The Day of the Guns (2 page)

I took the light he held out. “No ... not politics.” I looked across the flame at Rondine. She was sitting there with her chin propped on the back of her fingers, smiling. “You might call it ... international business. Of a sort, that is.”

“I see.” He didn’t really, but he said it.

“And how have you been, honey?”

“Fine, Mr. Mann.”

“It used to be Tiger.”

Her laugh was as deep as it ever was. “Fine, Tiger. And you?”

“Not bad at all. I’m surprised to see you again.”

She made a gesture with her hands. “The world changes. Things happen.”

I could still feel those two bullets going into my belly. “But we can still remember, can’t we?” I said.

Her eyes were a peculiar shade. I tried to remember what they were like when I saw them last in the little room in Hamburg. Outside, the Eighth Air Force was plastering the city with block-busters and in another two minutes Cal Haggerty would be coming up the stairs with a tommy gun that would blow that goddamn nest of agents right off the face of the earth
...
only she had killed Cal too because she was quicker and had all the wiles of a woman going for her. You don’t spray a naked broad with .45’s without looking at her first and he had looked too pointedly and too long and had missed the Luger in her hand.

Vincent Case looked at his watch and snubbed his cigar
out. “Well, you two, supposing we leave you to your reminiscing. We have to be back, but since everyone has adjourned for the weekend, you might as well stay, my dear. Mr. Mann, it was a pleasure.” Unlike his partner, there was a slight Scottish burr to his words.

Burton Selwick said, “As for me, I’m afraid my day is ended. A few years after fifty can bring tiredness too easily, ulcers too abruptly, and strange pains that make one yearn for the heath and heather and the hearth.”

Rondine shot him a sudden glance of compassion, but one so easily assumed. “Are you all right?”

“Just the usual complaint. Overwork, my dear. Too many late hours, too much work and the usual complaints. I’ll be happy to be replaced when the time comes.”

“The doctor ...”

He spread his palms out and smiled. “Exactly what I’ve just told you. Age, my dear. A few pills, a little administration, and I shall be quite well again to work another day.”

I shook hands with them both. “Nice to see you,” I said and watched them leave. Then I picked up a cigarette from her gold case, put it between her lips like I used to and lit it for her.

“Tiger,” she said softly.

“Yes, dear,” I said just as softly. “And now you’re on your way down because I’m going to kill you just as dead as you thought you did me. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.”

She blew a thin stream of smoke at me, her eyes as steady as ever, not afraid. They had never been afraid. Determined, dedicated, but never afraid. “I was wondering when someone would come,” she said.

“It’s now, honey.”

“I see. Can I explain?”

“No.”

“How are you going to kill me?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “I think I’ll shoot you.”

“Why?”

I grinned at her, enjoying something I had thought about for almost twenty years. “It’s not so much the past, sugar, but the present. You’re back, you’re here. Nobody knows it except me, maybe, but you haven’t changed. Your damn setup is as good as it was then. You’re still what you were, one of those tying the world into knots and you’re in the right place to do it. U.N. translator? Hell kid you can speak seven languages and were trained in the greatest espionage school that ever existed. Right now you have a minor job but a key position to take what you want and wherever your information is going you got it made. With all the background and experiences you have it must be like making mud pies for you. Only now there’s a difference.”

“Oh?”

“Me. Now you can die. You left me with my belly torn out and figured me for dead. You suckered me into a beautiful love trap when I should have known better than to fall for a stinking Nazi agent and even when I let you off the hook .. when I gave you a chance to get out when I could have killed you, you didn’t take it ... hell no, you gave me a pair of quick ones and blew. Honey ... it wouldn’t have mattered ... the war was over ... you could have made it if the hate wasn’t inside you so deep nobody could get it out.”

I put out my butt and sat back smiling at her as if it were just another luncheon conversation. “So now you die, kid. Whatever you’re up to, tough ... you die.”

Her face pulled together and the tip of her tongue wet her lips. “When?”

“Soon. I could do it right now, but first I find out what game you’re playing and why. Then, pretty killer ... right in that smooth gut of yours.”

“Tiger ...”

“Come on, honey ... you’ve had it too. No way out. Maybe you’ve had the face lifted and the gray dyed out, but this is the old soldier who dropped into Germany and made the big one. I don’t go the mistake route twice. Kid ... you’re dead. From this minute on, you’re dead. I’d do it now only I want to enjoy it. I want to poke around some and blow your game before I put the big one inside your stomach.”

I pushed my chair back, stood up and grinned down at her. A sudden, strange expression clouded her eyes. then passed.

“You were a great lover,” I said. “Remember the bomb shelter?”

Her eyes were like twin arrows reaching for me.

“Remember the rainy night I lied to keep the Frenchies from finding you?”

Both of her hands were tightened into knots.

“They would have killed me if they had found out, Rondine. But we were lovers, one Nazi spy, one American spy. You showed your appreciation well. Ten minutes after we went to bed together you shot me. Twice. Ten minutes after you were rolling on that bed crying and moaning because you never had anything like it before you gave me two in the gut. That’s real appreciation. Thanks a bunch. Now sweat.”

The wetness that came in her eyes didn’t bother me any. The quick motion of a sob that forced the cleft of her breasts apart had no effect at all.

I said, “Later, Rondine. I’ll see you later. Just sweat.”

They watched when I left. They knew I had been back there alone with her when nobody else was able to make it. They had seen the other two go, the essence of dignity and respectability, and now they saw a different type none of them could put their finger on and wouldn’t really want to because I had to shave every day and looked at too many mirrors not to know what the others had seen.

Only those wouldn’t talk any more. They couldn’t. They were dead.

They came for me that night like I knew they would. I set it up beautifully and it was like the New York Giants pulling the Statue of Liberty play on the Packers. It was so damn old, with the dummy in the bed and all the archaic bits and pieces that went with the play that it was almost pathetic. I wanted to find out how fast they could run me down when nobody knew I was here or where I was, and they did a great job. Just great.

Except they missed.

I was outside on the window sill, forty feet above the street, hanging on to a rig I had snapped into the window washer’s clamps, with a .45 in my fist for safety’s sake and they came in the door with a key, smiling and joking like it was their room and the two of them pumped a full clip of slugs into the mound on the bed, each one going off with an almost inaudible
plop,
and the idiots were so sure of themselves and so anxious to be out of there they didn’t check to see what they had hit. You don’t catch a slug, even in your sleep, without a twitch or rearing up or some blood spilling out and the jerks didn’t check it. They simply laughed some more, opened the door and walked out.

I gave them a full minute, opened the window, swung in and looked at the holes in the bedclothes. Tomorrow the house-keeper was going to be one teed-off broad. Maybe I’d even make a complaint. Fourteen shots had torn up three pillows under the blankets and left the room stinking of cordite.

I threw the chain on the door, double-locked it, fanned the fumes out of the room and climbed into my nice shot-up sack. Tomorrow was going to be full of surprises. For Rondine, anyway.

Unless you’ve made a trip to the U.N. and sat in on a meeting of the General Assembly or the Security Council you don’t know what you’re missing. Outside on the door there’s a quotation from Scripture ... about turning swords into plowshares. There’s not even a credit line ... you’d think they had dreamed the possibility up. But considering the fact that ever since its inception the world has been at war, you’d think that this magnificent conglomeration of brains assembled from the world over were there for one purpose ... not to make peace, but to figure out how many ways there were to kill. Hell, it’s an old story, look at the record. We get stuck with the bills and the trouble. They scream for the gravy. But there are still some of us left. They can’t kill us all.

Something had come up about Ghana and week-end passes had been canceled. I made a phone call from the lobby and an innocuous-looking guy had come out to show me to a spectator’s seat. He gave me that funny look I always got when my calls had been routed and didn’t ask any damn questions, but there was a distaste in his face when he saw my eyes. Maybe he knew. Maybe he didn’t. But he felt. I made sure of that.

The Russians were shouting that day. They didn’t like what was coming up. It had to do with U.N. dues and some million-dollar trivialities and all I could think of was the slobs who didn’t let Patton go ahead into Berlin and we had to split the spoils with pigs who later built the wall. We break our asses fighting and the striped-pants gang loses the peace.

Nothing much came out of it, but I found Rondine.

I came up behind her and said, “How much longer, honey?”

She was better than when we met. She looked around slowly, never hesitating in her translation, but the sudden widening of her eyes was enough to spell it out. The only thing that was wrong was that the wetness came back again and all I could think of was how much a woman could hate that she’d cry because one man didn’t die.

I looked at the clock. The session was almost over. “I’ll wait outside,” I said.

She only took fifteen minutes. She came through the door composed and smiling as if death and terror were a daily occurrence. And they were. “Hello, Tiger.”

“Tell me something.”

“All right.”

“Who did the face job ... the plastic surgery? You look great. The lines don’t show at all.”

“They weren’t supposed to.”

“Your boys missed last night. I want you to tell them something. Will you?”

“Yes.” Her eyes dropped to the floor.

“I could have killed them, baby. It would have been fun. Tell them they don’t get a second chance. Neither do you.”

“Tiger ...” She was clear again. Beautiful as hell, woman all the way. She was almost as big as I was, soft luxurious woman I could fall into and kiss and love ... only I wouldn’t. “Are you hurt that badly?” she asked.

“It was a long time ago. The hurt is a long time gone.”

“Revenge?”

“Nope.”

“What then?”

“Satisfaction. I need it. I died too many times since you. All I want is you dead.”

“I’m here.”

“Uh-uh. I want your reason first. I want to see you scared again, then you die.”

She did it too fast for me to stop her. She raised on her toes with her hands behind her head and her mouth was a hot, wet fire that pierced into me with a wild spurt of passion that sucked her body behind it, pressing it flat against mine. Before I could push her away she did it herself, then stood back and smiled, her teeth showing their white edges.

“Don’t die again, Tiger,” she said.

And when I smiled her eyes went dark and tightened at the comers because she read me right. “Don’t worry, I won’t,” I reminded her.

 

The building on Fifth Avenue was a brand-new modem monstrosity that towered over Manhattan and on the sixteenth floor it housed one single office that bore the label,
THOMAS WATFORD, IMPORT-EXPORT.
I walked in, told the receptionist I’d like to speak to Mr. Watford, and no I didn’t have an appointment, but he’d see me. She made the call, told me to go in and when I went through the door the gimlet-eyed guy in blue with the tight crew cut looked up, leaned back in his chair and said, “Ah, yes, Tiger Mann. Have a seat, Tiger.”

I sat down.

“We heard you were in town,” he said.

“Your agency has big ears.”

“Not really. The trouble you leave behind you is easy to follow. It isn’t appreciated.”

“Tough, Mac.”

The chair creaked forward and I wondered how many guys he had scared to death with that face of his. “We were aware that you knew of us. I don’t like it.”

“Then don’t try to hide. We’re pros too.”

“Are you really?”

“You got a file on me.”

“The rest of the group you represent, too. Very professional. You call yourselves patriots, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “Not me. I used to, but no more. Now I just like the trouble. We get clobbered by all the pinkos and the liberals, but I gave up the patriot angle a long time ago. Too damn many patriots are going down the wide-open trail to Communism to suit me. They swallow the garbage, the promises, they lead the country down the garden path singing songs of peace and happiness behind the shoe-pounder and the do-gooders, but not me. I’m just one guy who likes trouble.”

“Your bunch is going to get slammed by a Congressional investigation, Tiger.”

“So go ahead. We’re ready.”

“Listen ...”

“Who stopped the bit in Nicaragua? Who killed off the uprising in the Honduras? Who went into Colombia and Panama and put the squash on that deal? You slobs tried working it with papers and a couple of money twists when there were guns out in the open. Okay, buddy ... get this, we’re a power. We can push. We go right where it hurts those Commie bastards and we’re not stopping. Like Hitler had commercial money behind him, we have top financing too. It’s no Hitler job, but don’t count us out. You’re a secret tunnel here and we know the secret, so play ball or I’ll blow the lid off this outfit now. Pretty?”