Drumbeat Marianne by Stephen Marlowe

Author:Stephen Marlowe [Marlowe, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: detective, mystery, noir
ISBN: 9781453252574
Google: ULsmZpmWM_wC
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-04-17T19:47:06+00:00

FIFTEEN

I WOKE AND FLUNG an arm across the bed with the pleasant sleepy expectation of encountering a bare, sleep-warmed shoulder or breast. Enisa had been right about the women of Montenegro, and I thought she might want to prove her point again.

My arm flopped on the blanket. There was no body, Montenegran or other, under it. I sat up in the darkness, suddenly wary. Enisa wasn’t in bed and I wasn’t alone in the room. I smelled cigarette smoke.

“Get dressed, please,” a man’s voice said. It was a tired and anxious middle-of-the-night voice. I looked at the luminous dial of my watch. Three thirty and a small bit. I groped for the night-table lamp, knocked it over and then righted it and turned it on.

A small, plump man stood with his back to me, staring out the french doors at the darkness. The moon had gone down. The man was blowing smoke through the open shutters. His cigarette glowed against the blackness.

“Hurry.”

“Are we going somewhere?” I climbed into my shorts and khaki slacks.

“You have an appointment.”

“Will I need a gun,” I said, “or is it just a social call?”

He laughed grudgingly. “No gun. No cloak, no dagger. Just get dressed.”

In another few seconds I was ready. I lit a cigarette. He turned toward me from the window. Forty, give or take a few years. A round face with a hangdog look. Big basset-hound eyes behind shell-rimmed glasses, incipient dewlaps and a weak chin. He ran a hand not through but over sleeked down, receding hair. He stuck the hand out and I shook it. He had a flaccid, apologetic handshake.

“I’m Steve Reading,” he said. “Or Stevo Radenković, take your choice. Yugoslav-American.”

“Friend of Captain Storz?”

“Hardly,” he said with distaste. “Are you ready?”

I was as ready as I would ever be at three thirty in the morning. We went downstairs together. The night-porter in the lobby looked at us without interest. We went outside to Reading’s car. It was only a late-model Plymouth with Yugoslav plates and a Diplomatic Corps plaque, but next to the little Zlastvas and Volkswagens parked outside it looked like a Greyhound bus.

“American Embassy?” I said.

“I work for the Embassy in Belgrade, yes.”

“Virginia?” I said.

“What?” He looked genuinely surprised.

I decided he wasn’t Virginia. “I’m not sure I like the Embassy butting into this,” I said.

“Nobody said it was,” he told me irritably.

The sea made a rushing, sighing sound. I got into the car. Reading settled himself stolidly behind the wheel. He had short legs and the seat was slid well forward.

“This isn’t my idea,” he said. “I don’t want it getting back to the Embassy.”

“Whose idea is it?”

“My wife,” he said. “Ivo Jovanović is her grandfather.” Then he started driving.

We parked in the square outside the old walled city of Dubrovnik, and went across the bridge and between the stone towers on foot. The ornate street lamps of the Placa were lit, but the swarms of tourists had been tucked into their beds for the night. Deserted, the Placa had the look of a movie set.

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