The only sounds of life came from a bar a hundred feet from where Smith had parked. There, the voices made the kind of hollow noises of men with too much time and too little money. Smith walked down the block, into the bar, and stood at the dirty metal counter.
"Si, senor?" the bartender asked.
"Cerveza, por favor," said Smith. When the beer came, Smith asked in broken Spanish if the bartender knew a man named Salmon.
The man furrowed his brow in concentration and Smith repeated, "Sal-moan," accenting the second syllable.
To his surprise, the bartender threw the dirty bar rag in front of Smith and turned his back on him. The other men in the bar were silent for a moment, then burst into raucous laughter.
"Senor," a man with a creased red face said, as he walked up to Smith. "It is clear you do not understand. Salmon is a ... how do you call it, nickname. It means a fool, or a stupid lazy fellow. You see?" He raised his eyebrows inquiringly, then translated what he had just said for the other six men in the tavern. "Es Rafael, si," one of them shouted with a laugh. The bartender shook his fist at him.
"You have hurt Rafael's feelings," the red-faced man told Smith.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Smith said mildly. He began to apologize as best he could to the barman, but as he began to speak, a barrel-chested man who had been sitting at at table at the side of the room stood up. His eyes met Smith's and then he walked curtly toward the open entrance out into the street.
Smith took a sip of his beer, figured that his beer was ninety cents, debated about waiting for his change, then left a full dollar on the bar. The ten-cent tip might assuage the bartender's hurt feelings, he thought.
The street outside was empty. Smith thought for a moment that the man's exit had meant nothing, but he dismissed the thought. Decades of spy work had made him aware of the meanings behind even simple gestures, and he had to trust his instincts. Without them, he had nothing else.
He saw it then, suspended on an ironwork pole near the top of a run-down three-story building down the block. A sign. There were no words on it, only the drawing of a fish. A salmon?
He saw an open door at ground level and walked into a room devoid of furniture but cluttered with boxes and crates. A few bits of paper were strewn on the floor. In the corners stood rows of empty beer bottles. A shabby middle-aged woman with a face frozen into a permanent scowl waddled toward him down a corridor from the back of the apartment.
"Si?" she demanded with the air of one whose privacy had been violated.
"I'm looking for a man," he tried to explain in Spanish. "An American-"
"No men," she snapped in passable English. "Women only. You want?"
"No. I don't want a woman."
"Then go."
"I am looking for a man."
"Ten dollars."
"I..."
"Ten dollars," the woman repeated.
Smith handed her a bill reluctantly, then followed the woman to a filthy kitchen in the back of the store. "I just want to talk," Smith said.
"Follow me," the woman said. She led Smith up a rickety flight of stairs to the top landing. In the dim, roach-swarming corridor, she knocked brusquely on a door, then pushed it open. "You talk in here," she said, pushed Smith inside, and closed the door behind him.
Smith's eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness of the room. When they did, they rested on a solitary figure, a young woman with a tumble of black curls falling over her shoulders. She was sitting cross-legged on a rumpled corner of the bed, wearing shorts and a tight cotton shirt whose three buttons barely contained the ample flesh of her bosom.
Smith cleared his throat. "That's not necessary, Miss," he said, annoyed that his voice was barely audible. "Do you speak English? Habla usted ingles?"
The girl untangled her long legs from beneath her and rose. Her shorts stretched across her hips tantalizingly. She walked toward him, wordlessly, the hint of a smile playing on her lips.
Smith didn't know what gave her away. A glance of her eyes, perhaps, or a tension in her body as she snaked toward him. He did not know the reason but he was ready when he heard the first sound of the ambush.
Smith was no longer a young man and his reflexes were slow compared with what they had been during his days as an active agent. But no one with his background ever lost the razor-sharp sting of fear or forgot what to do when he felt it. Crouching and whirling about abruptly, he connected an elbow with someone's midsection. The assailant staggered backward in the darkened room, air whooshing from his lungs.
It gave Smith enough time to draw his automatic from the shoulder holster. He followed the man downward and planted one foot on the man's neck while he aimed the gun directly at the man's face.
"You get back on the bed," Smith growled over his shoulder at the young woman. He heard her soft footsteps move away, and then the squeak of the bed springs.
Smith recognized the man's face. It was the man who had led him from the bar.
"Sal-moan," Smith said. It was not a question. The man grunted and Smith dug the heel of his shoe, into the flesh of the man's neck.
"Are you Salmon?" Smith said. He pressed his foot down harder.
With an effort, the Puerto Rican nodded, his eyes bulging.
"Why did you set me up?" Smith ground his heel in harder. The barrel-chested man gestured helplessly and Smith lightened the pressure enough to allow the man to speak.
"Not my idea," the man gasped. "It's not me you want."
"I know who I want. Why did he send you to me?"
"The book-"
"Has he got it?" Salmon nodded. "I'm going to pay for it," Smith said. The Puerto Rican's eyes widened.
"You don't think I will, because I have a gun?" Smith said. "I don't want to use the gun and I don't want you two to follow me. I want that book and I'll pay for it. You understand?"
The man nodded.
Keeping the barrel of the gun flush against Salmon's head, Smith stepped back. "Get up," he said.
The man shambled to his feet, watching Smith carefully as the American picked up his leather attache case.
"I want to see Keenan Mikulka," Smith said. Salmon drove Smith's car at gunpoint through the gently rolling tropical hills. The macadam roads became gravel, then dirt, then little more than trails with grassy strips between two rows of tire-worn earth. He stopped the car at the foot of a hill dense with scrub bush and giant tropical ferns.
"Can't go no further," the Puerto Rican said. "Got to walk now."
Smith leveled the gun at his face. "You first," he said.
They trekked up the overgrown hill, following a snaking foot trail. Halfway up the slope, Smith spotted a roof of corrugated tin shining in the red light of the lowering sun.
Salmon pointed. "He's in there," he said. "He's got a gun too."
His eyes never leaving Salmon's, Smith shouted: "Mikulka. Keenan Mikulka."
Silence.
"My name is Smith. I've got your friend. We're alone. Come down here. I want to talk."
After a moment, Smith heard the rustling of leaves near the shack, then a voice calling back:
"What do you want to talk about?"
"Business. I'll buy the telephone book from you."
"Who says I even know what you're talking about?" Smith poked Salmon with the gun.
"It's okay. He knows," the Puerto Rican yelled. "He's got money."
"How much?" the voice answered.
"We'll talk when I see you," Smith called out. Footsteps sounded through the undergrowth. Finally a young man stepped into the clearing, across from Smith and Salmon.
Mikulka appeared to be in his late twenties with the seedy look of a man who had given up hoping or dreaming. An Army-regulation Colt was in his right hand, its barrel aimed directly at Smith.
"Suppose you put down that itty-bitty gun of yours," Mikulka said, smiling crookedly.