The first question concerned the lookout in the rose garden. He could easily have shot Bolan from behind before the warrior even knew he existed. But he had only produced the gun at the very last moment, preferring to rely on his physical prowess until He had lost hope. This implied, first, that the attackers had wanted Bolan alive; second, that they had known for one thing who he was and, for another, that he was going to be there.
The question led, paradoxically, to the mystery shots fired at him the moment he'd entered the stableyard. And fired only at him. Had those killers, too, been tipped off to lay an ambush? Bolan wondered just how much double-crossing Sally Ann was capable of.
Chapter Fourteen
Lübeck — thirty-nine miles northeast of Hamburg on the continuation of the high-speed E.45 freeway — was a port at the confluence of the Trave River and the huge Elbe Canal, nine miles inland from the open sea.
Why would a Greek freighter, presumably delivering a consignment of drugs to Lattuada or Asticot, choose to dock at such a remote and hard-to-reach berth? Why would a ship, which must have come through the Mediterranean and up the North Sea from the Middle East, or across the Atlantic from Central America, why would such a ship not stop off at Bremerhaven, Flensburg or even Hamburg itself? Why sail all the way around the Jutland Peninsula, through the Kattegat and the Skagerrak, past the southern boundary of Norway and Sweden and between the Danish islands, when four or five days could have been saved by calling at those other ports?
Could it be because Lübeck was at the head of an inlet forming the junction between the two Germanys? Because the far side of the narrow strip of water was East Germany? Because maybe the merchants of slow death were hoping to open up a new market?
Bolan would find out, if he could choke the truth out of the two underworld bosses before he blew them away. First, though, he had to locate the bosses themselves. And all he had to go on was Kraul's word that they were in town, that they weren't together and that although Asticot was «supervising» a drug shipment from the freighter to a "private individual," the American was there on a different mission.
And that meant what? Hiring new muscle? Arranging an arms delivery? Searching out fresh talent for the whorehouses? Fixing some kind of smuggling deal? Exploring the East German connection?
Eighty percent negative on all questions. The first three could be done more easily, and with much better results, back in Hamburg. Any small port would do for the fourth, and there were plenty far more accessible on the North Sea coast. And if anyone was planning East German contacts, surely it would be Asticot, else why would his Greek freighter come all the way to Lübeck?
In any case, Asticot was the better lead: Bolan at least knew which part of town he was likely to be in. Lattuada was going to be more difficult. Lübeck was a city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, and although Bolan supposed there would be a red-light quarter near the docks, he had no way of knowing what other neighborhoods a displaced mafioso might favor.
He snatched a few hours' sleep in a highway rest area and drove through the outskirts at first light — a wasteland of roadside diners, gas stations, steelworks and steep-roofed housing developments. It was bitterly cold, the sky was covered in low cloud, and the vacant lots and mounds of rusting wreckage in automobile junkyards were still powdered with week-old snow.
Reading a newspaper as he sipped hot coffee at a hamburger stall outside a trailer camp, Bolan saw that more snow was forecast. Germany had beaten France two to one in the qualifying round of World Cup Soccer. A radical deputy had been killed by a car bomb outside his home in Turin; neofascist extremists were thought to be responsible. The Hamburg killer was now thought to have been involved in the deaths of a taxi driver and an unidentified vagrant at a city intersection forty-eight hours before the murder of the St. Pauli blonde.
Back in the BMW, Bolan drove past the fifteenth-century Holstentor Gate, around a city hall that was even older, between two churches with immensely high towers and on into the medieval quarter that clung to the waterfront. Here, among close-packed brick houses leaning together above the cobblestoned lanes, he checked into a small hotel, parked the car and walked toward the dock basins. The nighttime mist had vanished, but a thin, cold rain was falling.
The first part of his search was easy. He learned at the port office that there was only one Greek-registered ship alongside. It was called the Aegean Queen, and it was discharging a mixed cargo of citrus fruit, dried goatskins and electrical components, that had been taken aboard at Le Havre, France.
Bolan located the freighter in a landscape of warehouses, mobile cranes and railroad tracks — a small, sleek, white-hulled craft that looked more like a rich man's pleasure boat than the battered and rusting tramp steamer he had expected. Part of the cargo had been discharged the previous day. Stevedores were loading wooden cases stacked on the quayside into a truck with the help of two forklifts. A seaman with a bullhorn was standing in the ship's bow, directing a crane driver who was lifting netted crates of fruit from the hold.
Between the Aegean Queen and a Finnish freighter unloading timber into a line of railroad flatcars, several groups of longshoremen stood smoking and talking, their cigarettes shielded from the rain in cupped hands. There was no sign of Arvell Asticot.
Bolan hadn't expected to see him in person. A guy at his level wouldn't go to Lübeck to check out the transfer of a handful of heroin packets smuggled in the lining of a purser's oilskin. It had to be a big consignment, and supervising didn't necessarily mean the drug baron had to wait all day on the quayside.
There would be at least one hardguy, if not more. What the Executioner hoped to do was identify these, locate the merchandise and allow one or the other to lead him to Asticot.
The longshoremen were wearing yellow oilskins or jeans and donkey jackets. Bolan felt conspicuous in his trench coat and tweed. He hurried back to the hotel, found a maritime outfitters a couple of blocks from the dockside and returned to join the waterfront idlers in a watch cap and pea jacket.
The Greek ship was small, not much bigger than a coaster. The wooden cases had all been off-loaded and the hoists were starting on the skins as the final nets of fruit were lowered to the wharf. There were several flatbeds stacked with the cases now; uniformed officers were prying open one or two at random next to one of the customs sheds. Bolan saw radio chassis, cathode-ray TV tubes, electric motors to power dishwashers.
He didn't rate the consignment as cover for a drug shipment, even though the legend Heckler-Asticot Maschinenfabrik GmbH was lettered on the truck doors.
Crated electrical components, cases stenciled Machine Parts — they were such obvious fronts for smuggled narcotics or small arms that they had become a thriller writer's cliché. No, the truth would be that Heckler-Asticot GmbH was the innocent front for the drug baron himself. It gave him a valid reason for being in Germany, in Lübeck, on this quayside at this time.
Flayed animal skins or citrus fruit, on the other hand…
Some of the customs men promenaded sniffer dogs. Bolan recalled Sally Ann's revelation that freshly baked bread disguised the odor of marijuana smoke, and if anything was going to put those highly trained animals literally off the scent, surely the sharp, acrid aroma of lemons, oranges and tangerines or the stench of uncured skins would do the trick.
Shallow trays of fruit, nevertheless, left very little room to maneuver if you wanted to hide a quantity of stuff, unless the fruit itself was split open and stuffed with the contraband, which would be one hell of a job. So Bolan's hunch tipped the skins as the most likely hiding place. A good number of packets could be hidden in a single hide.
The trucks laden with crates were beginning to move away; the fruit was being stacked in one of the freight sheds. Should he follow the last truck? He reckoned not; it was more likely to lead him to a straight storage depot than to any place Asticot would be. In any case, if Asticot was running a regular company as a front, the address would be in the phone book.
He decided to stay with the skins.
Six-foot stacks of them were still being swung off the freighter and onto the quayside; the rancid stink of the uncured pelts washed toward him with the squalls of icy rain blown inland by the wind from the Baltic. Maybe, if they were left in one of the sheds overnight, he would get a chance to check them out. If not, he would follow them when they left.
Except that there seemed to be a complication. The skins were being transported to a shed all right — dock-workers were already loading them onto a train of trolley cars hauled by a small diesel tractor — but the shed was a customs shed, and there were uniformed men stationed by the roller doors, opening and closing them between each delivery. It looked very much as if the skins were being held in bond.
For whom? In transit? And if so, en route for what destination?
Bolan frowned. He pushed himself upright from the steel gantry against which he had been lounging and sauntered toward the freighter. Work on the Finnish ship had stopped; most of the longshoremen had left the wharf when the rain had started to fall more heavily. The last thing he wanted to do was attract unwelcome attention. Maybe the comments of the guys unloading the skins would give him a clue.
He stood near the stem of the Aegean Queen, the collar of the pea jacket turned up against the rain, his chin tucked into his chest, staring out beyond the quay, across the expanse of sullen gray water at the flat shoreline on the East German side. There weren't many buildings there. Virtually the whole of Lübeck was concentrated on the left bank of the estuary.
The stevedores' dialogue didn't help him much.
'Tucking rain. Makes these bastards twice as heavy to handle."
"Can't get the stink out of your hair for days."
"They'll stink worse when they've been processed!"
"How come?"
"Leather pants to keep the Vopos' asses out of a sling!"
Laughter. And then, "Why don't they take the fuckers by road? We wouldn't have to load and unload the damn things twice, then."
"This way they get an escort of Soviet nuclear subs!"
"For Chrissakes, pack it in, you guys, and load the shit. You think I want to sit on this goddamn tractor all night?"
Bolan walked away and found partial shelter between the stacks of lumber off-loaded from the Finnish ship. It wasn't until midafternoon that he learned the answer to his question.
The cargo had all been discharged, the crew had come ashore, the skins were locked away in the bonded merchandise shed and the wharf was deserted. Somewhere among the confusion of cranes and derricks surrounding a nearby dock basin a donkey engine rattled, and a tug hooted out on the sound.
Half a dozen officials in watch caps and belted blue raincoats emerged from a glassed-in single-story shack beyond the customs sheds and gathered at the top of a flight of stone steps that led from the dockside to a landing stage below.
From his vantage point Bolan looked out across the water. The sky was now a sulfurous yellow and the rain was turning to sleet. Out beyond the hulls of berthed freighters a launch flying the ensign of the German Democratic Republic was slicing the steel-gray surface of the sound into dirty white foam.
The craft nosed into the landing stage and four men-three uniformed officials and a civilian — climbed the stairway to the dock, leaving an East German naval officer in charge of the boat. There were salutes and handshakes. The whole group then hurried to the glassed-in office shack. Through the misted windows Bolan could make out papers being exchanged, read, signed, stamped. A West German customs man was punching out a number on a desk phone. He began to speak.
Ten minutes later two of the customs officials escorted the East German civilian and one of his uniformed colleagues to the bonded warehouse. The doors were unlocked and rolled back a few feet and the four men went inside. While they were there a black Mercedes limo appeared between two sheds farther down the dock and rolled slowly to a stop outside the warehouse. A chauffeur climbed out and opened the rear door.
Bolan caught his breath. The man who emerged was short, with thinning hair and slightly protuberant eyes above a thin-lipped lizard mouth. He was wearing a belted camel topcoat with a homburg.
Arvell Asticot.
The Executioner's fingers itched. He could have whipped out the Beretta and blown the guy away then and there; Asticot was no more than sixty feet away. But there was more to learn still, and the soldier wanted this particular scumbag to know that his sins had caught up with him before he was sent to hell.
The chauffeur opened an umbrella and conducted Asticot the few yards to the customs shed. The light was fading fast and illumination from inside the shed cast streamers of yellow radiance across the wet asphalt of the quay. Asticot vanished through the open doors.
Now Bolan was in possession of all the pieces and could assemble the puzzle.
The Aegean Queen had indeed been directed to Lübeck because one part of her cargo, the skins, was destined — was now in transit — for East Germany. The officials from the launch must have come across to complete the necessary export-import formalities. They were now in the customs shed, presumably with the East German consignee, to check that the cargo was as advertised. Asticot would be there as the guy who had organized the deal, and the civilian was presumably the buyer.
But was he simply buying the skins, as the stevedores had implied, to turn into leather garments for the Vopos, the East German Volkspolizei? Or was he part of a larger, and far more profitable operation that would flood the GDR with hard drugs? If he was merely being used unknowingly as a front, a fall guy for the importation of narcotics, who was Asticot's real contact in East Germany?
One thing was certain: even if they had been given a little «encouragement» on the side to help the transfer go through smoothly, the customs men probably weren't aware of the skins' real purpose.
If Bolan could get next to Asticot and choke the truth out of him, and at the same time expose the filth hidden in the skins, there was a good chance he could tip off the authorities on both sides and wrap up the whole vile conspiracy. But he would have to work fast because, again according to the dockers, the skins were being transferred to East Germany by boat, perhaps tonight, instead of making it the long way around, past the two road frontiers in a convoy of trucks.
And there was, of course, the additional complication that Bolan, as a presumed murderer on the run, could hardly knock on the chief port officer's door and tell him about the drugs. But there wasn't a chance in a million that he could locate Lattuada, choke the truth out of him and straighten that one out in time.
There was, nevertheless, an unexpected link that took him totally by surprise. Asticot and the officials came out of the warehouse, and the drug baron summoned someone from the interior of the limo while the customs men were relocking the doors.
Clearly this was the sidekick delegated to oversee the actual transfer of the skins from the businesses rather than the authorities' point of view. Asticot's high tenor voice carried clearly to Bolan, where he lurked among the stacks of Finnish lumber.
"Now I don't want any mistakes. The barge will be alongside at dawn. The dockers have been notified. These gentlemen here will officiate at the shipment. But the whole operation must be completed before eight o'clock. I repeat, must be completed. Is that clear? The berth is booked for another incoming freighter at that time. I'll hold you personally responsible for the success of the project."
"No sweat, sir," the overseer replied. "All under control. The operation will go ahead exactly as planned."
"It had better," Asticot said. He turned toward the car.
It wasn't the exchange itself that made the Executioner catch his breath — that only confirmed what he suspected already. What fazed him was the identity of the overseer — a short, shaggy man with a blotched red face under the narrow brim of a tweed hat.
With his knee-high boots, breeches and belted jacket, the guy could have been a typical north German farmer. But there was no doub
t about it. The man receiving Asticot's orders was Hugo, the doorman from St. Pauli.
Chapter Fifteen
Lattuada could wait: it was a question of following Asticot and maneuvering to get him alone, or sticking close to Hugo, with the knowledge that at least he couldn't miss out on the transfer of skins to East Germany.
Bolan also wanted to take a look at those skins. It was, after all, only a guess on his part that drugs were concealed inside the consignment. He would bet all the money he had on it, but there was just a slim chance that he could be mistaken. And he'd sure feel stupid if he wasted his time spying on the transport of a cargo of regular goatskins!
Geography decided him. He knew where and when the East German boat was due. He knew where the skins were located. He knew where Hugo would be at that time, wherever he was before then. But he had no idea where Asticot was based: if he let him go now, he might lose him altogether. The drug baron might already have completed all the supervising that was necessary. Bolan ran for the BMW, which was parked at the inner end of an empty dry dock behind the customs shed.
Thirty minutes later he was crouched down outside a window, peering through a crack between heavy curtains and trying at the same time to make out an occasional word from the hum of conversation within the room. The window was on the tenth floor of a modern hotel. It was, of course, closed. And double-glazed. Bolan was on a small stone balcony, trying to forget the driving sleet that was beating on his shoulders. He had gotten onto the balcony via two other balconies and an emergency fire exit at the end of a passageway whose steel door had yielded easily to the Executioner's expertise.
Although Asticot had a small warehouse for his electrical goods, and an office crammed into one corner of the hangarlike lower floor — he had called in there to check out the trucks unloading on his way from the docks — it was clear he had no permanent residence in Lübeck. Following the Mercedes limo through the rush-hour traffic, Bolan had wondered whether the drug kingpin used the city solely as a staging post for a whole series of deals with the East Germans.
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