Ник Картер - The Spanish Connection

I stared at the wreckage below us. “Are you saying that Rico Corelli never was at Sol y Nieve at all?”

“I’m saying that he certainly hasn’t been here — or at any other hotel in the Sol y Nieve — for the past month or so. If his cover name is Mario Speranza.”

“But then—”

“Don’t you see it? Maybe he knew about Tina. Maybe he knew she had hired a hit man to kill him.”

I shook my head to clear it. “And all that jive about the meet was simply to set up Tina Bergson’s death?”

“Not at all. I’m saying that Rico Corelli must have known about Tina Bergson and Barry Parson. And he just didn’t come to the resort at all. Everybody else thought he was here — the hit man the Mafiosi hired, the hit man Tina hired — and us, because we wanted to meet Corelli. Everybody was here but Corelli!”

“Then where is the son of a bitch?”

Kelly shrugged. “I think we’d better put a signal out to Hawk and start all over again.”

We got up to climb the hillside, but I could not leave it alone.

I turned and looked down at the wreck again.

“Why did she go out that way?”

Kelly shook his head. “She was a beautiful woman, Nick. Beautiful women do dumb things. She must have loved Corelli. And hated him, too.”

“Or loved that money,” I said.

“You don’t think much of people do you, Nick?” Kelly sighed.

“Should I? Should I, really?” I calmed down. “I guess she figured it was a better way to go than to run all over the world trying to get away from Rico Corelli’s paid guns.”

“She’d never know when he was going to hit her,” Kelly observed dispassionately. .

“I wonder where the bastard is now?” I mused half aloud.

We were the first ones down for breakfast next morning. In spite of Juana’s glowing look, she was spiritually depressed. I laid it to the fact that we had botched our assignment.

We had a Continental breakfast and sat in the bright light of the sunshine eating it. I suggested a morning of skiing before departing from Spain, but she demurred.

“I just want to pack up.”

I nodded. “I’m going up to the Veleta and do a run or two.”

She nodded, her thoughts far off.

“A penny?”

She failed to respond.

“Two pennies?”

“What?”

“For your thoughts. What’s the matter?”

“I guess I was thinking about the waste of human life. Tina Bergson. Barry Parson. The Mosquito. Rico Corelli’s first double. And even Elena Morales — wherever she is.”

I reached across and gripped her hand. “It’s the way of the world.”

“It’s not a very nice world.”

“Did someone promise you it was?”

She shook her head sadly.

I paid the bill and went out.

It was cool but very still on the Veleta. The sun shone brightly. There was a good covering of powder on the surface of the run. I got my binocs out and scanned the slope. As I explained once before there were two runs from the top of the Veleta.

I decided to take the longer run this time, the one that branched out to the left as you went down. I was just putting my glasses back in their leather case when someone climbed over the rocks from the cable car turn-around and came toward me.

It was Herr Hauptli, and — for once — he was alone.

I waved. “Good morning, Herr Hauptli.”

He smiled. “Good morning, Herr Peabody.”

“I missed you yesterday, or whenever it was we were going to ski together.”

“Pressure of business, no doubt,” he said pleasantly.

“Yes,” I said, glancing quickly at him. But he had turned away to gaze down the slope.

“And where is your lovely wife?”

“Packing.”

“Then you are leaving?”

I nodded.

“Pity. It’s been such a good run of weather.”

“Indeed it has.”

He smiled and sat on a rock outcrop near the top of the run. I joined him while he laced his boots tightly and started to wax his skis with blue wax.

“Where are your friends?” I asked him as I sat down next to him. What the hell, I had nothing else to do at the moment.

“They are at the hotel,” he smiled. “They did not seem too eager to join me today. A late night at the Bar Esquí with lumumbas running out of their ears.”

“You usually are inseparable.”

“That is the way with money. It attracts like a magnet.” He smiled again, the crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes deep and shadowed.

“You are a cynic, Herr Hauptli.”

“I am a realist, Herr Peabody.”

He picked up the first ski and began to apply wax to the bottom carefully. He was a meticulous, methodic worker, exactly what you would expect of a good German.

“Fraulein Peabody reminds me of someone close to me,” he said after a moment.

“Indeed?”

“I had a daughter, you know.” He glanced up. “Of course, you did not know. Sorry.” He continued with his waxing. “She was a most beautiful girl.”

“Was, Herr Hauptli?”

He ignored my interruption. “She was nineteen and away at the University,” he went on. “My wife — her mother — died when she was a small girl of five. I am afraid I was never able to give her the proper guidance in growing up. You understand?” His eyes rose and met mine.

“I have never been a father, so I cannot truly know, Herr Hauptli.”

“An honest answer.” He sighed. “Whatever it was — parental neglect, or misguided lavishment of material possessions on her — when she went away to the University we lost contact.”

“It happens these days.”

“In her case, the very worst things happened. Her companions were very much into the drug scene.” He glanced at me again. “And she became involved with this group to an extent that I could not cope.” He continued waxing. “She became addicted to heroin.”

I stared at Hauptli.

“One year after her addiction she died of an overdose.” He gazed out into the distance over the Vega of Granada. “Self-administered.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“There is no use to waste your sorrow at this late date,” said Hauptli with a harsh sound to his normally pleasant voice.

“It’s the waste of human life I deplore,” I said, thinking of what Juana had said at breakfast.

He shrugged. “In a way, I blame myself. I had evaded the responsibility of a father. I had taken up with other women — not one, but many — and had neglected my daughter.” He thought a moment. “And she suffered my neglect, reacting in the only way she could. By rejecting herself in exactly the same way I had rejected her.”

“A shrink might tell you differently,” I said warningly. “Self-analysis is a dangerous game.”

“It wasn’t only the women I took up with. It was the business I was in.”

“Every man must have a profession,” I said.

“But not the one I had.”

I watched him, knowing what he was going to say.

“The drug business,” he said with a bitter smile. “Yes. I had quite probably supplied the heroin with which my only child had killed herself. How does that sit with your morality, Herr Peabody?”

I shook my head.

“It sat badly with mine. I began to analyze the business I had always been in. I began to think of its effects on the human race. I did not like what I saw.”

He selected another ski and began waxing it.

“I decided that it was time to get out of the business and begin making amends for my years of evildoing.”

There was nothing I could say. I waited.

“They told me what would happen if I left the organization. I would be searched out to the ends of the world. And killed.” He smiled mirthlessly. “You understand that?”