Silent Partner
Page 12
The sun rose and showed him Karim’s face, hollowed, drawn, tired, the face of a man who has lived a long time with death as a companion. For a moment it seemed to Tony that Karim was the prisoner and not he. For a moment he was touched with pity.
Only for a moment. No, Tony thought, I don’t care a damn what he’s planning to do. I only care about what he's already done. And I am not that grateful.
The truck crossed over a desert plain with barren mountains set about it. Presently there was a village and patches of cultivation, and a while later Tony saw one big saddle-backed peak like the one that hulks over Monterrey in Mexico, and he remembered it from the time he had been here before. They were approaching Isfahan.
The village men were awake now. So were Karim and Yadollah. Once more Tony felt the heartstrings pull tight, saw the predatory brilliance in Karim’s eye. This was the last hurdle.
They crossed the Zayenda Rud on one of the old bridges. Tony could hear that there was water still running in the channel. They passed into the streets of Isfahan, thronged with people and traffic, and the truck was not stopped. Apparently authority was depending on the roadblocks, and Tony could see why. If you stopped all this and checked it out piece by piece, you would only have one large hell of a mess which your quarry could see miles away and avoid. Since the river runs right through the city, you could not even tie up the bridges without causing chaos.
So they were through. As the truck swung, Tony caught a glimpse of domes and minarets. These vanished as the driver turned into a tangle of narrow streets, and they went with the horn sounding constantly and the brakes jarring, avoiding donkeys, sheep, goats, barrows, and people. Eventually they made a sharp tum and jolted in through some narrow place that set the echoes banging. The truck stopped. Tony saw a deep arched gateway like a tunnel, high enough to accommodate a loaded camel and wide enough, just, for a loaded truck. The great plank doors, with huge iron bosses as black as the wood, were being pushed shut by two men. The massive bar dropped into place. Karim drew the rug away and said, “God is still good to you. Get out."
Stiff and cramped, Tony shifted to let everyone else go ahead of him while he helped Ellen, who needed help as badly but no worse than he did. He put his head close to hers and whispered, “I’m going to run for it if I can."
She gave him a clear, hard look. “Not going to play it safe?”
“No. Stay out of it, and you'll be all right."
“The hell with that," she answered, unladylike. “I’ll go with you."
They stumbled out of the truck into a large square paved with stone and closed on four sides by low buildings with rows of alcoved chambers up and down—one of the old caravanserais of the bazaar. Caravans were long gone. and it was now used for storage. The buildings were pierced by two gates—the outer one through which they had entered and an inner one on the opposite side of the square.
“I don’t have to tell you,” said Karim, "what happens if you do anything stupid.”
“I know,” said Tony, and looked at Yadollah. “I get it the same way Harvey got it. Was it here?”
“No. In another part of the bazaar. Keep together and walk slowly.”
They walked, with Karim and Yadollah and the conservation officer ringed around like sheepdogs. The village men were clustered by the outer gate, and Tony saw that they were leaving one by one through a small postern door set in the big one. He glanced toward the inner gate. It too had a postern, so that the heavy doors did not have to be wrestled with every time someone wished to pass through. It looked like the only other way out of the serai. There might be rear entrances to the buildings; but he couldn’t count on that. and anyway, they would take too long to find. The postern door was closed, and there was a bar across it.
He didn’t know. He was not used to this sort of game, and he didn’t know how to play it, how to preguess the moves. If he and Ellen made the try, how much chance would they have? He knew that the conservation man had a gun. Would he use it? Gunshots were noisy—but maybe he had a silencer. He didn't know if Karim was armed. Yadollah didn't have to be; his weapons were built in.
What would he, Tony, do exactly? Just rush the door and try to get the bar up and climb through before the men killed him? Or would it be wiser to wait and try the break later? They might have a better chance. Or they might have none at all. And they might be separated. Probably would be, after their joint effort at the village.
He was going to have to make up his mind pretty soon. The group was moving on an angle across the court, and they would pass the nearest approach to the gate in a matter of seconds.
The sun beat down in the windless court, dry and stinging. Pigeons winged overhead, perched cooing on the roof. Black-and-gray crows eyed the intruders wickedly and screamed at them. The buildings slept, remembering old days, the broken lattice doors of the chambers closed like the eyes of the dead. Even in decay the pointed arches of the alcoves were graceful, the symmetry of line and proportion unchanged. There was something curiously satisfying about mud brick and stucco as building materials. They sat the earth well.
There was a slash of shadow under the arch of the gate, which was just opposite. Oh, hell, thought Tony, and leaned his weight against Ellen's shoulder. “The gate, now.”
She ran, her long legs swinging. She didn’t run like a girl, all knock-kneed and kicking her feet out at the sides. She ran like a boy or a goddamned deer. He couldn't keep up with her. “The bar,” he shouted. “Get the bar up.” He heard noises behind him and looked over his shoulder, the skin crawling tight across his back. The conservation officer was fitting a baffle onto his .45. Karim was standing still, every feature sharp in the pitiless sunlight—a statue, colored deadly.
Yadollah was thundering up on Tony’s heels, his arm upraised like the beam of a trip-hammer.
Tony stumbled on the old uneven stones. He saw the blow start downward, the neck breaker that had finished Harvey, and he flung himself desperately against it, catching Yadollah’s arm in both his hands. He had some idea of throwing Yadollah the way he saw people thrown on TV, judo style, using the forward impetus. It was like trying to throw an oak tree by grabbing one of its branches. While he hung struggling, Yadollah's left hand fetched him a buffet in the side that drove the breath out of him and put him gurgling on his knees. He discovered some more of the uses of anger. Instead of sobbing or vomiting or both, he pushed himself off the ground and butted Yadollah as hard as he could in the lower gut.
Astonishingly, Yadollah fell. Fell in a great awkward boneless heap, splashing blood over the dusty stones. My God, thought Tony, his head ringing, did I do that? How? Ellen was calling his name, screaming it. He saw Karim doubled over, running, dodging, toward the nearest shelter. The conservation man was standing irresolute, staring with his mouth open at some men who had appeared among the alcoves of the building in the area toward which they had been going when Tony had interrupted.
The strangers were busy shooting, their silenced guns making popping sounds that were barely audible over the cawing of the crows.
19
Karim jinked abruptly in flight, fell, rolled, scrambled up, and ran again. He flung himself into one of the ground-floor alcoves and hit the door. It let him through in a frail dry crackling of wood as the ancient lattice split apart. The conservation man was now sitting down, his head sunk forward in an attitude of profound thought. Something snarled past Tony’s ear, rasping his nerves like a naked file. He had never been shot at before, but instinct got the message through to him, loud and clear. He stopped goggling and ran.
Lead hit twice on the stones close beside him, making a peculiarly vicious, angry whine as it ricocheted. Ellen had already climbed through the pastern and was standing on the other side looking back at him, her arm outstretched. He noticed that there were holes in the wood around the postern; they had been shooting at Ellen, too. A bullet burned across his hip and went thunk! into the gate ahead of him. Ellen grabbed his hand, and he forged through the
postern, stumbling on the high sill, landing on all fours on earth packed as hard as brick by the passing feet of centuries. Ellen banged the postern shut; but it wouldn’t stay, and there was no fastening on this side.
“They’re coming,” she said as the door swung open again. "Are you all right?"
“I think so.” He picked himself up. “What the hell? Who —” Blinking in the dim light that seemed like no light at all after the blaze of the open court, he became aware of people all about, amazed and staring at this sudden eruption. They were in one of the covered streets of the bazaar, with shops chiefly occupied by sellers of cloth. A group of women directly opposite were frozen in the act of fingering a length of the gauzy speckled stuff that seemed to be the “in” thing for chadors, their mouths open on unspoken words. The merchant was looking over Tony’s shoulder with dawning alarm. All up and down the street, in the shafts of sunlight from the roof openings, people were stopping, turning their heads.
And the men in the courtyard, at least a couple of them, were coming fast. The others, presumably, were hunting Karim.
Tony caught Ellen’s hand, and they hurried away, moving in among the crowd.
“What was all that about?” demanded Tony, his voice rising to a pubescent squeak with shock and indignation. He fingered his hip gingerly. It was smarting, and his fingers came away red.
“I don’t know,” Ellen answered. She kept looking over her shoulder. “They were after all of us, including Karim. I think they hit him. What’s the matter?”
“I’ve been shot,” said Tony, and held up his hand with the stained fingers.
“Badly?”
The line came automatically; he had heard it so many times. The headshake, the gallant little smile. “Just a scratch.” A real scratch, with real blood, his. He wanted to throw up. And those were real men behind him, with real guns.
“Are they still coming?”
They were. Two men in store suits, conspicuous in the midst of reach-me-down poverty, shouldering roughly through the throng. Their hands were empty now, but there was a purposefulness in the way they moved that made Tony shiver.
He hurried on with Ellen, and it was like running down a long, dim corridor into time. These were the oldest streets of the bazaar, where the people lived and worked exactly as they had when Shah Abbas had thrown his fantastic parties at the Ali Qapu for the emissaries of Good Queen Bess. The women covered their faces. There were fakirs with strings of greasy hair, chanting beggars, bearded mullahs in robes and turbans. Ragged men strained under heavy burdens. A loaded donkey, trotting fast, knocked Tony aside, and the small fierce-faced man who drove it went by shouting his monotonous warning cry without ever glancing at the Feringi. They were not used to foreigners here and did not welcome them. Tony spoke to several men at random, asking for help and the police; but they only turned away, and the two men came closer. Tony and Ellen ran in the sour-smelling, smoky gloom, with the hostile faces staring at them, and the street seemed to go on forever.
At last there was daylight ahead, an opening. “Look," said Tony, “we’re all right. We’re out of it.” Ellen gave a sob of relief. They plunged into the light.
And stopped, dismayed. They were still in the bazaar, in the street of the blacksmiths. Forge fires burned in open stalls, and sweating men swung hammers. The way was blocked on the right by a wall that seemed to have no gate in it. Tony turned to the left, and Ellen followed close behind him. There was no place to hide, nowhere to go but straight ahead. They took temporary cover behind a parked truck, and an old woman who sat on the step of a coffee stall smoking the public pipe watched them as curiously as though they were Martians.
Looking back, Tony said, “I think we lost them.” Then he saw the men come out, still determinedly on the trail, and he groaned and took Ellen’s hand again. They fled down the clangorous street under the bright Persian sky, and all at once Tony saw two men ahead of them, coming their way. They too wore store suits, and they seemed to be looking for something. When they sighted Ellen and Tony, it was apparent that they had found it.
“Oh, lord,” said Ellen. “What now?”
“There,” said Tony, seeing a dark opening ahead and to their left. They raced the oncoming pair to it and beat them and dived back into the maze of covered streets.
The second set of men came in after them, running.
The slow-moving crowd hampered them all. Tony twisted and turned, trying to avoid knocking anybody down. The others were more ruthless, and Tony could judge their progress by the explosions of furious Persian. They were making much too good time. Tony looked desperately for some straw to grasp at, no matter how frail. At an intersection of two streets there was a shop selling samovars. He put on a burst of speed, swung Ellen around the corner, and then swept the whole display of samovars into the street. Instant bedlam broke loose. Some people tripped and fell. The shopkeeper sprang at Tony, shouting, and Tony pushed him into the crowd. Then he ran with Ellen into the transverse street.
It turned out to be a poor choice. It was wide and empty, and it went for a quarter of a mile without an exit. There were no busy shops here, only the little forges of the coppersmiths. The emptiness made for good running, but the crowd, Tony realized, had been a protection, as well as a nuisance.
The two men appeared again behind them, and now there was nothing at all to stop them shooting.
Nevertheless, they did not. Ellen and Tony reached the end of the street intact and turned into another. It was populous and lined with shops, and Tony's heart leaped up.
“I think I know where I am,” he said, panting like a dog. “This is the touristy part; somebody will speak English.”
Ellen gripped his shoulder and pointed. Three more men in suits had appeared from among the crowd and were rapidly closing.
Now Tony understood why the other two had not fired. They had simply let them run ahead into the trap.
Without giving it any thought at all, Tony charged the foremost of the men, the one who chiefly barred the way. "Run, Ellen!” he yelled. "Get help!” He went in low, and the man sidestepped gracefully, bent his knee, and picked an uppercut neatly off the floor. Tony went down with the feeling that his head had flown off and was bouncing on along the street all by itself. It was a giddy sensation, and when it stopped, he saw that two of the men had caught Ellen and were holding her between them. It took two of them. The men from the street of the blacksmiths had come up and joined the group, looking sweated and cross. No one in the general crowd was making any move to help; they all had drawn well back out of range. Tony sat on the hard earth and looked at Ellen, and then he began yelling, "Help! Police!” at the top of his voice.
The fifth man, the one he had tackled, came around from behind him where he had been talking to the others, apparently giving instructions. He stood over Tony in the shadowy half-light and said, "You damn fool, we are the police. I'm sorry I had to belt you, but you have to admit you had one coming.”
"Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Tony said. He felt like crying. “You Armenian son of a bitch.”
He grasped Zacharian’s outstretched hand as one grasping a lifeline in a deadly sea. "What are you doing here anyway?”
Zacharian pulled him up. "Looking for Karim. Maktabi was sure he’d make for Isfahan. He’s got a dozen teams in the souk, fifty men, and it's a drop in the bucket. You—”
"He’s here,” Tony said. "He’s here.”
"I guessed that,” said Zacharian patiently, "when I saw you. What I want to know is where.”
20
One of the men identified the particular caravanserai and led them to it quickly. But when they got there, the street looked unfamiliar to Tony. It was all deserted now, the people gone, the shops shut. He was going to say it was the wrong place, and then he saw the postem door still swinging open, and he knew it was the right one. They went through into the courtyard—Tony, Zacharian, and three Iranian security men. The fourth one had taken Ellen Lofting out of the bazaar.
Tony stood looking down at Yadollah. “He killed Harvey Martin. With one blow.” He shook his head and turned to where the armed men had appeared so suddenly. “I don't get it, Jake. They were waiting for us right over there. They didn't say anything, just started shooting. They were after all of us, Karim, me, Ellen. My God, I don't know how they missed any of us.”
Zacharian switched off the communicator. “They were using silencers, weren’t they?” He turned aside to answer some of the Iranian security men who were coming in. The serai and the streets around it were becoming as busy as a beehive in spring.
Tony said yes, they were.
“A baffle cuts down the noise, but it also cuts the accuracy. They were waiting for you to come within point-blank range; only you and Ellen broke up the party a little too soon.”
Tony touched his hip. “They got close enough. They hit Karim, too. I think they went in there after him.” He moved restlessly, shifting his feet on the stones. He could hear men crashing about through the buildings, calling to one another. “Who were they, Jake?”