Operation Flashpoint Read online

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Well, you said it was laid out by a pro,” Erikson said thoughtfully.

  “I still think it’s a dope shipment,” I said.

  “And I think you’re wrong,” Erikson countered. “Everything the Treasury boys have ever told me indicates this would be the last way in the world to move dope. It seldom leaves the hands of the individual entrusted with it.”

  “What was that you said awhile ago about returning the envelope?” I asked McLaren.

  “Since we’ve lost Hawk, the girl is our only link,” Erikson answered for him. He gave me his smile-that-wasn’t-quite-a-smile. “So all we have to do is send you back to the Turkish girl and have you follow through on her boss’s offer to pay you to recover it.”

  “Me? It’s your baby, Karl.”

  “The girl knows you,” Erikson continued. “Who else could get close to her in a hurry?” He handed the stapled plan to McLaren. “Make photostats of these sheets, Jock, and then get the originals back into the envelope. Earl will sell it to the girl’s boss, and then we’ll know who the boss is.”

  “Let me point out to you the holes in that Swiss cheese,” I said. “How do I account for the fact that the envelope is unopened? Shouldn’t whoever took it have been curious about what was inside?”

  “You’ll think of something,” Erikson said, unruffled. “The envelope can’t be opened, because then they’d change the plan. And when you talk to the girl’s boss, haggle. Start high on the price you want. That may give us some idea of how valuable this Item NUX is. But regardless, get to this character and get a look at him.”

  “I told Talia that one reason I had to leave right away was to put out word that the envelope was worthless if opened,” I said, thinking back over the sequence of events.

  “Then that will do it, since you also said you had to shake a tail en route here,” Erikson said. “You can tell Talia’s boss you had to put a ‘hold’ on anyone thinking of opening the envelope, and the tail will confirm your maneuvering.”

  “I think there was a tail,” I protested. “I don’t know. You guys are taking a hell of a lot for granted.”

  McLaren handed me the repacked envelope, still handling it via the tweezers. He was smiling as if he had heard Erikson’s brand of persuasion before.

  Their attitude irritated me.

  If I couldn’t get a shot at recovering Hazel’s money, the rest of this jazz meant nothing to me.

  I decided I’d take an hour from my sleeping time to line up a speech giving Erikson the word that I’d abdicated.

  But I didn’t get any sleep that night.

  I entered Chryssie’s tenement with my mind still on Karl Erikson and Jock McLaren and their calm assumption that I would let myself be talked into doing their bidding.

  I found myself in front of Chryssie’s door, key in hand, staring at the door standing ajar with its lock shattered.

  I think I knew what I was going to find inside.

  I drew my.38 before kicking the door wide open to make sure no one was hiding behind it. There was no sound except the dull thud of the door against the wall. The living room was empty. I made a quick tour of possible hiding places before I went into the bedroom.

  It was far worse than I expected.

  The bloody thing was spreadeagled to the four corners of the bed by gray clothesline-cord on wrists and ankles, the wide-staring blue eyes fixed on infinity.

  Chryssie was dead.

  Almost unrecognizably dead.

  I tried to tell myself that the pimp had come back and that this was his revenge for loss of face, but I knew better. A pimp doesn’t carve up a girl with a knife until he’s finished with her, not when he’s trying to recruit her.

  No, it wasn’t the pimp.

  It was me.

  Despite my precautions, I’d let someone tail me from Talia’s apartment. When I’d eventually double-doored him in the subway, he’d come back, and with his knife, tried to find out from Chryssie where I’d gone. Or if I’d said anything significant to her about recovering the envelope.

  I could only stand there and hope that she’d been on a marijuana-high and hadn’t known too much about what was being done to her. But looking at the mutilated girl-body, it was a forlorn hope.

  Sure, the girl had been a loser.

  She’d had no hold on life at all.

  She’d been a natural victim, her bizarre manner of living almost a guarantee of some such departure.

  But it had been me who had unwittingly stage-managed the gruesomely macabre finale. I’d involved myself with the girl because of her age. Involved myself in a half-hearted salvage attempt, yet I hadn’t hesitated to use her for cover at the Alhambra.

  Now there was this savage finale.

  There was one small consolation.

  After his failure to obtain information from Chryssie, the knife artist would station himself outside to await my return. He might report his temporary failure or he might not, but he’d be waiting. He’d be outside now to pick up my tail again when I left the tenement. If I didn’t come out, his curiosity—and his orders—would bring him back upstairs to find out why.

  So I waited for him.

  I employed the next twenty minutes wiping my prints from every possible object I might have touched in the flat. And I made one other preparation. I wrestled open the usually-closed window overlooking the alley below, the alley-window I’d noticed the first night I’d accompanied Chryssie home. Then I stationed myself in a corner of the room, keeping an ear cocked for sounds from the creaking stairway, the only access to the flat.

  When I finally heard the sounds, I was ready.

  The knife-artist sidled through the partly opened door at a fast glide, curved knife-blade in hand. He was small, furtive, and foreign-looking. “Inside,” I said to him from the corner of the room where I was standing.

  He whirled, raised his arm to throw the knife, saw my.38 lined up on his head, and changed his mind. “Inside,” I repeated, and motioned toward the bedroom in case he didn’t speak English. He started toward it slowly, trying to watch me as I closed in behind him, gun at the ready. He didn’t have a chance. I slammed the.38 against the base of his neck, and he pitched forward on his face.

  I dragged the unconscious figure into the bedroom and over to the opened window. I boosted him up and part way through it, turning him so that his upper body was outside the window and he was hanging by the hinges of his knees with only my weight on his legs to keep him from plunging down into the alley below.

  Then I waited.

  I wanted him conscious before I turned him loose.

  The rush of blood to his dangling head brought expected tremors as he regained consciousness. He started to struggle, then became rigid as his expanding awareness brought recognition of his situation. “Who sent you?” I said to him.

  Silence.

  I hadn’t expected anything different. Even if he understood English, I hadn’t expected anything different. There hadn’t been an amateur connected with the operation yet. I watched the mouth of the alley until a wide-spaced set of headlights turned into its narrow passageway. A diesel snorted as the truck picked up speed.

  I gauged the distance, then pushed at the legs I’d been holding.

  Professional to the core, he went silently.

  I heard the sound as he hit, the quick blare of a horn, and then another sound.

  I closed the window and wiped my prints from it.

  I went to the telephone, looked up the number on the scrap of paper I’d left in the night-table drawer, and dialed. “Yes?” a sleepy, Main Line-accented voice said after an interval. “Who’s calling at this hour of the night?”

  “Come and get your daughter, Mr. Rouse.”

  There was an instant during which the only sound was the faint humming of the phone receiver in my ear.

  “She’s—Cornelia is—” He couldn’t complete it.

  “Yes, she is.”

  I hu
ng up the phone, wiped my prints from it, left the building, and headed uptown toward Talia’s apartment.

  I felt a sudden urgency about meeting Talia’s boss.

  He might not have wielded the knife, but he was the man responsible for Chryssie’s death.

  I didn’t look for a cab.

  I still had steam coming out my ears over what had happened to Chryssie, and I had to get myself in a sweeter frame of mind before I went up against Talia again to con her, so I walked.

  The night doorman in the East Sixty-third-Street apartment building eyed me dubiously when I told him I was calling on Miss Talia Rhazmet. He looked at his watch and again at me. Finally he directed me to the house phone but kept an eye on me while I placed the call. “It’s me,” I said when Talia’s drowsy voice came on the line. “I’ve got good news for you.”

  Her voice came alive. “You have? Wonderful! Where are you?”

  “Downstairs in the lobby.”

  “Then come up right away.”

  “Tell the doorman. He doesn’t like my looks.”

  I held out the phone toward the watching uniformed man. He walked toward it and took it from me, listened for no longer than it must have taken Talia to get out one sentence, then nodded to me. The self-service elevator whisked me to Talia’s floor.

  Her apartment door was open, and she was standing in the corridor. She took my arm eagerly as I approached her, smiling widely. She looked bright and alert. I wondered if she was on the same high she’d been riding when I left her, or if she’d loaded up again while I was coming up in the elevator.

  I couldn’t help but notice as she ushered me inside that she had on a long-sleeved nightgown and robe so sheer that the combined lacy material could have been pulled through a man’s wedding ring. “You have the envelope?” she asked anxiously when she closed and locked the door.

  I took it out of my jacket pocket and showed it to her. She reached for it greedily, but I pulled it back. “You can look, baby, but you can’t touch. Not until I get paid.”

  “It is intact?”

  I turned it over and showed her the sealed back flap.

  “Wonderful!” she repeated with a toss of her dark hair that settled it loosely on her shoulders. “But how much do you expect to be paid?”

  “I’ll negotiate that with your boss.” I looked at the smooth, body curves within the semi-translucent material of her nightwear. “Although I remember you said you’d do anything yourself to get it back.”

  She appeared to have forgotten that. She glanced at the clock buried in the flank of the polished brass elephant. “I must call Iskir at once,” she said, moving to the telephone.

  “In English,” I said.

  “In English,” she agreed, and dialed. “Abdel? I must speak with Mr. Bayak.”

  “Who’s Mr. Bayak?” I asked.

  “Iskir Bayak, my employer. He is an importer of Oriental rugs.”

  For a second I wondered if she were telling the truth. If the proposed hijack concerned only a shipment of Oriental rugs, then Erikson, McLaren, and I were barking up the wrong dogwood. Then I visualized Chryssie’s nude, contorted, crimson-streaked body. No, Iskir Bayak was something more than a larcenous importer of Oriental rugs.

  “Iskir?” Talia said at last. “I know it’s late, but I have good—” She stopped as a tirade of abusive sounds reached my ear, even though she had the phone slightly shielded. “It’s not possible,” she said hurriedly when she could get a word in. “He is here with me now. With the envelope.” She cut her eyes toward me. “Yes. Sealed.” There was another torrent of sound from the phone. “I have seen it, Iskir!” she wedged desperately into the waterfall. “Yes. No. What?” She listened for a moment. “Yes, I can.” She hung up the phone slowly. “Mr. Bayak will see us in an hour,” she said without looking at me.

  “An hour!” I barked. “After working up a sweat convincing the guy who had the envelope that it had to be returned unopened to be worth anything, now your Mr. Bayak wants me to cool my heels for another hour?”

  I wondered if Bayak had already learned of the knife-artist’s demise. There wasn’t much else that could explain his abusiveness on the phone. Unless he was getting nervous waiting for a report which was never going to come? I inspected Talia’s beautiful face. The fear that I had seen before was back again.

  She slithered in my direction and stopped so close to me I could feel her body heat. “While we wait,” she said coaxingly, “I will take care your needs.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, knowing I had no choice but to wait to see Bayak on his terms. “The first thing I need is a shower.” I took hold of her nightgown-and-robe covered arm. “And you can join me.”

  The smile she gave me was almost demure. “You Americans,” she said archly. “You want to begin where other couples arrive after a day and a half.”

  I led her into the bathroom. All I’d really had in mind was removing her from the vicinity of the phone so she couldn’t make any phone calls I couldn’t hear, but I made no objection when she removed her robe and pulled her nightgown over her head. I really needed a shower after the exertion of dealing with the knife-artist, and I undressed quickly.

  Talia pulled on a pink shower cap and tucked her dark hair beneath it, then came to me. She ran her fingertips curiously over the numerous scars on my chest and thighs from the skin transplants that had made me a new face, but she didn’t say anything. I unfastened the tabs at my hairline and removed my wig. For an instant she looked startled at the unveiling of my hairless, serrated pate, but she recovered quickly. “Even when I was a little girl in Ismir, Yul Brynner was my favorite actor,” she murmured with a smile.

  There was a lot more to Talia’s olive-skinned nudity than appeared possible in street clothes. Her breasts were large, slightly pendulous, and grape-nippled. I turned her around, and her silky-looking buttocks were almost chunky, with just a hint of the controlled, powerful action seen in a thoroughbred mare. Tattooed on one upstanding hind cheek was a fantastically realistic multicolored butterfly. Talia made no move to hide the needle punctures on her arm, evidently feeling that my eyes were busy elsewhere.

  I turned on the water in the shower stall and adjusted it to lukewarm. I led her into the tiled enclosure, and when we were both wet I soaped her from neck to heels. The luxuriant female flesh was delightfully pliable under my palm.

  Then she did the same for me, with embellishments. “You must be a very strong man to have survived this,” she said quietly as her fingertips again traced my scars.

  I’m not the easiest man in the world to arouse at any time, and the thought of Chryssie’s end was still in the back of my mind; but Talia’s skillful hands turned me on standing in that steamy enclave. I had to breathe shallowly to avoid spontaneous combustion.

  We dried each other off with huge, fluffy towels, and Talia dusted us both liberally with perfumed talcum powder. “It prevents friction except where it’s wanted,” she assured me with a doe-eyed smile. I had suffered a diminishment during the drying-off process, and she dropped to her knees and restored me with a facile tongue.

  We went into the bedroom. Talia stripped off the coverlet, disclosing black silk sheets. She dusted these with still another kind of powder. Attar-of-roses wafted itself to my nostrils as she put me on my back on the huge bed and for ten minutes indulged herself and me in exercises which convinced me I was a sexual amateur.

  Considering my on-again, off-again track record with women, I hadn’t really expected to make it with this girl, despite her good looks and manifest availability. When she finally turned me loose, though, I rolled over her and plowed her wheat field with no thought of failure. Her expert, quick-darting hands encouraged the harvest.

  She patted my shoulder lightly when I slid off her. She rolled from the bed, and I raised my head to watch her lush, highlighted ivory nudity as she went to the dressing table, struck a match, and lighted two candles. The smell of a musky incense drifted through the room, pungently fragrant.<
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  She returned to the bed and resumed her role of domestic stimulant. I started to tell her she was wasting her time, then quickly found out that she wasn’t. To my surprise I found myself reaping a fresh crop and enjoying it.

  “You’re something better than an empty box stall,” I told her when I had back the breath lost during the second session.

  I could see that she didn’t know the meaning of the racetrack expression, but she didn’t mistake my meaning. “Americans are little boys,” she informed me gravely. “They start too late. They should begin at the age of ten. With their sisters.”

  “I’ll see if I can peddle your idea to Good Housekeeping.” An arched eyebrow indicated that she didn’t know what Good Housekeeping was, either. “Never mind.”

  She rolled away from me and looked at the bedside clock. “We can leave now,” she said, and slid from the bed. Her manner was subdued. All her sexual sparkle had left her.

  Her attitude reminded me that I was going to meet the man responsible for Chryssie’s death, even if indirectly. I went into the bathroom, removed my Smith & Wesson from its shoulder holster, and taped it lightly to the back of the calf of my leg with two strips of adhesive taken from Talia’s medicine cabinet. The classic frisk is a from-the-back job which concentrates on shoulders, armpits, chest cavity, rib cage, waist, buttocks, and thighs. It takes an unusually thorough searcher to proceed lower.

  “Where are we going?” I asked when I rejoined Talia.

  “It’s only two blocks,” she said. “We can walk.”

  On the street, she turned right, toward the river. We went left at the first corner, right at the next one, and then she turned in under a green-and-white marquee. I followed her into a high-ceilinged lobby lined with bronze mailboxes. For sheer luxury the lobby resembled a Hollywood set. No one was visible.

  Talia headed for the nearer of two side-by-side elevators. I boarded it behind her after noticing there was no floor indicator on the wall above it. A single button on the wall of the elevator cab confirmed my guess that the elevator served only the penthouse apartment.