Dead Man's Tale

by Don Pendleton

  "The commissioner thought of that. And the answer's negative."

  "What about other friends, business contacts?"

  He shook his head. "Too complicated. No time. It has to be something simple. Hell, he had to use something nobody would specially notice, something that would be easy and quick to hide afterward, and equally easy to find again."

  "You sure have the toughest end of the deal."

  "Come again?"

  "I mean the Mob has it easy. You have to locate the glass or whatever it is, recognize it for what it is, get it safely all the way back to the United States, then discover how it was used and repeat those conditions before you can really say you scored. All they have to do is destroy it."

  "Guess you're right."

  He relocked the apartment and they went out into the hallway. Apart from the back of a bulky man disappearing through the glass doors that led to the stairs, the floor was deserted. Alexandra pressed the button for the elevator and the grooved aluminum gates slid apart immediately.

  Bolan stood aside to let the woman enter first, but paused. "Just a minute. That guy we saw — why would a man ride to the tenth floor in an elevator, walk out, then immediately take the stairs and go down again?"

  "Because he was calling on someone else's wife on the ninth and didn't want to be seen going to that floor." She smiled. "Or maybe he meant to go to the ninth and pressed the wrong button."

  "It would be easier to stay in the elevator car. It's not an express that passes some floors. We have time to check."

  He leaned inside the car, pressed a button for one of the lower floors, and ducked out as the hydraulically operated bar slid the gates shut. The inner gates rumbled together, and they heard the whine of machinery as the car began to descend. The indicator arrow on the dial above the elevator sank from 10, past 9, to 8.

  "Suspicious!" Alexandra chided. "That's what you are. Now we'll have to wait until..."

  Something banged, twice, beyond the gates with enormous force. With an impact that appeared to shiver the whole story, a metallic thunderclap hammered the far side of the grooved aluminum. There was a subdued rushing noise, rising rapidly to a crescendo, from within the shaft. Gear wheels and pulleys, freed of their load, shrieked up the scale.

  A splintering crash from far below echoed up the empty elevator well as the car, its twin steel hawsers sheared, plummeted one hundred and sixty feet to the winch housing at the bottom of the shaft.

  18

  After the steel hawsers had been sawed almost through, the police investigators told Bolan the following day, a particularly neat modification to the electrical part of the elevator mechanism had ensured that the remaining strands would part a few seconds after the car was operated in a downward direction.

  "Okay, so we were followed to the building," Bolan said to Alexandra Tauber, "but they would have had to work damned quickly. Otherwise they could have killed the wrong people."

  "They probably blocked the car on that floor," she reasoned, "leaving it until the last moment, when we were actually leaving, before they made that final electrical connection. But there had to have been at least two of them."

  "Yeah." The warrior frowned, something that had been vaguely clamoring for attention beneath his consciousness finally emerging. Of course! The Lancia convertible he'd seen from the window: the driver, the sallow-faced character with a lock of hair over one eye. He was one of the mafiosi at Schloss Königsberg!

  Bolan learned two more things before he left police headquarters. Forensic experts had now established that a third wound on Zulowski's body, discovered during the autopsy on his right shoulder, was of a different caliber from the rifle bullets that killed him — a 9 mm slug probably fired from a submachine gun.

  That stacked up with the idea that Zulowski had been chased into Luxembourg by the Mob, and confirmed Bolan's deductions concerning the bullet-riddled Peugeot convertible. But it didn't get him any farther in his search for the hologram medium.

  Fact number two — gleaned after Wenzel had permitted him to put through a call to Brognola's office in Washington — told him that a cable finally had surfaced from the dead agent, but that it meant nothing to the Fed or his assistants.

  Bolan took down the text of the message, asked Frank O'Reilly to put through another trace on the Stony Man computers and hung up.

  The cable, delayed because — for security reasons — it had been routed through CIA stations in several different countries, read:

  Shades of meaning: forwarding for lens treatment to HB.

  The message didn't tell Bolan anything either, except that it had to refer to the package the agent had intended to mail. "Forwarding to HB" — clearly Hal Brognola — proved that. But the inference to be drawn from the first phrase remained a mystery. And the lens, presumably referring to the hologram medium, was as elusive as ever.

  Bolan walked back to his hotel, ate a quick lunch and crossed the street to the parking lot overlooking the ravine. Things were heating up — four sticks of dynamite had been wired to the starter of his rented Volkswagen.

  He dismantled the bomb, turned the car in at the rental company's local office and took a bus to Grevenmacher, a camping and boating holiday resort on the Moselle River. Here, once he had satisfied himself that he had no tail, he rented an '86 Buick Skylark sedan with tinted windows. Then he drove back to the city. He found a parking slot near the post office, fed coins into the meter and settled down to wait.

  It was easy enough to finger the witnesses to Zulowski's death. The fat guy and his even fatter wife who ran the tobacco stand set in the outer wall of the post office. The blind match seller who sat all day on the sidewalk nearby. The uniformed war veteran who opened and closed the post office doors. A lean, lined newspaper vendor on the corner outside the flower shop. The curvy redhead with green eyes who owned the necktie boutique. The three waiters at the café next door.

  Bolan's trained eye registered everything, but he was in no hurry to act. He wanted to submerge himself in the day-to-day activity, to soak up the feel of the neighborhood before he started asking questions. After everything had closed for the night, he walked back to his hotel and returned to the parked Buick by a roundabout route the following morning.

  Twenty-four hours later he knew that the post office doorman got angry if the customers stayed too long after the place was supposed to close at noon, making him lose his usual lunch-hour corner seat at the café. He had noted the number of the Paris-registered Porsche in which a dark, smooth young man called for the boutique redhead every lunchtime and evening. He knew that the smart bespectacled ladies from the flower shop weren't doing very well because they ate their lunches from brown paper bags. He could tell which taxi it was that would call to take home the blind man, and which one had been ordered to help with the marketing by the fat wife of the guy who ran the tobacco stand.

  For the tenth time, toward the end of that day, he checked over the Xeroxed statements made by the witnesses, measuring them against the flesh and blood human beings he could see.

  Hearing a disturbance on the steps, the impatient porter had testified, / went out and saw a small crowd at the bottom of the stairs. They were gathered around a tail man who had been coming into the post office and had fallen back so that his head was now on the sidewalk. He was clean shaven and his eyes were open. I could see that he was dead. There was plaster on the stairs and blood underneath the man.

  That figured with what Bolan knew of the doorman. An old soldier trained to observe. Crisp, factual comments. Eye for detail.

  The wider of the flower shop women was returning a jug to the cafe. That would be Madame Orosch. He flipped pages and read her statement. / heard my cousin cry out. I looked up. A tall man in dark glasses was lurching about on the post office steps. He sat down suddenly and fell back into the roadway. Then people rushed up and I couldn't see any more.

  A black Porsche drew up alongside the Buick. Seeing the dim bulk of someone behind the wheel t
hrough the tinted glass, the driver signaled — are you pulling out? When Bolan gestured NO, and shook his head, the guy scowled and shot away to double park outside the boutique. He leaned on his horn. The redhead came out, gesticulating. She pointed angrily at the clock on the post office wall, then at the shutters, which hadn't yet been closed over the boutique display windows. The Porsche accelerated away and shot a red light on the corner.

  Her name, Bolan saw, was Estrellita Vatel. She'd been to the post office to register some mail before lunch on the day Zulowski was killed. On the way out, her statement continued, / heard what I believed was a backfire. At first I thought maybe my friend's car was being temperamental again, but when I reached the steps there was a man lying there with people all around him. He was sort of staring at the sky. Somebody told me he was dead.

  The blind man of course had seen nothing. He heard somebody fall, heard another voice call for an ambulance, asked what was going on but had to wait some minutes before anyone could tell him.

  Bolan read again the testimony of the person who'd seen it all on her way out of the post office, a Madame Sara Richter.

  / noticed a man in sunglasses hurrying up the stairs toward me. I happened to glance over his head and saw three puffs of smoke, one after the other, float away from the window of an unfinished building down the road. The man gave a kind of cough and fell...

  Bolan closed the folder containing the Xeroxed sheets. He'd been right. No doubt about it. There was a discrepancy.

  He left the car and walked to the boutique. The redhead was a beauty. Her voice was deep and her skin, dark above the low neck of a white pique dress, positively glowed. Bolan pretended an interest in a display of silk neckties from Italy. "This one is kind of special, don't you think?" the girl suggested, sliding up to him. "The oyster-green color is definitely you."

  "Perhaps." He fondled several others. "I had something a little more... sober... in mind. Maybe this striped..."

  "Definitely not." She shook her head decisively. "I see you in a style that's discreet but vibrant. Those stripes are fine for northerners. I sold one to a Dutchman the other day. But for you..."

  He seized the opportunity. "A Dutchman? Not the guy who was shot outside the post office across the road?"

  "Was he Dutch? He didn't look it." She was indifferent.

  "I'd have thought so, with that tall, rangy frame, pale hair and blue eyes."

  "You got the wrong man, mister," she said. "He was certainly tall. But he was dark and his eyes were brown."

  "That's not what I heard."

  "But they were. I ran over there. I saw him. He was..."

  "I don't see how you could tell," Bolan cut in, "since he was wearing sunglasses."

  "He wasn't wearing glasses. I tell you I particularly noticed the color of his eyes. They had already begun to film over." She shivered and looked away, recalling the scene.

  "Oh, well," Bolan said, shrugging. "It's not important. I guess I'll take the dark maroon one with the small white spots."

  He went to buy some flowers.

  The wider of the two ladies was convinced that Zulowski had indeed been wearing tinted spectacles, and her leaner cousin confirmed this.

  By the time Bolan had bought a paper from the vendor across the street and heard that Zulowski had been behind sunglasses "as usual," the discrepancy had become glaring.

  He climbed the steps to the post office, stood in line for one of the pay phones and made a single call. He asked Wenzel's assistant one question, waited for the answer then hung up and left.

  Back in the Buick, he went over the Xeroxed statements and the results of his own questioning one more time.

  He was clean shaven and his eyes were open.

  A tall man in dark glasses was lurching about.

  He was sort of staring at the sky.

  A man in sunglasses hurrying up the stairs.

  The redhead from the boutique had observed, correctly, that Zulowski had brown eyes. But the flower ladies and the newspaper seller testified that the eyes were hidden behind smoked spectacles. And Colonel Heller, the NATO laser specialist, had described the agent as a man "always wearing sunglasses."

  If he had been wearing sunglasses when he was killed, witnesses would scarcely have noticed whether his eyes were open, what color they were, or that he was staring at the sky.

  Wenzel's assistant had just told Bolan that the body of Zulowski, when it was brought into the morgue, was without any kind of glasses.

  Yet no less than five witnesses had seen them.

  He checked over the statements once more.

  What stood out a mile, once you were looking for it, was that all the testimony citing sunglasses came from those literally in at the kill, witnesses who actually saw Zulowski shot down, whereas the folks who saw his eyes were those arriving on the scene after he was dead.

  The conclusion was inescapable.

  If the shades had been knocked off when he fell, they would have been picked up and taken to the mortuary with the body — and they weren't.

  Some person or persons, therefore, must have removed Zulowski's sunglasses, taken them between the time he was hit and the arrival of the later witnesses.

  What the warrior had to do now was find out who that was — and why he did it.

  19

  After the stores were closed and the area deserted, Bolan went over every inch of the ground. He climbed the stone staircase to the sixth floor of the unfinished apartment building and raced as quickly as he could back to the post office steps. He went from the steps to the flower shop, the cafe, the boutique and back again. He hurried up and down the steps with a stopwatch in his hand.

  When he had finished, his original hunch was strengthened: geographically and timewise only one answer was possible.

  The following morning he went to the tobacco stand and bought a pack of cigarettes he wasn't going to smoke. "And I'd like a couple of boxes of matches too," he said as he paid.

  The fat man who ran the stand leaned forward across the counter. "If it's all the same to you, sir, you can buy them from the blind man on the sidewalk — there beside you, at the bottom of the post office steps."

  Bolan raised inquiring eyebrows.

  "It is unusual, I agree," the man apologized. "Especially as the sale of cigarettes and matches here remains, as it does in France, a government monopoly, available to the public only at licensed tabacs." His shoulders heaved in a Gallic shrug. "But what would you do? The poor man must earn a living. Officially, for the books, he is an employee of the stand. The local police are good fellows and they ignore the fact that he sits physically outside it."

  Bolan nodded and moved away. The match seller sat with his back against a stone column flanking the flight of stairs, his feet stretched out in front of him. A gray stubble covered his wizened face and his ruined eyes were hidden behind the circular black lenses of old-fashioned steel-rimmed spectacles. Below his tray, a crudely printed notice announced that he had lost his sight with the Allied armies in North Africa in 1942 and that he had no other means of support.

  Politely, Bolan told the vendor that he needed some matches. The man cocked an ear in the direction that the stranger's voice came from, but he continued to look straight ahead, pointing to the tray.

  Bolan picked two of the boxes from the tray and dropped coins into the man's seamed hand. As he turned to leave, he tripped clumsily against the lower steps and one of the boxes flew from his hand toward the blind man's face.

  Instinctively, involuntarily, one of the peddler's own hands darted up protectively, was arrested in midflight, and then slowly lowered again to the tray.

  Bolan recovered the box from the sidewalk and returned to the Buick. He'd found out what he needed to know.

  At seven-thirty that evening, the match seller's customary cab called to take him home. Fifteen minutes later, it stopped outside a small cottage wedged between a bakery and a Laundromat in a suburb on the road to Thionville and Metz.


  There was a pantomime of finding change, unloading the cardboard case containing the blind man's tray and stock of matches, and then the white stick tapped its way along a brick path and up to the cottage door. He fumbled for his key, twisted it in the lock and opened the door.

  Once inside the musty-smelling hallway, he reached out one hand to check that the draperies were covering the window, then threw aside the stick, took off his dark glasses and switched on the light.

  Mack Bolan was leaning his back against a door at the far end of the hall. The silenced Beretta in his right hand pointed straight at the match seller's heart.

  The man gave a hoarse cry of alarm and his hand flew to his jacket pocket.

  "I wouldn't if I were you," Bolan said quietly. "At this range I couldn't miss."

  The wizened features twisted into a grimace of rage. "Who the hell are you?" the man protested furiously. "What right have you got to come bursting into a man's private..."

  "Quiet!" Bolan interrupted. "I'm on to your little racket, so let's take it from there. I won't waste my breath telling you what I think of a man mean enough to fake blindness so that he can get away with a smalltime sneak thief act. It's a good scam, isn't it? Women leave their shopping baskets on the sidewalk while they feed coins into the stamp machine. They put their purses down while they check their mail, and who's going to suspect a poor blind man, even if they do register their loss almost at once?"

  The cheap crook's face was contorted with rage. "Get out of here," he snarled. "Get out or I'll phone the police! I don't know who the hell you are, but I'll show you..."

  Bolan strode across the hall, grasped the man's lapels, bunched his knuckles in the material and lifted him bodily from the floor. "No, I'll show you. But first I'd like to see what you're hiding in that pocket. Face that wall, legs spread, hands above your head."

  He threw the guy away from him. As soon as the man adopted the classic frisking position, he ran expert hands over the skinny body, removing a small Allies automatic, minus butt plates, from the jacket pocket, and a Bowie knife sharpened to a deadly razor-sharp point from a sheath clipped to his belt.