Sunscream

8

Bolan sat with the girl at a cafe table drinking pastis. Bright shafts of sunlight speared the shade beneath the broad leaves of the plane trees.

“I could ask you the same question,” he said.

Bolan wondered if she had been ordered to shadow him.

“I’m studying philosophy,” Coralie said. “Here at the university in Aix.” She was friendly again now. Bolan didn’t have the time to figure out why. “I’m not just a poor little rich girl, you know. I shall have to earn my own living sometime.”

“Not taking over Daddy’s business?”

“Do I look like that kind of person?”

“Frankly,” Bolan said, “I’m not exactly sure what business your father is in. We’re kind of sheltered up in northern Germany.”

She flashed him a suspicious look. “He has the biggest machine-tool factory in Italy,” she said. “He has controlling interest in a company that manufactures digital watches and calculators in Alsace. He imports computer hardware from Japan, and he’s on the board of two major oil companies.”

“But why would a guy that successful have friends like... like the people I work for?” Bolan queried.

“Let me ask you a question,” Coralie said. “Why are you badmouthing people like Jean-Paul — a man with your reputation? I’ve heard about you, Herr Sondermann: you’re what they call a hit man; you kill people — for money. They tell me you murdered nine already.”

“Only folks I didn’t like,” Bolan said gravely. He would dearly have liked to set the girl straight, but the words he wanted to say would come uneasily from the mouth of a Teutonic killer... and if he allowed himself to show her what he really felt about the mafiosi, his cover would be blown for good. He tried to change the subject.

“Do you know Jean-Paul well?” he asked.

“Since I was in diapers.”

“I work for him, but I don’t really know him yet. What is he like?”

“He’s nice,” Coralie said defensively. Bolan remembered the way the gang leader had taken her arm the night before. “He’s got a better brain than most of the others. He’s generous. And he’s a caring man.”

“But he hires a guy like me to come down all the way from Hamburg. For what?”

“Oh,” she said with a pout, tossing back her hair. She drained her glass and set it carefully on the wrought-iron table. “When I first saw you in that gallery, before I knew who you were, I thought you might be... Oh, well. I guess one can misjudge people.”

Bolan suddenly realized the truth behind her mood swings. He was not a vain man, but he was objectively aware that he was attractive to many women. Coralie Sanguinetti was trying — and failing so far — to relate a natural liking for him to her own instinctive distrust of anyone in Sondermann’s line of business.

He felt sorry for the girl — sorrier still because she was also fighting another, harder, battle: loyalty to her father on one side, loathing for his associates on the other — but there was nothing he could do to help her. “Have another drink?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Thank you. I have a class at two o’clock.”

Bolan watched her get up from the table. Many other eyes followed her as she walked to her car parked by the curb. A white Porsche 928 — what else?

The Executioner frowned. He had a gut feeling that, given the right approach and the right conditions, he could make her into an ally. But right now he’d have to play it by ear. The one thing he knew was that any help she might offer in the future would not be to Kurt Sondermann...

For the moment, however, it was better that he reinforced that alter ego in her eyes. Back in character, he called out as she unlocked the door of the Porsche, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

Coralie looked across the terrace at him as she slid behind the wheel. “Is there anything you wouldn’t do?” she retorted.