The Consummata

“Nice,” I said. “So who gets squeezed in the middle?”

“You do not yet understand.” She sucked in her breath and began to prowl the room, as cat-like as her name promised, touching decorative items idly along the way. “We are pro-American, but for all the Americas.”

“Then you have others besides U.S. citizens on your client list?”

“Naturally.” She turned, smiling again. “Many men from below the border have a passion for your pale blonde women. This...type also has a place here in this house. It is very profitable.”

“I would imagine.”

Her hair tossed as she slowly shook her head. “By profitable, I do not mean in the monetary sense...at least not primarily.”

This was a whorehouse dealing in state secrets and probably blackmail, and the money the girls made was only incidental.

I leaned back in the chair and opened the other beer she had set out. “Sooner or later you’re going to get to the point, honey.”

Her laugh was sudden and low, but with a lilt to it. “We have a quarry, one Jaimie Halaquez, who must be found. It is a matter of necessity and pride and as an example that will prove a deterrent for others in the future.” She stopped, her mouth pursed. “The trail to Senor Halaquez is not so obscure as you might think.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. Senor Halaquez was a frequent guest here, and as such, certain things were learned about him. Not from him as much as about him. In retrospect, we should not have been surprised by his betrayal.”

“Pedro said it was a complete surprise.”

She sighed. “We knew that Halaquez was a traitor by definition— after all, he worked for Castro, took money from that regime, and yet he helped us. This blinded us to his most obvious trait.”

“That his chief loyalty was to himself.”

“Si, senor.”

I smirked at her. “You really couldn’t have stopped him?”

“For over a year he lay in wait. Then he moved quickly. He had to. My people have a vengeful nature.”

I nodded. “Do you have him located?”

“Not yet. But we do know where he has been, and one other thing—and this, senor, is most important—we know the single weakness that will trap him eventually.”

I leaned forward, the beer almost forgotten. “What?”

“His thirst for sexual gratification,” Gaita said. “His vanity and his physical need for a woman. Not just any woman, Morgan—only the most beautiful will do.”

“So what’s his kink?” Sounded like a game show.

“His tastes run to the...rough. He likes them young, but he also likes a woman of experience—any woman older than thirteen and younger than fifty, if she is beautiful and willing to...to play his sick games.”

An S & M freak. Hell, it was a place to start.

She looked at me for a long moment. “With just that one thing, you should be able to find him.”

“If it’s that easy, why don’t you just run him down yourself?”

Gaita’s face was absolutely impassive, but there was a strange expression in her eyes.

“Because, Morgan, he is a totally deadly person—a ruthless man trained to kill, who enjoys killing...and is more than the match for anyone we might send after him.”

Well, maybe not anyone....

She went on: “We have many who have volunteered for the mission, but these are brave Cuban boys we cannot afford to lose—young men of bravery but who were...what is the expression? In water over their heads.”

“But you’re okay risking a gringo’s life?”

“That is not fair, senor.” Her expression turned grave. “Three who took the assignment on their own initiative were successful enough to locate him, only to die painfully for their efforts. Slow deaths, senor. With a knife. Here.”

She touched her belly.

“Since then,” she said, “we have discouraged any such attempts. All those three succeeded in doing was to warn Senor Halaquez...and now he will be more wary than ever.”

I drank half the beer and put the can down. “He’s only safe with the money when he gets to Cuba. You don’t head west to get there. He could go south and try to cut across from Mexico, but my bet is you have pipelines into there, too, and he’d be picked up or your people alerted.”

She nodded.

“He wouldn’t chance getting caught in open country by somebody with a rifle, so he’d have to stay where any hostile contact would be made personally, so he could handle it, and that would mean sticking to the cities, and those Mexican cities sure wouldn’t be friendly to him at all. If he went north, his only available exit points would be international ports, and even there your people and sympathizers might lay hands on him.”

She nodded again, slowly. “Where then, Morgan?”

“Right here in his own back yard,” I said, “where he has previously established contacts. He’s close to Cuba, if he can make escape arrangements, he knows the area, and the probable moves of your organization...and all he has to do is wait for the right time and place to skip on out. Do you have any theory about why he hasn’t already skipped?”

“We do not.”

“I do. He needs to launder that money—well, not launder it, exactly. He’ll need to get it exchanged for currency that’s legal in Cuba—money from a country with normalized relations.”

“Would that be difficult for him?”

“No, but he would likely go through underground channels. And because he’s keeping his head down, he’s probably using middlemen. That may give me a lead on him. It’s the one thing that would force him out of hiding.”

Her eyes tightened. “Unless...”

“Unless what?”

“His own lust for the perverted sex, that may also...as you say, force him out.”

I looked around the room. “Well, he’s not coming here.”

“No. But there are other such places. And there is one other possibility.”

“Yeah?”

“When he learns, senor, that one capable of matching his skills is hunting him down? He may come after you. The hunted may prefer to become the hunter.”

I snorted a laugh. “So that’s how I got picked for the job. You fine folks want me to do the flush job.”

She shrugged, smiled just a little. “It was you who volunteered, Senor Morgan.”

I picked up the beer, finished it and leaned back again. “Hell, kid, I’m not complaining. Everything was getting too damn dull anyway. I was getting stale. I can use a break in the routine, to pick up my thinking again.”

She stood there in front of me, that enigmatic smile playing with the corners of her mouth again. Her hand went up to her throat, her fingers wove inside the drawstring of the blouse, and this time when she moved her shoulders the blouse came slipping off to her waist and she was like one of those bare-breasted Tahitian natives Gauguin loved to paint.

Once again her hands and arms moved, flowing behind her with swift, definite purpose, then the full skirt fell, taking the blouse with it, a fabric waterfall that pooled around her feet and she was a naked, lovely thing with olive skin that had a sheen to it and midnight hair that ornamented her to perfection. She pulled down white panties to fully reveal the dark delta that had already been showing through, and she kicked them away.

“You can have me, Senor Morgan, for a...break in your routine.”