War Against the Mafia

by Don Pendleton

  He nodded his head. “I’ve been shot. If you’ll just let me stay a while I promise you won’t be hurt.” The shoulder was beginning to burn as though a hot poker had been stabbed into it.

  “The policeman said you’re dangerous,” she said in a half-whisper.

  “Not for you,” he assured her.

  The cat leaped from the woman’s arms and ran into another room. Bolan gazed longingly at the couch. “There’s a small bullet in my shoulder,” he said. “I need some disinfectant and a pair of tweezers.”

  “Of course.” She moved swiftly toward a narrow hallway. Bolan followed, not certain that she was not trying to get to a telephone. She stepped into a bathroom. He sighed, returned to the living room, and sank onto the couch.

  “Do you live alone?” he called out tiredly.

  Her head reappeared in the open bathroom doorway. “Nope. Tabatha lives with me.” She wrinkled her nose. “Tabatha is my cat. Two old maids together, that’s us.” She went out of sight again, and Bolan began working his way out of the jersey blouse. When she returned to the living room carrying a small metal tray, Bolan had succeeded in freeing one arm and his head from the tight-fitting slipover and was carefully peeling it away from his injured arm. The woman had removed the scarf affair from her head and had obviously taken time to hastily brush out her hair from the large rollers it had been wrapped around. Bolan decided that she was a very pretty woman, small and delicate with luminous eyes and a decidedly intelligent face.

  She set the tray on a coffee table and helped him with the blouse, making sympathetic sounds over the shoulder wound. “It’s been bleeding a lot,” she observed. “Is the bullet still in there?”

  He nodded grimly, his eyes on the tray she had brought in. A pair of eyebrow tweezers stood upright in a small glass of colorless liquid. A roll of gauze, a box of bandages, and a large bottle of merthiolate completed the assortment.

  “I’m sterilizing the tweezers in alcohol,” she told him. “Is that all right?” He nodded his head again and reached for the merthiolate. “Do you expect me to take that bullet out?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve done it before. I can do it again.”

  She pushed him over flat and moved a pillow beneath his head. “You’re not going to do this one,” she said firmly. She picked up the tweezers. “Now hold still,” she said, between clenched teeth.

  9 — The Lull

  Bolan was lying on a silk-draped lounge, naked from the waist down. Angelina Turrin, in revealing green hip-huggers, was sitting astride him, pressing a glowing soldering iron into his shoulder. “You’re a goddamn iron man, Sarge,” Leo said, from somewhere in the background, “—and that’s a damn sweet little wife you got there.”

  “I’m going to kill you just the same,” Bolan said calmly, “just as soon as I wake up.”

  He did awaken immediately, bright sunshine spilling into his eyes and little fire demons dancing inside his shoulder. A girl was standing at a window next to the bed, doing something to the venetian blinds, her back to him. Jet black hair cascaded onto delicately curved and bare shoulders; she was dressed in a bra and a half-slip, this fact causing her considerable embarrassment when she turned and saw that his eyes were open. She grabbed a smock from the foot of the bed, turned her back to him once again, and fumbled her way into the billowing garment.

  “You’re the cat lady,” he said groggily.

  She perched on the edge of the bed and shoved a thermometer into his mouth. “I thought you would sleep the day through,” she told him, then shushed his reply with a meaningful glance at the thermometer. They looked at each other in silence for a while, eyes locked together, the girl smiling faintly. Then she retrieved the thermometer, studied it intently, and said: “Well, you must be an ox. Not a sign of a temperature.”

  “It’s all in my shoulder, I think,” he replied, grinning.

  “I know who you are,” she told him, her face going serious.

  “Is it good or bad?” he asked, watching her eyes.

  “Bad I guess,” she said soberly. “It’s all over television and radio and your picture is in the morning paper. They’re calling you ‘The Executioner.’ Are you an executioner, Mr. Bolan?”

  “Let me see, I’ll bet you have a very exotic name,” he said. “Carmencita. Yeah. You look like a Carmencita.”

  She flushed. “It’s Valentina. Querente. You can call me Val.”

  “Valentina fits you better,” he told her. “What time is it?”

  “It’s nearly noon.”

  “Which means you’ve had plenty of time to call the cops and get me off your hands. Why haven’t you?”

  “I almost did,” she replied, peering at him from beneath partially lowered lashes.

  “But you didn’t. Why?”

  “Well—you did trust me, didn’t you? Besides—a man is innocent until proven guilty.”

  “I’m guilty as sin,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Just how much do you know?”

  “All of it, I guess. You’ve killed eleven men in less than two weeks. You’re a living tragedy, Mr. Bolan. I suppose that is why I couldn’t turn you in.”

  He smiled. “You sympathize with my cause, then?”

  She shook her head firmly. “Not at all. No man has a right to take human life. There is never any justification for killing.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. There’s no way to justify it.”

  Bolan chuckled and shifted to a more comfortable position. “I don’t need to justify it,” he told her. “It justifies itself.”

  She moved another pillow over to offer better support to the wounded shoulder. “The end justifies the means?” she asked, smiling faintly.

  “No—the means justify the end. It’s the ages-old battle, Valentina. Good versus evil. Good justifies itself. Doesn’t it?”

  “I’ll argue that with you some day,” she said soberly. “—after we have identified good. Right now I’m going to get some food into you. How do you like your eggs?”

  “Cooked,” he said, grinning.

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously, I like them cooked. Any way you go about it. Uh—what happened to my clothes?”

  She made a face. “I stole them. You picked on the wrong old maid, Mr. Bolan. When I get ’em in my bed, I keep ’em there.”

  “Some old maid,” he replied, staring soberly into her eyes.

  She colored and jumped to her feet. “Scrambled,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “No matter which way I go about it, they come out scrambled. So I hope you eat them that way.” She smiled and sailed out of the room.

  Bolan immediately threw back the covers and cautiously moved to the side of the bed. He was stark naked. He stared at himself for a moment, then regained the protection of the bedcovers. “What’d you say you did with my clothes?” he called.

  “I said I stole ’em,” she replied from the kitchen. “If you’re going to be disagreeable about it, you can steal ’em back. In the bathroom, if you feel able.”

  Bolan felt able. He pushed to a sitting position and swung his feet over the side of the bed, fought back a wave of dizziness and got up and staggered nakedly to the bathroom. The black jerseys were pinned to a clothes hanger, suspended from the shower curtain rod. They had obviously been washed and drip-dried. The jockey shorts were on a towel rack, also clean and dry. He slipped into the shorts, grabbed the jerseys, and went back to sit on the side of the bed. Valentina rapped her knuckles lightly on the doorjamb and said, “Don’t put the shirt on until I change that bandage.”

  “The way I feel under that bandage,” he growled, “I may never put that shirt on.”

  “Are you decent?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” he replied.

  She stepped into the room, stared at him frankly, and said, “Well, almost anyway. You’d better let me help you with those pants. Honestly, that is the most ridiculous outfit. Who do you
think you are—Captain Marvel?” She was kneeling at his feet, and she seized the jersey pants and began stuffing his feet into them.

  “They’re entirely practical for sneaking about,” he replied.

  “I’ll bet. Into your tent I’ll creep, huh?”

  Bolan was embarrassed, and he realized this with some surprise. “They, uh, really are very practical,” he said. “The first time you try going over a fence or other obstacle in a baggy outfit you’ll know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” she told him. She had threaded his legs into the costume to just above the knees. “I guess you’ll have to manage the rest by yourself,” she said. “I’ll bet the eggs are burning up.”

  “You took ’em all the way off,” Bolan observed pointedly. “Is there some reason why you can’t put them all the way back on?”

  “I said, the eggs are burning up.” She went to the doorway, then threw him an impudent look. “Besides, I just skinned them off from beneath the covers and I didn’t see a darned thing.”

  Bolan had his mouth open but she was already gone. He smiled and stood up and succeeded in finishing the job with his good hand. She was quite a gal, he was deciding, even if the unmistakable odor of burning eggs was drifting through the open doorway. Yeah, quite a gal.

  The Sergio Frenchi home dominated the skyline of South Hills, the luxury suburb of Pittsfield. The site had been selected because of its resemblance to the Mediterranean coastline, though the ocean was hundreds of miles distant, and the house itself was of traditional Mediterranean architecture, stone and mortar and sweeping windows, varilevel porches and patios, the lower levels built into the hillside and exploiting the natural topography to the maximum. Shown a photo of the Frenchi estate, one would think the setting to be one of isolated seclusion; in reality it was the scene of an exclusive neighborhood of millionaires. Frenchi had merely gotten there first and carved out the large and commanding site; the others had followed.

  One rumor had it that Frenchi had accumulated his fortune in the export-import business; another, that he had been a shipping magnate. The first story was closer to the truth—Frenchi’s rise to riches had been chiefly through the international traffic in illegal drugs. He also had much reason to thank organized prostitution, bootlegging, gambling, and various other illegal American pastimes. In recent years, and especially in the impetus received during the Robert Kennedy Attorney-General days, Frenchi had been “legitimizing” his interests to every extent possible. He actually did own a small shipping line now, and his other latter-day interests included a string of loan companies and various small businesses, all lumped into the loose coagulation which was “Frenchi Enterprises.”

  First, last, and always, however, Sergio Frenchi was a “Family” man—the Mafia family. It was not a family one could disinherit or disclaim, even had he been so inclined. The family vows were a lifetime oath of primary allegiance, with all other considerations—including even marriage and fatherhood—falling into subservience to the higher obligation to the Mafia—God Himself and the church itself even stood in line behind the all-demanding sacred vows to the Mafia. Sergio Frenchi had been married to the same woman for 41 years, but it had been a barren marriage; there was no seed of Sergio Frenchi to immortalize this man. A warm and loving man, on his one side, Sergio filled this lack of his own loins with the products of other marriages close to him; he was “Uncle” Sergio to many, “Father” Sergio to a choice few—and Leopold Turrin was one of those latter. The Turrin children were as much at home in the sprawling Mediterranean villa as in their own residence; Angelina Turrin, orphaned at the age of ten, had actually come to think of Father Sergio as the grandfather of her children. Mother Frenchi had spent most of the past decade in traveling about the world; she was often present in the conversation of the Frenchi mansion but rarely seen in the flesh.

  On this late morning of early September the Frenchi villa seemed much the same as always to Angelina Turrin, except that there were a few more cars in the drive than usual. The Turrin children leapt from the family convertible and raced excitedly up the stone steps to the sun deck in their usual display of animated greeting. Leo gave his wife’s hand a comforting pat and left her standing beside the car; he followed a trail around to a rear stairway and disappeared from her view.

  It was funny, she was thinking, how a person’s world can change almost overnight. The big house she had loved so, for so many years, now seemed threatening and foreboding of evil. She wondered if she could go through the motions of warm cheer and happy association, just as though nothing at all had been changed in her life, just as though Father Sergio was still the warmly loving nonno of her earlier ignorance. She shivered, though the sun’s rays were warm on her skin, and followed the children up the steps.

  Her husband had come here to plot a man’s death. He was sitting down in the midst of racketeers and murderers, while his children frolicked in the sunshine outside, to work out the grisly details for the entrapment and extinction of another human being. Angelina herself, of course, had come painfully close to snuffing out that very life, but for her it had been a wild panic of reaction to an impossible situation. She could still not remember actually pulling the trigger—thank God she had, of course, thank God for that panicky reaction. But to sit and plot … She shivered again and forced her legs to keep moving her up the steps. Perhaps reaction was a relative thing, she reasoned. Perhaps the reaction of these men was no different from hers—it was a matter of survival, and they were reacting in the only rational manner available to them. And perhaps some day she would forgive Leo for his underworld ties. And maybe—maybe she would end up like Mother Frenchi, moving aimlessly about the corners of the world to avoid the confrontation with reality in her own living room. What is the profit for a man to gain the world, only to lose … She abruptly snapped off the chain of thought, blinked back the tears, and went in search of her children.

  They had learned from the earlier experience. The meeting was being conducted behind drawn blinds. A security force of twenty men had been moved onto the property, and an additional dozen quietly patrolled the neighborhood.

  “So our little Angelina very nearly did the job a small army could not do, eh?” Sergio said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “With a little toy of a pop-pop gun—eh?” He laughed, and turned chiding eyes onto an uncomfortable Leo Turrin. “You married well, Leopold. You take good care of that little lady. She will make a man of you yet.”

  “I’m just glad she was there,” Turrin muttered. “She saved my life. You ever feel the muzzle of cold steel against the back of your head? Hell, I’m just glad she was there.”

  “And you have no apologies,” Sergio observed quietly.

  “Hell, I told you how it happened. All of a sudden, blam, there he was. And I didn’t call those cops. Hell, they were all around the place. I’m just surprised that Bolan got away from them. I’m telling you, they were all around the place. It was like a police ball, and they were holding it at my place.”

  “I said you have no apologies. You know what I think?” The old eyes shifted about to take in the expectant stares lifted to him. “I think this guy is working with the cops. Not the locals—no, not the locals. He is an import—I think he’s federal. Maybe he’s CIA or something, with a license to kill. You know?”

  A small man at the far end of the table shifted nervously, cleared his throat, and said: “Doesn’t sound logical, Sergio. I’m sure I would have gotten wind of anything like that. Believe me, the department is going all out to get this guy.”

  Sergio fixed the speaker with a stern gaze. “And you would know about all these things, hah? You are too important to be bypassed on a hush-hush federal game, hah?”

  The other man nodded his head. “Yes, I am. You know I am. I’ve never steered you wrong before, have I?”

  “They’ve tried every way to bust us!” Sergio cried, suddenly emotional and pounding the table with his fist to emphasize the words. “Now why wouldn’t they
try this? Eh?”

  “It’s just alien to the American way,” the small man replied, his voice taking on a clearly placating tone. “They simply do not operate that way, not against American citizens at any rate.”

  “But look at who has been killed!” Sergio retorted. “Have any of us been shot? Huh? Or even shot at? No. No! A man who can shoot a glass almost out of my hands can shoot Sergio if he wants to! Huh? Can’t he?”

  “What do you think he’s up to, Sergio?” Plasky asked.

  “Psychological warfare!” the old man snapped. “This is what he is up to. And maybe …” The eyes took on a dreamy look. “Maybe, bambini, maybe this Bolan is more than one man.”

  A long silence followed the declaration, all eyes on Sergio. He took his seat, fiddled with a cocktail napkin, then continued the line of thought. “Look at it,” he said softly. “Just look. Five people are shot down in the street outside our Triangle office. Nobody sees the assassin, eh? This soldier shows up at Nathan’s place, he is seen for the first time, and he cons our college-man Walter into a place in the organization. As soon as he has had time to learn a few faces and a few places of business, we get word through our intelligence—” He raised his eyes and scowled at the man at the end of the table. “—through our intelligence that this soldier is the assassin of our Triangle people, and that he is out to get us all. So! We get the contract out for this assassin, and he is there waiting for our contractors, eh? Again, he is not seen by anybody now living. He puts in an appearance at one of Leopold’s places, but again he is seen only momentarily, and who is to say that the man who set the fire is the same man who fired senseless shots into an automobile, eh? Again, at Walter’s home, a man who fits the general description of our soldier has a conversation with the kitchen woman—but who can say how many other men were on that property, eh?

  “See what is a-building here, bambini? An image. An image of an invincible ghost who walks among us unseen and untouched, killing and destroying at will—an image of fear, eh?”