Diamonds Are for Dying Read online

  Street fighters in every country know all about kicks to the groin; they're usually skillful at evading them. Instead, Skytop leaped straight up and delivered a brutal kick to the most vulnerable target available at the man's side: his spleen. Then, overbalanced by his useless right arm, he crashed heavily to the ground.

  He instantly received a kick in the ribs from the third malandro. He rolled over to get to his feet, seeing the man's shiny yellow shoes dance hastily away. "Chega!" a voice commanded. Skytop stayed where he was. There was a gun in the man's hand: a 9mm Luger with a long round barrel that was pointed at the center of Skytop's chest.

  The man with the gun had backed away six feet — too far for Skytop to do anything. A huge splash of blood appeared on Skytop's shirt. He looked up, and the malandro whose nose he had ruined was leaning over him.

  "Calma, calma," the man warned him. He bent gingerly over Skytop and reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. His blood dripped on Skytop's shirt, soaking through to the skin. The malandro held up Skytop's wallet for the others to see.

  The first malandro — the one Skytop had kicked in the spleen — was moaning some distance away. He was on his knees, hugging himself, his pockmarked face gone ashen. The bastard will be pissing blood tomorrow, Skytop thought with satisfaction.

  "Sinto-me enjoado," the man with the damaged spleen moaned. His friend promptly aimed a kick at Skytop's head. He was able to move fast enough to keep from being brained, but the glancing kick left him dazed.

  The second thug stuffed Skytop's money into his pocket, then began going through the identification cards. He showed them all in turn to the man with the Luger: driver's license, Social Security, a press photographer's pass. There was nothing that could link him to a U.S. government agency, Skytop thought dizzily, trying desperately to clear his head. The man with the gun seemed disappointed. "O passaporte," he said. He wanted Skytop's passport.

  The man with the bleeding face began rummaging through Skytop's other pockets, dripping more blood. He came up with the passport and a sheaf of credit cards. He produced a small knife and, warning Skytop with a look not to resist, sliced open the lining of the denim jacket.

  "Olhe!" he shouted. He held up a small object he had found in the lining. It was small, round: about the size of a shirt button. Two small antennae protruded from it.

  A triggered transceiver, Skytop thought. A direction-finding bug. Somebody planted a tag on me.

  The man with the smashed nose carefully put the button into his pocket. "Faz favor?" he said. The one with the Luger nodded. Broken-nose prodded Skytop in the ribs with his toe. The malandro with the damaged spleen hobbled over, still moaning. They're going to kick me to death, Skytop thought. He was still unable to feel anything in his right arm, and he was weak and dizzy from the kick in the head. He tried, hazily, to plan some moves, but he knew it was no good. He was going to be dead in a few minutes; longer if they wanted some fun first.

  The first kick was aimed between his legs; he was able to get a leg up and take it in the thigh. The second caught him in the ribs.

  Skytop, his face turned upward, caught a flurry of motion against the blue sky and, incredibly, there was a man launching himself off the tin roof of one of the shanties: a Japanese in a linen suit. Still in midair, he kicked sharply with one foot, yelling, "Ki-ai!" The foot connected with the wrist of the gunman, and the Luger went spinning down the alley.

  The kicking foot swung down to touch ground, and simultaneously the other foot came up between the gunman's legs, with another shouted ki-ai! Without pausing, Skytop's rescuer bounded toward him. Bloody-face took off at high speed down the alley, Damaged-spleen hobbling crablike after him. Tom Sumo knelt down at Skytop's side.

  "Where are you hurt, Joe?" Sumo said.

  "Help me up," Skytop said. "This is the other guy's blood."

  Sumo, glancing worriedly at his immaculate linen suit, helped Skytop to his feet. "Aren't you glad I planted a tracer on you?" he said.

  "So you were the bugger? Why'd you do that?"

  Sumo grinned toothily. "I like to know where everybody is."

  "Man with gun," Skytop gasped. "Where…?"

  Sumo whirled. The man he had kicked was gone. "No use trying to go after him," he said. "He could be anywhere in these rotting rats' nests." He looked embarrassed. "He must have crawled off. I guess I didn't kick him hard enough — not enough leverage from that position."

  Skytop lurched forward. "Help me back to the hotel," he said. "I've got something to tell the Baroness."

  * * *

  The bellboys snapped to attention, and the assistant manager himself emerged from behind his desk and hurried forward. This was a very important lady coming into the lobby. A film star, perhaps, or a member of the aristocracy. He rubbed his hands and smiled.

  The Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini was making an impressive entrance. The hum of conversation in the lobby stilled noticeably and heads swiveled in her direction.

  She was wearing a dazzling white sharkskin pants suit, the brim of an enormous hat framing her perfect features like a halo. The face was animated, the teeth perfect and white in her smiling face, her green eyes huge and sparkling.

  There were six people in her entourage, not counting the two chauffeurs carrying in the hand luggage. Just behind her were two enormous Russian wolfhounds, their glossy white fur matching the pants suit. The dogs were being handled by a slim man with handsome Scandinavian features, who looked, in his expensive dark suit, like a personal secretary. There were two more men: a big, capable-looking black and a sandy-haired man in a rumpled seersucker suit, carrying a notebook. And, chattering vivaciously, were three female companions — breathtakingly beautiful girls, all of them. One was a striking redhead, one a blond and one a tall, lissome black girl in a vivid print dress.

  The assistant manager hovered in her path. Her eyes flicked over him, and she turned to the man in the seersucker suit. He said, in English: "I believe you have three suites reserved for the Baroness St. John-Orsini?"

  The assistant manager bobbed and bowed, his smile growing wider. He was used to people with titles; the Leme Palace was very popular with the jet set and the minor European nobility just now. But too often the dukes and the countesses and the milords and the princesses were drab creatures with pinched expressions who watched their cruzeiros, avoided tipping, complained about the service and sometimes stole the towels. But not this baroness, he thought; you could see that she was quality. A primeira classe.

  "But of course," he told the man in the seersucker suit. "All of them facing the ocean."

  The man gave him a curt nod. "Very good. Please see to the luggage."

  The assistant manager snapped his fingers, and the bellboys competed with one another to see who would be first to help the chauffeurs unload the limousines.

  "This way, please," the assistant manager said. The Baroness took the leads of the white wolfhounds and followed him.

  Before they could reach the elevators, an embarrassing incident occurred, the kind that the hotel was usually successful in preventing. A wrinkled old crone in a black shawl appeared from nowhere and thrust a figa into the Baroness' startled face. This was a particularly large figa — a life-size representation in clay of a human hand, the thumb sticking out from between the first and second fingers of the fist, in the ancient sign to ward off the Evil Eye.

  "Buy my good luck charm, Senhora," the old hag whined.

  "Go away, old woman!" the assistant manager hissed furiously. He looked about for a security guard. "V ase embora!"

  "Just a moment," the Baroness said. She put a hand on his arm. Her touch was exciting; the assistant manager shivered in spite of himself. "What is that thing?"

  Reluctantly, he said: "It is a figa, an amulet. They are very common in Brazil."

  "It brings fertility, passion, good luck, Senhora," the old woman said eagerly.

  "I like it," the Baroness said. "I think I'll buy it." She began to open her pocketbo
ok.

  Unwillingly, the assistant manager said, "According to the superstition, you cannot buy a figa for yourself. Someone must give it to you."

  "That's easily fixed," said the Baroness' servant, the big man in the seersucker suit. "I'll buy it for you, Baronessa." He conferred with the old woman, gave her some money, then presented the clay figa to the Baroness. The assistant manager fought his disapproval and forced a smile. The old woman scuttled off.

  * * *

  When the luggage had been deposited and the bellboys tipped and dismissed, Penelope took the figa out of her bag. Wharton took the clay fist from her. "Let me," he said.

  There was a metal paperweight on the hotel desk. He put the figa on the floor, swung the weight and the clay fist shattered into a dozen pieces. A tiny gold-plated pistol, hardly larger than a cigarette case, was inside.

  Penelope picked it up, thumbed the safety, checked the clip.

  "My Bernadelli VB," she said. "John Farnsworth is a doll. If only John had been able to smuggle in the Spyder."

  Wharton grinned. He reached into the sagging side pocket of the seersucker jacket and produced the flat, pistol-shaped bulk of the Spyder.

  "Porter slipped it to me at the airport," he said. "Son of a gun gave it to me before we cleared customs. I don't mind telling you I was sweating before we got through. The help you get down here!"

  "Anything else?" she said.

  "I've got a .45 for Skytop," he said. "It was in my shaving kit. I don't have the faintest idea of how it got there between the airport and here. I imagine we'll be collecting a few more pieces in the next day or two."

  The door to the suite buzzed. Penelope slipped the little pistol into her bag. Wharton got up, catlike, and went to the door. He unlatched it and pulled the knob toward him, slipping to one side before the door was open more than an inch.

  Skytop stumbled into the room, covered with blood. Sumo came in quietly behind him.

  "Joe," she said. "What on earth…?"

  "I'm all right," he grunted. "No serious damage. I thought I broke a bone, but the feeling's starting to come back to my right arm. Tom can start filling you in while I take a shower, clean up."

  When Skytop came back, wearing a clean shirt and Levi's, a great purple bruise showing on the side of his head and face, they held a council of war.

  "Who was behind it?" Wharton said. "Those men sounded like chacinadors — professional assassins." Wharton's Portuguese accent was awful, but his knowledge of local conditions was probably better than any of the others. He always absorbed his briefings in rare depth.

  "Heidrig?" Penelope said. "He's got a large organization. Probably has contacts within the B.N.D. in Germany, or with one of the big freelance intelligence outfits. Maybe he's onto us."

  Sumo said, "For what it's worth, the transceiver I planted on Joe, here, went out abruptly — didn't fade first, the way it would if those chacinadors simply got themselves some transportation. Somebody either knew how to turn it off or stamped on it like a bug."

  "No chance of tracing them, then," Wharton said.

  Skytop said, "It stinks. That arranged little scene at the airport, and then the ambush. What's a man like Silvio doing in a favela, anyway? And does he tie in to Heidrig?"

  "Baroness," Wharton said, "we've still got to make contact with Heidrig somehow. Legitimately. How do we arrange that?"

  She smiled sweetly. "Silvio's picking me up for dinner in a few hours. Why don't I ask him?"

  Chapter 6

  "It's really much too early for dinner in Rio," Silvio laughed, but you can see I'm being kind to your biological clock. Otherwise we'd be dining just as your body thinks it's sunrise."

  Penelope smiled back at him across the table. "My body thinks what I want it to."

  "What an admirable body!"

  They were sitting in the Taverna O Galo, a dim, white-painted cavern of a place, decorated with bright ceramic roosters. The roosters, evidently, were a not-too-subtle hint from Silvio.

  The body that Silvio was admiring was clad in a clinging midnight blue evening dress with a very low cut scoop neckline that exposed a generous helping of her breasts. Oscar de la Renta had made it for her under protest. "But dear Baroness," he'd said, "the long shirtdress with a matching cardigan is the only way a woman should dress for evenings. Still… hmmm… those shoulders, that lovely throat, that creamy bosom…" In the end he'd done what she asked. She wore it now with only a few simple pieces of jewelry, her ten-carat baguette-cut blue-white diamond ring, a silver bracelet in Florentine finish, a pin with another, single, blue-white diamond placed low, between her breasts.

  On the table before her was an abominable drink — a concoction of sugar cane brandy, lemon, sugar, ice and chilled beer called a caipirinha. She'd wanted a martini, but Silvio had insisted that she try something typically Brazilian. He himself, like any member of the rich, cosmopolitan granfinos class, was drinking Scotch.

  "Tell me about yourself, Silvio," she said.

  He shrugged. "What is there to tell? I live a dull life. Soccer, polo, the Jockey Club, parties. I watch over my father's fazenda — the coffee plantation — but there's really not that much for me to do. The foreman takes care of everything. Some day I shall have the responsibility of managing the family businesses and taking care of my sisters, but until then…" He shrugged again, then forced a smile. "Life is sweet, life is amusing. What more could a man want to do with his life?"

  There had been a strange, almost fanatical glint in his eye, quickly masked. Penelope thought of Heidrig and the Nazi dream of world domination that had been crushed when Hitler died. She wondered irrelevantly if those dreams were being kept alive at Heidrig's own fazenda, deep in the jungle.

  "But Silvio," she said softly, "don't you ever dream about doing something more important, being a part of something big?"

  "Never," he said. His laugh was a little unconvincing. He took a hasty sip of his Scotch.

  She persisted. "Changing society, for example."

  "Society is fine the way it is."

  She looked him straight in the eye. "There's probably more life going on in the favelas on the hills around Rio than in your precious Jockey Club."

  He looked uncomfortable. "My dear Penelope," he said, "I have never been in a favela, nor do I ever expect to get within a mile of one. And I have no interest in politics." He took another sip of Scotch. "Life is too short." He became suddenly animated. "And because it is so short, we should get on with the business of seeing Rio and having a good time."

  He took her by the wrist, threw some money on the table and led her to the door.

  The next few hours were a frenetic sampling of Rio's night life. Penelope began to lose track of all the taxis they'd climbed in and out of, all the little tables they'd sat down at, that after a while seemed to be the same little table waiting for them everywhere, the caipirinha and Scotch sitting there conspiratorially when they arrived and only half finished when they left.

  They were in a discotheque in Copacabana, bathed in jarring, deafening music and chattering voices and the pervasive smell of pot, when Penelope said, "I thought you promised me dinner."

  "What?" Silvio shouted. He was moving in a loose-jointed, jerky rhythm, his dark handsome face beaded in perspiration, his eyes growing glazed.

  She leaned closer to his ear. "Dinner!" she shouted back at him.

  Silvio mopped his face with a handkerchief. He looked at his watch. "You're right. It's dinnertime here. Sunrise for you."

  Dinner was in a place called the Bahianinha on the Avenida Atlantica, facing the splendor of Copacabana Beach and the nighttime ocean.

  "Feijoada," he said, pronouncing the word carefully for her. "It's practically the Brazilian national dish. Black beans, jerked beef, pork, pig's feet, tails and ears, sausages — all over white rice, with kale and orange on the side."

  "No, no," she said. "My stomach won't stand such an assault the first night here. What else can you suggest?"

 
Silvio gave her a sly look. "Galleto al primo canto. That means a rooster who has sung his first song — crowed for the first time. Chopped up on a spit and basted with white wine and oil."

  They finally settled on duck in tucupi sauce for her and vatapa for him — fish, shrimp, peanuts, grated coconut, coconut milk and dende oil. He insisted on her tasting it and offered her a mouthful on a fork he had already used. She overcame her normal fastidiousness and put the fork in her mouth, not minding at all. That was the little test she always gave herself. Yes, it definitely would be possible to go to bed with Silvio. She looked at his face appraisingly. Opposition or not, working for Heidrig or not, he was definitely an attractive man. The spark was there.

  Silvio seemed to understand that something had happened. He dropped the banter, took her hands across the table and began talking about Carnival. Carnival is fun Very colorful. You see a lot of Louis XV costumes — I don't know why. Or the devil. He's very popular. And skeletons and" — his eyes twinkled — "roosters. And the women! The barer the better. Any excuse to show flesh. You see a lot of harem girls — just tiny gold brassieres and bikini panties and a few transparent veils." He paused and stared at her low neckline. "Penelope, do you have your Carnival costume yet?"

  She put a hand to her throat. "I hadn't thought about it."

  "I would like you to be my companion during Carnival." He fixed her with an intense Latin stare. "It's no fun alone."

  "Silvio" — Penelope was distressed. How could she turn him down gracefully? Her job in Rio was to attach herself to Wilhelm Heidrig. And so far she hadn't begun to figure out a way to get close to him. She couldn't waste time with Silvio.

  Silvio hadn't noticed her hesitation. He rushed on enthusiastically: "I'll take you to the very best balls. A different one every night. The Copacabana on Saturday night. On Sunday, my cousin Heitor's private ball at the Yacht Club. Monday, the most lavish private ball in Rio — the one that Wilhelm Heidrig always throws. They say that this year, General Medici himself will put in an appearance!" He stopped to watch her narrowly.