We had reached the Thames. I could see it clearly now. A long, angular stream of water slicing into the land. The road was sloping up, forming low hills, rising into shelflike masses overhanging the roadway.
Except for my occupation, it was a fine day. It's just that the shadows I looked for, behind every silver-lined cloud, spoiled things.
Tiger had to be up to no good. She could just be going to London on a joy ride, but I wouldn't have bet a penny on that. Not knowing the lady as I did.
The Ferrari's tail got bigger and bigger. I knew she had slowed down. I eased up on the gas pedal, dying down to fifty. And then I had to grab the wheel and hit the brake, because at that moment a mighty explosion rocked the stillness of the sleeping English countryside. I saw it before I heard it.
Far ahead, somewhere in front of the Ferrari, in the midst of the three Cadillacs, a tremendous geyser of dust, smoke, and rubble flew up and widened into a fan—and the air was filled with the tearing thunder of crushed metal. The earth had moved. A mountainside—not a large mountain, but a mountain nonetheless—had suddenly shifted and leaned over, sending tons of earth and stone into the roadway and onto the wide draw below it. I raced ahead, jerking the Chrysler to a jarring stop behind the Ferrari. Long before I could clamber out I saw that I was too late.
The Cadillac escort had been neatly halved. The second car in the line had been carried off the roadway and flung into the draw by the downward surge of all that shifting real estate. I could see the car now. It wasn't shining and black anymore. It was a crumpled, discarded children's toy. And then, from beneath the rubble and the destruction, the gas tank blew up. I turned my head. A deafening roar of exploding metal and glass ripped the atmosphere. Then came a gush of flame. The Cadillac was now a fiery ball.
I ignored Gilda Tiger and Bhudda. who sat silently in the Ferrari, contemplating the wreckage below them. Up ahead, the lead Cadillac had swung halfway around. Richards was out of the car, poised on the roadway, staring down at the flaming mass. I could see his face working, his hands clenching. He couldn't see the Ferrari crouched behind the bend of the roadway.
He saw me coming and his hand clawed out a .38, aiming it at my chest. His eyes were wild and strained. He tried to say something, but he couldn't. I didn't look at him but hurried to the Cadillac. I flung a quick glance at its occupants. Henry Hallmark stared back at me. He still looked weak from the food poisoning, but his mouth and his eyes were almost defiant.
"Well, sir." he muttered, challenging. "Again—"
"Henry!" Mrs. Hallmark wailed at his side, huddling against him in fear. "It's Edward! Oh, Edward—is Tom—?"
"Steady." I said. "There's nobody alive down there. Looks like a mountainslide." I didn't know what to say. Richards had come back to the car, pointing the .38 at my back.
"Noon." he said hoarsely. "Barroni was in that car. And Faulkner. They're dead, you bastard. Somebody tried to kill the Hallmarks. And—"
"Mr. Richards," Henry Hallmark said sternly, almost commandingly. "Don't lose your senses, man. Would Mr. Noon approach us so openly if he were responsible?" Then his control broke, and he buried his head in his hands. "When will all this madness end?" he said hoarsely.
"But Mr. Hallmark. Why is he here—why—"
"Mr. Richards." Hallmark interrupted tiredly. "Get behind the wheel. We're due in London. We'll have to tell the authorities when we get there about this. Tom, Tom . . ." He seemed to be talking to himself, as if nobody were there to hear him. Esme Hallmark took his hands and squeezed them. Her eyes appealed to me.
"Edward, come with us. Please—we need you—"
"I have my car," I said. "I'll follow along."
Richards started to say something, his gaze still on the blazing wreck. But instead he holstered his gun and got back behind the wheel. The air was stinking with burning gasoline, choking with rubble and dust. But there was still enough clearance on the road to move on. I stepped back, and the Cadillac moved forward. Mrs. Hallmark waved a pitiful old hand and Henry Hallmark nodded wearily, lines of defeat and fatigue on his once-robust face.
The third Cadillac moved up, following, I got a jolt. Apart from the uniformed driver, there was only one other person in the car. I had a flashing glimpse of the sheets and pointed beard of Surat Singh. He did not look at me. The Cadillac churned by, picking up the trail of the car that bore the Hallmarks.
That was something to think about. I thought about it as I walked back to my Chrysler. The red Ferrari, parked some fifty yards from the rubble-strewn road, stood there as an insult. I had to pass it to get to my car. Gilda Tiger and Bhudda hadn't stirred from their seats. Gilda was vivacious, her eyes sparkling at the glorious blaze below, where Tom Faulkner and an agent named Pete Barroni had died so terribly.
I put my hand in my hip pocket, closing it as if I were holding a gun there. Gilda Tiger put the Ferrari in gear, laughing. I saw all her teeth and all her viciousness in that one flashing laugh. The engine throbbed. Bhudda stared ahead like an idol.
"Fun, eh, lover?" Gilda shouted.
I stepped out of the way as the Ferrari edged forward. There was no mistake about what I had to do now. Eliminate Gilda and her playmate. Noon the innocent bystander had fled on the wings of this explosion. She had overshot the mark and gotten the wrong Cadillac—or maybe she just hadn't been sure of the seating arrangement.
"Gilda," I called out. "This is your last chance. Get out of that car now. Or else."
"Or else what, Eddie doll-baby boy?" The Ferrari drew abreast of me. Its red body was blinding up so close.
"You're dead."
She laughed, engaging the gears, and Bhudda turned, his arm flicking. A fluid, deft movement. I would have been dead if I hadn't been ready for it. The knife with the mother-of-pearl button missed me for the second time that week. It sailed past my ear. By now I had my own gun out. The real one.
I could still hear the peal of her derisive laughter as the Ferrari bulleted forward with a fantastic thrust of power. I couldn't have gotten a shot off in time in a million light-years.
The Ferrari clawed after the Cadillac, a red streak cometing across country. I raced back to the Chrysler, climbed in, and hit the auxiliary propulsion buttons. The Chrysler was a secret weapon, too.
The old die was cast now. Kill or be killed.
I was going drag-stripping with Gilda Tiger. I had to keep in mind that Tiger, according to information gleaned from one of the ship bulletins about the passengers, had raced and won in the Mille Miglia, Italy's fabulous thousand-mile run that called for the utmost in driving skill.
Nevertheless, I was going to stop her. She'd had her last crack at Henry Hallmark.
19. Farewell to the Beasts
It was a wheel-to-wheel race, with the road beginning to dip sharply, and one hairpin turn after the other. Gilda Tiger must have been surprised, because Mr. Ferrari's very special sports car should have left my Chrysler miles behind. But something extra had been added: the propulsion boosters that could make the Chrysler hit 150 per.
That roadway toward London clouded now with dust. The early silence of the day was shattered by the zooming bellows of twin motors, high-powered and volatile, like a couple of supercharged rockets running wild. The Ferrari's red tail loomed in the window. I cut to one side, holding the wheel as if I'd never let it go. The heads of Gilda Tiger, hair flying, and Bhudda, Panama tight, came close enough to hit with a rock. The thunder of the motors combined in a thumping frenzy of horsepower.
The road was barely wide enough for two cars, the hard shoulders sloping down rapidly to the lower lane. To our right a sloping shelf of ground rose high, a wall blocking off that side. I pressed the gas pedal to the floor, scraping the Ferrari's hull.
Gilda's flying hair, her determined profile, might have been carved in stone. She was paying just as much attention to her driving as I was. But she wasn't going to be able to shake me. I meant to butt her out of the way, pile on by, and send the Ferrari off the road. She knew that,
of course; through the whipping dust blinding the glass in front of me, I saw Bhudda turn in his seat. The sun glinted on a shining object in his hands. It looked like a variation on a bazooka; the sort of Bob Burns thing that GI's in War II had used to propel rockets and high explosives. I got the picture now. This was what had started the mountainslide, the geyser of earth and death that had sent the second Cadillac down to its doom. Tiger and Company were a rolling antitank outfit. I wondered if they had used more of the stuff that had blown a check up in my face. Bhudda's face, still jolly, bent over the weapon. I swung the wheel sharply. A crazy thing to do at that speed, but very necessary. Even in the blazing turmoil of dust and engine roar, I imagined I could hear the whoosh of the bazooka as Bhudda fired.
There was a whistling, screeching sound to my right. And another upheaval of earth and land. I didn't bother looking back. He had missed, but he wouldn't miss the second time. I was too close. I made up my mind in a hurry, abandoning the butting technique. The Ferrari had sideslipped sharply, like a swerving snake, and then shot forward as Tiger gave her more gas. The Chrysler lost a valuable ten yards. Up ahead a fold in the road suddenly vanished behind a rise of ground. The lane was going uphill. But the Ferrari was shooting along like a bullet.
I reached into the glove compartment with my right hand, keeping my left anchored on the steering wheel. My fingers closed over the plastic-compound box. I worked it open, mindful of the blur of the Ferrari ahead and Bhudda's tube gun still aiming toward me. Rapidly I formed a ball of the explosive substance, fashioning it into a golf-ball-sized maker of death. The stuff was as harmless as Aunt Jemima's pancake flour until it was forcibly thudded against another object.
And then the Ferrari slackened speed. I got that picture, too. Gilda was letting me catch up to her so her man Bhudda could get off one good, accurate shot. I bit my lips. I had to play it her way and risk the whole show. She was still barreling along at close to a hundred miles an hour. Luckily is was a warm day and I had the windows open. The Ferrari's firehouse-red chassis filled the world. We came together in the twinkling of a star. There is was. Gilda's laughing face, all teeth and eyes, looking back at me. Bhudda poised with his bazooka. It was a beautiful day to get blown out of the world.
The Chrysler and the Ferrari touched. Wheels skidded. The road bobbed, shifting crazily, like too many pictures taken all at once. Far ahead, just breasting the rise of another hill, I could see the vanishing tail of the last Cadillac.
I flung the golf-ball mass of explosive compound. It wasn't a bad throw. I hit the right rear wheel of the Ferrari. I just had enough time. Bhudda's square body rocked from the recoil of the bazooka pinned to his shoulder. Gilda Tiger's flying mane was flapping like a flag in a high wind.
I had eased up on the accelerator, falling back deliberately. There shouldn't be any need for speed—now.
There wasn't.
The twin explosions—Bhudda's bazooka shot jerking high, sending a rocket at a high angle overhead, and the eruption of the right rear wheel of the Ferrari—sounded simultaneous. But they couldn't have been. It only seemed that way.
The Ferrari suddenly jerked and slammed down on one side, a flash of flame and burst of smoke obscuring it for one flying instant. Then the firehouse-red car rose on its hood as if it were doing a magic trick, seemed to hang poised in the narrow lane, and flung itself off the roadway end over end, like a boomerang gone wild. I watched it rotate and careen violently, not really hearing Gilda Tiger's scream of terror, or anything else, for that matter. I zoomed off the roadway, slammed on the brakes once again, and jumped out.
My ears were still pounding with noise. The sudden awful quiet was a devastating paradox. I stared down the hill. I hadn't far to go.
Some fifty yards down the narrow incline, just above the twisting road we had just traveled, lay the Ferrari, a bright red, crumpled mass of expensive junk. It was rammed like a crushed bag of potato chips into a thick copse of bushes. I started down, taking my .45 with me. Birds were chirping somewhere. The English countryside was once more tranquil. Not even the smell of gasoline and death here could destroy that.
I didn't see Gilda, but Bhudda had been flung clear. He saw me coming and rose from his contorted position on the ground. His face was a bloody smear, the Panama hat still jammed incongruously on his head. He had found a hefty-sized boulder and was trying to aim it at me. I kept on coming; I knew he was dying. The lower half of him was a ruin, but his trained reflexes were staying with him until the end.
He must have seen me through the curtain of his own blood. The rock came up, a fierce grunt escaping his mouth. I fired in mercy as well as self-preservation. The shot made a high, blasting sound in the quiet.
The slug caught him where it would do the most good. He was dead before the rock dropped from his numbed fingers and he joined it on the dry green ground.
Gilda was pinned in the wreck, the steering wheel jammed into her body. She hung suspended over the side door, her long hair trailing. Pocketing my .45. I reached in and tried to lift her out. It was useless. The raspy, erratic sound of her breathing sounded like crickets rubbing their wings together. I turned off the ignition and moved her head around to where she could see me.
"Sorry, Tiger," I said.
She twitched violently. Slowly, agonizingly, her face turned up to me. The green eyes were half closed; the teeth clenched in a grimace. But her lips moved, murmuring.
"Fink . . ." she hissed. "Dirty fink . . ."
"Sure. Gilda, why were you trying to kill Hallmark? Who hired you? Come on. Can't make any difference now."
She laughed somewhere in her smashed body. A dying laugh. "I . . . wouldn't . . . spit . . . on the best part of him. . . ." Her eyes went glassy, then focused on me again with startling clarity. "Eddie . . . doll . . . baby . . . boy . . ."
I put my hands on her shoulders, feeling what the artist Ravelli must have seen when she posed for "Naked Dawn." "I'm still here, Tiger."
"You go to hell . . . but . . . kiss me, will you . . .?"
I squatted before her and the pile of crumpled Ferrari in a distorted angular position. I put my mouth close to hers. She closed her eyes in agony, then opened them again. There was a dreamy glaze in them, but she wasn't that far away yet.
"Gilda. Talk. Why Hallmark?"
"Kiss . . . first . .."
What the hell. I hated her guts, but she was dying, I put my mouth on the lush red lips. She responded, gathering some last inner energy that had been her private weapon for years. I should have known better. The dying rattlesnake. Her sharp white teeth dug into my mouth, biting. Viciously, savagely, like the animal she was named for.
But she couldn't put on any real pressure. Suddenly the long, dark hair tumbled, she sagged, and she was no more than a lifeless dollar's worth of chemicals, come home to roost on the red door of a demolished Ferrari somewhere on the long road to London.
I went around to the other side of the car and forced open the jammed glove compartment. There was a lipstick, some folded maps, and a box of Kleenex. I hadn't expected to find anything incriminating. I didn't.
Gilda Tiger had had quite a wardrobe on the Francescs. It was a cinch she must have made arrangements to send it on ahead to London. You can't put fifty dresses like the ones I'd seen hanging in her stateroom into a small car like a Ferrari. When I got around to the trunk compartment, it was also with little hope. Dames like Tiger didn't wave their business affairs like red flags.
There was nothing in the trunk compartment except the things that belonged there. A jack and a spare tire. I had hoped for some clue to that great secret weapon. The exploding check. The secret had died with Gilda.
I walked back up the low hill without looking back. I climbed into the Chrysler, anxious to be gone before the local police wheels started arriving. I was not about to hang around to be the willing witness. The day was going to be long enough. There was London on the agenda, and maybe nine million questions to ask myself.
The roa
dway was still clear, not a vehicle or passerby sight. I put the Chrysler in motion and started for London, traveling fast at first to catch up with the Cadillacs.
I asked myself some of the questions as I drank in fresh air and warm English sunshine.
Gilda and Bhudda had tried to kill Henry Hallmark. Once by seeming accident, the falling pipe on the games deck. The second time they had poisoned his food. The third try was half a mountainside. Why? Who had given them the job? The international playgirl had played rough, with death the penalty for the losers. But why had she been involved? For kicks, or political beliefs, or money? The last two motives didn't seem likely. She'd probably had more money than most of the people who could hire her. And the idea of Gilda having ideals—political or any other—was laughable. Kicks, that's what it must have been. The sensation-seeking Gilda would have enjoyed the intrigue and thrills of setting out to kill a man.
Surat Singh, the avowed enemy of Henry Hallmark and all he stood for, was riding with him to London. Why? Just courtesy, or more political folderol? Singh had saved my life by letting Captain Donelli know I was in the drink. Again—why?
When I caught up with the last Cadillac, I slowed down and just cruised the rest of the way in.
I hadn't come to enjoy the scenery, but it was beautiful anyway. It wasn't easy to believe that four people had died within the last hour hardly twenty miles away.
A studious secretary named Tom Faulkner whose god was in danger. A fairly efficient agent named Pete Barroni who didn't approve of scab investigators. Bhudda, a giant of a man who had played willing slave to the queen of his world. And Gilda Tiger, the greatest body in the world.
Four deaths.
But Henry Hallmark was still alive.
20. Piccadilly Windup
From a hotel window, Piccadilly Circus looks like Times Square in circular form. The same sense of excitement and hustle permeates the air. The atmosphere is charged with the electricity of people hurrying, cars and trams moving. A world in microcosm, moving and humming with modernity. I hadn't taken the room for the view, though.
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