Interesting about the alarm, he thought as he tinkered with his lockpick. Loud enough to wake a heavy sleeper, but not loud enough to attract attention from outside. Instinct rather than anything else had made him want to kill the sound at once.
He rifled through the file drawers rapidly. Restaurant mail, mostly. Some letters in Chinese, which he pocketed. An official looking letter in Spanish. Menus. Ledgers. Bills.
And a narrow cardboard tube containing a map.
He searched the rest of the room rapidly and found nothing else. Then he padded quietly downstairs, took another fast look around the restaurant and kitchen, and went out into the alley whistling softly.
Paula got down from the driver’s seat.
“You took your time,” she murmured. “Everything all right?”
“Fine. Here, dump these on the seat, and then go watch at the end of the alley.”
“Right.” She moved off obediently.
Nick got to work. He dragged the bodies one by one through the back door and propped them in the restaurant, neatly at a table as though they had fallen asleep after a heavy dinner. His artistic arrangement of Hector was not quite finished when he heard a sharp, almost frantic, whistle from the alley and the sound of a car rounding a corner nearby. He dropped Hector and ran.
Paula was back in the driver’s seat with the jeep motor running.
“Hurry, hurry,” she whispered. He closed the back door quickly and leapt in beside her. She gunned the motor and roared into the cross street.
“What the hell?” said Nick, as she made a swerving turn and then another.
“That car,” she breathed. “I don’t think he saw me but I saw him — bandaged head and all, leaning forward talking to his driver. Tsing-fu is back in town.”
The Terrible Ones
Nick sat at the head of the great dining table and looked appreciatively at his companions. Isabella, Teresa, Alva, Luz, Paula, Lucia, Inez, Juanita… Ah, women, women. How he loved them! His smile widened as he gazed at them. He had bathed, shaved, slept, exercised, eaten, and now he was feasting his eyes on eight lovely ladies. Heaven, that’s what it was. He sighed with pleasure. One or two were a little mature for him, and Luz and Alva were still looking pale and strained, but without exception they had made themselves look their best for him.
“Senor Carter, you are, what you say, drooling,” Lucia said severely. She was a strikingly handsome woman of middle years who acted as the housemother Sergeant Major of The Terrible Ones. “And may I ask what you were doing in your room this morning with Juanita that made her giggle so much? She was only supposed to be taking you a cup of coffee.”
“Why, Lucia honey,” Nick said reproachfully. “That’s all she did. And all I was doing was my Yoga exercises.”
Juanita giggled again. She was a little dark girl with a quick laugh and a low boiling point. “You should have seen him, Lucia. Have you ever seen a man standing on his head and sucking in his stomach?”
“At the same time? Certainly I have not,” Lucia said firmly.
“May I ask, Senor Carter, what it is that you have on the table before you?”
Nick nodded. “I’ll get to it in a while. It shouldn’t cause you any immediate concern, but I think you’ll be interested. First I think we ought to fill you in a little more completely on what happened in Haiti. Paula?”
She told the story rapidly and succinctly, in a manner that Hawk himself would have admired. None of the women interrupted. Expressions flitted across their faces and at certain points in the recital they gave little moans of horror, but they listened as intently as any crew of AXEmen at a briefing. Nick’s admiration for them grew steadily. These women deserved to have the treasure; of all people they would use it wisely.
There was a brief silence when Paula finished. Eyes stared down at the tabletop and hands were clenched with anger.
Nick cut in quickly before reaction set in. “Luz, let’s have your story once again so we can put the pieces together. What’s most important is the clue, whatever you know about Alonzo, whatever he knew about you.”
Luz nodded slowly. “All he ever knew about me were small, personal things, and that I belonged to a group of patriots called The Terrible Ones. Somehow he must have heard a rumor that we were after the treasure, because he kept talking about it in sly little ways.” She looked beseechingly at Paula. “Truly, I told him nothing else. Not then. But I did not think he was such a bad man, only someone like us in a way, and there seemed no harm in sometimes meeting him in town. He was a man, to talk to—”
“Yes, I know,” said Paula gently. “I know just how it is.”
“And when you met him the day Paula left for Haiti,” Nick prompted, “what did he say?”
“He was excited,” said Luz. “He’d found out something and he kept hinting that it had to do with the treasure. Well, I had to know what it was — I told you last night how I tried to get it out of him. But he wasn’t giving anything away for nothing. So — I offered him a trade.” She looked steadily at Nick. “I never did think much of Paula’s idea of getting help from the Americans. So I told him about you. Said that our leader was meeting the American leader, told him the time and place. And he was furious. Said he’d just discovered his first clue and he wasn’t going to share it with anyone, not even his Cuban comrades, and he was damned if he was going to have any Americans horning in. Then he didn’t even want to give me the clue. But I… worked on him. Made all sorts of promises about how eagerly I’d look for his return and what we would do together. Said I’d go on working for my group and trying to collect other clues which he and I would share. Together we would seek the treasure, find it, and live happily ever afterwards. He seemed to believe me.” Her tone was dry. “I can imagine now how much use he would have had for me afterwards, if we really had worked together and found it. But I am positive that he told neither his fellow Cubans nor the Chinese where he was going or what he was trying to do.”
Nick nodded. “I think it’s pretty clear and he’d decided to go into business for himself. What about his clue?”
She wrinkled her nose and looked thoughtful. “I’ve thought and thought about it and I still can’t make head or tail out of it. But it does seem to fit, doesn’t it, with the other clues? ‘Trujillo es mi Pastor.’ El Benefactor Trujillo always used to love that line — that whole psalm, in fact ‘Trujillo es mi Pastor’! Do you know the rest of it? Everybody does, because he didn’t change it much: Trujillo is my Shepherd, I shall not want. And so on. The ego of the man! Oh, yes, he loved that psalm.”
“It makes a dandy clue,” said Nick. “Whatever it means.” He remembered reading about this little piece of blasphemy, how one of Trujillo’s sycophantic supporters had rewritten the psalm into a paean of praise for his dictator boss. Now its opening line had turned up as a clue. “Green pastures,” Nick said slowly, recalling the words. “Still waters. Paths of righteousness? That could hardly apply. But how about the valley of the shadow of death, and the house of the Lord? It does seem to fit with at least one of the other clues, La Trinitaria — The Trinity.”
“But that is shocking!” Lucia burst out indignantly. “Sacrilege!”
“That would scarcely have worried the Great Man,” the thin girl called Inez said bitterly. “I’m almost beginning to see why he thought it was all so funny. But I can’t see what the ‘Castle of the Blacks’ has to do with any of this.”
“Neither can I,” Nick admitted. “But maybe some research will cast some light on it. Anybody want to volunteer?”