Read Games of the Hangman Online
Authors: Victor O'Reilly
The High Noon
was in one corner of the Bärenplatz within a few yards of the Käfigturm, the
which divided what was essentially one street into Spitalgasse and Marktgasse.
Ivo had
stipulated no police, and the Bear, who knew him well, had been adamant.
If Ivo wasn't to be frightened away, the
backup force would have to be well concealed.
"Ivo," the Bear had said, tapping his nose, "may be odd,
but he's no fool.
He can smell a cop —
and he's got a good sense of smell.
Believe me."
They did.
All of which put the onus on Fitzduane and
good communications.
The idea was that
Ivo wouldn't be arrested until he had had a chance to say whatever was on his
mind.
Only then, at Fitzduane's signal,
would the trap be sprung.
Fitzduane
drank some beer and tried to feel less uneasy with his role.
He felt like a Judas.
Ivo, a lonely soul who needed help more than
anything else, trusted him.
The taped
wires of the concealed transmitter itched, but he resisted the temptation to
scratch under his shirt.
He pressed the
transmitter switch that was taped to his left wrist under his shirt cuff.
The gesture looked as if he were consulting
his watch.
He heard an answering click
from the Bear, who, together with the federal policeman, was sitting on the
second-floor veranda of a tearoom more or less directly across from where
Fitzduane sat.
This gave the Bear a
bird's-eye view of the operation, and it kept him out of Ivo's sight.
He was, however, too far away from the High
Noon to make the actual arrest.
That
would be the responsibility of the two detectives concealed in the
kitchen.
The task force was linked by
two radio nets.
One channel was
restricted to Fitzduane and the Bear.
The second channel was netted between the Bear and all the other members
of his team.
The setup should work fine
unless the Bear go this transmission buttons mixed up.
The clock in
the
*
*
*
*
*
Frau Hunziker
looked up in surprise as the door opened.
"Herr von
Graffenlaub," she said, a little flustered.
"I didn't expect you until next
week.
I thought you were in
Is something wrong?"
Beat von
Graffenlaub smiled at her gently.
The
smile was incongruous because his eyes were hollow from lack of sleep and his
whole demeanor projected stress and worry.
He had aged in the past few days.
My God, he's an old man, she thought for the first time.
"You and
I, Frau Hunziker," he said, "have some arrangements to make."
"I don't
understand," said Frau Hunziker.
"Everything is in order as far as I know."
"You do
an excellent job, my dear Frau Hunziker, excellent, quite excellent."
He stood in the doorway of his office.
"No interruptions until after
lunch.
Then I will need you.
No interruptions at all.
Is that quite clear?"
"Yes, Herr von Graffenlaub."
She heard the lock click in the door.
She was concerned.
Herr von Graffenlaub had never behaved this
way before, and he was looking terrible.
Perhaps she should do something.
She looked up at the clock on the wall.
It was just after midday, two hours until her employer would need
her.
But training and discipline
reasserted themselves, and she returned to her work.
*
*
*
*
*
Moving at
speed, Ivo emerged from behind the jugglers, sideslipped gracefully between a
mother and her dallying gaggle of children, looped around a flower stall, and
glissaded to a halt in front of Fitzduane.
He slid his visor up with a click.
Behind him the fire-eater started to do something antisocial.
Fitzduane hoped the mother was keeping count
of her children:
the smallest looked as
if he were planning to get fried.
"Hello,
Irishman," said Ivo.
"I'm glad
you came."
"I hope I
am," said Fitzduane.
"The last
time we met I nearly got shot."
"Nothing
will happen today," said Ivo.
"I am invisible to my enemies.
I have special powers, you know."
"Nothing
personal," said Fitzduane, "but it's not you I'm worried about.
I don't have any magic skates, not even a
broomstick, and there are people out there with decidedly unpleasant
habits."
Ivo sat down
across the table from Fitzduane and with the grace of a conjurer produced two
brightly painted eggs from the depths of his guitar and began to juggle with
them.
His special powers obviously
didn't extend to juggling, and Fitzduane waited for the accident to
happen.
He hoped that Ivo had used an
egg timer, or he was likely to need a fresh shirt.
The display was morbidly fascinating.
One egg went unilateral and thudded onto the
table in front of Fitzduane.
There was no
explosion of yellow; it just lay there cracked.
Ivo shrugged
and began removing the shell.
"I
can never decide which color to eat first," he said.
Fitzduane
pushed the salt cellar across the table.
"It's one of life's great dilemmas," he said.
"Something to
drink?"
A waiter was
standing by their table, looking at Ivo with ill-concealed distaste.
He wrinkled his nose as the light breeze
demonstrated the less visible aspects of knightly behavior, and he looked
around to see if the other customers seemed to have noticed the smell.
Fortunately it was late for morning coffee
and early for lunch.
The tables were
nearly empty.
In his own idiosyncratic
way, Fitzduane decided, Ivo was a smart screwball, and polite, too.
He was sitting downwind of Fitzduane.
"One of
those," said Ivo, pointing at Fitzduane's beer.
Fitzduane
looked up at the waiter, who seemed to be debating about accepting the
order.
Fitzduane was not entirely
unsympathetic, but the time didn't seem right for a discussion of personal
hygiene.
"My eccentric but very
rich and influential friend," he said, "would like a beer."
He smiled and placed a hundred-franc note on
the table, weighting it in place with his empty beer bottle.
The waiter's
scruples vanished at much the same speed as the hundred-franc note.
Fitzduane thought that with such manual
dexterity the waiter would be a safer bet with the colored eggs than Ivo.
"Would
the gentleman like anything else?" asked the waiter.
"Perhaps something to
eat?"
"The
gentleman's diet permits only a certain type of egg, which, as you can see, he
carries with him, but more salt would be appreciated."
Fitzduane indicated the nearly empty cellar.
Ivo moved on
to the second egg.
"I've written a
book," he said, his mouth half full.
"
a
book of poems."
He reached inside the guitar and produced a
soiled but bulky package, which he pushed across the table to Fitzduane.
"It's about my friend Klaus and the man
who killed him."
"Klaus
Minder?"
"Yes,"
said Ivo, "my friend Klaus."
He was silent.
Then he put some
salt on the side of his left thumb.
He
drank some beer and licked the salt.
"Like tequila," he said.
"You're
missing the lemon," said Fitzduane.
"Klaus is
dead, you know.
I miss him.
I need a friend.
Will you be my friend?
We can find out who killed Klaus
together."
"I
thought you knew who killed Klaus."
"I know
some things — quite a lot of things — but not all things.
I need help.
Will you help?"
Fitzduane
looked at him.
Sir Ivo, he thought, was
not such a bad invention.
There was a
noble and sturdy spirit inside that slight physique, though whether it would
ever have a chance of fulfillment was a very moot point.
He thought of the loaded gun on the table
beside him and the police team waiting and the years in prison or in some
mental institution that Ivo faced, and he hated himself for what he was
doing.
He held his hand out to him.
"I'll do what I can," he said.
"I'll be your friend."
Ivo removed
his helmet.
He was smiling from ear to
ear.
He seized Fitzduane's hand in both
of his.
"I knew you would
help," he said, "I knew it.
It
will be like the Knights of the Round Table, won't it?"
Then his head
exploded.
The long burst
had hit him in the back of the skull, perforating and smashing the bone into
fragments and blowing these and blood and brain matter out through the front of
his mouth in a fountain of death.
Fitzduane flung himself to the ground as a second burst of fire smashed
into Ivo's back and threw him across the table.
Arterial blood sprayed into the air and formed
a pink, frothy puddle with the spilled beer.
The attacker,
on roller skates, shrouded in a long brown robe, and with face concealed, slid
forward and grabbed Ivo's package from the table, stuffed it inside his robe,
and darted away into the crowd, a silencer-fitted machine gun in his hands.
There was a
spurt of flame and cries of agony as the fire-eater was brutally shouldered
aside by the fleeing assassin and burning liquid spewed inadvertently over a
crowd of onlookers.
People screamed and
scattered in every direction.
Baby
carriages were overturned, stalls were crushed in the press of bodies, and
complete pandemonium broke out.
The Bear
looked on aghast, barking instructions into the radio and trying to deploy his
people but constrained by the chaos below.
From his vantage point he could see what was happening, but he was
temporarily powerless to intervene.
If the police
deployment was hindered by the panicking crowd, the attacker was having his own
problems weaving in and out of the mêlée.
His very speed was at times a hindrance, and several times he crashed
into an obstacle or fell.
Frustrated in
the center of the Bärenplatz, the attacker, who had been heading in a roughly
diagonal line toward the Bündesplatz, cut back to cross the square at an angle
that would bring him almost directly below the balcony where the Bear and the
federal detective were stationed.
"He's
doubled back," said the Bear into his radio.
"He's going to pass under us.
I think he's headed up this side toward the
Bündesplatz.
Mobile One, corner of the
Bärenplatz and Schauplatzgasse.
Go!"
Mobile One, an
unmarked police BMW motorcycle ridden by a detective who did hill climbing in
his spare time, roared up Amthausgasse toward the corner as instructed, only to
fall foul of a diplomatic protection team that was escorting a delegation from
the Upper Voltan Embassy making an official visit to the Bundeshaus, the
Federal Parliament.
The diplomatic
protection team, seeing the unmarked motorcycle cut through the uniformed
police outriders toward the official-flag-flying Upper Voltan Mercedes full of
diplomats in tribal robes, performed as trained.
An escorting police car swung across in front
of the BMW, sending it into a violent skid that culminated under the nose of
the Swiss foreign minister, who was waiting, together with a retinue of
officials, to greet his distinguished guests.
The hill-climbing detective, clad in racing leathers, rose shakily to
his feet, his pistol butt protruding from the half-open zipper of his
jacket.
The first reaction of the dazed
man when faced by all this officialdom was to reach for identification,
whereupon he was shot in the shoulder.
The Bear's
side of the square, being out of the sun and gloomy, was less crowded.
"I think I can get a shot at him,"
said the federal detective.
He leaned
out across the balcony, wrecking a window box, and clasped his 9 mm SIG service
automatic in both hands.