The Devil's Dozen

Sixteen

Special Effects had chosen my identity. Where had they selected my name?

“Where did Raki come from? What do we know about this prospective partner of ours, I kept asking myself,” King said. “I asked my friends in Istanbul and Izmir. They never heard of him. No criminal in Turkey had the name. Another man might have had to be satisfied with no answer, but I wanted to help our friend Raki, to clear away any lingering doubt about his identity. So I kept searching and had my friends search for anyone named Raki Senevres. Finally, I found him. And what could be more perfect? As you know, I always try to provide Snowman guests with entertainment. This should be very entertaining, two men who each claim to be Raki Senevres, the greatest wrestler in Turkey.”

“Mr. King,” I broke in, “what kind of a stunt is this? I never told you I was a wrestler.”

“Are you Raki Senevres?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must be the greatest wrestler in Turkey. And this other man must be a liar.”

“I am not a liar!” the other Raki Senevres said. His voice sounded like gears grinding on bone.

I appealed to the family chiefs.

“This is a ridiculous test. I never said I was this man.”

“Mr. King insists this is the only Raki Senevres he was able to find,” the Boston chief answered. “Are you calling Mr. King a liar?”

“I’m not calling anyone a liar. I’m only saying Mr. King is wrong.”

“If you’re not Raki Senevres, who are you?” the outspoken Bostonian shot back. “I’ll tell you, Raki, we’ve always taken Mr. King’s advice in the past, and it’s always paid off. Now, we’d feel a lot better if you proved you really were someone. I can understand wanting to avoid identification, but there are some things worse.”

He nodded to the M-16 pointed at my back.

The Mafia mentality was medieval but it had some logic. Better to know I was someone, even the man I denied being, than to deal with a phantom, especially a phantom who might take a much more unpleasant shape than that of a corpse.

With the automatic rifle at my back I was marched to the billiard room. The other Raki Senevres pushed the pool tables to the side, a job that would have taken me a block and tackle. I looked at my watch as I removed it. The time was 12:30. I’d be cold by the time Hawk arrived.

Senevres and I stripped down to rolled up pants and bare feet. It’s fair to say that I am a muscular, well-proportioned man, but I looked small. The Turk was an ape. Hairy platforms of muscle sloped up from his shoulders to his neck. His stomach was broad but without a wrinkle of fat, and his curled fingers hung to his knees. Just in case I thought I might have an advantage in speed, he turned a warmup cartwheel and flipped from his hands to his feet.

King looked pleased.

“Gentlemen, this is Turkish greased wrestling. Our competitors, both of whom happened to be called Raki Senevres, will be covered in olive oil. There will be one fall. A fall is scored, according to Turkish rules, by picking your opponent up and carrying him three steps, or by flipping him completely over, or by dragging him face down by his feet. You can do this to him before or after he is dead. There are no other rules. The winner will receive $100,000,” he said to Senevres. “And the loser will simply be the loser,” he said to me.

Cans of cooking oil were punched and poured over our heads. As the slick ooze spread over my skin, I heard the betting action among the chiefs. I was 100 to one, what you might call a longshot.

“Shall we begin,” King waved us to the cleared center of the room. I mimicked the Turk’s loping, athletic approach. There was no point in appearing completely ignorant of the Turkish national sport. Every Turk was a fan and every Turkish man learned the rudiments in the Turkish Army.

“Allah, Allah, there is no god but Allah.” Senevres and I stepped toward each other, each singing the ancient battle cry. Our bodies glistened with oil. The heavy muscles of Senevres’s chest expanded like a bronzed balloon. His skull had the glow of a new bullet. He meant to kill me as quickly and efficiently as possible, but there was ritual to go through first

Senevres and I crossed each other’s path, embraced, and slapped each other on the thigh. The traditional start looks like pure friendliness. What it is is a ritualized search for hidden weapons.

“They both seem to know what they’re doing,” the Boston chief said.

King replied in Italian, and the audience laughed. Loosely translated, he’d said, “the pig is on his back.” A pig is only put on his back to be castrated or slaughtered, and he was talking about me.

The Turk punched my shoulder with the heel of his hand, and I rocked back. I retaliated, and his shoulder moved less than an inch. This was the last part of the rite, testing the opponent’s strength. The Turk’s confidence grew. He grabbed my arms in his hands and bulled me at will from one billiard table to another. I spread my arms and disengaged, then I tried the same bullying tactic. My fingers wouldn’t even reach around his biceps. My hands slipped off his oiled skin futilely.

The Turk grunted and stepped back. Tradition had been satisfied. Now the slaughter would begin.

Crouching, our hands out, the Turk and I locked, heads and shoulders meeting. He feinted a shove to one side, shoved to the other, but I kept my balance. He disengaged and slapped my face to the side, raking my forehead with his nails and sliding to the floor at the same time for a leg tackle. I pulled my leg away and elbowed his kidney as he went by. His hand caught my belt and swung me down on the floor like a sack, but my head had rolled out of the way when the edge of his hand slashed at my throat. We both got to our feet warily. He was a little surprised that his work wasn’t over, and I was thinking that in hand-to-hand combat, the Turk was one of the strongest opponents I’d ever met.

He moved forward with his big hands out again, but, as soon as we engaged, his shaven head shot forward like a cannonball. He held onto my arms and butted again and again. His skull was as thick as armor plate. I ducked, but he’d opened up cuts, and the blood ran into my eyes, blinding me. His head came through my reddened vision like a concrete fist. I rolled back with his momentum and kicked him off. He landed on his feet like an acrobat, laughing, and waiting briefly.

I wiped my blood off on his shirt, which changed his humor. He bounced forward again.

At the top of one of his bounces, I made a bounce of my own, flying with both feet high. My heel exploded onto his nose, snapping the cartilage from the bone. He dropped onto his back and rolled away. I’d missed. He’d already been pulling away when I hit, proof of unusual reflexes and body control in a big man. Otherwise, the bones of his nose would have been broken, too, and shoved up into his brain. He blew a crimson stream from his nose and moved towards me again, not the least bothered by the trail of blood he left. I wiped the blood from my forehead and met him.

I ducked the straightened fingers that jabbed at my eyes. My fingers, straightened in the same fatal karate form, shot at the Turk’s solar plexus. He caught my wrist in mid-air. Wheeling with all his weight, he swung me around and off the floor up to his shoulder. He began walking the three steps that would give him victory. I brought the palms of my hands together on his ears in a deadly clap. Cerebral hemorrhage should have killed him instantly, and I tensed for his collapse. Instead, the Turk screamed with pain and threw me over the audience. I hit a wall and landed half-in and half-out of a trophy vase. I was covered with small cuts.

The Turk, howling in agony, bled dark blood from his ears and mouth. He tore through the Mafiosos and grabbed my hair. I felt dizzy and helpless, vaguely aware that I was traveling through the air again. I smashed head first through a rack of cues. I rolled desperately as soon as I hit the floor, moving underneath billiard tables on my elbows and knees. The Turk cursed in frustration. I stood up in front of the room’s bulletproof picture window, and at once he pushed one of the billiard tables at me. I jumped to one side and the table caved through the glass into the dark night. The temperature of the room began dropping.

The Mafiosos were getting cold and frightened. They’d come for entertainment. Now they found themselves in a room splattered with blood and glass. Not just in front of them, but all around the room, the huge Turk raged after me. When he caught me we fought at close quarters with butts, elbows, and fists. I landed first every time but once, and then his knuckles nearly broke through my rib cage. I backed off gasping for air and threw an arm chair at him. He ducked, while the Mafiosos scattered. When the Turk lunged forward, I knocked his arm up, locked his wrist back and started forcing him onto his knees. As if he were snatching an insect, he grabbed my neck with his free hand and pulled his wrist out from my grasp. Air rushed from my throat as the Turk squeezed. The muscles of his shoulders and arms swelled with the pleasure of murder. My vision was already pink with blood. Now it became splotched from the lack of oxygen reaching my brain. King and the other Mafiosos were shouting encouragement to the Turk. The sound rose and fell with my pulse.

My hands, locked together in one fist, slammed up on the Turk’s jaw, once, twice, three times. The vise on my throat loosened. I hooked into his exposed gut, knocking some of the air from his lungs and out his bloodied mouth and nose. With one knuckle out, I punched his sternum, a blow hard and precise enough to stop another man’s heart, enough to make the Turk’s skip a beat. I hooked into him again, first into his abdomen and then into his ear.

The Turk let go and backed up. He turned his face aside and vomited on the shoes of the nearest member of the audience. Then he regarded me again. The fight was not as he’d expected to find it. I was no Turk, that much was clear to him, and he had the advantage of knowing how to use the oil’s slipperiness. And he was incredibly strong and agile with an amazing pain threshold. Still, something was wrong, and the something was that I was a Killmaster and he wasn’t. In a subtle manner the battle had changed. The Mafiosos weren’t aware of it yet, but we were. The Turk was losing. It was a fight to the death, and it was going to be his.

Bravely, he tackled me and got a knee in his teeth. I chopped his neck without effect, but, as he rose from the floor, I crossed his face with a right that staggered him back into King. The Turk moved into a second punch, and I ducked under his swing to drive a spear-shaped thrust into his abdomen.

The Turk didn’t give up. Again, he out-muscled me into a wall and trapped my throat with his forearm while his knee searched for my groin. I twisted away, which was what he wanted me to do because his hand, holding shards of broken glass between the fingers, was already slicing towards my eyes. I ducked, but not enough.

Fresh blood from my brows poured into my eyes. I dodged and retreated by instinct as the Turk slashed again. Glass sliced along my arm. There was no way of clearing my vision. The Turk kept slashing, his own hand spitting blood from the glass it held. My back grew colder, and I could tell I was backing up to the smashed window. Then more broken glass was under my feet. I was right at the window, and there was no place left to go.

Through the red film I saw a bulky silhouette approaching. A foot stepped on glass. A jagged, glittering fist shot forward.

At the sound of the footstep, I ducked. The Turk stumbled forward from momentum. His fist and arm flew over my head. I rose, catching his waist on my shoulder and lifted. It wasn’t much of a throw but it didn’t need to be. He’d supplied force and direction that carried him out the window.

I’d looked down the mountain side before. Below Snowman were sheer, iced walls of rock. Wisps of clouds played about a 1,000 feet down. Another 1,000 feet below that were the first outcroppings, the first obstacles to a falling body. The Turk never screamed, never made a sound, not that we heard. The room was very still and very cold.

Beginning to believe I was still alive, I staggered away from the window. Someone came forward and wiped blood from my eyes. It was Vera. I’d never noticed when she entered the room. Now she looked angry and vindicated. With my vision cleared I looked around the room. It seemed as if someone had gone around the room with a sledgehammer and a brush and a pail of red paint. Red was everywhere, covering the floor and walls where you could see an occasional outline of a back or shoulder. Red marked the clothes of the Mafiosos where they’d happened to come too close to the fight. Everything breakable was broken. On the floor was a pink tooth, a molar. I ran my tongue around my mouth and found no gaps. It was the Turk’s tooth, and I’d knocked it out, but I never knew when it happened.

“I think you can say Raki flipped your boy,” the Boston chief remarked to King and broke the silence.

“And now Raki’s going to bleed to death, thanks to you,” Vera told her father.

King stepped in front of the chiefs and consiglieres. As he started to speak, I interrupted.

“The winner and still Raki Senevres,” I said. “You make your apology. Then I’m going to go get some iodine.”

The boys were in no mood for King’s suspicions anymore. They’d had a better fight than Frazier-Ali, and they headed upstairs for the liquor and cigars. So, King delivered his little speech to me alone.

“All this proves you can only be one person. Only Nick Carter could have won that fight.”

“Flatterer,” I said and stumbled off in Vera’s arms.