The counter clerk pushed a paper bag and a waxed carton toward her. "There you are, sweetie. Six marks seventy to you," he said in German.
"Take it out of this. Mine, too." The Executioner slid a ten spot across the polished wood, keeping his eyes fixed on the girl. She was wearing a tan raincoat, belted tightly at the waist, with the collar turned up. "You can help me," he said. "I have to talk to you. Please."
That one worked better. Muscles around the gray eyes relaxed. The flesh softened. Dagmar smiled. "Walk me back to my door?" she asked.
He swept his change off the bar and nodded. They left the deli and started to cross the courtyard. She took his arm. "I'm treating you very badly," she apologized. "After all, you did rescue me most gallantly from a really tough situation."
"So why won't you at least have a drink with me? Why did you run out on me? Why don't you give me honest answers to my…"
"Because I'm scared!" she interrupted fiercely. "That's why."
"So tell me about it. Maybe I can rescue you again."
She shook her head. They had arrived outside the yellow door. She turned to face him, still with one hand on his arm. "You don't understand," she said. "It's not safe for me to go anywhere. No place at all. I'm holed up in this grotty little apartment until the heat's off — if it ever is. I only come out to hurry over to Fritz's place for something to eat."
"Okay. So if you can't come out, let me come up to your place and talk." Bolan smiled. "Otherwise I'll just play watchdog, lie right here on your doormat and compromise you." He waved a hand around the yard. "Think what the neighbors would say."
The hand tightened on his arm. She smiled again. "That might be nice," she said. Bolan hoped the sigh she gave was one of relief.
He said, "Look, why don't I go over to the market, pick up some cold meat, maybe a little fruit, and drop by a wine store? Then I'll come right back… and invite you to have dinner at your own place."
"That would be great," Dagmar said. "But not tonight."
He frowned. "Why not? If you're hiding out…"
"There are things I have to do…phone calls to make… the place is in a mess. I don't know." Once more she sounded confused, a rabbit dashing frantically up and down the warren as a fox digs its way in.
"So I'll stick around for half an hour, give you time to straighten things out, come up later."
"No, no. You don't understand."
"There's plenty I don't understand," Bolan said. "Okay. But there's one thing I do know. You're in a hole, and I'm here to help if I can. I can see you're in big trouble. Some of it I've seen, some I found out, some I can guess. But just remember, any problem eases once it's shared."
"You're sweet," Dagmar said. She was standing very close to him.
"Sure I'm sweet. And I can be sweeter. But I can't help unless you level with me, and I guess there's nobody else standing in line right now, or he'd be here already and you wouldn't be in this mess. Believe me, I'm on your side… whatever it is."
"Of course I believe you. But…"
"So what's to stop us attending to the matter now, tonight?"
Once more the gold bell of hair shook from side to side, this time decisively. "There are things I have to find out, too. I can't explain, but I think I can sort out certain… problems… tonight. Come tomorrow night. Please. I'll tell you the whole story then. I promise."
"Well…" Bolan still wasn't very happy. "You promise?"
"All of it." She nodded. The gray eyes softened, glistened. "If we can find time. Among other things."
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. "Nice Mr. Belasko," she said.
Bolan dragged his eyes away from the curve of raincoat above the tight belt and got out of there. He could still feel the trembling of her knees and the pressure of her breasts against his chest as he walked out the archway, stepped over half the engine from the old sedan, which the owner had laid out on the sidewalk, and zigzagged away from the fruit and flowers.
It was only when he was back in his hotel that he recalled the car whose innards had been displayed on the sidewalk outside Dagmar's courtyard.
A blue, beat-up Opel sedan.
Chapter Seven
By dawn the next day the sky had cleared, but it was still bitterly cold. Bolan decided to treat the weather seriously. He bought a fleece-lined sheepskin car coat and a fur hat to supplement the woolen muffler he'd worn when he'd first hit town. Skintight calf-leather gloves protected his hands from the freezing air but left his fingers nimble enough to pluck the Beretta from its quickdraw rig and operate the autoloader's mechanism at normal speed.
He was aware now that thoughts of Dagmar threatened to occupy his mind for more time than the solution of the mystery surrounding her strictly demanded. And he had to remember the main reason for his presence in the city. He was amassing evidence — and hoped to collect a great deal more when he saw the girl — on the Lattuada deal, but he was no nearer Arvell Asticot than the day he'd arrived.
He figured he could maybe help along both cases by filling in the daylight hours before his date with some legwork. And for now that meant making a round of the bars and cafes in St. Pauli, keeping his ears open and trusting that his knowledge of German would hold him in good stead.
He spent most of the morning eavesdropping, but all he heard were complaints and common gossip. Finally he struck paydirt in two places.
"Regardless of what's said," the barman at the Zillertal confided to a busboy, "it does make life easier now that they're getting themselves organized, and that's a fact."
The busboy shuffled his feet on the tiled floor. "Bastards ought to be behind bars, the whole goddamn lot of 'em. Stuff the motherfuckers inside out, that's what I say."
"Well, don't say it too loud if you want to stay upright. No, but you have to admit, when Kraul and his lot were on the loose, and all of them other punks, you risked getting fucked over two, three times on the trot. Ask me, it's better this way. Once you come across, they let you get on with it."
Bolan had heard the same conversation before, almost in the same words. It crystallized his interpretation of the underground battle dividing the criminal quarters of the city.
In a bar near the Opera he heard two chorus boys in stage makeup complaining — this time about the dangers of life after dark.
"It's as much as one's life is worth," said the younger one, "trolling nights these days in that grisly Reeperbahn. You know what that bitch Rudi said…"
"I know, dear," the other interrupted. "But for once she was right, you know. One's behind has scarcely touched a seat these days before one is surrounded by Hansie and those big, rough men. It's too discouraging. Really it is."
Bolan whipped around from his position at the bar. The two dancers were just leaving. "Pardon me, uh, gentlemen," he said at the door in his passable German. "I happened to overhear you mention a personal friend of mine — Hansie…?"
"Hansie Schiller?" one of the chorus boys said.
"Right. I'm anxious to contact him, and I'm a stranger in town. I wonder if you could tell me where he lives, or at least some place he goes where I could get in touch?"
They looked at each other, penciled brows raised superciliously. "He doesn't exactly encourage house calls," the older one said.
"No, don't call him. He'll call you," his friend tittered. "If you really want to see him, you could try the Coliseum, of course."
"The Coliseum? Thanks." Having chanced his hand this far, Bolan decided to go the whole way. "Say, I don't suppose either of you guys know where I could fix myself up with a snort, do you? Or maybe just a little charge?"
They exchanged glances again. "You're a friend of Hansie's and you're asking us?" the younger one cried. "How droll can you be! Really!" he said to his friend as they flounced off toward the theater. "Some people!"
Apart from a couple of isolated references to the Yank, heard but unidentified in a bleak dockside tavern crowded with longshoremen, that was the sum total of Bolan's
intel that day.
At seven o'clock he began his shopping. The Coliseum, wherever that was, could wait, as could Hansie Schiller and his connection with drugs, Lattuada, the Yank and their supposed relationship.
Bolan censored memories of loose, pointed breasts under a braless green top, a sexy, bent-knee walk, the promise in a certain kiss. He was seeing the girl because he needed information, right? He bought cold cuts, bread and two bottles of Alsatian wine. Then, he made his way to the Kinderplatz.
"I'll leave the yellow door open," she'd said, "but ring just the same, so I'll know it's you and I can open the one at the top. Three long and two short, followed by three short and two long. That's my private code. Special friends only!"
Bolan transferred the paper bag of cold cuts, and the bottles to one arm and thumbed the bell the way she'd said. Then, shouldering open the door, he lurched up the narrow stairway.
He couldn't find a switch for the lights as he cautiously made the fifth floor.
The hallway was completely dark. He'd heard no sounds from the other apartments as he climbed past: no voices, no radio, no street noises filtering through. All he could hear now was a dripping faucet and a creak someplace above as an old beam settled. There was a faint odor of fresh paint in the air. He sucked some in and started on the final flight of stairs.
As he turned on the landing he could see light around the edges of a door that had been left ajar at the top. Would she open it herself? Would she run forward and kiss him again, or would she wait for him to find her inside? The Executioner suddenly went cold. If she was there at all…
He had still heard no sound. She couldn't have run out on him again, could she? He shoved open the door and walked into the apartment.
She was there all right, and stark naked. The only thing on her was the knotted wool scarf with which she'd been strangled.
The body, still warm, lay on a divan, but he knew at once, before he saw the contorted, purple face, the staring eyes, the protruding tongue. There was something unmistakably final about the dead, that total lack of muscular control, the kinetic energy that knitted the frame together. The merely unconscious were never that way, even in deep coma. The unconscious sagged; the dead flopped.
The knot in the scarf was in back. The murderer must have been behind her. Someone she knew then? But why didn't she fight once she realized? Bruises on her wrists. Must have been two of them, one to hold her hands down, the other to…
That scarf?
His scarf!
Dagmar had been choked to death with the wool scarf he had bought two days before to keep the arctic air from searing his mouth and nose. As far as he knew, it was in the top left-hand drawer of the dresser in his hotel room, along with the Mike Belasko press card, a street map of Hamburg and a couple of spare batteries for his electric shaver.
What the hell was it doing here, sunk almost out of sight in the neck of a strangled dancer?
He wondered if he should call the cops. He hated just leaving her there. But did she have a phone? Involuntarily he half turned to look around the room — night table, closet, bookcase, a chair strewn with underclothes. The body slid off the edge of the divan and thumped onto the floor.
He turned back, but his left foot was imprisoned beneath the dead girl's hip. He stooped, some innate, inbred sense of decorum insisting he pick her up and place her back on the bed.
That's when the police burst in.
Chapter Eight
Bolan didn't catch on at once. Perhaps his mental reflexes had been momentarily numbed. And Fischer, the senior officer in charge of the squad, wasn't exactly an orator. He was solidly built, with a mustache, his voice was quiet, and he only used it for business purposes. His bleak face showed about as much expression as the Matterhom.
Neither the young plainclothes sergeant nor the two uniformed cops with him had much to say to the Executioner, either. There were formalities to attend to, photographers and doctors and ambulance men to organize. It wasn't until the body had been removed and the four of them were left alone with the American that he became fully aware of the spot he was in.
"Why did you do it?" Fischer asked.
"Come again?" Bolan was sprawled on the settee in the living room. The two uniformed cops were blocking the entrance door. Fischer was pacing up and down, his sergeant squatting awkwardly on a pile of cushions with a notebook and pencil at the ready.
"Why did you kill her?"
Bolan sat up straight. "Me? You don't think…? But you can't be serious! I had a date with her. The door was open and 1 walked in and found her there. 1 was just going to call…"
"Don't waste my time, Belasko, if that's really your name. You expect me to believe an explanation like that when we actually caught you red-handed?"
Bolan opened his mouth to point out the craziness of the situation… and then saw it from their point of view. A dead woman, the body still warm. A foreigner standing over her with his hand on the scarf that had strangled her. They didn't know yet that the scarf was his, but it wouldn't take them long to find out. He was going to have to do some fast talking if he was to be back at his hotel by midnight.
"Look," he said reasonably, "why would I kill the kid? I don't even know her."
"You just said you had a date with her."
"Sure. I did. I wanted to know her. But she was scared. She…"
"Scared of what?"
"That's what I wanted to find out. She was mixed up in some kind of racket, kind of a local protection routine, I guess. Maybe with drug connections. I don't know. But 1 figured her for an innocent bystander and I was trying to help. That's why I came here. She was too frightened to meet me anyplace else."
"I suggest your reasons for coming here were quite different," Fischer said levelly. "However, motive becomes a moot point, a debate for judges and juries and lawyers, when the murderer is actually seen committing the crime."
"If your police doctor's half as smart as you are, the autopsy will show she was dead before I arrived."
"We don't know when you arrived," the sergeant said, writing in his book. "We have nobody's word for it but your own."
"Well, before you arrived then. What I mean is, it will show that I couldn't have been killing her when you came in. It'll show she died before that, and so much for your 'red-handed' accusation."
"Possibly. The body was warm. It's difficult for a postmortem to establish a precise time of death within the short period before it cools. In any case, if you weren't tightening the ligature when we saw you, you could have been in the act of removing it to destroy the evidence."
Yeah, Bolan thought, since it was mine, that would certainly figure.
"The important thing is that you were observed by four police witnesses at the scene of the crime…" Fischer favored him with a wintry smile"…in circumstances suggesting that you had just committed it. That's the mildest way it can be put."
"But why?" Bolan stood up abruptly, stooping to avoid the sloping ceiling. The two uniformed cops moved closer together in front of the door. "We were going to have dinner together. I'm asking you, does a guy planning to knock off a girl arrive loaded with groceries and bottles of wine? Does he?"
"He might — if he was planning to make the point you're making now. Or he might not have planned the murder at all. It might have been the result of a quarrel." He shot the Executioner one of the X-ray glances policemen use to signal a hit coming up. "If he was planning a seduction and she had other ideas, for example. I noticed there were bruises on her wrists."
Bolan was becoming impatient. "Just look at the stuff I humped up those damn stairs and…" He broke off in midsentence, staring at a table just inside the door — the table on which he had dumped the bottles, and paper bag when he'd come in. They weren't there anymore.
"Did any of your men move that stuff?" he demanded. But even as he asked he knew they hadn't. He had been in the room all the time. Even if he had temporarily forgotten about the provisions, he would have noticed if
one of the cops had shifted them. Something else that had been worrying him surfaced. "Tell me," he asked, "how did you happen to show just when you did?"
Fischer shrugged. "Emergency call from the people in the apartment below. They heard a scream and the sounds of a struggle."
Suddenly, for the first time, Bolan had serious misgivings. He had obviously walked into some kind of setup. He recalled the loud creak he'd heard on his way upstairs. That had been no ancient beam settling. The killer or killers had been up there, someplace on that dark landing, waiting for him to walk into the trap before they left, taking his corroboratory evidence with them. They had already gotten into his hotel room and stolen the scarf, to tie him in with the murder. He wondered if they had actually made the emergency call from the silent apartment below Dagmar's, or whether he had been watched from outside and the call patched in someplace else.
How many other clues had they planted, pointing the Executioner's way? Then he had a chilling realization: they didn't have to. Not when he himself had spent the past two days leaving clues all over the city, asking for Dagmar Schroeder at every club, tavern and café. Probably, if they wanted the girl out of the way for some reason, it was those inquiries that decided them to pin the killing on him.
As for who «they» were, for once it didn't seem too difficult a question. Easier, certainly, than finding an answer to the mystery of the girl's own actions and reactions in the twenty-four hours before her death.
Both questions were soon — to quote the policeman himself — moot points. There were already guns in the hands of the uniformed cops at the door, but it wasn't until later, at the station house, that Bolan's misgivings were transformed into real alarm.
"You claim to be a special correspondent for this magazine in Chicago?" Fischer asked. He spoke like a man expecting lies.
"I am roving correspondent for World Review with special responsibility for foreign affairs," Bolan said.
"Yet you're carrying a German press card bearing another man's photograph and made out in a name not your own?"
Blowout Page 7