Zuta came into the room. She was dressed in jade-green lounging pajamas with wide pants and a loose jacket. "My God," she said, "I know we made sweet music together, but did I do that?"
She was staring at his naked body. He glanced down and saw that bruises he had received during the beating administered by Hansie had now blossomed into a pattern of blue, purple and dirty amber. He grinned. "I've been waltzing with bad company a lot these days."
"Poor love. I'll have them send up some lunch, then I'll give you a liniment rub while you tell me all about it."
"Swell," Bolan said. "Is the club open for lunch, then? By the way, where are we exactly? I've been trying to pinpoint the location, but I can't come up with it. It looks more like the outskirts of town than clubland."
"I wanted my club to be different," Zuta said. "I didn't want to be running just another joint in the square mile."
"The square mile?"
"St. Pauli — the square mile of vice, so-called. I wanted to be out of that. Which helped me with the no-shakedown situation, incidentally. No competition means no trouble. I wanted to be in a neighborhood that was easy to get to, but where clients could always find parking space. And I also wanted a place that wouldn't attract wandering drunks, tourists, soccer supporters and visiting firemen. Folks don't come to the Coliseum by chance. They come because they know it's there and because they want to come. The trees you can see at the end of the street there are by the Wandsbek-Markt U-Bahn station, where there's a big parking lot. To answer your other question, yes, we do open for lunch. And it'll be here in about three minutes, so you better shower and get shaved quickly."
Lunch was a dozen oysters followed by smoked salmon and a bottle of vintage German white wine. It was served by a guy in a white mess jacket whose face looked like a train wreck.
"Are they all like that?" Bolan asked when the character had swung off from branch to branch. "Or is it just our friend in the white jacket who's doubling for a gorilla in a new Tarzan movie?"
"A woman running a late-night club has to have a certain amount of muscle around," Zuta said, "or people will try to take advantage of her. If you can get strong men who are also good waiters — and that one is — then you're halfway home. Now pour me some wine and tell me all about this mess you got yourself into."
He poured the wine and gave her the complete rundown, telling it the way it was, right from the first time he'd seen Lattuada. The only thing he left out — women, he figured, were unknown quantities in some matters — was the fondness he'd had for Dagmar Schroeder. He pretended the meet with the unfortunate Dagmar was arranged simply in the hope of finding some lead that would get him nearer to the Yank.
"The whole works, in fact," Zuta said when he was through, "arose because you had a hunch, a hunch that this man Lattuada was in some way tied in with the crime scene here."
Bolan nodded. "I was right, too. There's a story there. But following it up landed me the star part in a bigger story. And I can't write the end to that before I get to Lattuada and choke the truth out of him. Which should wrap up the first story, too."
"Before you get to Lattuada? How do you think you'll do that?"
"Go on doing what I was doing. Find a new base. Stick around until I pick up a lead. Follow it through and then…"
"Belasko!" Zuta interrupted. "You're crazy! You wouldn't last a day the way things are now."
"How do you mean, the way things are now?"
"I made a few, shall we say, discreet inquiries this morning," she told him. "I sent up a few balloons and waited to see who would respond."
"And?"
"And you can't step outside this apartment, darling. That's the truth. You're on the spot two different ways. First, the cops, having missed you last night, are putting everything they have into the murder hunt. And, of course, the Team's after you, too. Word's gone around in the underworld that there'll be money paid to anyone who turns you in, and a beating given to anyone who recognizes you and doesn't. I promise, the moment you leave here you'll be surrounded by so many snitches, you'll think you're…"
"But I can't stay here," Bolan cut in. "I have to…"
"Why ever not? There's something wrong with the food? You have some fault to find with the… service? You don't like the company?" Her eyes flashed danger signals through the mascara.
"You know it's nothing like that," Bolan said.
"If this man Lattuada's around," Zuta said, "and if he's doing what you say he is, then you'll see him all right, a lot quicker than you expect, if you leave here. Only it won't be on your terms. It'll be on his. And if there's any choking to be done, it'll be your neck rather than his."
Bolan sighed. She made sense.
"Stay here with me," she said. "A place like this — downstairs, I mean — I can put out feelers, sound folks out. You can do a hell of a lot more for yourself working on the information I bring you than you ever could on your own."
"Yeah," Bolan said doubtfully. "You could be right. But would there be any intel? I mean, you know, I'm in a spot. I have to get to the bottom of this frame somehow, and that means facts and it means proof, which in turn means some kind of legwork. It has to. Do you really think you'd be able to…"
"You don't know the people I know," Zuta said. "You don't know what influence a girl in my position can have. Trust me, Mike. I'll do everything I possibly can. I promise. Meanwhile, well, there could be worse ways to keep out of jail, don't you think?"
That evening Zuta changed into a clinging black crepe dress with a red rose on one shoulder, and went down to play hostess in her club. She had shown the place to Bolan earlier, in the off hours between six and eight when the afternoon drunks had gone home after their hard day's work in the boardroom and the sugar daddies hadn't yet shown up to wine and dine their mistresses.
It was a ritzy place, all right. A single line of tables surrounded a small sunken dance floor. There were two more rows behind a balustrade a couple of feet above this. On a third level another balustrade partitioned off the tables for guests from the wrong side of Zuta's tracks, and a long bar stretched between the entrance stairs and a door leading to the washrooms. The band occupied a postage-stamp-size stage at one side of the shallow stairway linking the three levels.
They had entered the place through double padded doors with circular windows like classical oriels. On the way down they had passed an office floor full of accountants sorting through bills and invoices in an attempt to con the local tax people that Zuta was losing money. Above that was the apartment, and above the apartment there was an attic floor used for supplies.
Bolan had looked around at the white tablecloths, the cream-and-gold chairs and the crimson carpet. Midnight-blue paper spangled with stars covered the ceiling; Doric columns supported a pediment above the bar; and there were Greek vases here and there in niches to complete the amphitheater motif. Bolan had been happy to see that the waiters were dressed like waiters, not gladiators.
"This is a hell of a place to find in a residential street," he'd told Zuta. "Even in Wandsbek. What's the exterior look like?"
"Apart from the canopy over the sidewalk," she'd said, "you wouldn't know it was here. It's built inside three of the row houses knocked together. There's no electric sign, no neon, not even an nameplate. From the outside it looks exactly like the rest of the street."
He'd nodded. "Just like the Shangri-la, except for the catsup bottles."
Alone, now, in the evening, behind a distant buzz of conversation, he could hear faint strains of music. The five-piece band, Zuta had told him, mostly played quiet, intimate stuff, ballads and subtle torch numbers spiced with a little Latin-American.
The most persistent sounds, however, were the slamming of car doors and the gunning of engines in the street outside. Anyone who could believe the Coliseum wasn't doing good business, Bolan thought, needed his head examined, or maybe a job as a tax inspector.
To help pass the time, he scanned a pile of newspapers and magazines tha
t Zuta had sent up. The news hawks were still discussing disarmament. They traded priorities for the other page-one stories — an earthquake in Turkey, two more UN hostages kidnapped by Arab extremists in Lebanon, an expected rise in the price of gasoline. The Frankfurter Zeitung ran a feature on a French woman cyclist who had been stripped of her championship status because urine tests after her latest record-breaking run showed positive for anabolic steroids.
Only one tabloid mentioned the Dagmar Schroeder killer. Three people had recognized him boarding the Denmark ferry at Grossenbrode — for the second time! — but when Danish police later boarded the vessel, the suspect had disappeared. Clearly Sergeant Wertheim wasn't making any press announcements about his encounter with the wanted man the previous evening.
But that didn't mean he was doing nothing about it. Zuta came upstairs to have a drink with the Executioner when the simian in the white jacket delivered a casserole of coq au vin and a bottle of wine around ten o'clock. "Don't say I didn't tell you," she began, "but you can thank your lucky stars I persuaded you to stay with me today."
Bolan smiled, but didn't reply. He would just as soon have had a hamburger. "So what's new?"
"Kunstler, one of the police bosses, was in," she said. "There's a cordon around this neighborhood as tight as a hair net. When they lost you last night, they knew you must have gone to ground somewhere in the quarter. It seems they had every street and alleyway covered within a half hour. If you'd gone out this morning, you wouldn't have lasted a minute."
"So, okay, I stay here until the heat's off. There are problems, though. I need fresh clothes and I need cash. Do you know any way I can pass American Express checks without it being a dead giveaway? I hate to ask you, but, well, I guess I mean illegally."
She smiled. "No problem. We cash them here. Give them to me and I'll put them through myself."
"Thanks. That's terrific. It won't get you into trouble, though, will it?"
Zuta shook her head. "I'll predate the transaction, make it look as though you cashed them here before the cops were after you, before that girl was killed. I can fake a duplicate restaurant bill to make it look better still."
"Zuta," Bolan said, "you're a treasure."
"As well as a treasury? I have to go stroke the big spenders now," she said. "I may not be back until after two, but don't you dare be asleep."
He didn't dare. But it was nearly 5:00 a.m. before he finally got the chance. In the intervening hours, seasoned bedtime warrior that he was, Bolan was alternately astonished and delighted by the big brunette's insatiable sexual appetite and by the adventurousness of her demands. Finally she fell asleep herself with one heavy thigh over his hip.
Chapter Nineteen
The Executioner had been shacked up with Zuta Krohn for several days, and although she had come up with a stack of interesting material on other subjects, the Lattuada file remained at zero.
Bolan began to chafe at the inactivity. He was feeling constricted in the apartment, much as he was enamored of its voluptuous owner. The police cordon had been withdrawn days ago, and he wanted out.
Zuta was adamantly against it on account of underworld gossip insisting the warrior was still very much a target. If he went out, she argued, even if he wasn't nailed, they might follow him back to the apartment, and his cover would be blown once more.
At first he went along with her reservations because he didn't want the Team to associate her in any way with him. The Coliseum might not be on their visiting list right now, but if they knew the boss was sheltering their number one target, things could get tough for her.
Eventually they compromised and went out a couple of times together in a rental car that took them to a dine-and-dance joint somewhere southwest of the city. It didn't bring Bolan any closer to Lattuada, but it let fresh air into his lungs.
They figured on repeating the performance that Sunday, when the Coliseum was closed, but it turned out to be one of those days when northern Germany showed itself in its true colors, all thirty-six of them gray. To make matters worse, the temperature dropped another ten degrees and it snowed as if there were no tomorrow. So they spent the day in bed.
The next day, however, there were patches of blue again, an arctic wind had blown away the snow and the Executioner had itchy feet once more.
Zuta had gone out for the whole day, reordering at wine merchants, butchers and the like. Bolan was staring down at the icy remnants of the blizzard still veneering the street, wondering if he dared risk bringing the wrath of Hansie down on his hostess, when he knocked his billfold off the edge of a bureau as he reached for a bottle of beer.
The leather wallet containing his papers had been stolen in Lübeck, but the billfold had still been in his pocket. He stooped now to pick up the contents fanned over the floor — hundred-mark bills, two American tens, an address book, a sheet of airmail stamps, a small rectangle of pasteboard.
A rectangle of pasteboard? What was that? A business card? He turned it over and read: Heinrich J. Alberts. Day and night taxi service. And beneath, two telephone numbers. He frowned. How come such a card was in his billfold? Then he remembered. Of course — the sharp cabbie who had helped him tail Lattuada back near the beginning of the whole mess.
Seeing the card gave him an idea. With transport available, he could visit one or two of the places he wanted to go to while minimizing the risk of being picked up. As far as compromising Zuta was concerned, he could wait until he was dead sure he was clean before he was driven back to the apartment. And if it came to losing a tail, what could be more anonymous than a local cab?
He punched out the first number on the card, the one written in ink. There was no reply. At the second number, the cab stand on the south side of the Atlantic Hotel, a gruff voice told him that Alberts had taken a fare to the airport at Fuhlsbuttel.
"When will he be back?" Bolan inquired.
"Search me. Depends what he picks up at the airport, don't it?"
Bolan left the apartment number and asked for Alberts to call him as soon as he returned. In fact, it was less than twenty minutes before he rang.
"I'd like to hire you for the rest of the day," Bolan said. "Stop, wait, start, stop again, stuff like that. Do you know the Coliseum?"
"Yes, very well." He chuckled.
"Okay. Be there in ten minutes, and we're on our way."
Nobody noticed Bolan leave the Coliseum. The waiters were setting up tables for dinner, the bar was closed, and he slipped through the padded doors and out the entrance like a ghost.
He was waiting fifty yards down the street when the cab arrived, and he told the cabbie to take him straight to the Andreas Bernersstrasse. He aimed to retrace his steps during the first day he'd hit St. Pauli, and maybe try to scare one or two folks in the cheaper dives into talking. He even had a crazy idea he could con them into believing he was an FBI or CIA operative tracking Lattuada, and that they'd be better off singing rather than getting involved in a big-time investigation with its attendant publicity. With the cab waiting, he figured he could always take a powder if the going got tough or he walked into the wrong joint.
The way it happened, none of that was necessary.
He told Alberts to park at the corner of the cul-de-sac where he and Dagmar Schroeder had escaped from the alley in back of the Coconut Grove. At the far end was an arch leading to the court where he had last seen the mafioso.
Looking into the cul-de-sac was like seeing a favorite movie the second time around in an all-night house. There was a panel truck with the doors open and a guy delivering a rack of clothes to some rag-trade showroom. There was a snow-white Cadillac with maroon trim, tinted windows and whitewall tires, waiting with two wheels up on the sidewalk. And there was Ferucco Lattuada walking through the archway.
It seemed the most natural thing in the world to see him there: a reverse shot of the scene Bolan had witnessed before. There were just two alterations to the screenplay during the rerun. This time Bolan recognized the Cadillac as
the car he'd been roughed up in, and this time he knew who'd be sitting in the back. This time, too, there was a short extra scene.
Lattuada opened the rear door of the convertible and got in. The car moved off, turned right and headed south along the Andreas Bernersstrasse.
"Change of plan," Bolan said to the cabdriver, sliding aside the glass partition separating the front from the rear. "I want you to follow that car. But for Chrissakes, do it discreetly. Those are tough characters in there."
"Jawohl, Meinherr! All aboard for today's mystery tour!" The cabbie shoved the gearshift into first, pulled out in front of a truck and threaded his way through the traffic in the narrow, congested street in pursuit of Bolan's quarry.
Bolan glanced out the window as they passed the end of the alley above the club where he had first seen Dagmar Schroeder. There was a new sign above the yellow door now. The barker on the sidewalk was wearing an Australian bush hat, and blue lettering beneath the neon lighting announced: The Outback — Come Down Under for a Real Aussie Welcome!
A couple more pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. If any confirmation was needed of the links between Lattuada, Hansie and the Team, Bolan had it. Secondly the events of that afternoon when the Coconut Grove had been wrecked were now a little clearer.
Lattuada might well have done the same thing that day, too. He would have walked through the arch, climbed into the Cadillac and sat there waiting… for what? For Hansie and his goons to report that the job had been done. For Dagmar — his own ex-girlfriend who'd been cheating him on the dope pushing — to be hustled out the rear entry and delivered to him. Nobody seemed to know what was supposed to have happened to her after that, but it wouldn't have been pleasant. It must have shaken them up to see her walking past the car hanging on to the warrior's arm.
Maybe, Bolan thought as the cab circled the park surrounding the domed tower of the Bismarck monument, that was when Lattuada had decided he'd better run a check on Bolan and find out who the hell the man was. Maybe it was then that he'd gotten the bright idea of killing the girl and saddling the interloper with the murder.
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