Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  “Calm yourself, Felix.” Dauner made a face of distaste, waving his hand before him. “Pull yourself together, old man.”

  “No need to quarrel, lads.” Cassidy smiled, a peacemaker. “Because the wife of Manfred Moller is not all I have to offer—”

  “He knows, he knows!” The fat man’s explosion of words was almost involuntary. “He knows about Moller … it’s a trick, he’s made a fool of you—”

  “Be quiet!” Dauner looked at Cassidy through the veil of smoke. “What else are you offering?”

  “In addition to Frau Moller I also have my pledge of silence … in exchange for the minotaur.”

  Dauner turned his back, walked a few strides away, into the tennis court. “This is a very, very dangerous game you’ve chosen to play—”

  “You’re the one in danger,” Cassidy said. “You’re the Nazi.”

  Dauner turned to look at him. For an instant, Cassidy feared a bullet, but Dauner was still, his gloved hands holding the coat together. He exhaled, made a cloud of smoke, the cigarette stuck to his lip. Cassidy had had about enough.

  “Now, where’s the minotaur?”

  “Do you actually want the minotaur, Mr. Cassidy? Or are you in fact looking for this Manfred Moller you’ve mentioned?”

  “Believe me, it doesn’t make any difference in the world to you.”

  “Perhaps I can be of no help to you whatsoever.” He shrugged. “What then?”

  “I will kill you. Right now, on your own tennis court. Advantage to me.

  “Oh, my God!” Felix threw up his hands.

  “You may tell him, Felix.”

  “The piece,” Felix panted, “the statue reposes in Boston. Ah, so I have been told. A man called Henry Brenneman … a dealer in antiquities of greatest value.”

  “You’re sure we’re talking about the same thing? So high, covered all over with rubies and diamonds and emeralds, that sort of thing?”

  “I have never seen it.”

  “What’s it doing in Boston?”

  “Come, come, Mr. Cassidy,” Dauner said. “Believe me, it doesn’t make any difference in the world to you. Let us now turn to the matter of the woman, the wife … how can you assure us that you can deliver her?”

  “Tell me, why should I prove anything to you? Are you acting for the present owner of the statue now?”

  Dauner slid one hand from beneath the cape. It contained a Luger, black and shiny, reptilian. “Because I shall look very foolish in the eyes of the minotaur’s present owner if—”

  “Tell me, do you mean Moller? Or Vulkan?”

  Felix’s spotty cheeks were flushed with fright. “Vulkan … my God, Karl, kill him! Kill them all! They know everything. …” He seemed to totter at the edge of the abyss. For a long moment the only sound was the wind yelping at the chinks in the glass, nibbling at the structural skeleton.

  Dauner stared at Felix. “Well, this has turned into an unpleasant evening. However, as I was saying, I need some proof of the lady’s existence, our quid pro quo—”

  Karin suddenly pulled free from Cassidy to face Dauner.

  “I’m Frau Moller,” she cried, her face pale, her fingers raking her hair away from her eyes. “I am, I am. … Where is my husband?” She bit at a bleached knuckle, turned between the two men, staring, then slumped back against Cassidy. “What game are you playing?” Her fingers worked at his lapel. “What’s happening here …? I’m Frau Moller. …” Her eyes pleaded with Cassidy again, in fear and sorrow and anger.

  Dauner leaned forward, trying to hear. “What? What is she saying?”

  Karin was clinging to Cassidy, all eyes fastened on her, when the sky fell in, a sky of broken glass and noise and rushing wind, pane after pane of glass exploding in a fusillade of bullets, tommy guns rattling in the night, slugs ripping into the support beams.

  Karin screamed, stumbled backward.

  Cassidy caught her, pushed her flat on the clay, covered her with his own body, fumbling to get his gun from the holster.

  Felix dropped to his knees, his face melting with the heat of fear. Then he struggled to his feet, wobbling, and ran wildly across the court. Several slugs shredded his back, blowing chunks of him away into the darkness, and he plunged forward, into the net, hung suspended like a winner who’d miscalculated and failed in his leap.

  Terry Leary was kneeling beside the door returning fire, his .38 a toy against the jittering fire of the tommy guns.

  Karl Dauner had disappeared into the shadows.

  Cassidy placed him when he saw him fire through the broken glass on the other side of the court. The attackers were firing in on them from both sides, glass filling the air like a deadly snowfall.

  Something somewhere began to screech, metal on metal, a tearing, squealing sound. Voices were calling from the darkness outside. Cassidy sheltered Karin’s body as best he could, looked around; what the hell was that noise?

  The answer came with a rush.

  Far above, Cassidy saw the framework holding the glass canopy start to twist. It seemed to have developed a will of its own, silhouetted against the moonlight, twisting, pulling, the metal crying out.

  It began to collapse.

  With all the glass below shot to pieces and the supports weakened the weight was too much. The roof was pulling apart. The tommy-gun fire had stopped and while the skeleton of the building tore itself to pieces the first glass panels from above began to rain down.

  Cassidy grabbed Karin and rolled toward the end wall until they were huddled against it. When the roof finally collapsed the crash was deafening, long sabers of steel frame tearing loose, plummeting downward like a thousand javelins, driving home into the clay, broken glass in shattering, drifting clouds all across the tennis court.

  There was a ghastly, ear-splitting scream.

  Dauner had made a dash across the court, trying to get out before it all came tumbling down.

  A six-foot section of framework had skewered him at the fault line where he lay screaming, twisting, struggling to pull the stake from his back. He reached behind him, spasmodically, trying to reach the metal, succeeding only in tearing the wound. Blood was pumping out, spraying a red rainbow over him, spraying across his hands. He lay ten feet from Cassidy, his life pooling around him on the clay, his dark eyes no longer shiny but round and dulled in a moment of terminal surprise. Then he seemed no longer to give a damn. His hands stopped fluttering.

  Terry Leary, still crouched by the door, looked over at Cassidy and gave an elaborate comic shrug. “World War Three maybe? I tell ya, amigo, I’m gettin’ old before my time.”

  Once the noise had blown away and the last fragments of glass had come to rest, Cassidy slid off Karin, who lay still, her hands covering her face. She was staring out from between her fingers.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Cassidy squinted through the dust at Leary.

  As if in reply there was another crack, a pistol shot, and the bullet whined off the door frame. Then a rattle of machine-gun fire. There was no way out of this. Another spray of fire from the darkness chopped at the clay surface, grinding shards of glass to dust, plucking at the body of Karl Dauner.

  The ensuing stillness, the soft whispers in the grass as the attackers came closer for the kill, was cracked open by the sound of an automobile engine, revving at high speed, racing, bumping across the lawn, the headlights picking out four men with guns advancing on the ruin of the tennis court.

  A burst of gunfire came from the car and one of the men was blown ass over appetite into the lily pond.

  The car exploded through one of the teepees of leaves, skidded wildly, sliding out of control on the grass, until it fetched up against the stones bordering the pond. The rear wheels spun, then caught, the car jerking forward. The machine gun in the car burped again and a man yelled, something in a language Cassidy couldn’t understand, didn’t recognize. Someone from the stand of birches returned fire and the windshield of the car went.

  From the house came t
he sound of more shots. The lights went out.

  The car turned, swept back toward the tennis courts, came slewing sideways toward the doorway where Leary stood, frozen, the gun in his hand.

  “Come on, pards! We got ’em right where we want ’em!”

  Sam MacMurdo, bad leg and all, leaped out of the passenger side, Thompson submachine gun in his hand.

  Cassidy helped Karin to her feet. Leary was holding the rear door open.

  “Better bring her, pard. They might have left one sleeper in the weeds. I think they just finished off everybody in the house.”

  “We’ve got two dead down here—”

  “Dauner?”

  “The proverbial doornail. Who are these people?”

  “Same ones visited us the other night. Come on!”

  In the car Cassidy got a look at the driver.

  Walter Winchell was hunched over the wheel, holding on for dear life.

  “Give her the gun, Winch,” MacMurdo said.

  “You’re a goddamned brigand, Sam,” Cassidy said.

  MacMurdo laughed. “A highwayman. Bad Sam MacMurdo. Stand and deliver, you fuckers!”

  Winchell gunned it up the slope. They burst through the shrubbery like a tank, leaped the curbing into the driveway. Ahead in the darkness, taillights were disappearing through the gates. Winchell, speechless for once, floored the accelerator and they took the corner on two wheels, taking one of the wooden gates with them, spinning it away into the darkness.

  Winchell pulled the car out of the fishtailing swerve, floored it again. A gale was blowing where there had once been a windshield. Winchell’s hat blew into the back seat and he swore. Karin huddled against Cassidy. She seemed to be disappearing into the nightmare, her face blank.

  “There they are!” Winchell waved at the road.

  MacMurdo rested the machine gun on the dashboard, the barrel jutting out through the windshield frame, the round magazine hanging below, and opened fire.

  The car ahead swerved wildly across the narrow road. MacMurdo raked the road with fire and both rear tires went. They were closing now and MacMurdo gave it another burst.

  The car spun out of control, bounced off a thick white birch, rolled back across the road, rolled over twice, bouncing like a toy, came to rest on its side. The hood had pulled away, lay on its back like a dying beetle. Steam blew skyward like a geyser, spewing from the radiator.

  Slowly, painfully, a man appeared at the side window, levering himself up and out of the car. In the headlights his bearded face was streaming blood. The beard was long and black, matted with blood. He yelled something, that same language that meant nothing to Cassidy. MacMurdo held his fire.

  Halfway out the window the man brought his right hand out, leveled the machine gun at them.

  MacMurdo eased off a short burst and the man jerked sideways. The gun clattered onto the road. The man’s arm flexed upward, then fell back, leaving him hanging awkwardly, a broken doll.

  Another man who had crawled through the broken windshield made a staggering, tripping dash across the road, trying to fade into the underbrush and the trees.

  MacMurdo swiveled, fired again as if he were an efficient killing machine, the gun an extension of himself. Suddenly the firing stopped and he swore. The gun had jammed. He was struggling with it.

  His quarry turned, stepped back out of the shadows, blinking in the bright light, his eyes shining red with the reflection like a wounded, crazed animal about to be steamrollered by his fate. He seemed to gather his strength, then charged them, his tommy gun sputtering, slugs firing wild.

  MacMurdo swore at his gun.

  Leary’s view was blocked from where he sat and time was running out.

  Cassidy shifted Karin’s weight, opened the door, and stepped outside. He knew it was all going very fast but it was desperately slow in his mind.

  He took the .38 from his holster and waited until the man was close enough.

  It was a face he knew.

  The pianist from the billiards room.

  Harkavy.

  He was playing at Town Hall on Friday night. But right now he was trying to get the gun level as he ran forward. His face was contorted with hatred.

  “Nazis!” He kept screaming at them.

  Cassidy raised the .38 and dropped him where he stood.

  Cancel the performance.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT TOOK THE TRAIN FOREVER to struggle free from the muck of the city. It was afternoon and Cassidy was headed for Boston.

  The sky was gray, the window was grimy and misty, the view desolate. The guy across the aisle had a Motorola portable radio, very snappy in brown leatherette with a Bakelite pop-up handle. He was trying to get the Cubs and the Tigers in the World Series. The broadcast was fading in and out and it was going to fade in and out with lots of static all afternoon. The radio just couldn’t make sense of all the metal in the club car and the constantly moving location. Virgil Trucks was pitching for Detroit and Cassidy was damned if he could hear who was going for the Cubs. It was driving him crazy.

  Everything was driving him crazy.

  He didn’t really want to keep going over it all but he couldn’t get his mind onto much of anything else. He was still shaken by the events of the previous night. They were all lucky to be alive and none of it had made any sense at the time.

  In the aftermath Karin was a wreck, yet trying so hard to be brave. When they’d driven away from the devastation on the lonely country road, as if putting it out of sight might clear up the mess, Winchell had refused to give up the wheel. He’d jammed his hat back on his head and driven back to the Dauner estate where Leary, Cassidy, and Karin had transferred to Leary’s car for the drive back to Westchester.

  Rolf Moller took one look at Karin, heard the story, and blew a succession of fuses. He was desperately worried about her mental state, her fugue state, the danger of shock opening her head like a Pandora’s Box for the horrors to emerge. At least he’d switched images, giving up the cracking of the eggshell. Cassidy didn’t leave her side until she went to bed full of pills. She didn’t have much will left, moving like a somnambulist, forming her words carefully, her tongue thick—but she kept reaching out for him, grasping his hand. He saw her into bed, told her that she wouldn’t have to go through anything so bad again. With Dr. Moller waiting impatiently in the doorway, she squeezed Cassidy’s hand. “You will find my husband. …” The idea never left her mind. It seemed to crouch behind her every thought, frightening her, driving her onward. He tried to connect it to her behavior toward him and gave it up, realized that madness lay that way.

  But he was sure that Rolf Moller was wrong about her. She was worried and run down and frightened, but she wasn’t about to crack. She was worried about finding her husband, afraid for his safety. She loved her husband. And she was confused by Cassidy’s role in her life. But she wasn’t about to let herself unravel. …

  Or was that only his prayer?

  MacMurdo arrived at nearly two in the morning. He was limping and trying to ignore the pain. Rolf Moller changed the dressing on his thigh and MacMurdo came down to the kitchen wearing a plaid robe. “Christ, a skirmish like this one tonight, fella works up an appetite.” Terry Leary uncapped a beer for him and MacMurdo eased himself down into a chair, began building a Dagwood sandwich.

  He and Winchell had given the Dauner place a quick once-over. Karl Dauner and Heinz Felix were dead, as billed. In the house Helena Dauner and another couple were dead.

  The assassination team, of which the pianist Harkavy had been a part, made for ironic tragedy. MacMurdo had satisfied himself that they were Gypsies from New York—he knew there were such groups, avenging their fellows across Central Europe rounded up and exterminated by Hitler. How they’d gotten a line on Dauner and his colleagues, to say nothing of the MacMurdo operation headquartered in Westchester, was a mystery. “And destined to stay that way,” MacMurdo said, “just one of those goddamn things.” He chomped on the sandwich, wiped ma
yonnaise and mustard from the corner of his mouth. “We just can’t spend any time worrying about it. War is full of things you can’t explain. Hell, I worked with Gypsies behind German lines. Fierce bastards. Damn near as ruthless as your faithful servant here. And one thing I learned, what one Gypsy knows, all Gypsies know. They attacked us here and they did the job tonight. …” He shrugged. “We had no casualties tonight, praise God. We can’t let this stop us.” He turned to Cassidy. “Pard, you’re on the trail, you’re doin’ a helluva job. Now tell me what you got up to with our late Nazis. …”

  It turned out that MacMurdo had never intended to go to Washington the previous day. Working on the hunch that the enemy might be able to identify him, he’d planned the evening using Karin as the bait to attract the killers, with himself as the backup.

  It was all seat-of-the-pants flying but it was the way he’d worked all through the war. You got the ball and you ran with it, you improvised, you never got bogged down inside the plan. The important thing was to start. Then once the game was going, hell, you picked your spots and hoped you could react faster than the other guy.

  Once he’d set Karin, Cassidy, and Leary among the pigeons, he’d tailed them. Winchell had known MacMurdo from the old days, the phony war, when MacMurdo had run his own intelligence service out of London and Vienna, nominally seconded to the British and MI5. MacMurdo had fed Winchell information that kept him a step or two ahead of the competition. In return Winchell had leaked bits and pieces at MacMurdo’s request. Winchell claimed that since he’d set up the introduction to Dauner he deserved the chance to ride shotgun. Instead MacMurdo had made him driver. He was going to handle the guns himself. You couldn’t say no to Walter Winchell, though, and Winchell had liked the idea of being the wheel man.

  At Grand Central, MacMurdo took Cassidy aside. “You were never in any real danger,” he began, and Cassidy exploded with laughter. “No, seriously, we had the operation taped. Winch was in on it all the way. Hell of a guy, Winch. Of course, we didn’t know the goddamn tennis court was gonna collapse—Jesus, what a mess!”

  “Listen to me, Colonel. I don’t care if you want to be a war hero every day for the rest of your life. And when I get tired of it I can tell you to go to hell. But you goddamn near got Karin killed. If she’d died and I’d ever found out how you set it up, you’d have wished you were behind enemy lines again. I’d have come after you—that might not scare you much today, but I’d have scared you sooner or later.”