The little bitch.
It was hot up there with the arc lamp. There
was hardly enough room to sit, and nobody seemed to have done any
cleaning up in this little hole any time in the last several
months. There was a thin coat of dust over the window, which was
probably just as well—nobody could have seen in anyway, but
camouflage was always nice. What would Esther have thought if she
could have looked up and seen him scowling down at her?
Christiansen decided he wasn’t having a very entertaining time.
And then, after a while—after he had had a
moment to recover from his self-pity—he figured out that neither
was she.
She was allowing herself to be handled, like
a woman in a doctor’s office. It was Itzhak who had changed, not
Esther. She just didn’t seem to care, poor little bitch.
She was used to this. Men had been pressing
their fingers into her flesh for years—probably she just didn’t
care anymore. She was dead inside. It was sad, but there it
was.
God, he felt rotten. He felt like a man
coming off a long drunk. The dust seemed to have settled over his
eyeballs, over the whole fucking world:
“yet my soul drew back,
/ Guilty of dust and sin.”
What was that from? He couldn’t
remember.
And then Hagemann had arrived, behind his
wall of bodyguards. Yes, that was the man from the cliff.
It was the first time Christiansen had ever
seen him close up, this man who had murdered his parents. As he sat
down at his table, and the waiter came to stand by his chair,
bowing and smirking, he looked straight up at the window above the
stage, almost as if he knew he was being watched. Possibly the
small, dark man beside him had made some sort of joke. Hagemann
stared at the window and smiled, as if he understood
everything.
And then, when the fellow in the tuxedo, who
was probably Lutz, had lured Itzhak away, Hagemann came and sat
down beside Esther. And then it was Christiansen’s turn to read the
truth in her face.
Yes, darling
, he thought to himself,
yes, I can see now. It was my fault, and I’m the one to ask for
pardon.
He took out his revolver, pointing it at the
pane of glass, lining up the sights on the handkerchief in
Hagemann’s breast pocket, wondering if he would have the nerve not
to pull the trigger.
17
It was part of the plan that Christiansen at
some time or another should provide a distraction, something to
keep Herr Hagemann’s mind occupied while Mordecai and his boys
crept up with their butterfly nets. After all, he seemed to know
all about Christiansen—enough, at any rate, to be sending all kinds
of unpleasant types out to kill him.
So it was time to let Hagemann know that he
wasn’t being neglected. If he wasn’t going to kill him—not right
away, not this minute—Christiansen figured he could at least allow
himself the consolation of throwing a good scare into him.
He waited until there was something agreeably
noisy going on out front, then he gave them all a shower of pink
snowflakes on the back curtain to look at and crept down the
rickety little stairway, left his coveralls neatly folded on a
packing case, and let himself out through the stage door. In about
three minutes he had circled around and found a nice dark alleyway
where he could be sure of his back and had an unobstructed view of
the café entrance. He would wait until Esther and her escort had
left.
That happened almost as soon as the police
brought Itzhak back and, with a great show of politeness, escorted
him inside. Five minutes later the door opened again and Itzhak
came back out with Esther on his arm. They were walking fast and
Esther, even from a distance of some twenty-five yards, looked not
so much frightened as haunted, as if she had already seen the worst
and was trying to accustom herself to it.
Almost as soon as they were gone, swallowed
up in the darkness, another man came out of the cafe, looked around
warily, and then set off after them. That was to be
expected—Hagemann would have them tailed back to their hotel just
as a precaution. The man wasn’t rushing. He wasn’t even trying to
catch up with them, so it didn’t seem very likely he was part of
any plan to waylay the young couple before they reached home.
Anyway, Mordecai had doubtless taken a few precautions of his own.
They’d both be safe enough.
So that just left Hagemann, sitting at his
special table with his bodyguards and the little Arab gentleman for
company, considering what a clever fellow he was and what he ought
to do next to amaze the world. He probably felt invulnerable.
The Colonel had had a lovely time this
evening. Poor little Esther, perched there alone in the midst of
strangers, and who comes to help her finish off the champagne? Just
like old times back at Waldenburg, and he had enjoyed every second
of it, the son of a bitch.
Christiansen stepped out of the darkness and
crossed the street to the entrance of the Café Pícaro, where he
pushed open the door and went inside.
“Una mesa, Senor?”
Lutz smiled primly at him but his eyes had a
worried look, as if he realized this was a face he should know from
somewhere. He glanced behind the bar, where the man in the white
jacket polishing glasses put down his dish towel and started to
reach for something in his back pocket.
“I don’t have a reservation, but I’m
expected,” Christiansen said in German. He was standing no more
than eight or ten inches from Lutz. He let his left hand drop down,
allowing the fingers to sweep open his jacket so that the pistol in
his waistband was out in plain sight. “And if I don’t see your
friend’s hands on the bar this minute you’re dressed for your
funeral, understand?”
Lutz looked at the butt of Christiansen’s
revolver, and then at the bartender, and shook his head. He was the
reasonable sort. He wanted to stay alive to enjoy his
prosperity.
“I quite understand, sir. We are at your
service.”
“We’re going to have a chat with Colonel
Hagemann, and you’re going to make the introductions. How does that
sound?”
It sounded fine. The smile on Lutz’s face
went suddenly crafty—it had something to do with the lines around
his mouth. And, yes, by then he had made the connection. The big
Norwegian with the private grudge could be left to the Colonel’s
bodyguards, who were experts. All Lutz had to do was to contrive to
stay out of the way.
“But not out here in the open—I’m not that
stupid. We’ll go to your office, and then you’ll pick up your phone
and tell whoever’s listening that your patron has a call.”
The office was next door to the men’s room,
along the same wall as the bar. It was well screened from
Hagemann’s table, so there wasn’t any particular reason to suppose
his thugs had spotted them yet. Lutz opened the door with his key,
standing aside to let Christiansen pass through first—how dumb did
he think the opposition came? Christiansen took a handful of his
tuxedo jacket, just at the armhole, and shoved him inside.
It was a small room, poorly furnished, almost
military. A metal desk, a couple of filing cabinets, two
chairs—that was it. There was one window, with metal shutters that
locked from the inside. They opened onto a courtyard lined around
all four sides by trash barrels, but Christiansen already knew
that. The stage door was just around the corner of the building.
Narrow alleyways led off in four different directions. You couldn’t
ask for anything more.
“Sit down.”
Lutz did as he was told. He had lost some of
his sparkle. Christiansen did a quick body search and came up with
a tiny Mauser automatic in a shoulder holster. It was almost like a
Humphrey Bogart movie.
He unlocked the shutters and took a look
outside. There was no one waiting. He pushed open the two halves of
the window and listened. Nothing.
He took the coil of catgut out of his pocket
and dropped it on the desk, where Lutz could look at it.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Could be. I haven’t decided. Will the
Colonel have to come to the bar for his call, or can the phone be
brought to him?”
“It can be brought to him. I have had an
outlet installed there. He insisted.”
“Good—then that’s just how we’ll do it. Put
your hands behind your back, would you?”
Lutz was only too glad. His eyes hadn’t once
wandered from the coil of catgut. He had heard all the stories. He
would rather have the stuff around his wrists than around his
neck.
“If you are going to kill me, I would take it
as a kindness if you would use the pistol. It’s more
dignified.”
“We’ll see.”
When he had finished making sure that Lutz
wouldn’t go wandering off, Christiansen picked up the telephone and
held it up close to Lutz’s head.
“No tricks, or I’ll shoot three or four holes
in your guts and let you die the hard way. Is that clear?”
“No tricks.”
“Tell your man at the bar to bring a phone
over to Hagemann’s table,”
Lutz nodded stiffly and murmured something in
Spanish into the receiver. His voice sounded as if it hadn’t been
used in a week.
All that remained was to wait.
“What do you say we give him something to
listen to, hmm?” Christiansen touched him on the back of his head
with the muzzle of the pistol, and Lutz jerked to a kind of
attention, sucking in a short, sharp breath through his nostrils.
He wasn’t thinking about his dignity anymore.
Well, and why not? Once in a while a little
selfindulgence was good for one, and Lutz wouldn’t be any great
loss to the human family. He had all the right credentials to have
earned getting his brains scattered around the room. And it was the
sort of thing likely to make an impression on Hagemann the way a
few whispered threats over the phone never would.
“Yes? What is it, Ernst?”
Christiansen didn’t have to be told whose
voice it was. He had never seen Hagemann before today, and had
never heard him speak a word, but there was a certain intimacy to
that kind of hatred. He would have known the commander of the
Kirstenstad operation in a thousand.
“It isn’t Ernst, Colonel. It’s Inar
Christiansen. I’m going to kill you pretty soon—not just this
second, but soon—and I thought you’d appreciate knowing that you’ve
finally run out of places to hide.”
For a moment there was no answer, only
silence. Hagemann probably had his hand over the mouthpiece. He was
probably telling his goons to get moving, to make sure that nobody
named Christiansen came out of that office alive. He knew no one
was kidding, and he wasn’t a man to miss an opportunity.
“I don’t think I understand, Herr
Christiansen. What reason could you have for wanting to kill
me?”
That settled it. He was stalling, the son of
a bitch. He was trying to give his boys time to get into
position.
Christiansen glanced back toward the window,
making a rough calculation as to how long it would take someone in
a hurry to find his way around the building and into that back
courtyard. He was willing to play along for the odd few seconds,
but he didn’t relish the prospect of really letting himself be
taken by surprise.
“You must pardon me, Herr Christiansen, since
I am not sure what purpose you could have had in telephoning
me.”
“I’m in your friend Lutz’s office, Colonel—as
if you didn’t know. I’m not fifty meters from where you’re sitting.
“ He swung the Mauser around so that the front sight was almost
touching Lutz’s earlobe. “I want you to appreciate how close you
have been to death this evening. I want you to sweat a little
before you die. Listen to this.”
He set the telephone receiver down on the
desktop. Lutz twisted his head around, saw the gun muzzle out of
the corner of his eye, and looked away again, breathing in short
little gasps.
“
Auf Wiedersehen
, Lutz.”
But he couldn’t do it. For some reason he
couldn’t even begin to guess, he couldn’t bring himself to kill
this man in cold blood. He had made the decision to do it; Lutz
deserved to die, and it was the right move. Everything was there
except the will.
“Aw, shit!”
Christiansen turned the barrel about an inch
and fired. The bullet hit the wall, hurting no one, but Lutz made a
faint gurgling sound and pitched forward face first onto the desk.
He was alive unless the shock had killed him, but he was out cold,
his eyes half open and staring at nothing.
At almost the same instant, the office door
sprang open with a sound of splintering wood and a man in a dark
blue suit pushed his way inside. Christiansen seemed to have all
the time in the world—the man had pale blond hair, he noticed, and
the knot in his tie was pulled a little loose. There was a Luger in
his right hand, but apparently it hadn’t occurred to him yet that
he would be needing it. He seemed surprised to see Christiansen, as
if they had known each other somewhere else and he hadn’t expected
to run into him in a place like Burriana.
With something like relief, Christiansen
realized that there would be no problem this time. The man was
armed, and everyone was playing for keeps now. It was open season.
He brought the Mauser up and fired twice. Both slugs went into the
man’s face, one just below the left eye and the other almost square
in the middle of the upper lip, popping open his mouth so that he
seemed to scream, but there was no sound, only a thick rush of
blood. The man was dead, even as he reached back to brace himself
against the door frame. The Luger dropped harmlessly to the
floor.
There was a lot of racket now, and
Christiansen could look through the open doorway and see people
staring at the body. It seemed to be causing quite a sensation. So
far, apparently, no one had noticed him—the sound of gunshots and
the sight of a corpse were distraction enough.