Brett Halliday

At the Point of a .38

1

Murray Gold—liquid brown eyes, soft voice with an occasional trace of a stammer, only five feet six and with skin that seemed a half size too large—didn’t look like a criminal, and this had given him an enormous competitive advantage. Seen coming out of a meeting that had just handed down a death sentence, or ordered that somebody’s knees be broken, he looked like some dim Jewish accountant, who didn’t bet, drink, sniff cocaine or commit adultery, who had never experienced any unusual pain or excitement. Headaches, sore throats, hemorrhoids—never any of the glamorous ailments like ulcers or gonorrhea. Worries about car payments, not about being kidnapped for ransom or murdered by hired hit-men in an expense-account restaurant. Jail-house photographers, artists who can make even an Episcopalian bishop look like a child molester, had had a crack at Gold twice, once for robbery and once for suspicious loitering, early raps which he beat without difficulty. To go by the mug shots, the police had been dozing that day, and had arrested the wrong man.

As a boy, like most others in his generation, Gold began with small neighborhood hold-ups. Few people took him seriously. A delicatessen-owner, confronted by the fierce but unprepossessing figure of Murray Gold, asked first if he meant it, if the pistol he was holding would really fire. Gold showed a mouthful of crooked, yellowish teeth, which he later had capped. The delicatessen-owner then emptied his cash register, but there was something about the way he did it, almost contemptuously. So Gold, two days past his sixteenth birthday, killed him. About to leave with his meager loot, Gold had an idea. Here was an opportunity to establish that he was not quite as inoffensive as he looked. He went behind the counter and stamped on the dead man’s face. At that period boys his age made a practice of wearing steel inserts in their heels. Finally, he stuck a pickle into the bloody mouth. He got no pleasure out of any of this. But unless he could persuade his contemporaries that in spite of his mild, pimpled appearance, he was basically vicious, he knew he could never expect to have much of a career.

Prohibition at the time had three years to run. Those were the golden years. The market had been divided, and now the survivors could concentrate on making and spending money. Gold never seemed to spend much, but he accumulated vast sums. And this was the best kind of money, the kind that didn’t have to be shared with Internal Revenue.

Until the very end of his life, Gold never had to kill anybody again. Of course he frequently ordered killings, it was part of the way these people did business. They couldn’t call on the courts to enforce their kind of contract, or to collect a debt. Gold did what was necessary, but in his own style. While others were boisterous and quarrelsome, he was calm. No one was ever allowed to see him angry. At twenty, even his closest associates thought he was thirty. At forty he was already being referred to as the Old Man.

The others liked to move around in big cars, showing off their power. Gold stayed home in his stocking feet. He told an interviewer years later that the only times he had ever entered a speakeasy had been during the afternoons, to go over the books.

He handled payoffs and selected judges and D.A.s. He became one of the most skillful political puppet-masters of his era, and if the audience ever caught a glimpse of Gold at the other end of the strings, it was a fleeting one.

He was receptive to other people’s new ideas, though he rarely had any of his own. Several of the great garment-trade rackets of the middle thirties were manipulated by him. At that time he had two principal rivals for control of New York. One, at the end of the decade, was jailed for running prostitutes—a joke to anyone who knew the man; he had moved on from prostitutes years before. The second was arrested on some minor charge and beaten up and humiliated in jail. When he came out he looked much older, and had lost his authority. Murray Gold was very big from then on. He became known as Chairman of the Board, or Prime Minister, although in his organization there was no real board and certainly no king.

He was careful not to lock himself into situations. He believed in research and development, long before that term came into common use. He liked to work with politicians from their earliest move, before they won the first election. He kept his money fluid. Actually he was as ignorant in financial matters as in most others, but he had sense enough and money enough to buy expert advice.

After World War II, gambling became his main source of power and income. At one time he owned the basic racing wire, two Las Vegas hotel-casinos, much of downtown Havana, the big coin-machine companies, numbers in two major cities, a racetrack and a football team—although ownership, again, is not a precise word for his relationship to these properties. The Treasury Department sleuths had become more sophisticated, and on paper, Gold had never owned anything in his life, not even a car. He owned numbers, for example, for just as long as his colleagues acknowledged that he owned them.

He was never shot at. Nobody tried to blow up his car.

He came to dislike northern winters, and in a new division in the early 1950s, he allotted himself southern Florida and the Caribbean. He lived modestly, on a manufactured island in Biscayne Bay, between Miami and Miami Beach. His clothes always seemed somewhat wrong, and they fitted him only approximately. He married twice, without success. He enjoyed the company of girls in their late teens, and he usually kept one in the house. They were drab girls, who fitted into his generally unspectacular style, and they mystified his friends; a man in Gold’s position usually picked someone with good looks and a nice figure, and show-business aspirations. Such ill-assorted couples were seen all the time in the Beach hotels or in the clubhouse sections of Tropical Park or Hialeah. But then, Murray Gold didn’t go near those places. He liked the tranquillizing effect of TV in the evenings. The FBI and cop shows gave him great amusement, sometimes causing him to laugh so hard that he ended up coughing.

Most of his girls were Jewish. Some were able to cook simple meals. One was a skilled masseuse. Gold had really appreciated that massage; unfortunately, she wanted her mother to live with them, a terrible, talkative woman, and in the end he wrote the girl a small check and sent her away.

He remained important through three wars and five presidents, longer than any major criminal figure in this century. He had learned from the rocketlike careers of men like Luciano and Capone. The famous Al, for a time another winter resident of the Miami area, had become such a publicized star that a whole movie cycle was built around him—not just one movie, but a school of movies. He became a symbol, a myth. Americans who lived through that period would never forget Scarface Al. But the interesting thing about the story was that he had only four good years, and then was picked up and jailed like a common drunk, and died wretchedly, stone broke and without sycophants or friends.

By living carefully, Gold avoided this kind of dangerous celebrity. The newspapers ignored him, and consequently the police ignored him, while chivvying and tapping and tailing, and in general making life miserable, for the flashier mobsters with their bodyguards and their blondes and big cars. (Gold drove a Chevrolet.) But his secret couldn’t be kept forever. References to him began to appear. When crime reporters asked their newspaper morgues for the envelope on Gold, they were surprised to see how fat it had become. His inconspicuousness became conspicuous, a trademark. His lack of color turned into color. For here was a man with more power than the gaudy Al in his prime, and yet he suffered from swollen ankles and had dowdy, scared-looking girl friends. The story was improved by exaggerating his power, and he was given credit in the papers for deals he had never come near. The crime writers had long ago decided that organized crime was tightly controlled by a small group of fanatical Sicilians, and they were bothered only briefly by the fact that Murray Gold was a Jew, not an Italian. The hamhanded mafiosi obviously knew nothing about corporate finance, and they needed Gold to do that kind of thinking for them. And so in the new mythology, Gold became the Bankroller, the Wizard, who knew how to launder dirty money by shifting it from pocket to pocket and back and forth between countries.

And at that point his immunity was at an end.

He had been brought to this country from Poland at the age of six months. While one branch of the Federal government scrutinized his tax returns, another set out to revoke his citizenship and deport him. Poland would undoubtedly decline to take him back, but meanwhile he would be tied up in complex legal proceedings and his affairs would suffer. He was subpoenaed to appear before special grand juries, before this congressional committee and that, and between the Scylla of perjury and the Charybdis of contempt, there was no way Gold could keep from getting wet. Over a period of years, there was hardly a day when his presence wasn’t required in some courtroom or other, or before some investigative body. He was excessively bugged. His phone rang at all hours. His girls were followed and photographed. He himself was convoyed everywhere by state police and highway patrolmen, who maneuvered their cruisers in and out of his driveway all night, with their lights on and their radios squawking.

All this was overdoing it, of course. He was being punished before being convicted of anything. But only a few professional civil libertarians considered it objectionable. The sad-eyed little creep was unquestionably an important mobster. Everybody said so. He was labelled as such, with none of the usual quibbles like “reputed” or “alleged,” whenever his name was mentioned, which was almost constantly now. The framers of the Constitution hadn’t been thinking of protecting the rights of that kind of unsavory person.

And it worked. His legal fees were enormous. In Cuba, Fidel Castro moved into Havana and ripped off his casinos, without paying a penny of compensation. With the help of his expensive legal talent he stayed out of jail, but a lot else went. Like Fidel Castro, his old friends and comrades-in-arms, bit by bit and without making a big thing of it, began to foreclose. Scheduled payments failed to arrive in the mail. Gold was too perplexed and harassed to do anything about it. Suddenly nobody liked his suggestions. Judges who owed their robes to a word and a money-filled envelope from Murray Gold now didn’t seem to know him when they saw him on the street.

Every child on the beach knows the foolishness of building sand castles below the highwater mark. Gold had made this basic mistake, and of course the tide had come in, as it invariably does. His current girl friend moved out. The house itself was listed with real estate agents. He began having trouble meeting his lawyers’ exactions, and he had enough experience with that profession to know that they wouldn’t carry him for long.

And then one fine day, with no advance notice, where should Murray Gold turn up but in Tel Aviv, Israel, forfeiting bail in excess of a million dollars—to be precise, $1,125,000. None of that had been Gold’s money. The bonding companies had been pleased and honored to write the paper and get a piece of the prestige that goes with being number one.

He reached Israel on a regularly scheduled El Al flight, having bought a ticket openly, under his own name. He wore a tacky brown jacket and an openwork golf shirt. His pants were several inches too long, and bagged through the seat. His only luggage was a canvas flight bag. His picture in this costume appeared the next morning in most American newspapers, and probably most of the people who saw it said to themselves, “This is the Jewish Godfather? Can you believe it?”

Gold, in Tel Aviv, did his best to disappear. He rented a small apartment on a side street, hired a local lawyer and applied for refugee status under the Law of Return. He had several thousand dollars in cash, no connections, no marketable skills.

What to do about his application was discussed more than once on a cabinet level. Certainly he looked more like a refugee than most of the refugees who came in through that airport, but was he legit? Was it really possible that those millions and millions of dollars had melted away in so short a time? Someone in Shin Bet, the Israeli counterintelligence, devised a test. The Consul General of a hard-up Central American republic was induced to approach Gold secretly and offer a passport and an ironclad guarantee against extradition, in return for the token sum of $500,000, less than the annual skim from just one of his casinos. Gold seemed interested. He fired off a flurry of letters, and called a few people collect. The answers were all noes. But the strategists wondered if he had arranged those noes himself, as part of an elaborate con. Was he up to something in Israel? The government had begun to worry about the crime rate. They already had criminals enough, without importing new ones. Prostitutes were openly walking the streets. Kif was being smoked by alienated young people. Policemen had been caught stealing from appliance stores, as in all the more advanced countries. Probably Gold hadn’t led an entirely blameless life, but leaving newspaper talk aside, he had literally never been convicted of anything. Lying to Senators and showing contempt for a Federal grand jury—from the other side of the Atlantic, these niggling charges had a trumped-up look. Not for the first time in the history of the world, the Jew, perhaps, was being made the scapegoat? In his prosperous days, Gold had been a good friend of Israel, buying development bonds and contributing to money-raising projects, as long as he had money to give. Why send him back so the Americans could have the satisfaction of revoking his citizenship and deporting him? He was willing to renounce that citizenship, and he was already here. Look at those eyes. Were they the eyes of a killer?

While the authorities pondered, his tourist visa was renewed, and renewed again. He took a part-time job as a hospital orderly. And then, quite suddenly, he was arrested at two o’clock one morning.

Israel was still in a state of war with the neighboring Arab nations. Under Emergency Regulations inherited from the British, the military authorities had power to arrest any suspicious person and hold him without trial indefinitely, if necessary forever, on the vague charge of conspiracy—“conspiracy to commit, or to aid and abet those conspiring to commit, terrorist acts against the state.” These weren’t prisoners in the usual sense. They were “administrative detainees,” and how Murray Gold or anybody else got on the list was a bit uncertain. It was supposed that there was some shadowy committee in the Shin Bet, which conducted whatever investigations were thought necessary. From the decisions of this committee there was, of course, no appeal. A lawyer was no good here. Many months later, the detainee might be released, with no more explanation than he had been given when he was arrested. Presumably he would be a little more careful from then on.

Gold was taken to Ramleh Prison, in a little village near the foot of Mt. Tabor. Most of the other detainees were Arabs. Of the thirty or so Jews, about half were considered to be harborers of dangerous political opinions. The others were criminals, who could be counted on to engage in illegal activities if allowed to remain at large. This must have been the category that included Gold.

As always, he was calm and uncomplaining. To be realistic, where could he address a complaint? He was questioned frequently by police and intelligence agents. An Arab believed to be a Shin Bet informer was assigned to the next bed. Later it was learned that Gold had organized a handbook, and had done a small business in contraband cigarettes.

He remained at Ramleh for five and a half months.

One night a party of Palestinian commandos, which had infiltrated across the Syrian border, assembled in a dry ravine two kilometers from the prison. They had brought demolition charges and a 4.2 mortar. Most were experienced men who had taken part in these raids before. By starlight, their faces and hands soot-blackened, they picked their way to the prison wall. The charges were placed and exploded. Inside, the Arab members of the guerrilla organization broke out of their barracks, killed as many guards as they could get their hands on, joined the attackers, and they were all back across the Syrian border before dawn. In the confusion, a number of non-political prisoners also escaped. When the count was taken the next morning, Murray Gold was among the missing.

But he would be quickly recaptured, the authorities thought, if he were truly without money or Israeli connections.

2

Michael Shayne, the private detective, left Mercy Hospital in Southwest Miami by the emergency dock. He was a big man, ruggedly built, red-haired, with a lined face. Even now, with one arm in a sling, he moved with a gymnast’s grace and power and precise control.

His Buick was where he had left it, with the key still in the ignition and the lights on, the door not fully latched. He had brought it in with one arm, in considerable pain. The bumper nudged a utility stanchion. On an ordinary Detroit car, this small knock would have crumpled some of the front steel. But Shayne, who spent a great deal of time in his car and depended on it, had replaced the stock bumper with one of his own design. On more than one occasion, he and his Buick had contended with another car for the same patch of highway. So far these arguments had always been won by Shayne.

Three hours earlier, he had been involved in a collision of a different kind, crashing the Buick into a Cessna four-passenger airplane that was at tempting to take off from an old wind-sock airstrip south of Miami. There were two men in the plane, the Argentine pilot and a slick Italian who was a salesman for a shoe company when he worked legally. Their hand-luggage was double-lined, and forty kilos of unpackaged heroin were recovered from the wreck. Both passengers survived, and would have fifteen or twenty years to wish they had picked a more difficult way to make money. The heroin trade, of course, would continue.

Shayne’s right arm had been broken in two places, above and below the elbow. The lower break was the bad one, and had been set under traction. The hospital had wanted to keep him overnight, but Shayne disliked hospitals and left them as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, in his business it was hard to avoid them entirely.

He inspected the damage he had done to his car. It was less serious than he had expected—one fender, dents in the hood, a few scratches.

Fitting himself behind the wheel, he reached across to the glove box for his cognac flask. He shook it, and was sorry to hear that it was nearly empty.

After emptying it completely, he changed the setting of the seat-belt so it would accommodate his cast. The stick-shift, of course, was on the wrong side, and reaching it would be awkward. But he was in no hurry, and this wouldn’t be the first time he had driven with one hand.

For the last several months, Shayne’s friend Timothy Rourke, the Miami News crime-and-corruption man, had been emceeing a late-night talk show on WKMW, an FM station trying to build an audience. Rourke had always considered sleeping a waste of time. Now, instead of talking with friends in bars between eleven and one, they talked in a studio. Rourke was a needling, argumentative host, and conversations he started usually continued long after the station went off the air. From time to time he interrupted himself to take a phone call. The station had recently doubled his miniscule salary, so it now covered the cost of the liquor and sandwiches consumed on the show.

Rourke assembled his panels at the last possible minute, trying to tie them in to the day’s news events. Shayne had half promised to stop on his way home, after his arm was set, and give a first-person account of the violent occurrence at the airstrip. Throughout the evening, the station had been broadcasting ten-second teasers announcing that a major news story would be broken later on the Rourke show. For background, Rourke had brought in a radical professor from the University of Miami, who believed that heroin should be legalized, and Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police, another old friend of Shayne’s, who of course believed the opposite. As he drove, Shayne turned on the dashboard radio, which was already set to Rourke’s station. Rourke was talking, in his hoarse, two-pack-a-day smoker’s voice.

“—tonight. Shayne just called from the hospital, and he sounded O.K. One of the luckiest sons of bitches I ever ran into. He totalled their goddamn airplane, took away their guns, left them tied to a tree and drove himself twenty miles to the hospital with a broken arm. Typical night’s work. He’ll be here in five or ten minutes, and he may have a different version of what happened. With Shayne, you never know.”

Shayne held the steering wheel with pressure from his knee, and reached across his body to make the shift. He was on Miami Avenue. There was little traffic, and probably the thing to do was to stay in third. Rourke’s quick summary had been reasonably correct, but the two men in the plane, though they had been carrying guns, had been too frightened to use them. They had climbed out in a daze and followed Shayne’s instructions without protest.

Now Rourke was saying: “And Angie Robustelli said he’ll try and make it a little later. Robustelli—for those who are new in town, that’s Captain Robustelli, head of the Narcotics Division of the MPD, known to romantic reporters on the opposition paper as Mr. Enforcement. He’s been breaking his ass on this drug shtick for the last twenty years, and that’s the point I’ve been trying to make. How many good people has Angie put away? It must be thousands by now. How many stoolies on the confidential payroll? How much junk has he seized and burned? Feed your habit, Will,” he remarked in an aside to Gentry. “Get another beer. I don’t want to put words in anybody’s mouth, but I think I know what Angie’s going to say because we’ve discussed it often enough. I listen to him with disbelief and dismay. You have to admit, Will, that the way we make our user arrests really stinks. Get their confidence and set them up for the bust. It may not be entrapment legally, but that’s what it is, just the same. Stick the bastard in jail for a few years so we can forget about him. He’ll be back on the needle two hours after he hits the street. O.K.—if it worked, that would be one thing. But we all know it doesn’t work. Robustelli is the world’s toughest cop. A really hard man. Dedicated! Twenty years on the job, and what’s he accomplished, after all the violence and crookedness—”

“And deaths,” the Miami professor put in.

“Not to mention the cost in dollars. So there’s just as many addicts as there ever were. Just as much stuff in circulation. Will, I was mugged coming over tonight. I’m not complaining. I know you can’t put a cop on every street corner, that would run into money and you need it for drug buys. I’d say the guy was about two hours into withdrawal, very sick and jittery. He had a knife. I’ve taken knives away from junkies, but not for years. I don’t get enough exercise. I’m told I smoke too much and I drink these bad blends. He was polite with me. He wanted my wallet. I handed him my wallet. He wanted my watch, but they stole that two weeks ago. I carry exactly seventeen bucks. Naturally they’d be glad to lift more, and they might even suspect that I’m carrying a few tens in my shoe. But they don’t press me because seventeen’s enough to get them through until noon tomorrow, and they hurry off to make their connection. We all have different ways to get by. What I do, I have a money-pouch inside my fly, and let’s hope all the H-heads are too zonked out to be listening to the radio this late at night. Seventeen bucks, I’m glad to contribute. I look on it as one citizen’s share of what it costs to maintain the criminal market in heroin. But look, Will. Will, are you listening? I want to see you flounder when you try to contradict me. Mike Shayne knocked off forty K’s tonight. Forty big K’s of unadulterated sh—No, that’s a word they don’t want me to use on the air. Worth millions and millions in street prices, after everybody and his brother, including the beat cop and the desk sergeant, take their cut.”

Will Gentry growled, “Wait a minute, Tim.”

Rourke laughed. “I stuck that in to see if you were still with me. All over the world, cops are crooked. But not in Miami. Our brave men in blue would never take a wrong dime, and they’ll all go to heaven when they die; thank you, Jesus. Forty kilograms of happy powder pulled out of the pipeline, thanks to Mike Shayne, which is wonderful news for the good guys. Hallelujah. That cat who mugged me tonight probably heard it on the six o’clock news, and he knows what it means. Higher prices for a few weeks, until the boys get the interruption taken care of. And who’s going to pay the higher prices? The dope-heads? Don’t be silly, they can’t afford the prices they have to pay now. We pay it, Will. They’ll just have to steal more. There’s going to be a sharp rise in street crime, starting tomorrow. Right? I’ll be carrying twenty-three bucks from now on, instead of seventeen.”

Shayne shook his head ruefully. Rourke was right, of course. Not only that, Shayne had been waiting at the weed-grown airstrip as a result of a roundabout tip originating somewhere in the established heroin network. Someone had wanted these two men removed. They had cheated, perhaps, or had seemed unreliable. Perhaps they were beginners, trying to carve a piece of the market for themselves. It was a complex and dirty business, and Shayne usually let other people worry about it.

He shifted down for a red light. Seeing no approaching traffic, he jumped the light and came back up into third. Rourke was taking a call from Washington. The caller wanted to speak to Mike Shayne. Rourke explained once more that Shayne had left the hospital and was on his way, and he advised the caller to try again in half an hour.

Shayne, an eighth of a mile away, was heading northwest along the river. He turned onto 7th Avenue, then, after several more blocks, into a narrower side street. He pulled the wheel too far and had to correct.

He parked a half block from the rundown one-story building which KMW shared with a travel agency and a record company. He cut the lights and ignition but left the radio on. Will Gentry, over frequent interruptions from Rourke’s other guest, was trying to respond. He defended his department’s use of informers; how the hell else could they enforce the law?

When Rourke interrupted to take another call, giving Gentry a moment to catch his breath, Shayne turned off the radio and began a series of careful movements that would get him out of the car.

As he opened the door, he heard a gunshot.

Shayne had been shot at too often to take the sound lightly. He jerked back, knocking his injured arm painfully against the wheel. Probably the shot had nothing to do with him, but nevertheless his left hand went instinctively into the door-pocket and came back with a .357 Smith and Wesson. This was an accurate weapon up to a distance of twenty yards, but he had never had to fire it left-handed.

He listened hard, one foot out of the car.

There was a second shot, either muffled by something or farther away. Shayne was ready for this one, and recognized it as having been made by a small-caliber handgun, probably a .25. Shayne, or Shayne’s car, was not the target.

The street and sidewalks were empty. There were parking spaces nearer the lighted WKMW sign; Shayne had chosen this one because he could get into it without backing. He stood up quietly, letting the door close enough to turn off the dome-light inside.

He was still a long way from normal. The sidewalk seemed to be slipping beneath his feet. He waited, holding the radio antenna, until he came into balance. After releasing the antenna, he waited another few seconds before he moved. He was very much off duty, and unlike off-duty policemen, he felt no obligation to intervene in other people’s quarrels. This was the main reason he was still alive, and reasonably healthy. But it seemed likely that this quarrel was over. One explanation for the two closely-spaced shots, one sharp, the other muffled, was that when the second shot was fired, the gun muzzle had been pressed against a body.

He moved past the station and on to the corner, keeping to the outside of the parked cars so he could go either way.

He stopped in the shadow of a parked truck, as near as he could get to the corner without coming out into the light. Diagonally across the intersection was a five-unit shopping center, a chain supermarket flanked by smaller stores. The parking space seemed excessive, and was probably rarely filled. There were two cars in it now, and several abandoned carts. Shayne studied the scene through the truck’s side window and windshield. The two cars were well back, facing the street. The shadows changed, and the rear trunk of one car snapped up.

It was a black sedan, with a license combination identifying it as part of a rental fleet. Someone was attempting to manhandle a bulky object into the luggage space. The angle was wrong, and the raised hatch concealed what was happening. The object was heavy as well as large; the person doing the lifting had difficulty getting it off the ground.

Suddenly a woman’s bare arm flopped into view.

Something fell and rolled. A figure emerged and moved to retrieve it. In the night illumination from the supermarket windows, Shayne saw a small man with a beard, wearing a light-colored fisherman’s cap with a long bill. He was in the open for only a second, stooping. There was something puzzlingly familiar about the slight figure, but he was gone before Shayne could pin it down.

Headlights were approaching. Shayne moved to the other side of the truck and waited, crouching.

In the parking lot, the man in the long-billed cap finished what he was doing. The lid slammed down.

Shayne lifted the pistol into the light, and was disgusted to see that the barrel was trembling slightly. He had already decided that he was too far away for an accurate shot. There was no nearer cover. In the ungainly, disfiguring cast, he was more visible than usual; certainly he felt more visible. The small man in the parking lot, now burrowing in the front seat of the rented car, would know he had been seen stuffing a body into the trunk, and he would hardly stand still and put his hands out meekly for the handcuffs.

The parking lot exit was within easy range, and ordinarily Shayne would have waited, and shot out a tire. He wished he had more confidence in his accuracy with his left hand. Making up his mind abruptly, he loped back to the Buick. His own luggage hatch was controlled by a release inside the fender. The lid rose soundlessly and a light came on.

Everything was carefully arranged. Reaching for a grenade, Shayne saw a spray can of luminous paint, and hesitated briefly. In the end he took both, the paint can and the grenade, tucking them into the elbow-bend of his sling.

He came back to the front seat, where he listened intently for an instant. Hearing nothing, he opened his phone and signalled the mobile operator.

When she came on he told her in a low voice to call WKMW and insist on being put through to Will Gentry, a guest on the Rourke show.

“Tell him there’s a black rented Ford in the shopping center on the next corner. If it’s still there, he’ll find a body in the trunk. And hurry.”

“Right, Mike, underway.”

Shayne heard a car door slam. He broke the connection and returned to the corner at a half-run, using his left hand to support the cast and the weight of the weapons. He was in time to see the fishing cap duck into the second of the two parked cars. This one, also a sedan but longer and heavier, was an off-white Olds, carrying scars from minor scrapes.

Shayne was bothered by the feeling that if he could get close enough to see the face under the jaunty cap, he would recognize it. This part of town was nearly deserted at night, and there was a strong possibility that what had just happened here had some connection with Rourke’s radio show, being aired less than a block away, or with Shayne himself. He placed his automatic on the truck fender. Moving quickly now that he had made up his mind, he snapped his cigarette lighter and sprinkled the paint can with the highly inflammable fluid. Using his teeth and his good hand, he tore a handkerchief-sized piece out of the sling, drenched it in fluid and tied it around the can with a shoelace. He left six inches of lace dangling, and soaked that in fluid so it would work as a fuse.

In the parking lot, the Oldsmobile’s engine took hold with a nice even roar. It moved out fast, grazing one of the derelict shopping carts and sending it careening away.

Shayne was holding his paint-bomb well back, ready to throw. The Oldsmobile rocked toward the exit. He noted that the front suspension needed some work. As it began to come around, he touched the fuse to the lighter flame, and threw.

Hissing, the can went up and out in a long arc. The timing was fair. But the Oldsmobile’s driver made his cut sooner than Shayne had expected, and his aim was a bit off. The can exploded ten feet from the ground, five feet to the car’s right and slightly behind it.

Shayne fired twice. Probably neither bullet hit the rapidly moving car.

He raced back to the Buick and jackknifed himself in. Hurrying, he knocked his elbow, and the pain was so bad for a moment that he wasn’t really conscious of starting the car. He left the seat-belt hanging and shot away from the curb, lights off, accelerating hard. He missed the moment for the first upward shift, and the Buick responded with a loss of momentum. Shayne bit down hard, to keep the pain at a manageable level. This would be a difficult pursuit.

The Oldsmobile had a three block lead, and was moving dangerously fast. The explosion and the shots must have startled the driver, and he would be startled even more when he picked up Shayne’s lights in his mirror. Hampered by the necessary changes in his driving rhythm, Shayne lost another half block. On a fast skidding turn into Biscayne Park and through it into Biscayne Boulevard, he came close to losing control. After that he let up slightly. It was much too soon to spend any more time in the hospital.

The driver of the Olds seemed to know his way around town nearly as well as Shayne himself did. He was heading for the Northwest-Northeast interchange, probably hoping that once he was out in the open he could run away, using nothing but speed. This was a mistake. Shayne’s Buick, in spite of its shabby exterior—it was never washed or polished, or withdrawn from service for cosmetic repairs—was powered by a Mercedes 4.5 liter V-8 engine with overhead cams, and cruised easily at 125. Shayne was at more of a disadvantage here, with the constant cornering and changes of speed.

He noticed that he was low on gas.

Coming up from a shift, he knocked the phone off its bracket, opening the connection. After shifting again he managed to retrieve the phone and hang it from the dashboard. His operator was calling him.

“I’m kind of occupied here,” Shayne said, his teeth set. “A call to Watson Park heliport. Either Larry Dietrich or a guy named Norman. If there’s no answer try the Yacht Club bar. It’s urgent.”

He went into the interchange ramp too fast. For a moment the heavy car seemed to want to leave the pavement in an attempt to fly. He came back with wheels locked and skidding, and nearly left the ramp on the opposite side. Less than a foot from the edge, the skid reversed. Shayne fought the wheel, trying to keep away from the brake. He missed a Yield sign by inches. Tonight it was the traffic already on the expressway that would have to yield for him. An oncoming car hurtled sideward. Shayne shifted up into fourth with the pedal on the floor. There were taillights ahead. The car they belonged to had a splotch of luminous paint on its roof. After making this identification, Shayne dropped back and held steady.

“Mr. Shayne?” the operator said. “Ringing the heliport. I gave Chief Gentry your message. The switchboard picked it up and it went out on the air. Is that bad or not?”

“Christ, I don’t know.”

He felt for a cigarette, but gave up after deciding that lighting it would be too much of a problem. He kept his interval, the needle holding steady at a tick higher than 90. They headed north toward Hollywood, through light traffic. The operator tried another number. This ring was answered almost immediately, and he heard her asking for Larry Dietrich. He punched the radio on. Rourke’s show still had an hour to run, but the call from Shayne had emptied the studio. A record was playing.

Shayne’s gas indicator came to rest on the E. Now he had seventeen miles. After another five, he would close with the Olds and see if he could scare the driver into making a costly mistake.

Rourke’s voice interrupted the music.

“All right,” he said. “Out of breath. Give me a minute. This is Tim Rourke. It’s a first for this show, and my editor at the News won’t like it one bit. He wants me to save the hot stories for the paper. All right,” he repeated. “We thought that phone call might be a put-on, but definitely not. There is a black Ford. There is a body in the trunk. A woman, shot twice through the head. Description—somewhere in her mid-twenties, black hair, kind of low center of gravity, hair on her legs and under her arms, an arm vaccination. No purse, no identification. Cheap silver ring on her right hand. Wearing a white blouse, lavender skirt. Clothes look O.K., but not expensive. Good teeth. Now for anybody who’s just joined us, I’ll repeat what happened here. Mike Shayne, that’s the private detective, was just pulling up outside the station. He heard shots. We don’t know where he is now, but his mobile operator called in here for Will Gentry, who needless to say is Miami Chief of Police—”

The same operator was trying to get Shayne’s attention now. He cut Rourke’s voice down to a mutter.

Suddenly the Oldsmobile’s brake-lights flared. The Golden Glades interchange was ahead. Undoubtedly the driver had decided that he was out-powered in expressway driving, and that he would be better off on narrower roads with quick turns and heavier traffic.

“Hold it,” Shayne told his operator.

The Olds ran past the exit. Shayne followed. All at once the other car braked really hard and came about in a tight U, running off on the center strip. Shayne picked his .357 magnum out of his sling and flicked off the safety. The two cars passed each other with both drivers firing. Shayne held the wheel with one knee and the pressure of his cast. He went down the Route 9 entrance ramp while the Olds went down the regular exit. Shayne was in time at the bottom to pick up the taillights before they disappeared.

“That sounded like shooting,” Shayne’s operator said.

“I don’t think we hit anything. Go ahead.”

Larry Dietrich’s voice said, “Do you need me, Mike? I hope so, because I’ve got bills. I’m a little soused, but I can fly.”

“How long will it take you to get a chopper in the air?”

“Five, six minutes. I think there’s one ready.”

“I’ve got the Buick. I’m on Route 9, going into Opa-Locka. Following a white Olds, and he knows I’m behind him. He should be easy to spot from the air, because I put a splash of fluorescent paint on his roof, running down over the rear end. Head northwest and call me.”

3

For the first long leg of the chase, Shayne had kept himself tightly keyed up, thinking ahead to the next corner, the next shift. Now he was beginning to lose his concentration. He overshot a turn and had to back up. Backing was his most difficult maneuver; he had to work from the mirrors. By the time he completed the turn, the Olds was out of sight.

By his earlier calculations, his gas tank was now totally dry. He swerved off the road and came to a stop by the premium pump in an all-night gas station. While the attendant filled his tank Shayne weighed possible moves. If the Oldsmobile’s driver thought he had finally shaken Shayne, he would head west, to pick up the Palmetto Expressway on the other side of the Opa-Locka airport. There he could turn either north or south.

Shayne juggled distances and times. The helicopter, casting back and forth overhead, might be able to pick up the Olds even if Shayne, on the ground, was no longer in contact.

Leaving the gas station, he drove north on 27th Avenue to Golden Glades Drive, making the turn just as Dietrich, through the mobile operator, reported himself in the air. The operator relayed Shayne’s instructions, and Shayne turned south.

He watched the traffic carefully, looking for the Olds with its telltale splotch. Flying west from the heliport, Dietrich would strike into the expressway near Miami International Airport. That would give them their bracket, with Shayne on one side, Dietrich on the other.

He relaxed against the belt, holding the Buick at an easy sixty, and collected his energies for the next spurt. His operator was having trouble maintaining contact with the helicopter. The signal cut in and out. Dietrich began a long slant to the south, keeping away from the flight lanes into the airport.

“There he is!” he called suddenly. “Absolutely. Mike, my God, he’s lit up like a birthday cake. Does he know what you did to him?”

“I hope not.”

“The poor guy. Travelling south. There’s no way he can get off for the next eight miles. I’ll haul back so he won’t hear me, and come in ahead of him.”

Shayne worked a quick equation. He increased his own speed to seventy, to close the gap. After a time, when he guessed that he was only a mile or so back, he came down to sixty-five.

It was sleepy driving. He maintained intermittent contact between his cast and the steering wheel, letting the painful little raps keep him awake.

The Olds passed the next exit, then the one after that. This interval was nearly ten miles. Dietrich set the helicopter down in a field and turned off his engine until he saw the Olds go by.

So they continued south, passing the airstrip where Shayne had piled up the Cessna earlier that evening, and on into Perrine. Whenever Shayne caught a glimpse of the luminescent roof, he dropped back at once. In the helicopter, Dietrich paralleled the highway, keeping out of sight and earshot, coming in for a quick fix only when the Olds had a choice between leaving the expressway and continuing on.

They were getting closer to the big Homestead Airbase. Here aircraft noises were part of the environment, and at Shayne’s suggestion, Dietrich moved in. At last the Olds left the highway, with Dietrich continuing to dog him, through Florida City and into the narrow road to Homestead Beach.

“He’s pulling off,” Dietrich reported. “Meeting somebody.”

“O.K.,” Shayne said. “I’d better monitor this. Pull back and I’ll pass him.”

“In a gas station, Mike. Right-hand side, about a quarter of a mile down.”

The helicopter clacked away, circling back toward Florida City.

Shayne continued along the road until he saw the announcement board: “Gas 500 Feet.” He switched off his dashboard lights and came down hard on the gas. The station was boarded up, without pumps. Two cars on the weed-grown service apron were lined up in tandem. The Olds had reversed, to point back the way it had come.

Shayne passed in high gear, accelerating. The second car was a compact wagon, its front door open. Both sets of headlights were burning, and the luminous paint on the Oldsmobile, so conspicuous in the dark, now seemed merely a slightly lighter patch on the mottled roof.

At the next cross-roads, Shayne pulled off into another gas station. This one had pumps, but they were locked for the night. He parked pointing out, and picked up the phone.

“I think it’s time to split up,” he told Dietrich. “You stay with the Olds. He may be heading back north. Let’s play percentages on this. Probably he’ll stay on the expressway as far as South Miami. Go on up and wait for him.”

“Right, Mike. Working for you is always interesting.” After a moment: “The Olds, pulling out. Yeah—coming this way. The other car’s moving toward you.”

“Keep reporting in.”

Shayne tightened up gradually, flicking the ignition on and off. When headlights appeared, he started his engine. The station wagon, a Volvo, slowed for the intersection, and continued across. This road went nowhere except to Homestead Beach, a jerry-built, high-rent community occupied mainly by married non-coms from the air-base.

Ordinarily Shayne might have moved more discreetly, but he had used up most of his resources, and all of his patience. Somebody had killed a woman in downtown Miami, and had then travelled thirty miles to a rendezvous with somebody else. It was time to find out what was going on.

He pulled out, turning on his headlights after committing himself to the turn toward Homestead Beach. The station wagon was poking along, in no hurry. Shayne, on the contrary, was anxious to wind this up quickly, so he could resume the pursuit of the small bearded man in the Olds. He came up fast, blinking his headlights and mashing the horn. The Volvo eased over. Shayne swung wide, but as soon as he came abreast he closed in to the right and began to herd the other car off the road.

He started the move gradually. Then he twitched the wheel hard, heard a clash of metal and went back to the gas. After a quick spurt to open a gap, he activated the grenade he had considered using on the Oldsmobile, and rolled it out the window.

It exploded in the road, and Shayne hit the brake.

He was straddling the center line. The other driver, coming out of the impact area, plunged into a mango grove.

Shayne brought the Buick to a stop and backed up. Before stopping again, he turned his wheels to the right and aimed his lights at the wreck. The station wagon had struck at right angles. One rear wheel was off the ground, revolving. Dust rose.

Shayne picked the pistol off the seat and stepped out. Suddenly the Volvo’s door came open and the driver emerged. His heavy face was the color of cooked liver. He had a haircut out of the old Army, close to the bone. He was strongly built through the shoulders, but his stomach hung out over his belt, which cut into him cruelly. Shayne wanted to get through the night without further trouble, and brought up his gun. The other man didn’t seem to know he was there. He started walking away, but tripped on his own foot, and went headlong.

He raised his head slowly, shook it from side to side, as though to find out if anything rattled. He worked himself erect, spun around and came running toward Shayne, swinging his arms and moving in a side-to-side waddle, as though he had never tried anything faster than a walk, and he wasn’t sure how people did it. His eyes were pale blue, opaque, with a peculiar surface flatness. As yet nothing was registering on the brain behind them.

Shayne swung the gun in a short arc. If the man saw it coming, he didn’t react. He went facedown in the dirt.

Wedging the .357 inside his sling, Shayne pulled the unconscious man over on his back. Something bulged inside the shirt. Shayne opened the top three buttons and took out a long sealed envelope. There was no doubt about what was inside. It had the unmistakable feel of money.

Shayne slit the envelope. There were thirty or forty bills, all seeming to be hundreds. He slipped the envelope inside his own shirt.

The man was wearing a metal plate around his neck. Shayne tipped it into the light, and learned that he was dealing with one Marian (NMI) Tibbett, USAF, Blood Type O, serial number 456-9994-07. His wallet, which Shayne checked next, yielded little information except that he was a master sergeant with twenty-two years service. Twenty-two years earlier, his home had been Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Leaving Tibbett in the dirt, Shayne went to the Volvo, where he found two things that interested him. One was a pint of good bourbon. Tibbett had been working at this and there was little left. Shayne finished it in two pulls, waited until he felt the warm surge, and continued his search of the car.

The rear seat had been folded forward to increase the cargo space. There was nothing there now except a few empty beer bottles and some torn green wrapping paper, heavy gauge, with a hard, shiny surface and a slippery feel. Shayne examined the paper closely. It was streaked with grease. He picked up some of this on one finger and smelled it. It was cosmolene, in which guns are packed when they leave the factory or arsenal.

Tibbett was breathing harshly, with a catch at the end of each breath, as though that one might be his last. Shayne broke a handful of ice out of the refrigerating unit in his back seat and applied it to the unconscious sergeant’s temples until his eyes opened and he said feebly, “What are we trying to do?”

“You had an accident, sergeant. Are you drunk, or did you fall asleep?”

“Fall asleep?”

“That’s the way it usually goes. Do you remember any dreams, like a hand grenade going off?”

The sergeant raised his head just enough so he could look at his smashed car. Comprehension returned slowly to his eyes. He clapped his hand to his chest and found that the envelope was gone.

“What’s the matter, sergeant?” Shayne said. “Have you been hijacked or something?”

“You bastard—”

He shifted weight, but before he could start his roll, Shayne kicked him in the neck.

He fell back hard. Shayne slid the butt of his pistol into view.

“Tonight I don’t want to wrestle anybody. I’d probably lose. If you try anything physical I’ll have to shoot you.”

The sergeant looked toward the wrecked Volvo and croaked, “There’s a jug in the front seat.”

“I found it, but I’ve already killed it. I also saw the paper the guns came in.”

The injured man was already feeling miserable, but now he began to feel worse. The flesh around his eyes contracted and the eyes themselves seemed to become smaller.

“Guns?” he said unhappily.

Shayne dropped into a squat to be on the sergeant’s level. “I took the liberty of checking your ID. The only reason to stay in the Air Force twenty-two years is to get that pension. And the one thing you’ve got to watch out for is a bad discharge.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“What’s your job on the base?”

“Headquarters company, sergeant major.”

“The Air Force wouldn’t like it if they knew you were stealing guns. But I don’t care that much about it. There are hundreds of loose guns floating around. A few more won’t change anything. I’d like to know who you sold them to, and how he’s planning to use them. It could be something I might want to get in on.”

“I’ve got a headache,” Tibbett complained. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

“Nine or ten new Thompson machine pistols, .45 caliber. Of course I’m just going by the grease marks. It could be something harmless, except why would anybody pack something harmless in cosmolene?”

Tibbett’s breathing was still ragged, but otherwise he was on the mend. “You smashed up a good car and stole some money. And now you expect me to cooperate? Tell me why.” He started a movement, but looked up warily. “Are you going to let me sit up?”

Shayne motioned, and the sergeant came forward into a sitting position. “I mean, be realistic. You can’t prove anything with some smears of grease. They keep a pretty tight control of weapons on the base, especially automatic weapons. You’re right, that’s the one rip-off they don’t forgive. So with twenty-two years in the service, don’t you think I know enough to be mighty careful? I’m in charge of the paperwork, I’ve got it down to a science.”

“This can’t be your only angle. If they get the idea you’ve been stealing, you’ll be watched. That might cramp you a little.”

“It might. What do you want out of me, outside of my money?”

“The name of the guy in the Oldsmobile.”

“I’ll sell it to you for half the bread in the envelope. Fifteen hundred.”

“No, Marian. I like money as much as the next man.”

The sergeant’s lips worked in and out as he considered. “All you want is that one name and you’ll forget mine, is that it?”

“I may not forget it, but I won’t do anything about it.”

“Let alone could they prove anything,” Tibbett said grudgingly, “I honestly don’t want those intelligence jerks blowing down the back of my neck. Not that my few little swindles amount to anything, because they don’t. I’m not one of those big swingers. The opportunities down here in this off-corner of the world aren’t too extensive, believe it or not, especially now that the base is more or less closed down, with the budget cuts—”

His mind was working again, a little too soon for Shayne’s purpose. He broke off.

“You wouldn’t be Mike Shayne, would you, by any possible chance?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s the idea that suddenly hit me. I was listening to the car radio while I was waiting, you know? One of those creep shows. A lot of goddamn chatter. His pal Mike Shayne suffered a broken arm, so on and so forth and this and that. A body in the back of a car. Pretty heavy stuff. I mean—murder. I don’t know a thing. I make a point of not asking. So why don’t you just fuck off, Shayne? I put away nearly a full pint of bourbon whiskey. It’s all been a blur, one big blur in living color.”

“I’ve got a helicopter trailing the Olds. If this thing falls apart, you might be needing a friend.”

“I’ll worry about that when the time comes. I’m taking the Fifth. Why incriminate myself before I have to?”

A car stopped. The two young men in the front seat were wearing civilian clothes, but there were various indications that they were not civilians.

“Sergeant?” one of them called. “What the hell happened to you?”

Tibbett stood up, gauging the situation. He wanted his money back. Shayne eased the gun far enough out of the sling so he could touch the trigger. The sergeant studied him for a moment.

“Talk about petty crime.”

“Don’t desert,” Shayne told him. “I want to know where I can find you.”

“Hey, sarge,” the young man said from the car. “Are you O. K.?”

The sergeant turned. “Snapped the steering linkage or something. Ran the mother right off the road.”

Shayne returned to his Buick and belted himself in, then backed and filled until he was headed back toward the airbase. As he passed the group around the smashed Volvo, Sergeant Tibbett raised one finger.

Back on the expressway, northbound, Shayne built up his speed to over ninety, then brought in his operator.

“I’ve been trying to get you,” she said. “We’ve lost contact with the helicopter.”

“Where did he call in from last?”

“South of Hialeah. He said the Oldsmobile was still on the expressway, travelling north.”

Shayne acknowledged the message, and told her to keep trying.

For the next twenty minutes, he maintained the same pace, and was approaching Miami when the phone clicked beside him.

“Here’s Larry Dietrich. But it’s a ground call.” Dietrich came on, with bad news. Bypassing Miami, the Oldsmobile had continued north to Fort Lauderdale, and left the expressway at the Boca Raton turn-off. At that point Dietrich began having difficulty getting fuel. He stalled out twice, and had to put down on a golf course. As for the Olds, it had been about to enter Boca Raton. But this was a heavily-built up section of the coast. He was sorry to say it could be anywhere.

“I’m really sorry as hell, Mike. Maybe I could have hung on for a couple more miles, but I was running very rough. That golf course looked too damn inviting down there.”

“No, it’s a relief,” Shayne said. “Now I can go home and get some sleep. Not a bad way to tail somebody—we’ll have to do it again sometime. I’ll send you a check.”

Rourke had gone off the air and the station was no longer taking calls. Shayne’s operator tried to locate Gentry, without success. Shayne finally talked to a homicide lieutenant and gave him a description of the Oldsmobile and its driver, and where they had last been seen.

Then he turned off the expressway and headed for home.

4

Rashid Abd El-Din, a dark young man with a pencil-line mustache, wearing a black turtleneck, black slacks and sneakers, had been watching for headlights. When they turned in from the street, he swung over the marble balustrade and dropped lightly to the grass.

He moved on the balls of his feet, soundlessly. He was built like a scimitar—a rather sentimental woman had said that about him once, and he liked the metaphor. The scimitar, with which his people had driven to the Pyrenees and Vienna; forged from Damascus steel (Rashid himself had been born not far from Damascus), and ground to a fine edge that could take the whiskers off a goat or the head off an enemy. Of course at this moment, after two years of starchy prison food and enforced idleness, he was no longer quite as narrow as a scimitar. Never mind; a few weeks of desert marches would bring him back to his usual trim.

The car rustled across the gravel and parked, as arranged, under the single outside light at the end of the six-car garage. Six cars! And all enormous—black, gleaming Cadillacs and Lincolns, none with a mileage reading in five figures. What did they do with cars in this rich country when they travelled 10,000 miles, take them out in a field and abandon them to the crows?

This car, having been stolen off the street earlier in the evening, was considerably less costly. It had once been white. The paint had been patched here and there, with no effort to match shades. One patch on the roof was considerably lighter than the rest.

Rashid focussed his energies on the man at the wheel. He could become a problem, this old man. Rashid had known him six months, had studied him intensely, but he was still a puzzle. His name was Murray Gold, a prominent gangster, a Jew.

Gold came out holding a pistol. At the sight of the drawn weapon Rashid felt a perverse stir of pleasure. There had been little chance for action in prison, until those final minutes.

“Is that truly a gun?” he said in lightly accented English, smiling. “I had begun to believe we were friends.”

“Don’t be dumb.”

At the best of times the Jew looked slightly weary. Now he looked tired enough to fall asleep where he stood. All the vertical lines of his face had lengthened. His glasses had slid down his nose. He had no more flesh than a sparrow. He had stopped shaving in prison, producing a scraggly beard which after their joint escape he had dyed a depressing shade of brown. In his cocky American sporting cap he looked a little disgusting—to tell the truth, more than a little. Unlike some in the movement, Rashid had nothing against Jews except that they had had the poor judgment to designate Palestine as their so-called homeland, on the basis of a dubious reading of history. They were like roaches. You couldn’t reason with them; stamp on them was all you could do.

“I’ve done some driving tonight,” Gold said. “A few things worked out, a few things didn’t. I’ve got the guns. Let’s finish right now.”

“Finish in what way?”

“I give you the guns, you give me the heroin.”

“No,” Rashid said coolly.

“The big rule with that stuff is, get rid of it fast. I’m beginning to feel itchy. This is a bad part of the world for me, I want to get out.”

“The morning after tomorrow morning, in accordance with plans.”

“One of the reasons for having plans is so you can change them.”

“But the gun,” Rashid said gently. “We are working so closely together. Why does a gun appear suddenly between us? There is a saying among Arabs that when you take out a gun, you should be ready to use it.”

The two men, adversaries and co-conspirators, examined each other. The exhausted old man was trying hard to look dangerous. A joke! Rashid was surrounded by sleeping friends. The last thing Gold would do now was shoot anybody—and in spite of the Jew’s reputation, Rashid secretly believed he was incapable of shooting.

With a sigh, Gold put the pistol into the waistband of his disreputable pants.

“I almost fell asleep about six times. Is there any chance of getting some coffee?”

“Of course. But your battered automobile—on this property it seems absurd. I believe you should unload the guns and park on the street.”

“We’ve got some talking to do first.”

“Then come in over the garage. Two of our people have been sleeping here. Will it bother you to be outnumbered?”

“I can probably handle it, if I can stay awake. I need more sleep these days than I used to.”

Rashid led the way after another glance at the bearded Jew. The number one professional criminal in the United States, supposedly! In prison, he had been so lacking in definition that he had seemed to blend with the walls. An interesting man, all the same. But what did he want? Surely not money alone? During the violence at the end, he had turned his face aside, his hands in his pockets. There were guards who had beaten him with bamboo rods. Apparently he forgot and forgave. He let somebody else kill them.

Upstairs, Rashid awakened one of his friends, a student named Sayyid, and told him to make coffee. Sayyid gave Gold a malevolent look, widening his nostrils. This one hated Jews when he went to sleep, and he hated them when he woke up, and in between he dreamed about strangling them and blowing them to bits with explosive. A second Arab, a Syrian pilot named Fuad Sabri, was asleep in a bedroom. Rashid would use him only if he had to.

“I begin to understand,” Rashid said. “The guns are not in your car. You unloaded them elsewhere.”

Gold nodded, and picked a chair in which he would have the wall behind him. “You’ll love them. Ten brand-new Thompsons, with the grease still on. Two hundred rounds of ammo. You’re going to want more. It’s standard .45 caliber, look up a gun store in the yellow pages and they’ll sell you all you can carry, no questions asked.”

“Thompsons. I would like to see them.”

“When the time comes,” Gold said. “And I’m going to be cagey about that. Not that I don’t trust you.”

“You don’t trust us?” Rashid said, surprised.

Gold laughed. “You people are so strange. I never met anybody like you.”

Rashid opened his hands. “In what way are we strange? We want our country returned to us, nothing more. We are willing to die for this.”

“I’m not willing to die to keep it away from you, I can tell you that,” Gold said. “I just want to make sure you come through on your end of the deal. I know how you feel about handling heroin—”

“It will be consumed by Americans. Why should we care what Americans choose to inject into their bodies?”

Sayyid came in with the tiny cups. Rashid asked the Jew if he minded Syrian coffee.

Gold shrugged. “I’m getting used to it. I wouldn’t want you to think I like it. It’s like the Front for the Liberation of Palestine. I’d prefer to work with a Jewish organization, but in my case you’re the only game in town.”

They sipped ceremoniously.

“Ugh,” Gold said. “I mean, delicious. Now if we can talk business, I want to move up the timetable. I didn’t think we could get everything organized here in less than three days. But we’ve been making good headway and the sooner we get it over with the better, for both of us. I’m sorry to say I ran into some trouble tonight.”

“Of what kind?”

“Rashid, believe me, you don’t want to know. As far as I can tell, I took care of it O.K. But the longer we hold off, the more chance there is of that kind of thing happening. I’m too known. It’s not the cops I’m thinking about. We’ve got good protection there, as I told you. Our man couldn’t be in a better spot to look out for us. It’s the bondsmen. They took a bad bath with me, over a million bucks, and they’d like to get some of it back. Or some satisfaction if they can’t. They’re not in the business of killing people, but they know people who are. So do it tomorrow morning, Rashid. I urge you strongly.”

“Two of my men are still on their way.”

“A couple of kids. Hell, you’ve got seven, and you’re going to have absolute surprise, I mean absolute surprise. Because it’s the first time anything like this has ever happened in this hemisphere. You’ve got everything covered three ways. I don’t say you couldn’t still blow it, but right now I’d give you four to one odds, and in your line of work that’s a very good price.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’ve got this skittery feeling. Do it twenty-four hours early, that’s twenty-four hours when things can’t go wrong.”

Rashid sipped the sweet, strong, brew. There was much, much that he wasn’t being told. Trust each other? Of course they didn’t, couldn’t. As for the heroin, Gold had made an acute political observation. Heroin was the wrong kind of contraband for members of an idealistic nationalist group to carry from the Middle East to the south of Florida. The Arab masses would find it a difficult thing to understand. Americans called it shit—a good name for it, Rashid believed. Dear God, the risk. Everybody in the U.S. was in a state of hysteria on the subject, suspicious, frightened. Of course Murray Gold, selling Rashid the scheme in those long conversations in the prison exercise yard, had maintained that the risk would be zero. When Sheik Muhammed al-Khabir of Dubat, on a semi-state visit to the Boca Raton mansion of his dear friend and business associate Harvey West of Union Petroleum, arrived at Miami International in his personal D-6, there was no conceivable chance that one of the American customs inspectors would take members of his party aside and subject them to a personal search. So Gold had maintained. But it is known that in the real world, the inconceivable frequently happens. Drug spies are everywhere. The risk might be negligible, but it wasn’t quite zero.

So Rashid had thrown Gold’s heroin away. He had emptied the bags into the Beirut sewer, and replaced it with quinine and ground chalk. This had its own dangers, but they could be identified and contained. It was a single-time transaction. They had no reason to establish a reputation for probity with Murray Gold and his dirty friends. In Ramleh, Rashid had become, unwillingly, somewhat fond of the old man, unquestionably a schemer of genius. And at the same time, of course, had despised him, and the way he put the security of his own skin ahead of the interests of his people. To cheat him would be a pleasure.

“Tomorrow morning,” Rashid said thoughtfully.

“At least you’re thinking about it. I honestly can’t think of any reason why not. Maybe those two guys you’re waiting for won’t even show up. Can we talk about this with just the two of us, Rashid? I don’t like the way your boy is looking at me. What does he drink before bedtime, blood?”

Sayyid understood English, though he spoke it badly. He looked down.

“Certainly,” Rashid said. “Sayyid can leave if you will let him hold your gun and search you to be sure you have no other.”

“Hell, let him stay,” Gold said irritably. “Why would I want to shoot you? I’d come out without a cent.”

“But no longer in an Israeli jail. Back in your native land.”

“I’m a hot property in my native land. I’d rather be somewhere else.” He set the cup back on the tray with a clink. “If you agree, this is the last time we’ll talk about it, so what we say now has to stick. Everything the same except one day earlier. I checked out the parking garage. It’s a good place to exchange cars. I thought of a couple of new points. Don’t drive anywhere with more than three of your guys in one car. Three total. You all look alike. I don’t mean really—by comparison. Everybody else can catch a bus down to Miami and taxi over.”

He went on talking for several minutes, sketching a diagram on the carpet with his finger. Rashid had questions. Gold answered patiently. He was looking older than when he arrived, and he was nearly asleep.

Rashid looked at Sayyid for an opinion. Sayyid, a doctor’s son, had come into the movement as a student at American University, and he had done several difficult and dangerous things while Rashid was growing fat and impatient in prison. He had been prudent up to the moment when the fighting started, then fearfully imprudent, a combination of qualities not usually found in one person. In the look that passed between them, it was agreed that the Jew would be faithful to the plan only so long as it served his purposes, but that this proposal had some merit. They were getting edgy after the long wait, the discussions, the postponements. To do the action at once, the following morning, would catch them at the peak of tension.

Rashid agreed, therefore, implying by his manner that he would prefer to keep to the original schedule, and was consenting only because the old man wished it. Gold nodded without surprise.

“Then we’re in business.”

Rashid accompanied him back to the dilapidated car. It would be fine, the Arab was thinking, if they had those guns now, and could avoid the touchy moment when they turned over a hundred pounds of worthless powder to a suspicious man who had lived all his life at the edge of violence. They would be seven, however. Gold would be two. Perhaps, even so, Rashid should think about arranging a diversion. In guerrilla doctrine, though a seven-to-two superiority was considered good, seven-to-nothing was better.

The Jew’s demeanor changed instantly as he approached the car. His fatigue dropped away. Stepping closer, he examined the splotched roof.

“What is it?” Rashid said.

Without replying, Gold took off the glasses he was wearing and replaced them with another pair with thicker lenses. He touched the paint and then moved around the car to get another angle, with the light behind him. He hammered his fist on the roof and began to swear, in a voice choked with emotion, using rhetorical combinations that were unfamiliar to the Arab.

“I ask you again,” Rashid said. “Something is wrong. Please tell me. We are concerned in this also.”

“It could be bad,” Gold said. “Very bad.”

When Rashid tried his question again, the old man flared out at him. The Arab was a son of a dog, and copulated with his mother, using forbidden instruments and positions. He also ate shit. Rashid reminded himself again that the man was an enigma. There was real passion inside him, and enemies would be wise not to take him for granted.

“Why are you calling me these names?” Rashid asked. “Mother fucking? A really exotic practice. We had nothing to do with this, whatever it is.”

Gold continued to stare at the paint. “Mike Shayne,” he whispered. “That has to be who.”

“The conversation begins, finally. Who is Mike Shayne?”

“Trouble. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The son of a bitch used a chopper on me.”

“A chopper? A sort of knife?”

“I kept hearing helicopters. But it was always right near an airport. I thought—”

Lines of concentration appeared around his eyes. He changed glasses slowly.

He half turned, turned back and said decisively, “Something you guys have got to do. You’ve got to kill somebody for me.”

“Indeed? This man Shayne? Why?”

“O. K.,” Gold was over his brief panic, and his tone was dry and businesslike. “Go back a couple of hours. I didn’t want to tell you because I know it’s going to make you nervous. Somebody did some guessing or had some fantastic luck, I don’t know which. I was spotted. I told you I took care of it. I thought I took care of it good. I haven’t had to hit anybody for a long time, but there isn’t that much to it, you pull the goddamn trigger and if your aim is right they fall over.”

“I’ve seen this happen.”

“I didn’t know Shayne was there, but he saw it. There I was with a dead body. I hope I’m not shocking you. I locked it in the car trunk and threw the key away. Cars come and go there, and the body wouldn’t be found till it started to smell. I was hoping to be on the other side of the Equator by that time. So Shayne called in, and the body was found tonight. I know it was Shayne because it was on the news, and I heard about it when I picked up the guns. I didn’t think it was too bad. I’ve had experience being tailed, and I know good and goddamn well I lost him.”

“But before you managed to do that, he put this paint on your car?”

“I didn’t know what it was. A big bang behind me. The chopper pilot picked me up from the air and Shayne could hang out of sight.”

Suddenly Rashid felt a spurt of adrenalin, and understood what the Jew was telling him, that a helicopter had followed him here. “When was the last time you heard a helicopter, as you entered this driveway?”

Gold shrugged. “They went to a lot of trouble. They wouldn’t knock off because it was after their bedtime or they crossed a county line.”

“So this Mike Shayne, whoever he may be—”

“He’s a private detective, and a bad man to know. Tough and smart and goddamn fast on his feet sometimes.” He looked up at the big house, an imposing Spanish-style structure of stucco and stained timbers. “So if he’s made the connection it’s not just me. It’s you guys and me, both.”

“We must move elsewhere at once.”

Gold was thinking, his eyes moving like cornered animals. He took several steps on the gravel and came back, several more and came back—these were the inside dimensions of his cell in the Israeli prison.

“This isn’t your house. You’re just staying here. If you start running around turning on lights, he’ll wake up the cops and move in.”

“You assume he’s nearby.”

“He’s got to be. He’ll want to know if he’s put me away for the night, or do I have some more errands. He’s driving a beat-up Buick with plenty of juice. Let’s set it up like this. I pull out and start south on One. Theoretically, I got rid of him hours ago, and I won’t be watching for headlights. I’ll take a couple of you with me, out of sight in the back seat. I’ll pick a spot and pull over. You come up behind in another car and we’ll wipe him out.”

“Making a certain amount of noise,” Rashid said skeptically.

“But fast. Then we scatter. I know that stretch of road. I’ll pick a place where we won’t be bothered.”

“I see why having this detective put out of the way would be a relief for you, to remove a witness to a killing. For us, it seems less urgent.”

“This is a special kind of private detective. I know him from way back.”

“But only one man, Murray. We can leave at once, now that you have been careless enough to lead him here. As for you, simply steal someone else’s car so that trick with the helicopter can no longer work. We can make sure he doesn’t follow you, without having to kill him. In my judgment, we should do as little as possible to draw attention before eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“You can’t make book on this guy. All the people who’ve tried it have ended up dead or in jail. Without exception.”

“You’re an exception.”

“Am I?” Gold said bitterly. “He’s one of the big reasons I had to blow the country. Let me tell you about him. He’s no super-hero out of the comic-strips, but there are things he’s good at. He knows somebody on every block in town. He gets the feel of a thing, and anticipates. He’s stubborn as hell and when he’s underway he doesn’t give a shit about anything or anybody. Believe me. He can wreck us.”

“You, perhaps, if you’ve been rash enough to do murder underneath his nose. But we are a new species. All that experience of his will count for nothing. What sort of intuition will cause him to be waiting at the Hotel St. Albans tomorrow morning with a battalion of paratroopers?”

Gold shook his head. “He’s pulled off swindles I’ve never been able to explain.”

“No,” Rashid said. “We’ll take a chance with this miracle-worker. We didn’t come to this country to shoot somebody at the edge of a highway, like cinema gangsters. You say you know that road. You have a memory, from the last time you travelled over it. But things change. Here in America they change fast. There may be a police barracks there now, a hundred meters from the spot you choose. It is a strong principle of mine, to see the terrain, to prepare alternative plans, to know the strength of the enemy. Mike Shayne? Merely a name.”

“Let me tell you—”

Rashid interrupted, “I have decided. I am in command. We do it my way.”

“Then without me.”

“Sayyid,” Rashid called without turning his head.

“I am here,” Sayyid answered from the shadows at the edge of the garage. “I have a revolver. I am watching the Jew with it.”

Gold shrugged and started walking away. Rashid watched him go. He was bluffing, surely. That shipment of narcotics was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps a million. Gold reached the grass.

“Those plastic bags filled with the white dust,” Rashid said. “What would you like us to do with them?”

Gold looked back. “You can shoot it up your ass. I want to live.”

Sayyid stepped into the light, and the two Arabs looked at each other. Apparently this American, Mike Shayne, was a genuine threat.

“Murray,” Rashid called, and Gold stopped and turned. “You hire somebody to kill him, one of your own people.”

“I tried that once. It didn’t work out. Can’t you get it through your skull that I don’t want people to know I’m back?”

“The killing of this one man would satisfy you? It wouldn’t become necessary to kill the helicopter pilot, and after that someone else?”

Gold came back a step. “No, the one good angle on Shayne is that he works alone. He doesn’t check in until he has his package all tied up, nice and pretty.”

“I don’t like it, but very well, we’ll do it.”

The Jew came back. “In the desert, O.K., you’re in charge. But this is the pleasure capital of the world, and I know the ins and outs. I won’t take you into anything risky.”

“What if you’ve guessed wrong and he isn’t outside waiting for you to appear?”

“We’ll try something else.”

5

Shayne’s phone rang several times in the night.

He heard the ringing, but it was far away, as though taking place in somebody else’s dream. On the dot of seven, the phone struck again. This time it partially woke him.

He tried to reach for it but he seemed to be strapped to the bed. Nothing worked as it should. He was off balance and sliding. He lunged with his left hand and knocked the phone off the table. That stopped the insistent ringing. He still had no idea where he was, or why one of his arms was in a cast.

Rolling with difficulty, he sat up.

Scratching sounds came from the floor, as though a family of mice was trapped in the phone. Shayne crumpled and threw away an empty cigarette pack. He got out of bed, supporting the weight of the cast with his left hand. After some clattering and fumbling, he put water on for coffee. He used the bathroom. Then he put his head in a stream of cold water and held it there until he remembered a few of the questions that had been in his mind when he went to sleep.

He towelled himself off, still a long way from normal, and returned to pick up the phone.

“Shayne speaking.”

A long-distance operator asked him to hold for Leonard Dodd. Shayne pinched the bridge of his nose. He was still thinking in categories. Dodd. Washington. State Department.

A voice said, “Apologies, Mike. From the noises I’ve been hearing, I assume we woke you up?”

“I took a pill. I won’t be all the way back until I get some coffee.”

“Then maybe I’d better say my name again. Leonard Dodd. Do you place me?”

“State Department, isn’t it? Give me a minute. A couple of years back, something about forged passports. I seem to remember you were ninety-five percent human. In your department that’s high.”

Dodd laughed. “That was two years ago. My wife tells me I’ve slipped a few points since. Mike, I tried to reach you last night without any luck, and I thought I’d better get started early before you went anywhere. Have you had a call from somebody named Esther Landau?”

“The phone’s been ringing. It didn’t get all the way through.”

“I don’t know when she’s due in—she’ll call from the airport. This is a nice bright Israeli chick, and I’ll give you her name again. Esther Landau. She works for the Shin Bet. That’s like their FBI, but it covers more ground.”

“Never heard of it,” Shayne said. “And I’m not sure I want to right now. Try me again in half an hour.”

“Mike, hang on, please. All I’d like to do is establish her bonafides, and ask you to see her.”

“Does she speak English?”

“With a cute accent. And she’s nice, Mike. Very down to earth, and I think you’ll like her. She was an army lieutenant. That doesn’t mean she’s not totally feminine, if you don’t mind that old-fashioned word. An interesting mixture, and she has an interesting problem, just your kind of thing.”

Shayne breathed in and out slowly. “I’ll be tied up later, I’m not sure for how long. Talk a little slower. Don’t be afraid to say things twice. As I keep saying, I haven’t had coffee yet.”

At the other end of the conversation, Dodd made an effort to slow down, but the pace wasn’t natural to him. In a moment he was speaking as rapidly as before, in staccato bursts.

“The channels on this I won’t go into, but they’re gilt-edged. It carries a high priority, shall we say. The Ambassador put in a personal request, and that’s why I got up so early to make this call. What Esther wanted us to supply was the name of a competent and discreet—and I’ll say that again, discreet—investigator in Miami, with connections to handle an important undercover assignment. The name Michael Shayne sprang to mind. If you’re too busy to take it on, I hope you’ll talk to her and recommend somebody else. The bill comes to us.”

“To the State Department? That must mean you really think it’s important.”

“You’re remembering the trouble you had getting paid. This is different, it’s out of contingency funds and it won’t have to be approved by so many people.”

“I have to talk to the cops about something that happened last night. How pressing is this?”

“Rather. I want her to tell you about it, but maybe I can whet your appetite. Murray Gold.”

“Yeah?” Shayne said slowly. “And she’s from Israel. That’s enough, you’ve hooked me. If she’s a cop why don’t you send her to our cops here and save your department some money? They’re as interested in Murray Gold as I am.”

“If you try hard enough, maybe you can guess why. All right, great. That’s all I want to say on the phone. I won’t tie up your line any longer. She may be trying to get through. Call me if you have any questions.”

The phone rang the instant Shayne put it down. It wasn’t the Israeli woman he had just been told about. It was Rourke.

“Man, are you O.K.? What happened last night?”

“Two or three things. I’m waiting for a call, Tim, but quickly: I saw a guy putting a body in a car and I chased him around for an hour and a half. He finally got away from me. That’s more or less all, except that at one point he bought ten or a dozen stolen submachine guns from a master sergeant at Homestead. I haven’t decided what to do with that. Don’t print it, but if you want to pass it along, go ahead. I’ll be talking to Gentry later. Have you heard anything about Murray Gold in the last couple of weeks?”

“Gold. Now there’s a newsworthy name. Where does he connect?”

“Tim,” Shayne said curtly. “I want the line.”

“Just the usual rumors that he’s been seen. The bondsmen are so anxious to get their hands on him they’re catching at anything. If he really is around, and I doubt it, he has to have a damn good reason. O.K., I’ll hang up,” he said when Shayne made an impatient sound. “But remember your good friend Rourke. Remember I’m in the newspaper business.”

The water was boiling. Shayne made coffee, adding a sizeable dollop of cognac. While he sipped, he watched the local news. He frequently made this program. This morning he made it twice. He listened with no change of expression to several misstatements of fact, no more or less wide of the mark than usual. He poured more coffee and dressed.

His next caller was his daytime mobile operator.

“This is a funny one,” she said. “I have a call from your own car phone.”

“My car’s in the garage downstairs, I hope. That’s where I left it.”

A woman’s voice, speaking quickly: “Mr. Shayne. My name is Landau. I am here in this country from Israel, and I would like to consult you on a matter. I am sorry to say that I believe some men have been following me. It seems I have evaded them, but I decided against using one of those glass cages the phones are in on the street. I persuaded the man to show me your car, and it is from there I am calling. May I tell you the subject I would like to discuss?”

“It’s O.K. Dodd called me from Washington. Come on up. Take the elevator from there. You won’t have to go through the lobby.”

“That was what I intended, but for these people to know I am here in Miami has surprised me completely. Do they also know that I hope for the assistance of Michael Shayne? I would dislike to have our discussion interrupted by gunfire. If you would come down, perhaps I can compress myself into a small space, out of sight, and you will drive us somewhere.”

“O.K., compress yourself,” Shayne said with a smile. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

He finished his loaded coffee. He took cigarettes, a half-filled fifth of cognac, and in case of trouble on the way, a Walther .38, which he concealed in his sling.

The elevator took him to the basement garage without stopping. His Buick seemed at first to be empty. The woman was on the floor of the front seat, her knees high, a gun in her hand. She was older than she had sounded, but better looking than he had expected from Dodd’s description. She looked more like an ex-Harper’s Bazaar model than an ex-lieutenant in the Israeli army. She had black shoulder-length hair and olive skin, and was so slender the bones of her shoulders showed through the fabric of her black dress. Her earrings might have been diamonds. High-heeled shoes elevated her knees still further. She had a stern look, and the lines of concentration around her eyes were likely to stay there, Shayne thought, even after she stopped concentrating.

“You have a broken arm!” she exclaimed. “Can you drive a car?”

“Not easily,” Shayne said, getting in. “But I put on quite a few miles last night, and I’m getting better at it.”

She opened a shiny purse and put the pistol away. “Am I down far enough? I regret this, Mr. Shayne, and it is possible, of course, that it is all my fancy. One reads so much about violence in America. But these men did seem to have a certain—intentness. I was quite frightened.”

Shayne backed out of the berth and eased the Buick around. He nodded to the attendant, who glanced in and saw the woman on the floor.

“I hope it was all right, letting her use the phone. She showed me her credentials.”

“Sure.”

When they were out on the street the woman said, “I showed him credentials, and I also tipped him five dollars.”

“That’s how we do things here.”

“In Israel too, I’m afraid, more and more.”

He turned north along the Miami River. “Any special place?”

“No, somewhere we can talk.”

She began to change position to come up on the seat. Shayne said quietly, “No, stay down there. We’ve got somebody with us.”

There were two men in the car he had spotted. Both had a charged air, as though when they moved they would go directly from repose into violent action. A third, who had been looking into a show window, crossed the sidewalk, too hurriedly, and joined them.

“A green Pontiac, three men,” Shayne said, still speaking quietly. “They’re new at this. They aren’t being too careful.”

“Oh, God. What do we do now?”

She had been about to put on dark glasses as they came out of the garage. She completed the movement, and her face partially disappeared.

“If they give us a few minutes we can call a cruiser and have them arrested,” Shayne said.

“They won’t wait so long. I really believe they’ve been hired to kill me. Can you keep ahead of them?”

“Probably.”

“I’m so sorry to involve you in this, Mr. Shayne. I had no idea whatsoever that anyone knew—”

He was driving easily in third, keeping the following car centered in the rearview mirror. It moved up but made no attempt to pass.

“They don’t look quite right,” he said after a moment. “The guy jerked getting away, and he’s using too much brake. Who are they?”

“I would like to know! They must realize I am here in the matter of the arch criminal Gold.”

Shayne took a hard right, passed a truck on the wrong side, forced himself into a narrow opening between cars, and turned left.

“I haven’t heard anybody called an arch criminal in years.”

“That’s what he is, however, from the inside out. It makes one ashamed to be a Jew.”

They were approaching 36th Street. Arrows pointed to the airport expressway. Suddenly a second car, a large sedan, moving fast, passed the Pontiac and then passed Shayne, cutting in sharply and forcing him to brake. The change in speed threw the woman forward.

“If they want it this way, then,” she said grimly, opening her purse.

One man was out of the car ahead, waving Shayne over. Again, there was something slightly off about him—he wasn’t one of the arch criminal Gold’s usual people.

“Brace yourself,” Shayne said. “Get all the way down and tighten up.”

She responded instantly, tucking her knees under her chin and rolling. Shayne was trussed up in his seat-belt, but if she hadn’t reacted promptly to his warning, she would have been thrown violently forward against the dashboard when the Buick’s reinforced bumper caved in the rear end of the stopped car, and drove the car ten feet forward, clearing the entrance to the expressway. Shayne reversed—he was becoming more adept at this difficult one-hand movement—and went past on the inside, kissing fenders.

He was leaning forward, using his cast to steady the wheel. The woman, off the floor, extended her arm behind his head and fired out the side window. The unexpected crack of the gun behind Shayne’s ear caused him to pull the wheel. They ran out on the shoulder.

“Hey,” he said, after bringing all four wheels back on the concrete. “We can outrun them.”

In the side mirror, as they carried into the curve, he saw the man in the street bend forward clutching his stomach. The curve took them around so their assailants were now on their right. The woman reversed herself and fired twice more, through the window on her side. Then Shayne was out on the expressway.

She had held the pistol in both hands as she fired. Now, turning, she lowered it between her knees.

“I believe I hit one of them.”

“I believe you did,” Shayne agreed. “Hang on now. We’re going to do some steeplechasing.”

He shifted lanes abruptly without signalling, moving into the middle lane first, then the highspeed lane to the left. Again, using only his speed and judgment, he came all the way back across and left the expressway. If any other cars had been following, they would have been swept past the exit in the stream heading for the airport.

The woman was sitting forward, her knees locked, her mouth a straight line. She didn’t seem to notice that her arm was bleeding.

“Esther,” Shayne said gently. “You can put the gun away now. The fight’s over. You did very well.”

“I did, didn’t I? I always made a good score shooting at a paper target. That was the first time I shot at a living man.”

“I doubt if you killed him. It’s almost impossible at that range with a handgun.”

The gun dropped and she began to shudder lightly. In a moment she was sobbing.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what?” He pulled over and stopped. “Everybody takes his chances in a war. The guy signed up to knock you over before you could talk to anybody. You fired first. I’ll repeat—I don’t think you killed him. He took a little stutter step and stayed on his feet. If he was going to die, he would have sat down. So brighten up and we’ll go somewhere and get some breakfast.”

“Yes,” she told herself. “And one more or less of such people hardly matters, does it?” She added, “Except that for some reason it does seem to matter.”

He offered her the cognac. “This sometimes helps.”

“I don’t drink.”

“It’s a good time to start. Go ahead, it’s not that habit-forming.”

Still tense, she took the bottle, looking at Shayne doubtfully. “Are you sure?”

When he nodded, smiling, she put it to her lips and drank deeply. She sputtered, waited and drank again.

“Strong, isn’t it?”

“That’s the whole idea. Now let’s get something to eat and you can tell me what this is all about.”

“Food?” she said faintly. “I really feel extraordinarily—”

A Sanitation Department truck passed, clanking and emitting a smell of garbage and partly-burned diesel fuel. She forced herself to sit erect.

“I’m quite all right,” she said firmly. “It is merely, you see, that I haven’t slept for two days, and the way it is necessary to do now, step in an airplane in one time zone and step out in another, I hardly know what planet I’m on. A doctor gave me some pills to keep from falling asleep. You wish to eat breakfast, I will accompany you. But order nothing for me.”

He crossed beneath the expressway and entered it from the other side, joining the citybound flow. He was watching the mirrors closely. Nothing showed up; apparently their pursuers had definitely broken contact. He was heading for a nearby motel, which had a restaurant and coffee shop.

After a moment’s strained silence, the woman took another pull at the cognac. The neck of the bottle chattered briefly against her teeth. She screwed the cap back on deliberately, and set it on the floor between her feet. When she straightened she made a faint sound and pressed her hand to her mouth.

“Can you stop, please.”

“This is a bad place to stop. Hang on for one minute.”

She gagged violently. He pulled over, setting his emergency blinkers. She grabbed blindly for the door handle but didn’t get it open. Everything came up in a rush. She caught some of it in her cupped hands but the overflow went on her skirt. Then she was able to get the door open and was partially out of the car, vomiting hard. Shayne stayed in his seat-belt. Between spasms, she apologized.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’d get out and hold your forehead, but that always seems a little silly.”

She was holding her hair back from her face with both hands. The dark glasses were still on. After a time she fell back into the seat.

“I’m so ashamed. I don’t know how that could have happened. Look at me, I’m a mess.”

“Are you finished for now?”

“I think so.”

He told her to close the door, and he moved along the highway to the motel turnoff. He rented a room while she lay with her head back and her eyes closed, pale and embarrassed. Returning, he parked in front of a ground-floor unit and helped the woman out of the car.

“Did you leave your suitcase at the airport?”

“Yes, but never mind it for now. I have some things I must tell you. If I can wash my dress it will dry quickly. I’m so disgusted. Disgusted! I have been a soldier, you know, and soldiers are not supposed to behave in such a weak fashion. But I can’t stop thinking about how the man put a hand to his stomach as though to keep it from emptying on the road. Yet I must tell myself, as you said, he is one of Murray Gold’s gangsters, and if he dies or not, it doesn’t matter a particle.”

Shayne closed the door after them. “These weren’t local people. I don’t claim to know every button-man in Miami by sight, but I do know what kind of clothes they wear, how often they get haircuts and what kind.”

Without her dark glasses, she gave him a puzzled look. “You mean they were imported from some other city?”

“That’s possible, but there may be more to it.”

She shivered again. “First I must stop feeling so wretchedly ill, then perhaps I can think. Somehow they knew I was coming to see you?”

“That’s how it looks, if you’re part of it at all. I’m involved in more than one thing.”

Her face wrinkled as she smelled herself. “First I must clean this off, then we can talk.”

Shayne had brought the cognac in from the car, but he didn’t drink. The bathroom door—like all motel doors, a layer of air separating two layers of one-eighth-inch plywood—had been badly hung and gave her little privacy. He heard her clean her mouth and spit. She filled the basin and washed her dress. A bit later, she came out in her slip, and though she was wearing a bra underneath, she had arranged a bath towel modestly over her bare shoulders. Some of her color had come back. She had used a comb and lipstick.

She sat down on the edge of one of the double beds, knees together, but groaned faintly, piled two pillows together and lay back against them, her feet up.

“Take your time,” Shayne said.

“But that’s the point, you see. If I lie here being sick while everyone else is hurrying, I will go home with empty hands. And if you knew how much arguing before they agreed to let me come.”

She had left her purse in the bathroom, but had brought a small leather folder, which she opened to show Shayne.

“To start being formal. Though you don’t read Hebrew, I fear.”

“You fear right.”

“I am a member of the Shin Bet, which is a sort of police, but also part of the army. How much did the man from Washington tell you?”

“Not a hell of a lot, just to expect you and it had something to do with an arch criminal who broke out of one of your jails.”

“Arch criminal, I must remember not to say that any more. This is all you were told?”

“If it turns out I can help, the State Department will be paying my fee, and they’re so damn tight they wouldn’t suggest it unless somebody in your government thinks it’s important.”

“Which expresses it mildly. Very well, Murray Gold. We didn’t publish the reason at the time, but he was arrested for heroin.”

“For doing what with heroin?”

“For buying, to smuggle into the U.S. You realize his presence in our country presented a serious problem. Was he truly a poor Jew, or was that merely a ruse to persuade us to give him asylum? We were watching him, not very seriously. He had a young paramour in his house. We persuaded her to report to us who came to see him, how he filled his time. And she has vanished, by the way. We think she is no longer in the country.”

“Just a minute.”

Pulling the phone toward him, he dialled the combination to get an outside line, and then Tim Rourke’s number.

“Tim, this has to be fast,” he said when his friend answered. “Can you give me a better description of that woman last night?”

“The one we pulled out of the Ford?”

“Yeah.”

“The labels were cut out of her clothes. On the short side—say five-four. Broad through the can. She was shot in the face, and that changes anybody’s looks. Oh, heavy eyebrows—all the way across. When she rented the car she gave a New York address, but it’s a phony. Fingerprints negative. That’s about all.”

Shayne thanked him. After hanging up, he repeated the description to the woman on the bed.

“Those eyebrows!” she exclaimed. “Her most conspicuous feature, the very strong eyebrows. Hair pulled back tightly. You mean she’s here?”

“Her body’s here. Somebody killed her last night.”

“My word,” she breathed. “Gerda Fox is her name. How complex it becomes. What we think, this is the current theory about Gold, is that when he first came he was authentically without money. At the same time, not ready to take his place as a working Israeli. He was constantly looking about for some crooked way to recover his fortunes. And one fine day he had a visitor from America. He was very much taken by surprise, and he jumped out the window and sprained an ankle. But afterwards they talked companionably. It meant nothing to us, merely an old friend or so. But Gerda reported that from this time on he had money. Now we began getting hints that heroin was entering the country. After the laboratories were closed down in the south of France, the smugglers were setting up new routes. And we are determined to keep this filthy traffic on the other side of Israeli frontiers. Many of our people have money-grubbing in their background, and heroin profits are so huge! Our Murray was behind this, we believed, but in police work it is always nice to draw a complete diagram before the pounce, to be sure of getting everyone. This time we couldn’t wait. He was accumulating a shipment, of this we were convinced. Where it was hidden, how it would be transported, these things we had not yet discovered. A decision was reached, and we came down on him like wolves and put him in prison under the Emergency Regulations. We continued our investigation, and it proved to be very true. He had invested a large sum in Turkish opium, and installed refining equipment on a fishing boat. They did the work at sea, so if the boat should be stopped for a search they could dump the evidence over the side. That he is clever, we already knew. Today, thank heaven, there is nothing left of the organization he put together. All have been jailed or have fled.”

“Why didn’t you charge him and put him on trial?”

“Because his big cache was still missing. So long as he was on preventive detention, it was possible to hope that he would come to terms. He was not a young man, or a well one. Our offer was one year, to be followed by deportation, in return for a guilty plea and the handing over of the hidden narcotics. He declared himself innocent. Then he escaped. Now I should tell you why I am coming to you and not the regular police. That person who visited him before he became less poverty-stricken also visited him in prison. Usually detainees are allowed no visitors, but this man presented police papers from the city of Miami, and stated that he wished to interrogate the prisoner on some criminal matter. What was actually said between them, we have no way of knowing. The escape happened a week later. So you see why I must be careful. One has heard accounts of police corruption in this country.”

“What name did he give?”

“Those records were destroyed in the explosions. The commandant was killed. Two of the survivors remember the visitor, but their descriptions differ. They agree that the name commenced with a J sound, Jennings, Jenny. The first name was Will.”

“Will Gentry?”

“Perhaps. Do you know such an officer? Is it likely?”

“I know him, and it’s damned unlikely. But go on.”

“I’ve been assigned to this business for a matter of months. I take it a little too personally, I’m sorry to say. This man tried to fool us, claiming the protection that has been earned by genuine victims of persecution. It was an affront to the memory of the millions who perished. Now if he is to succeed, after all, and live to a prosperous old age with good food and liquor and corrupt young women, it would be painful to me, in the extreme. So here I am. I have been convinced that he would come to Miami. I believe that immediately after his escape he recovered the hidden drugs and managed to slip across the border. How? It couldn’t have been simple, because it is my firm conviction that we had totally smashed his group. Every person who had the faintest, most cobwebby connection with that scoundrel.”

“Why Miami? It’s true he comes from here, but it’s also true that everybody knows him.”

“First because of his Miami visitor,” she said. “If here is where the money came from, here is where the drugs will be delivered. Second.”

Shayne had followed her story carefully. Now he was trying to bring back the dimly-lit scene in the parking lot the night before—the two cars, the Ford with its trunk lid raised, a glimpsed figure struggling to lift a woman’s body. Murray Gold? Gold had always been a man who committed his crimes behind a screen of lawyers. The funny cap, the beard, the quick lift of a shoulder. It seemed almost as unlikely as her other idea, that Will Gentry had visited Gold in an Israeli prison. “Second,” the woman repeated.

Her hand was at her mouth, and she was showing signs of returning distress.

“I’m sorry as the devil, but I think I am going to vomit again.”

She ran into the bathroom. The door slammed. She retched violently, and the toilet flushed.

6

Inside the bathroom, the woman who was using the identity of Esther Landau—she was the wife of the Sheik Muhammed al-Kabir, and a strong sympathizer with the Freedom Front—flushed the toilet again. She let the tank fill and flushed it once more, to cover the half-hearted choking noises she was making.

And that was enough, she decided. It was hard to vomit convincingly without feeling sick. Earlier, to maneuver Shayne into a motel room, she had swallowed a fast-acting emetic, but she wasn’t putting her long-suffering stomach through that torment again, and there wasn’t anything left to come up.

She gave her reflection in the mirror a small smile. So far, everything had meshed like the works of a fine watch. Shayne’s phone call from Washington, which had frightened her at first, had actually helped; he had given her identification folder no more than a quick glance, after all the trouble they had put themselves to, changing photographs.

She listened at the door. She didn’t want the man to make any more of those sudden phone calls. She had convinced him, she thought, that the dead woman in the back of the car had been someone named Gerda Fox, one of Murray Gold’s procession of Israeli mistresses, but Shayne was no fool, and she knew that his mind was working. He impressed her, this American. There was strength and competence beneath his quiet manner, and something else. A hint of passion, if that was the proper word. Given the right occasion, he would catch fire, and like fire moving through brush, he would be impossible to stop.

Even with his immobilized arm, he was as graceful as a cat. The movement of muscle across his chest had been delightful to watch. She was unaccustomed to big men, and she had been stirred by him. She had even considered—for only a moment, she was glad to say—maneuvering herself beneath the covers of that bed, still wearing the personality of the Israeli policewoman, and maneuvering Shayne’s large body in beside her. She herself, though she had never been allowed the freedoms that were considered by Israeli women to be theirs by right, was a woman of the twentieth century. She subscribed to western magazines, which kept her aquiver with reports about the worldwide sexual revolution. She agreed with this in theory, but until recently there had been pitifully little she could do to put it into practice. From this moment on, however, things were going to be very different.

She took the pistol out of her purse, and started the water running hard into the basin to cover the sound she made changing clips. As she had been shown, she cleared the harmless blank round out of the chamber, replacing it with one that looked the same, but was nevertheless deadly. She smiled. Fuad had overdone the agony, pretending to be shot in the stomach, and Shayne, even with nine-tenths of his attention on the road, had come close to seeing the deception. She reminded herself again that it was a sharp man she was about to kill, and her hand had better not tremble.

She slid the pistol back carefully, and wadded up handkerchiefs to wedge in around it. When she reached, she wanted her hand to close naturally on the handle. She was an amateur here, whereas the man in the other room was clearly skillful with guns.

Her head felt suddenly queer and light. It would be the first time for her, ever. She had to do it, that had been made plain by everybody. She had asked to be included in the main action, and they had smiled. A woman? It was a galling reflection to her, that in the hated nation of Israel, women were required—not permitted, required—to serve in the army, elbow to elbow with men. Presumably they were also allowed, in certain circumstances, to initiate the sexual encounter. Among her own people, it was a different story. The women could show their faces at last, after centuries of agitation. But while the men talked and acted, they were expected to make the soup and keep their eyes modestly lowered.

The thought had always made her angry. Now if she could focus on it she could carry this off without wishing it didn’t have to happen. She had been a soldier for one hour, Esther Landau, once an army lieutenant, now a police agent, who had come to a foreign country, entirely on her own, with a gun, to hunt a fugitive. The real Esther had had hair on her legs, a straight bar of eyebrows—an unattractive woman, probably. Did Israeli women make up their eyes? Probably not. Nevertheless, she took out a brush and worked on her eyelashes.

Perfume? Unnecessary. She looked at herself once more. In another moment, she would kill a man.

Shayne was at the TV set, flipping channels, with the sound down. “Better?” he said, causing the picture to dwindle and disappear.

“Somewhat, I think.”

“Cognac?”

“No!”

She sat in a chair this time, setting the purse on the floor so she could touch it with her right hand. Shayne stayed across the room. She had been advised to shoot him twice, aiming first at the bulk of his body, to knock him down, and then at his head, to kill. But if she missed with her first shot, he would be on her like a bolt of lightning. So she had to get him to come to her.

“You were beginning to tell me something,” Shayne said.

“It’s gone. Remind me.”

“About why you expected Gold to come back to Miami.”

“For this reason. I searched his residence after the arrest, most carefully. There was painfully little, a scattering of checks and bills and memos to himself. And one letter. Mr. Shayne, move nearer to me. I haven’t the strength to speak loudly.”

Shayne moved to the edge of the bed and sat down there. This was no improvement, for his weight was forward and he was watching her closely.

“If he received any other mail, he didn’t save it. It was from a girl here who signed herself Helen. No address—merely the date and Miami.”

She could have invented something, but Gold and Rashid had decided, discussing what she was to say, that she should stick closely to the truth. No one could be sure exactly where Shayne stood, or how much he knew. There actually had been a Gerda Fox, and she had actually been a Shin Bet informer. Gold’s opium-into-heroin laboratory had actually been set up in the galley of a fishing boat. The letter she was describing now was real. They had laughed about it in Beirut.

“It was illiterate and childish. That is his pattern, it is in his dossier. He confined himself to girls below the age of twenty. From indications, this was one of them, it seemed perhaps the last before he left this country. She was having difficulties at school, at home, she longed to see him and squeeze him, et cetera. Oddly enough, she was a policeman’s daughter. She asked Gold to tell her where to look, and she would go into the files through her father and remove or destroy evidence against him, so he could come back and she could do various sexual things to him which I won’t repeat. Did he need money? She had some saved. And I thought to myself—if he came to Miami, wouldn’t he notify her? He could use her to carry messages, to find him a secure place. He would have to be careful about old acquaintances. I thought this Helen would be a good one to start with, in any event. Do you think it’s enough?”

She played with the flap of her purse. Shayne’s eyes were on her every minute. She had a horrible thought suddenly that something had made him doubt she was Israeli. The earrings? She regretted those. Perhaps she would have to lay the purse in her lap and shoot through its bottom. But she had bought it in Paris, she would hate to spoil it.

Shayne scraped his thumbnail across his chin. “Half the people in the drug world inform on the other half. They’re jittery right now. If Gold killed a woman last night, that steps up the pressure. He can’t hang around and feed it into the market a bag at a time. It all has to hit at once. We can wait till that happens and trace it back. There are a few people I can lean on. But there may be a faster way.”

He continued to watch her with those penetrating eyes. She sat forward, bringing the purse up from the floor. The pistol inside had shifted, and she couldn’t locate the grip.

“If that was Murray Gold I was chasing,” Shayne said, still working on moves which her two bullets would prevent him from making, “why would he drive down to Homestead to pick up ten tommy guns?”

“Tommy guns?” Rashid hadn’t known that Shayne knew about those. “This doesn’t fit into my theory at all.”

“See if you can make it fit. Did Gold grow a beard in Israel?”

“Not while I watched him. Perhaps in prison. I can cable and find out.”

“You can buy beards at a hair-store. But if that woman was Gerda Fox, and Gold knew she was the one who turned him in—if she knew the name of the buyer here—”

He stopped to think again. “He bought the guns from a master sergeant. I’m not really sure how many, but he paid three thousand in cash, and submachine guns go for about three hundred apiece. For ten guns, you need ten men. You don’t take ten men along on a drug buy. The hell of it is, I had him right in my fist. But I tried to be too tricky, and I lost him.”

She had adjusted the pistol so it was pointed at Shayne. The safety was off.

“Mr. Shayne, you keep throwing fragments. What do you mean, you lost him?”

“I had a helicopter on him, and the engine conked out. He was up around Boca Raton at the time. That doesn’t mean he stayed there.”

Alarm bells began clanging. Wait. Wait.

All at once she thought of the danger she was in. Of course the plan had been worked out to minimize the danger, but if Shayne and his helicopter hadn’t linked Gold to the Arabs, it was no longer necessary to kill him. She had been keyed up to do it, but it was a relief not to have to.

And then she had a better idea, having to do with the money. It was mad, and most unlikely to work, but what a coup if it did! It would prove to a few people, including her almighty husband, that Arab women were not altogether as helpless as they looked.

“Then we’ll be working together?”

“It seems so,” Shayne said, still studying her. “Unless you can think of something else you ought to tell me, I’ll be moving.”

“Mr. Shayne, if you knew how relieved! All the piled-up sleepiness has caught up to me suddenly.” This was true; she had had no sleep the night before, after Rashid had come into her bedroom, and now she was having trouble keeping her eyelids up. “How would it be if I simply stay here? If you’ll get off that bed I’ll fall into it. Three hours at the most. Three hours would make an enormous difference.” Also true! Everything was scheduled to take place during the next three hours. “My dress will be dry by then. Phone me or come back for me.”

“I’ll see what I can find out about the girl. First name Helen. A cop’s daughter. I’ll ask some people.”

Good; that would take him out of Miami. He had a few more questions, and to make him go she acted as though she was about to fall asleep in the chair. They stood up together. She pretended to lose her balance, and touched his arm. She would like to see him undressed.

But not now, unhappily. Even if she could have thought of a way to bring it about, there was too little time.

After he left she waited at the closed blind, peering through the thin slit between blind and window-frame, and saw his Buick pull out, return to the street and turn north. He was apparently in every way a careful man. A moment later he was back, cruising slowly past to make sure he had left her in safety.

But Rashid was equally cautious. He had parked elsewhere, and came among the motel cars on foot. He rapped quickly. Smiling, she let him suffer out there in the open, where the world could see him. He would be furious, she knew.

He shook the doorknob. Would it disturb this strange creature, she wondered, if Shayne had taken away her gun and left her dead on the floor? Not for more than a moment, probably, and then only because it would entail a change of plan. He would prod her with his toe, walk out and never think of her again. And that made her almost as angry as he was when she opened the door and he came storming in.

“What in the devil’s name have you done here, woman?” he demanded. “You let him walk away unharmed.”

No woman likes to be called woman in that tone of voice. “I decided not to shoot him,” she said calmly. “Those magnificent shoulders and narrow hips.”

Really enraged, he slammed her in the face with his closed fist. It was a serious blow. He had entered her sexually a half dozen times in Beirut, and apparently he thought, incorrectly, that that entitled him to do this. She fell against the television set, and somehow the contact turned it on. The voices came up first, followed by a picture of four American women with beautifully groomed hair, sitting at a table discussing the population explosion.

She still had her purse in her hand. Sitting up, she took out the gun and let Rashid look into the muzzle.

“Or perhaps you think I was unable to change the bullets,” she said. “That I am too ignorant to understand the mechanism, unlike Israeli women. Shall I press the trigger and convince you?”

He waved to show her that the gun didn’t intimidate him. But she noticed that he was careful to move no closer.

“No, no. Merely tell me at once how it happened. Up to a point it went off perfectly. You were alone together. I watched the window for your signal, that you had done it and I should drive in to pick you up. Instead, he drove away, in a car with a radio telephone. And I find you here partly undressed.”

“It was necessary to wash my dress.”

“And because of those narrow hips and so forth—”

“We discussed making love, but decided against it. It would have been a mistake to kill him. The helicopter last night had a failed engine. He knows nothing about us.”

Rashid thrust his head forward. “He told you that.”

“Convincingly. If I put the pistol away, will you hit me again?”

“No, I was angry. Turn off that noise.”

As much as she would have enjoyed hearing intelligent American women talk about the best way to avoid becoming pregnant, this was not the time, she agreed.

Rashid put a cigarette in his mouth. After shutting off the television, she came up to him, removed the cigarette and kissed him, forcing her tongue between his lips, daringly. He responded with less than his usual masculine fervor.

“You taste of being sick.”

“Still?” she said coolly. She lay down on the bed and crossed her ankles. “I know our schedule as well as you do, my dear. We have a full twenty minutes before you meet the Jew, and it is safer to be here behind drawn blinds than riding around in a foreign city. Michael Shayne will not be back. He believes me to be asleep, from airplane exhaustion. And if he does come back, you can have the pleasant experience of killing him, as you seem to want to so much. Meanwhile, I want to persuade you to take me with you.”

“Akhatari, I beseech you, not again and again. But if I have to listen to it, finish first with the detective. How much did you tell him?”

“Only about Gold and his narcotics. I watched the time constantly. You said fifteen minutes would be safer, so I wouldn’t walk out one moment after we came in. I said nothing about the prison escape, that it was Mr. Gold’s idea.”

“It was also mine. For months I was thinking of nothing else.”

“But without him you would all still be gathering dust, behind bars. You did the fighting, of course, and I admire your bravery. A word about this Michael Shayne. I see why Gold fears him. I was very much struck by him, to be truthful, and even with the one arm, I knew I would have to be quick. You have taught me to be willing to take chances, but only when necessary, and in this case it would have been foolishness. Oh, the Jew would be delighted to hear of Shayne’s death, but we should let him take care of his own part of that business. If a policeman and his mistress were making love in the next room, for example, and he heard the shots, I would have been captured immediately. But if you prefer to think I failed to shoot because I am a cowardly female—”

“Akhatari, you know I respect you. Where is Shayne now? Do we have to include him as a factor?”

“I sent him off on a wild chase, in the other direction from Miami Beach. All he thinks about is Murray Gold and the heroin, the one thing that occupies all Americans’ thoughts, it seems. He knows nothing about Palestinians, only that Gold last night bought ten machine pistols—”

“He knows that!”

“But could the cleverest detective in the world find out more than that in the next twenty minutes? Needless to say, no.”

“I still believe it would have been better—”

“If so, the harm is already done. But up to that moment, do you agree that I did well? I persuaded him I was a woman of action, formerly an officer in an army at war. Now I hope to convince you.”

“Akhatari, it’s impossible. Women have no place in the camps. And you are a sheik’s wife, it would be insane to offend him. He has given us much money and support.”

“He’s divorcing me in any case.”

Rashid was so surprised that he dropped his cigarette. “Does he know about Beirut?”

“He knows what he wishes to know. He wanted me to come with him to the United States because of my English, but I have developed the wrong style for him. I disagree with his opinions. Unheard of! He wants submission, and many children. Do you think he knows about you and Sayyid and the rest? Wait and find out! If the action succeeds, he will take credit for it—his own wife was one of the conspirators. But if it is a disaster—”

“Don’t say it,” Rashid said superstitiously.

“He will say he had no part in it, and cast me out. For me to come in the airplane with you, would fit either story.”

“When we land in Libya, we disperse and disappear, one by one. For you to disappear would be difficult. You are too beautiful.”

“Nonsense. I would disguise myself as a bent-over grandmother.”

But she could see there was no chance. This was going to be another all-male operation, from first to last. Very well. They could hardly object if she played an independent hand. A million dollars would be a marvelous sum of money with which to start her new life.

Changing the subject, she suggested that while they had the use of this big soft bed, they should give each other a moment’s pleasure. It would ease the tension in so many ways, and it might be their last time. He was reluctant, but masculinity has its bad side, and by making it into a challenge she left him no choice. He came down to her.

And nothing came of it in the end, for he failed to erect, for the first time in their dealings together. She had been three-quarters sure this would happen, and she wasn’t particularly nice to him about it. But she needed some compensation, she believed, for being struck in the face with his fist.

7

Shayne’s operator reported that Will Gentry had been calling. Shayne hesitated, and then told her to try to find Tim Rourke for him.

While she was trying numbers, Shayne crossed the river on the 27th Avenue bridge. Rourke came on. He was at his desk in the News city room.

“I wonder how you guessed I was writing my story. I’ve got two or three hundred questions. Do you have a minute?”

Shayne continued to maneuver through traffic, without replying.

“Mike? Are you on?”

Shayne had been counting backward. Three weeks before, Murray Gold had escaped from prison. A week before that, someone had appeared there to see him, with a Miami police card. At just about that time, Shayne’s good friend Gentry had been vacationing in Bermuda. Gentry’s wife had been sick for ten months, in the hospital for six. His expenses had been enormous. He had been spending all of his free time in the hospital, drinking too much, eating too little. Finally his own doctor had ordered him to take a few days off, completely alone, and do nothing but lie in the sun, out of the reach of the telephone. Shayne had been away from Miami himself, and he had wanted to ask Rourke if he or anybody else had been in touch with Gentry during that time.

But it was a question he found himself unable to ask. When Rourke called his name again, Shayne quietly broke the connection.

He drove to a small bar on 8th Street, patronized in the evening largely by homosexuals. The owner, a part-time homosexual himself, was a small, lively, brown-skinned man named Manson. He had once fought professionally at 150 pounds, and he still carried ring scars over one eye. Shayne, some years earlier, had broken up a ring of extortionists specializing in gay bars, and since then Manson had become one of Shayne’s principal sources of gossip.

Shayne interrupted him at breakfast, in the kitchen behind his bar.

“Mike, next time phone, all right? So I can meet you someplace. It isn’t good for the joint’s reputation to have private detectives walking in and out.”

“Today I’m in a hurry,” Shayne said.

He took out one of the hundred dollar bills he had confiscated from Marian Tibbett, the Homestead master sergeant, and laid it beside Manson’s coffee cup. Manson became more cheerful at once.

“Coffee?”

“No time,” Shayne said. “I have two topics. Number one, Murray Gold. Number two, heroin.”

Manson folded the bill and put it away. “And do they connect? Mike, anything’s possible. He always steered clear of it here, but you know it wasn’t for moral reasons. There he was, at loose ends, in the Middle East, where most of our shit comes from. If he really was broke, that’s the one way you recoup with one turnover of capital. But different ones have different ideas.”

“Why do you think he went to Israel in the first place?”

“We all thought they promised him a passport, and then they put on those delays and hesitations to run up the price. But Gold—you just know he couldn’t change his lifetime habits. A hospital orderly? After being that big? No, he saw an opportunity and started working on it, and they caught him at it. I’ll tell you what everybody’s saying about that prison break.” He finished filling his cup, and returned the pot to the stove. “He organized it.”

“Using Arabs?”

“That’s the nice part of the story. What other Jew would be so open-minded?” Manson took a sip of steaming coffee and lowered his voice. “I understand he’s in Uruguay.”

“Why Uruguay?”

“Why not? No, as a matter of fact, it was set up long ago. Maybe he hasn’t got there yet, but I do know he’s expected. This isn’t more of the usual crap, Mike. Most of what I give you is what I hear pouring drinks, but this I happen to know.”

“Can I count on that?”

“It’s definite.”

“Now talk to me a minute about the heroin situation. All I want is a market report.”

“I don’t know why everybody thinks I’m such an expert. I don’t do anything stronger than aspirin myself, and I keep it out of the bar. But when the subject comes up, I admit I don’t stop up my ears. It’s so-so, Mike. The big bust yesterday had everybody worried, but not that much, you know? No panic. Does that mean help is on the way? In the shape of a major shipment from someplace? You decide.”

“None of this is worth a hundred bucks. Now something specific. I’d like to get the name of his last girl friend before he left the country. Her first name was Helen.”

Manson shook his head. “I didn’t keep up with him that close. Do you have anything else on her except that she was under nineteen? Which goes without saying.”

“Her father’s a cop.”

“Robustelli!” Manson said promptly. “That was the angle that got it talked about. Did the old man know it or not? Gold used to pick her up every afternoon after school, was the story. Charming.”

Returning to his car, Shayne called Miami High School and asked for the vice principal. Helen Robustelli, he was told, was a junior there, and she had been absent for five days with a virus infection. Shayne checked the phone book. The listing for Captain Angelo Robustelli, the girl’s father, was in Southwest Miami, less than ten blocks away. Shayne drove past the house, turned around and parked. He gave his operator the Robustelli number. After nearly a dozen rings, a woman’s voice answered. It was Mrs. Robustelli, and she told Shayne emphatically that she didn’t wish to discuss her daughter.

“Helen may be in trouble,” Shayne said politely. “I may be able to help. The school says they set up two conferences with you but you missed them both.”

“Those morons, what do they know? Well, O.K. I suppose you better give me the bad news.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to stop in and see you. I’m not far away.”

She did seem to mind, but Shayne persisted.

“Let me see now,” she said. “You’re that big ugly private detective. Well, all right. Give me ten minutes to sort of tidy up?”

A TV repair truck was parked across the street from the Robustelli house. A moment after Shayne hung up, a young man in coveralls came around from the kitchen door. As he crossed, he checked the closure of his front buttons and pushed back the hair over his ears. Shayne let him get off the block before leaving the Buick and ringing the Robustelli bell.

Mrs. Robustelli was wearing fresh lipstick, with a strong punctuation mark at each corner of her mouth. One of her sweater buttons was missing, showing a portion of the bulge beneath. She was large-hipped and large-breasted, with a sullen look. She glanced at the street where the TV truck had been.

“That was quick.”

She let him enter the house, giving his broken arm an appraising look. “Before we sit down, what are you drinking?”

“Coffee, if it’s made.”

She took him into a bright kitchen. The unwashed dishes piled up in the sink dated back more than one meal, possibly more than one day.

“We’ve been having TV troubles. Maddening. Not that I spend that much time watching. A big strong one-fisted man like you—you don’t want coffee. I’ll fix you a drink.”

The upshot was that she poured Shayne a cognac and made herself a bourbon and water, which was clearly not her first of the day. She enjoyed the taste so much that she took off the top half before setting it down.

“I suppose you think I’m perfectly terrible, drinking bourbon right after breakfast.”

Shayne didn’t comment. As a matter of fact, she was pretty terrible. Her diction was already slightly moist; she would be unintelligible by noon.

Robustelli, her husband, was primarily a drug cop, with a secondary interest in prostitution, and he hadn’t had much luck stopping that, either. His picture, cut out of the News, in which it appeared frequently—he gave his basic get-tough-with-drug-traffickers speech somewhere in town once a week—was pinned to the wall over the kitchen table. He had an abundant growth of iron-gray hair, a jaw like a rock, the steady gaze of a man who, as far as Shayne knew, had never enjoyed a moment’s self-doubt.

“He doesn’t know his daughter is missing,” Mrs. Robustelli said, with a glance at the picture. “He’s usually late to dinner, when he does us the favor of coming in at all. When you’re trying to stamp out heroin single-handed, you keep crazy hours, junkie’s hours. Even a wife can understand that.”

“I’m feeling the pressure of time, Mrs. Robustelli. Do you know where Helen is?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. What do you want with my daughter, Mr. Shayne?”

“She may know something about a man I’m trying to track down.”

“Now you’re talking my language. I hope it’s serious?”

“You know who it is?”

“Let’s say I have a pretty good idea. His initials wouldn’t be A.C., by any chance?”

“If they aren’t M.G. I’m wasting my time.”

She began paying more attention. “Not Artie Constable?”

“I don’t have time to play twenty questions, Mrs. Robustelli. Didn’t you know she’s mixed up with Murray Gold?”

That jarred her. She had the glass to her mouth, but some of the whiskey went down the wrong way.

“Murray Gold? Murray Gold? The gangster? What a goddamned fantastic lie. What kind of weirdos have you been talking to?”

“The guy who told me is usually right about these things. Gold’s been picking her up after school.”

It didn’t take the girl’s mother long to adjust to the idea. “I knew there was something fishy,” she said grimly. “She was supposed to be staying late for extra help. But she went right on getting E’s and D’s. Gold! My God, we all know he likes them young and dumb, but this is going a bit far.” Her eyes jumped to the photograph. “Listen—listen—if Angelo finds out about this, he’ll kill her, I swear. I know you sometimes say that and don’t mean it, but I mean it. He’ll take out his trusty revolver and shots will be fired. Gold’s about eighty years old!”

“Sixty-four.”

“But no longer a teenager, right? My Helen. I’m just—absolutely—flabbergasted. What this calls for is another drink.”

She poured for herself, and brought the cognac bottle for Shayne. “I’ve been taking this disappearing act a little too la-di-da, I see that. But Gold’s over in Israel, isn’t he? Isn’t he? That’s what it said in the paper.”

“Nobody’s sure. Helen sent him a letter, apparently.”

“The poor old guy,” she said, surprisingly. “All that money, why would he have to run to seventeen-year-old kids?” She waved her glass. “Seventeen, sixteen, which is she? I can never keep track.”

“Mrs. Robustelli—”

“I guess it’s revolting. I don’t know. We haven’t been such wonderful parents. Angelo believes in the strap, and I go too far the other way, to compensate. She’s never learned how to study. She never had dates, like the other girls. Let’s face it, she’s a bit of a slob.”

“If you have any ideas about where I can reach her—”

But she was going to make him work for it. She glanced at him almost flirtatiously over her raised glass. “I’m not one of those uptight parents, as you can probably guess by looking at me. I gave her the full lecture the first time she menstruated. Personal example is so very important! I think I can honestly say that I tried to give her a healthy attitude toward the sexual relationship. I have few hangups on that score. I like it upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber. I don’t actually get all that much, and that’s no reflection on Angelo because the dear man does what he can. The reason I mentioned Artie Constable.” She considered. “Should I tell you? I think so, because you may not be right about Gold, you and your sources. They never made a mistake? Artie lives over here on the next block. He used to deliver papers on this street. Now don’t get any dirty ideas! Nothing happened. Really a great-looking kid, Mike. He would have gone out for football, but you know these chicken-shit high school coaches. I thought I’d encourage him, find out if he’s college material, kind of help him develop his potential. I invited him in one day last week when I had the house to myself.”

Her eyes glazed; she was beginning to daydream.

“Mrs. Robustelli, will you get back to your daughter?”

“She’s part of the story, and I wish she wasn’t. Call me Angela. I’m Angela, my husband’s Angelo. Cute?”

“Very.”

“I know, I know, you’ve got lots to do, places to go, and I have to hang around here doing the vacuuming. Did you ever think about marriage from a woman’s point of view?”

“All right, tell me about Artie.”

“Blond, you know? Very good pectorals and triceps. But wild, wild as they come. Ask anybody about Artie Constable at that high school. He threw his Social Studies teacher through a plate-glass door once. And I had him right there in the palm of my hand.” She swallowed part of a giggle. “And was it enormous, too. And wouldn’t you know? Helen walked in. Artie was extremely embarrassed, because he and Helen, I was astonished to learn, had been making it themselves. I felt like a pretty fool. So that put me on my guard. Mothers aren’t exactly helpless, you know. I sneaked into her room that night and did a little private investigating of my own. She was zonked out on reds. She was into that scene at school, never mind, I knew all about it.”

“But not as far as heroin.”

“Good Lord, no. Speed, LSD, mesk and the like. Angelo’s completely irrational on the whole thing, but to me it’s like booze with our generation. I went through her purse, I’m ashamed to say. There was too much money in it, for one thing. Ah-ha, I said to myself. Pushing? And a receipt for a hundred dollar deposit on a certain apartment in a certain beach community, and right now I want to get your solemn promise that my daughter’s name is not going to figure in any of the publicity.”

“I can’t promise that, Mrs. Robustelli. I’ll do what I can. How soon after that did she leave?”

“Call me Angela. Next day. I knew she was gone because when I went in to make her bed, Raggedy Ann was missing. She didn’t take her toothbrush, but she wouldn’t leave Raggedy. So I got to work and I did a little intriguing, and sure enough, Artie Constable didn’t go to school and he didn’t come home that night either. So there may be some holes in your Murray Gold story! I sat down at this very table and poured myself a strong bourbon and pondered. Tell Angelo? No. He’s about as much of an expert on female psychology as that fly on the lampshade. Send Angelo to bring her back, and she’d end up emotionally scarred for life. If they wanted to play grownup, she and Artie, why not let them alone for a few days? And I have a right to consider myself a teensy bit too, don’t I? They’ve had it with Helen at school. This time it wouldn’t be another ten-day suspension, it would be out on her ass. And then I’d have her around underfoot all day, and goodbye privacy. I’ve been trying to figure out something to tell Angelo when he notices she’s gone. He loves her madly, supposedly.”

“Is Constable still missing?”

“I haven’t checked up, I couldn’t be bothered.” She shook the ice cubes thoughtfully. “The night before the night I was telling you about. I didn’t think about it until this minute. The phone rang. When I picked it up nothing happened. A little later it rang again. Helen answered, and she got so excited. She hung up and took the rest of the call upstairs. I had my curiosity up by this time, but she was practically whispering. Could that have been Gold? Maybe so!”

When she didn’t go on, Shayne finished his cognac and stood up. “If you want to tell me that address now it may help, but I can’t spend any more time here.”

“Rush, rush. Homestead Beach, 37 Azalea Drive. Try not to make her feel guilty. We all make mistakes. Don’t worry, I won’t let her off scot-free, I’ll think of a good way to punish her.”

She came to the door with him, snapping her fingers as she walked, not to any music that Shayne could hear. After opening the door for him, she pulled him closer by his sling and whispered against his face, “Why don’t you come back later and fuck me?”

She pulled back and put her fingers to her lips. “Forget I said that.”

8

Murray Gold had always been a compulsive planner, overdoing it at times. He thought everything out in advance, and went back over it again and again, imagining the worst and working out countermoves. Today he called all the funeral directors listed in heavy type in the classified pages, and found three with no funerals scheduled. Gold gave a Gentile name and told them he was from New York. He was here in Miami with his sister. She had been stricken suddenly with chest-pains, and had died in the night. Each telephone voice was sorry to hear it, and hoped he could be of service.

Gold started in Miami Beach, with Everett and Wilkins, on Alton Road. There was ample parking space for the funeral vehicles. He saw a hearse and two limousines and no drivers. Gold himself was using a stolen Dodge, with New York plates. Helen’s loony friend, Artie Constable, was at the wheel. Gold had him drive past without stopping, and then come back slowly. If he had seen anything to put him off, they would have continued on and tried the next place on his list.

“Seems O.K.?”

Constable pulled into the driveway. He was wearing jeans and a smelly T-shirt, and he had been barefoot when they started out from Homestead Beach. Gold took him to a clothing store and bought him a dark lightweight raincoat and a pair of shoes, on the grounds that it would be considered funny to be calling on funeral directors barefooted. Artie was a tall boy, two inches or so over six feet, and his neck was a tremendous column, nearly as wide as his head. He looked as though he could tuck in that chin and bulldoze a hole in a brick wall. Gold had been testing him for intelligence, but if he had any, he didn’t see any point in displaying it. He looked angry most of the time, particularly so this morning because he and Helen had stayed up late drinking muscatel. He had a .38 in each raincoat pocket, which was a joke in a way because he had never fired a gun of any kind in his life.

“Remember we don’t want to hurt this man unless we have to,” Gold said. “Just watch me and do what I do.”

Skinny enough before, Gold had wasted away in that miserable Israeli prison. He could take the flesh on his belly and fold it over like the flap on an envelope. He had been semi-bald for years, and had always shaved clean. Now, with a scraggly beard and a hairpiece, with sun glasses blotting out most of the space between, he was a totally different man, he hoped. Nevertheless, he hated to be out in the open in a town where so many people were dying to get their fingernails in his eyes. He entered the funeral parlor with his head down, clearly bereaved.

The funeral director, Mr. Everett, had been watching at the front window to see what kind of car he came in, as that would have an effect on the price. A plump man, Mr. Everett had the silkiness and perennial low spirits that went with his profession. He took Gold’s hand in both of his own, and gave it an extra squeeze before letting go, to show how much he sympathized in the loss of the dear one. There was only one girl in the front room; Gold had decided that the maximum number he and Artie could handle comfortably would be three. After introducing Artie as a young cousin who had been kind enough to drive him, he and the funeral director withdrew to discuss options and prices.

Embalming, he learned, was done on the premises, by Everett himself, with the help of an assistant who came in afternoons. Apologizing for being so picky, Gold asked to be shown the complete range of coffins. His sister had been a particular person, and he wanted everything exactly as she would have wished.

Alone with Everett and his coffins, Gold produced a pistol and showed it to the undertaker, who had been in business long enough to see almost everything. His jaw dropped into a nest of double chins.

Gold said mildly, “You’ve been helpful, but I’m sorry to say I don’t have a sister.”

“A robbery,” Everett breathed.

“That’s what it looks like. I don’t suppose you carry a gun.”

“Why, no.”

“I think I’ll believe you. Being frisked is so unpleasant. I hate it when it happens to me. Back up over there and be good, unless you want to end up being embalmed by the competition.”

“I never keep much cash.”

Gold decided he had been friendly enough. He snarled and stabbed the fat little businessman with the pistol barrel.

“No noise. Back up. Here.” He pulled the lining out of one of the coffins. “Tear this up.”

The undertaker, very scared and confused, managed to rip off several long strips. Gold ordered him to climb into one of the expensive coffins, rust-resistant steel lined with cedar lined with lavender-colored silk, with a pillow for the corpse’s head. He wasn’t coordinating well, and he had to be helped with a succession of light slaps with the gun.

“It’s airtight,” Everett whispered.

“You won’t suffocate,” Gold told him. “I’m not completely out of my mind.”

Everett seemed to doubt that statement, but he clambered in and lay back. Gold tied his ankles and wrists.

“Promise you won’t close the lid?” Everett said. “I’ll hold you to it. Because they really make it so no air can get in—”

Gold had never liked complainers. He reversed the pistol and gave Everett a really good rap with the butt-plate. Then he gagged him, and went back to the reception room and told the girl that Mr. Everett wanted her. She walked in briskly, with Artie a step behind. She was only a year or so out of high school, and Gold really dug her freshness and the way she moved, though her face was marred by too many pimples. He snaked an arm around her from behind and kept her from yelling when she saw her employer trussed up in one of the firm’s best coffins.

Gold’s second hand went naturally to her breast, and the nipple stood up between his fingers. Artie grabbed her ankles and tied them. She twisted in Gold’s grip, trying to buck loose, and her soft backside jolted against his midsection, arousing him to the point where he nearly forgot that the ticklish part of the morning was just beginning. Then she went limp.

“That’s right, dear,” he said, panting. “Relax and enjoy it.”

She was completely out. They lifted her into another coffin. Gold kept his word, and when he lowered the coffin lids, he remembered to leave several thicknesses of fabric so the seal was less than complete.

Artie went out for the Dodge and brought it around.

Gold chose a child’s coffin, lined with white satin dotted with rosebuds. It was surprisingly heavy. Artie used a two-wheeled dolly to load it into the hearse. Then he opened the Dodge’s trunk. The Thompsons from Homestead Air Base were piled up inside, wrapped in rags. Gold passed them in, one by one, then the loaded clips and the boxes of ammunition. Artie stowed everything in the coffin. He backed out and they closed the double doors.

“I almost forgot something,” Gold said.

Using the point of a screwdriver, he chewed up the lock so the latch wouldn’t hold, and fastened the doors with tape.

“Did you happen to notice she wasn’t wearing pants?” Artie said.

“What?”

“The chick. How about that, in a funeral parlor? If you don’t believe me, go and look.”

“Thanks,” Gold said chillily. “What kind of a zombie do you think I am?”

Artie chuckled and faked a punch. “Didn’t it all go easy, though? Like you said.”

“The day’s just getting underway.”

Artie had taken three Dexies before they left, a dose Gold had considered about right. But after tying up the girl and laying her out in the coffin, without underpants, he was so high that Gold considered feeding him something different now to take off the edge. No, he decided. He wanted the boy to seem dangerously excited when they met the Arabs. Of course it was a gamble. He would have preferred to use somebody from his old world, whose behavior could be predicted exactly, but what the hell! This whole thing was out of character for him. He might as well go all the way.

Artie did an impromptu shuffle on the blacktop while Gold tended to one other matter. He had a paper bag containing two timing devices, two lumps of plastic explosive, two ping-pong balls and a hypodermic needle. Each assembly had cost him twenty dollars. He had placed the order by phone, refusing to give his name, and Helen had driven in to pick them up. The ping-pong balls were partly filled with some mysterious fluid. Gold had never inquired into the chemistry of it; all he knew was that it worked. He injected each ball with a spurt from the hypodermic needle, and sealed the puncture with a drop of quick-setting adhesive. He set one timer for 11:40, the other for thirty seconds later, wired each package, and then installed one in a limousine, the other in the hearse. At 11:40, when the plastic material blew, the ruptured ball would scatter its contents over the motor, burning with an intense heat. And if for any reason the timing mechanism failed, the ping-pong balls would catch on fire themselves, sometime within a twenty-minute range, between 11:30 and 11:50.

“I know you’re going to explain all this to me sometime,” Artie said, watching.

“When we get to Uruguay.”

“I wanted to look that up on the map, where it is.”

“Their winter is our summer,” Gold said. “Otherwise it’s about the same. Now throttle down, Artie. I want you to look like Bogart, in those early movies. Dumb. Deadly.”

“Like this?” Artie said, making a face.

Gold gave a half snort and waved him into the hearse. The black raincoat helped, but no funeral director in his senses would hire a driver with that tangle of hair. But it wouldn’t matter. They would only be travelling a few blocks.

Gold got into the limousine and moved the seat forward a notch. After checking the gas and working his way through the shifting system, he gave Artie the signal to move out.

He went first. Their destination was a parking garage between Dade Boulevard and Collins—a many-tiered concrete structure with a spiralling outside ramp. They picked up their tickets and began the climb. Ignoring open spaces along the way, they went all the way to the top, and found the Arabs waiting.

At this hour—it was 10:42—the tide of parked cars hadn’t risen this high, and they had the level to themselves. Artie parked at a slant, blocking the ramp. Bringing the keys with him, Gold got out of the limousine.

He counted Rashid Abd El-Din, the leader, and three others. Three more were somewhere out of sight. Unlike Artie, the Arabs were dressed for their role as undertaker’s helpers, in jackets and ties. It was only when they were clumped together that it could be seen how much they resembled each other. They were all in the same age bracket, mustached, equally dark and lean. Gold knew, however, that they were not all equally foolhardy or equally anxious to die.

But God, they looked serious.

Rashid gave him a tight smile and went to the rear of the hearse. “One limousine, one hearse. As ordered, Murray.”

“Something wrong with the doors. You’ll have to hold them shut from inside. You’ll find the guns in the coffin.”

Rashid stepped inside. Artie had drifted over to the elevators and leaned back, his hands deep in his side pockets. The outline of the guns showed clearly. After all Gold’s worrying, he couldn’t have been better. His eyelids were partly down. His demeanor showed that whatever he was called upon to do here, his conscience would give him no trouble later, because he didn’t possess one. He looked like the one thing he was not, a professional killer. He was the one the Arabs watched, not Gold, who had killed someone as recently as the previous evening.

The Arabs had come in a rented Pinto. Looking into the back seat, Gold saw the suitcase. The young Sayyid was beside it, forcing himself to smile.

“A warm morning, Mr. Gold! Here it is, heroin, from the other side of the ocean, successfully.”

Gold got in and moved the suitcase to his lap. It was locked, but it was his own suitcase, bought in Beirut, and he had the key. He opened it. Moving shirts and pajamas aside, he saw the four tightly packed bags.

“Now that’s a beautiful sight.”

“The keys to the other cars, Mr. Gold. We must separate now, and good luck.”

“This is going to take about thirty seconds.”

He had a 200-tablet aspirin bottle, containing a colorless, slightly oily liquid. He slit the tape on one bag with the limousine’s key, and pinched out an approximate double-dose.

Sayyid murmured, “We didn’t expect any delay. We should move.”

“Don’t rush me.”

He unscrewed the cap with one hand. Heroin dropped into this bottle would turn the liquid deep blue. It was the same crude test used by narcotics agents, not for heroin’s purity but for its presence in a mixture after a cut. Rashid jumped down from the hearse.

“Sayyid,” he said sharply, and added something in Arabic.

“We can’t wait here, it’s dangerous,” Sayyid announced, and snatched the car key from Gold.

Gold was trying to do too much at one time with only two hands, and he dropped the damn bottle. As he went down to retrieve it before the liquid could gurgle out, Sayyid gave him a push.

And the door opened.

From a cramped position partly on the seat, partly on the floor, Gold looked into the hole at the end of a pistol barrel. The pistol was no larger than normal, but the hole looked huge. Gold had already begun to wonder if it had been smart to trust these enemies of the Jewish homeland. His pleasure at seeing the suitcase again had caused him to slack off, and his reactions were slow. He blinked up at a face he vaguely recognized. This was one of those people who do the small, dirty, high-risk jobs, and as a result spend most of their lives in jail. His face said that he had stopped caring. Gold had never had much contact with these men, and here he was, at the age of sixty-four, being stared at by one from the other side of a cocked pistol.

A second man of the same type got into the driver’s seat. No new car had arrived. They had been waiting for him, and it was apparent that they had known where to wait as a result of being tipped by the Arabs. The unnatural alliance was definitely over.

Sayyid said nervously, “All right? All right?”

He slipped away. The gunman came in and slammed the door.

“Barney’s going to scream when he sees that suitcase. Junk, Murray? And you were always such a big man.”

The name Barney explained something. Barney was head of a loosely-organized group of investors who wrote most of the organization bonds. Sale of the confiscated heroin would go a long way toward covering the losses they had incurred when Gold absconded to Israel.

The limousine and the hearse, with the Arabs inside, moved toward the exit ramp and disappeared. Artie Constable, as Gold could have predicted, had faded from view.

“In fact,” Gold said, “Barney’s going to be so glad he’ll give me a big hug and a kiss and put me on an airplane.”

The man seemed to doubt this. “But everybody’s been so pissed off at you, Murray.”

Artie, approaching the car from behind, didn’t try anything fancy. He fired through the window, hitting the gunman in the head and killing him instantly. Gold grabbed the pistol. The driver gave one backward glance, and his hands went up as though trying to catch a fly ball. Artie opened the door for him and he got out, his hands still high. Artie disarmed him, and Gold dumped the dead man at his feet. Artie contorted himself into the narrow space behind the wheel and they drove away, winding down to the exit, where they had to pay to return to the street.

9

Shayne had no trouble finding the Homestead Beach address. It was the upper half of a two-family house, three blocks from the ocean. Like many of the houses on the block, the For Sale sign was up; Homestead Beach had been hit hard by the cutbacks at the nearby airbase. The windows were curtainless. Shayne drove past. It was a street of nearly identical houses, most of which needed paint or other forms of attention. In a few more years, the only thing to do with the place would be to burn it down and begin again.

He parked and came back across-lots, approaching the house from the rear. The two-car garage was empty. He went quietly up the back stairs. The door was unlocked.

He turned the knob, and entered a kitchen. Like her mother, Helen felt no obligation to keep abreast of the dishes. The fare here was TV dinners, sardines and crackers, store pie, instant Sanka. Much beer had been drunk, many cigarettes had been smoked. The remains were everywhere.

He heard a belch. A girl walked in with a beer in one hand. When she saw Shayne she screeched and the can went flying. She had just come from the bathroom and her jeans were open. This was clearly Helen. She had her mother’s hips and thighs, from which she would probably have been glad to shed a few pounds. Her hair was in curlers. Without them, and with a new expression on her face, she might have been almost pretty.

“How are you making out down here?” Shayne said. “I’m Michael Shayne. A couple of questions to ask you.”

She grabbed her jeans as they started to slide. “Goddamn you, goddamn you. Two minutes later I would have been on the road. How did you find me?”

“You left footprints.”

She took a step forward. “What do people have to do to get a break in this world? Please, please! Don’t take me back.”

The shock of finding a strange man in her kitchen had drained most of the color from her face. Even her lips were white. She held out both hands to him and said desperately, “Please! You don’t know what he’ll do to me.”

“Your father? What will he do?”

“Beat me to a pulp. Do you think I’m kidding? You know how he does with the pot-heads. He comes home with scabs on his knuckles. Why do you think I kept dropping out of school? Because I was bruised up! Give me a break, Mr. Shayne?”

“Let’s find out what the situation is first. Where’s Gold?”

She stared. “She-it,” she said in disgust. “I hoped you didn’t know about that.” She came closer and picked at his sling. “I can’t offer you money because I don’t have any. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in—” She gave him a look. “No, I didn’t think so. But I’ve heard about you. You’re supposed to be halfway fair. I don’t care about Murray, I don’t care about anybody in the goddamn fucking world. I’ll confess every little sin I ever committed, if you won’t make me go home.”

“You still haven’t told me where Gold is.”

A calculating look fled across her face. “I’ll make a deal. I’ll tell you the whole thing, from the time I first went down on him, if you’ll say you won’t make me go back. You don’t know what it’s like there.”

“I’m beginning to get a pretty good idea. Maybe you can persuade me.”

She gave a relieved laugh. “Then come on in and have a beer or a smoke. Are you a pot-man, by any chance?”

“Sometimes, when I’m not working.”

The kitchen had a table and chairs, but the only furniture in the living room were two mattresses and a folding beach chair. Helen sat down cross-legged on a mattress.

“You’re the guest, you can sit in the chair.” She waved around. “Ghoulish, yes? And if I told you what they charge for this place!”

Shayne sat on the footrest of the long chair. Helen popped a beer can and offered it. When he declined, she took a quick pull at the beer herself.

“Luke,” she complained. Setting it down, she began taking out curlers. “I must look like a singed cat. Not too irresistibly attractive, huh? I know where you want me to start, and I’m not going to start any place until you give me your oath. If I answer all your questions to the best of my ability, so help me God, will you bug off and tell my old man you couldn’t find me?”

After considering for a moment, Shayne nodded. “Unless you’ve done something you can be arrested for.”

“You could probably get me for conspiracy, but that’s the shittiest law there is, and besides I’m a juvenile.”

“Conspiracy to do what?”

She said sincerely, leaning forward, “Mr. Shayne, I honestly don’t know! Murray kept telling me it would be better if I didn’t. The idea I had at first, he was bringing in a shipment of hash. But considering how nervous everybody’s getting, I think it may be something a little stronger. A little more illegal. Anyway, I had nothing to do with that part, and I know Murray will bear me out if you can find him.”

Shayne lit one of his own cigarettes, the kind containing tobacco. “How did he get in touch with you?”

“Oh, I wrote him a silly letter. I was feeling moody that day. I didn’t expect anything to come of it, but what did it cost me? I sort of exaggerated how much I missed him. I like Murray, he’s sweet, and he’s not too enterprising sex-wise any more. It’s been practically all oral on my part. I told you I wasn’t going to keep anything back.”

As the curlers came out and the dark hair fell around her face she looked younger and prettier. “I’m supposed to be kind of good at that, as a matter of fact. I can make almost anybody squeal. Be that as it may, I drew him some X-rated pictures to get that old tingle going. I had this nutty idea, that if he ever came back it would change my luck. And that’s the way it happened! But I don’t see why I owe him a hell of a lot of gratitude, considering I have to think of my own self, don’t I?”

“Yeah.” Her mother had said much the same thing.

“Well, I do! He called from New York. I was so thrilled! He told me to rent a place, and then he came down, looking just like all the other tourists. He told me he rented a car, but what he really did, he stole it at the airport. So all the time I’ve been hurrying here and there, I was driving a hot car, and if some nosy trooper had picked me up, wouldn’t that have been marvelous, though?”

“Where does Artie Constable come in?”

She gave a high laugh and took some more beer. “You’ve been talking to dear old mom. He’s this friend of mine from school. Murray needed somebody who looked sort of tough and I suggested Artie and we contacted him, and he said sure. He’s been staying here, and the less said about that, the better. Murray doesn’t mind, he’s so out of it himself.”

“Now about the heroin, Helen.”

“I never said it was heroin. All I know is, some Arabs brought it in for him.”

“What kind of Arabs?”

She went into a handbag on the floor beside her. “I’ve got a clipping. I cut it out when Murray broke jail. I’ve been reading everything, all that stuff about the citizenship, keeping my fingers crossed that he wouldn’t get it and he’d have to come back. Well, I know it’s here somewhere, but take my word for it. It had the name of one of the Arabs, Rashid whatever. Murray sent me to this certain mansion in Boca Raton to ask for somebody with that same identical name, and don’t tell me that was a coincidence. And to bring him down here. A neat guy, but he looked right through me. He could be a fag—I wondered about that. He and Murray had a lot to chew over. Do you mind if we pick up the beat a little, Mr. Shayne? I was about to split when you walked in. I’m going to try and make it in Southern California.”

“Without your two friends?”

“Seriously! Artie’s O.K., but all he likes to do is smoke dope and float. And Murray I said goodbye to this morning. He gave me two hundred for a going-away present, which wasn’t too bad. That was no permanent thing. To begin with, how long would he last? All I wanted was travelling money, and I got that. So.”

She poured down more beer. “I bought a few things for him. You may not believe this one—ping-pong balls and a hypo. I know! Don’t ask for an explanation. And there was a sergeant here from the airbase one night.” She giggled, sounding for an instant like her mother. “He put his hand on my ass in the kitchen, which I appreciated because he knew it was risky, with Artie and Murray in the next room. Am I helping?”

“Some. What happened this morning?”

“He packed his bag. So long, kid, thanks a million. I didn’t ask any questions! Artie was so wound up he had to keep going to the bathroom. Before they left he hopped himself up with some jumpers. Murray told him to take three. He took five. I popped a couple myself, does it show?”

She sneaked a look at her watch.

“How are you travelling?” Shayne said.

“By thumb, natch.”

“What do you think they’re doing now?”

“What I think they’re doing now—I could have wormed it out of Artie, but I decided not to—is picking up a package and taking it somewhere and turning it into cash. And then they’ll go their separate ways. Murray did some phoning last night. Plane reservations? Maybe. He’s got a wonderful Lebanese passport, it looks just exactly like him. He grew a beard, did I tell you? And he has this creepy hairpiece that looks about as real as Astroturf. Well.” She looked at her watch again. “The thing is, I want to be out by the time Artie gets back. He thinks we’re going to stay through the month. What he doesn’t know is, I already got back the deposit. If you want to, you can drop me on the highway. And gee—I certainly want to thank you, Mr. Shayne. It shows there are nice people in the world, after all.”

Shayne picked up her overloaded purse. Before she could object, he spilled it on the floor. “I don’t want to find out later I made a mistake.”

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to find in there. That stuff has been piling up for years.”

She was trying, but she couldn’t conceal her anxiety. Shayne stirred the pile with one finger. The money added up to over $500. There were various pill containers, extra underwear and socks, Band-aids, earplugs, postcards, jacks. There was a library card and homework assignments, three or four keys, including one with a tag: “Nefertiti.” He swept it all up and stuffed it back.

“Can we go now?” she said. “I’m ready if you are.”

“I think I’ll have a beer while I think about it.”

“I just drank the last one. Mr. Shayne, my feet are itching. I want to be on my way! If Artie shows up, it’ll just be one big hassle. I’m not driving anywhere with him in a stolen car.”

Shayne put another cigarette in his mouth, watching her. “One minute won’t make any difference.”

“It may! If you’re going to grab Murray, don’t you think you’d better get out to the airport?”

“All I could get him on now is jumping bail. It’s not enough.”

She was on her feet, moving impatiently. When he still didn’t get up, she said, “All right, it makes me feel like a fink, and maybe it doesn’t mean anything. The St. Albans.”

“What about the St. Albans?”

“Do I have to keep telling you I don’t know? Nobody told me anything, but I’m human too, and whenever there was anything to listen to, I listened. The St. Albans kept cropping up. They had a floor-plan, a diagram. If you hurry, maybe you can catch him at it. But don’t for God’s sake tell him I told you anything.”

Shayne continued to smoke.

“I know how it sounds,” she said, “that I’m making this up because it’s really happening someplace else, but what do I care? He’s not the big thing in my life.”

To her relief, Shayne came to his feet at last. “Is there a phone here?”

“No, but there are booths downtown.”

All she took with her was her purse. She gave one last look at the sordid room.

“Parts of it were fun.”

She told him to drop her on the main road to the expressway north. He offered her a lift as far as Miami after he finished his calls, but she was in a big hurry to get out of the car.

“Not that I don’t like you!” She kissed his cheek quickly. “If you were driving west, we could have ourselves a high old time. I just don’t want you to get religion and decide it’s your duty to turn me in.”

He left her on the corner. She was still there, signalling cars, when he turned into the main shopping street and parked.

He brought in his operator and asked for police headquarters in Miami Beach. It was busy. So were the police numbers in Miami. Those switchboards were frequently overloaded when something important was happening, and Shayne had an unlisted number which would put him through directly to Will Gentry. The operator tried this number. It, too, was busy.

Shayne’s own private radar was picking up blips. He hadn’t liked the way the girl had kept sneaking peeks at her watch. It was now 10:59. Apparently he had injected himself into Gold’s schedule at an inconvenient time.

“Mike?” the operator said. “Are you still with me?”

“Get me the St. Albans, on the Beach.”

That line was open. Shayne asked for the manager, an acquaintance of his. He had to go through a secretary, who wasn’t sure Mr. Farber was free.

“Put him on right away,” Shayne said. “It’s urgent.”

In a moment, a man’s voice: “Mike? I’ve got some people in the office. Can I get back to you?”

“No. Listen to this, and take it seriously. Are there any Israeli government officials staying at your hotel?”

“What are you talking!” Farber said, alarmed. “Not that I know of. Are there supposed to be?”

“Here’s what I know. These are facts. There’s a party of Arabs around. Their leader broke out of an Israeli prison a few weeks ago. They’re carrying submachine guns, and they’ve been studying a floor-plan of the St. Albans. Do you have anybody staying there who might be a target? Or can you think of any other reason why they might be focussing on your hotel?”

“But this is fantastic! In the United States? Impossible—” He paused. “No. We’ve got a meeting of the Coordinating Committee, chairmen of all the big fund-raising outfits, in fact I’m on it myself. I have two gentlemen with me here right now. But good God, you don’t seriously—”

The phone thumped. Something was said sharply elsewhere in Farber’s office, and that was followed by confused noises, a scraping movement, a command, several voices speaking at the same time.

Then the phone was hung up decisively.

10

Lillian LaCroix was her real name, though people sometimes wouldn’t believe it. She didn’t consider herself a professional, and she had never been able to utter the phrase “call girl,” even in privacy. She had a circle of friends, that was all, and when one of them happened to be down, he was usually nice enough to call, and she was nice enough to come over, and he was nice enough to make her a cash present when he left, though some of her friends preferred to wait and give her something for Christmas. There were even a few who never offered her a cent. That didn’t mean that she refused to go out with them the next time, if she had nothing better to do that evening. She was completely unmercenary. All she wanted was enough to live nicely, without having to get married, the fool’s way out.

She was blonde, not because she was naturally blonde, but that was the way her friends liked her. She tanned nicely. Sexual exercise was the only exercise she got, so she was on a diet most of the time. She was thirty-one. She had an excellent sense of humor, and was a successful over-the-counter speculator, using information dropped in her ear by friends, who had no reason to lie. She didn’t drink or drug. Laziness was her only vice.

When Andrew Weinberger called, she was reading the financial page of the Times with her glasses on. She remembered him at once—an attorney from one of the big New York firms. They chatted, and then he asked if there was any possible chance that she could visit him in his room at the St. Albans.

She frowned, but kept it out of her voice. “You mean right away?”

“If you can make it. I’ve got a meeting coming up with some of the world’s leading bores, and there’s only one way I can get through it and keep my sanity.”

She suggested alternatives, but he had his wife with him this trip, which meant he was going to be tied up for meals. The meeting was likely to continue all afternoon and into the evening, perhaps most of the next day. But he thought it would be marvelous to see her. His wife was visiting family in Coral Gables.

Lillian reached his room at 10:45. He was nearly bald, with a mottled forehead, a big laugh. He was wearing flowered shorts and a loose poolside shirt. They were easy with each other at once. It was that way sometimes.

“No time to kid around,” he said. “I’m a busy, busy man.”

She saluted, and pulled her first zipper. “You’re sure your wife—”

“No problem. She just called me from there.”

She burst out of her clothes. He was delighted to see this happen, and said some nice things. Like everybody, she enjoyed getting compliments. Lying down, she kissed him seriously, and that was enough to get him up. She was glad it was easy, because the truth was, she liked to keep her mornings to herself, so she could adjust gradually to the day. But Weinberger was no trouble. She took him in her mouth for a moment, and he kissed her the same way, and when it was all over he was hardly breathing hard.

She kissed him fondly. “Beautiful. I didn’t go all the way myself, but that’s all right sometimes. I don’t have to run right away, do I? Can we talk?” There was a knock at the door. They both stiffened, and Lillian made a pass at the corner of the sheet. It had happened once or twice that a wife had walked in on her, and that was the kind of unpleasantness she didn’t care for, that ruined her mood for days.

“Some hotel thing,” Weinberger said. He went to the door naked. “Who is it?”

“Special delivery package for Weinberger.”

“Leave it at the desk and I’ll pick it up later.”

“No, you have to sign. Securities.”

Weinberger looked back at Lillian and shrugged. “Shall I go in the bathroom?” she said.

“No need to.”

She covered herself. Weinberger pulled on his shorts. He opened only enough to admit a parcel. The door was knocked out of his hand, striking his bare toes.

Two men exploded into the room. That was the only way to describe it: an explosion. They jumped inside and closed the door. They were dark, and overdressed for Miami Beach, with jackets that matched their pants, white shirts and ties. They were dressed for a funeral, except for one thing. They were carrying machine pistols, the frightening kind with the long clip.

Lillian had been pleasantly relaxed, but the suddenness of the intrusion had sent her back hard against the headboard, pulling the sheet with her. Weinberger was hopping in pain. The guns kept him silent. He was scared, and from the way the young men looked at him, he had reason to be.

“You come with us,” one of the intruders said. “Both.”

He drew an arc in the air with his gun, to be sure Lillian knew she was included. In spite of her easy life, she had never made the mistake of thinking that people were basically kind and gentle. For too many of her friends, sex was a battle, and when it was finished they wanted to think they were the winners. Outside of this strip of sand and hotels, the world was an ugly place, and here were two delegates from that world, their nerves stretched to a point where any sign of contempt or distaste would push them over the mysterious borderline into open insanity.

“Andrew,” she said warningly. “It’s a tax deduction.”

She saw that he had read the danger correctly, and had decided to ride with it. One of the thieves had his back to the door, holding his weapon tightly in crossed arms, that long clip sticking out toward Lillian like a penis. The other looked into the bathroom, moving like a wind-up toy. Excitement came off him in waves. Everything about him was tight, stiff—very scary. But Lillian felt a twinge of the sexual response she had missed with Weinberger.

“Dress,” the young man said.

Again he moved the gun barrel. Lillian didn’t get the accent, but it came over her all at once that they couldn’t be Americans, and they were too heavily armed to be simple hotel thieves. Weinberger was not only rich, he was something in Republican politics. What had she got herself mixed up in here?

Really alarmed now, she came off the bed clutching the sheet.

“I say to you hurry,” the youth repeated, his gunbarrel shaking with urgency.

“But why me?” Lillian said. “I’m only here for half an hour.”

The young man didn’t like her to talk. He lunged, swinging the gun. She stumbled and went sprawling, absolutely naked except for her jewels. The young man almost fell over her, and for an instant she wondered if rape was on the program, along with whatever else.

The man at the door said sharply, “No, no. Only if necessary.”

Lillian rolled away. At least one of their visitors, she knew now, was closer to the insanity borderline than most people, and if he wanted her to hurry, she was perfectly willing to hurry. Her clothes had come off here and there, and she had to move around nimbly picking them up and putting them on. Weinberger pulled on the loose shirt he had been wearing when she came, and put his feet into sandals. He had recovered some of his coolness. She remembered hearing it said once, admiringly, that he was a good man to stay on the right side of. Even in the silly shirt, he looked tough and competent. It was a style she liked.

He put a cigar in his mouth. One of the gunmen slapped it away.

That made their point. Lillian’s young man kept trembling his gun barrel at her, and she tried to move fast without showing everybody how frightened she was. She was wearing a violet pants suit, a little too tight, not the costume she would have picked to go to a kidnapping. She wondered suddenly about Weinberger’s wife. He had never said anything on the subject. There was going to be publicity here, and how would Mrs. Weinberger take it?

They didn’t let her do anything about her face. Having recently made love, there were small repairs she needed to make. Her hair was all right; she wore it tousled anyway. Weinberger saw what was in her mind. He said in an unexcited voice, “Lillian, I don’t think I told you before. You look terrific.”

One of the young men had a small suitcase for his gun. The other put his inside his jacket. It was too big to be carried that way, but he already looked strange and dangerous without the bulge.

They were herded along the corridor to a room on the same floor. This was a big corner room, the sitting room of a $100-a-day suite, and it was jammed with people.

No one was talking. That was the worrying thing—the silence. This became more and more weird. From the glances that were exchanged when they came in, she picked up that everybody there knew Weinberger. Wives were with them, a few teenagers, several frightened children. She counted guns. Including the two she already knew about, she saw six, with a young man accompanying each, all in the same dismal kind of clothes. With that many weapons showing, with the atmosphere of terror so thick that you could have eaten it with a spoon, it was surprising to Lillian that there was room for any other feeling. But she saw the looks pass. Each group had been rounded up from a bedroom, and instead of coming in with Mrs. Weinberger, Weinberger had come in with Lillian, and they had both obviously just been rousted out of the same bed. Which was too goddamn bad!

She knew two other men there, the hotel manager, Manny something, Manny Farber, and an older man, retired now, named Solomon. He was the one, in fact, who had recommended her to Weinberger. She thought at first that he wouldn’t admit knowing her, but he nodded and said quietly, “Lil. A hell of a thing.”

Weinberger said, “Has anybody said yet what it’s all about?”

Solomon lifted his hands. “Only too obvious.”

A little girl started to cry. Her mother pulled her close.

One of their abductors, a tick older than the others with guns, said harshly, “Stop that crying. We do not harm children.”

The child’s mother whispered something and the noise stopped. The gunman looked around slowly, pleased by all that had happened so far. Lillian didn’t care for this one’s looks. He wasn’t a man who often enjoyed himself. The others seemed to be telling themselves continually that fierceness was called for, but he had probably looked fierce for years, long enough so it had become habitual to him. He was far gone in something, possibly patriotism.

“We are waiting for one more,” he said. “I am Rashid Abd El-Din, a Palestinian. I am of the Black September, of which you have read. I have been locked up in a bug-infested Israeli prison for two years, and for cause, I assure you! I and the others are here to achieve certain ends. If we have time later we can debate the pros and cons and practical aspects of terrorism. Is this the best way to secure justice? We have decided, we in this room, that it is our way. Henceforth we conduct all arguments with guns. Palestine is an Arab land, torn from us by the Jews of the West, most of all by the Jews of the United States. You have raised billions to sustain the robber state. You are of high political standing. You direct your gold to Republicans and Democrats alike, so whatever candidate is elected, he is a pro-Israeli. That posturing puppet of a country would collapse in a week without support from here, without American dollars, American airplanes. And this we intend to make plain for the world to see.”

His audience—a captive audience if there ever was one—listened quietly, though there were signs of restlessness among his fellow Arabs. No doubt they had heard it before, and wanted to move along to the next stage. Which would be what? This was a collection of very rich men, and they and their families—and Lillian LaCroix thrown in for laughs—would fetch a pretty ransom.

“It is not a hospital you raise money for,” the Arab said, “or the battle against cancer. It is a nation of murderers, who bomb little children. After today it may not be so easy to raise those rivers of money. We have made a declaration of war against you. You realize that we are serious, we will back what we say with guns, with our lives. And if we die, you others will die with us.”

He lifted his narrow head, with a quick enlargement of the nostrils. It was a pose, but an effective one. He had brought a party of armed men across the Atlantic, into the enemy’s stronghold. But Lillian had always distrusted people who were that pleased with themselves. In the sack, they had little imagination and expected nothing but service. Her knees felt weak. For her to be included in this was really ridiculous. She had never decided what she thought about that whole Middle Eastern mess, who was right and who was wrong.

Another Arab came in, carrying his gun in a book bag. He gave Rashid a head-shake.

The leader said, “The seventh man cannot be found. We will settle for six.”

“What ransom are you asking?” Weinberger said.

“One million dollars per committeeman. An airplane to take us out of the country. We leave here now. I want you to look happy and careless, like vacationers. These are American guns, we are sure they will function well. Will everybody please listen intently for another minute. You understand that we have no intention of being captured. But there has been no warfare on American soil for one hundred years, and you are all of you civilians, possibly you have never seen a bloody death. I am assured that kidnapping is a bad crime in your country. Not as bad as some others, however. You,” he said, pointing with his gun.

Lillian’s stomach clenched. What she wanted most was not to be noticed. The crowd parted in front of the leader. He stopped, facing her.

“What is your name?”

“Mrs. LaCroix.”

“You were taken in the bedroom of the Jew Weinberger.” He flicked his fingernails across her breast. “Are you Jewish?”

“About one-tenth.”

“A perfumed whore.” he said, pronouncing the w. “Not Jewish, I have no reason to hate you.”

For a fraction of an instant, she thought he was about to tell her to go. When she saw from a change in his eyes what he really intended, she tried to seize the barrel of the gun as it rotated toward her. A three-round burst shattered her forearm and tore into her body.

11

“Something’s wrong with their switchboard,” Shayne’s operator reported after re-dialing the St. Albans. “I get a funny buzz.”

Shayne rattled his fingers on the steering wheel. “Get me the Fontainebleau, and keep trying those police numbers. What the hell are they doing up there, calling each other?”

The Fontainebleau security officer was an experienced, reliable man who had often worked with Shayne. He listened without interrupting, and wasted no time asking Shayne if he was fooling or drunk.

“From their standpoint it makes more sense than that kidnapping at the Olympics,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll get right on it.”

Shayne released his operator, but told her to watch for his signal. His forehead was creased. Ordinarily, in a case like this that was bristling with unanswered questions, he would have broken in on the action and hoped that his presence would provoke some kind of counter-move that would tell him something. But he was thirty miles from Miami. He knew that timing was vital. Sitting absolutely still, seeing none of the movement about him on the street, he imagined a plot-line for Murray Gold, taking him to Israel, in and out of prison, back to Miami. The guns. What else would the Arabs need? Vehicles, information about American traffic patterns and police reactions, advice on how to handle the media while the blackmail was being collected. Their shadowy police connection—Gentry? Shayne didn’t believe it, and he had pushed the question out of sight so it wouldn’t keep irritating him—could block incoming calls during the crucial moments. With the cashing-in of the heroin, Gold’s role would be over. He wouldn’t wait around for the guns to be used. Shayne’s one chance was to intercept him before he could leave the country. Somebody else would have to deal with the Arabs. Murray Gold was Shayne’s.

To be in the right place at the right time, he had to force himself inside Gold’s skull, to think like him. Would Helen Robustelli consent to being left behind? In a deal involving hundreds of thousands, would $500 satisfy her? She had talked Shayne out of the house, but one of the things he had noticed was that when she left she hadn’t taken her Raggedy Ann doll, which might mean that she intended to come back. Gold had been using her as an arranger. Perhaps she had arranged a way to escape. The keys in her purse: Nefertiti.

“Mike?” his operator said.

“Get me the Coast Guard station in Key West.”

When a Coast Guardsman answered, Shayne identified himself and asked if they had a listing for a pleasure boat named Nefertiti. The answer was yes: a thirty-five foot sports fisherman chartering out of Key Largo.

That decided him. While he was waiting, he had looked up the number of a plainclothes detective in Southwest Miami, named Henry Coddington. He looked at his watch, and followed the second hand all the way around. Then he gave the number to the operator. Coddington answered.

“Shayne? On my day off? I’m taking my daughter out to the Glades to get some pictures of the birds. You just caught me.”

“Can you postpone it, in the interests of making some money? Seven hundred and fifty for the afternoon.”

“You know the rule against moonlighting, but I don’t think it applies to seven hundred and fifty dollar jobs, do you? If you’re paying that much, I suppose it has to be slightly illegal.”

“Only slightly. If it works, it’s going to be a major collar, and any little shortcuts along the way will be overlooked. That package of counterfeit fifties and hundreds you pulled in a couple of weeks ago. Where is it now, with the evidence clerk?”

“It better be. We need it to convict.”

“Sign it out and bring it down to Homestead Beach, and pay no attention to speed limits. Bring a gun.”

“Man, it sounds heavy. I can say the D.A. wants to look at it, but if anything happens to it, you know they’ll burn my ass.”

“Trust me,” Shayne said. “If it goes sour I’ll cover for you. Come on, move, or I’ll get somebody else.”

“I’m moving. But only for you, Mike.”

Shayne had a surprise as he hung up. Master Sergeant Marian Tibbett, USAF, blood type O, who had sold government property in the amount of $3000 to Murray Gold, to be passed on to Arab terrorists, came out of a sporting-goods store and walked off carrying a paper-wrapped parcel.

There were two blocks of stores. Tibbett got into a car on the next block—today he was travelling in a bright red, low-slung MG—and drove away. Shayne thought hard for a moment. Important parts of the puzzle were still missing, but Tibbett fell into place in an instant. Having been hijacked of some small change by Shayne, he was taking a shot at the real money.

Shayne crossed to the sporting-goods store. Except for one elderly clerk, it was empty. Amid the general clutter of merchandise, overflowing the shelves and covering every square inch of counter space, the big items seemed to be fishing rods, scuba gear and guns, in that order.

Shayne shook open his identification folder. The clerk peered at it through the bottom half of his bifocals, then through the top half at Shayne himself.

“A private detective from the big city. What can I do for you, sir?”

“You can sell me the same kind of gun you sold the guy who was just in here.”

“Sergeant Tibbett? That was a Winchester sixteen-gauge, over and under, and I think I do have another one like it.”

But something about Shayne’s request bothered him, and he didn’t move until Shayne brought out his wallet.

“I’ll be paying cash. And I see you do repairs here. There’s a little modification I’d like to have made.”

“You’ll have to wait for that—the repairman doesn’t come in until one.”

“I can do it myself. Tibbett and I are doing some skeet-shooting. We want to use the same guns, so we’ll start even.”

That explanation, thin as it was, satisfied the clerk. He unlocked a rack and took out a handsome weapon. Shayne had hunted with this gun, and knew it well. He checked the trigger action, holding the hammers to let them come down gently.

“I like a freer trigger, a little more play.”

He took the gun back to a work-room. The clerk came with him, stopping in the doorway.

“Be sure to put everything back. He’s the world’s fussiest man.”

When the street door banged, he returned to the main part of the store. Shayne broke the gun and tightened it into the gun vise, muzzle end up. He looked through the scrap barrel, without finding anything the right size, then picked out two stove-bolts and cut off the heads. They were a bit too big, and he ground down the corners until they fitted into the barrels. Lighting up a portable welding outfit, he welded them in.

He put everything back as he had found it. After paying for the gun and buying a box of shells, breaking one of Tibbett’s own hundreds, he asked to have the gun wrapped.

“I liked the way you wrapped Tibbett’s. Do mine the same way.”

Without looking at Shayne directly, the clerk said nervously, “We won’t get in any trouble over this, will we?”

“I don’t see how. You sold two separate guns. Naturally the packages are going to look pretty much alike. Don’t seal it.”

The clerk tore off a piece of heavy wrapping paper and folded it carefully around Shayne’s purchase. He used a strip of paper tape printed with the name of the store, but only fastened down one end.

“Like this?”

“Fine.”

Shayne took the gun back to his Buick and locked it inside. Then he went off to reconnoiter on foot.

The red car was easy to spot, parked on the almost empty street a half block from the two-family house where Helen Robustelli and her Raggedy Ann doll had spent the last few days with her ill-assorted friends. In his sling and cast, Shayne was nearly as conspicuous as the red car, and he returned for his Buick.

He parked on the same street as the MG, on the next block but one, and pointing the same way. Using binoculars, he saw the back of the sergeant’s cropped head, his elbow on the car door.

He lit a cigarette and settled back to work through everything again. The players in the game were scattered about the map of southern Florida, and the clocks were running. His operator checked once more, and found the police switchboards still not functioning normally. Shayne planted the pins in his imaginary map. In Miami Beach, the Arabs’ action was well underway. Unless Coddington had run into trouble at the property office, he had the counterfeit bills and was just reaching the Palmetto Expressway, and Shayne had reason to hope that he was still a jump and a half ahead of Gold, moving in the same direction. Artie Constable was probably still with Gold. Esther Landau, of Israeli intelligence, was asleep in a motel near the airport. Helen, Sergeant Tibbett and Shayne himself were waiting, within three hundred yards of each other.

Again and again, he returned to the enigmatic figure of Murray Gold. If he made any mistakes with that man, Shayne knew he would vanish like smoke.

Every so often, he checked the time and moved Coddington another leg from Miami. He had watched the odometer when he made the same run the night before, and he assumed that Coddington was following instructions and driving fast. Three minutes sooner than Shayne had expected, the detective’s car turned the corner and came toward him. He parked behind Shayne, unloaded a bulky carton tied with twine, and brought it to Shayne’s car. Shayne motioned him in.

City detectives were theoretically required to keep their weight within five pounds of their age-height line on the life insurance tables, but Coddington was thirty pounds over. He was sweating heavily.

“How’s the arm?”

“It’s O.K.,” Shayne said. “We may be cutting this close so let’s get underway. You see the red MG parked up there. There’s a guy in it. Do you think you can act like a junkie?”

“Junkies are usually thinner, but I can try. I wondered why you wanted the package of rags. We’re buying junk?”

“We’re working the handkerchief switch, only with shotguns. The money’s for somebody else.”

He told Coddington what to do. Like all good plainclothesmen, Coddington had worked up an identity for the times when it was important not to be tagged as a cop. In his basic undercover role he was a vacationist, a little drunk, with money in his pocket and looking for ways to spend it. Today he was unshaven, wearing the clothes he had put on for his expedition into the Everglades. Wetting his fingers, he picked up some dirt from the floor and rubbed it across his face. Then he shambled off.

Shayne watched through the field glasses. Coddington passed the parked car, but the brightness of the color and the fact that somebody was sitting in it pulled his eye. He looked back, stooped and played with a shoelace until a passing car was out of sight, looked around once more, and walked out in the street and back to the MG.

He showed his revolver, holding it close so Tibbett alone could see it. He was shaking with excitement. He ordered Tibbett out, to accompany him to a place where they could do business in private. He wasn’t a car-thief, he assured the sergeant. He wouldn’t know how to get rid of the MG even if he felt like bothering with it. All he wanted was Tibbett’s money and watch and shoes. He was half a day late. He needed medicine badly.

If Tibbett had tried to defend himself with the shotgun, Coddington had been told to shoot him. Tibbett decided to do as he was ordered, and unfolded himself from the car. The two men disappeared between houses. Shayne started his engine. The detective returned, a moment later, alone, carrying a pair of shoes. Shayne moved up and double-parked.

Tibbett’s new Winchester was lying across the second bucket seat in the red car, still wrapped, but he had broken the paper tape so he could get it out in a hurry. Shayne, while he was waiting, had loaded and rewrapped the gun he had doctored in the sporting goods store. Now he sealed that package and tore the tape so it would look exactly like the package in the MG.

Coddington made the switch and got into the Buick. Shayne circled the block, ending up back where he had started.

“How hard did you hit him?”

“Maybe too hard. You wanted him unconscious for exactly three minutes. That’s a tough thing to judge. Hey. There he comes. Three minutes and twenty seconds. That’s what I call a delicate touch.”

Shayne asked for binoculars, and watched Tibbett waver into sight. His face was a mask of blood. He wouldn’t be firing a shotgun at anybody until he got his coordination back. He stood in the street swaying and brushing at his face. Then he answered one of Shayne’s questions—was he operating alone, or was he in this with Helen? He walked away, some of the time on the sidewalk, some of the time on the grass. Reaching the house with the For Sale sign, he went in.

After taking the loads out of Tibbett’s shotgun, Shayne moved into the back seat and untied the carton of money. Taking out one of the bills, he held it to the light.

“Damn nice job,” he commented after a moment. “It looks real to me. It feels real.”

“One of the best fakes I ever saw,” Coddington said. “The giveaway is a little blot in the spinach on Ben’s collar. See where the line thickens?”

Shayne found the imperfection, which he would never have noticed if Coddington hadn’t pointed it out. He emptied his back-seat refrigerator, and filled it with money. Coddington took everything that had come out of the refrigerator to his own car, and stayed there.

Shayne moved back into the front seat, and the waiting resumed.

Tibbett reappeared, wearing two of the band-aids Shayne had seen in Helen’s purse. His balance was better, and he moved in a straight line. But as he crouched to enter the low car, he miscalculated the opening, and banged his head. The door stayed open until he recovered.

Waiting was a major part of Shayne’s job, and he had long since adjusted to it. But Tibbett moved nervously, lighting cigarettes and throwing them away almost unsmoked. Two boys went by on bikes, wearing bathing trunks. There was little through traffic, but an occasional car or delivery truck came and went. Mail was being delivered. A salesman carrying a sample case worked along from house to house, and gave Coddington and Shayne a close inspection as he passed.

And then it happened, though not precisely the way Shayne had planned.

A black Pinto, cruising at moderate speed, braked to a stop in front of the For Sale sign, and the driver honked. Shayne turned on the ignition and went into gear.

The Buick and the MG both moved out at the same instant. Tibbett accelerated hard. The twin shotgun barrels came out the window. The driver’s door of the Pinto opened. Coming abreast, the MG slowed abruptly.

The shotgun roared.

Over the Buick’s noises, Shayne heard a scream. The MG careened ahead, then darted off at an angle, mounted the low curb, and crashed smoking into the porch of one of the almost identical houses.

12

Shayne pulled up to the Pinto and got out.

The driver was a youth in his late teens, with long, untidy blond hair, in a black lightweight raincoat. Like Sergeant Tibbett, he had been driving barefoot. He had been smashed back into the car, his feet still outside on the pavement. Shayne’s makeshift weld had failed to hold in one of the Winchester barrels, and the bolt-head had been driven into the boy’s chest. But the obstruction had broken the close-range pattern, and some of the pellets had gone past to tear up the front seat and strike Murray Gold, hanging from his seatbelt on the other side of the wounded boy.

Gold stared incredulously at Shayne. “Mike Shayne.”

“Who did you expect?”

Gold moaned, and picked at the tangled harness. “Get me out of this.”

“Murray, I know this is going to be hard for you, but a man in your position has to learn to say please.”

Shayne left him hanging, and looked for the money. He found an old-fashioned leather satchel on the floor of the back seat. He swung it into his own car and followed it in. Gold was making plaintive noises behind him. Shayne turned the satchel upside down and dumped the money on the floor. He refilled the satchel with counterfeits from the refrigerator, replacing them with the genuine bills—at least he hoped these were genuine. By craning, Artie Constable could have seen what he was doing, but he was going fast. He clutched himself tightly beneath the breast bone with both hands. The acne on his face stood out like stigmata. A bubble broke at his lips.

Artie’s body and Shayne’s own back screened Shayne’s actions from Gold. “You son of a bitch,” Gold said faintly. “Please.”

Artie fell back. Doors were opening along the block. Women appeared on the porches. Coddington, as instructed, stayed where he was, waiting for Shayne to signal. Shayne took a gun from each of the boy’s raincoat pockets, two more from the floor of the Pinto’s front seat, and threw them into the Buick. He honked his horn and looked up at the second floor windows. When nothing happened he honked again, a long demanding blare, and Helen came out, looking mad and frightened. This time she brought Raggedy Ann.

Shayne circled the Pinto to open the door on Gold’s side. The old man was sighing heavily.

“I need some help here,” Shayne said. “I can’t carry him.”

“You bastard.”

“Don’t blame me. I didn’t shoot anybody.”

“Don’t blame you,” she said bitterly. “You really know how to spoil things, don’t you?”

Gold said feebly, “Baby, help me.”

“God, look at Artie,” the girl said.

Artie was clearly dying. His head was against Gold’s thigh. His hands fell away from the wound, which had the circumference of a clenched fist. He rolled out of the seat and lay with his neck on the knob of the stick shift.

Shayne patted Gold and took a gun out of his waistband. Only then did he unhook the belt.

“How bad is he?” the girl said.

“Let’s take him somewhere and see. Move him to my car. You carry him. I’ll carry Raggedy.” While she struggled with Gold, Shayne went to check on Sergeant Tibbett. The top barrel of the Winchester had blown apart in his face, and there was nothing anyone could do to help. The air force would give him a military funeral.

Gold was almost as limp and floppy as Helen’s long-limbed doll. She kept him on his feet and moving. A car stopped; Shayne waved it on. Gold and the girl fell together into the back seat of the Buick.

Helen saw two things, the satchel and the shotgun. Her eyes jumped to Shayne.

“Don’t grab it,” he told her. “It isn’t loaded. But the satchel is, you’ll be glad to hear. Close the door.”

“And just leave Artie—”

“Artie forgot that when you fool around with loaded guns, they sometimes go off. But you weren’t planning to take him with you, were you? Sergeant Tibbett was more mature. A much better complexion.”

She cut her eyes at Gold, to see how much of this he was comprehending. Not much, probably.

“Your father won’t care for any of this,” Shayne said.

“Don’t I know it,” she muttered, and went on, for Gold’s benefit, “Was that Tibbett in the red car? What happened, did Artie shoot him?”

Shayne gave a barking half-laugh, and drove off. Gold was waving, begging for attention.

“Wipe off the blood and slap on a few band-aids. That’s mostly shock. Nobody’s had the guts to shoot at him in years. I think you’ll find a box of Kleenex back there somewhere.”

She worked in silence while Shayne took the turn toward the ocean, then started south. Gold gave a yip of pain.

“Are you going to tell us where the hell we’re going?” she said.

“We’ll talk about that as soon as I find a place to stop. There’s a lot of picking up to do after a double-shooting, and we don’t want to spend the day answering questions, do we?”

Hearing a faint sound a moment later, he twisted the rearview mirror so he could see what was happening in the back seat. The girl was whispering into the old man’s ear. Gold’s eyes met Shayne’s. Hearing that Shayne was willing to talk was helping him recover.

Shayne swung into a two-table picnic area between the road and the ocean, and turned everything off except the tape-recorder. Gold came up on his elbows.

“How serious?” he asked the girl.

“If you’ll hold still for a minute,” she said crossly, “maybe I can tell you.”

She spat on a folded Kleenex and scrubbed at his face. He tried to push her away.

“Can you be a little more gentle?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without any water.”

“Dip it in the ocean,” Shayne suggested.

Helen considered this a not bad idea. Getting out, she crossed the strip of hard sand to the water’s edge. Shayne offered the old man his flask. Gold looked at it suspiciously, but finally took it. He touched the refrigerator with his toe.

“Any ice in this thing?”

“That hasn’t worked for weeks. Drink it straight. It’s better for you.”

“Mike Shayne,” Gold said after drinking. “One of the reasons I blew this country was to get away from you. And here you are when I get back. You’d think Dade County would be big enough so we wouldn’t keep bumping, but no.”

He handed the flask over the seat. “Well, I came close.”

Helen returned with the wet Kleenex and a piece of cloth she had torn off the tail of her denim shirt. “What have you been talking about while I was gone?”

“Nothing important,” Gold said wearily. “We don’t have secrets. We’re on opposite sides.”

“Honey, maybe you didn’t catch what Mike said back there. He’s going to start talking business in a minute.”

“It’s an old technique. That’s to get our hopes up. This car is famous—it’s heavily wired. He’s taping everything we say.”

“So? That’s for insurance. Honest,” she insisted, “he’s as big a crook as anybody. I’ve listened to my old man. Let me see your face.”

Gold offered it to her, and she cleaned him off. Apparently most of the blood had come from Artie.

“When that gun went off,” Gold said. “A double-barrelled shotgun from a range of two feet. Quite a surprise.”

“Will you hold still?”

She pulled the thread of a band-aid and slapped it on.

Gold said, “If we’re going to be talking about money, Shayne, I’d like to get out of earshot of that tape recorder. But go ahead. How much are you thinking about cutting yourself in for?”

“Half,” Shayne said. “One dollar to you, one dollar to me.” He drank from the flask before putting it away. “I don’t know what your father was talking about, Helen. I try to stay straight on everything but narcotics. That whole thing’s such a mess there’s no honest way. I think half would be fair. If I turn you in, Murray, and I don’t turn in the whole package, I’ll have rumors to cope with, and for a private detective rumors can be bad. And if I tried to rip off the whole amount, I’d have you on my back.”

“Which isn’t such a big thing as it used to be,” Gold said, “but still.”

“I’d be worrying, and I couldn’t enjoy the money. I don’t know how much there is there, but fifty percent ought to keep you going. To be realistic, how many years do you have left?”

“Eight hundred thousand bucks,” the girl said dreamily.

“Divide it in half and it’s still good bread. I’ll drop you in Key Largo and hope I never set eyes on either of you again.”

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Helen declared when Gold looked at her. “He saw the key to the boat.”

“People have been talking about Uruguay,” Shayne said.

Gold exclaimed, “That’s the thing about you, Shayne. ESP or something.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll want to take Helen, after she tried to get you killed.”

“I—!” Helen cried. “I tried to kill Murray? He’s my passport.”

“Sergeant Marian Tibbett,” Shayne said. “Same money, same boat. But much more of a fun companion for a young girl.”

“Murray, he’s just saying that to make trouble.”

Gold put his hand on her leg. “As far as I’m concerned you can come. I’ve lived with this kind of thing for a long time.”

Shayne laughed. “Murray, you’re pathetic.”

“Then let’s move,” she cried. “Open the bag and start counting.”

“Oh, there’s more,” Gold said. “This is a law and order man, basically. He wants an arrest. So we’re going to chat for a few minutes. But the kid’s right, Shayne. We don’t want to hang around all day. Who can I give you? I don’t suppose Helen’s big enough.”

“I know you’re not serious,” she said nervously.

“For my own information,” Shayne said, “who was your buyer?”

“That’s the one thing I’ll reserve. I don’t even like to mention the word.”

“Heroin.”

“That’s right—get it on tape. But that’s stale stuff. You want to get in on the big news today, and that’s not heroin and it’s not Murray Gold. I’m passé.” He linked fingers with the girl. “In more ways than one.”

“Daddy, you’re not,” she protested. “You’re just a little slow sometimes.”

“Turn on the radio, Shayne.”

Shayne flicked on the dashboard radio. It was still tuned to the FM station that carried Tim Rourke’s show. It played jazz most of the day, and that was what was being broadcast now, an old Bessie Smith single.

Gold said, sitting forward, “Is that a Miami station?”

Shayne punched a preset button and the indicator jumped. An unexcited voice was telling them what to expect in the way of weather: continued warm, a three out of ten possibility of showers.

Then: “Repeating the day’s top story. A woman has been found slain in a luxury suite at the Hotel St. Albans. Identified as Mrs. Lillian LaCroix, thirty-one, of this city. She was shot three times at close range with a heavy-caliber weapon. Robbery has been ruled out as a motive, police say. The expensively dressed Miami Beach woman was wearing a valuable watch and other jewelry, and carrying several hundred dollars in cash. The suite is registered in the name of Louis Solomon of New York, who is being sought for questioning. Further details as they come in.”

And he went into a commercial.

“Lou Solomon,” Gold said in a low voice. “What the hell.”

When he didn’t go on, Shayne reached for the dial.

“Leave it on, leave it on,” Gold said.

13

That commercial was followed by another.

“And all we’re doing is sitting here,” Helen complained.

Shayne turned down the volume. “Who’s Lou Solomon?”

“One of the big Jewish fund-raisers. Rich? It goes without saying.” He turned Helen’s wrist so he could see what her watch was telling them. “But what’s going on up there, will you kindly tell me?”

“What’s supposed to be going on?”

Helen moved restlessly. Gold shook her wrist without letting go.

“I’ll fill you in, Shayne, and when the news breaks we’ll go our separate ways. Give me a slight idea how much you know.”

“Helen told me quite a bit.”

“To get him to go, Murray!” she said. “He planted himself down as though he planned to stay all day. You were due any minute.”

“You used to be a hot pro-Israel man yourself,” Shayne said. “I seem to remember some arguments about whether or not they should take your money.”

“A long time ago,” Gold said. “And if I’d gone on acting one hundred percent pure, where would I be right now? In Ramleh prison, on indeterminate sentence, and I’d be dead in six months. I’ve got a heart condition, I’m a physical wreck. So when an Arab was willing to talk to me, I shouldn’t extend him the courtesy?”

“Murray—Daddy—” Helen said. “That’s ancient history. Tell him about it, but in a nutshell.”

“I needed their help with the bust-out, and that went off fine. And there I was, didn’t have a cent to my name, and all my friends were either scared to see me or I couldn’t find them. How I needed those Black September guys. They bought me some clothes and an airplane ticket, and they carried in a suitcase for me. But after they got over here, this is my neck of the woods and the shoe was turned around, they needed me. They had no phone numbers at all. Of course I let them think I’m bigger than I really am any more. But with help from this dear child here, I worked it. Though I’m willing to state for the tape recorder that she didn’t know she was doing anything against the law.”

“At the beginning,” Shayne said.

“She’s a bright kid,” Gold agreed, giving her leg a pat.

“Who had the idea for the kidnapping, you?”

The question embarrassed Gold slightly. “It came up. They’ve been wanting to pull some kind of trick in this country. Everything sort of fitted in. There’s this oil sheik who had a standing invitation to visit some big muckymuck in Boca Raton. They found out when the committee was having the quarterly meeting in Miami Beach, and timed it to overlap. All right!” he said defensively. “But what they don’t realize is that this won’t cut into the flow of funds at all. Wait till you see next month’s totals. Every Jew in America will bring out his checkbook. I grant you—it’ll be a big boost for the Arabs if it works.” He smiled slightly. “But not if they blow it.”

“Explain that,” Shayne said, and Helen added, “Quickly?”

“Artie and me supplied the vehicles,” Gold explained, “but before I turned them over I stuck in a couple of bombs. Timed to go off just about now.”

“The ping-pong balls!” Helen said.

“Incendiaries. You know what we’re talking about, Shayne? All the arsonists have been using them lately.”

On the radio a voice began speaking in great excitement. When Shayne turned up the sound, it proved to be merely the regular announcer praising a liquid floor wax.

“Goddamn it,” Gold said, worried. “They wouldn’t hold back a piece of news like that. They’d put it out right away.”

The girl put in, “If anything’s wrong, Murray, isn’t it all the more reason for you and I to be heading out to sea?”

“I kept hearing how everything had to be timed, to the goddamned second,” Gold said. “A guy named Rashid. I saw him work at Ramleh, and the cat is good. He’d be a colonel in any army in the world. When he said something would happen at such and such a time, that’s when it happened or some heads got chopped. We got the cars to them at a quarter to eleven. Game-time was eleven sharp.”

“I was talking to the manager of the St. A. when they walked in,” Shayne said. “Eleven o’clock straight up.”

“Eleven forty-five now,” Gold said, checking the watch. “Even if they ran into trouble right away, we ought to be hearing about it. They were going to collect everybody in Solomon’s room. Nine men on the committee, but a couple aren’t getting in till this afternoon. They had everybody’s room number. Like with the manager, they were going to take his secretary and everybody else in the office, to keep the lid on as long as they could. Phase one was fifteen minutes. If they couldn’t find somebody, forget it. Then down to the lobby for the announcement. They had a bullhorn. Rashid figured out the best place to stand. Eleven-twenty. ‘I’m Rashid Abd El-Din, known to my friends as the Palestinian Superman. The vile Jews, blah, blah, blah. We want one million apiece, and we want to see it at the airport in exactly one hour, sixty minutes. An airplane, and get it gassed up and rolled out on a runway, all by itself, with a full crew. And no monkey business or all the Jews will get killed. Which they’re used to, of course.’ Any questions? No questions. Off to the airport.”

“Taking everybody?”

“Just the committee. There were eight Arabs to start with, one kid didn’t make it in time. Just about one on one. I tried to tell them it would take over an hour to scrape up that much cash. What do you think, Shayne?”

“Six or seven million? Banks, racetracks.”

“His big point was that he didn’t want to get into one of those long negotiations, with everybody armed on both sides and getting more and more nervous. That’s why he didn’t make any demands on Israel. Everybody knows they don’t pay blackmail, period. If they didn’t have the cash by the deadline, too bad for the hostages. The hour was supposed to start at eleven-twenty. So what’s happening? I set those timers for eleven-forty, to go off about halfway between the Beach and the airport. They’re distributed like this. Three Arabs in a limousine, the rest in a hearse, two in the front seat, two in back with the Jews. They’re bowling along at fifty or sixty miles an hour. Bang. The guy who sold me the ping-pong balls said those flames are going to shoot thirty feet in the air. The explosion comes up through the floorboards and takes out the driver. They’re going to rack up, aren’t they? That takes out the limo. The hearse slams on its brakes. Thirty seconds later, another bang. I jammed the back doors so they wouldn’t lock. They fly open and six or seven Jews and two Arabs spill out on the highway. I think we can take them, if we jump fast enough. There’s going to be plenty of confusion, and that’s all to the good. The bomb in the hearse, I put it in on the right, and hopefully that’s where Rashid is going to be riding. The others aren’t in his class.”

“Murray,” the girl said admiringly, “you know you’re sort of a genius? Now can I make a suggestion? While we’re talking why don’t I divide the money?”

“Shayne wants to be in on that.”

“Get it up off the floor where I can see it,” Shayne said. “Do it by packages, throw one over and keep one.”

“And don’t try any razzle-dazzle,” Gold said. “He said half, and if we don’t give him half he’ll hold it against us.”

Shayne stepped up the volume again. Fifty minutes had now passed since the Arabs walked into Manny Farber’s office. The St. Albans was one of the long row of Collins Avenue hotels, almost as closely spaced as the two-family houses in Homestead Beach. The Fontainebleau security officer had listened intently to Shayne’s call, and had seemed to take it seriously. So where were the police?

“One for you,” the girl said. “One for us. This is fun.”

“Any ideas, Shayne?” Gold said after a moment.

“Yeah,” Shayne said slowly. “Did these guys trust you?”

“Not an inch. Trust me? You know Barney, the bondsman. They told him how he could find me, and he had a good financial reason to do it. That way I’d be tied up so I couldn’t call the cops and have them waiting at the hotel. I sneaked out of it O.K., but it damn near worked.”

“So why would they give you the right timetable?”

Gold’s eyes slitted down. “You said they put the snatch on Farber exactly at eleven.”

“But they didn’t make an announcement in the lobby at eleven-twenty, or we’d know it by now. This is a new kind of operation for them. If they’re smart they’ll try to keep it quiet until they’re gone—all the way out of the country. After they picked out the hostages they wanted, I think they left the others locked up in the hotel. Helen said that you and Rashid were looking at diagrams. He wouldn’t need diagrams if he was really planning to walk out the front door with all the guns showing.”

“They have to run a press conference somewhere, why not at the hotel? They’re perfectly safe, nobody’s going to shoot at them as long as they’ve got those hostages. Be serious, an hour isn’t a hell of a lot of time to raise six million bucks. You mentioned the racetracks. The money’s there, but somebody’s going to have to persuade those guys.”

“This is political. The Arabs didn’t come here to make money.”

“I grant you, but why would they pass up six or seven million bucks? They have expenses, like everybody.”

“Maybe their minds don’t work like yours, Murray. If they can pull it off, they’ll be famous. Money will pour in.”

“One for Mike Shayne, one for us,” Helen murmured.

Gold closed his eyes briefly, so he wouldn’t be distracted. His forehead tightened.

“Give me another jolt of cognac.”

Shayne passed him the flask. Gold drank. His eyes opened.

“Let’s don’t fuck around collecting ransom,” he said. “Kill them all.”

“They’re terrorists. One of the things terrorists do is kill people.”

“That was their first idea,” Gold went on, speaking slowly. “Wait till the chairman called the committee to order and walk in and turn the tommy guns loose. But then what? They’d be wiped out themselves. I wondered about Rashid sometimes, but the rest of them definitely didn’t want to die. And I made it clear to them that I wouldn’t go along with anything like that.”

“But you would go along with a kidnapping for ransom. So they worked up one plan for your benefit, and a real plan. They’ll keep the hostages alive as long as they have some value, and kill them in the plane.”

“Maybe,” Gold said tightly, drinking again.

“You’ve done a lousy thing here, Murray, and if they get away with it, people are going to say some unfriendly things about you.”

“Why should he care?” Helen said.

“He cares. He’s been careful with his reputation all these years, and all of a sudden he’s smuggling shit and helping a bunch of fanatics to kidnap some of the country’s top Jews. If the bombs work, fine. Good old Murray Gold. Crooked as they come, but what a conniver. The heroin won’t be mentioned—I’m being well paid to forget about that. The story would be that he heard about the plan in prison, and swindled his way in so he could blow them up at the last minute. Who knows, Murray? The government might even withdraw some of those contempt charges so you can come back and die in your home town.”

“I’m not ready to die yet,” Gold said. “Do you know what I’m starting to think? That before they went anywhere, the bastards looked under the hood and found the bombs. You’ve got a phone. Call the airport. Tell them who’s on the way.”

“And how many lives would that save? The minute the shooting starts, the hostages will get it in the head. No, let’s do some more guessing. Do they have anybody who can fly an airplane?”

Gold looked up quickly. “Goddamn it, yes. He was in on the break with us. Pilot in the Syrian air force.”

“So they won’t hijack a plane. They can steal one. At Miami International they’d have a hard time getting off the ground. Did Rashid and Sergeant Tibbett know each other?”

Gold said, “No,” but Helen contradicted him. “Yes, they did, Murray. He didn’t drive off right away that night. He waited till Marian left and they went someplace. Now there. I contributed something. Can we please get this conversation over with?”

“How much would Tibbett charge to let them into Homestead?” Shayne said.

“About three dollars and fifty cents.”

“He wasn’t as trashy as all that,” Helen said. “All he wanted was a chance at some illegal bread, and you’re in no position to criticize, Mr. Murray Gold.”

Shayne, abstractedly, had been stacking the packages of money as they rained down on the seat beside him. Now he picked out one of the hundred dollar bills and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. With an abrupt change of manner, he looked at it more closely.

“Shayne?” Gold said, watching.

“Maybe I made this deal too fast,” Shayne said. He took a genuine hundred from his wallet and looked at the two bills together, showing more and more concern. Gold leaned forward. The girl caught the sudden tension and looked from one to the other. Shayne grunted.

“You’ve been taken, Murray. These are rags.” Gold snatched the bills out of Shayne’s hands. “Impossible.”

He put on his close-range glasses and compared them, moving his head in quick birdlike pecks. “I don’t see anything wrong. I know a queer bill when I see one.”

“Look at Ben Franklin’s collar.”

Using a pencil, Shayne pointed out the small imperfection Coddington had shown him. Gold picked it up at once. Swearing, he crumpled the counterfeit in his fist.

“Daddy!” Helen cried. “Is it true? After all this?”

“That’s what happens when you do business with crooks,” Shayne said. “They aren’t worrying about keeping your good will. You’ll be in Uruguay.”

“I haven’t left yet,” Gold said in a low voice.

Helen plunged into the open satchel and pulled her hands out filled with money. “It’s no good? It’s counterfeit? Murray, you goddamn old fart, couldn’t you check?”

“So our deal’s off,” Shayne said. “I could probably get five or ten thousand for my share, but that’s too much risk for too little money. Sorry, Murray. I’ll have to take you in.”

“But it’s weird!” Helen said. “Artie’s dead. Marian’s dead, I guess. All those poor Jews. And we get paid off in funny money.”

After a moment, Gold gave one of his small shrugs. “I don’t like to be conned, but at least I’m out of that goddamn prison. I’ve had some excitement and a little sex. I knew the odds.” He changed glasses. “Now what are we going to do about these Black September bastards?”

“From here, there isn’t much we can do.”

“I can’t do anything,” Gold said briskly. “I’m old and slow. You’ll have to beat them to Homestead and knock them off, one at a time.”

“Seven Arabs, armed with GI issue submachine guns.”

“Did I say it would be easy?” Gold said.

There was a sudden flurry of action further along the beach. Gold turned his head sharply. Shayne followed the look, and saw a man and a woman in a silent struggle at the edge of the water. The man was trying to break her grip on a long-barrelled pistol. It was Coddington.

There was a bright dancing haze behind them, and until they staggered further up on the sand Shayne didn’t recognize the woman.

“Esther Landau,” he said.

“Who?” Gold said sharply. “Who?”

14

Shayne had turned away from the struggling pair to look at Gold, and the old man’s tone told him one more thing he wanted to know: that the woman who had been calling herself Esther Landau was actually somebody else.

“That’s the one,” Shayne said. “All the way from Israel, looking for you, Murray.”

He slid out of the Buick and moved toward the water. There were muscles concealed under Coddington’s fat, and he was usually able to disarm a slightly built woman, even when she didn’t fight entirely fair. Her gun came around, and Shayne dodged. The pistol discharged harmlessly into the sand.

She brought her knee up hard. Coddington, though hurt, managed to hang on. An instant later the gun went flying. She lowered her head and butted him under the jaw. He fell away from her into the water.

She scrambled away, to get to the gun before Shayne arrived. She was wearing only one shoe, and the heel sank in the sand. Coddington caught her ankle and pulled her down beside him.

On his knees, he cuffed her twice, to set her up for the punch. She kicked him with her pointed toe, and the punch was never delivered. Grappling, they rolled down the incline. A breaking wave carried them out into less shallow water. Coddington, finally, managed to drive his fist into her face. But she seemed very strong.

Shayne decided that with only one usable arm, he would just get in the way. He watched for a moment, scraping his chin with his thumbnail, and went to retrieve the pistol. Her purse was further up the beach, in loose sand. He picked it up. He looked back, but the two people in the water were fully engaged with each other. He found a spare clip in the purse and chucked out the top round, finding, as he suspected, that the clip was loaded with blanks. He cleared the chamber and switched clips.

The man and the woman were still rolling, unable to break each other’s hold. It seemed to be a standoff. Coddington, blowing, got her face down in the wet sand, but his hands slipped and she wriggled free.

Shayne left the purse and the pistol at the water’s edge and waded out after a retreating wave. He seized the woman’s wrist with his one good hand and twisted. She snapped her teeth at him. When she understood who it was, the fight stopped abruptly. Coddington had a hard swing under way. It landed, and sent her down with a splash. He stayed on hands and knees, panting.

Another wave nearly knocked him over. Floundering, he said in disgust, “I’ll have to spend more time in the gym. A hundred and ten pound female. She damn near whipped me.”

“She’s had basic training,” Shayne said. “It’s all right, we’re all on the same side.”

Wincing, Coddington adjusted himself inside his wet clothes. “Why didn’t you tell me three minutes ago? I think she crippled me.”

He had lost his own gun during the fight. Shayne picked it out of the water and stuck it in his sling while Coddington was washing the blood off his face. The woman stood up, lost her footing and went down again. Then she stamped out onto dry sand, soaked to the skin and furious. She shook her wet hair, sending water flying. One of Coddington’s swings had caught her in the eye, and it was already beginning to puff.

“Why did you come jumping out on me like that?” she demanded. “Who are you? Who is he?” she asked Shayne. “Is that Murray Gold in your car?”

Her wet dress was molded to her body. Except for her injured eye, she looked very good.

“Well?” she said. “Is that Murray Gold? What is taking place here behind my back?”

“It’s Gold,” Shayne said. “But he’s been shot. He’s stopped running for the time being. How did you know where to look for me?”

She pulled at her dress to keep it from adhering so closely.

“My gun,” she said, dropping it in her purse. “I couldn’t fall asleep in the motel, after all. I did considerable telephoning. I learned about Homestead Beach from the mother of Helen. The moment I arrived, the guns went off. You drove away with Gold and the girl. That seemed peculiar to me, and it still seems peculiar! There he was, the evil man Gold, helpless, why didn’t you wait for the police? I really know nothing about you, do I? And the things one hears about American private detectives—Has he offered you a bribe to let him escape? Have you accepted? When you stopped here, talking, I became impatient and tried to come close on foot, so I could hear. And then this man—”

“Henry Coddington,” Shayne said. “Miami Police Department, plainclothes. Reasonably honest, as far as I know.”

“Thanks,” Coddington said. “If I spoiled anything here, I’m sorry. She had the gun out, and I thought I’d better grab her. Have you got my .38?”

“Yeah,” Shayne said. “I’ll hold it for now. I don’t want anybody else shot.”

They were returning in a group to Shayne’s car.

“Some crazy things have been happening,” Shayne told the woman. “Murray’s been having second thoughts, and I think he’s going to help us.”

They reached the Buick. Helen, crying hopelessly, was alone in the back seat. Murray Gold was gone.

“I thought things were going to be different,” Helen said, blaming Shayne. “It’s all going to be exactly the same. Just like before.”

“Not quite,” Shayne said. “You’ll be on probation if you’re lucky. If you aren’t lucky you’ll be in jail. Where’s Murray?”

The woman beside Shayne took a quick step, and saw the packages of money scattered about on the front and back seats. She turned on Shayne. “You let him buy you. Where is he?”

As though in answer to her question, an engine coughed and took hold. The sound came from around the bend to the north, and was followed by a shriek of tires as a car peeled out on the highway, being pushed to the extreme limit of the gear. Shayne and Coddington looked at each other.

“That sounds like my Mustang,” Coddington said. “She starts to shimmy at seventy. We can catch him.”

“Hell with it,” Shayne said. “We’ve got better things to do than chase an old man off the expressway. We can pick him up later.”

“He took one of the guns,” Helen said, “so you’d better watch out. He’s meaner than he looks.”

The woman said incredulously, “You’re letting him escape! So you can keep the money.”

“Money,” Helen said bitterly. “That’s a laugh.”

Suddenly furious, Shayne pulled the car door open. “You’re a mess. Climb the hell out and hit the road before I lose my temper and work you over.”

“You big tough men.”

Shayne grabbed her shirt and pulled hard. The others stayed out of it. Helen fell in the sand. He faked a kick and she moved out of range in a flurry of arms and legs. She stood up, wiping at her wet face.

“It’s so damned unfair. What’s the point of trying? All right, if that’s the way you feel.”

“Damn right it’s the way I feel. I don’t like you and I don’t like the rest of your family.”

She turned. Shayne aimed another kick at her, catching her neatly between the over-ripe buttocks, lifting her off the dirt and assisting her some inches in the direction of the highway. She yelped and ran.

“You’re forgetting something,” Shayne called.

He reached into the car for her Raggedy Ann doll and threw it after her. She came back to get it, ready to jump and dodge, and then started off along the road, crying. When a car approached she stuck up her thumb, but no sensible motorist would pick her up until she did something to improve her appearance.

While this was going on, the woman was gathering the packages of bills and stuffing them into the open satchel.

“I’ve been wanting to kick that girl since the minute I saw her,” Shayne said. “It’s the one satisfying thing I’ve done all day. What we’ve got to do now—”

“Mike,” Coddington warned.

The woman backed out of the car, closing the satchel, and pointed her long pistol at Shayne.

“I want to have nothing more to do with you people, my dear Mr. Shayne. I don’t trust you any longer. So you are above being bribed? Not at all, here is the evidence of it, money being counted. I see that I must pursue my quarry single-handed. All Americans are thieves.”

“Do you think she’s serious with the gun?” Coddington said, his hands out from his sides.

“You handled her the last time,” Shayne said. “Let me do this one.”

The woman backed away. “Please. You think I’m not serious.” Groping inside the front seat, she pulled out the ignition key and scaled it into the ocean. “I am serious, serious enough to shoot you both. I will permit nothing further to go wrong, or return home with my mission unaccomplished. Stand still.”

Shayne grinned and started forward. She backed off another step, and when he kept coming, she fired.

He looked at her blankly and fell to his knees. He balanced like that for an instant, then toppled over, careful to fall on his good arm.

She swung the gun toward Coddington. “I have more bullets. Perhaps you will now believe me.”

“I believe you.”

She moved backward. Helen, on the highway, watched open-mouthed. A dozen steps from the car, the woman began running sideward, throwing quick glances back to be sure Coddington stayed in the open.

The detective started to move.

“Jesus, Mike—”

“I’m O.K. Blanks.”

Coddington swore savagely. “I keep forgetting this is a Shayne operation. Blanks—great. I wish you’d told me. My stomach turned over. What a lousy feeling. Turned completely over.”

When the woman passed out of sight, Shayne pushed himself up. A car was heard to start. Coddington was walking toward the water. Shayne called him back.

“I saw where the key went in,” Coddington said. “I think I can find it. Don’t feel sorry for me—I’m already wet.”

“We don’t need it.”

Getting into the Buick, Shayne reached under the dashboard to the concealed by-pass switch and snapped on the ignition.

15

Rashid Abd El-Din permitted himself to feel a glimmer of satisfaction. He knew he had to ration this feeling, because it was not a moment to relax. Trouble could be waiting around the next turn. But so far these Americans had been as spreadable as butter. Some he had had to buy. They had sold themselves without hesitation. Those he had had to frighten had turned pale on command, sweat had stood out on their foreheads, their legs had changed from flesh to cotton. This had all been highly satisfactory to him. He had always disliked the idea of Americans, and now he found that he disliked them as intensely in person.

He was tooling along the Expressway in the comfortable front seat of the big stolen hearse. The limousine, carrying three of his comrades, with their guns on the back seat amid bunches of gladioli, was twenty meters ahead. They drove with their headlights on, which Rashid had been told was the custom in American funeral processions. It was a fine sunny morning, too warm for neckties—the kind of weather Rashid preferred. A stately blimp drifted overhead. The ugly city stretched away on either hand. Great grotesque signs were everywhere. The wealth of this country was unbelievable, sickening.

He lit a kif cigarette, and sucked fragrant smoke into his lungs. Fuad Sabri, the driver, said nothing but his throat worked with desire. Rashid laughed and passed the cigarette to him.

“Only one breath for you,” Rashid said. “One long breath. You must keep watching the mirror for police or soldiers, the road for holes, the other traffic. I have a few minutes to think about nothing until I tighten up again for the assault at the airport.”

“Assault? But I thought the gate was to be unlocked.”

“We must be ready for accidents.”

Taking the cigarette back, he drew on it deeply. He was filled with respect for his bravery and cleverness, the bravery and cleverness of his comrades and friends. With such fighters, success was sure.

“You spoke of police,” Fuad said softly, his eyes moving to the mirror.

A gray vehicle with a revolving beacon came up fast on their left. Rashid reached down to caress the tommy gun wedged alongside his leg. The police car passed, passed the limousine, and continued to hurtle along the highway after somebody else.

Rashid pitched the half-smoked cigarette out the window. When they were safely in the airplane, streaking across the Atlantic toward home and the embraces of the camp women, when all the Jews were dead and the news of their coup was making its way into the consciousness of the world, that would be the time to congratulate themselves.

And yet it was true, so far his men had behaved superbly, with exemplary discipline. He had proved his major contention, that enemy leaders could be abducted from a crowded hotel in an American resort city at the height of the season, with little or no commotion. Highly placed comrades had refused to believe it could be done. He had succeeded in persuading them, finally, that even if something went amiss, he could fall back on their usual confused scenario: the political harangues delivered through a bullhorn, the hoods and the face masks, highly publicized threats and demands, and then the increasing strain through the tense hours of negotiation, and finally success. Or capitulation. Or death.

But that, some of the theoreticians argued, was the proper object of such an action—to die, to show the masses that there were some Arabs, at least, who had kept the early fervor. Rashid put it to those who had been selected to go with him. To a man, they had voted his way, a quick pounce, a clean escape.

And it had worked like a daydream, everything to the minute. He had made a deliberate exertion, not to let his judgment be affected by contempt for these Jews, for the ways they chose to enjoy themselves in that gaudy hotel. The lobby was a parvenu’s idea of luxury—goldfish inside a glass wall, machine-made carpet, a glare of light, fat ugly people. Heavily creamed, they lay elbow to fat elbow on chairs around a pool. They played cards. They fell asleep reading magazines. And when they saw the nakedness of the guns—the fear on those buttery faces had been like an intoxication to Rashid, a happiness.

It couldn’t be done? They had herded nineteen people together without causing a ripple. Eighteen, minus the blonde whore, had crowded together into two elevators. Each time they stopped on the way down, the people who had signalled stepped back to wait for the next car, seeing that these were clearly too full to carry anybody else. The prisoners stood in cowed silence, their fat necks trembling.

And then the elevator Rashid was in stopped at the lobby level.

“Stay in your places,” he told the passengers quietly.

He had pressed the button for the basement, and while the electronic controls thought it over before deciding that it was correct to continue, the prisoners looked out into the lobby, in which brightly-clad tourists were coming and going as usual, checking in, checking out. Whores waited for victims. Jewelled old ladies sat like vegetables. And if only one of the prisoners had burst out of the car, shouting, the situation would have blown apart. The Arab raiders were outnumbered three-to-one. Each had a responsibility for one of the main Jews. The gun was in Rashid’s right hand, the bullhorn in his left. He had his speech by heart. “Americans! Jews! We are Arabs of the Black September, we demand the release of forty-three of our comrades in Israeli jails—”

It was a delicate moment. Rashid, for one, never doubted that their prisoners would stand quietly like cattle, as their relatives had once gone so unresistingly to the gas chambers. The children clung to their mothers’ clothing. Fear was written in plain letters on each face. If any of the lobby guests noticed anything odd or menacing, they assumed it would be taken care of by someone else, and continued toward the cabanas or one of the many bars for a pre-lunch martini. They were vacationing. Melodrama was far from their minds.

The doors closed. They descended to the basement, where the other group was waiting. Reconnaissance, carried out by Rashid himself the previous afternoon, had disclosed a utility room with only one door and tiny windows near the top of the cinderblock walls. He had bought a hasp and a staple at a hardware store, and installed it. One of his men today had brought a padlock. He ordered the committee members to stand apart, and drove all the rest of the prisoners into the room.

“Make no noise above a whisper, you people,” he said, “if you want your men to live. That is the best advice I can give you.”

Sayyid closed the door and clapped on the padlock. The Jew Weinberger, whose blonde doxie had been executed by Rashid as a way of establishing his control, had a dangerous look. Rashid had already punched into his inner computer the notation that he should be careful with this one, and he touched him with the muzzle of the tommy gun.

“What is six million dollars? You can raise it with one advertisement in the New York Times.” Lou Solomon, the oldest man there, according to his dossier a famous doctor, said peaceably, “It’s a humiliation, Andrew, but do we have a choice?”

“This could be a lynching,” Weinberger said.

A lynching, exactly. Rashid knew the word, but it hadn’t occurred to him before. He said politely, “This way, gentlemen.”

They entered a dank corridor and soon were climbing a flight of cement stairs. Sayyid, two steps ahead, halted the group’s movement with a gesture, and went on into the pantry adjoining the kitchens. Finding it empty, he waved the Jews to the service entrance.

Now came the difficult job of loading them one by one into the hearse. The Arabs stationed themselves at intervals. They could be seen from the beach, and it was important to hurry. One of their prisoners collapsed, and had to be lifted. Rashid saved Weinberger for last, and used two men to drive him. An absurd but somehow threatening figure in his flowered beach clothes, Weinberger looked at the guns, at the bathers throwing Frisbees on the sand, and climbed in without help.

“Shoot that one first if there’s trouble,” Rashid told a guard.

The two vehicles kept close together through the Collins Avenue traffic, and presently were crossing the causeway to Miami. It was 11:28. A textbook operation, swift and efficient.

They put on speed after reaching the expressway, but kept in the right-hand lane. They passed the international airport, a large graveyard and crematorium.

“They’re fools,” Fuad said suddenly. “And these people are millionaires? I didn’t expect them to disgust me so much. If you want to know my opinion, I wish it had been less simple.”

“There is more to come.”

“Who would suspect we are about to steal an airplane of the mighty United States Air Force? I predict it will go on being simple, easy and simple. And when we get back we will have difficulty persuading the women that we were ever in danger.”

And that, of course, called down the lightning.

The limousine blew up. Rashid’s first improbable thought was that it had run over a mine. The front end rose from the pavement, the trunk sprang open. They were travelling at eighty kilometers an hour. One wheel blew off, and rolled away into a tomato field, bowling down staked plants. Fuad, in the hearse, was riding his brake. The crippled limousine swerved, crossing in front of another rapidly moving car. Horn blaring, that car managed to squeeze through the gap between limousine and hearse. The limousine struck the divider and lost a second wheel. The long, shiny, ostentatious car bumped down and turned over, sliding on its side, rotating, for another fifty feet before it came to rest, on fire.

Rashid hadn’t been using his belt, and he was thrown forward against the unpadded dashboard. He was yelling. The brakes grabbed unevenly, taking the hearse onto the rough shoulder. For an instant, unaccustomed to the behavior of big cars under stress, Fuad lost command and nearly piled them up among the tomatoes. The hearse rocked and shook and came back, missing the wreck by millimeters.

“Gold did this!” Rashid yelled. “A bomb—”

He spun out of the hearse before it was completely at rest, yelling at Fuad to pull the hood-latch. The hearse had come about broadside to the traffic, blocking both lanes. Fuad was unable to understand. In mild shock, he stared ahead, gripping the wheel. Rashid hammered on the hood, then came back and punched him in the face through the open window.

Still Fuad couldn’t make himself understand what the leader wanted. Rashid pulled the door open and hunted for the inside latch. He yanked it. Running back, he found the outside release, and the hood snapped up, like an animal opening its jaws.

He was fighting panic. The immense engine was steaming and clicking. He had no time, absolutely no time at all. There were hundreds of tubes, wires, connections, coiling and doubling back. Then he saw a black cancerous growth taped to the fuel line as it came into the fuel pump from beneath. It was ticking faintly.

He scratched frantically at the tape with his fingernail, without finding the juncture. He tried to pull it loose, but merely endangered the fuel-line connection. Inside the lump, nearly concealed by the tape, he caught a glint of white plastic: some kind of small ball.

Fuad had finally released the steering wheel and come out of the hearse. He saw Rashid under the hood, struggling. His brain unfroze. An open knife jumped into his hand.

“Here.”

Rashid snatched it away and sawed through the tape. The device came free in his hand. Whirling in one quick motion, he flicked it away. If he had taken time to cock his arm, they would have been blown apart. He threw it like the plateshaped objects the Americans played with on the beach, and it went off in the air above the tomatoes. A cone of liquid flame poured to the ground.

The force of the blast tore the buttons off Rashid’s shirt and tumbled him into Fuad’s arms. One of the armed Arabs had jumped down from the rear of the hearse. Rashid shouted at him to stay where he was, and ran toward the wreck.

Two of the three Arabs had been thrown clear. Sayyid, the young student, lay huddled at the edge of the road, his clothing torn, without his gun, mumbling to himself in Arabic. The driver, nearby, was burning. Rashid tore off his own coat and beat out the flames. The third Arab was still in the limousine.

Rashid called for Solomon, the Jewish doctor, to look at the burned man. One look was enough.

“If you can get him to a hospital in five minutes, maybe,” Solomon said. “There’s one in Coral Gables. Otherwise no.”

“A hospital? Obviously not,” Rashid said. “Leave him.”

16

Michael Shayne was twelve minutes from Homestead Air Base.

Coddington drove, having the use of both arms. Shayne opened the phone and his operator tried once more to get into the police switchboards. They were still blocked. But she found Tim Rourke, still in the News city room. It was one minute before twelve, nearly an hour since the beginning of the Arab action.

“Have you heard anything out of the ordinary from the St. Albans?” Shayne said.

“You mean the call-girl killing?”

Blinking his lights, Coddington roared past a slow-moving pickup. Shayne talked for a moment, omitting Murray Gold and condensing the remainder of the story to a series of quick headlines.

“Mike, is this all true?”

“Yeah, believe me. I can’t get through to the cops. I think the Arabs are heading for Homestead, and I may be ahead of them. But not by much. I can’t take time to do any more phoning. You do it from Miami.”

“You want me to call the base and tell them Arab hijackers are heading their way? Who’s going to believe me? I don’t believe it myself yet.”

“Was that woman in the St. A. shot with a tommy gun?”

“That’s what they say, but Mike—”

“Hotel thieves don’t use tommy guns. You have to be very, very careful. You don’t have more than ten or eleven minutes. If the sirens all go off at once, those hostages are going to be murdered. That may happen anyway, but let’s see if we can avoid it.”

“Don’t worry about sirens. Remember Pearl Harbor, man. They didn’t believe anything was happening that day until it was all over.”

“I don’t know about the command structure. But get the commanding officer and don’t talk to anybody else.”

“It’s going to sound like a crank call. You don’t want the sirens. What do you want, sharpshooters?”

“To be ready, in case. It won’t be a frontal attack on the main gate. They’ve bought their way in. Somewhere, in one of the hangars, there’s a plane that’s fueled up and ready to fly. I’ll look for it. I want to be left absolutely alone.”

“Mike, this may not be the time for one-man heroics. You’ve got a broken arm.”

“I’ve got a helper, and I’m about to offer him combat pay. I’ll say this again. Don’t pass on the message unless you’re sure of your man. If they move too soon, the wrong people will die, and I could be included. If one of the hangars opens and a plane rolls out, I don’t want it to get off the ground. If it gets off the ground, I want them to be ready to shoot it down.”

“I’ll try,” Rourke said, still doubtful. “But in my experience with the air force, these things take more than ten minutes. Anything else?”

“Do that first, and then get hold of Gentry. An oil sheik is visiting somebody in Boca Raton, probably Harvey West. I want a woman in his party. I don’t know her name, but she has a mouse under one eye, and it’s recent. They may be about to leave. I want her arrested, it doesn’t matter for what. If I’m a casualty down here, I don’t know how anybody’s going to put this all together, but that’s all I have time for now.”

They passed a sign welcoming them to Homestead Air Base. Instead of continuing to the main gate, they turned off along a side road paralleling the security fence.

“I heard you mention a combat bonus,” Coddington said.

“Five hundred if any shots are fired. Five hundred for each wound. In case of death, five thousand to your widow. That’s if I’m still alive myself to sign the check.”

“You’re so encouraging, Mike. But I accept. This is a novelty for me, because I haven’t fired my revolver once in the last nine years. And that time was a mistake, I hit an innocent woman in the ankle. Tell me how I’m going to know the good guys from the bad guys.”

“The bad guys have the submachine guns. We’ll be ad libbing most of this. If it looks too rough we can leave it to the Air Force.”

“Who’re in the business. Who have the fire power.”

“But who may be taking a nap after lunch.”

“True.”

There were side gates along the perimeter at half-mile intervals. As they came to each, Coddington jumped down and examined the fastenings. The big gate at the extreme end of the field, like the others, was secured by a heavy chain, but one of the links had been burned through, and the pieces had been fastened back together with copper wire. Coddington unwound the wire, and opened the gate. Shayne had moved behind the wheel. He drove through. Coddington rewired the chain.

“If anybody asks,” Coddington said, getting in, “what are we doing driving down a runway in a civilian Buick?”

“Let’s hope nobody asks. The only unit still operating here is the Caribbean Patrol. But you’re right, they can see us from the tower. There’s a clip board in back. We’d better be making an inspection.”

He stopped. Coddington found the clip-board, walked out in front of the car and stamped on the concrete. He pretended to jot something down, stepped off ten paces and stamped again.

Shayne was laughing when he came back. “What the hell was that?”

“Testing the surface. I want to see how it’s holding up after all that rain.”

They continued toward the hangar area, stopping again to allow Coddington to repeat his little ritual. Two airplanes were parked on taxi-strips near the control tower, but there was no activity around them, and no other planes were going out or coming in. There was a hum of insects.

“This place is dead,” Coddington said.

Approaching the hangars, Shayne drove more slowly. The ribbed buildings, blank-faced, crouched in the weeds—including Shayne noticed, a stand of marijuana, not quite ready for harvest. The whole place seemed abandoned, like a mining town after the ore is gone.

“The second one?” Coddington said.

A thin gap showed between the electrically-operated doors. A block of wood kept them from closing all the way.

Coddington entered by an unlocked door. He looked out in a moment, and made a V sign with spread fingers.

The doors rolled back. As soon as the Buick was inside, Coddington reversed the controls and they closed again, but again they were prevented from engaging by the wooden block.

In the gloom, four enormous four-engined cargo planes were parked nose-to-tail. Shayne left the Buick in the darkness beneath one of the wings. A medium-sized airplane, with two engines, had been pulled out of line. A power cart was in position under its starboard engine, lines and air hose already hooked up. The plane was an unfamiliar type to Shayne, probably an attack-bomber, with rocket tubes hanging from the wings, bomb-bay doors, a cannon in the tail.

Coddington craned up at it. “If we can find some ammunition we won’t have to worry about submachine guns.”

Shayne checked their armament. He had two pistols of his own, a .357 and a .38. Coddington had a .38. Then there were the two .38’s Shayne had taken from Artie Constable, the two extra guns he had found in the Pinto, and the double-barrelled Winchester.

“Not enough,” Coddington said. “We’re outgunned. Take your time. Work out something tricky.”

Using a pencil flash, Shayne opened the power cart and examined its electrical system. There were four heavy batteries, powering a blower which would force air into the airplane’s turbine starter, activating a compressor. After the engine took hold, connection with the power cart would be maintained until the airplane’s own generators were charging. Shayne loosened the connections and reversed the cables. Then he climbed into the plane.

On a combat mission, it probably carried a five-man crew. Shayne looked it over thoroughly. The clutter in the main compartment was carefully organized. The communications man had a corner, the navigator another. Off the narrow companion-way leading to the tail gunner’s station, he found a stainless steel lavatory. He examined the layout again, and made his preparations. He emptied a canvas map case and replaced the maps with five of his hand-guns, retaining only the .357. He hung the case from a bracket over the navigator’s table. He ripped out a length of wire from the communications board, attached one end to the map case and threaded the wire along the bulkhead to the lavatory, where he had decided to conceal himself.

He returned to the open hatch. Coddington, below, was waiting for instructions.

“They’ll have to divide up when they start the engines,” Shayne said. “Two men on the ground, the rest in the plane. Find a place where you can cover the power cart. Let me make the first move. The two outside men are yours. When the shooting starts, try to get them both.”

“To kill?”

“Damn right to kill. One tommy gun in action is too many.”

17

The child-size coffin, set crosswise in the back of the hearse, separated the Jews from their armed captors. The Jews were sitting hip to hip in two rows, with those in front holding the legs of those behind. There was a carpet, but the steel floor was directly beneath it. It was a jolting ride. It had started badly, and was likely to end badly.

Andrew Weinberger, after the killing in the hotel room, had been sure that if they did as they were told, they would all die. For an instant, blinded by rage, he had almost lunged for the killer’s gun, to kill the man with it or be killed himself. But the room was full of people; others would have been killed as well. He caught Lillian as she fell, and some of her blood was still on his clothes and hands. She was already dead, he thought, when he laid her on the sofa, wishing—it was a strange wish, one he knew he would never forget—that it was his wife lying there, not this stranger. Ten minutes earlier, he had been inside her. She had enjoyed it, as she enjoyed most things in her life. When the Arabs entered, she had looked years older. He realized that he had never seen her without a smile. Their relationship had been based on pleasure and shared jokes. He regretted bitterly that he had never seen her real face until a moment before she died.

At first, hardly aware of what was happening, he went where the guns pointed him. In the hotel basement, he began to return to life. He saw the gleam of contempt in the Arab’s eyes, the sneer, when he spoke of the multi-million dollar ransom. The sneer, translated, said: “A million apiece. To Shylocks like these, it would be inconceivable that anyone could throw away a chance to obtain such magnificent sums. But we are men of the desert. Money is unimportant to us. We’ll talk about ransom, and rub thumb and forefinger together in the old gesture, and keep the Jews docile and quiet so we can kill them at our convenience.”

As the hearse moved away, Weinberger silently called the roll.

He started with Lou Solomon, the chairman. Solomon had slowed down since he stopped opening hearts. His physical movements were slower, he forgot things he was told. But he had seen considerable blood in his life, and he was no longer very impressed by it. His wife was dead. His children were cool to him. Crowded into the corner, he seemed indifferent, almost asleep. But as he felt Weinberger’s look, his eyelids came up.

“I’m digging you, Andy,” he said, surprisingly; he had never before called Weinberger Andy.

A gun moved; they had been told to be silent. Weinberger’s hand tightened on Manny Farber’s leg, and he felt the muscle tighten in response. Farber had been a boy in Belgium when the Nazis entered his country. Relatives in the countryside kept him out of harm’s way until the last months of the war, while his parents and his older brothers and sisters perished. To succeed in the hotel business, amiability is required, and Farber was excessively amiable. He had a bad habit of tapping people continually while he talked to them. But a year or two earlier, he and Weinberger had sat up late drinking, and the amiable mask had slipped. His main regret, Farber had said, was that he had never been tested, he allowed himself to be blown by the winds. He had organized guns for Israel in the early days, but at no danger to himself. He would never know if he was worth something or nothing.

The others? Bernard Marx was a sick man, with a single kidney, in pain most of the time. The other two, Joe Rachlis and Lawrence Hill, had made their money in family businesses, and rarely opened their mouths in committee. Rachlis was in good physical shape, but he was also the most frightened.

They made the right-angle turn at Miami International, and headed south. Weinberger wondered at first if a light plane was waiting for them—or possibly the talk about planes had been another deception, and the Arabs were hoping to leave by boat. But as they continued, clipping along at sixty or seventy miles an hour, he thought of Homestead. He tried to judge the mileage, but his mind was moving more rapidly than the vehicles.

And then there was the sound of an explosion ahead of them and the brakes went on hard. The coffin slammed against Weinberger’s knees. One of the Arabs lost his hold on his gun. His comrade came forward, so tightly tuned that if any of the hostages had tried for the gun he would have slaughtered them all. A look flashed between Weinberger and Lawrence Hill. Hill was a clothing manufacturer with spindly legs under a businessman’s paunch. Thick-lensed glasses made him look like a deepwater fish. Even so, he came within a tick of grabbing for the gun. They skidded to a stop and the door flew open. They saw the limousine burning. The guard picked up his gun and jumped down. There was another bang and Rashid appeared, running. When Solomon was called out to look at the charred Arab, he looked grave, but gave Weinberger a lifted eyebrow when he came back in. Two Arabs less. Now it was six to five, in the Jews’ favor. However, the Arabs still had the guns.

After a time they turned off the expressway. The new road was bumpy and high-crowned. Soon they stopped. A gate was heard to clang open. Homestead? It had to be Homestead, Weinberger decided, but not the main entrance. And that removed the last possibility that their captors meant to trade them for an airplane. It was to be a theft, not a deal. Did the other Jews understand? Marx and Rachlis, no. The others, at least partially.

Solomon said, “Soon.”

They drove for another moment, and stopped again. Weinberger heard an electronic murmur. They moved forward. The light changed from bright to dim. Then the Arab leader was ordering them to dismount.

They stumbled out into a great murky hangar, lit only by shafts of mote-filled light from above. A plane faced the doors, ready to accept power.

Weinberger counted Arabs. He had been right: there were five. They were alert now, and for an instant, he despaired. When the shots were fired, there would be a quick clattering echo, and then silence. No one would hear.

Had the moment of death arrived? Weinberger murmured in Yiddish, “We must move together.”

A gun caught him in the mouth and knocked out two front teeth. They were on edge, these people.

“Shoot us, get it over with,” Manny Farber said in English.

“You are hostages for money,” Rashid said. “This was explained to you.”

“Bullshit,” Weinberger said. “The only question is, how long do you need us?”

His mouth was full of blood, and the words were garbled. Going limp, he fell to his knees and began to wail like a hysterical woman. Hill did the same, then Solomon. Rashid approached, in a fury. If the barrel had come down toward him, Weinberger was ready to jump. It was the butt, however; it hit him on the side of the head and knocked him over.

“Walk.”

So they were going to be kept alive, as a bargaining counter, until the plane was in the air. Weinberger stumbled to the steps, continuing to pray aloud, and made it hard for the Arabs. Solomon, the last, forced them to carry him.

The Jews were herded into one end of the crowded compartment. Solomon staggered, took two steps and fell toward the nearest guard. The second Arab shouted in Arabic and ripped off four shots. Weinberger darted, but the Arab jumped back and brought his gun around. Now a third Arab was in the compartment. Solomon, down, said in Yiddish, “I will make him shoot at me again. Then everyone together.”

Rashid was shouting from beneath. One of the Arabs entered the cockpit. There was a thump behind Weinberger. A kind of cloth bag had been jarred loose and fallen onto an instrument table. It was a miracle. He had been praying at random, merely to make noise, but one of the prayers had been answered. He saw a gun.

He drifted over to the table and rested one hip on it. Manny Farber walked toward the open door. The guard shouted, “Stand still or I shoot.”

Farber turned back, and Weinberger fitted his hand around the gun. Although he had never before touched a gun, his finger instinctively found the trigger. He shot the guard in the head.

The Arab tumbled backward down the steps, taking his gun with him. The other Arab whirled. The compartment filled with blast and concussion, as though the plane had been blown apart, and the guard went flying, jerking his arms almost comically, like a puppet out of control.

A voice said evenly in English, “All of you down.”

A tall redheaded man, with one arm in a sling, was standing at the bottom of the compartment. He had a double-barreled shotgun. His right shoulder was turned toward them, the shotgun barrels resting on his cast.

Weinberger was between the redheaded stranger and the cockpit. He dropped as though shot himself, and pulled Farber down.

The pilot appeared. His gun was up, but before he could fire, the shotgun roared again. The pilot went back hard against the instrument panel.

“Mike Shayne,” Farber said.

“How’re you doing, Manny?” The redhead broke the shotgun and reloaded. “Now we’ve got guns for everybody. There are a couple more pistols in the bag.”

A revolver shot sounded outside, followed by a burst of submachine gunfire. Bullets tore through the skin of the plane. Weinberger picked up one of the Arabs’ guns and started for the door. Shayne ordered him back.

“There’s no hurry. They’re the ones in trouble now.” He grinned. “What kept you? I was beginning to think you wouldn’t get here.”

“We were beginning to think we wouldn’t get here alive,” Weinberger said. “I’m glad to meet you, Shayne.”

“How many are still out there?”

“Two.”

“We can handle two. Manny, you watch the door.”

Shayne entered the cockpit carefully. Weinberger followed, unable to hold still. Through the curved windshield, he looked across to a catwalk on the nearest wall. A fat man in loose clothes crouched on it, sighting with a pistol resting on the iron railing. He tightened visibly, fired twice, then jumped back into the shadows. Somebody yelled. A submachine gun, thrown or dropped, skidded across the floor. Another gun fired from directly underneath the plane.

“That locates him,” Shayne said.

He called Hill, and posted him in the cockpit. He crossed the main compartment, stepping over bodies, and went down a short ladder into the bomb-bay. Nothing happened for a moment. Looking down from above, Weinberger heard a grinding sound, and saw the belly-doors slowly open. Rashid, below, looked up and fired. Shayne was back out of sight, against the curving wall. He reached out and fired one barrel without aiming. Drawing back, he changed position. Rashid turned slowly without returning the fire. Weinberger started down the metal ladder.

Shayne heard him and shook his head. Then, like a clumsy ox, Weinberger slipped. Looking back on it later, he blamed the fact that he was wearing sandals.

He went all the way down, hit the edge of the open door, snatched at the gun but lost it, teetered for a second and fell onto Rashid’s shoulders. Jarred to the floor, he grabbed the Arab’s knees. Rashid brought the gun down, but Weinberger came up inside it. His fingers closed on Rashid’s throat. Hit repeatedly with the gun-butt, he managed to hold. Letting the gun swing, the Arab seized his clutching hands.

They were closely entangled, and Shayne, above, found it impossible to fire. He swung from the bomb-rack with one hand and dropped into the fight, driving them both to the ground.

His cast struck Rashid a blow from above and behind. Weinberger heard shouts and running footsteps. People were all around them. He continued to hang on. The Arab’s face, an inch from his own, contorted and began to darken. They looked into each other’s eyes. The Arab’s eyeballs protruded, a tracery of red lines standing out against the white.

Weinberger went on choking him, knocking his head again and again on the concrete, for a considerable time after he knew he must be dead.

18

At Shayne’s request, the Army nurse pressed a button, bringing up the head of the bed, and brought him a second pillow. She was the nicest-looking woman he had seen in weeks, black-haired, as graceful as a seal, and presumably she wasn’t a killer, a thief or a dealer in heroin. Nevertheless, she was getting less than Shayne’s full attention. He was too mad.

She put a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and offered him a lemonade with a bent straw.

“Lemonade,” he said.

“Get well, Mr. Shayne,” she said lightly, “and we’ll let you have all the hard liquor you can drink.”

While still in the air after dropping through the bomb-bay doors, Shayne had aimed a kick at the Arab’s spine. He had connected solidly, but the weight of his cast had pulled him off balance and he had come down hard on his left arm. Now both arms were in casts, and he was taking it badly. He bit down on the cigarette and she had to take it away.

“Be nice, please? I know it’s not pleasant, but from what people tell me, worse things could have happened. Incidentally, we’re overstaffed here since the cutbacks, so I’m pretty much available if you want anything. Within the general context of the patient-nurse relationship—”

“Hmm,” he said.

“I mean, if you want to be read to, or if you’d like a massage—Do you play chess? What I’m trying to get at, I think this whole thing today was fantastic!”

She took a deep breath and smiled. “All right, I got that off my chest. There are some policemen outside. I can easily tell them you’re sleeping?”

“No, I want to wind it up.”

In a moment Will Gentry and two others came in.

“Just you, Will,” Shayne said.

“You’re calling the shots,” Gentry said equably, and waved the others out.

“Did you get any of the messages I’ve been sending you?” Shayne said when they were alone.

Gentry filled his pipe. After he had it alight, he said, “We had a kind of communications breakdown. Phone calls didn’t get through for about forty minutes. As luck would have it, the radio net wasn’t working too well either.”

“As luck would have it. Did you go to Boca Raton? Did you find anybody with a fresh black eye?”

“I did, Mike. A handsome woman, except for that eye. I caught them as they were leaving for the airport. As soon as I told her my name she took me into a bedroom and tried to bribe me. Nobody’s done that for the last couple of weeks.”

“What did you book her for?”

“Attempted bribery and passing counterfeit money. I’ve been talking to Coddington about that, and it seems we’ll have to use the same evidence in two different cases.”

“All right, start the questions.”

“Who killed the woman outside the radio station last night?”

“Murray Gold. Her name was Esther Landau. She was working for Israeli intelligence. She got my name from a guy in Washington, and she was trying to intercept me before I went on Tim’s show. Gold was there to make some arrangements with a cop who came to see him in Israel. Will Gentry, he called himself.”

Gentry continued to smoke.

Shayne said, “What happened to Gold, has he turned up anywhere?”

“He’s dead. I know you’ve been arranging most of this, Mike, and you probably arranged that.”

“Did you kill him?”

Gentry shook his head. “Angie Robustelli killed him. He caught him with a suitcase of heroin in his car, and shots were exchanged. I keep trying to persuade Angie that he’s too quick with his pistol, but it’s an old habit. The funny thing is, it isn’t heroin. Somebody burned somebody, somewhere along the line.”

“How did Robustelli make out?”

“Shot in the stomach. He’ll live. And that brings us to the hard question. Are you going to let it ride, Mike?”

“So Robustelli gets credit for shooting the number one man?”

“What credit?” Gentry said. “He’ll get another citation. He already has seventeen. He also retires from the department.”

“With a pension.”

“Naturally. There’s plenty of other news today, Mike. People can only absorb so much.”

“You know he used your name to get in to see Gold. You’ve been needing money lately for hospital bills. He made the visit at a time when you were out of the country. If anything had gone sour, the rap would have been yours.”

“And he fouled up the switchboards on us today, which I don’t like, especially. Nevertheless, this is something the department doesn’t need right now. He’s been a good cop all his life.”

“He’s been a rotten cop, and a rotten human being. This was a typical drug bust, except that he didn’t mean it to end as a bust. He advanced Gold money to buy the stuff. The difference this time was that it wasn’t the city’s money. It was his. Where did he get it, out of his Christmas Club? He’s been stealing for years. There wouldn’t have been any crime here if he hadn’t organized it.”

“But in a roundabout way, he brought Gold back to us. The thing is, Mike, there’ve been too many police scandals lately, all over the country. This would be one of the biggest. It would take us years to digest it. And Gold’s dead. So where’s your case?”

“Gold had a boat waiting. He was a desperate man, and we all know I had a broken arm. I couldn’t stop him. Somehow he got the strange idea that he’d been paid off in counterfeit money. He’s lived all his life by certain rules. He couldn’t let it go by. He went looking for that man, the man who bought the heroin from him. The next thing we know, he was shooting at Robustelli.”

“It’s circumstantial, Mike.”

“After I tell my story to the grand jury, I think they’ll indict.”

“I’m not thinking of this one man,” Gentry said. “His money’s gone and he’s been shot in the stomach. His wife is a lush who lies down for anybody. His daughter hates him.”

“I won’t argue anymore. Arrest him. If you won’t do it, I’ll bring in somebody with a bigger badge.” Shayne gave his old friend a direct look. “When he took off in Coddington’s car, I didn’t know where he was going. The only name I’d heard mentioned was yours.”

Gentry took the pipe out of his mouth. “You didn’t seriously think—”

“Funnier things have happened. There was only one way to find out. Give Gold a gun. If you’d been the one he shot, I would have come to the funeral.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say to a friend.”

“Yeah, but it’s the business we’re in. You’ve got things to take care of. On the way out, send in the nurse. I think she’s going to try to teach me to play chess.”

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