Peril Is My Pay

by Stephen Marlowe

  Her companion in the window was what the Germans call an Iron Maiden. She looked as tough as a storm trooper and only a little more feminine. Her black hair was cropped short, her face was heavy-boned, her small hard breasts were caught in two crossed scarves of black monk’s cloth worn like bandoliers diagonally across her body. Her flat midriff was bare. Below it she wore black tights on her muscular thighs and polished black kneeboots that gleamed like glass. She had everything an Iron Maiden needs except a whip, and she probably had a room full of those inside.

  “A woman for every taste,” Talese said. His Latin sense of a woman’s role in life was slightly offended.

  “Every,” said Koenig.

  Five minutes later Koenig and two plainclothesmen entered Fat Steak Willi’s and went upstairs. No fuss, no bother—they could have been three paying customers. But the women of Bordelstrasse had come from all over Europe. They hadn’t always plied their trade in licensed houses on a street sanctioned by the cops, and they could smell law. The demure deb and the Iron Maiden left the window through the curtain at its rear.

  “And now we wait,” Talese told me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Relax. Hamburg had a picture of the Greek. All Koenig’s men have copies. Even if he manages to slip out of Fat Steak Willi’s, which he won’t, he cannot get away. It is over, Signor Drum. Over.”

  I said nothing. The crowds of window-shoppers surged and eddied around us, giving us a little space for the first time because Fat Steak Willi’s window was now empty. My palms were moist, my mouth dry. My head began to ache again. I put a codeine tablet in my mouth and swallowed it. I waited for a sound, any kind of sound at all from Fat Steak Willi’s. I heard only the babble of conversation on the street. A big man jostled me. He was drunk and he said something in German, angrily. A very small man with the buck teeth of a rabbit laughed nervously next to him and tried to steer him away by the elbow. The big man placed his hand on my shoulder and said something else, still angry.

  “Beat it,” I said. I was edgy.

  The big man raised his voice. A knot of men gathered around us. A fight would make their evening on Bordelstrasse complete.

  “He speaks no English,” the little man told me apologetically. “He says you ought to walk, Herr. You are in the way.” He sucked at his rabbit teeth anxiously with his lower lip.

  “Then tell him I’m sorry,” I said. “But tell him to get lost.”

  I brushed the hand off my shoulder.

  The big man’s face got redder. He shouted something. The crowd around us grew. They could sense a brawl.

  “Get rid of him,” Talese said. “Here they come.”

  Koenig and his two plainclothesmen had come downstairs. In single file they passed through the doorway, Koenig leading.

  “Not there,” he said laconically. “Not Andros, nor the girl, nor the American. Fat Steak Willi knew nothing about them.”

  “What do you mean, knew nothing about them?” Talese asked blankly.

  Koenig shrugged. Just then the big red-faced drunk shoved me.

  If he hadn’t, the Greek’s final bit of back-stopping would have paid off. Fat Steak Willi’s was the end of the line for us.

  I had a head like an abused anvil and a low-grade fever to go with it. I was frustrated and angry. The drunk shoved me again. He shouted something, his face very close to mine, and spittle flew from his lips.

  He made a convenient scapegoat.

  “All right, friend,” I said, and swung and hit him in the face.

  He fell like a sack of meal. Hitting him had really started the trip hammers in my head. I saw faces behind him, wide eyes, gaping mouths.

  I also saw, in a seersucker suit and with a hat covering his too-long blond hair as one covered my bandages, Kenny Farmer.

  He backed into the crowd and darted through it.

  “Hey!” I said. I started running.

  The loud-mouthed drunk grabbed my legs and dragged me down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HE SNARLED OBSCENITIES AT me. He tried to hold me there. Then he tried to bite my leg. There is no one angrier than an angry German, no one drunker than a North German with too much beer in his belly and no one who would rather brawl than an angry drunk.

  I had spotted Kenny Farmer. And Farmer was getting away. I drove a heel into the big man’s face. He screamed. His arms, that had been wrapped around my legs, let go. I got up shouting:

  “That was Farmer! I saw Farmer! He’s getting away.”

  I started pushing through the crowd, back toward the wall where we had entered Bordelstrasse.

  “Lassen sie Ihnen nicht durchgehen!” Koenig bellowed at the top of his voice. “Halten sie jedermann beim Mauer!” Let no one pass. Stop them all at the wall.

  His men had pictures of the Greek, but only a verbal description of Kenny Farmer. To stop Farmer they’d have to stop everyone.

  But in the crowd on Bordelstrasse were too many guilty consciences, too many burghers with reputations to protect, too many husbands working late at the office.

  They stampeded for the wall.

  “Halt!” one of Koenig’s plainclothesmen cried out.

  He stood for an instant in the opening in the wall, spreading his arms wide. Then they swarmed all over him and began streaming out into the night.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Talese and Koenig were lost in the crowd behind me. I was swept along in the stampede. It bottlenecked at the opening in the wall. There was no gate, no door. Just a gap eight feet wide and beyond it a second fence, narrower, that didn’t run the width of the street. To left and right between the two fences the German burghers streamed out of Bordelstrasse. I was pushed left past the bottleneck. Suddenly I was in the clear. A man shouted. Another one tripped and fell. Two uniformed cops came running toward us, blowing whistles, waving their arms.

  Outside the wall the crowd splintered into its component parts, scattering. Shoe leather scraped and clattered on cobblestones. Dark moon-cast shadows chased one another up and down the street. A car door slammed, and then another. Headlights glowed, starters ground, motors roared.

  A Volkswagen’s headlights impaled Kenny Farmer fifty feet down the cobbled street. Sprinting, he was darting glances back over his shoulder.

  I drew my .44 Magnum and shouted: “Farmer! Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  He kept running. He reached the Mercedes-Benz taxi, where Lois, Kyle and Wolf were waiting with our driver. The rear door opened and Kyle leaped out. He was still straightening when Farmer gave him a shoulder. Kyle collapsed against the fender of the Mercedes.

  I fired once, in the air. That didn’t stop Farmer. I couldn’t shoot to kill because he had to tell us where the Greek and Hilda were. I aimed low, for his legs. He broke stride and dodged behind a parked car. I hadn’t hit him.

  Kyle got up.

  “Farmer,” I said.

  “I know … saw him.…”

  Kyle started running.

  Three muzzle blasts seared the night as Farmer returned my fire from behind the parked car. I caught Kyle and pinned him against the side of a Kleinbus.

  “He’s got cover. You’ll run right into his fire.”

  Kyle tried to shake me off. Just then the dome light went on in the car up ahead. Farmer couldn’t prevent that; the opening door triggered the light. The car was a sleek, low-slung Karmann-Ghia. Its door slammed. Farmer fired once more through the rolled-down window. Between the Klein-bus and the Ghia were an Opel and two Volkswagens. We had passed the Opel and reached the first Volkswagen when the Ghia’s engine roared. Tires squealing, the little sports car lurched away from the curb.

  I dropped to one knee and took dead aim on a rear tire.

  Kyle pounded my shoulder. “Come on,” he urged. “The taxi.” My shot went wild.

  Together we sprinted back to the taxi. A uniformed cop was running toward it from the Bordelstrasse wall. Behind him, the bottleneck in the wall was still disgorging fugitives. I didn’t see Koenig or Talese.


  “A car,” I called to the cop. “Karmann-Ghia. We’re going after him. Get Koenig.”

  Then I was in the front seat of the taxi, and Kyle in the rear with Lois and Wolf. A block and a half ahead, the Ghia’s taillights winked out as it turned left.

  “Get rolling,” I told the driver. He was a plump man, completely bald.

  “Herr?”

  “You saw the Ghia? Follow it. And hurry. There’s a hundred marks in it for you if you don’t lose him.”

  The driver had enough English to understand. We had spoken English to him on the way over from the Reichshof Hotel.

  “Then, in that case,” he assured me, “I will not lose him.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Ten seconds had passed since the Ghia had roared away from the curb. Farmer had turned once. If he turned again before we spotted him …

  We started driving.

  As we made the left turn, we saw taillights. They might have belonged to Farmer’s Ghia. No way of telling. They turned right.

  We took that corner on two wheels.

  “We’re gaining,” Lois said. “We’re gaining on him.”

  We were. The taillights were closer. The Mercedes-Benz had a lot of power under its hood while, for all its racy looks, the Ghia was just a jazzed-up Volkswagen with a thirty-five-horsepower motor. Farmer’s best chance was running straight. He couldn’t pick up speed around corners the way we could.

  Two blocks ahead of us, he crossed a wide, brightly lighted street. We reached it seconds later as the traffic light turned red. Our driver braked.

  “Keep going,” I said. “Run it.”

  The thought of a hundred marks made him sigh, and lean on his horn, and run it.

  After we crossed the intersection, I was sure the car ahead was a Karmann-Ghia. Only a block separated us.

  We streaked through a business district, then past a park. On the straightaway the Ghia held its own. It had to be Farmer. Who else would be driving through downtown Hamburg in the middle of the night at seventy miles an hour?

  Suburban houses behind their well-kept lawns slipped by. We clattered across a canal on a bumpy wooden bridge. Then ahead of us there was a wide street and beyond it, shimmering in the moonlight, a broad expanse of water.

  “Alster Canal,” the driver said. “It goes out to the harbor.”

  Farmer turned left on the wide street fronting the canal. He drove a hundred yards and then pulled up short where a dock thrust its giant finger into the Alster Canal. We slowed down. We had him now, I thought. I had one hand on the doorknob and one on my Magnum.

  As we neared the Ghia, Farmer took a shot at us. The slug whanged off metal. Our driver tromped on the gas pedal. “For a hundred marks I will follow him, ja,” he said. “But for a hundred marks I will not get shot at.”

  We sped past the dock. I could see Farmer running out along its length.

  “Stop,” Kyle said. “Stop, damn it. He isn’t shooting now.”

  The driver pulled up two hundred yards beyond the dock. I was out of the cab before he came to a stop. Kyle too. “Wait,” I ordered the driver. He’d wait; I hadn’t paid him.

  With Kyle, I sprinted back toward the dock.

  Even before we reached it we heard the sputtering roar of an outboard motor. A sleek runabout was pulling away from the end of the dock. It bobbed in the water and then began to run straight and fast over the swells. The brisk wind off the Alster Canal ripped Talese’s Borsalino hat off my head. It rolled across the dock and dropped into the water.

  “Jeez,” Kyle said. “A boat.”

  The runabout was angling left in the Alster Canal. It was moving without any lights, but moonlight turned the water silvery around it and the wake creamed out behind.

  “Keep your shirt on,” I said. We ran back to the taxi. Several hundred feet out, the runabout was heading in the same direction.

  “A boat,” I asked the driver. “Can we get a boat around here?”

  “Pleasure boats, ja.” He waved a hand. “Further down the canal. Sight-seeing launches.”

  “No. For ourselves.”

  He shrugged. “We can of course see, mein Herr.”

  We started driving again, slowly, along the Alster. The runabout was making ten knots or so. It passed an anchored yacht, white in the moonlight, and kept going. We had no trouble keeping it in sight.

  But that wouldn’t help once it reached the wider water of the harbor itself—unless we got a boat.

  We pulled up at a dock. Big ungainly scows lined one side of it and open launches the other. A launch with half a dozen tourists crowded in the small cockpit was chugging up to the dock near a sign that said ALSTER NIGHT TOUR—30 Marks, in German, English and French. The tourists were singing beerily. The launch struck the dock fender, a man in coveralls and a peaked cap tossed a hawser and seconds later the tourists began to alight on the dock.

  The launch’s powerful outboard motor was still idling. I jumped aboard as the last tourist and the man in the coveralls climbed onto the dock. The man in the coveralls looked at me and shouted something.

  “No more tours tonight,” our driver explained.

  “We don’t want a tour. We want to rent his boat. We’re in a hurry.”

  The two Germans spoke for a while. Our driver showed me the palms of his hands. “He says it is out of the question.”

  I remained in the launch.

  The man in the coveralls crouched and put one leg over the fender. He was going to come down after me. I didn’t have time to argue. Every second that passed gave the runabout that much more of a head start.

  I pointed the Magnum at him. “Halt!” I shouted. The word means the same in German and English.

  He stiffened, watching me warily.

  “Tell him we’re renting his boat. Tell him he can name his price—unless he wants us just to take it.”

  Our driver translated. The man in the coveralls gave him a speculative look. His price was five hundred marks. That is a hundred and twenty-five dollars. I had seventy dollars and change in my pocket. Kyle made up the difference. The man in the coveralls looked smug. He said something in German.

  “One of you must stay behind,” our driver explained. “As a—guarantee. As a deposit.”

  Kyle and Wolf got into the launch. “Lois,” I said “If there’s a phone here, call the cops. Otherwise find one.”

  “But I—”

  “Don’t argue. Someone’s got to call them.”

  I could still see the runabout, a quarter of a mile down the Alster Canal.

  “I have not been paid,” our driver said.

  “Later. See that the police are called.”

  “I’ve got some travelers’ checks,” Lois said.

  “Okay, okay. Just call the police.”

  The launch bobbed on the swells lapping against the dock’s pilings. There were benches on either side of the launch’s cockpit, and a wide bench at the stern, near the tiller. Kyle sat down there. I cast off the line. The big outboard throbbed. We began to drift.

  Lois stood at the end of the dock watching us pull away. She called out something. The wind swept her words away. I just heard my name, and then only the rush of the water and the steady throb of the outboard motor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WE SPED PAST ANOTHER DOCK with scows lining it, then Kyle swung the tiller over and we angled out into deep water.

  “See him?” Kyle called from the bow.

  A quarter of a mile away, the runabout led its foaming wake down the Alster Canal. “Straight ahead.”

  We passed a small cargo ship anchored a hundred yards off shore, and then a larger one with a Danish flag flapping in the stiff wind.

  “We’re gaining,” Wolf said tensely.

  Pretty soon even in the bright moonlight we couldn’t see the farther shore. We had left the Alster Canal and entered Hamburg harbor.

  “Big one coming,” Wolf called.

  A black shape loomed in the moonlight—the prow of an ocean-going fre
ighter. Kyle cursed. We swung hard left and passed close enough to hear the hissing water parted by the freighter’s prow.

  The motor launch teetered crazily from side to side. Wolf shouted in fear. He thought we were going over. Then the freighter’s wake caught us. We slapped up and down on it. Finally the wake receded. Kyle steadied us.

  “Where is he?”

  “Closer. A little left,” I said. Wolf was sitting forward on the starboard side of the launch. His head swung into line with the runabout, now no more than two hundred yards away. “That’s it now.”

  Ten minutes later Wolf said: “Three of them. There are three of them.”

  Only a hundred yards separated us from the runabout. You could see three figures in the cockpit that ran almost the entire length of the boat. One of them pointed suddenly, and bright flame spurted near him. Simultaneously I heard a faint cracking sound and the louder whine of a bullet ricocheting off the surface of the water.

  “They see us!” Wolf cried. “They’re shooting.”

  “They won’t hit anything at this distance with a pistol,” I said, still looking at the runabout. There was no more gunfire. Two of the figures had come together at the rear of its cockpit. They were struggling. The third was hunched over the wheel beyond them.

  Kenny Farmer, of course. And Hilda and Andros?

  Seventy-five yards now.

  And then fifty.

  At fifty yards I could see only two figures silhouetted against the moonlight. One at the wheel. A big one at the rear of the cockpit. He pointed again, and flame spurted. A gout of water exploded two feet to the left of our boat.

  “Get down low,” I warned Wolf. I couldn’t return their fire. If we’d seen three figures before, and we had, one of them must have been Hilda.

  Ahead of the runabout and to its left something much larger than the freighter that had almost overturned us suddenly loomed. It looked like an enormous wall rising sheer out of the water. The runabout started along its length. Sixty or seventy feet above the surface of the water, the top of the wall looked crenelated, like a medieval castle. Then I told myself: no, not crenelated; it thrust jagged, haphazard towers into the moonlight, as if it were a building that had been part of a bombed-out city, magically transplanted into Hamburg harbor. And then I knew what it was.