Sure, the girl had been a loser.
She'd had no hold on life at all.
She'd been a natural victim, her bizarre manner of living almost a guarantee of some such departure.
But it had been me who had unwittingly stage-managed the gruesomely macabre finale. I'd involved myself with the girl because of her age. Involved myself in a half-hearted salvage attempt, yet I hadn't hesitated to use her for cover at the Alhambra.
Now there was this savage finale.
There was one small consolation.
After his failure to obtain information from Chryssie, the knife artist would station himself outside to await my return. He might report his temporary failure or he might not, but he'd be waiting. He'd be outside now to pick up my tail again when I left the tenement. If I didn't come out, his curiosity-and his orders-would bring him back upstairs to find out why.
So I waited for him.
I employed the next twenty minutes wiping my prints from every possible object I might have touched in the flat. And I made one other preparation. I wrestled open the usually-closed window overlooking the alley below, the alley-window I'd noticed the first night I'd accompanied Chryssie home. Then I stationed myself in a corner of the room, keeping an ear cocked for sounds from the creaking stairway, the only access to the flat.
When I finally heard the sounds, I was ready.
The knife-artist sidled through the partly opened door at a fast glide, curved knife-blade in hand. He was small, furtive, and foreign-looking. "Inside," I said to him from the corner of the room where I was standing.
He whirled, raised his arm to throw the knife, saw my.38 lined up on his head, and changed his mind. "Inside," I repeated, and motioned toward the bedroom in case he didn't speak English. He started toward it slowly, trying to watch me as I closed in behind him, gun at the ready. He didn't have a chance. I slammed the.38 against the base of his neck, and he pitched forward on his face.
I dragged the unconscious figure into the bedroom and over to the opened window. I boosted him up and part way through it, turning him so that his upper body was outside the window and he was hanging by the hinges of his knees with only my weight on his legs to keep him from plunging down into the alley below.
Then I waited.
I wanted him conscious before I turned him loose.
The rush of blood to his dangling head brought expected tremors as he regained consciousness. He started to struggle, then became rigid as his expanding awareness brought recognition of his situation. "Who sent you?" I said to him.
Silence.
I hadn't expected anything different. Even if he understood English, I hadn't expected anything different. There hadn't been an amateur connected with the operation yet. I watched the mouth of the alley until a wide-spaced set of headlights turned into its narrow passageway. A diesel snorted as the truck picked up speed.
I gauged the distance, then pushed at the legs I'd been holding.
Professional to the core, he went silently.
I heard the sound as he hit, the quick blare of a horn, and then another sound.
I closed the window and wiped my prints from it.
I went to the telephone, looked up the number on the scrap of paper I'd left in the night-table drawer, and dialed. "Yes?" a sleepy, Main Line-accented voice said after an interval. "Who's calling at this hour of the night?"
"Come and get your daughter, Mr. Rouse."
There was an instant during which the only sound was the faint humming of the phone receiver in my ear.
"She's-Cornelia is-" He couldn't complete it.
"Yes, she is."
I hung up the phone, wiped my prints from it, left the building, and headed uptown toward Talia's apartment.
I felt a sudden urgency about meeting Talia's boss.
He might not have wielded the knife, but he was the man responsible for Chryssie's death.
I didn't look for a cab.
I still had steam coming out my ears over what had happened to Chryssie, and I had to get myself in a sweeter frame of mind before I went up against Talia again to con her, so I walked.
***
The night doorman in the East Sixty-third-Street apartment building eyed me dubiously when I told him I was calling on Miss Talia Rhazmet. He looked at his watch and again at me. Finally he directed me to the house phone but kept an eye on me while I placed the call. "It's me," I said when Talia's drowsy voice came on the line. "I've got good news for you."
Her voice came alive. "You have? Wonderful! Where are you?"
"Downstairs in the lobby."
"Then come up right away."
"Tell the doorman. He doesn't like my looks."
I held out the phone toward the watching uniformed man. He walked toward it and took it from me, listened for no longer than it must have taken Talia to get out one sentence, then nodded to me. The self-service elevator whisked me to Talia's floor.
Her apartment door was open, and she was standing in the corridor. She took my arm eagerly as I approached her, smiling widely. She looked bright and alert. I wondered if she was on the same high she'd been riding when I left her, or if she'd loaded up again while I was coming up in the elevator.
I couldn't help but notice as she ushered me inside that she had on a long-sleeved nightgown and robe so sheer that the combined lacy material could have been pulled through a man's wedding ring. "You have the envelope?" she asked anxiously when she closed and locked the door.
I took it out of my jacket pocket and showed it to her. She reached for it greedily, but I pulled it back. "You can look, baby, but you can't touch. Not until I get paid."
"It is intact?"
I turned it over and showed her the sealed back flap.
"Wonderful!" she repeated with a toss of her dark hair that settled it loosely on her shoulders. "But how much do you expect to be paid?"
"I'll negotiate that with your boss." I looked at the smooth, body curves within the semi-translucent material of her nightwear. "Although I remember you said you'd do anything yourself to get it back."
She appeared to have forgotten that. She glanced at the clock buried in the flank of the polished brass elephant. "I must call Iskir at once," she said, moving to the telephone.
"In English," I said.
"In English," she agreed, and dialed. "Abdel? I must speak with Mr. Bayak."
"Who's Mr. Bayak?" I asked.
"Iskir Bayak, my employer. He is an importer of Oriental rugs."
For a second I wondered if she were telling the truth. If the proposed hijack concerned only a shipment of Oriental rugs, then Erikson, McLaren, and I were barking up the wrong dogwood. Then I visualized Chryssie's nude, contorted, crimson-streaked body. No, Iskir Bayak was something more than a larcenous importer of Oriental rugs.
"Iskir?" Talia said at last. "I know it's late, but I have good-" She stopped as a tirade of abusive sounds reached my ear, even though she had the phone slightly shielded. "It's not possible," she said hurriedly when she could get a word in. "He is here with me now. With the envelope." She cut her eyes toward me. "Yes. Sealed." There was another torrent of sound from the phone. "I have seen it, Iskir!" she wedged desperately into the waterfall. "Yes. No. What?" She listened for a moment. "Yes, I can." She hung up the phone slowly. "Mr. Bayak will see us in an hour," she said without looking at me.
"An hour!" I barked. "After working up a sweat convincing the guy who had the envelope that it had to be returned unopened to be worth anything, now your Mr. Bayak wants me to cool my heels for another hour?"
I wondered if Bayak had already learned of the knife-artist's demise. There wasn't much else that could explain his abusiveness on the phone. Unless he was getting nervous waiting for a report which was never going to come? I inspected Talia's beautiful face. The fear that I had seen before was back again.
She slithered in my direction and stopped so close to me I could feel her body heat. "While we wait," she said coaxingly, "I will take care your ne
eds."
"Okay," I agreed, knowing I had no choice but to wait to see Bayak on his terms. "The first thing I need is a shower." I took hold of her nightgown-and-robe covered arm. "And you can join me."
The smile she gave me was almost demure. "You Americans," she said archly. "You want to begin where other couples arrive after a day and a half."
I led her into the bathroom. All I'd really had in mind was removing her from the vicinity of the phone so she couldn't make any phone calls I couldn't hear, but I made no objection when she removed her robe and pulled her nightgown over her head. I really needed a shower after the exertion of dealing with the knife-artist, and I undressed quickly.
Talia pulled on a pink shower cap and tucked her dark hair beneath it, then came to me. She ran her fingertips curiously over the numerous scars on my chest and thighs from the skin transplants that had made me a new face, but she didn't say anything. I unfastened the tabs at my hairline and removed my wig. For an instant she looked startled at the unveiling of my hairless, serrated pate, but she recovered quickly. "Even when I was a little girl in Ismir, Yul Brynner was my favorite actor," she murmured with a smile.
There was a lot more to Talia's olive-skinned nudity than appeared possible in street clothes. Her breasts were large, slightly pendulous, and grape-nippled. I turned her around, and her silky-looking buttocks were almost chunky, with just a hint of the controlled, powerful action seen in a thoroughbred mare. Tattooed on one upstanding hind cheek was a fantastically realistic multicolored butterfly. Talia made no move to hide the needle punctures on her arm, evidently feeling that my eyes were busy elsewhere.
I turned on the water in the shower stall and adjusted it to lukewarm. I led her into the tiled enclosure, and when we were both wet I soaped her from neck to heels. The luxuriant female flesh was delightfully pliable under my palm.
Then she did the same for me, with embellishments. "You must be a very strong man to have survived this," she said quietly as her fingertips again traced my scars.
I'm not the easiest man in the world to arouse at any time, and the thought of Chryssie's end was still in the back of my mind; but Talia's skillful hands turned me on standing in that steamy enclave. I had to breathe shallowly to avoid spontaneous combustion.
We dried each other off with huge, fluffy towels, and Talia dusted us both liberally with perfumed talcum powder. "It prevents friction except where it's wanted," she assured me with a doe-eyed smile. I had suffered a diminishment during the drying-off process, and she dropped to her knees and restored me with a facile tongue.
We went into the bedroom. Talia stripped off the coverlet, disclosing black silk sheets. She dusted these with still another kind of powder. Attar-of-roses wafted itself to my nostrils as she put me on my back on the huge bed and for ten minutes indulged herself and me in exercises which convinced me I was a sexual amateur.
Considering my on-again, off-again track record with women, I hadn't really expected to make it with this girl, despite her good looks and manifest availability. When she finally turned me loose, though, I rolled over her and plowed her wheat field with no thought of failure. Her expert, quick-darting hands encouraged the harvest.
She patted my shoulder lightly when I slid off her. She rolled from the bed, and I raised my head to watch her lush, highlighted ivory nudity as she went to the dressing table, struck a match, and lighted two candles. The smell of a musky incense drifted through the room, pungently fragrant.
She returned to the bed and resumed her role of domestic stimulant. I started to tell her she was wasting her time, then quickly found out that she wasn't. To my surprise I found myself reaping a fresh crop and enjoying it.
"You're something better than an empty box stall," I told her when I had back the breath lost during the second session.
I could see that she didn't know the meaning of the racetrack expression, but she didn't mistake my meaning. "Americans are little boys," she informed me gravely. "They start too late. They should begin at the age of ten. With their sisters."
"I'll see if I can peddle your idea to Good Housekeeping." An arched eyebrow indicated that she didn't know what Good Housekeeping was, either. "Never mind."
She rolled away from me and looked at the bedside clock. "We can leave now," she said, and slid from the bed. Her manner was subdued. All her sexual sparkle had left her.
Her attitude reminded me that I was going to meet the man responsible for Chryssie's death, even if indirectly. I went into the bathroom, removed my Smith & Wesson from its shoulder holster, and taped it lightly to the back of the calf of my leg with two strips of adhesive taken from Talia's medicine cabinet. The classic frisk is a from-the-back job which concentrates on shoulders, armpits, chest cavity, rib cage, waist, buttocks, and thighs. It takes an unusually thorough searcher to proceed lower.
"Where are we going?" I asked when I rejoined Talia.
"It's only two blocks," she said. "We can walk."
On the street, she turned right, toward the river. We went left at the first corner, right at the next one, and then she turned in under a green-and-white marquee. I followed her into a high-ceilinged lobby lined with bronze mailboxes. For sheer luxury the lobby resembled a Hollywood set. No one was visible.
Talia headed for the nearer of two side-by-side elevators. I boarded it behind her after noticing there was no floor indicator on the wall above it. A single button on the wall of the elevator cab confirmed my guess that the elevator served only the penthouse apartment.
I still had one thing to do, and now was the time to do it. The instant Talia pushed the button and the doors started to close, I snapped my fingers. "Cigarettes," I said, squeezing through the closing doors. "Be right back," I called over my shoulder as the doors shut behind me. I removed the envelope from my pocket as I crossed the lobby, found the name Bayak on the lineup of mailboxes, and dropped the envelope into it.
I was recrossing the lobby when the elevator doors opened again. "Doesn't seem to be anywhere close by to get cigarettes," I explained.
"I could have told you that if you'd asked me," Talia said sharply.
I stepped aboard the elevator again, she punched the button, and we ascended silently.
8
THE elevator doors opened and we stepped out into a scene worthy of a House Beautiful center spread. A foyerlike room was bathed in soft, amber light. The tile floor was patterned in large black-and-white squares, so highly polished that the grillwork of the gold-painted, wrought-iron room divider beyond was reflected in the surface.
Through the grillwork I could see a sunken living room the size of a tennis court. Except where covered by black tufted throw rugs, its matching black-and-white checkerboard floor mirrored a sparkling, heavy crystal chandelier overhead. The entire decor in the two rooms consisted of stark white and flat black contrasts highlighted by gold accents. Displays of Moorish swords, lances, mail, and armor lined the white walls, with handcarved ivory pieces and decorative brass pitchers containing fresh white flowers adorned oversized ebony end tables.
Two steps off the elevator my left wrist was seized and my right arm was trapped to my side by a viselike grip. Both hands were then pulled behind me, and my crossed wrists were painfully gripped in one giant hand which locked them together with finger-lengths to spare.
I had two quick impressions: over my shoulder a huge figure towering ten inches taller, and the overpowering odor of a musky, heavy-scented male cologne which resembled nothing so much as a whiff of lemon-essenced wine.
Talia stood impassively while a matching giant hand searched me roughly from neck to knees for weapons. The hand then made an additional search of each pocket, turning them out one by one. All my belongings clattered to the tile floor. "Nossing," a guttural voice announced.
I was released and thrust to one side. I nearly fell as I had my first look at the giant's flat-faced features and almond-shaped eyes which suggested Mongol blood. Black slacks disappeared under a white, knee-length, choke-
collared Nehru jacket. The shoulders were wide enough to have caused the man difficulty in passing through any ordinary door.
"You said he had the envelope, my dear," another voice said pleasantly. It was high pitched, almost a tenor. The sound of it directed my attention to a thick-cushioned white sofa at the right side of the sunken living room. Seated upon it was a gross caricature of a man who looked as though he could surely match the bodyguard in weight but not dimensions. Pear-shaped, with narrow shoulders, broad hips, heavy thighs, and spindly legs, he looked like one of those inflated punching toys that always rocks back upright awaiting the next punch. Sparse, black hair looked as though individual strands had been glued to his pate, and a thin, waxed mustache diminished to tightly-twisted, needle-sharp ends.
This apparition had on a white-velvet smoking jacket with black satin lapels, and his pudgy fingers were encircled by numerous gold rings. Bulbous, froglike eyes were fixed steadily upon Talia.
"He does have it!" she cried out anxiously. "I saw it!"
"Perhaps you had better check out the sincerity of her statement, Abdel," the fat man said softly. The giant moved toward the girl, and I could see her turn pale.
"Get the hell away from her!" I said harshly. "Did you think I was stupid enough to walk in here with it?" The giant paused. "Or to let her know what I was doing?"
"Obviously not, as regards the first part, at least," the fat man said amiably. "You had better have him tell you where it is, Abdel."
The giant reversed his direction and started for me. I stooped swiftly, snatched the.38 from the loosely confining adhesive around my calf under my pants' leg, and showed it to Abdel. He kept right on coming.
I had no intentions of going through the meat grinder of those massive hands. "Left shoulder, Abdel," I said, and put a bullet into it. The sound of the.38 was just a flat crack in the tiled room. The giant tilted to one side but still advanced. "Right arm," I said, and blasted him in the fleshy part. He rocked to a halt, clutching at his arm as blood stained the sleeve of his Nehru jacket; then he started toward me again.
Flashpoint Page 11