Ник Картер - The Spanish Connection

“Yes, Sigñor Corelli.”

“Enrico Corelli,” he said with a half-smile. “Rico Corelli. And you’re Carter. They tell me Nick Carter is the best.”

I nodded. “Usually. Not always. But usually.”

“I tell you, this has been an administrative problem from the beginning. A simple meeting, no? A meeting in the snow — to deal with snow!” He laughed, his strong teeth showing. “A joke, Mr. Carter! A joke.”

“Yes,” I acknowledged.

“It seemed simple enough. I leave Corsica on the Lysistrata and I meet you in the Sierra Nevada.”

“Of course.”

“From the beginning there was trouble. The Capos got wind of my scheme. Someone close to me had guessed the truth. Or had eavesdropped. The Mafiosi put out a contract on me.”

“The Mosquito.”

“Yes. To forestall such a hit, I persuaded my old colleague, Basillio Di Vanessi, to pose as me on my yacht. And the very lovely girl I was sleeping with went with him to make the characterization real.”

“You set your own man up?” I said softly.

“Without knowing there would be a successful hit,” Corelli said. “Essentially, I did what you say I did. But I did not really think The Mosquito would succeed. I had hopes that the meeting between Basillio and you would go off without a hitch and a real meet between you and me could be arranged.”

I sighed.

“But there is more. Just before I left the yacht at Valencia, I discovered that my beautiful Swedish nightingale was scheming, to rid herself of me!”

“Tina Bergson?”

“Yes. She wanted me dead. She had put out a contract herself on me.” Corelli smiled sardonically.

“Was there any reason?”

“I was as curious as you, Mr. Carter. You must understand Tina a little more clearly.”

I understood her quite clearly, but I did not say anything.

“She is a nymphomaniac, Mr. Carter. I think that is no surprise to you. But perhaps her reason for developing into such a Freudian symbol is as interesting as the fact of her obsession.”

I looked at him curiously.

“She was raped at the age of fifteen by a Swedish farmhand. She became pregnant. The abortion was successful, but developed sepsis. She underwent a hysterectomy at the age of fifteen. This sterile, beautiful, intelligent creature then became obsessed with her destroyed womanhood, with her inability to be a mother. Since she was neither woman nor man, she became what she must become — a super -human! With that beauty, and that intelligence — I assure you that her intellect is boundless, Mr. Carter! — she decided that she would take over the little empire of which I was master.”

“The drug chain,” I said.

“Exactly. I am now speaking of her ambitions after I had decided to destroy the chain and reveal its innermost secrets to the United States Narcotics Department.”

I nodded. “And that was the reason she hired Parson to kill you!”

“That is correct. Luckily I interpreted her first shocked reactions to my decision to dismantle the chain as suspicious, and kept my eyes open. Although she promised me she would remain faithful to me and accompany me to America, I guessed that she might be lying. So I put a tap on her phone — our villa in Corsica is a large one and each of us has a great deal of freedom — and finally heard her making a deal with Barry Parson in Malaga. Interesting?”

“Most interesting.”

“My next move was to put my own spy on Parson. I believe, incidentally, that you’ll find Parson listed in Interpol files as Daniel Tussaud, late of the French Underground. He was a child of ten at the time of World War Two, and grew up to a life of espionage and murder.”

“He is dead now.”

“I suspected as much.” Corelli shrugged. “I heard about your exit from the discothèque with your Malaga contact.”

I smiled. “Not much escapes you.”

“Enough,” sighed Corelli. “Well, Elena Morales did keep a close watch on Parson, after letting him pick her up in a bar in Torremolinos. And it was she who warned me that he had come to Sol y Nieve here to find me and kill me. For that reason I did not meet you at the Veleta.”

“I had reasoned that out.”

Corelli nodded. He had finished with his skis. “I hoped that perhaps Tina might be killed on the yacht Lysistrata if anything happened there, but she escaped serious injury, as you know. Even though the Capos had planned the execution nicely. That meant that I must keep a weather eye out for not only the Capo’s assassin, but for Tina’s hired killer as well! The Mosquito. And Parson. So I simply became Herr Hauptli, having hired several out-of-work actors in Valencia to play the part of my supposed sycophants.”

I laughed. “You’re a most resourceful man, Mr. Corelli.”

“I have lived a long life because of my resourcefulness, in a very dangerous profession.” He frowned. “Not profession. That desecrates the very meaning of profession. In a very dangerous racket. A good word. Harsh. Flat. Unromantic. Racket.”

I nodded.

“I have watched you at some length with admiration.” Corelli smiled. “I knew instantly that you had killed The Mosquito. And I predicted that you would kill Parson as well. The death of Tina is a surprise to me. I do not think she committed suicide, as they are saying around the Prado Llano. But I think she must have lost control of that car after quite possibly finding that Parson was dead and figuring that I knew all about her and would kill her.”

I said, “In which case she decided to run away before you found out she was here.”

“Exactly.”

“She’s dead. That’s all there is to it.”

Corelli nodded. He tightened the cable bindings on his skis, fitted his boots to them, then slipped the clamps on. He stood and flexed his knees.

I began to put my own on.

“Care to do the slope with me?”

“Beautiful.”

He grinned. “Before that, Nick, I’d like you to take possession of this.”

I looked down. He was holding out an envelope. It had a bulge in it. I opened the envelope and saw a familiar-looking roll — microfilm.

“It’s just what you think it is. Names. Places. Dates. Everything. All the way from Turkey through Sicily and the Riviera and on to Mexico. You can’t miss a thing or a person if you follow the facts. I want that chain destroyed so it can never be put back together again. For Beatrice’s sake.”

Beatrice. His daughter. And wasn’t that Dante’s dream image of womanhood?

“Okay, Corelli,” I said.

He slapped me on the back. “Let’s go!”

He began a slow traverse against the fall line, and then cut across the slope and schussed down toward a curve in the rim. Then he turned back in a nicely executed christie, and went around a pile of rocks.

I tucked the microfilm into an inside pocket of my ski jacket and began my run behind him. The snow was packed just right. I could feel my skis biting into the powder with a good springy bounce.

There was Corelli below me as I came around the curve of rocks. He executed a few turns, went into a wedeln, and then turned into a very wide traverse across a flat angle of the run.

I came down behind him, making a few turns and shaking the kinks out of my body. It was at the end of my run and just into the traverse that I saw the third skier on the alternate route.

The slopes were such that the alternate runs kept rejoining at intervals, somewhat like two wires that had been twisted loosely together at certain points.

It was a young man in brown togs. He seemed to be a teenager; at least he had that wiry, slender build. Whatever his age, he was an excellent skier. His skis bit into the snow and he was expert in turning and in drifting down the run.