Dead Man's Tale

by Don Pendleton

  The gun, only four inches long, could be concealed in the palm of a hand. Bolan tossed it, as well as the killing knife, into a corner. He jammed the muzzle of his Beretta into the match seller's spine. "All right," he rapped. "What have you done with the dead man's sunglasses?"

  "What are you talking about?" the man whined. "I don't know what..."

  "When he fell down those steps, his head came to rest just by you, didn't it? And in the general confusion you picked the glasses off the ground — or maybe you even snatched them from his nose, isn't that the way it was?"

  "You're out of your skull! I tell you I don't know what you're talking about."

  Bolan jerked the man away from the wall and hurled him into a cluttered parlor that led off the entrance hall. He crashed against a table that overturned and sprawled on the floor.

  "AH right, all right." The bluster changed to an abject snivel. "There's no need to make such a big production over a pair of fucking sunglasses, for Chrissake. Why do you have to get violent?"

  "So you do have them."

  "Yeah, if you must know, I have the bastard glasses. If it's so important to you. I don't see the harm in it. The stiff wasn't going to need them anymore. If I'd left them, the cops would've pinched them anyway. They were a good pair too. They would've looked great on me."

  "Would have?"

  "Sure. Would have," the guy mimicked, a malevolent gleam in his eye. "The stupid jerk must have caught them on something as he went down. One of the lenses is splintered to hell. They're no fucking use to anyone."

  "Go and get them. And anything else you took from the body."

  "There was nothing else."

  Bolan hauled the guy to his feet. With his free hand he slapped the ratlike face once, twice, the blows sounding like pistol shots in the small room. The match seller yelled, glaring viciously at the warrior over black-rimmed nails as he felt his unshaven jaw.

  "What else was there?"

  "All right. There was a pocketbook. One of those zippered things. It was looped over his wrist, but it slipped off when he fell. The police would have..."

  "I get the message. Naturally there was no money in it?"

  "No, there wasn't. And nothing you can do will prove there was."

  "Go get it. And the sunglasses."

  "I tell you there wasn't any money. Not even one hundred francs."

  "You might find it hard to swallow, but I'm not interested in the money — or the lack of it. So go get them. Now!"

  Still holding the Beretta, he followed as the man sullenly walked through into a squalid bedroom. Beyond the bed, with its tumbled gray sheets, was a cheap veneer dressing table piled with watches, belts, neckties, billfolds, wallets, three or four women's purses, cameras, even a pair of binoculars.

  He pulled open the top drawer and rummaged inside it. Eventually he fished out a zippered pochette, nearly new, and a pair of sunglasses with expensive tortoise-shell frames. The left-hand lens was, as the man had said, cracked, the smoked glass finely starred and splintered, though none of it had fallen out.

  Bolan held out his hand and took them. Back in the parlor, he kicked the miniature automatic and the knife underneath a bureau. He slid the Beretta back into its quick-draw rig and opened the front door.

  "That's all for now," he told the scowling match seller. "You can consider yourself lucky. But I'll fill in the police chief about your little racket, and I wouldn't like to find you back outside the post office if I happened to pass by tomorrow."

  He went out and slammed the door, his hawklike features stamped with an expression of contempt.

  In his room at the Hotel Cravat, he examined his prizes.

  There was very little in the soft leather pochette. Any cash would have vanished within minutes of the theft, and the pickpocket would have plenty of black market contacts for the sale of driving license, ID papers, check book and credit cards. There was, however, a miniature diary, a small wad of folded wrapping paper, the end of a Scotch tape reel and a shallow cardboard box about six inches long. Inside it was a blank label with a gummed back.

  And an unused cable form.

  Bolan flicked over the pages of the tiny volume. Zulowski hadn't filled it in as a diary, a record of things done. He hadn't used it as a pint-sized engagement book. He had treated it as a mobile memo pad, full of entries in the kind of personal shorthand people often use. At random, the warrior leafed through and read:

  RTB's ex AF... H'lamp bulb... Dks for W (NB no Scotch)...Check elec rpr + concge...B'day card for C.

  The last entry, for the day he died, read: Send shades to HB.

  Bolan caught his breath. Revelation. He recalled at once the text of the message he'd taken down from Frank O'Reilly, the delayed cable that had finally arrived on Brognola's desk.

  Shades of meaning: forwarding for lens treatment to HB.

  Shades again?

  Of course! It hadn't meant anything then, but with what he knew now it was an easy read.

  He picked up the damaged sunglasses — the shades — and laid them in the shallow cardboard box. They fitted exactly.

  He nodded. Alpha plus for simplicity and ingenuity.

  Zulowski had used his own sunglasses as the refracting medium when he set up his holograms.

  No sweat now deciphering the scenario that final, fateful day.

  Zulowski had already cabled a warning that he was going to send shades. And they would sure as hell be meaningful because, after the "lens treatment," they would transform the holograms into the Mafia report.

  When he was killed, he was on his way to fill in that blank cable form to advise Brognola that the shades were on the way. After that he would have packed the sunglasses into the cardboard box, wrapped it in brown paper and mailed it, with the address filled in on the gummed label. Either from that post office or another.

  It all figured. Except for the final entry in the miniature diary. An operative of Zulowski's experience didn't need a written reminder to send vital material back to his headquarters.

  There was only one explanation. The phrase — the only one in the whole book with a clear meaning — was a deliberate tip-off. To Bolan or whoever might be delegated as a backup. It was a direct indication that the sunglasses were the medium used to make the holograms.

  Zulowski was covering himself in case anything happened to him. And unfortunately for him the precaution turned out to have been necessary.

  Bolan examined the shades, turning them over in his hand. He saw a pair of expensive spectacles with outsize lenses, one of which was cracked to hell. He hoped that both lenses had exactly the same curvature. Otherwise, if the guy happened to have used the one that got damaged when he was killed, then Brognola was right back where he started.

  But that wasn't the Executioner's worry. As far as he was concerned, he had located the medium. All he had to do now was get it safely back to the States.

  20

  Two blocks behind Mack Bolan's hotel there was a picturesque cobbled square, one side of which was filled by adjoining five-story brick buildings crowned by peaked slate roofs and pepperpot spires. These were the royal palace and the Luxembourg National Assembly. In front of the Grand Duchess's home, which rose directly from the sidewalk, were two sentry boxes, each manned by a single soldier wearing an ornate uniform.

  It had started to rain and the cobbles were slippery, polished bright by the light from the streetlamps. Bolan steered the Buick carefully across the sloping square: whatever happened, he was determined not to lose the Lancia convertible, but it wouldn't help if he allowed the sedan to skid on the treacherous surface and end up wrapped around one of the concrete posts in front of the palace.

  He'd seen the convertible quite by chance, gazing out his window at the parking lot on the edge of the ravine. But it was the fact that Fraser Latta was easing himself into the car on the passenger side that prompted his spur-of-the-moment decision to give chase. He was down the stairs and behind the wheel of the Buick before the driv
er of the Lancia had maneuvered his way out of the crowded lot.

  His plane didn't leave until ten o'clock the following morning, nor was there a Brussels-Washington connection until midday. Right now he reckoned he could afford the time to find out a little more about the Mob's European money man. It would be something he could give Alexandra and her GSG-9 associates to help them in the future.

  The Lancia disappeared down a ramp that led to an underground parking lot beneath a modern apartment building a mile north of the palace. A few minutes later a row of lighted windows sprang to life behind a balcony spanning one side of the building. Bolan drove on for two hundred yards, found a curbside slot, parked the Buick and walked back.

  The structure was seven stories high. The balcony with the lighted windows was on the fifth, overlooking a vacant lot that was clearly scheduled for development, as the area was littered with dump trucks, a bulldozer and a construction engineer's crane parked among the stacks of lumber and loads of bricks.

  The apartment building too was obviously due for a face-lift. Scaffolding spined the edges of the flat roof and a painter's cradle hung at third-floor level.

  Bolan skirted the concrete platforms where the foundations of the projected building had been laid down. The horizontal arm of the crane, higher than the roof of the block, was angled over the scaffolding. Halfway along, a cable supporting a bucket hung from the pulley that ran out to the end of the arm. The bucket was suspended just below the level of the building's third-floor balcony.

  Bolan wanted at all costs to avoid entering the building at street level, either through the front or the rear entrance. For all he knew, the whole place could be a stronghold.

  He looked up at the vertical, telescoped portion of the crane that supported the arm. It wasn't going to be all that easy, but he'd give it a shot. He began to climb.

  The rain, gusting in from the west, made the latticed girder works slippery, and the higher he rose, the greasier the wet steel became. But the really tough part only started when he reached the horizontal arm.

  The pulley, and the cable hanging below it, were about twenty-five feet away. Very slowly, the muscles of his shoulders and arms aching with effort, he started working his way hand over hand out along the arm.

  Rain soaked his hair, ran down into his eyes and trickled between his neck and the collar of his sweater. The wind plucked at his pants. The farther he moved away from the base, the more the crane shivered each time he transferred his weight from one hand to the other.

  His swaying body, hanging at the full stretch of his arms from the slender structure, was about eighty or ninety feet from the ground. His fingers were raw from grasping the squared edges of the girder by the time he finally made it to the pulley. He reached out one hand and grabbed the cable, hoping it might be a thick rope, but what he touched was a chill, rain-slicked steel hawser. He cursed. It was going to be hell lowering himself down that slippery metal strand. The wire was too stiff — and probably too smooth — to allow him to thread it around sole and instep and support most of his weight. His savaged fingers, thumbs and palms would have to do most of the work as he edged down.

  He tested the hawser experimentally to check that it was securely braked by the operating mechanisms at the inner end of the arm and the foot of the base. Then gritting his teeth, he let go of the girder and transferred himself to the steel rope.

  It seemed like a long time before his feet grounded in the iron bucket at the lower end of the line. He rested for two minutes while the heaving of his chest subsided and the throbbing in his hands abated somewhat. Then he shifted the upper half of his body strongly back and forth and began rocking the bucket in a widening arc, to and from the facade of the apartment building.

  On the fifth swing, the bucket rose almost within reach of the painter's cradle hanging by the third-floor balcony. It was kind of ironic — Bolan thought grimly as the pendulum effect increased — that he was using the same technique now to get into Latta's property that he'd used to escape from his country place. And, more recently, from Maccione's castle.

  Two arcs later he leaned over the edge of the bucket at the height of the upswing and seized the wooden railing at the edge of the cradle. The hawser shuddered and far above, the pulley squealed. Bolan felt as if his arms were being pulled from their sockets as his muscles took the strain, resisting the gravitational pull trying to swing the cast-iron bucket back down.

  Panting, he tumbled forward into the cradle and let the bucket drop away. Thirty seconds later the creak of the oscillating hawser had died and the bucket hung motionless once more in the rain. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything.

  Bolan hauled down on the counterbalanced rope to raise the cradle to fifth-floor level. He swung a leg over the stone balustrade, dropped silently to the tiled balcony floor and then padded toward the nearest lighted window.

  He saw a deserted corridor with deep blue wall-to-wall carpet, cream walls and doors, and a number of sepia etchings in gold frames.

  The next several windows were masked by draperies, but he heard the hum of voices from the brightly lighted room beyond the second. He leaned closely against it, but the window was tightly closed and double-glazed: it was impossible to make out individual words in the conversation.

  He turned and stole back the other way. At the far end of the balcony he peered through a chink of a Venetian blind into a modern kitchen. The window was locked, but next to it was a narrow, frosted-glass casement that was only latched. Bolan opened the longer blade of his Swiss army knife, inserted this into the crack and cautiously lifted the latch's metal tongue. He pushed open the window and squeezed through into a shelved pantry loaded with canned food, preserves and packaged cereals. Beyond this was the kitchen. He tiptoed through and found himself in a passage at right angles to the first.

  The hallway was lined with three doors on each side. If his calculations were correct, the voices were behind the second on the left. He passed a carved ebony table with a Buffet oil painting of a harbor scene hanging above it, and bent forward to see if the door was old-fashioned enough to have a keyhole. It wasn't. The style of the place was luxury-modern, with satin-finish aluminum fixtures and sliding partitions that moved on rails.

  Bolan had already recognized the suave tones of Fraser Latta, however, and there were at least two other men, one of whom was certainly the killer with the falling lock of hair.

  He straightened up and laid his ear against the door by the hairline crack above the hinges.

  "...view of the latest development," Latta was saying, "we think it reasonable for the moment to call off all attempts and plans to eliminate Bolan. Different units have been working at cross-purposes for far too long, but I have persuaded Vito that it's to our advantage from now on to play a waiting game."

  "Call off the dogs? Is that it?" This was the killer.

  "That is it, DaSilva. I leave you to give the necessary orders."

  "Whatever you say."

  "Why the change of plans?" The third voice was rough, grating. Bolan imagined one of the gunners from Schloss Königsberg. "For days we've been bustin' our asses trying to blow away this mother. Now all of a sudden you call us off. Where the hell does that leave..."

  "The situation has changed, Bertorelli," an impatient female voice cut in. "Don't you see? Now that we have Bolan so well covered, why should we beat our brains out trying to locate... whatever the hell it is we're looking for? Now that we know he's hot on the trail, why not let him do all the work? Then, once he scores, we can destroy it, and him, in our own time."

  Bolan realized that the dark, sultry, Katrina Holman must be in the room. The voice, talking emotionlessly of his own death, lost none of its sensuous charm.

  "She's right," Latta said. "If we want him to act as our hound dog, we have to have him alive to do it."

  "You said hot on the trail," Bertorelli growled. "How hot... and what trail?"

  "The guy with the white stick," DaSilva said. "Black Eyes the
bogus beggar!" he sniggered. "Seems he lifted some stuff off Zulowski before the cops got to him."

  "So?"

  "So it's on the cards the prize might be among them."

  "Then why don't we..."

  "Bolan got there first," Latta said. "We're waiting to find out what he makes of his find."

  "You say 'stuff.' So what did he get?"

  "According to what I could beat out of the guy," DaSilva said, "nothing but a lot of crap. An empty cardboard box, a pocket book, some diary, a pair of broken shades, shit like that. The creep couldn't even remember, it was such a load of junk."

  "Maybe he'll remember later. Did he know what..."

  "He didn't know from nothin'. He was just a cheap chiseler who got in the way and loused things up for everybody. Anyway he isn't going to be doing any more remembering. I did him a favor. His blindness is kind of permanent now." Once more the killer uttered a high-pitched giggle.

  Outside the door, Bolan's flesh crawled at the coldblooded, callous indifference to life and death that was characteristic of the Mob. The wretched little sneak thief had paid for his treachery and greed in spades.

  "What we have to do next," Latta began.

  Bolan froze, then jerked his head away from the door.

  A key had rasped in a lock somewhere, a heavy door opened and closed. He heard men's voices behind him. Two, maybe three.

  The entrance door was at the inner end of the passageway he'd crossed. He glanced back the way he'd come, the Beretta already in his hand. If he could slip through one of the doors opposite the room where Latta and his confederates were talking...?

  No way. His eye fell on the deep pile of the blue carpet covering the hallway. His feet, muddy from the rain-sodden vacant lot beside the apartment block, had left unmistakable tracks that led from the kitchen to where he was now.

  At any moment the newcomers would see them.

  They would know wherever he went. But maybe not, if there were no tracks.