slit above the sink. Nobody fatter than a cat could get in or out that way. No doors or windows save for the ones up front. So we’re forted pretty good, and Vera here says we only have to stay one night.”

Gaston felt up the giggling Sarah some more as he grinned and said, “Trés bien. In that case this little cabbage and I shall take the nearest bedroom, hein?”

Vera shook her head and said, “You’ll do no such thing. There are only two bedrooms. So the plan was for you boys to take one while we girls spent the night in the other, with the door locked!”

Sarah pouted and told Vera to speak for herself as Gaston fixed her with a sardonic smile and said, “Doesn’t that sound most perverse, m’mselle? Dick and I are good friends, as you know, but every time I suggest we go to bed together he beats me up!”

Sarah laughed and said, “I’m no bloody lezzy, either. Come on, Gaston, I’ll show you to the bedroom with the softest bed.” So the two of them rose from the settee and scampered out, hand in hand, as Captain Gringo laughed.

Vera didn’t. She said, “Damn, I might have known Sarah would go into heat on me again. All right, you’ll just have to kip out here in the parlor. I’ll fetch you some blankets from the one bedroom left.”

He said, “No you won’t. That love seat can’t be five feet long and I’m well over six. A guy can’t run for his life worth a damn on cramped legs, Doll. So I’m taking the bedroom. You can sleep anywhere you want.”

He moved out to the hall before she could answer. He remembered the two bedroom doors from his earlier exploration. So he twisted the first knob he came to, opened the door, and said, “Oops. Sorry, Gaston,” and closed it quickly. But not before Vera, behind him, got a good look at what Gaston and her chum, Sarah, were doing without bothering to undress first. She blanched and said, “Oh, how disgusting!”

Captain Gringo didn’t answer. He opened the next door and stepped inside, unbuttoning his skeleton suit as he moved toward the big four-poster. He pulled the quilted comforter off the sheets and held it out to Vera, saying, “Here. I won’t need this with no cross ventilation on a tropic night.”

She took it but said, “You’re just awful. Haven’t you a shred of gallantry left?”

He said, “You were the one who said I was a nut for paying my bills. You’re probably right that there’s a little self-serving hypocrisy in the Robin Hood act. So, I’m trying to reform.”

She said, “You ... bastard! That settee is hard and lumpy!”

“That’s why you wanted me to sleep on it? Look on the bright side, Vera. At least you’re shorter than me.”

He sat on the mattress of the four-poster, bounced, and said, “Yum yum yum. If that other bed’s softer it’s too soft for me. Like Goldilocks said, this is just right.”

He bent to pull off his mosquito boots. Then he peeled off the grotesque' fiesta costume, wadded it up, and placed it on the bed table with the mask on top of it. As he stood in his shorts to unbuckle his money belt and gun rig, Vera stamped her foot and said, “Dammit, I want that bed!”

He shrugged and said, “I’ll let you use half. It’s big enough.”

She blushed and said, “Not bloody likely! I don’t want to be raped in my sleep!”

He frowned and said, “Don’t be so egotistical. Did I say I owed you any favors?”

Again she laughed despite herself and said, “Pooh, you’re not going to try to tell me you weren’t sleeping with that dumpy Spanish girl back at that posada!”

He shrugged, slid his money belt and gun rig between the headboard and the mattress, and slid himself between the sheets as he said, “I didn’t do anything to Lucita she didn’t want me to do. We were good friends.”

“I’ll bet. Did you ever enjoy her the way Gaston was just treating poor Sarah?”

“You’d better ask Sarah in the morning if she spent the night in agony. I don’t talk about what I may or may not have done to a lady who might have been a real pal.”

Vera sneered and said, “It’s small wonder you’re ashamed to go into detail about your sordid relationship with that fat peasant girl! How could a white man sink so low?”

“Old Lucita wasn’t so low, with a couple of pillows under her. She was white, sort of, and a lot nicer than you. Built better, too. So please shut the door as you leave. It’s been a long hard Day of the Dead and I gotta catch forty winks before I’ll feel alive again.”

She called him a bastard again and flounced out, slamming the door behind her. He chuckled, trimmed the bed lamp to a faint glow, just in case, and rolled over to catch some shut-eye.

He was asleep within minutes. He didn’t dream that night. So he had no idea how long he’d been asleep when he found himself sitting bolt upright in bed, training his .38 on the door.

He saw that it was Vera and lowered the muzzle with a puzzled frown. She gasped and said, “My God, you move fast! How did you do that?”

“Practice. What’s your problem?”

She said, “I couldn’t sleep,” as she stepped inside and closed the door after her. He could see by the dim light, now, that she was wrapped in the comforter. He couldn’t tell what, if anything, she wore under it. She asked, “Did you mean what you said about not raping me if I sort of took the other side?”

He laughed and said, “I don’t pay for it, either. You might say I’m a romantic fool. Get in or get out. I’m going back to sleep.”

He put his gun away and plumped up the pillows on his side as she moved around the foot of the bed, dropped the comforter to reveal the thin silk slip she wore, and gingerly raised the sheet on her side to slide into bed with him. Then she gasped and said, “Oh, you’re not wearing anything? Not even your shorts!”

He grimaced and said, “Sleeping in your underwear is a disgusting habit. But you’ve still got yours on, so cross your legs, say your prayers, and for Chrissake let’s get some sleep!”

He rolled onto his left side with his bare back facing her and snuggled his head down into the pillows as he shut his eyes. He was just dozing off again when she murmured, “Are you asleep, Dick?”

He groaned and said, “Not now. What do you want, a glass of wawa?”

“It was mean of you to say that other girl had a nicer figure than me. She was short and dumpy, dammit!”

“Okay, you’re built like a brick shithouse. Shut up and go to sleep.”

“I can’t. I’ve been turning and twisting for hours on that damned lumpy settee and now I seem to be too overtired to fall asleep.”

“Speak for yourself, girl. I could sleep like a log right now, if only you’d let me!”

Actually, he was getting an erection, for some dumb reason. But he wasn’t in the mood to play games. So he shut his eyes and willed himself into the arms of Morpheus. But now Morpheus was acting like a bitch, too, and it was sort of tough to fall asleep with a throbbing dong and strange stuff just a few teasing inches away from it.

He started counting sheep. But they had hard-ons too, dammit. He tried counting backward from a hundred. Vera was wearing some kind of musky perfume and couldn’t seem to settle down. He tried to ignore the way she was rubbing her body around on the mattress next to him. So she gave in first and said, pouting, “I may be a little flat-chested, but at least I’m not fat.”

He sighed, rolled over, and took her in his arms. She gasped and said, “Oh, you promised you wouldn’t get fresh!”

He said, “I’m not getting fresh. I’m just trying to see if you’re right. Lessee, you are a little flatter topside, but not enough to qualify as flat-chested. I’d call you sort of willowy. Belly’s okay and, yeah, I really like them hips.”

“Dick, that’s enough! Stop right there!” she began. But when he kissed her, and she kissed back, she couldn’t say more as he ran his free hand down to cup her silk-sheathed mons in his palm. She moaned and threw her arms around him as he proceeded to rub her silk-filled valley of delight with two fingers. But as they came up for air she protested, “You’re going to stain my slip if you don’t stop that, you horrid thing.”

So he said, “No problem. Let’s just slide that slip off so we can do it right.”

She said, “Oh, no, I never go to bed naked, even by myself. They say it’s wicked. Girls who sleep naked might wind up playing with themselves!”

“Don’t worry. They don’t know what’s going on, and if I catch you jerking off I’ll make you stop.”

She giggled like a little kid being tickled as he got the slip up at least around her waist and rolled in place between her naked thighs. But even as she spread them and thrust her pelvis up in welcome the dumb dame had to say, “Please be gentle, dear. I’ve never done this sort of thing before.”

Her passion-lubricated love maw made a liar out of her as she slid its lips up to swallow him alive. But he was too polite to accuse a lady of insulting his intelligence. Some dames thought they had to talk like that, and her middle-class English accent gave her away as a girl who’d probably been reared by a strict and doubtless frustrated nanny who’d been paid to scare the shit out of her about sex. But obviously old Vera had learned the facts of life from someone who’d broken her in pretty good, God bless him, or, more likely, them.

As he laid her he kept working the silk slip higher until her naked nipples rubbed against his chest as she kissed him passionately. Vera suddenly grabbed the crumpled silk and pulled it all the way off over her head, sobbing as she said, “Oh, it does feel better with no clothes on, after all. But how shall I ever be able to face you again, after we’ve been so vile?”

He said, “Let’s not worry about it now. I’m fixing to come!”

“Does that mean you’re about to have an orgasm, dear?”

“Something like that. How about you?”

“Oh, women don’t have orgasms. We just have to let you brutes have your way with us until you’ve satisfied your lusts and ... could you move a little faster, dear?”

He did, and said, growling, “This must be really killing you, right?” as she moved her slim hips skillfully and replied, “Oh, I don’t really mind, now that I’m getting used to it. Do you enjoy my body as much as you did that awful Costa Rican girl’s?”

He said, “There’s no comparison.” Which was the simple truth. For no two women were the same in bed, bless their sweet hides. She took his assurance at face value and began to move faster, as if to settle the contest in her favor once and for all. So he came in her, hard, and she gasped and said, “Oh, that was mean! I was hoping you’d last longer. Just to be a good sport, of course. It’s rather flattering to feel a man wants you, even though ... Dick, aren’t you going to stop now?”

“Do you really want me to?”

“Not if it amuses you. I said I was a good sport, and, well, I know I shouldn’t say it, but it does feel rather nice and ... oh, dear, what are you doing to me, dear?”

That was a pretty dumb question, even coming from a Victorian English dame. So he didn’t answer. He just raised his weight on locked elbows to look down between them as he pounded her to glory. The view inspired him to pound her even harder. For, in truth, Vera was a redhead all over. She moaned. “Wait, take it easy, it’s starting to hurt, or at least it’s starting to do something odd, and if you don’t at least slow down I’m going to have to go to the loo or, oh, oh, Jeeeeeeeeezusssss!'’

He kept on throwing the blocks to her as she moaned and groaned and rolled her red head back and forth across the pillow, eyes closed and mouth wide open in a silent scream. And then he ejaculated in her still-climaxing vagina and fell limply down against her willowy torso to catch his breath as Vera wrapped her long slender legs around his waist and kept moving and milking until her internal contractions slowly subsided. As he kissed her throat she murmured in a scared little-girl voice, “So that's what they meant! My God, I think I just lost my flaming virginity!”

He said, “Come on, Doll Box. You’re among friends now.”

She laughed sheepishly and said, “I didn’t say I’d never screwed before. I just meant I’d never seen what all the fuss was about, up until now.”

He knew he was in for the story of her life now, whether he wanted to hear it or not. So he dismounted, got out the matches and a claro, and snuggled her against him as he smoked and she talked.

It was funny. Though every dame was different, making love, so many of them told the same old stories. Vera’s, in a nutshell, was the one about the girl living in genteel poverty who’d been seduced in her teens by an older friend of the family, found out it didn’t hurt, and drifted into hooking as an easy source of income next to working as a lady’s maid or shop girl. Hakim’s people had found her working Waterloo Bridge in London and recruited her to work for them as an undercover agent who could pass, as need be, for anything from a well-bred Englishwoman to a slut. She confided that she hadn’t enjoyed seducing people for Sir Basil much, up until now.

He blew a thoughtful smoke ring up at the bed canopy and asked, “Why did he order you to seduce me, Vera? I wasn’t about to take off in that silly skeleton suit, you know.”

She giggled, snuggled closer, and confided, “Sir Basil said Sarah and I should do anything to keep you happy until he could have you smuggled out of San José. I didn’t know whether I wanted to seduce you or not. You had me confused. I don’t know why you made me so uncomfortable before you made me come. Most men are putty in my hands and I can take them or leave them. You seem to feel the same way about most women, and it bothered me. I suppose I was a little jealous, too. That Costa Rican girl was awfully pretty, even if she was sort of plump.”

He didn’t answer. So she said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Am I better in bed than she was?”

He laughed and patted her bare shoulder as he said, “Can’t say, yet. We haven’t tried all the positions yet.”

“My God, aren’t you satisfied yet?”

“Hell, no, are you?”

“No. Would you think I was awful if I suggested trying what Gaston and Sarah were up to, or down to, when we caught them at it?”

~*~

It wasn’t easy, but Captain Gringo managed to get at least a little sleep that night, and the night passed all too swiftly, according to Vera. In the morning she served him breakfast as well as more of herself in bed. Then some spoilsport sons of bitches came knocking on the front door with railroad tickets and the sort of chino work clothes engineers and construction workers wore in the tropics if they weren’t natives. Gaston could pass for a native or anything else. But Captain Gringo tended to agree that a tall blond guy with Anglo-Saxon features looked a little dumb in a charro outfit and big sombrero. The nondescript sneaks who delivered the tickets and disguises gave the two soldiers of fortune instructions to head for Limón on their own, where they’d be contacted by others with further instructions. Then they lit out, warning Captain Gringo and Gaston not to head for the railroad station until just before the eastbound train was ready to leave.

That left them time to say adios to the girls right. So everyone went back to bed. Captain Gringo was mildly surprised when he found himself in bed with Sarah, of all people. But as the little blonde stripped off her robe it didn’t upset him. It just confused him. He asked, “Who’s idea was this, Sarah?” and the little blonde giggled and said, “Vera’s in command. We discussed it while you and dear Gaston were chatting with those other men. She was too shy to tell you herself. She’s ever so prim, our Vera. But as we’re never likely to see you lads again, and there’s so little time, we agreed there was no sense mucking about with long-winded explanations.”

He finished undressing, and as he hauled the smaller, softer Sarah in for a get-acquainted feel, chuckled fondly and said, “I heard you tell her it was true what they said about Frenchmen. I guess I must have disappointed her in that department.”

Sarah coyly reached down between them to take his shaft in her smaller, stranger hand, and giggled as she said, “Variety is the spice of life for us, too, you know. But, coo, she might have warned me about this!”

She was just being polite, he knew, for he’d seen Gaston with his pants off. So he really didn’t see what all the fuss was about when he rolled Sarah on her back and entered her. But she seemed to think he expected her to gasp and groan, “Oh, not so deep until a girl gets used to it!”

Then she wrapped her soft arms and stocky legs around him to screw like a little blond mink.

He found her smaller, more well-padded body a welcome change, too, and aside from that, a worry off his mind. The taller, slimmer redhead had said some dumb things during the night, while carried away by passion, and-it was good to know the girls weren’t going to be pining away for either of them, after all. He wondered why that sort of pissed him off. Sarah was a great little lay, but even as he laid her, the idea of Vera offering her red-thatched snatch to old Gaston right next door made him feel a little used and abused, for some reason. The idea that the tight blond snatch he was in at the moment had been inspired to sex madness by Gaston’s skilled tongue just made the whole thing seem sort of dirty, the way a guy liked it, when ships were passing in the dark or, in this case, lamplight.

There was no window in the room. So he made a mental note to keep track of the time as he got to know his new bedroom associate better. Sarah knew they didn’t have all day, either. So he’d no sooner come in her old-fashioned than she insisted on getting on top.

He didn’t argue. By now he’d have been completely spent, had it not been for the new inspiration of strange stuff. The strange shaft in her inspired Sarah, too. She braced the bare soles of her tiny feet flat against the sheets on either side of his hips and played stoop tag on his love stalk as her big soft breasts bobbed alarmingly in time with her movements. He grinned up at her. She grinned back, dirty, and asked, “Do I screw as good as Vera?”

He said, “I don’t know why all you dames want to know that much about each other. I don’t want to be compared to old Gaston.”

She giggled and said, “You’re prettier and nicer, this way. But would you tickle my clit, please? For some reason it feels so sensitized this morning.”

He reached down to strum her old banjo, politely, but in truth it was getting to be just showing off, or, worse yet, work. There was a fine thin line between a good sport and a slut, and old Sarah didn’t have much couth.

He knew he’d never come this way now. So he suggested dog style, and Sarah would have done it in a pig sty, with a pig, he was sure. So they wound up with him standing by the bed behind her where he didn’t have to look into her amoral and not too bright eyes as he humped her very pretty rump. He managed to climax that way, at last, after Sarah had come thrice dog style and swore undying love and devotion. He decided to quit while he was ahead. He knew he’d never forgive himself if he’d gotten into anything that nice without coming at least once. But enough was enough.

As the chubby blonde lay face down across the sheets, purring, Captain Gringo sat on the edge of the bed and fumbled for both his pocket watch and a smoke from among the jumble on the bed table. He forgot the smoke as he saw how late it was getting; He patted Sarah’s bare behind and said, “I’ll see you around the campus, Doll. Gotta grab a whore bath and get dressed.” Sarah answered with a soft snore. He chuckled wryly and headed for the crapper. That was the trouble with the bitch goddess, Sex. When she offered a quickie, or, worse yet, nothing but your fist, Sex filled your head with endless possibilities. But let a poor guy or gal get a shot at all their fantasies come true and their poor bodies gave out long before they could take Sex up on her offer in full.

There was no tub and the tap water in the sink, of course, was cold. But there were plenty of washrags and towels, so what the hell. He washed and dried and went back to put on the new outfit. He put his money belt on under the khaki shirt and wore the gun rig over it, under the light whipcord jacket. Then he put on the felt hat, picked up the carpetbag the change of duds had been delivered in, and blew Sarah’s bare ass a kiss as he went out to the parlor to wait for Gaston.

He didn’t have to wait. Gaston was seated on the settee, fully dressed. The Frenchman said, “Ah, there you are, mon sleepy head. Why the luggage?”

Captain Gringo hefted the carpetbag and said, “A guy attracts less attention boarding a train with a bag in his hand.”

“Merde alors, what train? We are armed and once more in the money, with a coast of clearness, non?” “Non. Too many people looking for us here in San José. If Hakim’s ruse worked, they’ll be looking for us in Puntarenas, too. That leaves the east coast. So get off your duff and let’s get the fuck out of here!”

Gaston rose and followed. But as Captain Gringo locked the spring latch of the front door after them, Gaston frowned and said, “I thought we agreed to cross everybody double, Dick.”

“Them was the good old days. Last night somebody tried to get us, and it wasn’t Hakim’s people. That makes them even bigger bastards in my book. So I think we’d better go along with the bastard we know until we at least figure out who’s gunning for us.”

~*~

They did. Nobody had the railroad station staked out and the train ride down to the jungle-covered lowlands was as uneventful as it was uncomfortable. But by the time two more of Hakim’s people had met them at the Limón station and whisked them away to another hide-out in the favilla slums above the waterfront, secret-service agent Purvis was getting pensive up in San José. As his assistant, Rumford, entered the office, Purvis said, “Just got a long-distance call from Puntarenas. We’ve been slickered. Neither Walker nor that little Frenchman were really aboard that train last night.”

Rumford protested, “They must have jumped off somewhere along the way then, sir. My boys tailed them to the station and saw them get on board.”

Purvis shook his head and said, “I listen in on other people’s telephone conversations. Two British agents did more than follow them to the station. They bought hasty tickets and got on the train after them. They just called Grey stoke from Puntarenas and, you think our guys are confused? The Brits lost them aboard the train! One minute they were there, drinking gin and tonic in the club car. Then they apparently headed back to the coach cars. The Brits finished their own drinks and followed, casually. But guess what, neither seemed to be seated anywhere in the coaches. Greystoke’s men looked. In every seat of every coach. How do you like them apples, son?”

Rumford frowned and answered, “Like I said, sir, they must have jumped off.”

“Going downhill, through the mountains, fast, with a sheer drop on one side and a solid wall of whizzing rock on the other? They didn’t jump. Both us and the Brits were slickered.”

“But how, sir?”

“Try her this way. What if Captain Gringo and Gaston Verrier never got on in the first place?”

“But we saw them board the train, sir!”

“You mean you thought you saw them board it. It was dark. The station is illuminated by faith and a firefly or two at night. Two guys about the same size and wearing the same outfits left the posada we knew they’d been staying in. So everyone assumed they were tailing the renegade and his sidekick. But they were tailing a couple of other wise-asses, who simply changed clothes somewhere on die night train and simply sat down to enjoy the ride with their bare but unknown faces hanging out. I can’t prove it. But it works better than anything else I can come up with.”

Rumford nodded. “Anything else won’t work at all, sir. So what are your orders, now that we’ve lost them?”

Purvis growled, “Who says we’ve lost ’em? They’re not here in San José, unless my street people lie for no reason. They never went to Puntarenas, so that note Walker left about El Salvador was a crock. He wouldn’t have said he was going there if he really was in any case. That leaves what, Rumford? You’re supposed to think once in a while, too, you know.”

Rumford did, and said, “East coast, of course. That’s all that’s left, and we did pick up that rumor about a mysterious Spanish naval vessel stranded somewhere along the Mosquito Coast, remember, sir?”

“I remember. It’s good to see you’ve been paying attention, too. So do you really need a diagram on the blackboard, Rumford?”

“Nosir. With your permission, I’ll take a team of field agents down to Limón and see if we can locate those rascals again.”

“You do that, son. But be careful. Walker and Verrier are dangerous as hell, as a German agent found out to his sorrow last night.”

Rumford frowned and asked, “Where do German agents enter into this case, sir?”

Purvis said, “I wish I knew. Obviously our boys and the Brits weren’t the only ones watching that posada. This morning the local police picked up the body of what they thought was a native cabdriver near the German legation. I took the liberty of staking out the San José morgue, and guess what, about an hour ago, Jager, the Kaiser’s top Latin American troubleshooter, checked said stiff out for a proper burial. He told the guys at the morgue the guy was related to a Costa Rican cook at his legation and he wanted to do the right thing.”

“Naturally he didn’t send the dead man to any local undertaker we have on the payroll, sir?”

“Naturally. We do spread a little cheer among the underpaid help at the morgue. So we know the cabdriver, who didn’t have a local coach license, by the way, was shot with a .38. Neatly, between the eyes.”

Rumford nodded and said, “The renegade packs a double-action .38 and used to win pistol-shooting contests regularly when he was a troop leader back in the States.”

Purvis nodded and said, “So don’t let him get the drop on you, and watch out for the throwing knife the Frenchman carries at the nape of his neck. The next eastbound train leaves in less than an hour. What are you waiting for?”

“Full instructions, sir. Are my orders to pick them up or just keep them under surveillance for now?” Purvis said, “By now they know what the hell the deal is. So, yeah, you’d better pick ’em up. Alive, if possible. But take no chances.”

~*~

The reason most of the population of Costa Rica had settled in the highlands to the west was that the coastal lowlands were hellishly hot and buggy. The squalid shacks of the Limón favilla had been thrown together from salvaged crates, palmetto matting, and flattened tin cans and oil drums. There was no street lighting because there were no streets in the favilla. Just a maze of narrow muddy lanes running crookedly between the casually constructed shacks, with a ditch here and there to carry rain water and shit that hopefully floated somewhere else. The resultant stench was enough to gag a pig. But it failed to keep away the flies, mosquitoes, rats, and tropical cockroaches almost as big as rats.

The air was a little better, albeit still eye-watering, inside the hideout the two soldiers of fortune were holed up in, with two sleepy-eyed mestizo gunslicks and an old black crone in one corner who kept cooking plantains and red peppers in deep fat for some reason. No human stomach could have eaten such an awful mess. But perhaps destroying the appetites of her temporary boarders was her idea of home economics.

Captain Gringo and Gaston couldn’t do much plotting behind Hakim’s back with two of his guys in the same one room with them. The mestizos, in turn, answered every question anyone asked them with a sleepy, “¿Quién sabe?” So it was shaping up to be a long night.

Things got worse when it started to rain. The warm tropic rain on the tin roof didn’t cool the air enough to matter but filled the shack with steam room mist and mosquitoes seeking shelter. Gaston slapped his own face, reflexively, and said, “Mon Dieu, I can’t remember when I last spent such a lovely evening.” He turned to the old black woman and asked when or if she intended to produce something they could sleep on, hopefully drier than her mud floor. She cackled like a witch and went on stirring her deep fry. Gaston sighed and said, “Merde, that’s what I thought. Eh bien, why don’t we trim the lamp and just jack off in privacy, hein?”

Captain Gringo told him to shut up and took out his watch. He said, “It’s early yet. I think they just brought us here to make sure nobody tailed us from San José.” He smiled a question at one of the guys who’d brought them this far and the mestizo yawned and said, “¿Quién sabe?”

Actually Captain Gringo was right. For, though things were dull as hell in the squalid shack, all sorts of people were up to all sorts of things out in the rain.

Secret-service agent Rumford and his five-man team had no way of knowing just where in the favilla Captain Gringo and Gaston might be, of course. But Rumford ' was a pretty good field agent, so it had only taken him an hour or so to establish that, since the men they were looking for were not holed up in any of the regular hotels and posadas along the waterfront, they had to be holed up somewhere in the slums of what was, after all, little more than a village.

U.S. secret agents weren’t supposed to annoy the local natives if it could be avoided. But could it hurt to move from shack to shack in the dark to press a discreet ear against a paper-thin wall? It was time-consuming as well as soggy work. But Rumford and his men had plenty of time, and plenty of guns, so what the hell.

On the far side of the favilla, another secret agent, named Wolfgang Vogelshorst, had the same idea and a couple more men than Rumford as he carried out the orders of his superior, Oberst Jager of Der Kaiser’s intelligence service. Vogelshorst had been told not to come back without Captain Gringo and Gaston, dead or alive. He wasn’t as worried about local feelings. People just had to understand that the fatherland had a mandate from a German-speaking Gott. So his team was moving faster, simply barging in on bewildered favilla dwellers for a quick look, a click of the heels, and a move next door.

Meanwhile, Greystoke of British intelligence had known for some time about Sir Basil Hakim’s way station in the Limón favilla. Greystoke had been trying to put the Merchant of Death in Dartmoor for some time, and it wasn’t really all that hard for British intelligence to infiltrate an arms combine based in England. But the team of agents Greystoke had sent had been ordered to proceed with caution and see if they could find out what in the devil Hakim had hired Captain Gringo for before they moved in on anybody.

So as British agents watched the shack and German and American agents moved in on it from north and south, the two soldiers of fortune swatted mosquitoes in blissful albeit bored unawareness of the more serious troubles closing in on them. Gaston said, “It must be getting late. That disgusting mess that disgusting crone is cooking is beginning to smell good. It couldn’t be fatal to eat just a little of it. She eats it all the time, and she must be at least a hundred and ten, non?”

He’d spoken in his version of English. But Captain Gringo told him to watch his big mouth anyhow. One never knew how many languages a lady that old might have picked up in her considerable years on earth. Captain Gringo’s stomach was starting to growl, too. But in the end they were saved from having to try deep-fat-fried plantains and peppers.

The packing-case door of the shack popped open, and as the four men inside all went for their guns at the same time, the slim youth in wet poncho and dripping straw sombrero said, “Papadakis sent me. The Peirene is ready to weigh anchor and the coast is clear, I think.”

Captain Gringo put his .38 away but asked, “Who the hell is Papadakis and what do you mean you think the coast is clear?”

The younger stranger said, “Skata, do you want to sail with us or do you want a soapbox lecture? Spyros Papadakis is the skipper of the sponge schooner Peirene. I am Kantos, ship’s cook and interpreter. What else do you need to know right now? Let’s get out of here. My skipper likes to sail with the tide and he has a temper!”

The two soldiers of fortune rose to their feet. The local hired guns didn’t. So Captain Gringo knew they weren’t going along. This wasn’t what was making the hairs on the back of his neck tingle as he said, “You said you thought the coast was clear? Run that past me again, Kid.”

Kantos shrugged and said, “I spotted someone crouched behind the shack across the way just now. But it may have just been some native peeping Tom, eh?”

Captain Gringo frowned and answered, “In this rain? What do you think, Gaston?”

Gaston said, “I think it would be most stupid to leave by the front door when the back wall is nothing but palmetto matting, non?”

Captain Gringo nodded grimly, reached into his pocket, and took out a few coins and his jackknife. He tossed the coins to the old woman in the corner and told Gaston, “Trim the lamp,” as he slashed the back wall down one side.

Gaston, Kantos, and the two mestizos thought it was a good idea, but as Gaston plunged the shack into darkness, save the glow of charcoal under the deep fat fryer, the old woman screamed like a banshee and leaped to her feet to stop what she regarded as a shocking vandalism, to hear her tell it.

Kantos grabbed the old woman and held her as Captain Gringo cut an L-shaped flap and said, “Bueno. Let’s go!” So Kantos dumped the wailing old woman on her duff and followed the two soldiers of fortune out into the driving rain, downslope between other close-spaced shacks.

Behind them, the old woman still rent the soggy air with outraged wails. They weren’t the only people who heard her. The German team had worked its way close in any case, and Vogelshorst heard the old woman shouting, “Damn you, Captain Gringo!” So he hissed, “Los, that shack we just saw the peon in that poncho enter! Follow me!”

They did, as Vogelshorst charged the shack, shooting his Mauser with more noise than effect until one of the surprised mestizos still in it cracked the front door, aimed at the German’s gun flashes, and blew out the charging German’s brains.

His more-cautious followers flopped belly down in the mud and proceeded to smoke up the shack with stolid Teutonic thoroughness. A Mauser slug through the thin front wall sent the old woman headfirst into her deep fat, spilling her and scalding hot grease all over the floor. So the two triggermen still on their feet had hot feet indeed as they charged out, screaming and shooting wildly, one leaving by way of a thin spot in the south wall instead of following his comrade out the front door.

The one who’d charged out the usual exit, bellowing in pain, was of course hit twice before he made it across to the shack in his line of unplanned evacuation. But he was still on his feet and firing ahead of him, dazed from his pain and wounds. So when one of his .45 rounds took a British agent behind said shack in the chest, the Brit he’d just missed growled, “Oh, I say!” and dropped the mestizo in the middle of the path with a well-placed Webley round.

Then he winced and hit the wet dirt as a German, firing at his muzzle flash, spanged a bullet off the corner of the shack near his head. So he was more than a little ticked off when another Brit crawled over to him and asked, “What’s up, Mate?”

He fired in the general direction of the German team before he replied, “Don’t know. But some beggers seem to be shooting at us!” So the second British agent, and then the whole British team, was soon pegging shots at the Germans, who of course returned their fire, not knowing what else to do, with their leader dead.

Meanwhile, Rumford and the U.S. secret-service team had been taught that when in doubt, one should always advance on the sound of the guns. So they were running up the crooked path between the shacks to find out what the hell was going on, when the mestizo gunslick who’d charged out the side wall and may have been a bit overexcited came around a corner , spotted them, and fired from the hip.

Rumford grunted, said, “Shit!” and went down with a .45 slug in his thigh, adding, “Get ’em!” even as his men were blowing the mestizo away with their own smoking guns. Then they reloaded and moved on, grim faced and thoroughly pissed, even if they weren’t sure why.

It was too good to last, of course. Once the secret-service men charged in to fire at every muzzle flash they didn’t know personally, the casualties on all three sides began to get too serious for sensible people to accept. So all three teams began to fight what each thought a strategic withdrawal, dragging their dead and wounded with them.

Obviously, Captain Gringo had a bigger gang than any of them had expected, damn his renegade soul!

~*~

The real Captain Gringo and Gaston of course had heard and been somewhat bemused by the sounds of the mysterious firefight behind them as they followed Kantos through the quieter parts of the favilla to the darker end of the Limón waterfront. There, Kantos showed them to a longboat held against the quay by other Greeks manning it. They all piled in. Kantos snapped something that was Greek to Captain Gringo, and they rowed out through the darkness to a big dim shape that might have been a schooner and smelled just awful.

“What’s that stink?” asked Captain Gringo.

Kantos said, “Sponge. Haven’t you ever smelled sponge before?”

“Sure, but no sponge I ever scrubbed with smelled like … let’s see, battlefield and cesspool, with spoiled fish thrown in?”

“You’ll get used to it,” Kantos replied, adding, “The sponges you bathe with are just the soft skeletons of the creatures we dive for. We let them rot until their meat can be rinsed out of the odorless framework, see?”

“No, but I can sure smell ’em! How come you guys have to have rotten sponge aboard, Kid? I thought this was really an undercover salvage mission for Woodbine Arms.”

Kantos shrugged and said, “It’s supposed to be an innocent sponging schooner, too. A sponger that does not stink is not a sponger. Such details can be important, if one meets a nosy patrol vessel, no?”

Captain Gringo had to agree, however reluctantly. At least it was cooler out here on the water, and dead sponges didn’t really smell much worse than that old woman’s cooking had, once one got over the surprise.

The longboat bumped against a ship’s ladder and Kantos went lightly up it, then the soldiers of fortune followed. On deck they were introduced to a burly dark figure who reeked of dead sponge and garlic. Kantos said Captain Papadakis spoke neither English nor Spanish, but they shook hands with him anyway and Kantos said, “Come. I’ll show you to your quarters. It’s going to be very busy on deck for a while.”

It was noisy as well as busy as they followed Kantos forward to a hatchway. Behind them the skipper was yelling and apparently cursing in Greek as chains rattled, lines were heaved, and so forth. By the time they’d been shown to a tiny stateroom furnished with no porthole and with built-in top and bottom bunks, they could feel the schooner was under way. Gaston stared about in dismay and said, “Merde alors, you call these quarters, M’sieur Kantos? I have spent the night in more than one jail cell more luxurious!”

Kantos shrugged and said, “You should see the crew’s quarters, up in the bows. We were told to take good care of you. These are officer’s quarters, on a Greek sponger. The other people Hakim has on board are no better off.”

Captain Gringo asked, “When do we get to meet them, and when do I get to see the weapons Hakim promised?”

Kantos said, “Later. You’ll be able to meet the other passengers in the ship’s mess, and your machine gun as well as their salvage gear is in the hold, of course. But you’d better stay here quietly until we’re well out to sea. I’ll come for you as soon as the skipper’s good and drunk.”

Captain Gringo laughed and asked “Is your skipper in a nicer mood when he’s drunk, Kid?”

Kantos replied soberly, “He’s never in a nice mood. But when he’s drunk he can’t hit anything he throws at people.”

“He throws things at people? Why?”

“We’ve often wondered. But the last crewman who asked Papadakis why he had such a vile disposition wound up in the scuppers with a split scalp. I have to go now. I could wind up with a split scalp if I don’t get back to my galley. I’ll send your food to you in a little while. Meanwhile, there’s a bottle of retsina in that cupboard by the heads of your bunks. Lock the door after me. The boy I send with your tray will knock once, then twice. Don’t open up for anyone else.”

Without waiting for an answer, Kantos left. Captain Gringo sat on the bottom bunk and muttered, “Jesus, what kind of a tub have we wound up aboard?” Gaston said, “I told you I did not want to take this sea voyage.” Then he opened the cupboard, took out a clear glass bottle filled with amber fluid, and uncorked it, adding, “Eh bien, perhaps it could be worse.”

He took a swig and handed the bottle to Captain Gringo, who did the same, wheezed, and said, “Jesus, you might have warned a guy! What is this shit? It tastes like turpentine, for God’s sake!”

Gaston said, “It’s retsina, or what the droll Greeks regard as wine. It’s an acquired taste, as you just observed, but in the legion we learned to drink everything. I’ve no idea why Greeks put pine tar in their booze and asphalt in their coffee. But they are both strong as the devil. So let’s have the bottle back if you’re a sissy, hein?”

Captain Gringo took another experimental sip, frowned, and said, “It’s not so bad, once you get over the first shock. But I sure hope that Greek cooking on its way tastes more like Mom’s apple pie.”

Gaston took the bottle, swallowed a healthy jolt of retsina, and sat down beside him, saying, “This may help if we drink enough first. Greek cooking is something one must be born a Greek to understand, I fear. As a Frenchman, I’ve never understood why the English like their chocolates and marmalade so bitter. But next to a Greek, an Englishman suffers from a sweet tooth. Wait until you try Greek olives. I think they pickle them in quinine. I have yet to figure out how they manage bitter cheese. But that seems to be the way they like it.”

Captain Gringo tried some more retsina and said, “Oh well, young Kantos speaks pretty good English, and if he’s the cook he might know English tastes. If the others Hakim’s sending along work for Woodbine, they’re probably Brits, and English marmalade’s not as weird as this stuff.”

Gaston took out a smoke as he mused, “Eh bien, I noticed the slight clipped British accent the boy spoke his English with. What did you think of our young Kantos, Dick?”

“What’s to think? He’s just a young Greek sea cook who probably picked up his English working in Cyprus or even London, if he’s working for Woodbine Arms. He seems like a nice enough young guy. Why?”

“I think he combs his hair on the wrong side. You know what they say about Greek boys, hein?”

Captain Gringo grimaced and said, “You should hear what they say about French boys sometime. Okay, he did seem a little effeminate. But that’s not our problem, unless you want to bugger him.”

Gaston laughed lewdly and said, “One imagines our gallant skipper already reams his petite rectum well and trés often. That no doubt accounts for the swishy way he walks, non?”

“Don’t you ever think of anything but sex, Gaston?”

“Mais non, why should I? It’s the only thing that makes existence on this otherwise banal planet worth the time and effort.” He took another swig of retsina and added, “Aside from this, of course.”

“Hey, you’d better go easy on that booze, Gaston. You’ve already put away half the bottle, on an empty stomach, too.”

“Sacre God damn, Dick, when has a Frenchman ever gotten drunk on wine?”

Captain Gringo chuckled fondly and said, “Many many times, you old goat. I keep telling you and telling you that you just don’t have the body weight to drink like a fish, but do you ever listen?”

“Of course not. Every time I listen to you I wind up in a gunfight or a war.”

Before the younger American could answer they heard one knock, then two, on the stateroom door. So Captain Gringo rose to open it, and a scared-looking little Greek came in with a tray in each hand. He must not have spoken English or Spanish, since neither worked on him. But when Gaston took his tray as well and said, “Efcharisto,” the Greek grinned, nodded, and crawfished out, muttering all sorts of things Captain Gringo didn’t understand.

He locked the door again, sat down by Gaston with his own tray, and said, “I didn’t know you spoke Greek, Gaston.”

Gaston said, “I don’t. All I know is that ‘efcharisto’ means merci beaucoup, the ‘kore’ is the one who gets on the bottom and the ‘kouros’ is the one who gets on top, and, oh, oui, ‘skata’ means shit. That is enough to get laid in Alexandria, if one waves money about as one speaks. I think that one was a swish too.”

Captain Gringo didn’t care if the galley crew was swishy or not. He was more worried about what Gaston had said about Greek cooking. He dug in, put what looked like scrambled eggs and bacon in his mouth, and said, “Hey, this tastes just like bacon and eggs. Let’s try the home fries … Yeah, they’re good too. You’re full of shit about Greek cooking, Gaston.”

“Eh bien, I told you there was something sneaky about that Kantos. We may put in at some mainland port on the way to the Bahías. If we do, I vote we jump ship there and quit while we’re ahead! Our skipper is an obvious lunatic and the Greek cook can’t be a real Greek. Seriously, Dick, I’m really beginning to worry now!”

~*~

Gaston wasn’t the only one who was worried that night. Up in San José, secret-service agent Purvis was burning lots of midnight oil and tobacco as he tried to get a handle on the general confusion. His phone was ringing again. He picked up on the third ring and heard, “Greystoke here, British Intelligence. We need a bit of a favor from Uncle Sam, Purvis.”

“Do tell? What can we do you for, Greystoke?”

“Your new battle cruiser Pittsburgh is paying courtesy calls at various Central American ports and is due to arrive at Limón within twenty-four hours, right?”

“Maybe. Keep talking,”

“Our own RN in these waters is spread a bit thin, and for some reason Whitehall sterns to think vessels left over from our French wars suffice to show the Union Jack in these parts. Your cruiser’s the fastest thing with guns we could get a message to in time. We’d like to, ah, borrow her for a sea chase.”

Purvis laughed incredulously and replied, “I’ll bet you would. But the USS Pittsburgh wasn’t built by the U.S. taxpayers for the Royal Navy, Pal. Who did you say you were chasing?”

There was a cautious pause. Then Greystoke said, “Same chaps you lot are. We’ve reason to believe Captain Gringo and Gaston Verrier just left Limón aboard one of those ubiquitous Greek spongers. We know for a fact the so-called schooner Peirene is faster than she looks. A British subject who should be ashamed of himself saw fit to install a torpedo-ram engine in her when he bought her from her original Greek owners a few months ago. But your Pittsburgh should be able to overtake her easily enough.”

Purvis frowned thoughtfully and said, “You’re still holding out on me, Pal. Walker and the Frenchman aren’t wanted by the British government, and I know for a fact you guys have hired them to pull some chestnuts out of the fire for you in the past!” Greystoke sighed and said,-“Those were the good old days. They’re working for the wrong side now. Actually, we don’t want to hang your renegade. We just want to question him and, above all, stop him! He seems to be up to something murky for a peer of the empire who also dabbles in international skullduggery. We’re willing to turn those two soldiers of fortune over to you as soon as we’re finished with them, of course. But if we don’t get cracking, they’ll be out of reach bloody soon!”

Purvis growled, “You’re all heart. You know we want those guys. But our navy may take some convincing. When did you say that schooner left Limón?”

“Around ten-thirty, on the ebb tide. What difference does that make, Old Bean?”

Purvis laughed harshly and said, “You just saved me an argument with our navy department. Walker and the Frenchman couldn’t have left Limón aboard anything at ten-thirty. At the time in question they were shooting the shit out of a team I sent to arrest them in the Limón favilla. So they’re still there, and, come morning and some light on the subject, we’ll be sending in some marines from the Limón consulate to do it right!”

There was another cautious silence on the other end of the line before Greystoke said, “That’s odd. Some of our lot was involved in a messy firefight in the same favilla tonight. You don’t suppose ...?”

“Don’t be silly. Our guys tangled with natives, not your guys. Our field agent, Rumford, got a look at the guy who put him on the ground with a bullet in his leg. He was a ragged-ass guerrilla type, like the renegade usually teams up with.”

“Couldn’t they have left a rear guard as they headed for the schooner?”

“Surely you jest. I told you they shot the shit out of my boys and chased them clean out of the favilla! We’re talking about trained gunfighters, Greystoke. There’s only one guy in these parts who could have led such a neatly planned surprise attack, and they call him Captain Gringo. So that Greek sponger’s all yours. Unless, of course, you’re ready to deal with the cards face up on the table for a change.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t beg my pardon. Tell me what the fuck is going on! I’m not about to stick my neck out and request sea chases at the expense of the U.S. taxpayers until I know what in hell they’re chasing, and how come!”

“I told you, Captain Gringo and the Frenchman are—”

“Bullshit!” Purvis cut in, adding, “Who do you think you’re trying to green? If Walker was smoking up your guys about the same time he was smoking up ours, you know as well as I do he couldn’t have been fishing for sponges at the time. You made another slip just now, Buddy Boy. You said that schooner was owned by a British peer. Ergo, you want Uncle Sammy to take the heat instead of you when Queen Vickie gets around to asking awkward questions, right?”

“I assure you, stopping that vessel may well be in the best interests of your government as well as mine, Purvis.”

“So tell me about it.”

Greystoke couldn’t, of course. So Purvis said, “That’s what I thought,” and hung up.

Over at the German legation, the officer who’d been listening in on the tapped line didn’t hang up. He handed the earphones to his assistant, tore off the top sheet of the pad he’d been covering with shorthand notes, and headed for the office of his superior, schnell!

Oberst Karl Jager was a handsome middle-aged Prussian who would have been handsomer without the saber scar on his left cheek or if he’d at least smiled once in a blue moon. His face wore no expression at all as he took the sheet of foolscap from his underling and read it, leaning back in his severe desk chair behind his severe desk.

He didn’t have to have shorthand transcribed for him. Jager could read shorthand, Russian Cyrillic, and, if need be, Arabic. That was one of the reasons Der Kaiser had made him a colonel. The other reasons were that he was utterly dedicated to the German Empire and was a coldblooded killer who made even the bully-boy Kaiser a little nervous at times.

Jager put down the paper, stared thoughtfully up at his junior officer, and mused aloud, “Zo! A picture begins to emerge from the mists at last, nicht wahr? Our men were not the only people ambushed in the Limón favilla earlier tonight. Great minds must have been running in the same channels, if both the British and Americans had the same idea of nipping Hakim’s plans in the bud. Our men, too, reported shooting at least one native guerrilla, obviously led by this Captain Gringo. Gott im Himmel, such a fighting man he must be! Such a pity he is not on our side. We could surely use such a man when Der Tag arrives!”

His aide saw he was expected to say something. So he nodded and said, “He and the little Frenchman must be good indeed if they shot their way out of such a situation, Herr Oberst. I can see what must have happened, now. As you say, both the British and Americans were closing in on them as well as us. But of course they must have had lookouts posted and—”

“Never mind the past,” Jager cut in, adding, “It is the future we must deal with now. Greystoke may be right about die time that Greek vessel left port. On the other hand, he could be wrong. They are not as professional as we are and we don’t know when the Peirene left port.”

He rose and moved over to a big wall map to stare at it with his hands clasped behind him. His aide’s balls were itching, but one did not stand at ease around Oberst Jager unless he told one to, and he never did. Jager stared at the map for what felt like a million years to the aide’s balls. Then he said, “They could have waited. Or they could have put in further up the coast to wait for those soldiers of fortune. In any case, we know what the Peirene is up to so far from Greek waters, nicht wahr?”

The aide risked a sneering chuckle as he said, “We always know more than the stupid British and Americans, Herr Oberst. Shall I send a message to have the schooner cut off by one of our own disguised commerce raiders?”

Jager turned, stared at him as if he’d just crawled out from under a rock, and snapped, “Don’t be an idiot! If those soldiers of fortune are aboard the Peirene it can’t be stopped at sea without a fight, and if I wanted it sunk I would not have put my own agent on board. We are intelligence officers, not young Herrs engaged in blood sports, so let us act intelligent! If Hakim has those soldiers of fortune aboard for security, it may complicate our plans a bit, but not enough to change them much. Before we do anything about that salvage operation we must let them find that wreck for us! Nobody working for us seems to be able to pinpoint it among those unmapped keys and reefs of the Bahías. Hakim may not know where it is either. But if he does, it solves two problems for us. We’ll know there’s a leak in our navy and we’ll be able to salvage that U-boat ourselves!”

He went back to his desk and sat down again, growling, “We still don’t know why it went down in that storm. It wasn’t supposed to go down in any storm. We have to know what went wrong before Der Tag. For Der Kaiser is building a fleet of sister ships for Der Tag and ... never mind. I am not going to serve mein Kaiser sitting here and talking to meinself. When does the next train leave for the east coast?”

“The last midnight train just left, Herr Oberst. There will not be another leaving before morning. But I can send someone over for your tickets right now.”

“Don’t bother. I always carry tickets. One never knows when such things may come in handy. But I can’t wait until morning. Have mein thoroughbred saddled and waiting for me by the time I change into civilian disguise. Wire our agents at Pejivalle and Guagimo to have fresh mounts waiting for me. I see I have some riding to do tonight if I have to take personal charge of this unangenehm case!”

So, less than an hour later, a telephone at British intelligence rang, and when Greystoke answered, one of his field agents reported, “Jager just hit the east-bound trail in mufti aboard a mount that’s sure to drop dead if he doesn’t slow down between here and Limón, sir. Do you want him ambushed on the trail by, ah, bandits? We’ll never get a better crack at the murderous bastard.”

Greystoke sighed and said, “No. Alert our people in Limón and let’s see if he can lead us to that perishing submarine. Our agents up in the Bahías certainly haven’t had any luck looking for the damned thing!”

~*~

Aboard the Peirene, the rain-soaked chinos of Captain Gringo and Gaston had dried by the time Kantos came to lead them to the ship’s mess. The young sea cook had changed to dungarees, a pea jacket, and a wool knit cap. When Captain Gringo asked how their skipper was feeling, Kantos said, “He’s not feeling anything. He’s out like a light. But I don’t know what we’ll do when we run out of ouzo. Papadakis won’t drink rum and we’re a long way from anyplace we can buy more ouzo.”

Captain Gringo didn’t ask what ouzo was. He’d ordered it at a Greek joint back in the States one time. One time had been enough. If retsina tasted like wine laced with turpentine, ouzo was the real thing, pure turpentine, one hundred percent proof. Or maybe paint remover. He’d never swallowed enough to make sure.

They were expecting a salvage crew working for a British arms firm to be British, of course, so they were surprised to discover that none of the other passengers they were introduced to in the ship’s mess were. Hakim had recruited six other men and two women for the soldiers of fortune to guard as they searched for the mysterious Spanish submarine. The head of the team was a German-American naval architect called Keller. One of the dames, the big blond one, was his wife, Herta, a for-real German he’d married while working in Hamburg at one of Hakim’s shipyards he probably didn’t discuss much with his card playing buddy, the Prince of Wales. Keller said he’d worked on American Holland boats, too. So he probably knew his submarines. Second in command was a Hungarian named Horgany. So he’d gotten to bring his wife along, too, and she was the little Oriental-looking brunette called Eva, damn Horgany’s hide.

None of the others had their own sex lives aboard, assuming they preferred to screw women. Fitzke was a Swiss machinist. Olsen was a Swedish gunnery expert as blond as old Herta but a lot uglier. DuVal was a snooty-looking Frenchman who winced at Gaston’s French and said he was up on internal-combustion engines. The last male member of the team, Forsythe, had a British name but was a black Jamaican who knew his way around the Caribbean, he said.

As they sorted everyone out, the scared-looking little Greek from the galley served rum or coffee, depending, to all concerned. Gaston took coffee laced with rum or, to be more accurate, rum with a little coffee in it. Captain Gringo shot him a warning look, but Gaston kept swilling it anyway. Captain Gringo didn’t care if anyone else got smashed, but he noticed that while blond Herta stuck to coffee, the Hungarian girl, Eva, took her rum neat. It didn’t seem to be affecting her. She looked sort of wild anyway, with those animated slanty eyes rolling around as she tried to follow the conversation in English. Her own English seemed a little fuzzy, judging from her weird accent.

Once they’d all been introduced, the conversation rapidly went downhill. Captain Gringo had hoped someone there could explain more about the wreck they were searching for. But nobody seemed to know much more about it than the soldiers of fortune did. So he asked Keller, “Is this trip really necessary, if nobody knows where the effing wreck is?”

Keller shot a look at the Jamaican, Forsythe, who said, “We’ll find it, Mon. We already got it narrowed down to one of the uninhabited islands. For I got friends and relations on Roatan an’ Bonacca and they’d know was they a shipwreck thereabouts. They sort of in the wreckin’ business, when the fish ain’t biting, you see.”

“All too well. But isn’t there another main island, Forsythe?”

“Sure, Utila, closer to the Honduran coast. Ain’t got no contacts there. Old Honduran government too picky about black folks lighting beacons on a stormy night. But that Spanish sailor boy wasn’t picked up near Utila. They fished him out of the water amongst the bitty uninhabited keys further out. Before he passed away he say he didn’t make it far from the place his ship run aground, see?”

Gaston stared owlishly over the rim of his cup and said, “Mais non, there are no uninhabited islands among the Bahías, mon ami.”

So the big Jamaican shrugged and said, “Shoot, Mon, I hope you don’t consider no-good Nigger-Caribs People! You gotta have people on a key for it to be inhabited, right?”

Captain Gringo said, “Whatever Black Caribs are, they’re there. Do you savvy their dialect, Forsythe?”

“Hey, Mon, I’m civilized, even if I do have a healthy tan! Nobody savvies Carib, Black or otherwise, Mon. Do you meet a Carib, the first thing you has to do is shoot him in the head to gain his undivided attention! Nobody can talk to Caribs. It’s been tried. Those crazy Caribs ain’t ones for conversation. They shoot strangers on sight.”

Keller cut in to say, “We’ve gone over all of this before, Walker. The plan is for you to man the machine guns, trained on the shore, as we cruise just out of arrow range, searching each key in turn for some sign of the wreck.”

“What if it’s under water?”

“We have diving gear, if it comes to that. I don’t see how a vessel that size could be completely under, since the coral flats between the islands are shallow. If it did find a hole to settle into, there should be plenty of black oil staining the white coral sands of the nearest key, see?”

“If you say so. The salvage end ain’t my job. Did you say machine guns, plural?”

Keller nodded and said, “Hakim had us load two Maxims aboard with the other gear, along with plenty of ammo. You don’t have to worry about that now. They’re stored safely in the hold until we need them.”

Captain Gringo put down his coffee cup and said, “I need ’em now. Can you show me the way, Kantos?”

The young Greek looked surprised but nodded and replied, “If you wish. But we’re nowhere near the Bahías yet.”

He rose and said, “Yeah, and I want to check ’em out and mount ’em well before we get there. Coming, Gaston? You’ll have to man the stem gun, you know.”

Gaston looked up, bleary-eyed, and asked, “Is someone calling my name in vain?”

So Captain Gringo said, “Never mind. Let’s go, Kantos.”

They left the mess and moved forward along the companionway. Kantos had just pointed out a ladderway leading down to the hold when a door on the other side of the companionway slid open and the burly Papadakis popped out. Kantos sighed and muttered, “Skata,” as the skipper grinned owlishly, grabbed the young Greek, and dragged Kantos back into his cabin, straggling and protesting in Greek.

Captain Gringo followed the uneven match into the skipper’s evil-smelling stateroom, and as Papadakis wrestled Kanto to a bunk stained with vomited booze and worse, he asked mildly, “Are you in trouble, Kid, or just acting coy?”

Kantos gasped. “The animal is trying to rape me, dammit!”

So Captain Gringo shrugged, moved in, and rabbit punched the big Greek across the nape of the neck.

It didn’t work. Papadakis let go of his first victim and stood up to turn with a bearlike roar as his bloodshot eyes focused on Captain Gringo. Then he growled deep in his throat and grabbed for the American who’d love to have tapped him for some mysterious reason. Papadakis didn’t just growl like a bear. He was strong as a grizzly and not nearly as nice as he proceeded to slam Captain Gringo against the door jamb over and over again, obviously most annoyed but oblivious to the punches the big Yank was throwing, even as they tore hell out of his blind-drunk face!

There had to be a better way. Captain Gringo kicked Papadakis in the crotch as hard as he could. The monstrous Greek grimaced in pain, but hung on and slammed the now dazed American against the wood again. So Captain Gringo growled, “Oh, shit,” drew his .38, and shoved the muzzle deep in the big Greek’s paunch as he pulled the trigger.

That worked better. Papadakis stared sadly at him from his ruined face, tried to say something, and let go to fall backward like a redwood cut off at the roots. He hit the floor with more noise than the muffled shot had made. Captain Gringo slid the door all the way shut behind him before he shook his head to clear it and asked Kantos, “What happens now?”

Kantos sat up on the bunk, stared soberly down at the big corpse between them, and murmured, “Now we both die. You don’t understand my people. He was our captain!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, the drunken brute just tried to sodomize you, Kid. Don’t you have any rules at all in the Greek merchant marine?”

“Yes. One rule is that the master’s word is law, at sea. The others hated him as much as me. But we Greeks are an inflexible race, and there is only one way to deal with mutiny at sea, so... “

Captain Gringo put his head to the closed door a moment before he said, “I get the picture. But, so far, this is still our little secret. Nobody seems to have heard that muffled shot.”

Kantos shrugged and said, “What of it? It’s only a question of time before he’s found, and everyone knew how he’s been after my body, so—”

“So shut up and listen, Kid. The rest of the crew knows he had a serious drinking problem, too. Guys who stagger around drunk aboard a ship at sea sure fall overboard a lot, don’t they?”

Kantos gasped and asked, “My God, do you think we can get away with it?”

Captain Gringo said, “We’ll have to, unless we want to do some swimming ourselves before morning. You go first and see if the coast is clear. Trim the companionway lamps as you lead us to the nearest way up on deck. What are you waiting for, Kid? Move!”

Kantos did. They got away with it. As the dead skipper went over the lee rail and hit with a soft splash amidships in the shadows of the moonlit sails, someone aft called out in Greek, albeit casually, and Captain Gringo hissed, “Don’t answer! If the helmsman doesn’t put about, and puts it together later, he’ll feel too guilty to speak up. Let’s get down to the hold fast. That’s where we’re supposed to be right now, remember?”

Kantos nodded and led the way down to the hold ahead of the engine-room bulkhead. It was dark, of course, until the young Greek struck a match and lit a hanging lamp that helped a little bit. Captain Gringo had to find the arms and ammo himself amid the other stored gear. But he managed. The two machine guns were packed in petroleum jelly, bless Hakim’s heart, and aside from being spanking new as well as rust free, the headspace had been set right, for a change. He grinned and said, “One thing you gotta hand the old gunrunner. He knows his guns. Now what’s the matter?”

Kantos was leaning against a nearby packing case, crying like a frightened girl. Captain Gringo put a comforting hand on the shoulder of the rough pea jacket and said gently, “Hey, look, it’s over, see?”

Kantos sobbed, threw both arms around Captain Gringo, and kissed him passionately on the lips. Even worse, it felt good!

The big American shoved the little Greek away, gasping. “For God’s sake, Kid, I thought you didn’t go in for that sort of thing! I know I don’t!”

Then he saw what had happened when the force of his shove had knocked off the other’s big knit cap. As he stared in wonder down at the heart-shaped face staring up at his adoringly from between raven’s wings of long black silky hair, he blinked and gasped. “For God’s sake, Kid, are you one hell of a convincing fairy or a real girl?”

Kantos looked just as surprised as she asked, “Didn’t you know I was a woman, Dick? I didn’t try to hide it from you. I just thought you considered me plain, until you saved me from Papadakis!”

He laughed like hell and said, “I’d have hit him harder had I known what he was really after! But that male costume had me sort of confused, Kantos. Is that a Greek girl’s name, by the way?”

“Kantos is my family name. My first name is Antigone. Don’t you want to kiss me ... Dick?”

He did. It felt a lot nicer, knowing their first thrilling kiss hadn’t meant he was starting to get strange, and as he held her closer, leaning against the packing case, it seemed impossible that he’d ever thought the body under the pea jacket was that of a sort of soft-looking boy. The thick wool still left a lot to be desired, though, so he started to unbutton it for her as they tongued each other and made nice nice. But she stiffened and said, “Not down here, Dick. What if someone should come?”

Coming was just, what he’d had in mind. But he said, “Yeah, we’d better get these guns topside and mounted under tarps before we take our pants off. Do the other crew members know you’re really a girl, Antigone?”

“Of course, although it would be cruel of me to wear skirts at sea where the wind blows so much. But even Papadakis respected me, when he was sober. Back on Kríti—you call it Crete—my male relatives have a certain reputation for dealing harshly with anyone who insults their kinswomen. So now that you have saved me from Papadakis, my virtue is safe once more.”

“Oh, hell, there went a great notion!”

She laughed and said, “You don’t have to worry about my virtue, Dick. You are not a Greek from Kríti, see?”

He wasn’t sure he did. But the next hour or so kept him too busy to worry about the social customs of Greek villagers, as they mounted machine guns fore and aft. Nobody argued about the nails they drove into the deck up by the bows. But as Captain Gringo got to work on the stem gun, the sleepy-looking helmsman back there asked Antigone in Greek if they’d cleared all that hammering with the skipper. She assured him they had and rather cleverly added that Papadakis was up in the bows at the moment, if the helmsman wanted to clear it with him. The Greek at the helm repressed a shudder and said no thanks. So they lashed a tarp over the securely mounted Maxim and went to Antigone’s cubby near the galley to see her etchings or whatever.

She didn’t have etchings to show her newfound friend, but as she undressed in the little one-bunk chamber by soft lamplight she reminded him not a little of the marble nymph her much uglier schooner was named after. But as he enveloped her white flesh in his arms there was nothing cool as marble about her, and when she pulled him down on the bunk and spread her creamy thighs in welcome, there was something a lot yummier than a fig leaf between them.

As he entered her she gasped in delight, then sighed. “Oh, God, I’m really in trouble now!”

That was enough to cool a guy some, even amid such lovely warm surroundings. He said cautiously, “Don’t you know how to, ah, take care of yourself, Antigone?”

She wrapped her soft white limbs around his waist to hug him deeper as she smiled up at him adoringly and said, “I didn’t mean that sort of trouble, darling. Heavens, I’m a sea cook, not a blushing virgin. It’s just that I was hoping one time would be enough to, ah, thank you properly.”

“You didn’t have to thank me this way, Kid. I’d have hit him even if you really had been a boy.”

She giggled and moved her hips teasingly as she replied, “I’m so glad I’m not. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed this sort of thing, discreetly, and I can feel you haven’t had a woman for some time either, true?”

He started moving in her faster as he said, growling, “Let’s save the pillow talk for later, huh?”

So they did, and it was wonderful. Despite Gaston’s jokes about Greek loving, Antigone needed nothing odd or acrobatic to enjoy sex in a healthy peasant fashion, and, with her moving under him so nicely, Captain Gringo found all the inspiration he needed to keep going as they made old-fashioned earthy love, climaxing together over and over until by wordless mutual consent they stopped to get their second winds.

She sighed and said, “That was lovely, dammit. You make love the way I always imagined the elder gods atop Mount Ida must have done, back in the Golden Age.”

“You’d make a pretty good fertility goddess, too, Antigone. So what’s to damn about it?”

“I’m going to want more, of course. But now I know there’s no way I’ll be able to get all I want of you.”

He kissed her and smoothed her black hair across the pillow as he chuckled and said, “No problem. Both the other women on board are married, so I’m all yours, Kitten.”

She sighed and said, “It’s not that simple. We’ll have to be very discreet. I told you some of the crew are from my village back on Kriti, and if my people ever found out—”

“Okay, we won’t tell anybody we’re lovers. Who’s to know if we don’t do this on deck a lot?”

She sighed and said, “We’re not completely safe even here. Oh, Dick, if only we could be alone together on some desert island, instead of risking our reputations like this aboard a crowded little schooner!”

He sighed and said, “I usually get to have this conversation by the cold gray light of dawn, around Monday, with luck. Are you saying this has to be a one-night stand, Antigone?”

“If only I had that much strength.” She sobbed, kissing him in sudden passion and groping for his semi-erection to guide it back where she wanted it.

But after they’d come again she said, “You know I can’t resist you. So you’ll have to be strong for both of us.”

“I wish you’d make up your mind, Kid, I can be strong as hell, once I know what a lady wants!”

She sobbed. “I want you inside me every waking minute, day and night, but we have to be discreet about it. We don’t dare risk this every night. What if we agreed to only try to get away with it every other night? That way, one of us could make a point of being with someone else when the crew knows the other is in his or her quarters alone, see?”

He laughed and said, “Okay. Who do you suggest I sleep with when I’m not sleeping with you, the blond German dame or the little spooky Hungarian?”

She didn’t have his sense of humor. She sank her nails in his buttocks as she pulled him deeper in and said, “If I catch you looking at another woman, now that you’re mine, I’ll feed your liver to the sharks, darling!”

She sounded like she meant it.

~*~

It took the crew almost until noon the next day to notice their skipper was missing, and not miss him all that much. After some debate it was decided he must have fallen overboard in one of his drunken fits and that the first mate, Venezis, was automatically their new skipper.

Passengers as well as crew found Ilias Venezis a vast improvement over the late Papadakis. Venezis was a calmer, smaller, older man who’d been running the Peirene most of the time in the first place, and now that he was in full command, he seemed able to do so without hitting anyone. Better yet, Venezis spoke a little English as well as a smattering of Spanish. So the Jamaican, Forsythe, could get through to him when they were approaching a reef.

There were a lot of those along the east coast of Central America, but the big Jamaican was fantastic at spotting them well before the lookout up on the main mast could. The jovial Jamaican explained that in his day he’d met most of the reefs of the Caribbean personally, with a keel, and so he knew all too well what it meant when the whitecaps ahead seemed to be running against the prevailing trade winds from the northeast. Venezis told his helmsmen not to argue with the big black when and if he yelled at them to give the schooner hard right rudder. So the next few days passed serenely enough, save for a few close calls when the Jamaican was eating or taking a crap.

The nights were more fun for Captain Gringo and Antigone, or at least every other night was. She’d weakened the night following their first get-together. But after screwing him silly while bitching all the while about her reputation, she was adamant about him spending every other night with Gaston, who probably found it just as boring.

With nothing to make love to but his fist and a bottle of rum, Gaston was enjoying the voyage less, and bitching about it more than Antigone was.

Captain Gringo wasn’t in the habit of discussing his conquests. But Gaston had things figured out, once he’d seen Antigone at mess in a tight seaman’s pullover. The others on board had of course known earlier that their sea cook was a lady in pants. Gaston said he admired Captain Gringo’s taste and asked him what she tasted like. Captain Gringo told him to find his own stuff to eat, and Gaston said, “Merde alors, if only one could, aboard this stinking species of tub! But the big blonde seems devoted to her damned husband, and the wild-eyed Hungarian creature has been trés difficult to get alone.”

They were having this conversation in the privacy of their tiny stateroom, of course, as Antigone had said no that night. The schooner was sailing through the darkness with the sails reefed and the engine just ticking over, dead slow. Forsythe had to sleep sometime, too.

Captain Gringo let Gaston rave on as he played with himself in the top bunk until the horny Frenchman said, “I’m sure the Hungarian girl is hot for adventure. She shows the whites of her eyes trés alarmingly, considering her Oriental eyes.”

Captain Gringo growled, “Keep it down to a roar, you old goat. The bulkheads are thin, and her husband, Horgany, is a lot bigger than you.”

“Merde, not where it counts, I’ll bet. That little Eva is gushing for a good lay, I tell you. Aside from being perhaps a bit taller than me, Horgany drinks too much for a man who means to keep his woman satisfied.”

Captain Gringo snorted and said, “Shit, Gaston, nobody aboard this tub’s been drinking more than you!”

“That’s different. I have not been called upon to keep it up for that little Hungarian spitfire. Besides, you are wrong. I have only been trying to stay drunk. Horgany drinks himself into a stupor every night before going to bed with all that ooh-la-la! It’s a crime against nature, I tell you!”

Captain Gringo thought about that as he lay naked under the sheet in his bottom bunk. He had thought he’d picked up a few bedroom glances from little Eva at mess that night, and, yeah, Horgany had been socking his booze away pretty good. But he told Gaston, “You’d better stay true to your fist, anyway. Lots of dames flirt just for practice, and we have enough problems now. Speaking of Hungarians, isn’t Hungary part of the Austrian Empire at the moment?”

“Oui, but what has that to do with my poor frustrated cock?”

“I’m trying to figure out how come we’ve been sent to spy on German naval architecture with so many guys who speak German. Keller is a Yank who’s spent most of his adult career in Germany. Horgany’s a subject of the German-speaking Hapsburgs. Fitzke says he’s Swiss. But he’s from the German-speaking part of Switzerland even if he is.”

Gaston shrugged and said, “What of it? Olsen, DuVal, and Forsythe are not Boche, and it stands to reason Hakim would want people who can read German dials and so on, non? Besides, the species of international death dealer has arms factories in Germany as well as England, non?”

“Yeah, if there’s one thing I admire, it’s loyalty. How far in the future do you figure that big war Der Kaiser seems to be arming for gets to start, Gaston?”

“If my French countrymens have anything to say about it, twenty years at the most. We still owe the Boches for 1870, and next time ...”

“Yeah, I figure the Brits will get into it too. So where will that leave Hakim, if he doesn’t screw himself to death first?”

“Very rich, of course. That is why he wants to know how Linke-Stettin underbid him. He obviously intended to build submarines for everybody”

Captain Gringo frowned and mused aloud, “I wish I knew if we were doing the right thing, dammit. My own country’s liable to get into it, if it’s a big enough war, and I’d hate to think I helped Hakim if one of his underwater gunboats ever sinks a Yankee ship!”

Gaston laughed and said, “Who says either of us will get to live long enough to find out? If we make it to the end of this century, I, for one, will be astounded. Besides, if Hakim can prove his rival’s submarines are no good, Spain will stop buying them, and a Spanish-American war seems a lot more likely, in our time, non?”

“Yeah, but what if Hakim starts building underwater gun buckets for Spain? He will, you know, if they ask polite.”

“Mais oui, but you forget how slowly the gears of Spanish government turn, Dick. If you Yanks don’t finish off the Spanish Empire within the next few years, you’re not as seriously annoyed with them as young M’sieur Hearst would have one believe. If the Spanish navy is forced to change its plans, it will take them at least ten years of trés tedious discussion. I agree Hakim is a treacherous toad. But in this case he may be on the side of the angels despite his satanic tendencies.”

Captain Gringo yawned and said, “We’re talking in circles. But what the hell, we’ve gone along with the game so far, and even if we had a crystal ball, who’d listen to a couple of guys like us? Let’s get some sleep.”

He closed his eyes and tried to. Then he stared up at the creaking mattress between them and muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake, Gaston, can’t you do that when I’m not sleeping under you?”

“I do. Is it my fault I am more passionate than your cautious Greek girl friend? If I do not keep this damned thing satisfied it tends to get me in trouble. I have never gone in much for sodomy, but that mess attendant, Socrates, is starting to look better to me every time he bats his big brown eyes at me!”

Captain Gringo laughed despite himself and said, “Socrates? Is that the little Greek boy’s name?”

“Oui. Worse yet, he speaks a little French and says he loves me. So if you don’t want me getting merde all over my adorable dong, just leave me alone and let me satisfy it less disgustingly!”

Suiting actions to his words, Gaston proceeded to jerk off harder. Captain Gringo wrinkled his nose, sat up, and pulled on his pants. He knew he was probably being puritan, but it still smacked of homosexuality to him to share a stateroom with a grunting and groaning jerk-off artist. So he decided to enjoy a smoke on deck while Gaston enjoyed himself.

The moon was high and the sea was calm and phosphorescent as he moved up into the bows on his bare feet. The trades were gentle and clean-smelling, albeit a little cool against his bare chest. But he wasn’t uncomfortable enough to go back down for his shirt. He’d only brought one cigar topside. If Gaston wasn’t asleep by the time he finished it, he’d just have to knock out the crazy son of a bitch.

He’d moved to the bows to avoid the effort of conversation with the night watch, aft. He didn’t think it was true about all Greek boys. Save for little Socrates, most of the crew seemed masculine enough. But trying to make small talk with guys who didn’t speak English or Spanish could be another kind of pain in the ass.

So he was a little annoyed when he found someone else up in the bows, leaning against the waist-high forward cabin. He tried to remember what Antigone had said was Greek for “howdy.” Then he saw it was Herta Keller, the big German blonde. So he said, “Gut aben,” and she laughed and said, “It’s Guten abend, Dick. I thank you for the thought, but perhaps we’d better stick to English, nicht wahr?”

He laughed too and said, “Yeah, you would have heard more English than I’ve heard German, married to a Yank.”

Herta looked away and asked, “Why is the water shining so? I have seen phosphorescent waves in European waters, of course, but never so bright as this. The sea looks as if it were on fire all around, nein?”

He moved over to the mounted machine gun and checked the lashings of its tarp as he said, “Yeah, some nights the waves are bright as hell. But let’s not talk about it. It stirs up bittersweet memories of a lady who wrote poetry about green liquid fire and all that poetic stuff.”

“That sounds like the sweet part, Dick. What was the bitter? Did she say no?”

“She said yes. Then she got killed in a fight she had no part in. I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”

He was tempted to go back below. He could see that she was as bad as Gaston when it came to talking. But she was a lot prettier, and he’d just lit a claro, so he moved over and rested his buttocks on the cabin coaming next to hers instead. As he did so, the schooner heeled a bit and placed his hip bone closer to hers than he’d intended. She didn’t move away. So he stayed where he was.

There was a moment of awkward silence. Then he said, “I understand your husband worked for Hakim in Hamburg.”

Then it was her turn to look away and ask, “Do you have to talk about him? Oh, look, a shooting star! I wonder if we both just made the same wish, Dick.”

He sort of wondered, too. But he said, “I’ve a reason for asking about what you guys were doing in Hamburg, Herta. Hakim says his rivals built that mystery sub at Kiel.”

“So?”

“So how come he knows so much about Linke-Stettin’s shipbuilding techniques if he’s never worked around ’em?”

She hesitated, then said, “If you must know, my husband did once work for Linke-Stettin in Kiel. They fired him, of course. Sooner or later they always fire him. So now we find him working for a degenerate named Hakim, and is not a life of travel and adventure wunderbar?”

She didn’t sound like she meant it. He said so. She shrugged and said, “When we married I expected him to take me to America. If I had wished to stay in Germany I would have married a German.”

She shuddered and added, almost to herself, “Gott, if only I’d met a nice Russian, or even a Turk. But that is what one gets for guessing wrong.”

He said, “You’re right. We’d better not talk about your old man if you’re ticked off at him.” But then he couldn’t help asking, “What happened, Herta, did you two have a little spat this evening?”

She made a wry face and said, “We never fight. We have an understandings But, Gott im Himmel, with a toy?”

“Holy Toledo! You have to be kidding! A man would have to be nutty as a fruitcake to pass up something as nice as you for ... uh, it’s not Socrates, is it?”

She sobbed and said, “Who else? That’s how he lost his job with Linke-Stettin. That’s how he always loses his jobs with real men! He says variety is the spice of life and that I must understand he really loves me in his own way. But, Gott im Himmel, how would you feel if your husband made love to other men, Dick?”

He tried not to laugh as he said, “Pretty weird. I’d feel funny being married to another man even if he didn't cheat on me. I feel for you, but I just can’t reach you, Herta.”

She took one of his hands, placed it in her lap as she spread her thighs under her thin cotton skirts, and asked calmly, “What if I help you reach me, Dick?”

He was reaching her pretty good. His questing fingers could feel the moistness of her aroused or vengeful vagina as he held her closer with his other arm but said, “Hold it, we’ve got some ground rules to work out here, Herta. You’re a married woman and I’m—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, while you’re acting coy my husband’s locked in our stateroom with my male rival for the night! Don’t you want me, Dick?”

“I wouldn’t want you to think I was a sissy, too. But what if your old man gets excited about the cruel things you’re doing to my hand?”

She lay back atop the cabin as she rubbed his hand harder between her thighs and asked, “Who’s going to tell him?”

He said, “You, for openers. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t want more than a feel, Herta, but I’ve been around this block before, and the one thing you can count on when a woman cheats on her husband for spite is that she’s sure as hell going to let him know about it sooner or later.”

She started pulling up her skirts as she insisted, “I said we had an arrangement. He says it’s all right for me to seek variety too, the brute. Naturally he knows I don’t like girls. But he never so much as said I couldn’t join him in his mad passion for men, so what are we waiting for? Stop teasing me, Dick. I want it now!”

He knew she was going to be just as pissed and just as likely to get him in trouble with her husband if he rejected her at this late date. So he stood up, got between her bare chunky knees, and dropped his chinos to enter her, standing, as he held her spread legs like wheelbarrow handles. She gasped and pleaded, “Not so deep! Let me get used to it first, for Gott’s sake. It’s been so long since I’ve had a real man in me and ... Ach, nein, forget what I just said and do it, liebling!”

So he did and, thanks to Antigone, was able to do it right. Aside from being rested and not a little frustrated by the Greek girl’s on-again-off-again ways, the contrast between the big chunky German blonde and the dark petite Antigone served to inspire him to new heights. But as soon as he’d made the frustrated Herta come, of course, she started getting cold gray thoughts and said, “Nein, not again. Not here on the open deck! What if someone should come?”

“We just did. But you may have a point. Let’s see, we can’t go to your place and we can’t go to mine so … oh, sure, Socrates has a cubbyhole of his own next to Antigone’s and we know he won’t be using it tonight, right?”

She blanched and asked, “Do you really think I’d let you lay me in that disgusting sodomite’s quarters?”

“Why not? Your husband’s laying him in your quarters, isn’t he?”

Herta laughed, told him how awful he was, and then they pulled down her skirts and pulled up his pants to go somewhere they could do it right.

As they locked themselves into the mess attendant’s perfumed cubby, he lit the lamp and cautioned her, “No conversation. His boss, the cook Antigone, is right next door and we wouldn’t want to give her a bad impression of poor Socrates, see?”

Herta managed not to giggle too loud as he dropped his pants again and helped her undress by soft lantern light. As he got his first good look at the buxom blonde in the buff, it was as if that first quickie up on deck didn’t count. For if Antigone, next door, had the body of a petite marble nymph, this one was built like a Wagnerian soprano made of angel-food cake with lemon frosting.

She fell back on the fortunately fresh sheets the fussy fairy had made his bed with earlier that evening and welcomed him with open arms and legs as his raging erection found its way home again through the familiar blond brush. They went deliciously crazy together for a time, and though they tried to keep the moans of passion down to a roar, they must not have been as quiet as they’d hoped, because they suddenly heard a dainty fist pounding on the bulkhead and then they froze as Antigone, on the other side, cursed them roundly in Greek.

It got worse. As they lay entwined in each other’s flesh, they heard the Greek girl next door get up, stomp on her sea boots, and them slam her own door as she moved out to the companionway. The next time she knocked and swore, it was on the cubby door they’d entered through and, hopefully, locked right!

“Don’t answer!” Captain Gringo whispered as Antigone kicked the door with her sea boots and yelled something awful through the panel in Greek. Despite herself, Herta giggled. On the far side, one feminine giggle probably sounded much like any other, so Antigone spat, “Skata!” and stomped off in a huff.

Herta said, “We’d better get dressed and get out of here schnell!”

But he said, “That’s the sure way to get caught. We don’t dare open that door until she’s back in her own quarters, see?”

“What if she’s going to tell her captain on us, Dick?”

“I don’t think she is. But if she is, we’re no worse off in the end. The odds are better on getting caught if we try to sneak out now after all the hell she just raised out there. Let’s just enjoy life while we wait for things to simmer down.”

“I am too nervous now to make love! What will you do if the captain comes to that door, Dick?”

“Tell him to go away, of course. He speaks English and I don’t think he’s married to Socrates.”

“Mein Gott, that might make him think you, too, are like mein husband!”

“Yeah, well, better me than you. We haven’t tried it dog style yet, Doll. Or would you rather get on top?”

She laughed a little wildly and said, “This is pretty funny, once one thinks about it, nicht wahr?”

He didn’t think it was going to be funny if Antigone figured out who was in there. But he grinned back at the big blonde reassuringly and said, “You wanted to play dirty tricks on your old man. So let’s get dirty some more.”

She said, “All right.” Then she rolled over on her stomach, placed a pillow under her to raise her rump invitingly, and said, “Let’s pretend I am a Greek boy, too.”

He frowned down at her heroic rear and said, “I thought you said your old man was the one who went in for that sort of thing, Herta.”

She said, “He is. I’ve never let him put it in me that way. So I’ll really be cheating on him if I give myself to you that way, ja?”

“I think I grasp your logic, sort of, but I’m not sure this is such a good idea, if you haven’t done it before. They tell me it’s sort of an acquired taste, Herta.”

“Who told you, boys or girls?” she asked archly as she arched her spine and reached down with both hands to spread her cheeks for him.

He didn’t answer. He heard movement next door and knew Antigone had come back from her snit. He didn’t want Herta sounding off again. So he got above and behind her, spit on two fingers to lubricate her anal opening, and eased it in the naughty way as Herta groaned and said, “Gross Gott!”

“Hush! Do you want me to stop?”

“Nein, it feels ... interesting, now that I have gotten used to it and, ach, ja, do it do it do it!”

He didn’t have to do much, and now he knew she was full of shit, as well as cock, about never having done it that way before. Nobody moved like that unless they liked it a lot, and he had it on good authority, albeit all female, that nobody liked it that much back there the first time.

But what the hell, he’d known she was a cheat from the beginning, and it was sure a change, so... Then the skipper pounded on the door and yelled at them in Greek, which was all Greek to Captain Gringo, save for the name, Socrates, which old Venezis seemed to be cussing hell out of.

Captain Gringo knew he was in a hell of a mess whether he answered or not. So he just kept buggering Herta to get at least a last good orgasm out of an otherwise dismal mess. Then someone else shouted in Greek, farther away, and Venezis shouted something that must have meant “Just you wait!” before he ran off down the companionway. Captain Gringo smiled in pleased surprise and ejaculated in Herta as, next door, Antigone tore out of her own quarters again. Herta pleaded, “More, more, deeper, Dick!” But he said, “Save it for a rainy day, Doll. We’re never going to get a better chance to get out of here now. I’ll hit the light and go first. Haul on your duds and don’t follow me unless the companionway is clear. It should be. Everyone seems to be up on deck for some reason. So that’s where I’m going, too!”

He pulled up his pants, put out the lamp, and cracked the door to see if he was right about the companionway being empty. It was. So all he had to do was find the nearest ladder and go up on deck. When he did so, he saw that everyone was crowded in the stem. So that’s where he went, too, calling out, “Hey, Gang, what’s up?”

Antigone grabbed his bare arm and hauled him closer to the taffrail, saying, “There, back along our wake. Where in the devil have you been, Dick? I just looked for you in your stateroom but Gaston said you’d just left.”

“Had to go potty. Let’s not worry about that now. I have to get the tarp off that Maxim, dammit!”

He elbowed his way through to the stem gun, shouting, “Everybody but the helm forward and take cover, dammit! Don’t any of you know a coastal pirate when you see one?”

As the others at least started giving him some elbow room, Venezis said, “My lookout’s been watching it for some time, Captain Gringo. It just began to move closer a few minutes ago.”

Captain Gringo stripped off the tarp and armed the Maxim, growling as he said, “He should have given a holler sooner. Vessels in these waters are supposed to show running lights, unless they’re up to something sneaky.”

“We are not showing our running lights, Captain Gringo.”

“That’s what I just said. Get everybody forward, dammit! They’re closing fast and you’re not supposed to wait until you’re in range before you duck, see?”

“We are cruising at reduced speed and they are not closing too fast. What if I ordered full speed ahead, Captain Gringo?”

“In the dark, in uncharted waters off a lee shore? No thanks, I’d rather take my chances with the dangers I can see. Hey, Forsythe, you anywhere in this crowd?”

The big Jamaican joined him at the taffrail to ask what he wanted. Captain Gringo pointed the way the jacket of his Maxim was aimed and said, “You know these waters. What the fuck is that chasing us?”

Forsythe squinted and replied, “Hard to tell in this light, Mon. But it’s too small for a gunboat and coming up our wake too fast for a sailing craft.”

The mystery vessel bounced over a wave through a patch of brighter moonlight and the Jamaican said, “Hey, you know what that is, Mon? That’s a sea sled, that’s what that is, Mon!”

Captain Gringo almost asked a dumb question. Then he remembered seeing something about sea sleds in some magazine and said, “I thought those newfangled speedboats only raced in quiet waters.”

The Jamaican nodded and said, “They supposed to. I saw one flip like a flapjack in Kingston harbor when they had a race there last year. But till it flipped it was beating every other craft in the water, Mon. I suppose a mighty good helmsman, in a mighty good hurry for some mighty good reason, could skip a sea sled across the high seas did he have to. That boy coming up our wake must be either crazy or good, Mon!”

Captain Gringo squinted through his machine-gun sights as he frowned and said, “It’s a sea sled all right, but it’s not going full speed. It’s just cruising, not planning, and Venezis is right that we could outdistance it easy.”

Forsythe said, “Not did it open up full throttle, Mon. That fool back there is playing some sort of game with us. You mean to shoot it up?”

“I can’t, yet. It’s just out of range and, yeah, hanging there, the son of a bitch. How many passengers could you cram in a sea sled, with guns?”

The big black shrugged and said, “Six or seven at the most. I don’t see nobody aboard that funny notion. Unless they’re all down on the duckboards. Mon, that sure is a crazy way to go to sea!”

Above and behind them, they heard the masthead lookout shout in Greek. Captain Gringo called out to anyone who was listening to tell him what that was all about, and Antigone came over to kneel at his side and explain, “Nikos, aloft, says he thinks there is yet another vessel on the horizon, astern. He makes it a topsail schooner and it, too, shows no running lights. Oh, look, the funny little boat is gaining on us now!” Captain Gringo swore and snapped, “Forsythe^ grab the wheel and heel us as close to a right angle as you can get!”

“Which way, Mon, windward or alee?”

“Just do it! That son of a bitch coming up our wake isn’t full of guys, it’s full of dynamite!”

Forsythe could take a hint. The big Jamaican made the helm in two bounds, took the wheel with one good shove that put the startled Greek crewman on his duff, and gave the Peirene hard right rudder to use the trade winds as well as the engine to whip her bows to the west as, up the wake, now doing at least thirty-five or forty knots, came the light sea sled some wise-ass out of range was steering by Marconi control!

“Skata!” Antigone gasped. “You’ve put us broadside to that thing!”

Captain Gringo snapped, “Hit the deck and stay there,” as he opened up with the machine gun. He didn’t aim directly at the guided missile. It was skipping wildly across the chop at the very limit of its stability now, as its distant controller opened its throttle to full speed. So he fired at an angle for it to cross while, up in the bows, Gaston at the other Maxim did the same, drawing an X of white water for the sea sled to cross.

It didn’t. As its scowlike plywood bows entered the crossfire they were treated to a moment of mock sunrise as the explosives-laden craft evaporated in a big ball of fire. Then they all got wet as the explosion lashed the Peirene with salt spray and soggy splinters.

Antigone laughed incredulously and asked, “How did you know Gaston was manning the other Maxim, Dick?”

He said, “He had to be someplace and he wasn’t here. Stay down. The sons of bitches are sending another one at us!”

He held his fire as he watched a second sea sled tear out of the darkness toward them like an enraged water beetle. It was moving even faster as the wise-ass manning its Marconi controls steered it zigzag in an attempt to outwit his aim. But, as Forsythe had observed, a flat-bottomed sea sled could only press its luck so far on the open sea. Just as it got within maximum range it hit a whitecap wrong, bounced high in the sky, and roiled over twice in the air before landing upright on its flat bottom with a mighty splash; then it tore off to the west across the curved wake of the Peirene as Captain Gringo put some plunging fire into it for luck.

Then, as the sea sled began to act like a water beetle indeed, he laughed and called out, “Forsythe! Hard right rudder and full speed ahead. We’d better get out of here poco tiempo!”

Antigone said, “It seems to be circling out of control now!”

He said, “Yeah, so let it circle all it wants. That other vessel’s not about to come any closer with that toy as likely to hit them as us!”

The big Jamaican at the helm didn’t want to discuss it. He just signaled the engine room full speed and, as the schooner’s powerful screw began to churn green fire in the phosphorescent sea, swung her bows north to put some distance between them and the mystery ship on the southern horizon.

So in less than an hour they seemed to have the moonlit Caribbean all to themselves again. But Captain Gringo stayed at the stem gun anyway until Antigone whispered, “You’re soaked to the skin, darling. Would you like to come to my cubby and get warm? I don’t think anyone will notice in all this confusion.”

He smiled wistfully and said, “We would, if another sea sled exploded against the hull while we were, ah, getting warm. I thought you said we had to be discreet, honey.”

“I know, but I’m feeling weak again. I should be ashamed of myself, but that damned little Socrates has a man in his cubby next to mine and I just know I’ll never get any sleep tonight anyway!”

He smiled innocently and said, “That does sound disgusting. Do you know who’s in there with him?” She said, “No. I thought he was the only one like that aboard, now that Papadakis has, ah, fallen overboard. But we’ve been at sea for some time and, well, I know how I feel right now!”

He said, “Me too. Maybe later, when things settle down. We shouldn’t have our heads together like this, if you really want to be discreet. Now that we seem to be in the clear, people are starting to pick themselves up off the deck and, oops, heads up, here comes Venezis.”

She quickly rose and moved away as the new skipper joined Captain Gringo at the taffrail and said, “The lookout says that other vessel has vanished. Should we slow down to leave less of an illuminated wake?”

Captain Gringo said, “Not just yet. The phosphorescence fades pretty fast.” Then he called to Forsythe, “Hey, Jamaica, do you think you could swing us shorewards into the mangroves without running us aground?”

Forsythe swung the wheel as directed and called for reduced engine speed as he said, “The odds are fifty-fifty with the seas on fire tonight. The Good Lord has lit a lamp unto my feet and I ought to see the shallows before I hit ’em. It’s dangerous ahead no matter which way we steers now. We should be just south of the Mosquito Keys by now. So we’ll likely run aground before morning anyways!”