“Simpson shot you, didn’t he?” I asked, gesturing with my head toward Khordad’s dangling arm. “He must have severed a few nerves. That’s why you couldn’t go back to the circus.” Khordad was staring at me intently, seemingly as curious about me as I was about him. “How am I doing so far?”
Khordad half-smiled, but his raisin eyes seemed too bright. “Very good,” he said. “I think I’m going to give you a prize.”
“Simpson was trailing Mehdi Zahedi and he stumbled across Bannon’s operation,” I wheezed. “Bannon pushed the panic button and you came running. You ambushed Simpson in Bannon’s office, but it wasn’t as easy as you’d thought it was going to be. You managed to break Simpson’s back, but not before he’d put a few bullets into your arm. Bannon found himself with one dead detective and a crippled assassin. You couldn’t very well go to a hospital, but you probably have people ready for just such emergencies. They wheeled you away, but Bannon had to dispose of Simpson himself. He took him down in the freight elevator to his car, then dumped him in the river. But there was a hitch. Bannon was in such a snit that he forgot to empty Simpson’s pockets. How’s that?”
“I’ve listened patiently to you, dwarf,” Khordad said in his curious, slow manner. “I’ll continue to listen patiently while you tell me who sent you after me, and why.”
“Did you kill the kid who was calling himself Mehdi Zahedi?” Khordad stopped in the middle of a swing and looked at me strangely. For the first time his eyes reflected uncertainty. I swallowed blood and kept talking. “Why are you sticking around? You’re well enough to travel.”
He hesitated a moment, then reached into his pocket. The huge hand came out holding the notebook I’d taken from his trunk. He spoke very softly. “Why did you take these things, dwarf? Who’s paying you?”
“I can’t remember,” I said, certain that whatever Khordad didn’t know was all that was keeping me alive.
“Then I will give you your prize.”
Khordad surprised me by snapping his fingers again instead of hitting me. The thin man disappeared once more into the other room. When he returned, my stomach contracted involuntarily, forcing the breath out of me in a single, explosive rush; my heartbeat fluttered, then began to pound inside my chest. The “prize” Khordad had mentioned was Neptune. Her mouth was taped, and her hands were bound tightly behind her back. The thin man tore the adhesive tape from her mouth with one quick motion.
“Mongo!” Neptune cried, her eyes wide with terror. “Don’t tell them anything you don’t—”
The thin man pulled on her hair, snapping her head back. A stiletto had suddenly appeared in his hand, and he ran its edge softly up and down the line of her throat.
“For God’s sake, Khordad,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “Let’s be reasonable. Now, you’re going to let the woman go … and I’m going to watch her go. Then you and I are going to sit down calmly and have a long chat. I don’t know very much to begin with, but you can have every bit of it. Okay?”
Khordad smiled and nodded his head. I began to relax. Then the strongman gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head; the two men suddenly grabbed Neptune by the arms and dragged her into the other room. The door slammed shut. I arched my back and struggled desperately against the ropes, but managed only to tip over the chair and bang my head painfully on the floor. Khordad effortlessly picked up the chair with his good hand and righted it.
Then Neptune began to scream. The horrible, banshee wailing carried easily through the closed door.
“Now will you answer my questions, dwarf?”
“Wh … what?” Khordad had spoken so softly that I could barely hear him. Also, the sound of Neptune’s torment was disorienting me, making me numb, threatening to hurl me into some kind of silent, alternative universe where a certain stupid dwarf private detective would have a second chance to undo a stupid mistake.
“I want to know all about what you’ve been up to in this matter. From the beginning.”
“Yes,” I heard myself saying. My voice was distant, hollow, like a drugged man’s. “Of course. What’s the matter with you? But I can’t think; make them stop so I can think!”
“No,” Khordad said easily. “They will stop torturing your friend when I tell them to, and I will give that order only when I have satisfactory answers to all my questions.”
I imagined I heard something click inside me—a sensation of ears popping at high altitude. Then I heard myself start to talk. While I cringed inside myself against the agony of Neptune’s pain, my voice quickly and efficiently spun out the answers to Khordad’s questions. After what seemed an eternity but was probably no more than four or five minutes, Khordad shouted and the screaming abruptly stopped. The silence that suddenly fell in the house was almost as bad. There was not a sound from the other room. The two men reappeared, closed the door quietly behind them, leaned back against the wall and exchanged smiles. I sighed and closed my eyes.
“So Statler sent you after me.” Khordad sounded surprised. “Why would Statler spend his money to hire a private detective to find me?”
“What have you done with the woman?”
“The woman will be taken care of. Answer me.”
“I did!”
“I want to hear it again.” He started to turn toward the thin man.
“Statler’s a funny guy,” I said quickly. “It was a matter of pride. You were important to him, and your absence was costing him money. He wanted to find out what had happened to you; he was going to either try to help you or sue you for breach of contract.”
“That’s stupid; it’s just throwing good money after bad.”
My mouth tasted of bile. I swallowed, trying to work up some moisture on my tongue. I got blood instead. “He gave you a break and you took off on him. He just wanted to settle accounts.”
Khordad chuckled, and the muscles in his good arm rippled. “I believe you, dwarf. It’s very funny.” He glanced at his watch, then turned to the two men. “Kill him as we discussed,” he said. “I have business. I’ll call in an hour to make sure the job has been done properly.”
The English had been for my benefit—one more turn of the screw. I suddenly knew without doubt that they intended to kill both Neptune and me, and there was nothing I could do about it. My reaction was rage. I leaned forward and spat into Khordad’s face. Calmly, without a trace of anger in his face, he stepped forward and hit me once, expertly, in the side with the edge of his good hand. I felt ribs crack. I slumped forward, struggling to remain conscious. Khordad repeated his instructions in Farsi to make sure the men understood, then turned and walked out the door.
The door closed behind Khordad and the two men came toward me. The thought of dying like a trussed turkey enraged me. I leaned farther forward against the ropes and felt a stab of pain in my side. The fat man drew a gun and pointed it at my head. I tensed, wondering how many milliseconds of life were left, waiting for the bullet to smash into my future. But the bullet didn’t come; the fat man kept his gun trained on me while his skinny partner cut my bonds with his knife. I went limp again and closed my eyes, trying to think.
I could see they didn’t want me found with a bullet in me, which meant they had something else in mind. The fat man grabbed my shirt and lifted me to my feet. Khordad’s hammer hand had drained the strength from my arms and legs. The searing pain that racked my side was all that I had to hold on to, all that was keeping me conscious.
The fat man let go of me and I sagged to my knees, then flopped over onto my good side and twitched my legs. I thought it was a great performance, and I could only hope that the two men were buying tickets.
The fat one cursed and shook his gun at me. I moaned. The other one stepped forward and jammed the toe of his shoe into my side, just inches away from my broken ribs. I groaned and rolled my eyes. The men exchanged a few words, then put their weapons away. They teamed up to lift me by my arms and ankles; then we were off through the door. We passed under a chandeli
er, through a room filled with draped furniture, and then outside onto a bright expanse of manicured green. That surprised me. I’d assumed we were still inside the factory building.
The sun was warm on my upturned face. I squinted against the sunlight and could see that we were heading around the side of the house toward a grove of trees. I made a mental inventory of how much of me was left in working order; everything hurt, but I was fairly certain I could make the pieces move when I had to. Sounds and shapes around me had an annoying habit of sliding into and out of focus, and I wondered if I were bleeding internally. My arms were growing numb where the thin man held me in his strong, bony fingers.
What annoyed me almost as much as the fact that the two men intended to kill me was that I hadn’t even begun to unravel the whole story of Khordad’s contact at the university, a missing student leader who wasn’t who he said he was, American superguns and ruined cities.
We came out of the trees, threading along a narrow path on the edge of the sheer escarpment that was the New Jersey Palisades. To the south, the George Washington Bridge gleamed in the sunlight; below, at the base of the cliff, the dark, oily Hudson rolled along its littered banks. Across the river, New York lay sedentary under a steely-blue haze of smoky air.
The two men stepped off the path and carried me toward the edge of the cliff. It was a perfectly logical move; a fall to the rocks below would be just as permanent as a bullet, and there’d be no lead for the police to dig out of me. They stopped at the edge, looked at each other, then started to swing me. It was time to see which parts of me would still do what I wanted them to do.
I waited until the last possible moment, at the top of a swing. Up until that moment I’d remained completely limp, and as a result the men were completely off guard, paying no more attention to me than they might to a bag of sand. Now I arched my back, going for additional height. Thousands of knife-edged steel bands twisted back and forth around my broken ribs; but pain was life, and I embraced it, using it as a mental springboard to launch myself at the men who would kill me. At the top of my arch I pulled my right leg back sharply, freeing it from the fat man’s loose grip. I brought the leg back to my chest, then snapped it forward, slashing the razor in the tip of my shoe across his throat. He screamed, and the scream became a gurgle. He let go of my other leg and sat down hard on the grass.
The thin man still had hold of my arms. I twisted hard, breaking his grip. I felt something snap in my left side and I knew that a rib had broken clean; but the side was growing numb, and I had other things to worry about besides the pain. I hit the ground on my shoulder and rolled to my feet, praying that the jagged end of the rib would stay clear of my lung.
The pain returned, rolling through me like some great tidal wave from hell. Everything was tinted red, and in the middle of that scarlet sea the thin man was reaching for his knife. I lurched forward and flicked the tip of my shoe across his shinbone. He yelped and jackknifed forward. I drove a stiff thumb up into his face; it hit his cheekbone, then skidded to the side and buried itself in something soft.
The man’s screams climbed the scale. I watched as he reeled backward, chanting his pain in a high-pitched, wavering squeal. He took one step too many, teetered for a moment on the cliff edge, then disappeared over the lip of the escarpment.
I staggered around in a circle, groping blindly. My vision cleared in time for me to see the fat man, still in a sitting position, shudder, then stiffen as the last of the life in him drained out. I wobbled to the edge of the escarpment and retched. Far below, the thin man’s broken body lay sprawled among the rocks.
Gradually my head cleared and I started to sort out the excruciating pains from those that were merely torturous. So far, the broken end of the rib had stayed clear of my vital organs, but I couldn’t be sure how long my good fortune would last; the slightest move in the wrong direction and I’d undoubtedly end up with a punctured lung.
Moving very slowly and carefully, I walked over to the fat man’s body, took his gun and walked just as carefully back to the house. I managed to get inside, then—keeping my back very straight—gingerly eased myself down on the floor, bracing myself against a desk on which there was a telephone. I pulled the phone to the floor by yanking on the cord, picked up the receiver and started to dial Garth’s precinct. Then I slowly replaced the receiver in its cradle.
First and foremost, I had to find out what Khordad had done with Neptune; if I called the police in now, I might never know. My only hope lay in the possibility that Khordad would return. If he did, I’d know what to do with him.
And there was another reason I didn’t yet want to call the police. A jagged memory had surged up from a dark place: Kaznakov, the Russian. Stronger than the pain, welling up from a deep font in my soul, was a poisonous geyser of rage. After I found out what he’d done with Neptune, I wanted Khordad to feel some of the pain he’d so casually administered to the two of us. Khordad, with the same last initial and mildly abrasive personality, strongly reminded me of the Russian.
For a long time after the session with Kaznakov I’d been out of my mind, not only from lingering pain but from the memory of the pain and, most of all, terror that the Russian would find out I was still alive and come back to finish the job he’d started. By the grace of Victor Rafferty’s strange talents, I’d been able to overcome my terror and kill Kaznakov. But Rafferty wasn’t around to bail me out this time, and I wasn’t about to go through that same mental torture again, to wake screaming in the middle of the night, certain that Khordad, with his soft voice and deadly hands, was waiting for me outside my bedroom door. This particular exorcism would have to be a solo performance. I knew I would hear Neptune’s screams for the rest of my life, and there was nothing I could do about that; that was the totally inadequate price I’d have to pay for my stupidity. But I wanted Khordad to pay with the only thing I could extract—his life.
The ringing of the telephone jarred me. That would be Khordad checking on his lieutenants. I counted the rings: twenty. The ringing stopped for a few seconds, then started again; fifteen rings this time, then silence. I gripped the dead man’s gun in my hand and settled down to wait. I could only hope that Khordad would return alone.
He did. Night had fallen, and I’d left a light on in an outer room while I sat by the desk in the dark. I saw the Iranian come through the front door, gun in hand. He glanced around, then moved toward the open door of the room where I was waiting. He was silhouetted plainly as he reached inside for the wall switch. When the lights came on, he saw me and grunted with surprise. I shot him in the left arm, aiming high for the collarbone. He yelled with pain and rage, then spun, clawing at the wall.
“What did you do with the woman, you big fuck?” I couldn’t recognize my own voice.
Khordad had slipped to one knee. He slowly pulled himself to his feet and braced himself against the wall. Disembodied words were banging around inside my head; I had to pick out the ones I wanted and force them from my throat. It was only then that I realized I was crying. For Neptune; for Garth. For myself. “Where’s the woman!” I screamed, sobbing. “Did you kill her?”
Khordad pushed himself off the wall and staggered toward me, both arms now dangling useless at his sides. Steadying the gun with both hands, I shot him in the right leg. This time he made no sound as he went down. The only sign of his agony was the flesh of his face, which had gone chalk white.
“Answer me, goddamn it!” My voice quavered with pain, grief and exhaustion. I knew I was very close to the edge, and so did Khordad.
Incredibly, the Iranian smiled; on his face it was a tortured, obscene expression, a sick grimace that did nothing to hide the rage and terrible pain in his eyes. Defying all the laws of nature, logic and the body’s mechanics, Khordad struggled to his feet and came toward me, locking his right leg and shuffling forward, using the momentum of his weight to carry him toward me. His head was lowered like a battering ram. By now my strength was almost gone and I was shaking. If
Khordad reached me, I was dead. My vision was blurring and the room had begun to tilt.
I picked Khordad’s shape out from the shadows and fired again. The bullet entered through his right cheekbone and he dropped at my feet. I didn’t have to move to know he was dead. I managed to dial the operator and give an approximation of where I was before I passed out.
9
Wanting to get absolutely everything connected with the case out of the way at the earliest possible moment, I forced myself to call Phil Statler in the morning from the hospital. I told him what had happened. He wanted to talk, but I gently cut him off and hung up. Then Garth came. During the night I’d babbled out the entire story of what had happened, so he never mentioned it. He stared at my chest and asked how I felt. I said I was all right. He nodded, said he’d spoken to the doctor who’d wired me up and that I’d be out of the hospital in a day or two. Then he walked to the window.
The house in New Jersey had belonged to Bannon, whose body had been found in the river. It seemed he’d attracted one too many investigators and Khordad had decided it was time to cut off that particular liability after he’d interrogated me. As far as the authorities from the State Department on down were concerned, I’d become entangled in a foreign espionage operation, and there’d be no publicity at all. No charges would be filed against me, since I’d obviously killed in self-defense; I wouldn’t even have to file a deposition. It seemed everyone was overflowing with gratitude, and only the hypersensitivity of the matter prevented the Secretary of State from writing me a personal message. Soussan Bannon had known nothing of her husband’s activities, as far as the authorities were concerned, and she was on her way back to Iran. The university was considering making me a full professor. No trace had been found of Neptune, and it was assumed her body had been thoroughly and professionally disposed of by Khordad. For reasons that had died with him, he hadn’t wanted her death connected with either Bannon’s or mine.
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