At the Point of a. 38 ms-67

by Brett Halliday

  On a combat mission, it probably carried a five-man crew. Shayne looked it over thoroughly. The clutter in the main compartment was carefully organized. The communications man had a corner, the navigator another. Off the narrow companion-way leading to the tail gunner’s station, he found a stainless steel lavatory. He examined the layout again, and made his preparations. He emptied a canvas map case and replaced the maps with five of his hand-guns, retaining only the. 357. He hung the case from a bracket over the navigator’s table. He ripped out a length of wire from the communications board, attached one end to the map case and threaded the wire along the bulkhead to the lavatory, where he had decided to conceal himself.

  He returned to the open hatch. Coddington, below, was waiting for instructions.

  “They’ll have to divide up when they start the engines,” Shayne said. “Two men on the ground, the rest in the plane. Find a place where you can cover the power cart. Let me make the first move. The two outside men are yours. When the shooting starts, try to get them both.”

  “To kill?”

  “Damn right to kill. One tommy gun in action is too many.”

  17

  The child-size coffin, set crosswise in the back of the hearse, separated the Jews from their armed captors. The Jews were sitting hip to hip in two rows, with those in front holding the legs of those behind. There was a carpet, but the steel floor was directly beneath it. It was a jolting ride. It had started badly, and was likely to end badly.

  Andrew Weinberger, after the killing in the hotel room, had been sure that if they did as they were told, they would all die. For an instant, blinded by rage, he had almost lunged for the killer’s gun, to kill the man with it or be killed himself. But the room was full of people; others would have been killed as well. He caught Lillian as she fell, and some of her blood was still on his clothes and hands. She was already dead, he thought, when he laid her on the sofa, wishing-it was a strange wish, one he knew he would never forget-that it was his wife lying there, not this stranger. Ten minutes earlier, he had been inside her. She had enjoyed it, as she enjoyed most things in her life. When the Arabs entered, she had looked years older. He realized that he had never seen her without a smile. Their relationship had been based on pleasure and shared jokes. He regretted bitterly that he had never seen her real face until a moment before she died.

  At first, hardly aware of what was happening, he went where the guns pointed him. In the hotel basement, he began to return to life. He saw the gleam of contempt in the Arab’s eyes, the sneer, when he spoke of the multi-million dollar ransom. The sneer, translated, said: “A million apiece. To Shylocks like these, it would be inconceivable that anyone could throw away a chance to obtain such magnificent sums. But we are men of the desert. Money is unimportant to us. We’ll talk about ransom, and rub thumb and forefinger together in the old gesture, and keep the Jews docile and quiet so we can kill them at our convenience.”

  As the hearse moved away, Weinberger silently called the roll.

  He started with Lou Solomon, the chairman. Solomon had slowed down since he stopped opening hearts. His physical movements were slower, he forgot things he was told. But he had seen considerable blood in his life, and he was no longer very impressed by it. His wife was dead. His children were cool to him. Crowded into the corner, he seemed indifferent, almost asleep. But as he felt Weinberger’s look, his eyelids came up.

  “I’m digging you, Andy,” he said, surprisingly; he had never before called Weinberger Andy.

  A gun moved; they had been told to be silent. Weinberger’s hand tightened on Manny Farber’s leg, and he felt the muscle tighten in response. Farber had been a boy in Belgium when the Nazis entered his country. Relatives in the countryside kept him out of harm’s way until the last months of the war, while his parents and his older brothers and sisters perished. To succeed in the hotel business, amiability is required, and Farber was excessively amiable. He had a bad habit of tapping people continually while he talked to them. But a year or two earlier, he and Weinberger had sat up late drinking, and the amiable mask had slipped. His main regret, Farber had said, was that he had never been tested, he allowed himself to be blown by the winds. He had organized guns for Israel in the early days, but at no danger to himself. He would never know if he was worth something or nothing.

  The others? Bernard Marx was a sick man, with a single kidney, in pain most of the time. The other two, Joe Rachlis and Lawrence Hill, had made their money in family businesses, and rarely opened their mouths in committee. Rachlis was in good physical shape, but he was also the most frightened.

  They made the right-angle turn at Miami International, and headed south. Weinberger wondered at first if a light plane was waiting for them-or possibly the talk about planes had been another deception, and the Arabs were hoping to leave by boat. But as they continued, clipping along at sixty or seventy miles an hour, he thought of Homestead. He tried to judge the mileage, but his mind was moving more rapidly than the vehicles.

  And then there was the sound of an explosion ahead of them and the brakes went on hard. The coffin slammed against Weinberger’s knees. One of the Arabs lost his hold on his gun. His comrade came forward, so tightly tuned that if any of the hostages had tried for the gun he would have slaughtered them all. A look flashed between Weinberger and Lawrence Hill. Hill was a clothing manufacturer with spindly legs under a businessman’s paunch. Thick-lensed glasses made him look like a deepwater fish. Even so, he came within a tick of grabbing for the gun. They skidded to a stop and the door flew open. They saw the limousine burning. The guard picked up his gun and jumped down. There was another bang and Rashid appeared, running. When Solomon was called out to look at the charred Arab, he looked grave, but gave Weinberger a lifted eyebrow when he came back in. Two Arabs less. Now it was six to five, in the Jews’ favor. However, the Arabs still had the guns.

  After a time they turned off the expressway. The new road was bumpy and high-crowned. Soon they stopped. A gate was heard to clang open. Homestead? It had to be Homestead, Weinberger decided, but not the main entrance. And that removed the last possibility that their captors meant to trade them for an airplane. It was to be a theft, not a deal. Did the other Jews understand? Marx and Rachlis, no. The others, at least partially.

  Solomon said, “Soon.”

  They drove for another moment, and stopped again. Weinberger heard an electronic murmur. They moved forward. The light changed from bright to dim. Then the Arab leader was ordering them to dismount.

  They stumbled out into a great murky hangar, lit only by shafts of mote-filled light from above. A plane faced the doors, ready to accept power.

  Weinberger counted Arabs. He had been right: there were five. They were alert now, and for an instant, he despaired. When the shots were fired, there would be a quick clattering echo, and then silence. No one would hear.

  Had the moment of death arrived? Weinberger murmured in Yiddish, “We must move together.”

  A gun caught him in the mouth and knocked out two front teeth. They were on edge, these people.

  “Shoot us, get it over with,” Manny Farber said in English.

  “You are hostages for money,” Rashid said. “This was explained to you.”

  “Bullshit,” Weinberger said. “The only question is, how long do you need us?”

  His mouth was full of blood, and the words were garbled. Going limp, he fell to his knees and began to wail like a hysterical woman. Hill did the same, then Solomon. Rashid approached, in a fury. If the barrel had come down toward him, Weinberger was ready to jump. It was the butt, however; it hit him on the side of the head and knocked him over.

  “Walk.”

  So they were going to be kept alive, as a bargaining counter, until the plane was in the air. Weinberger stumbled to the steps, continuing to pray aloud, and made it hard for the Arabs. Solomon, the last, forced them to carry him.

  The Jews were herded into one end of the crowded compartment. Solomon staggered, took t
wo steps and fell toward the nearest guard. The second Arab shouted in Arabic and ripped off four shots. Weinberger darted, but the Arab jumped back and brought his gun around. Now a third Arab was in the compartment. Solomon, down, said in Yiddish, “I will make him shoot at me again. Then everyone together.”

  Rashid was shouting from beneath. One of the Arabs entered the cockpit. There was a thump behind Weinberger. A kind of cloth bag had been jarred loose and fallen onto an instrument table. It was a miracle. He had been praying at random, merely to make noise, but one of the prayers had been answered. He saw a gun.

  He drifted over to the table and rested one hip on it. Manny Farber walked toward the open door. The guard shouted, “Stand still or I shoot.”

  Farber turned back, and Weinberger fitted his hand around the gun. Although he had never before touched a gun, his finger instinctively found the trigger. He shot the guard in the head.

  The Arab tumbled backward down the steps, taking his gun with him. The other Arab whirled. The compartment filled with blast and concussion, as though the plane had been blown apart, and the guard went flying, jerking his arms almost comically, like a puppet out of control.

  A voice said evenly in English, “All of you down.”

  A tall redheaded man, with one arm in a sling, was standing at the bottom of the compartment. He had a double-barreled shotgun. His right shoulder was turned toward them, the shotgun barrels resting on his cast.

  Weinberger was between the redheaded stranger and the cockpit. He dropped as though shot himself, and pulled Farber down.

  The pilot appeared. His gun was up, but before he could fire, the shotgun roared again. The pilot went back hard against the instrument panel.

  “Mike Shayne,” Farber said.

  “How’re you doing, Manny?” The redhead broke the shotgun and reloaded. “Now we’ve got guns for everybody. There are a couple more pistols in the bag.”

  A revolver shot sounded outside, followed by a burst of submachine gunfire. Bullets tore through the skin of the plane. Weinberger picked up one of the Arabs’ guns and started for the door. Shayne ordered him back.

  “There’s no hurry. They’re the ones in trouble now.” He grinned. “What kept you? I was beginning to think you wouldn’t get here.”

  “We were beginning to think we wouldn’t get here alive,” Weinberger said. “I’m glad to meet you, Shayne.”

  “How many are still out there?”

  “Two.”

  “We can handle two. Manny, you watch the door.”

  Shayne entered the cockpit carefully. Weinberger followed, unable to hold still. Through the curved windshield, he looked across to a catwalk on the nearest wall. A fat man in loose clothes crouched on it, sighting with a pistol resting on the iron railing. He tightened visibly, fired twice, then jumped back into the shadows. Somebody yelled. A submachine gun, thrown or dropped, skidded across the floor. Another gun fired from directly underneath the plane.

  “That locates him,” Shayne said.

  He called Hill, and posted him in the cockpit. He crossed the main compartment, stepping over bodies, and went down a short ladder into the bomb-bay. Nothing happened for a moment. Looking down from above, Weinberger heard a grinding sound, and saw the belly-doors slowly open. Rashid, below, looked up and fired. Shayne was back out of sight, against the curving wall. He reached out and fired one barrel without aiming. Drawing back, he changed position. Rashid turned slowly without returning the fire. Weinberger started down the metal ladder.

  Shayne heard him and shook his head. Then, like a clumsy ox, Weinberger slipped. Looking back on it later, he blamed the fact that he was wearing sandals.

  He went all the way down, hit the edge of the open door, snatched at the gun but lost it, teetered for a second and fell onto Rashid’s shoulders. Jarred to the floor, he grabbed the Arab’s knees. Rashid brought the gun down, but Weinberger came up inside it. His fingers closed on Rashid’s throat. Hit repeatedly with the gun-butt, he managed to hold. Letting the gun swing, the Arab seized his clutching hands.

  They were closely entangled, and Shayne, above, found it impossible to fire. He swung from the bomb-rack with one hand and dropped into the fight, driving them both to the ground.

  His cast struck Rashid a blow from above and behind. Weinberger heard shouts and running footsteps. People were all around them. He continued to hang on. The Arab’s face, an inch from his own, contorted and began to darken. They looked into each other’s eyes. The Arab’s eyeballs protruded, a tracery of red lines standing out against the white.

  Weinberger went on choking him, knocking his head again and again on the concrete, for a considerable time after he knew he must be dead.

  18

  At Shayne’s request, the Army nurse pressed a button, bringing up the head of the bed, and brought him a second pillow. She was the nicest-looking woman he had seen in weeks, black-haired, as graceful as a seal, and presumably she wasn’t a killer, a thief or a dealer in heroin. Nevertheless, she was getting less than Shayne’s full attention. He was too mad.

  She put a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and offered him a lemonade with a bent straw.

  “Lemonade,” he said.

  “Get well, Mr. Shayne,” she said lightly, “and we’ll let you have all the hard liquor you can drink.”

  While still in the air after dropping through the bomb-bay doors, Shayne had aimed a kick at the Arab’s spine. He had connected solidly, but the weight of his cast had pulled him off balance and he had come down hard on his left arm. Now both arms were in casts, and he was taking it badly. He bit down on the cigarette and she had to take it away.

  “Be nice, please? I know it’s not pleasant, but from what people tell me, worse things could have happened. Incidentally, we’re overstaffed here since the cutbacks, so I’m pretty much available if you want anything. Within the general context of the patient-nurse relationship-”

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “I mean, if you want to be read to, or if you’d like a massage-Do you play chess? What I’m trying to get at, I think this whole thing today was fantastic!”

  She took a deep breath and smiled. “All right, I got that off my chest. There are some policemen outside. I can easily tell them you’re sleeping?”

  “No, I want to wind it up.”

  In a moment Will Gentry and two others came in.

  “Just you, Will,” Shayne said.

  “You’re calling the shots,” Gentry said equably, and waved the others out.

  “Did you get any of the messages I’ve been sending you?” Shayne said when they were alone.

  Gentry filled his pipe. After he had it alight, he said, “We had a kind of communications breakdown. Phone calls didn’t get through for about forty minutes. As luck would have it, the radio net wasn’t working too well either.”

  “As luck would have it. Did you go to Boca Raton? Did you find anybody with a fresh black eye?”

  “I did, Mike. A handsome woman, except for that eye. I caught them as they were leaving for the airport. As soon as I told her my name she took me into a bedroom and tried to bribe me. Nobody’s done that for the last couple of weeks.”

  “What did you book her for?”

  “Attempted bribery and passing counterfeit money. I’ve been talking to Coddington about that, and it seems we’ll have to use the same evidence in two different cases.”

  “All right, start the questions.”

  “Who killed the woman outside the radio station last night?”

  “Murray Gold. Her name was Esther Landau. She was working for Israeli intelligence. She got my name from a guy in Washington, and she was trying to intercept me before I went on Tim’s show. Gold was there to make some arrangements with a cop who came to see him in Israel. Will Gentry, he called himself.”

  Gentry continued to smoke.

  Shayne said, “What happened to Gold, has he turned up anywhere?”

  “He’s dead. I know you’ve been arranging most of thi
s, Mike, and you probably arranged that.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  Gentry shook his head. “Angie Robustelli killed him. He caught him with a suitcase of heroin in his car, and shots were exchanged. I keep trying to persuade Angie that he’s too quick with his pistol, but it’s an old habit. The funny thing is, it isn’t heroin. Somebody burned somebody, somewhere along the line.”

  “How did Robustelli make out?”

  “Shot in the stomach. He’ll live. And that brings us to the hard question. Are you going to let it ride, Mike?”

  “So Robustelli gets credit for shooting the number one man?”

  “What credit?” Gentry said. “He’ll get another citation. He already has seventeen. He also retires from the department.”

  “With a pension.”

  “Naturally. There’s plenty of other news today, Mike. People can only absorb so much.”

  “You know he used your name to get in to see Gold. You’ve been needing money lately for hospital bills. He made the visit at a time when you were out of the country. If anything had gone sour, the rap would have been yours.”

  “And he fouled up the switchboards on us today, which I don’t like, especially. Nevertheless, this is something the department doesn’t need right now. He’s been a good cop all his life.”

  “He’s been a rotten cop, and a rotten human being. This was a typical drug bust, except that he didn’t mean it to end as a bust. He advanced Gold money to buy the stuff. The difference this time was that it wasn’t the city’s money. It was his. Where did he get it, out of his Christmas Club? He’s been stealing for years. There wouldn’t have been any crime here if he hadn’t organized it.”

  “But in a roundabout way, he brought Gold back to us. The thing is, Mike, there’ve been too many police scandals lately, all over the country. This would be one of the biggest. It would take us years to digest it. And Gold’s dead. So where’s your case?”