“Then let’s try for it. You crouch down in back of me, and when I run, you stay with me. Keep to my left, and that way we’ll present less of a target. If we take them by surprise, they won’t have time to really aim.”
“All right.” She did as I said. Then, just as I was poised to go, she broke into a giggle.
“What the hell is funny?” I asked.
“The view.” Despite the situation, she was positively simpering.
“What—-?” And then I realized. In my hurry to escape upstairs, I hadn’t paused to grab my pants. I was stark naked. And the “view” she was talking about was my bare bodkin poised for flight.
“I wasn’t dressed for a revolution,” I told her. “My apologies. And now, if you can control your mirth, what do you say we find out whether it’s easier for them to hit a nude target or a painted one?”
“That’s not very gentlemanly, Mr. Victor. I’ve always thought I applied make-up with discretion and I don’t think you--”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to insult you. Now will you for Pete’s sake just accept my apology and let’s get back to trying to stay alive. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready, Mr. Victor,” she said stiflly.
“Then let’s go!”
I jumped out from under the table and bolted. I ran in a crouch, as fast as I could. The madam kept up with me all the way. There was a tattoo of bullets in our wake, but somehow we made it into the kitchen.
I heard the footsteps racing down the stairs and knew they’d be right behind us. I pushed the madam through the cellar door and followed right behind her. It was a narrow staircase, and I stopped halfway down and waited for the door to open behind us. When it did, I fired a burst and there was a scream. A body tumbled down the stairs and nearly knocked me off my feet. The door was hastily closed. I grabbed the gun still clutched in the dead man’s hands and continued down to the cellar.
“He’s a friend,” the madam was explaining to the two young Cubans huddled there. “Mr. Victor, this is Consuela. And this is Raoul Marti.”
“Hi.” I tossed Marti the extra gun. “Better hold onto it,” I told him. “We’re going to have to fight our way out of here.”
“Raoul was ready to do that without a gun,” the girl told me. “We had decided that there would be no other choice.”
“I don’t see how,” the madam said. “They will have summoned help upstairs by now. They don’t even have to come down after us. All they have to do is wait us out.”
“Are you sure there’s no other way out of here?” I asked.
“That stairway to the kitchen is the only exit,” the madam assured me.
“How about windows?”
“There is one, but-—”
“I have already investigated it,” Marti interrupted. “There is a guard stationed there. You can see his feet.”
“Maybe we can overpower him,” I suggested.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Marti sighed. “It leads to a courtyard that’s filled with rebels at the moment.”
Throughout this conversation, Consuela had been staring at me. Now she spoke. “Aren’t you chilly?” she asked irrelevantly.
“Sorry,” I said, remembering my nudity and rearranging the tommygun I was holding as best I could to cover it. “I was being entertained by a friend of yours when all this started.”
“What friend?” she asked curiously.
“Dovita,” I replied.
“Oh, that one! She is very unprofessional. She is so oversexed I think she would give it away.”
“Not any more she won’t,” I told Consuela. “I’m afraid she’s dead.”
“Oh.” Consuela didn’t exactly seem broken up at the news. “It served her right. She was a Castro spy, you know.”
“I found that out,” I said. “But how is it that you knew?”
“She was one of our contacts here,” Raoul told me. “Before I defected. When I did, I warned Consuela about her.”
“What did you do with the German?” I asked Raoul. I didn’t know whether either one of us would live through this, but it seemed sensible to find out what I could while I could.
“He was put on a ship to Barranquilla,” he told me without hesitation.
“Then he’s not in Santo Domingo. But why Barranquilla? And I hate to show my ignorance, but where the hell is that?”
“The reason, I don’t know. But Barranquilla is a small seaport on the coast of Colombia.”
“Is he a prisoner?” I asked.
“That’s hard to answer. He wasn’t treated like a prisoner. But Castro’s guards were always right beside him.”
“Did they go to Colombia with him?”
“Si.”
“This is all very interesting,” the madam interrupted, “but wouldn’t it be better if you gentlemen postponed this discussion and concentrated on getting us out of here?”
“But how can we get out?” Consuela asked. “We’re trapped.”
“I have checked,” Raoul echoed, “and there is no way out of this cellar except the stairs, or that window. And death awaits us by both routes.”
“I wonder why the devil I always seem to get myself trapped in basements,” I murmured, remembering the Cuban interlude.
“What?” The madam hadn’t quite heard me.
“Nothing,” I told her. There was no point in going into my recent history. I reflected briefly that, despite the professional status of the ladies, it was unlikely that this subterranean venture would yield such fruitful material for the O.R.G.Y. files as my last one had. There wasn’t a bottle of champagne in sight. And besides, there was all that hostility surrounding us and waiting to pounce.
I wandered around the cellar, hoping I might find something Raoul had missed. I did, in the form of a large furnace standing in the center of the cement floor. I strode over to it and opened the door. The dust of month-old ashes greeted me, making me cough.
Putting my hand over my mouth, I struck my head inside the furnace and craned it around so that I could look upward. A large tunnel of pipe angled toward the ceiling of the basement and then arched out of sight. I took my head out of the furnace and studied the pipe from the outside. It looked quite stout, and seemed to be made of some sort of iron alloy. “Do you have any idea where this might lead?” I asked the madam.
“No. Not really. Still, eventually it must reach the chimney, I suppose.”
“If it does, then we’ll have a chance of escaping,” I told them. “In any case, it’s our only chance.”
“You mean you want us to try to crawl through there?” The madam looked very dubious.
“It’s the only thing we can do.”
“But will it be wide enough for us to pass through?”
“Just about. It is at this end, anyway. Of course, it might narrow farther on. There’s no way of telling.”
“But if it does, won’t we get stuck up there?’
“It’s a possibility. But it’s a chance we just have to take.”
“But suppose we do get stuck! Then what?”
“Then nothing-—until Christmas,” I answered impatiently.
“Until Christmas? What do you mean?”
“I mean that when Santa comes down this particular chimney, what’s left of us will probably still be enough to provide a considerable roadblock,” I told her sarcastically. “Until then, I’d say the only other thing we might have to worry about is the possibility that somebody may decide to toast marshmallows. If that happens, things could get a little warm for us.”
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Victor.”
“Skip it. All I’m saying is this is the only possible way out. So let’s just get started and worry about all the catastrophic things that can happen when they happen.”
Raoul, the slenderest of us, went first. The madam followed, and then Consuela, with me bringing up the rear. There were two reasons why I went last. The first one was that I’d looped a tommygun to my ankle so that if there was any pursuit I might have a chance of discouraging it—always providing the pipe was wide enough for me to pull the gun up and manipulate it, of course. The second reason was that I had the widest shoulders of any of us, and if I did get stuck in the pipe, by being last I wouldn’t block off the escape route for the others.