Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers

by Wilbur Smith

  The barrel of the machine pistol was short enough to enable him to press the muzzle into Peter's body just as soon as he completed his turn; it would tear Peter to pieces like a chain saw.

  Peter changed his grip slightly, no longer opposing the man's turn, but throwing all his weight and the strength of his right arm into the same direction; they spun together like a pair of waltzing dancers, but Peter knew that the moment they broke apart the man would have the killing advantage again.

  The river was his one chance, he realized that instinctively, and before the advantage passed back from him to his adversary, he hurled himself backwards, keeping his grip on the man's head.

  They went out into black space, falling together in a short gut-swooping drop with Peter underneath. If there was rock below the steep bank of the river, he realized he would be crushed by the other's weight.

  They struck the surface of the fast water, and freezing cold struck like a club so that Peter almost released the air from his lungs as a reflex.

  The shock of cold water seemed to have stunned the man in his grip momentarily, and Peter felt the whoosh of air from his lungs as he let go. Peter changed his grip, wedging his elbow under the chin, but not quite able to get at the throat immediately the man began the wild panic stricken struggles of somebody held under icy water with empty lungs.

  He had lost the machine pistol, for he was tearing at Peter's arms and face with both hands as the water swirled them both end over end down towards the bridge.

  Peter had to keep him from getting air, and as he held his own precious single breath, he tried to get on top and stay there.

  Fingers hooked at his closed eyes, and then into his mouth as the man reached back desperately over his own shoulders. Peter opened his mouth slightly and the other man thrust his fingers deeply in, trying to tear at his tongue.

  Immediately Peter locked his teeth into the fingers with a force that made his jaw ache at the hinges, and his mouth filled with the sickening warm spurt of the other man's blood.

  Fighting his own revulsion, he hung on desperately with teeth and arms. He had lost his own weapon, dropping it into the black flood from numbed and crippled fingers, and the man was fighting now with the animal strength of his starved lungs and mutilated fingers; every time he tried to yank his hand out of Peter's mouth the flesh tore audibly in Peter's ears and fresh blood made him gag and choke.

  They came out on the surface and through streaming eyes Peter had one glimpse of the bridge looming above him. The blue van had disappeared, but Magda Altmann's Mercedes limousine was parked in the centre of the bridge, and in the wash of its headlights he recognized her two bodyguards. They were leaning far out over the guardrail, and Peter had a moment's dread that one of them might try a shot then they were flung into the concrete piles of the bridge with such force that they lost the death lock they had upon each other.

  The back eddy beyond the bridge swung them in towards the bank. Gasping and swallowing with cold and exhaustion and pain, Peter fought for footing on gravel and rock. The machine-gunner had found bottom also and was stumbling desperately towards the bank. In the headlights of the limousine Peter saw Magda's two bodyguards racing back across the bridge to head him off.

  Peter realized that he would not be able to catch the man before he reached the bank.

  "Carl!" he screamed at the bodyguard who was leading.

  "Stop him. Don't let him get away."

  The bodyguard vaulted over the guardrail, landing cat like in complete balance, with the pistol double-handed at the level of his navel.

  Below him the machine-gunner dragged himself waist deep towards the bank. It was only then that Peter realized what was going to happen.

  "No!" He choked on blood and water. "Take him alive.

  Don't kill him, Carl!" The bodyguard had not heard, or had not understood.

  The muzzle blast seemed to join him and the wallowing figure in the river below him, a blood-orange rope of flame and thunderous explosion. The bullets smacked into the machine-gunner's chest and belly like an axe man cutting down a tree.

  "No!" Peter yelled helplessly. "Oh Jesus, no! No!" Peter lunged forward and caught the corpse before it slid below the black water, and he dragged it by one arm to the bank. The bodyguards took it from him and hauled it up, the head lolling like an idiot's, and the blood diluted to pale pink in the reflected headlights.

  Peter made three attempts to climb the bank, each time slithering back tiredly into the water, then Carl reached down and gripped his wrist.

  Peter knelt on the muddy bank, still choking with the water and blood he had swallowed, and he retched weakly.

  "Peter!" Magda's voice rang with concern, and he looked up and wiped his mouth on the back of his forearm. She had slipped out of the back door of the limousine and was running back along the bridge, long-legged in black boots and ski-pants, her face dead white with concern and her eyes frantic with worry.

  Peter pushed himself onto his feet and swayed drunkenly.

  She reached him and caught him, steadying him as he teetered.

  "Peter, Oh God, darling. What happened-"

  "This beauty and some of his friends wanted to take you for a ride and they got the wrong address." They stared down at the corpse. Carl had used a .357 magnum and the damage was massive. Magda turned her head away.

  "Nice work," Peter told the bodyguard bitterly. "He's not going to answer any questions now, is he?"

  "You said to stop him." Carl growled as he reloaded the pistol.

  "I wonder what you would have done if I'd said to really clobber him." Peter began to turn away with disgust, and pain checked him. He gasped.

  "You're hurt." Magda's "concern returned in full strength.

  "Take his other arm," she ordered Carl, and they helped him over the parapet to the limousine.

  Peter stripped off the torn and sodden remains of his clothing and Magda wrapped him in the Angora wool travel rug before examining his wound under the interior light of the cab.

  The bullet hole was a perfect little blue puncture in the smooth skin, already surrounded by a halo of inflammation, and the bullet was trapped between his ribs and the sheet of flat, hard trapezium muscles.

  She could see the outline of it quite clearly, the size of a ripe acorn in his flesh, swollen out angry purple.

  "Thank God-" she whispered, and unwound the jean Patou scarf from her long pale throat. She bound the wound carefully. "We'll take you directly to the hospital at Versailles. Drive fast, Carl." She opened the walnut-fronted cocktail cabinet in the body work beside her and poured half a tumbler of whisky from the crystal decanter.

  It washed the taste of blood from Peter's mouth and then went warmly all the way down his throat to soothe the cramps of cold and shock in his belly.

  "What made you come?" he asked, his voice still rough with the fierce spirit, the timely arrival nagged at his sense of rightness.

  "a report a car smash they knew the Maserati, and the inspector rang La Pierre Benite immediately. I guessed something bad-" At that moment they reached the gates at the main road. The remains of the Maserati lay smouldering on the side of the road; around it like boy scouts around a camp fire were half a dozen gendarmes in their white plastic capes and pillbox kepis. They seemed uncertain of what they should do next.

  Carl slowed the limousine and Magda spoke tersely through the window to a sergeant, who treated her with immense respect. "Oui, madame la Baronne, d'accord. Tout d fait vrai-" She dismissed him with a final nod, and he and his men saluted the departing limousine.

  "They will find the body at the bridge-"

  "There may be another one on the edge of the forest there-"

  "You are very good, aren't you?" She slanted her eyes at him.

  "The really good ones don't get hit," he said, and smiled at her. The whisky had taken some of the sting and stiffness out of the wound and unknotted his guts. It was good to still be alive, he started to appreciate that again.


  "You were right about the Maserati then they were waiting for it."

  "That's why I burned it," he told her, but she did not answer his smile.

  "Oh, Peter. You'll never know how I felt. The police told me that the driver of the Maserati was still in it and had been burned. I thought I felt as though part of me had been destroyed. It was the most terrifying feeling-" She shivered. "I nearly did not come, I didn't want to see it. I nearly sent my wolves, but then I had to know. Carl saw you in the river as we turned onto the bridge. He said it was you, I just couldn't believe it-" She stopped herself and shuddered at the memory. "Tell me what happened, tell me all of it," she demanded and poured more whisky into his tumbler.

  For some reason that he was not sure of himself, Peter did not mention the Citroin that had followed him out of Paris. He told himself that it could not have been relevant.

  It must have been a coincidence, for if the driver of the Citron had been one of them he would have been able to telephone ahead and warn the others that Baroness Magda Altmann was not in the Maserati, so that would have meant that they were not after her but after him, Peter Stride, and that didn't make sense because he had only set himself up as bait that very morning, and they would not have had time yet. He stopped the giddy carousel of thoughts shock and whisky, he told himself. There would be time later to think it all out more carefully. Now he would simply believe that they were waiting for Magda, and he had run into their net. He told it that way, beginning from the moment that he had seen the police van parked in the road. Magda listened with complete attention, the huge eyes clinging to his face, and she touched him every few moments as if to reassure herself.

  When Carl parked under the portico of the emergency entrance of the hospital, the police had radioed ahead and there were an intern and two nurses waiting for Peter with a theatre trolley.

  Before she opened the door to let them take Peter, Magda leaned to him and kissed him full on the lips.

  "I'm so very glad to have you still," she whispered, and then with her lips still very close to his ear she went on. "It was Caliph again, wasn't it?" He shrugged slightly, grimaced at the stab of pain, and answered, "I can't think of anyone else offhand that would do such a professional job." Magda walked beside the trolley as far as the theatre doors, and she was beside his bed in the curtained cubic leas he struggled up through the deadening, suffocating false death of the anaesthetic.

  The French doctor was with her, and he produced the gruesome blood-clotted souvenir with a magician's flourish.

  "I did not have to cut," he told Peter proudly. "Probe only." The bullet had mushroomed impressively, had certainly lost much of its velocity in penetrating the body work of the Maserati. "You are a very lucky man," the doctor went on. "You are in fine condition, muscles like a racehorse that stopped the bullet going deep. You will be well again very soon."

  "I have promised to look after you, so he is letting you come home now." Magda hovered over him also. "Aren't you, doctor?" "You will have one of the world's most beautiful nurses." The doctor bowed gallantly towards Magda with a certain wistfulness in his expression.

  The doctor was right, the bullet wound gave him less discomfort than the tears in his thighs from the barbed wire, but Magda Altmann behaved as though he were suffering from an irreversible and terminal disease.

  When she did have to go up to her office suite in the Boulevard des Capucines the next day, she telephoned three times for no other reason than to make sure he was still alive and to ask for his size in shoes and clothing. The cavalcade of automobiles carrying her and her entourage were back at La Pierre Brute while it was still daylight.

  "You are keeping civil service hours," he accused when she came directly to the main guest suite overlooking the terraced lawns and the artificial lake.

  "I knew you were missing me," she explained, and kissed him before beginning to scold him. "Roberto tells me you have been wandering around in the rain. The doctor said you were to stay in bed. Tomorrow I will have to stay here to take care of you myself." "Is that a threat?" he grinned at her. "For that sort of punishment I would let Caliph shoot another hole-" Swiftly she laid her fingers on his lips. "Peter, cuM, don't joke like that." And the shadow that passed across her eyes was touched with fear, then immediately she was smiling again. "Look what I have bought you." Peter's valise had been in the trunk of the Maserati, and she had replaced it with one in black crocodile from Hennes. To fill it she must have started at the top end of the Faubourg St. Honore and worked her way down to the Place Vendeme.

  "I had forgotten how much fun it is to buy presents for one who you-" She did not finish the sentence, but held up a brocade silk dressing-gown. " Everybody in St. Laurent knew what I was thinking when I chose this." She had forgotten nothing. Shaving gear, silk handkerchiefs and underwear, a blue blazer, slacks and shoes from Gucci, even cufflinks in plain gold, each set with a small sapphire.

  "You have such blue eyes," she explained. "Now I will go and make myself respectable for dinner. I told Roberto we would eat here, for there are no other guests tonight." She had changed from the gunmetal business suit and turban into floating cloud-light layers of gossamer silk, and her hair was down to her waist, more lustrous than the cloth.

  "I will open the champagne," she said. "It needs two hands." He wore the brocade gown, with his left arm still in a sling, and they stood and admired each other over the top of the champagne glasses.

  "I was right." She nodded comfortably. "Blue is your colour. You must wear it more often." And he had to smile at the quaint compliment, and touched her glass with his.

  The crystal pinged musically and they saluted each other before they drank. Immediately she set the glass aside, and her expression became serious.

  "I spoke with my friends in the Sorete. They agree that it was a kidnap attempt against me, and because I asked it, they will not trouble you to make a statement until you feel better. I told them to send a man tomorrow to speak to you.

  There was no sign of the second man you shot at on the edge of the woods, he must have been able to walk or been carried by his friends." "And the other man?" Peter asked. "The dead one."

  "They know him well.

  He had a very ugly past. Algeria with the par as The mutiny." She spread her hands eloquently. "My friends were very surprised that he had not killed you when he tried to do so. I did not say too much about your own past. It is better, I think?"

  "It's better," Peter agreed.

  "When I am with you like this, I forget that you also are a very dangerous man." She stopped and examined his face carefully. "Or is it part of the reason I find you so-" she searched for the word " so compelling? You have such a gentle manner, Peter. Your voice is so soft and-" She shrugged. "But there is something in the way you smile sometimes, and in certain light your eyes are so blue and hard and cruel. Then I remember that you have killed many men. Do you think that is what attracts me?"

  "I hope it is not."

  "Some women are excited by blood and violence the bullfight, the prize ring, there are always as many women as men at these, and I have watched their faces. I have thought about myself, and still I do not know it all. I know only that I am attracted by strong men, powerful men.

  Aaron was such a man. I have not found many others since then."

  "Cruelty is not strength," Peter told her.

  "No, a truly strong man has that streak of gentleness and compassion. You are so strong, and yet when you make love to me it is with extreme gentleness, though I can always feel the strength and cruelty there, held in hate, like the falcon under the hood." She moved away across the room furnished in cream and chocolate and gold, and she tugged the embroidered bell-pull that dangled from the corruced ceiling with its hand-painted panels, pastoral scenes of the type that Marie Antoinette had so admired. Peter knew that much of the furnishing of La Pierre Brute had been purchased at the auction sales with which the revolutionary committee dispersed the accumulated treasures of the House
of Bourbon. With the other treasures there were flowers, wherever Magda Altmann went there were flowers.

  She came back to him as Roberto, the Italian butler, supervised the entry of the dinner trolley, and then Roberto filled the wine glasses himself, handling the bottles with white gloves as though they were part of the sacrament, and stationed himself ready to serve the meal, but Magda dismissed him with a curt gesture and he bowed himself out silently.

  There was a presentation-wrapped parcel at Peter's place setting, tissue paper and an elaborately tied red ribbon. He looked up at her inquiringly as she served the soup into fragile Limoges bowls.

  "Once I began buying presents, I could not stop myself," she explained. "Besides, I kept thinking that bullet might have been in my back." Then she was impatient. "Are you not going to open it?" He did so carefully, and then was silent.

  "Africa, it is your speciality, is it not?" she asked anxiously. "Nineteenth-century Africa?" He nodded, and reverently opened the cover of the volume in its bed of tissue paper. It was fully bound in maroon leather, and the state of preservation was quite extraordinary, only the dedication on the flyleaf in the author's handwriting was faded yellow.

  "Where on earth did you find this?" he demanded. "It was at Sotheby's in 1971. I bid on it then." He had dropped out of the bidding at five thousand pounds.

  "You do not have a first edition of Cornwallis Harris?" she asked again anxiously, and he shook his head, examining one of the perfectly preserved colour plates of African big game.

  "No, I do not. But how did you know that?"

  "Oh, I know as much about you as you do yourself," she laughed. "Do you like it?"

  "It is magnificent. I am speechless." The gift was too extravagant, even for someone of her fortune. It troubled him, and he was reminded of the comedy situation of the husband who brings home flowers unexpectedly and is immediately accused by his wife. "Why do you have a guilty conscience?"