Cat In A Topaz Tango

The Bus Fume

Boogie Blues

Lord, if they wanted to assassinate him, now would be the time to try. Please!

Max had a “seat” on the hard-topped storage box in the tail of the airplane-long bus, where the diesel fumes almost put him under like lethal ether. He needed anesthesia again. His recently abused bones were shuddering with the efforts of the engine beneath him.

As the incredibly long bus zigzagged like a sewing machine through the hairpin turns down the Alps, gorgeous postcards of scenery careened by, making his stomach into a blender for every acid in his system.

A babel of foreign languages simmered like stew from the comfy upholstered reclining seats stretching endlessly toward the front of the bus, and exit, and fresh air.

And Revienne was enjoying the cushy leather comfort of a Mercedes backseat somewhere far ahead. Did he really have to find her?

Yes, dammit.

If she had been kidnapped, he owed her a rescue-for-a-rescue.

If she had been whisked away like a fancy fishing lure he was to be tricked into following, he needed to know that too.

ZH 12656. Tracing a Mercedes license plate in Zurich would be like looking for fleas on a mongrel dog.

He grabbed his duffle bag as a new lurch almost sent it skidding down the long aisle to the pert driver in the front. She shrugged when she’d indicated the far back of the bus: the only spot a hitchhiker could expect. And the price of a bouquet was small admission.

He thought ahead to Zurich. Garry Randolph had said they’d “worked” the Continent together, magicians and spies. Counterterrorists. Switzerland was supposedly neutral ground in the politics of Western Europe, but all the money was here, and there was nothing neutral about money.

Garry must have flown into Zurich. Max would concoct a story: a missed plane connection, a missing uncle. He’d need a new credit card as soon as he left the bus. His long fingers did an arpeggio of anticipation. No dexterity loss there. He could whisper an American Express Platinum from any breast pocket. He needed a better hotel, better wardrobe, some better food, and grooming/disguise time. Might keep the smudge of not-quite-shaved beard. Trendy Eurotrash look. The bus driver had liked it. Maybe not Revienne. She was a silk stocking girl, and they still made those lovely late-lamented articles here, abroad. How did he know that?

Previous life.

Odd, what seemed to be coming back were instincts and memories from the farther past, not the immediate one. Short-term memory was shorted out. He was a man without a country.

Max clutched his elbows to keep them from jolting into seat backs ahead of him and let his disabled mind roam. Maybe it would guide him to a glimmer of Garry Randolph.

Zurich.

They had joked once. He and the older man had joked about the English word rich being in the city name. The restaurant had been dark and had served coffee as thick and black as molasses. Max’s after-dinner cup had a shot of whiskey in it. He was young and raw-boned, Irish and melancholy, and far from home and could drink under age twenty-one. He was still nervous about it but Garry had chuckled, sounding just like his favorite uncle . . . uncle? Uncle Liam. Sean’s father. Sean’s sonless father.

“Drink up,” Garry’s voice came over the grind of the huge engine, as the boozy coffee’s aroma erased the diesel fumes. “You’ve managed to get the one thing most men in the world would give the world for: just revenge. The IRA bastards who blew up your cousin Sean are history. Two shot dead in the raid; three bound for a life sentence. We did it.”

So that’s what they had done. Acted as an unofficial “equalizing” force against terrorists. Max tried to remember how he’d felt after that belt of Irish whiskey and Turkish coffee. Scared. Just scared. He was too young to be drinking hard liquor. He was too young to be seeing to it that men he didn’t know died.

So, had he aged like whiskey, getting stronger, smoother, and mellower? Or had he grown hard and bitter, like coffee? Or was he a combination of dark and light, like most people. No, he’d never been like most people, never would be again, not a teenage virgin who’d graduated from high school to taking lethal revenge on five grown men in a single now-forgotten Irish summer.

He must have fallen asleep. The bus was forging through the darkness into fistfuls of glittering lights in a distance that offered little sense of up and down.

People’s heads were bobbing on headrests all down the aisles. Asleep, as he had been.

They must be on the outskirts of Zoo-rich. Max stretched his long frame, hearing sinews crack. His legs ached like the devil.

And that was appropriate. He had a lot of the Devil’s work to do in Zurich if he was to remain free, and remain free to find Revienne Schneider in that mass of people, buildings, cars, and numbered bank accounts.