Hard Case Crime: Honey in His Mouth (15 page)

The sea with the early morning sun falling across it looked licorice black, with swatches of scintillating brilliance following along on the wave crests.

“Not that you ain’t good company, but I would rather sit on the beach with Miss Muirz, if you know what I mean.” Harsh took off his shoes and socks and dug his bare feet into the warm sand. “What happened to that dish anyway?”

“She had a business trip to make. I imagine she may return today.”

“Yeah?” Harsh grinned. “I hardly got to know her, she was in and out of here like the Irishman’s flea. So she’s gonna be back, huh? Well, that should pick up things around here.”

Mr. Hassam looked at him with amusement. “You have my felicitations.”

Harsh eyed him. “Yeah. What in the hell’s a felicitation?”

“A blessing.”

“Yeah. You mean with your fingers crossed, the way you sound.”

A wave came swelling in and fell on the ash blond beach at their feet with an audible grunt. Mr. Hassam kicked some dry sand out of the wet sand. “Maybe we should get at the Spanish lesson.”

“If you say so.”

“How much do you remember of what we have already gone over, Harsh?”

For some time they practiced what Mr. Hassam called the lilt of the Spanish tongue, which Harsh decided was mostly a way of pronouncing each vowel with great clarity as if he was attacking the sound. He learned how to take the fuzzy edges off his vowels, and how to put vowel glides in certain places so as to lay a special emphasis. A lot of noodle soup, Harsh thought, but he kept at it.

“You are progressing excellently, Mr. Harsh.”

“Yeah. Well you would have a time proving it by me. This stuff is way out of my line. Say, am I supposed to be able to spout this stuff like a native? I’ll never make it.”

“A smattering will do.”

“Maybe this
El Presidente
made some speeches or something, ones that were recorded, that I could listen to. Wouldn’t that help?”

“That will come later.”

“Okay.”

They watched a small plane come down the shoreline. The plane had its nose down to within fifty feet of the surf and was making time down the beach. The pilot waved when he went past. Harsh waved back. “That’s a lucky bastard, that pilot. You know I always wished I could fly one of them things. Lot of ’em by here. Must be twenty, thirty, a day. Lot of sightseeing.”

“Tourists, I imagine.” Mr. Hassam was not much interested in the plane.

“Yeah, I suppose. A treat for them poor tourists, I bet, getting a look at a palace like this. It ain’t every day you see something that fancy.” The plane had passed on, dragging a broom of sound over the beach. “Take my old man, he wouldn’t believe this. He was a farmer. He had his feet in the clay all his life. He never knew he was sweating his guts out so some people could live high on the hog in places like this. I wonder what he would have thought, give him a look at this.” Harsh glanced at Mr. Hassam. “Maybe it ain’t nothing unusual to you, though.”

Mr. Hassam looked sober. “I, too, had a humble beginning.” He lay back on the sand and began to talk. He said Harsh might not believe it, but this was a far cry from his own youth also. All but the sand. The sand was the same. Sand was sand, and Mr. Hassam’s had been in dunes, hot as a furnace by day and as nice as a woman at night. “Mr. Harsh, I was born on the sand in a rug tent, begat by a father who bred white asses of fine quality which he exported to Mecca. He bought my mother in a market for a sum of silver piastres the equal of about twenty-five dollars American. Mr. Harsh, does that sound romantic, picturesque? It was not, believe me. I cannot remember a time when I was not hungry there in that desert, and you should have seen me, a skinny teenage kid riding a white ass or a camel. I was seventeen when my father sent me to sell a herd of the asses to a Mecca dealer, and do you know what I did? I took the money the dealer paid and I never went back. I have not seen my father nor my mother again until this day. I went to Damascus, became a fat boy in Damascus. You know what is a fat boy in Damascus? No, nothing nasty. Just a boy the desert has given a permanent hunger for food. I went to work for an importer. In time I found the importer was doing a smuggling business and paying off the local police and bigwigs with a bag of Dutch gold once a month, a bag of gulden left discreetly at the house of the girlfriend of an official. That Dutch gold intrigued me. For decades Dutch gulden have been the most dependable of the world currencies. Anyway, I befriended the girl, we tipped off the military, and we came out of it with one bag of Dutch gold. Or rather, I did, because I left the girl behind but not the gold, and went to Cairo for schooling, and then to Oxford, a great university in England, and then to South America to be a college professor with a specialty in finance. So you see, Mr. Harsh, one thing leads to another and here we are.”

Mr. Hassam fell silent and his eyes were shiny with memories.

Harsh waggled his toes in the sand and scratched his face around the edge of the bandage and wondered what was the pitch. He could not think of anything that could have put Mr. Hassam in a reminiscing mood. They had not been drinking or anything. The fat little slicker is leading up to something, Harsh decided.

“Yeah, Mr. Hassam, here we are.”

“Two men perhaps more alike in environmental molding than you at first presumed, eh, Mr. Harsh? Two men with the same greed and the same needs.”

Harsh watched a wave march up the beach. “So you figure I’m greedy?”

“Well, are you not?”

“Sure. I guess so. Who ain’t? When you come right down to it, who ain’t?”

“No one, I imagine.”

Harsh dumped sand out of one of his shoes.

“I don’t mind talking to you, Mr. Hassam. You’re a very interesting talker. But ain’t you afraid of wearing the bush out by beating around it? What I mean, why not come to the point?”

Mr. Hassam’s eyes were suddenly alert and shiny. “I was coming to the point.”

“Yeah? How, by way of Detroit and points between? What are you driving at anyway?”

“Harsh, I was pointing out that we both like money.”

“Well goddamn it now, I know what you were pointing out. I understand the word money.”

“Harsh, you had a narrow escape yesterday. With the telephone in the cabana, I mean.”

“I wouldn’t know what you mean. And if I did, I would have a hell of a time figuring out what it had to do with money. I’m sorry, I don’t follow you, Mr. Hassam.”

“Harsh, you did not knock that telephone off the table accidentally. What you did, you picked up the telephone to make an outside call. Possibly you planned to reach a confederate to help you crack this nut. You found the telephone was not an outside line, and Brother answered on the switchboard, so you pretended the phone had just been knocked off the table. That was quick thinking, Harsh. A man who was not alert, a man who did not have natural instincts of wariness, would have hung up the phone. That is what a stupid man would have done. But you did not. You were a wary man.”

Harsh watched the other intently. “Mr. Hassam, I don’t know what you’re driving at. You’ve got me going.”

“I am trying to tell you the telephone incident convinced me you are the kind of a man it would be safe to do business with, Harsh.”

“How was that?”

“You can think on your feet. I mean thinking on your feet comes naturally to you.”

“I guess opinions about that might differ.”

Mr. Hassam gave the neighborhood a precautionary look. “You do not need to call in an outside confederate, Harsh. Not when you have one ready-made who knows the ropes.”

“I guess you mean you and I might work something together.”

“Precisely.”

“We put out heads together, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“You help me, I help you. That the idea?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Hassam, how do you expect me to help you? I mean, what will I have to do?”

Mr. Hassam smiled thinly. “That will come. I am sure it will come. Frankly, I had not yet worked out a plan.”

“Well, you can help me right now. I already got my problem. My problem is fifty thousand dollars in that safe, plus nineteen hundred for my car. That son of a bitching Brother locked the money in the safe and gave me one key and kept the other key himself. My problem is to get my dough out of that safe.”

“Yes, I know about that.”

“There by God is one place you can help me right now.”

Mr. Hassam tilted his head back and watched an airplane that was circling high in the sky above the sea. “I do not have the other key to the safe, you know.” The plane’s wings gave off reflections of light like faint sparks.

“Well, I know one way to get the key off Brother. Knock the son of a bitch on the head and take it.”

“Yes. Yes indeed.” Mr. Hassam’s voice was dry. “Then you could pocket the fifty thousand, and off you could go. Right?”

Harsh’s eyes narrowed. “I get it.”

“You get what?”

“You wouldn’t just hand me the fifty thousand bucks now, would you. I mean, that would be a real sucker deal for you.”

Mr. Hassam nodded. “I think we are beginning to reach a sense of compatibility.”

“You could call it that, I suppose.” Harsh caught a movement near the house. “Look, Hassam, this sniffing around the post you’re doing, are you figuring you might latch onto a part of my fifty thousand?”

Hassam smiled. “Not in the least. I might even add to it, if things break right.”

The figure at the house was Brother, who had popped into view and was running toward them. “We better knock it off. Here comes Brother.”

“Where?” Mr. Hassam looked around.

Harsh pointed. “He’s got the ants for some reason. Look at him run.”

Brother ran toward them with the long loping lurching pace of a distance man. He had been interrupted while shaving for there was lather on one side of his face and he carried a towel in one hand.

Brother confronted Mr. Hassam breathlessly. “Miss Muirz. Long distance. Urgent. You are to return at once. I looked all over hell for you.”

“We were here on the beach, working on his Spanish.” Mr. Hassam’s face began to be less coffee-colored. “Urgent, you say? Has something gone wrong?”

Brother drew himself erect.
“El Presidente
has resigned.”

Mr. Hassam turned and ran toward the house.

El Presidente had made his move against the Catholics, and it had not worked out as he had hoped. Posturing, shouting, standing on the balcony of the Presidential residence on
Avenida del Libertador General San Martin—
he had learned the effectiveness of the balcony speech from Mussolini a long time ago—he made his bluff, screaming that he would resign his office if the people wished, if the people felt it would bring peace and prosperity. The expected cries thundered back from the mob below.
No, no! Prefero El Presidente! Viva la Señora de la Esperanza!
However the crowd had amounted to only about thirty thousand, which was disappointing, since the organizers of the
descamisada,
the shirtless ones, had worked like dogs and had been able to turn out but little more than half of the fifty thousand demanded of them. Also the wave of hysteria that swept the shirtless ones was neither violent nor long-lived.

The moment he got back from Miami, Mr. Hassam could sense a change in the people. He went to the bank at once. Not officially an officer of the bank, he had however access to its information pipelines, and the conclusion he drew was that the inevitable had come. He heard that two Catholic leaders, two prominent Bishops, had been tossed in jail accused of sex perversion. Mr. Hassam felt the bastard had made a real big mistake there. Rumors were tearing like sky rockets through the town, the main one a report that some of the army leaders had been unable to stomach the rank thing with the Catholic prelates, and had set up a clique among themselves.

Mr. Hassam had as yet found no reliable evidence that
El Presidente
had resigned. He wondered if the bastard was shacked up somewhere with one of his tarts and doing nothing about the situation, happy to fiddle while Rome burned. Mr. Hassam was fairly sure he had resigned, however, or was resigning—Miss Muirz had said so, and Miss Muirz was the one person
El Presidente
was likely to confide in.

The telephone rang in Mr. Hassam’s office and he jumped like a gazelle.

“My place. Right away. You took your time getting down here.”

Miss Muirz’s voice.

“On my way. Did my best.” Nervousness made Mr. Hassam just as cryptic as she.

Miss Muirz lived in a four-story house in
Calle Corrientes,
and this was Mr. Hassam’s first visit to the house. He expected to be impressed and he was; the luxury, the costliness of the furnishings, struck him as fantastic. Also the taste was far worse than he expected, so bad that he wondered if she had gone back to sleeping with
El Presidente,
although the way the grapevine had it, for two years this had not been the case. The garish display of gold bric-a-brac, tapestries and old masters was exactly the kind of rich foulness that appealed to
El Presidente.
Or maybe, Mr. Hassam reflected, Miss Muirz was keeping the awful decorative scheme intact as a shrine to her memories, in which case
El Presidente
must have been a better lover than anyone thought.

Doctor Englaster arrived shortly and was let in by the same unspeaking, dour-faced servant who had admitted Mr. Hassam. Miss Muirz had still not made an appearance. “Good afternoon, Achmed. You got the call also, did you?”

Mr. Hassam did not like to be called Achmed. It was his given name and it was also the name under which he had once been sent to prison. “Is it true, Doctor?”

“I am not sure. Rumors. Rumors everywhere, like buzzing hornets. Have you any facts?”

“I have seen no one who is on the inside.” Mr. Hassam waved a hand at the room they stood in. “I am surprised she has not loaded up a lot of this crap and dumped it in the river. I would if it was me.”

“The place is a bit of a circus ring, all right.” Doctor Englaster had found a cabinet which turned into a bar when one lifted the top. “I see we have potables here. What do you say we place a cushion, liquid form, under the shock I suspect we are in for.”