The Kremlin File

I put my new ID card on the counter. It said I was security chief for the Sawyer Grand LaClare. The swarthy clerk sneered and gave me empty eyes. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“You didn’t ask. Mr. Sawyer expects courtesy to the guests from the staff. What’s your name?”

He didn’t like that. But he was the sort of bully who deflates when authority’s pin sticks him.

“Tony Ricco.” It was a mumble.

I said, “You get one warning. Not a second. Don’t let me hear a complaint. Now, Cappola.”

“Right through this door.” He was in a helpful sweat now, indicating the way the redhead had gone, buzzing the electric lock under his counter.

The thick metal door folded back on silent hinges at my shove. I went through to a blind passage. Back here the building looked like a vault and was used as one. A huge black man sat at a desk studded with unidentified buttons along its back edge. He wore a khaki uniform, no insignia, and could have been either island or hotel police. He was just as cordial as the cashier. The cold eyes watched me come toward him.

I said, “Cappola,” and dropped the ID.

He bent toward a speaker that was set flush in the desk, flicked the switch, and said in a deep growl, “A Mr. Carter. New security guy.”

An answer grated back, fuzzed by the intercom. “Shoot him through.”

The man dipped his head, thumbed a button and a panel across the corridor slid aside without sound. Beyond it was a large room, with bare yellow walls, a desk with nothing on it, some empty chairs and a deep couch with the redhead draped against its back. A cigarette set in her mouth, sending blue smoke in a thin straight rise past half-lowered eyes. She showed no surprise to see me.

Chip Cappola tilted his chair back behind the desk, looking like George Raft hoped he did thirty years ago. Dark straight oiled hair plastered flat, deep olive skin over a tight face that was still sleek but would be creviced and jowly in a few years. The coat of his white silk suit hung on a hanger against the wall. His lavender shirt with a maroon monogram on the sleeve was the bright spot in the drab room. His tone was drab too.

“The geese came south early this year.”

“They didn’t stop in Miami,” I told him.

I don’t know who dreams up the recognition signals we use to make a new contact. They’re supposed to sound innocuous and yet not likely to have been spoken by accident, although agents have been known to make mistakes with outsiders. Cappola looked me up and down, a sardonic twist on his brown lips.

“Nick Carter, huh? Killmaster, huh? You don’t look like any hit man I ever saw. That kind of job takes guts.”

I winked at the redhead and asked him, “You like to inspect mine?”

He shrugged. “Not unless you got ’em with polka dots. You see one, you seen them all.”

The girl chortled, and the man at the desk threw a thumb her way “Mitzy Gardner there. Maybe you heard of her.”

I had indeed. But she wasn’t the Mitzy type. She was a bomb, and notorious in her own right. Her rap sheet said she’d been mistress to a long list of top echelon hoods, four of them now dead. An educated guess put her as a bag girl for all of them, trusted to carry Mafia money to Miami, to be moved on to the Bahamas for laundering before it went to Swiss bank accounts.

Chip Cappola now headed her list, a man high in gangster ranks, wanted in the States and unable to go to the mainland. It was a laugh that with his record he was presently up to his thick neck working for AXE.

Cappola wasn’t interested in national security. His loyalty was exclusively to the nation of the underworld. But he decidedly did not want the Communists taking this casino away from him and so it was to his advantage to have Randolph Fleming as president. With Fleming in the saddle, Cappola’s business on Grand LaClare could continue as it had under Hammond.

Cappola waved at a chair and I took it. He said, “I’m damned glad you lucked in on the flight with Fleming. We lose him, we’ll get our throats cut. The casino goes down the drain and Sawyer’s out another hotel.” There was undisguised worry in the flat, rasping voice.

“We didn’t loose him,” I reminded the gangster. “He’s president and Colonel Jerome says everything’s quiet.”

The front legs of his chair hit the floor hard. “You talked to Jerome? Tell him who you are?” He spat the words out. There was fury in his voice.

I said. “Why are you so mad?”

“Did you tell him?”

“Of course not. What have you got against him?” He put both hands flat on the desk and leaned over them. “Carib Jerome ordered Fleming kidnapped.”

I kept a straight face. “What gave you that idea, Cappola?”

“Idea? We know. You think nobody but AXE keeps track of what’s what? We got an ear in Cuba. He’s like this with Fidel.” He held up two fingers tight together. “Jerome wants Fleming out of the way for good.”

“Uh-uh.” I wasn’t impressed. Whatever information the Cosa Nostra had, it didn’t match with ours nor did it fit with the Colonel’s behavior. “Fleming was out of the way in the States. Jerome called him back.”