by Paul Moomaw
“Let’s hope they’re not having their morning coffee out there.” He reached through the window and pulled himself up, rotating his shoulders to clear the space, then scrambled out. He crouched and peered around the garden. It was empty. When he turned to help Gabriela through, she had already climbed out, and was pushing the window closed again. She glanced at him with a grin.
“Neatness pays,” she said, wiping her hands on the wet grass, and standing up. “Let’s go see if the car’s where we left it.”
“Won’t help,” Pray said. “The old fart took my car keys.”
“So hotwire it.”
“I hate to admit it, but I don’t know how.”
“I do.” Gabriela crouched and sprinted to the garden wall. “Come on, Adam,” she whispered loudly. She jumped, grabbed the top of the wall, and hoisted herself up.
Pray scuttled to the wall below her.
“Maybe I can get the key. You can wait at the car for me. I want to go back for my boat, anyway.”
“Forget the key. And forget the damned boat. I’ll buy you a boat when we get out of here—any kind of boat you want.”
“It’s a matter of principle.”
“Suit yourself, Adam. I’m going.” She disappeared over the wall.
Pray slumped. “Shit,” he murmured. “I want that boat.” He jumped up and grabbed the wall, then hung there briefly. “What the hell, I’ll just come back. They’ll never expect it.” His spirits climbed with his body as he hoisted himself up, and then half rolled, half vaulted over the top. He landed in a crouch and stood up.
Gabriela stood there. So did somebody else, a man with dark hair, mean looking eyes, and a large handgun, which he shifted briefly away from Gabriela to give Pray a good view of its gaping muzzle.
“Who the hell are you?” Pray asked.
The man waved the gun slightly to one side and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Allon!” he said.
Chapter 45
Delon paced back and forth in the sitting room, glancing at the door to the hallway from time to time, ignoring the others. Pray and Gabriela shared a brocade love seat with flimsy looking, curved, gold painted legs. A few feet away, Elaine Tarbell sat in a high-backed chair, her brow furrowed in an attitude of intense concentration. Pray decided she must be listening hard, trying to decipher the sounds in the room in an effort to comprehend what was going on. He admired her coolness, especially when he compared it to Susan Tarbell, who sat on the carpet at her daughter’s feet, looking terrified. Every time Delon passed close to her, she drew away with a whimper; and every time she whimpered, Elaine reached out a hand to comfort her. Ilona Horthy stood by the French doors, gazing at the autumn brown garden. Susan whimpered again. Ilona whirled and stared at her, one eyebrow cocked in disdain.
“Please control yourself, Frau Tarbell,” she said. “Try to be calm at least for your daughter’s sake.”
Pray found himself nodding in agreement. A child shouldn’t have to be strong for her parent, he thought.
Susan Tarbell ducked her head. Elaine patted her shoulder. “She can’t help it. She’s never had to be afraid of anything.”
Pray wondered how many times in her life Elaine Tarbell had been given reason to fear. Blindness must breed toughness, he thought.
“You are right,” Ilona said. “I apologize, Frau Tarbell. It’s not your fault if you have led a sheltered life.”
“I wonder how many shelters Ilona Horthy’s been in and out of,” Pray murmured. “Or ports of call.”
“You wouldn’t begin to understand, Adam.” Gabriela’s voice held an edge. “You can’t have any idea what it’s like to face the world as a woman.”
Orsine sauntered into the room, saving Pray the necessity of a response—which was a good thing, he decided. It was difficult to speak with a foot in the mouth.
“Did you find him?” Delon asked in French, and Pray noted that everyone appeared to understand. He pondered the degree to which learning French, despite the language’s loss of political and economic importance in the world, remained a mark of culture.
“Maybe,” Orsine replied. “I found someone. An old fellow, lying in a bed upstairs. He’s dead.”
There was a gasp from the window. Pray turned and saw Ilona Horthy swaying where she stood, her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide and frightened, and her face gone sallow.
“No one else?” Delon asked. Orsine shook his head. “Probably Meissner, then. I’ll go up and make sure.” Delon strode quickly from the room. Ilona walked shakily to a chair and dropped into it. She sat there, her chest heaving as if she were crying; but no sound emerged.
Orsine approached Pray. “L’Americain,” he said. He raised his arms and sighted down a pretend rifle. “Pum!” he said, and grinned.
“Tu est trop bavard, Orsine. You talk too much.” Delon had reentered the room. “Now you’ve put him on his guard.”
Orsine shrugged. “He has a right to know what’s coming”.
“Never mind. That’s Meissner upstairs all right, next to a little bag of cocaine. He and the white stuff have been inseparable for years—I guess the old faggot finally overdid it.”
“Don’t talk about him like that!” Ilona Horthy leaped out of her chair and flung herself at Delon. “He was a good man, a gentleman. You aren’t good enough to lick the shit from his ass, you little frog.” She took a wild swing at Delon, who caught her arms and held her while she continued to struggle. Finally, she slumped in defeat.
“You’re hurting my arms,” she said.
Delon released his grip. As she stood in front of him, head hanging in defeat, he hit her in the face, hard, with his cupped palm, then knocked her back in the other direction with the other.
Pray winced at the sound of the blows. Then, enraged, he launched himself toward Delon, ready to kill, even as he wondered why he reacted so strongly to something that had happened to a woman he hardly knew, and probably wouldn’t like if he knew her.
Orsine put a quick end to both the attack and the self-analysis, leaping between Delon and Pray, and placing a spinning kick into Pray’s midsection.
Pray sat down all at once and tried to breathe. He looked up at Orsine, who was gazing back down at him with a cocky smile and an expression that begged Pray to try again.
“It wasn’t just drugs, I think,” Orsine said to Delon, still watching Pray hopefully. “I checked him out a little. He had big bruises on the side of his neck. Somebody did for him. Somebody strong.”
“Hesse,” Gabriela said.
Delon turned to her. “What name is that, Mademoiselle?”
Gabriela offered him a child’s smile, all big eyes and dimples. “I was just sneezing,” she said.
Delon held her eyes briefly, then looked around at the others, stopping finally at Pray, who was lifting himself painfully into the love seat.
“We should, I think, make the effort to be pleasant. We are going to be together for quite a while.” He was rewarded by sullen stares from everyone except Susan Tarbell, whose frightened eyes remained on the floor, and Elaine Tarbell, whose hands, and attention, were focused on her mother. Delon shrugged and sat down.
“What are we doing now?” Pray asked.
“We are waiting.”
“For anything in particular?”
As Delon opened his mouth to reply, Orsine sprang suddenly to the door and vanished through it.
“He has very good ears,” Delon said. “Not that much between them, c’est entendu. But the ears themselves—very acute.” The sound of a door opening floated down the hall and into the sun room. Silence followed, then more sounds, crashings and bangings, and unintelligible voices which, along with odd, uneven footsteps, grew closer. Then Orsine reappeared, holding, struggling with, a short, dark man.
“This is what we were waiting for,” Delon said. He jerked a thumb toward the wall. “Get him quieted down,” he told Orsine in French.
Orsine half shoved, half carried the other man to a c
orner of the room. He threw him against the wall and rabbit chopped him to the floor. Then, with obvious deliberation and a broad smile, he kicked the other man on the left side of his abdomen, just below the ribs.
The other man screamed, and his face went chalky. Orsine kicked him again, but his victim appeared already to have lost consciousness. The only response this time was a blot of fresh red blood that spread over what appeared to be old blood stains on his shirt, at the point where Orsine had kicked him.
“C’est beaucoup,” Delon said. Orsine backed away with obvious reluctance.
“My Orsine holds grudges, too,” Delon said. “And has a very long memory—a thing for all of you to take into account, non?” He snapped his fingers at Orsine. “Go see if he’s still got the stuff.” Orsine nodded and left the room.
“Now, Messieurs-Dames, in a short while, if all goes properly, we will take a trip.” He smiled. “You are going to be my guests. I will give you a tour of my very own country, la belle France. Additionally, you are going to have the opportunity to visit a part of France that most tourists never see.” He bowed with theatrical self-deprecation and spread his palms toward the others. “Some would allege that this is because the region in question is not very exciting—no grand mountains, no lovely beaches, nothing to recommend it to the visitor who is not interested in heavy manufacture and air pollution. But I find it very exciting.”
Orsine reappeared in the door. He lounged against it, raised a thumb toward the ceiling, and nodded at Delon.
“Excellent!” Delon clapped his hands together, and continued to massage them slowly as he spoke.
“The most exciting part of our trip will be a tour of the newest nuclear power plant at Cattenom—not a boring, official type of tour, where they tell you lies about the safety of nuclear power and keep you as far from the action as possible.” Delon stopped smiling. “We will be going directly to the nuclear pile, the reactor chamber. My contacts inform me that it is fueled, and due to be activated in ten days. I intend to activate it a little sooner.”
“How helpful of you,” Pray said.
Delon nodded his head rapidly up and down. “Indeed. More helpful than you think. I—ah, pardon, we, because all of you will be with me—are going to blow that plant to hell. It should be a wonderful sight, and that young man,” he pointed to Peter, “Has helped to make it even more wonderful. He has brought an entire truck—well, only a small delivery van—filled with plutonium oxide, the very stuff of nuclear hell. It will insure that when we set off our little atomic firecracker, there will be plenty of fuel. And if we don’t need it for that, we can just pour it into the Moselle. It’s in powdered form, so it should heat up the river for miles.”
“You cannot take that.” Peter stared at Delon from where he still sat huddled on the floor, his eyes and voice filled with pain. “It is for Herr Meissner.”
“He won’t need it,” Orsine said.
“It is his!”
Ilona Horthy knelt next to Peter. “Reinhardt is dead,” she said.
Peter stared at her, his eyes growing round. “What do you mean?”
“She means no more blow jobs, faggot,” Orsine said.
“They say he has been murdered,” Ilona said, ignoring Orsine. “I’m sorry.”
Peter struggled to his feet. “Where is he? Where is Herr Meissner?”
Ilona glanced toward the ceiling, and Peter ran limping from the room, holding his side, blood seeping between his fingers. Orsine started after him.
“Let him go,” Delon said. “He’ll come back.”
“What are you going to do with us?” Elaine Tarbell’s voice was as calm as if she were discussing a selection of canapés. Pray’s respect for her courage climbed higher; he wasn’t certain he could sound that cool, under the circumstances.
“You and your mother, I hope, will be released after this is all over,” Delon said. “That depends, in part, on your father, of course. You are our channel to him, and he is my guarantee of escape.”
“Come on, Delon,” Pray said, pleased that his voice didn’t squeak. The last time he had been this scared he was fifteen, with a voice to match. “You blew it when you kidnapped these two. Whether you let them go or not, the Company won’t rest until you’re caught. Loyalty to its employees and all that, you know.”
Delon shook his head. “No, Monsieur Pray, you are wrong. After all, it is your Company which has financed the deal; and it is Monsieur Tarbell, himself, who brought me the money—in a big brown envelope, right to Paris.”
Delon paused and looked at Susan Tarbell, who had begun to sob noisily.
“When loyalty conflicts with self preservation, the outcome is seldom to be doubted, n’est ce pas?” He smiled brightly at Pray. “As for you, I fear you will have to end your trip at Cattenom, permanently. Monsieur Tarbell also brought the money for that, and I never renege on a contract. You can understand, I’m sure.”
Pray felt sick to his stomach. He knew Chet had changed—more than Pray might have believed, if Biven’s hints were to be believed. But not that much. Chet couldn’t have known about any contract on Pray. It had to be Parker. Chet was just the messenger boy, that was all. Pray clung to the thought, even as a part of him wondered if he would ever get a chance to find out the truth.
Ilona had stood up, a tense, expectant look on her face. Pray glanced at her, then at Gabriela.
“What about them?”
Delon cocked his head to one side and looked wistful. He sighed loudly, then spread his hands and shrugged.
“Who killed him?” Peter stood in the doorway again, breathing heavily. Tears streaked his face. “Who killed Herr Meissner?”
Delon stood up. “Who knows? All I can tell you is that we caught those two,” and he waved a hand toward Pray and Gabriela, “Sneaking out of the house.”
“Bad guess,” Pray said. “One other person isn’t here—someone who is very strong. Your boy Orsine said it looked as if someone very strong killed Meissner, right? Not some skinny fellow like me.”
Peter stared at Pray. “Who isn’t here?”
“Facundo Hesse.”
“He wouldn’t have done it. He loved Herr Meissner.”
“And I had no reason to,” Pray said. “Meissner and I were doing business together.”
“Why did he never mention you, then?”
“Did he tell you all his business?”
Peter shook his head. “No,” he said, in a quieter voice. He rubbed his face with his hand, leaving smears of blood on his nose and cheek. “I’m confused. I don’t know whom to believe.”
“Good,” Delon said. “Let’s go.”
As they marched toward the door, Gabriela pressed against Pray and dropped something heavy into his trouser pocket.
“What was that?”
“Your little popgun. It was still lying on a table, under a napkin. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”
“And no one noticed you pick it up?”
“Give me a little credit, Adam.”
He grinned. His spirits were suddenly lighter. “You’re pretty great,” he said.
“Tell me again, if we get out of this.”
“When we get out of this.”
She gave him a wide-eyed gaze and patted him on the butt. “My brave little soldier.”
“You bet, momma.”
Chapter 46
It had always been Elaine’s favorite chair, the one she sat in to listen to music, her earphone cord stretching back to the stereo, the chair she called her Teddy Bear lap, because its plush upholstery was so soft.
On this evening, not Elaine, but Terry Parker, sat in the chair, looking as if he wanted to be somewhere else. Chet Tarbell stood before him, legs spraddled, his hands extended in front of him. It would take little at this moment for those hands to wrap themselves around Parker’s neck. He knew it, and so did Parker; it showed in the other’s eyes.
“Where are they, Parker?”
Parker sighed theatrically, shrugg
ed and crossed laced his fingers over his knee. He looked back at Tarbell with a thin smile, but his eyes still betrayed him.
He’s not as cool as he wants to look, Tarbell thought, and leaned toward Parker as he repeated, “Where are they?”
“I’m sure they’ll be all right. There’s been a misunderstanding. That’s all.”
“Where, Parker?”
Parker held his gaze a moment longer, then looked away. “They’re with Delon.”
“What the fuck do you mean, they’re with Delon? Why would they be with that crazy Nazi?”
“It was just his way of getting our attention. Now that he has it, I’m sure he’ll let your women go.”
“What if he doesn’t, Parker? What are you going to do then?”
“He will. Don’t get so upset.”
“Don’t get so upset?” Tarbell clenched his fists, snapped one to within half an inch of Parker’s nose, and had the satisfaction of seeing the other man flinch.
He’s afraid of me. The thought calmed Tarbell a little, allowed him to lower his voice. “You tell me a crazy French thug has my wife and daughter, but I shouldn’t get upset.”
“He’s got nothing against Susan and Elaine. He’ll let them go when he gets what he wants.”
“What does he want?”
“We don’t quite know yet.”
“Where has he got them?”
Parker glanced up at Tarbell, then looked away again. “We don’t exactly know that, either.”
“What the shit do you know Parker?”
“I know your wife and daughter are all right so far; and I know they’ll stay that way as long as you don’t do anything foolish.”
“You don’t know a goddam thing, Parker.”
“Watch your voice, Tarbell. Don’t forget who I am. And don’t forget your career.”