“And suppose I just stay right where I
am.”
“Then I shall know there is no way out for
me and I shall kill Miss Rosensaft here and now. Why not? Why
shouldn’t I? Are you going to start backing up, Mr. Christiansen,
or do we end it this second?”
Christiansen took a tentative step backward.
It didn’t commit him to anything, but it bought a little bargaining
time.
“So what if you make it to the stairwell?
You’ve got two flights to go down, and then there’s the lobby. And
you’ll be all alone. Would you like to see Rudi before you go? I’ve
got him hanging around in that broom closet just down the hall. He
makes a picturesque sight. Perhaps you’d like to say goodbye.”
The light changed in Hagemann’s eyes—whether
it was fear or anger was impossible to know. But something had
reached him. He took a step forward, pressing the muzzle of his gun
deeper against the side of Esther’s throat. She gave a little gasp
of pain.
“You shouldn’t have killed Rudi like that,
Mr. Christiansen. Did you strangle him with your little cord? He
was a soldier—he had a right to be shot.”
“He was a butcher, just like you.”
The two men were no more than fifteen feet
apart, so there was no room for error. Christiansen took another
step backward, and then another.
“I’ll get you,” he said quietly. “Somewhere
between here and the street, I’ll nail you. Kill the girl and I’ll
see to it that you take hours and hours to die. I’ll gut-shoot you,
Hagemann, and let you roll around on the floor, praying that you’ll
bleed to death quickly. You’ll have plenty of time to remember how
you murdered my parents at Kirstenstad. But either way, easy or
hard, you’ll never make it out of this hotel.”
“Won’t I? Won’t I really?”
And then, of course, Christiansen
understood. The stairway—yes, the windowless stairway. Once
Hagemann was inside, and had let the door swing closed behind him,
he could make it a condition of trade that if the door opened
again, if Christiansen tried to follow him there, Esther would be
shot at once.
“I didn’t come here with just Rudi, you
know.” Hagemann shook his head slowly, and as he did so the gun
muzzle wobbled against Esther’s throat in a way appalling to see.
“My driver is downstairs now. He has his orders, to come inside the
moment he sees Rudi start upstairs and to wait in the lobby. Don’t
come along with me to the stairwell, Mr. Christiansen. You would
make me very nervous in that enclosed space, and no one could tell
what foolish thing I might do.”
Like partners at a dance, they moved down
the corridor, one careful step at a time. It seemed to take hours,
and then, suddenly, they were almost beside the stairwell door.
“You might open it for me, Mr.
Christiansen.”
“No, Inar—don’t!”
It was Esther, in a voice that sounded like
a scream of pain. He had to look at her now, and her face was
ravaged. The suffering of years had been etched into her in those
few minutes. There were tear stains on her cheeks, unheeded and
left to dry. Her eyes pleaded with him.
“Don’t let him take me with him, Inar. Don’t
do that to me, not if you care at all. Kill him!”
She tried to tear herself free, knowing that
if she succeeded it would mean nothing except her own death.
She fought against this man she hated and
feared so desperately, but he was too strong. Hagemann simply
clamped her more tightly under his arm until it seemed she would
not be able to breathe.
“Go ahead, Mr. Christiansen. Now is the
time, if you want to.”
“Please, Inar! Don’t let him have me
alive.”
It was a done thing. In his mind’s eye he
could already see it happening—the way Hagemann’s head would snap
back when the bullet hit him, his arms and legs flailing out, the
fine spray of blood as his skull split in two. . . The man was
already dead, dead meat bleeding into the carpet. All it would take
was that one little squeeze on the trigger. Except that he couldn’t
bring himself. . .
Except that it would all happen to Esther
too. She would die in the same instant—Hagemann wasn’t kidding
about that. That was what Christiansen saw in his mind, the split
second when she too would he turned into garbage. And he just
couldn’t. Hagemann had won.
With his left hand he reached across his
body to touch the wall, feeling his way until his fingers brushed
against the door handle.
“My God, Inar—please!”
“He doesn’t have any choice, my dear. It
would seem that once more you have worked your magic. You’ve made
Mr. Christiansen love you even more than he does his revenge.”
The sound of Hagemann’s laughter filled the
corridor. It was all a great mad joke, you see. He had been right
all along.
As Christiansen moved backward he carried
the door with him until finally it was all the way open. The arm at
the top locked into place—the entrance to the stairs yawned open.
He stepped away. He would give Hagemann all the room he wanted.
There wasn’t any choice.
Hagemann stepped over the threshold, still
carrying Esther in front of him like a shield.
“Close it behind us like a good fellow,” he
said. “And don’t follow us. Don’t do anything except wait up here
and stay out of trouble. I don’t have to explain what will happen
if you decide on something desperate.”
The look in Esther’s eyes pleaded with him.
There were many things worse than death, and this surely was one of
them.
It was still possible. Christiansen willed
himself to fire, but he couldn’t. The nerves in his arm simply
wouldn’t obey. Hagemann was grinning at him—he knew what was in his
mind. He was daring him to do it.
With painful, sluggish deliberation the door
swung closed.
The muzzle of Christiansen’s pistol sank
slowly down—he couldn’t seem to hold it up anymore. There was a
pressure in his chest and neck, a feeling that something inside him
would burst any second. He could feel his heart pounding in his
ears and he wanted to weep with simple rage.
Do something, you stupid
bastard
, he thought to himself.
Do something before you die of
indecision.
And then he remembered Hirsch.
A telephone, God damn it. All he needed in
the whole stinking world was to pick up a goddamned telephone and
call the goddamned desk. Hagemann wasn’t going to walk through the
whole fucking lobby with that filthy Luger screwed into Esther’s
ear. Hirsch could still burn him down before he got to the front
door.
He ran back to Esther’s empty room. Maybe it
would have been quicker just to kick in the first door he came to,
but that never even crossed his mind. All he could think about was
the phone in Esther’s room.
He picked up the receiver and for perhaps as
long as three seconds couldn’t understand why he didn’t hear it
buzzing. Then he glanced down and saw the tape over the cradle.
The clever bastard. The god damned, fucking
clever bastard.
He took the knife from his pocket, glad he
still had sufficient presence of mind not to start just clawing at
the stuff with his fingernails, and within a few seconds he had the
cradle loose. How much time was that wasted? Where the hell was
Hagemann now?
“Yeah?”
It was Hirsch—he had picked up the phone in
the middle of the second ring. He sounded almost as if he had
guessed how much had gone wrong.
“Hagemann’s coming down the stairs—yes,
right now! He’s got Esther with him, so have a care. He’ll kill her
in a second if you give him that long. And he’s got another man
down there waiting for him. His driver.”
“Anything else? What are you doing upstairs
then? Jesus, Christiansen, what is—?”
“Just stop him, dammit.”
Christiansen hung up—he
couldn’t stand it. He just couldn’t stand it another second.
What
was
he doing
up here? He didn’t have the remotest idea.
He had to get downstairs.
The fire escapes—the fucking fire escapes.
He would have to use the back one, or Hagemann would see him coming
and leave Esther on the curb with her brains blown out.
This time he did break down doors. He got a
running start on the one directly opposite Esther’s and went
through it as if it had been made out of paper. There was a
middle-aged woman asleep on the bed, fully dressed with just a
blanket over her legs. The scream she let out when she started
awake and saw Christiansen striding through her room, glaring at
her as if he would have liked to break her neck, could have been
heard in Saragossa.
“Shut up, you old bitch!” he cried savagely.
He hated the damn woman and didn’t even know why.
He threw open the window, crawled outside to
the fire escape landing, and began clambering down the metal stairs
that swayed under his weight and his urgency. When he reached the
second landing he lost patience and jumped over the rail, hitting
the cobbled alleyway with a jolt that nearly sent him sprawling. He
could already hear the sounds of pistol shots.
Oh God
, he thought—the idea ached in his brain like a
wound—
oh God, if he’s killed her. .
.
As he reached the mouth of the alleyway,
where it opened up behind the hotel, he could see a huge gray
Mercedes as it drew away down the main street.
He was too late. He was already too
late.
In the lobby of the hotel, just inside the
main entrance, lay the body of a man who had been shot through the
heart by someone who knew what he was doing. He had just died, from
one instant to the next, with no trouble to anyone. He was curled
up like a baby, sleeping the sleep of innocence on the polished
wooden floor. He was nobody Christiansen had ever seen before, but
it didn’t take a degree in logic to figure out how he had got
there.
Otherwise, the place was nearly empty. In
Spain, people had enough sense not to hang around when the
fireworks started.
Except, of course, for Hirsch.
He was on his knees beside the main desk.
His gun was on the floor in front of him, and he was bent over at
the waist trying to keep from toppling onto his face. He was
holding his left arm just above the elbow. There was a lot of blood
leaking out between his fingers. When he saw Christiansen, he
looked up and grinned.
“Sorry, pal. Close but no cigar.”
“Did he take Esther with him? Is she still
alive?”
“Yeah. I got the driver, but then I ran out
of luck. I don’t know why Hagemann didn’t finish me off, except
maybe he didn’t feel he had the time.”
“How bad are you?”
Hirsch laughed softly. All right, it had
been a stupid question.
“I’ll have some trouble with my golf for a
while, but I’ll mend. Not soon enough to go up that cliff with you,
but I’ll mend. You’d better get out of here.”
He had a point. Christiansen had been
pushing his luck with the police all day.
“He diddled us, pal.” The expression on
Hirsch’s face was pained, and not only from the hole in his arm.
“You think maybe that’s why he grabbed Mordecai, to decoy us away
from here so he could take the girl? He suckered us good.”
What was there to say? Christiansen didn’t
pretend to know how the man’s mind worked, but it was possible—more
than possible. Hagemann was a clever, devious bastard.
“I’ll call here tonight—seven o’clock. Try
to be stitched up and finished answering official questions by
then.”
“Don’t worry about me—is it my fault if
unknown persons start firing guns in my hotel? Hey, Christian. .
.”
“What?”
“You really are a son of a bitch.”
“Take care of yourself.”
Already, even as he walked down the sidewalk
away from the hotel, Christiansen could hear the high pitched
tinkle of the police siren—so perhaps he hadn’t killed them all
after all. He ducked under the shade of a shop awning and waited
for the car to pass by.
There was nothing to do now—nothing to do
until it had grown dark.
22
It was a large room. the bed stood in the
center of a thick white rug, almost like the skin of an animal.
Otherwise the floor was covered with small square tiles the color
of brick and polished so they seemed to glow. They were like ice.
Esther took off her shoes so she could feel the cold. It reminded
her that she was still alive.
Hagemann had left her completely alone. He
was so sure of himself that he hadn’t even bothered to lock the
door.
Why shouldn’t he be? Where was there to go?
This house was a prison, with armed guards patrolling the grounds.
She wasn’t even sure where it was. She might as well have been back
at Waldenburg.
She sat down on the cold tile floor, wrapped
her arms about her knees, and let her despair overcome her. She
could feel the tears running down her face, but otherwise she had
no sensation of crying. She felt dead. She would never get away
from Hagemann. He would keep hold of her until he grew bored, and
he would kill her. There was nothing to look forward to except
death. She would never see Inar again. She might as well be dead.
She almost was.
Why hadn’t Inar saved her from this? Why
hadn’t he killed Hagemann when he had had the chance? Why hadn’t he
taken his revenge and let her die where she could still see his
face?
“You won’t mind it so much, my dear,”
Hagemann had said. “After all, we’ve grown accustomed to each
other.”
He had thrust her in through the driver’s
door of his car and, with his hand still clamped around her wrist,
had driven them away from the hotel. One of his men had been
waiting for them in the lobby, and when Hirsch killed him Hagemann
had stepped over his dead body almost as if it hadn’t been there.
He had shot Hirsch—had he killed him? Esther didn’t know.
He had driven fast, all the way back here.
She should have had the courage to open the door and throw herself
out. She shouldn’t have been so very afraid of a little pain.