From the pained look on his puss, I knew what I’d done to him must have smarted. I wasn’t finished yet, either. I wrenched the screwdriver handle ninety degrees due north, ratcheting his arm up and around into a most unnatural position. From the timbre of the cracking sounds, I’d just dislocated it at the shoulder—or worse. FUC One screamed unintelligible imprecations, oaths, and other deleteful expletives in a language that I didn’t understand, and then dropped to his knees in agony, pulling me and my screwdriver with him.
That wasn’t very nice. After all, I needed the goddamn thing back, and FUC One—well, FUC One’s arm anyway—was being recalcitrant about letting me have it. I stood over him, kneed him in the face thrice, simultaneously yanking hard on the screwdriver a couple of times, but the goddamn thing was as solidly embedded just above his wrist as King Arthur’s fucking sword Excaliber had been locked in its medieval stone. I guess I’d put it right through FUC One’s wrist bone. Oops.
A shadow fell over me as I struggled, and I whirled just in time to see FUC Two’s fist slashing out at my head. He was holding something—a collapsible, spring metal baton. He whapped it in a short arc, punching the blow to give it extra power. Nasty things, spring batons. In fact, I wished I’d had mine right then. I pulled myself up, raised my arms into a defensive position, whirled, and sidestepped his powerhouse swing. But not fast enough. He’d anticipated my move, countered, and changed his angle of attack to uppercut me. So, as I raised my right arm to protect my face, the weighted metal knob on the end of the spring connected solidly with the tip of my elbow—and my whole fucking arm went numb.
Why the hell do they call that the funny bone? There is absofuckinglutely nothing funny about it at all.
Meanwhile, something actually went right: FUC Two’s momentum carried him slightly past me. I used his weight to my advantage: numb elbow or no, I shoved him rudely in the direction he was already moving. My weight, combined with his motion, propelled him another five or six feet, and smacked him whop against the wall between two of the antique stores. He made contact with the rough stone fist first, face second.
Double smash, double ouch. The baton dropped onto le trottoir—which is how they refer to sidewalks here in La France. I scrambled to pick it up—but my fucking hand was still so numb I couldn’t close my fingers around the goddamn shaft. I looked up just in time—he was coming off the wall to retrieve his weapon. If I couldn’t have it, I was damned if he would. I slide-kicked it well beyond anybody’s reach into the gutter and under a car, then rolled away from him.
FUC Two momentarily halted his activity to assess the situation, which gave me a chance to regain my feet, massage my sore elbow, and kick FUC One in the head to make sure he’d stay put. I moved clockwise, trying to pen FUC Two up close to the wall, where he wouldn’t have much space to maneuver. FUC Two spat blood in my direction as if to ward me away, then growled, put his head down like a billy goat, and charged. Numb arm or not I caught him with a glancing blow on his thick neck. But he managed to grab me around the chest, pinion my arms, push me backward as if I were an unweighted tackling dummy, and sledded me—slam—up against a parked car. I listened as my back protested loudly. Hey, friends, I may love the sound of human vertebrae popping—but only when they’re someone else’s.
It was time to put the sonofabitch away. I took the initiative—broke his grip, smacked him twice to set him off-balance, then grappling-hooked him up close by the lapels of his double-breasted overcoat so he couldn’t get away, then head-butted him as hard as I could—and nearly knocked myself silly.
Oh, shit, oh, fuck, oh, doom on me. He was supposed to be out cold on the sidewalk, but I was the one seeing stars. Damn—was that ever a mistake. I’d misjudged our relative positions, or he’d moved and I hadn’t compensated, or Mr. Murphy had interjected his miserable self between us and I hadn’t noticed—whatever the case, the bottom line is that fights like these don’t happen in a vacuum, and it’s hard to get these things right when your opponent isn’t standing still like people do during martial arts classes. So instead of stunning the sonofabitch, I’d smacked him right on top of his skull with my eyebrows, which did a lot more damage to me than it did to him.
As I woozed, he gut-punched me. When that didn’t work—my gut, friends, is washboard tight and rock hard—he hugged me tight and whispered a sweet nothing in my ear as he tried to bite it off. What nothing? “Kooz emeq,” is what he told me. If I’d realized what he was saying and what language he was using I’d have answered him in kind. But I had no idea, except that it probably didn’t translate as, “You are handsome and wise and your ear tastes good,” so I told him to fuck himself in plain old Anglo-Saxon and tried to work my hands high enough to break his friggin’ neck—except I couldn’t get hold of him because there were currently three somewhat fuzzy FUC Twos—or at least that’s the way it seemed in my somewhat headcombuttulated state.
From the way he kept p-p-p-pounding at me I knew that he knew I was fucking dizzy, while I knew he wasn’t (this is a sentence, dear friends, that illustrates my woozy state through the literary means of construction, syntax, and irony). How’d I know? I knew that because I saw three nasty little FUC hands digging inside his coat pockets while three other FUC arms tried to keep me pinned up against the car. It was like trying to wrestle with one of those six-armed statues you see in Thailand. I stopped trying to choke him, grabbed the middle arm, and came up with air. Tried the next one and made contact just in time to see the surprise he had in his hand.
Doom on Dickie—it was a Syrette, which is one of those battlefield morphine self-injectors. They’re built to penetrate through uniforms—even body armor. What the hell he had in it—ketamine, sodium pentothal, or some other nasty love potion that would knock the shit out of me—I didn’t want to know. Or experience, either. The needle guard came off and his fist started toward my upper thigh.
I grabbed his Syrette hand with both of mine and managed to clear it away about two inches before it would have pierced my trouser leg. He twisted, broke my grip, and brought his hand around once more as he worked the business end toward me for another try.
No way. I elbowed him across the face. That rocked him back a foot or so, which in turn gave me a little bit of working room. I slammed the base of my palm against the side of his nose. I must have broken it because he staggered backward, his free hand involuntarily letting go of my coat and moving toward the injury. But the Syrette was still too close. I mean, he didn’t have to hit me in the arm as if he was a clinic doc giving me an injection. He could put the fucking thing anywhere and it would work. Leg, thigh, side, shoulder—it didn’t matter. He wasn’t worried about being gentle or accurate—I was simply a fucking pin cushion and he was TMWTP—the man with the pin.
But I’d hurt him—and he let me know it because he’d stopped pushing forward and started moving back to protect himself from me. Bad move. Retreat is something you don’t do unless it is a tactical move to draw the enemy into an ambush—and this certainly wasn’t the case here. So I moved in close enough to strike but far enough to keep away from the needle, faked right, dropped left, and roundhouse-kicked at his legs, sweeping them right out from under him. He hadn’t expected that and he went down hard—which knocked the fucking Syrette out of his hand.
That was good—because I’d just used up eighteen or nineteen or even twenty seconds of the twenty-five I’d allotted myself to deal with these two ugly FUClings.
Time was short. I dropped on top of FUC Two, the full weight of my knee on his Adam’s apple. He gurgled and went limp. The sonofabitch was mine.
Not an instant too soon, either. Because one of the Team One bad guys was huff/puffing in my direction from the top of the square. Good news: he must have been thirty kilos overweight, because he wasn’t moving very fast. Bad news: he was waving something that appeared to be similar in size and shape to a suppressed small-caliber semiautomatic pistol.
I quick sit-repped to look around for the other bad g
uy from Team One—and discovered him hung up on the picket fence on the far side of the square. No—I mean literally hung up. He’d caught his ankle between the iron spear points and was hanging upside down like a trapeze artist, trying vainly to extract his trapped leg from the pickets without breaking it.
Yeah—but there was the Citroën Xantia, too. While the sedan waited at the top of the square to block any potential escape, the Xantia was moving down the far side of the square, positioning itself to scoop me up as soon as I’d been disabled by the foot teams. I waited until the station wagon rounded the corner at the bottom and was fishhooking back on my side. When they were about sixty yards away, I shed my coat and vaulted the wrought iron fence in one motion, throwing my body over the top like a pole-vaulter goes over the bar. Listen, friends, once you’ve learned to pull yourself up an icy caving ladder to board a ship under way at twenty knots, a six-foot iron fence that ain’t moving at all be child’s play.
The sedan reacted—coming out of the intersection and beginning its pursuit. I stayed in the park, tacking back and forth, port to starboard. I could tell from the way the sedan was moving that the driver couldn’t see me distinctly. Good—that gave me the opportunity to head toward a deserted taxi stand at the bottom end of the square.
Just beyond the phone booth—all Parisian cab stands have phone booths—perhaps a hundred meters from where I was currently running out of alternatives, I picked out a narrow street I hadn’t seen before. Way down it, a blinking sign in orange, green, and white lights proclaimed a Neapolitan Pizzeria.
Time for a sit-rep. I turned and checked on my pursuers. By now, the station wagon had pulled abreast of the wounded FUCs. The driver, sensing he’d gone too far, stopped, threw the car into reverse, and began backing down the square, to cut me off at the bottom.
For once in my life, gentle reader, my constant traveling companion, Mr. Murphy, latched his miserable, rotten self to someone else. Just as the Citroën reversed course, a huge, white Mercedes sedan pulled out of the side street at the bottom of the square, made a left—and began flashing its lights and honking furiously when it came up upon the Xantia’s rear bumper.
Now they couldn’t back up to cut me off. But they didn’t move right away, either: I watched as the front passenger door of the Citroën opened and a tall, silver-haired figure emerged, a pair of night-vision binoculars pressed against his forehead. Even at three hundred yards in dim light I realized who it was: Ehud Golan.
These FUCs weren’t Corsicans—they were goddamn Israelis M2s—which as you can probably figure out, stands for Mossad Muscle. Avi assumed he’d shaken the tail set up by his own fucking COS—that’s Chief of Station. Of all people, he should have remembered the old Rogue’s Commandment, “Thou shall never assume.”
I threw the Hood a one-fingered salut, vaulted the fence at the bottom of the square, and jogged toward the pizzeria lights, the remaining armed asshole wheezing his way back to the Citroën sedan that sat some two hundred yards behind me.
Chapter 16
IN FRONT OF THE GAUDY ESTABLISHMENT SAT A LONE PEUGEOT taxi. Its on-duty light was extinguished. I darted through the traffic, jogged up close, and saw the driver inside, a bulgy figure in a Disneyland baseball cap worn backward, hunched over a huge, steaming, sloppy calzone.
I knocked on the window. Without looking he waved me off and continued his munching. I knocked again. This time he looked up long enough to give me a dirty, chipmunk-cheeked look. Dirty, that is, until he saw my sweating face, my earnest expression—and the trio of two-hundred franc notes fanned in my hand.
The calzone was forgotten—that is to say he swallowed what he could (burning his mouth in the process from the look of it). He flashed a grateful smile behind his thick mustache and flicked the electronic door locks that would allow me to climb in the backseat.
Instead, I opened his door and shouldered him onto the opposite side of the front bench seat atop a pile of greasy pizza paper. He started to protest. I handed him the banknotes, turned the ignition, adjusted the mirrors, hit the lights, and edged into traffic, simultaneously explaining that I was in a hurry and that I preferred to drive myself. He started to complain again. I fixed him with my baby-blues and growled for him to S2C: “Sit still, shut up, and count the fucking money.” I guess my friendly tone (not to mention the roguish War Face) dissuaded any further objection.
There are a couple of things about car chases that I should explain before we go much further into this action sequence, and I get too busy to talk. The first, is that unlike the car chases you see in Hollywood movies—Bullitt and The French Connection come to mind right now, as do a lot of the James Bond extravaganzas—the idea is not to wreck the car you’re in.
Playing the sorts of fender-bender games you see in movies can be detrimental to your health in real life, where there are no stunt men, there is only one “take,” the people chasing you really do want to wax your ass, and their ammo is all real. And as for the rest, such cinematic grist as demolishing tenders and doors against brick walls, scraping bumpers off on parked cars or highway barriers, jumping roadblocks like Evel Knievel, and other sundry forms of annihilation are bad Juju in the real world, because they mean you’re going to lose your transportation and the bad guys will get their hands on you.
So much for real versus unreal. My second point can actually save your life in situations like the one I’m engaged in now, so pay attention. It is that in any vehicle chase, it is more important to concentrate on what is going on ahead of you than on what happens behind you. Do not give a rusty F-word about the assholes back there chasing you. Either they’ll stay with you, or they won’t. That is their problem. Now I am not saying that you should never pay attention to ’em. Of course you have to check your six—and more than every now and then, too. But if you spend all your time looking in your rearview mirror, your reaction time for dealing with what’s in front of you will be severely cut back—and you’ll probably end up in an accident.
Okay—back to real time. I swung out and hung a left, moving uphill slowly but steadily on Rue Le Nôtre as I rejoined the heavy, rush-hour traffic that was coursing off the Kennedy drive toward the big intersection at Trocadero. The driver had settled nicely into the passenger seat and resumed munching on his calzone. My eye caught his eye and he started to say something, then thought the better of it. I glanced quickly in the rearview mirror and caught a pair—nope, it was two pairs—of driving lights swerving crazily behind me. Ehud Golan’s Citroën, no doubt—joined by a second chase car. Well, they were as stuck as I was, because no one was moving very fast right now.
I crept up the Rue Le Nôtre, turned right at the top and tried to make my way across three lanes of traffic on United Nations Avenue. If I could squeeze through, I’d have a shot at making my way north toward Étoile on a fast-moving thoroughfare.
Why Étoile? Because the six lanes revolving around the Arc de Triomphe combine the worst aspects of driving in a traffic circle sans stoplights or yield signs with a chaotic, aggressive traffic flow that combines the madness of Cairo, the machismo of Rome, the third-world fatalism of Tehran, and the belligerence of New York, all in one chaotic, uncontrolled intersection. If I made it as far as Étoile, I knew I could lose any pursuers.
But the French zey are an unforgiving race of drivers, and without physically altering the front end of the taxi, there was no way I could cross the lanes in time to hit the intersection I needed. So I cut a sharp right into the curb lane, and kept moving at a crawl, going east when I should have been going north. Behind me, the Citroën made the lane change—but now fell even farther behind. As we crawled along, I saw the reason: ahead was a bottleneck: a pair of flashing signs telling drivers to change lanes, due to construction in the road.
Well, friends, there are times when Mr. Murphy is helpful and times he is not. Right now, I was on the side of the bottleneck that was moving faster—and I must admit that I wasn’t as courteous as I might have been when it came to easing fr
om my lane into the through lane. That’s a nice way of saying that I cut off three cars.
Just above the bottleneck, the road widened again—but there was now even more traffic—the flow from side streets—as I eased into the middle lane. Time to check my six. The Citroën was just pulling past the construction—he was perhaps fifteen car lengths behind me. It was adequate space for me to get creative.
A hundred yards ahead, the traffic light at the intersection began to change. You can tell when a light is going to change in Paris because, instead of going yellow as it does in the United States, the green light begins to blink. When that happens, you know you have about five seconds to stop—or run it. Now, it is a fact that Parisians love to jump stoplights. It always looks like the start of Le Mans when the light changes—and this evening was no different.
So, blinking light or not, no way was I about to stop. Not when I could artfully create an impenetrable barrier of le traffic Française between me and my pursuers. I rolled the window down, stuck my left arm out, and waved cars off as I nosed the cab through. Then I steered left, cut into an oncoming lane, and swerved around the cluster of cars between me and the intersection, and, grinning at my ingenuity, punched the accelerator. Demo Dick does it again—doom on you, bad guys.
Too much Hybris, the old Greek philosophers are fond of repeating, breeds nemesis. That is a fifty-dollar way of saying not to gloat too soon. Like now, when the taxi’s tachometer needle climbed well into the red zone—but nothing else happened. I may have been running five thousand revs, but this tucking cab obviously had no more power than a goddamn Tinkertoy. The transmission was shot. Let me tell you how it was: both my hands were clenched on the wheel; my right leg was absofuckinglutely straight—I’d pushed the goddamn gas pedal two inches past the goddamn metal. I glanced to my right—it was like looking in a fucking mirror, because the driver was mimicking my every move, right down to the gritted teeth and the white fingers around his own imaginary steering wheel. His lips were moving. The motherfucker was praying. I hoped his pleas were directed at the gods of war, because I was too fucking busy to pray right now. I swerved left, then right, oozing through the fucking intersection at about twenty-two kilometers an hour—that’s 13 point 75 miles an hour American, friends.
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