The Day of the Guns (8 page)

Oh, kid, I thought, what the hell do you think you’re pulling? This old soldier’s been through the routine. Backwards and forwards. Don’t give
me
the negligee and thigh deal. Hell, I’ve seen more naked broads than you have hair on your head. I’ve put them to bed, waked them up, left them gasping and two dyingand now you’re doing this to me? Nuts.

“Nice,” I said. “You’d make a great whore.”

She stopped in mid-stride and smiled. “Thank you. Have you finished your drink?”

“I’m ready for another.”

“So am I.” She never saw the first one I poured down the drain, but I took the second one she handed to me, tasted it, then walked across the room to the windows. The apartment looked out on Central Park, the view taking in almost all of the giant rectangle that was so tightly laced together with the lights of taxis.

“Nice place, Rondine. Rent must go about a grand a month. Your U.N. job isn’t about to keep you in a joint like this one.”

“I have a private income,” she answered simply. “I consider the position important enough to warrant the loss. My family feels the same way.”

“Hell. I can think up an easier explanation.”

“What would that be?”

I turned around and stared at her. She was standing in the middle of the room, the superb beauty of her turning my guts around. “You have a private income all right, but the source isn’t the family. It’s another government, a Red one.”

She didn’t challenge me. The small shake of her head was almost pitying.

Then I had another thought. “But maybe you are right, kid. Maybe it is the Caine family after all. Rattle that skeleton enough and they’ll come across with anything.” I paused a moment and grinned. “Perfect. Trace back your income and it fits the picture. What a wonderful setup.”

The whiteness was there again, the fine lines back at her eyes, but only momentarily. The hate dissolved into the thinnest of smiles and she raised her glass to take a taste of her drink.

“In two days I’ll have a pipeline into your family, kitten,” I said. “If you could do it, so can I. You should know I’m not working alone. Behind me are others trained to the hilt and they’ll get everything I want.”

“Tiger ...”

“How about your brother and sister who are dead? Maybe we’ll have to go that far back if that’s where the skeleton is. Want to tell me about them?”

“Damn you!” She threw the glass and it went past my head to smash against the wall. I never moved. “They’re dead. You let my family alone.” There was a harsh edge to her voice.

I let out a little laugh. “Honey,” I said, “how you forget. You don’t remember your old Tiger very well at all. I never let anything alone until I bury it personally. I want all the answers, sugar. I want you to fall hard and fast and I want to watch it happen. I loved you too damn much so I hate your guts the same way. So remember, girl.”

I wouldn’t let her talk. I said, “Remember all the things we were going to do after the war? The house on the ocean and the business together. How many kids did you say you wanted? Remember ... four ... and they’d look like both of us and we could teach them the things they should know and not the things they shouldn’t? They’d never know how or where we met ... we were going to fake a story about that one, but they would know how much we loved each other.

“Honey, was I ever a sucker for that. I pulled you out of the fire and nearly wrecked an operation doing it and then you shot me. Love? Hell, you don’t know the meaning of the word. You grifted me for information and called it love. You suckered me, beautiful, but never again.”

Her eyes had widened somehow and there was a lost expression on her face, but she was a great actress.

Suddenly she said quietly, “Do you still love me, Tiger?”

And just as quickly I told her. “Sure I do, Rondine. I always have. It isn’t something you can turn off. After I kill you I’ll go right on loving you like I always have but it won’t make a damn bit of difference to me. The game is over. It’s all cold, hard fact now.”

“You really mean to kill me, don’t you?”

“For certain, baby. You can be sure of it.”

The music was coming to a close. The timing was right for what I wanted to do. I put my drink down and sat on the arm of a big chair and looked at her. “Take off that robe, Rondine.”

If she had a drink in her hand she would have dropped it. She gave me a startled look and one hand went to her throat inadvertently to close the neckline that had been so deliberately opened.

She just stood there a second, then when I got up, took a step back and there was no place else to go because the couch was behind her pressing into her hips.

I walked the ten feet that separated us and stood there in front of her. “What’s the matter, kitten? I’ve seen you naked before, dozens of times, from bedrooms to swimming in a river together. There’s not an inch of you I haven’t explored and you loved every minute of it. Don’t play prude, not with me.”

“Please ...” The quiver of her mouth even looked genuine. If I hadn’t seen her do it before I would have fallen for the act.

“Off,” I said, “or do I do it for you?”

Her hands grabbed at the back of the couch and bit into the fabric. Rondine was scared silly. She had a right to be.

“Please ...” she said again, “why ...”

I grinned at her. “You thinking I’ll jump you kid? Hell, I wouldn’t throw a rock at you any more. I wouldn’t give you another inch of myself. No, baby, I just want to see how far you went with the plastic surgery. Faces can be lifted, but women don’t usually go all the way down to their shoes. The faces they show in the day ... the rest they can hide in the night so why bother. But I’m curious about you, Rondine.”

Ten seconds ticked by slowly before she moved. Her teeth bit into her lip and she made her decision. Her fingers came away from the couch, fumbled at the belt of her robe, loosened it, then with one sweeping motion she flung the housecoat wide and stood there like some new Joan of Arc challenging the mob.

The clock turned back twenty years instantly and it was the day Rondine and I were hiding in the loft in France with the
maquis
somewhere outside searching for her. There was a driving summer rain we knew had wiped out our tracks and in the exuberance of knowing we would make it together had felt the heady flow of happiness that turned into the wild, emotional waterfall of love and ecstasy. She had danced there in the loft and stripped off her clothes piece by piece and, in one final gesture before she flung herself at me, had stood there motionless, arms outstretched, every muscle in her body taut and vibrant, a luminescent, white, beautiful thing that was all mine.

And now she stood there again, breasts hard and proud, her belly trembling, the quiver seeming to run into her thighs, legs at a defiant angle, the auburn tint of her hair highlighted with gold, eyes flashing, daring.

“So you went all the way. The medics did a good job.” There was a cold flat tone to my voice. “Paraffin injections, invisible surgery, hard diet and steady exercise can knock a lot of years off a person’s appearance.” I grinned at her again. “But they can’t operate on memories, can they, kid?”

I stepped back, laughed and turned toward the door. I heard her curse me softly with something like a sob in her voice and she said, “Tiger ... turn around.”

She had the gun in her hand this time, the pocketbook open on the chair. “I could kill you right now if I wanted to.”

“No you couldn’t. Rondine. You forget too much.” I reached in my pocket and took out the clip, looked at it and threw it at her feet. “Better try using bullets. You should know how they work.”

Her mouth opened in surprise and she looked at the useless piece in her hand. I saw the tears start and like a kid she sort of crumpled to her knees on the floor and sat there crying with her head down.

She hated to be outguessed and that was the only way she could take it out on herself. But, Rondine had always been like that.

I got the hell out of there.

 

Downstairs, I walked to the corner, waited a couple of minutes for a cruising taxi and when none came by empty, turned west toward Broadway and started up the empty channel of the street. On either side the apartments rose flatly into the night sky, angular and drab, windows like dull yellow eyes sick of looking out at nothing. Cars were parked bumper to bumper along either curb, stacked there until morning, abrogating every law and violating every rule of common sense until the herd instinct took over at the de-witching hour of eight A.M. I never failed to wonder how the hell they got out of there. One big Caddie had pushed in the nose of a Volkswagen and tomorrow there would be one big bash on the sidewalk when the owners had it out. Halfway down the block somebody had swiped both tires off a Chewie and left it on chocks. New York at night. Great place.

Traffic went opposite me so I didn’t bother looking for a cab. All I could think about was Rondine.

Naked, lovely Rondine.

How could a woman devote her life to destruction? How could anyone so beautiful as her throw away the only good thing she had ever had? Sure, war could demand things of anyone, but out of war can come peace and decency if you have the sense to let it. Goddamn it, we could have had the world for our own, everything we ever wanted, only she was too warped and twisted inside to take it.

And now? The big now?

Warped and twisted? Balls ... she was the essence of total depravity, a person who had gone from one scheme to another to recapture and keep the one thing a woman always wants ... control. She needed it. But she’d never get it. That’s why she cried.

For a pro I had gotten too lost inside my own head. There was too much night and too many thoughts and too much Rondine to stop and think of what she would do and I damn near died because of it. I didn’t notice the car slowing down at first until the first shot came and missed, but I knew there would be others and went into a crazy dive toward the curb with the slug from a tommy gun slamming into the parked cars and whistling over my head. I had the .45 in my hand when my back hit the doors of a Buick beside me and let one go through the back window of the Ford racing off down the street.

But it didn’t go any further than that. I was ready for the rest, ready for the second car that pulled up and the guy who jumped out when he thought I was concentrating on watching the Ford and when I turned and killed him with one smashing blow from the butt end of the Army Colt his eyes were white with the murderous horror of the moment. I shot through the window of the car and saw the driver slam up against the window and watched the car swerve into the others across the street and stand churning a moment before it stalled and the yelling from the windows started.

You never run. You walk. Nobody pays any attention when you walk near the scene of a killing. They only get civic when you run and not always then, except that they give descriptions. I took my time about lifting the guy’s wallet before easing off down the block and by the time I heard the first siren I was already in a cab headed back toward Times Square and when I reached the Big Intersection I tapped the driver on the shoulder, handed him a buck and told him to let me out.

Down in the subway station I went into the men’s room, went through the wallet and found thirty-two bucks in small bills stuffed in the money folder and not a card, scrap of paper or anything else. I was almost ready to toss it when I saw it was one of those secret-pocket types with a hidden compartment. I got my finger under the flap of leather, slipped it out and there was a brand-new thousand-dollar bill. I fingered it out, stuck it with the rest in my pocket, went out and tossed the wallet down between the tracks when nobody was watching and went up to the next level where the Coke machine was and had one.

At nine P.M. I put a credit-card call through to London and, after a ten-minute wait, got Peter Johnson in our office there. He operated out of a fashionable haberdashery shop near Piccadilly Circus with a crew of four and after a four-month lay-off since the Berlin affair he was glad to get back on an assignment.

So far, he hadn’t come up with anything on the Caine family outside of what Wally had given me, but was going to dig into the deceased Vernon and Diana Caine to see if there was any possibility of blackmail tactics being used against the Caines because of them. To date his research had been pretty thorough with no tangible results, so he wasn’t especially hopeful about going back into the war years to find something new.

He did have one interesting piece of news though. In the general backtracking of Rondine Lund he had contacted a former
maqui
officer who said he had heard that the beautiful Rondine made two successful escapes from her captors at the war’s end, and although he wasn’t certain, he heard later she had been recaptured and shot. At that time she had been caught in a round up of Nazi collaborators when justice had been swift, burial quick and no reference made of identity after the act.

It wouldn’t have been hard for Rondine to switch identities with some sucker. There were ways of working it. I had done it myself once. An unsuspecting woman gives the name of Rondine Lund and before she knows what’s happening to her it’s over. Exit Rondine, Enter Edith Caine.

I told Johnson to stay with it until I called and hung up.

The next call was through a relay and took five minutes before Martin Grady answered. As usual, he simply picked up the phone and held it without speaking, waiting for the caller to make the first move.

“Tiger here,” I said.

“Is this necessary?” He had the cool, polished voice of a diplomat, but behind it was all the raw power of the man he was.

“Yes,” I said. “I need to draw on all the resources. I.A.T.S. and the rest are looking for Vidor Churis. I want him first. He’s in this area.”