The Snake Flag Conspiracy

Chapter Nine

Julie’s apartment was small. It had been partitioned off from one of the great, old, rambling apartments of the early twenties. Bedroom, living room, half-kitchen and bathroom had once been just the living room of the original apartment. The girls had tried to decorate it Burlap sacking had been made into window drapes. A multi-colored, imitation Tiffany lamp shade hung down from the ceiling. One wall was painted chartreuse, another was in mauve. Posters were pinned on the third wall so thickly you could hardly see the wall itself.

While I took a shower to clean the grime off my body, Julie made something for us to eat. Health food. The raw vegetables ground in a blender to a thin, pulpy drink wasn’t too bad. I’ll pass over the rest of the meal. Let’s just say looking at Julie across the small dining table made it easier to get down.

Afterwards she washed the few dishes and turned up the hi-fi set before we went into the bedroom. Julie pulled off her shirt and blue jeans and, clad only in her bikini panties, flung herself onto the waterbed that took up most of the small room. There were a dozen throw pillows of all sizes, shapes and colors at the head of the bed. The bed itself was covered with a patchwork crazy quilt. Julie sat with her knees drawn up, her back against one of the larger pillows. She patted the bed beside her.

I had nothing much to take off, but I couldn’t let her see either Hugo or Pierre. Fortunately the light was dim and I turned partially away from her, so when I dropped what was left of my slacks, Hugo and Pierre were wrapped in them. When I turned back, Julie saw the effect she was having on me and smiled.

She rolled a double cigarette paper deftly with the fingers of her left hand, sprinkling the finely-ground marijuana into it in a thin line. Licking the paper with the tip of her tongue, she sealed it and twisted the ends.

“Nicaragua Red,” she said, grinning proudly at me. “It’s hard to get these days.” She picked up the sheet of paper in her lap and shook the spillings neatly into a small film cannister. She lit the joint, inhaling deeply, sucking air around the end of the butt to mix with the smoke of the weed.

She took another drag and then held out the joint to me. I took it from her and placed it between my lips, inhaling as deeply as she had.

I’ve had hashish in North Africa. I’ve snorted cocaine in Chile and Ecuador. I’ve chewed peyote buttons in Arizona and Mexico. And I’ve smoked more than one pipe of opium in Viet Nam, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. As a secret agent, you do whatever you have to do to blend in with the group you’re with, and the people I’ve had to mix with aren’t the kind that would meet with the approval of Elks, Lions and Rotarian Clubs in the States.

Marijuana has different effects on different people. It made Julie feel like talking.

She waved the joint in the air and said, peering at the smoke as if she could discover a great, important meaning in the drifting, formless wisps, “You know something, whatever your name is?”

“Nick,” I told her. “Nick Carter.”

“That’s a nice name,” she observed. “I like it. You know something?”

“What?”

“I used to think I was a rebel. Boy, did I rebel! Against my father and mother. Against the snobbish finishing school they sent me to for a couple of years before I walked out. Against the whole damn society!”

“You burned your bra,” I said.

She laughed. “Hell, I don’t have a bra to burn. You think I need one?” She touched her small breasts.

I smiled, shaking my head slowly. “Never. Did you need to rebel?”

“I thought so. I marched in protest parades. I led demonstrations. They kicked me out of one college.”

“And?”

She turned on her side and looked at me sadly. “But I’m not a rebel. All I am is rebellious, Nick. And that’s a damn shame!”

I touched her face gently.

“Not really,” I said. “There are very few rebels in the world. But there are a lot of rebellious people. If you understand what you’ve just said to me, it’s a sign you’ve stopped being an adolescent and become an adult.”

Very carefully Julie considered what I’d said.

“Hey, man,” she exclaimed. “You’re right!”

“What were you really rebelling against?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said casually, “mostly it was against my father and his friends. You know, they’ve got loot. They’ve got so much loot they don’t even bother to count it. I used to think — all that money and it’s not helping anyone! That used to tee me off. But what was worse — they’ve got power. Power, man, like you wouldn’t believe! And they never used any of it to help anyone! Now, that really got me!”

“What kind of power?” I asked, the first stirrings of interest coming alive in me.

“Don’t you know who my old man is?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t even know your last name,” I pointed out.

Julie nodded soberly. “That’s right. You don’t. Alcott Chelmsford is my father.”

“I don’t know him,” I said, disappointed but not surprised. Well, hell, it would have been too much of a coincidence if her father had been one of the men whose names Calvin Woolfolk had given me.

“No reason you should,” she said. “He tries to keep out of the public eye. Did you ever hear of Frank Guilfoyle, or Alexander Bradford or Arthur Barnes?”

It was like hitting the jackpot in a slot machine in Las Vegas. Three out of the five names!

“I’ve heard of them. They’re biggies like Mather Woolfolk and Leverett Pepperidge, right?”

“Right,” she said. “The whole bunch of them! My father’s one of that crowd. Man, did they bug me!”

“You know them well?” I asked.

“From the time I was born. Alexander Bradford is my godfather. Would you believe it?” She laughed bitterly.

“Tell me about old Bradford,” I suggested, trying to be as casual as I could.

Julie turned away.

“Oh, hell,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about them! I’ve spent the last five years of my life running away from that bunch. You don’t want to hear about them.”

“I want to hear about Alexander Bradford,” I said, reaching out to stroke her neck. It was the first chance I’d had to get some inside dope on Sabrina’s employer.

Julie shook her head in refusal. “No way, man,” she said. “I don’t want to spoil the mood. I dig you too much!”

She clipped the remnant of the joint into a spring holder, inhaled deeply and handed it to me. “Let’s ball,” she suggested, as simply and as innocently as a child would say, “Let’s go play.”

I knew there was nothing I could do right then to make her talk, so I took the final drag on the joint, put it down and turned to her.

Julie made love as simply and uninhibitedly as she talked. My body was a plaything for her, to be explored and enjoyed as if I were a giant panda toy she’d taken to bed. At the same time, she gave herself to me completely, to do with as I wished. She derived as much pleasure from pleasing me as I did in making her discover the little, uncontrollable excitements the female body is capable of.

Her breasts were small. My hand covered each completely, and then my mouth, and I looked up to find an expression of ecstasy on her face so acute it almost seemed she was in pain. I kissed the taut, smooth skin of her stomach, and as I moved down, Julie squirmed around so that she could match each of my actions.

We became the yin and yang of that ancient Chinese symbol of completeness. Our bodies were intertwined in a tangle of soft and hard flesh, of smoothness and roughness, of skin so moist that we slid easily into one another.

There was no moment when it was suddenly over. We reached peaks and then quieted down slowly, until, finally, we felt no more urgency to explore each other. She snuggled into me.

“Hey, man,” she said tiredly, “that was good.”

I kissed the tip of her nose. She brushed away a lock of my hair that had fallen over my forehead.

“Who are you?” she asked. “How come you want to know so much about Alex Bradford?”

It really didn’t take me by surprise. Julie was too bright to be fooled for very long. I decided to take a chance because I could use whatever information she had.

So I told her. Not all of it. Specifically, not about AXE or my role as Killmaster in that supersecret organization. I did tell her about the Russian who’d almost died because of what he’d learned. I told her about the plot and about the organization that had been trying to kill me. Julie listened carefully and seriously. When I was through, she said, “That’s big trouble, man.”

“I know.”

“I wasn’t talking about you,” she said gravely. “I mean, if they succeed, what’s going to happen to all the little people?”

I didn’t say anything. Before she’d give her cooperation, Julie had to work it through according to her own scale of values, in her own terms.

She said thoughtfully, “I don’t think our present society is the best. I think there’s a hell of a lot wrong with it, but it’s something we can work with. If they have their way, they’ll smash it completely. Okay. So it gets smashed. Then what? Do the little people take over? No way! They’ll run it for their benefit and the hell with the little people. All the riots! All the people killed! The millions who’ll starve — just so they can take over! That’s Hitler and Stalin and Franco all over again!”

She turned serious eyes on me. She’d made her commitment. “Nick, how can I help you?”

“I want to know as much as you can tell me about Alexander Bradford. Somehow I get the feeling he’s the key to this whole thing.”

“What about the others?”

“I don’t think they’re in it. There’s just one man at the top. I think it’s him.”

“Bradford could be your man,” she admitted. “Alex always seemed to me to be a little different from the others.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “I can’t really put it into words. There’s something about him. Like he’s always standing back and watching you and kind of filing you away in his mind, like he’s got a computer there and everything you do or say gets punched into it. You know what I mean? Even though he’s my godfather, he gives me the creeps!”

“Can’t you be more specific?”

“He’s a loner. He’s secretive about what he does. God, Nick, even in that group of people who didn’t say much about what they were doing, Alex was the most secretive. I mean, he’s charming and all that, but it’s all on the surface. Underneath, he’s cold as ice. He never lets you know what he’s thinking. Like you can’t pin him down about anything he’s involved in. Know what I mean?”

I knew. Like me, all she had was a gut feeling and no facts, and that really shouldn’t be enough to go on. Certainly not if I had to justify it to Hawk. However, it was enough for me. If Julie’s gut feelings about Bradford matched mine, it added up to something.

I reached for my wristwatch.

“You going somewhere?” she asked, amused.

“I’ve got to meet a man,” I told her.

“At one-thirty in the morning?”

I nodded. “He’s waiting for me now in a bar in Fields Corner.”

“Hey, you’re serious!”

“Right. Only I have a problem. I need a shirt, slacks and shoes.”

Julie popped out of bed. “Stand up,” she said. I obliged her. She looked at my nude body with a measuring eye. “I’ll be right back,” she said and ducked out of the bedroom. Two minutes later she came in carrying a pair of men’s slacks, socks, shirt and shoes. She dumped them on the bed.

“There!” she said proudly. “I think they’ll fit close enough. Raymond’s about your size.”

“Raymond?”

“He’s one of my roommates.”

I lifted an eyebrow.

Julie shook her head disapprovingly at me. “Hey, where’ve you been? We just live together. All the colleges have coed dorms these days. Everybody lives with everybody else, but it doesn’t mean everybody’s screwing everybody! It’s the same with us. We tried — three girls together. Man, I’ll tell you, it’s a drag! So when Barbara left, we asked Raymond if he wanted to take her place. It’s better if there’s a man around. He comes in handy when there’s heavy work to be done. And we don’t get hassled as much by guys who take us out on a date and then try to make it when they bring us home. I don’t know if Raymond has eyes for Sheila or me, but his girl would kill him if he tried making a pass. She’s the jealous type.”

“Okay,” I said. “I get it.” I started dressing. The shirt and slacks fit well enough. The shoes could have been half a size smaller. They were really half-boots with long rawhide laces.

Julie looked me over when I was through dressing. “You’ll do. Now, how were you planning on getting across town to Fields Corner?”

“Subway or taxi.”

“I’ve got a Volks,” she offered. “I’ll drive you.”

I was going to say no, then I changed my mind. “Let’s go,” I said.

Grogan’s is the kind of bar that Jimmy Breslin likes to write about. Its patrons are blue-collar, working Irish. Some of them work for the city, some of them can’t find work, and some of them only work from time to time — at things the law frowns on. The place is paneled in mahogany gone dark from the years and the furniture wax rubbed into it by hand, and from the spillings of whiskey and beer and the countless wipings down with a wet cloth every few minutes. The strong smell of brew is in the air, ingrained in the wood of the booths and the tables and the floor. It’s a man’s place.

At that time of morning there weren’t many customers, so I spotted Reilly as soon as we walked in. He was sitting by himself in the middle booth along the righthand wall.

I turned to Julie, slipping my arm around her shoulders. “How about keeping the motor warm? I won’t be long.”

She glanced at Reilly, then back at me, and shrugged her slender shoulders. “Okay, but don’t forget about me.” She winked as she turned back to the door. “I’ll be keeping my motor warm, too!”

I gave Reilly a hopeful smile as I slid into the booth opposite him. “Do I owe you a bottle?”

His pugnacious face was more irate than usual. “You owe me a hell of a lot more than a bottle!” he growled. He turned his head so I got a full view of the side of his face. His left eye was completely closed. Blood had scabbed along a savage cut that ran from his temple down his cheekbone. The left side of his mouth was badly swollen.

“You want to tell me about that?” I asked.

“Try to stop me from the telling,” he replied. Reilly is third generation but he still has a touch of brogue. The Boston Irish hang onto it longer than their kinfolk anywhere else in the country. “Sweet Jesus, Nick! I knew I should never have gone along with you in the first place! Then I said to myself, what the hell, lookin’ through the morgue for information doesn’t seem like the most dangerous thing in the world, now does it? So I did. I spent the afternoon goin’ through all the old clips. To tell the truth, I was lookin’ forward to a cold glass of brew, it was so dry and dusty in there.”

“You found something,” I said. “Otherwise, that wouldn’t have happened.” I pointed to his cheek.

He shook his head. “I found nothing. Nothing, that is, except trouble on my way here.”

“When?”

“About ten o’clock. Four of them. Big ones, they were, too.”

“Hoods?”

He shook his head again. “You know better than that, Nick. There’s not a punk in town with connections who doesn’t know better than to leave me alone. No, my lad, these were a different breed. Too well dressed, for one thing. Not the right class, for another. There was something about them that tells me they don’t belong in this neighborhood. And they didn’t try to hold me up or anything. Just came right at me like they meant to finish me off. Didn’t say a word. One of them caught me a good lick with a blackjack. That’s how come I got this.” He pointed at his swollen, split cheek. “I was lucky. I got away from them and started shooting. I don’t think I hit any of them, but it was enough to throw a scare into them, so they took off running.”

He was almost embarrassed. “Four years I’ve had that gun and never once had to use it. I’m too well known, Nick. Now, it’s like they don’t care what happens if I get knocked off.”

“So it’s not the Syndicate?”

“Not unless they’ve gone clean out of their minds! And I doubt that! No, my boy, it was someone else’s work.”

“What’d you find in the morgue?” I asked. “You must have found something or they wouldn’t have gone after you.”

“Not a thing,” he said ruefully. “Every one of those five men is a model upstanding citizen — about whom not much is written, I’ll admit,” — he flashed a trace of his old, cynical smile — “because of their influence. They’ve a lot of that, y’know.”

“What about Alexander Bradford?”

“He’s the most interesting of them all,” Reilly said, his eyes locking into mine. “Why are you so interested in him alone now? How come not the others?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Just tell me about him.”

“Well,” said Reilly, “he’s old family — like the others. They all go back to the Mayflower, or maybe the second or third ship after it, at the latest. He’s the only one left of his family. That’s what’s different about him. His father and mother both died when he was a child. He was brought up by his grand-aunt. Served in World War II. He was a lieutenant-colonel in an infantry outfit. He was captured by the Germans, spent a year in a prisoner of war camp—”

“Hold it,” I said. That was it. That was what I had been looking for. “Which stalag?”

Reilly was puzzled. “What the hell difference does it make?”

“Did you learn which camp?”

Reilly looked at me as if I were a teacher accusing him of not having done his homework thoroughly. My question was an insult to a newspaperman as good as he was.

Reilly mentioned the stalag number. And it fit. That particular stalag, I knew, was located in what is now the DDR. Deutche Democratische Republic. East Germany.

“He was liberated by the Russians,” I said. “Right?”

Watching my face carefully, Reilly asked, “Is that a guess or do you know?”

“I’ll do some more guessing,” I said, growing more and more certain of my hypothesis because it was the only way it could have happened, the only way the Russians could have made the swap. “He wasn’t returned to the States right after he was liberated, right?”

Reilly nodded. “Word came back that he was a hospital case. It took him almost a year to recuperate, first in a Russian hospital and then back here in the States at Walter Reed. There was a lot of surgery. For a time, they thought he might not pull through.”

“Plastic surgery?”

“Some. Not much,” said Reilly.

“Just enough so that if someone who knew him before the war wondered about the difference in his appearance, the surgery would explain it.”

“You could say that,” said Reilly.

“No family? No relatives? Right?”

“Just a grand-aunt, like I mentioned before,” said Reilly. “She raised him, but she was very old by the time he returned from Germany.”

“So if he not only looked different, but acted differently, there’d really be nobody to notice it?”

“Is that a question or a statement?” asked Reilly.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re trying to tell me something,” Reilly observed, staring intently at me with a cold, inquisitive look in his eyes. “You think the Russians got their hands on him and brainwashed him. Is that it?”

“Suppose they substituted another man for him, John? Suppose the original Alexander Bradford’s been dead since 1945 and another man — a Russian, a KGB infiltrator, a ‘plant’ — has been taking his place ever since?”

“It could have happened that way,” he admitted grudgingly.

“It did happen that way, John.”

The expression on Reilly’s face changed. Not irreverently, he whispered, “Holy Mother of God! That’s a wild statement, Nick. Is that what this is all about? Are you trying to tell me that the men who came after me tonight are Russians?”

“No, they’re Americans. John, you know enough. Stay out of it now.”

“So that’s the story you said I’d never be able to print,” Reilly mused out loud. “You’re right, m’lad. No one’d ever believe it! Not in this town! It’d be like trying to claim that the Pope, himself, is a Communist spy!”

I slid out of the booth.

Reilly reached out and caught me by the arm.

“There’s more to it, Nick, isn’t there?”

I nodded my head.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Later on? When it’s over?”

I smiled at him. “No way, John. Never. You’ve learned enough. Maybe too much for your own good.”

“Well,” said Reilly, leaning back against the wooden partition between the booths, “take care of yourself, Nick.”

“You, too, John.”

I started to turn away when he suddenly reached forward across the corner of the table and fastened his hand on my arm.

“Sit down, Nick!” The sudden urgency in his voice made me obey without questioning.

“What’s the matter, John?”

“Two men just walked in the door.” His voice was pitched low, barely reaching me.

“You know them?”

He shook his head, his eyes staring past me at them. “Not by name. But I know them alright. They’re two of the men who tried to kill me earlier tonight. But I think you’re the one they want now, laddie. They haven’t taken their eyes off you since they came in.”

“Is there a back door to this place?”

Before Reilly could answer, the front door of Grogan’s swung open and Julie strolled in, impatiently jangling her car keys. She marched right over to our booth and slid in beside me.

“I’m running out of gas,” she announced, unsmiling.

“You and John, here, were just leaving, sweetheart,” I answered.

Reilly knew what I meant. This was no place for Julie. I wanted him to take her out of the bar. And to get the hell out himself. One side of his face had already been smashed in because of me. He grinned crookedly and shook his head.

“You two” — he pointed a chubby finger first at my chest, then Julie’s — “go through the kitchen. Then up a flight of stairs. Don’t go all the way to the top, though. The door to the roof hasn’t been unlocked in years. Go down the hall to the end of the first floor. You’ll find a window there. It opens out onto the fire escape. It’ll take you to the roof. From there, you’re on your own.”

He reached inside his coat and surreptitiously took out his revolver, sliding it under the table to me.

“I think you’ll be needing this more than I will.”

Cupped in my hand, muzzle up, the snub-nosed .38 gleamed brightly under the dark shadow of the table top. I looked down at it. Light reflected off the round chambers and from the trigger guard. The hole of its barrel gaped blackly at me. So did four of the chambers I could see into.

“I appreciate the offer, John, but this thing won’t do me any good...”

Reilly frowned. “Since when will a gun not do—”

“—unless you have cartridges to go with it, friend,” I finished. “You fired all six of them.”

Reilly flushed with embarrassment. “Wait here a minute.”

For a heavy-set man, Reilly moved nimbly. He got to his feet and went across the room, motioning to the bartender to join him. The two of them conferred in whispers at the end of the bar. The barman went into the back room. Reilly drummed his fingers impatiently on the hard mahogany surface until the man came back.

I put my arm around Julie’s thin shoulders and put my head against hers. “Can you look around the end of the booth and take a gander at the two men Reilly was talking about?”

Julie turned her head casually, looked around and then turned back to me. “I saw them,” she said.

“What do they look like?”

“They’re in their late twenties, maybe early thirties. One’s about five-ten, the other’s a little taller. Musclemen. They’re standing at the end of the bar near the door looking this way. They give me the shivers. Real bad vibes, if you dig what I mean!”

Reilly came back and slid into the booth again. He said quietly, “It’s taken care of, Nick. As soon as the action begins, get the hell out of here.”

He passed me a small cardboard box. “Thirty-eights,” he said. “A favor from a friend of mine.”

The bartender went over to a group of three men talking together at the middle of the bar. They looked like regular customers. Work shirts and high-laced work boots. He spoke briefly to them. They looked quickly at the two newcomers and nodded. The bartender moved off.

I put the cartridges in my pocket along with the .38 revolver. This was no place to load it.

“Give the man my thanks, John.”

“Just buy me another bottle,” Reilly said sourly. He touched his split cheek gingerly. “How many do you owe me now?” That was the thing about Reilly. He always talked about buying the bottle, but he never drank anything harder than beer.

I never got a chance to answer. Halfway down the bar one of the three drinkers — a short, square-set middle-aged man — pushed aside his beer glass and strode pugnaciously toward the two men at the end of the bar.

“What’d you say about this place?” he demanded in a loud voice. “If you don’t like it here, get the hell out!”

The two men straightened up. One said in surprise, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I heard you! You come into a place like this and make remarks about it! If it ain’t good enough for you, then get the hell out!”

“Look,” said the other placatingly, “whatever we were talking about, it wasn’t that.”

“You’re calling me a liar?”

“For Christ’s sake—”

I heard the crash of a beer bottle being smashed against the bar and the sudden shout, “Duck, Charlie!”

Reilly leaned forward. “Now, Nick! On your way!”

Julie and I scooted out of the booth and made a run for the kitchen. Behind us there was the crash of a table being overturned and more shouting. As we went through the swinging door to the kitchen, I took a quick look behind me. The short middle-aged man had been joined by his two drinking friends. Those three and the two on my tail were throwing punches at each other.

Someone shouted, “They’re getting away, Charlie!”

Charlie tried to break free of the fight. He made it to the end of the bar. The barman rapped him with a sawed-off billiard cue and he went down.

Then the swinging door slammed behind us, and Julie and I were racing through the kitchen. The door at the back of the steamy white-tiled room opened onto a hallway barely illuminated by a twenty-five watt bulb hanging naked on the end of a black electrical cord. We ran up the flight of stairs to the first landing. To our left, at the far end of the corridor, I made out a grime-covered window. We ran toward it. Like the rest of the building, the window was warped and dirty. Julie pushed fruitlessly at the frame.

“Stand back!”

I lifted my right leg and kicked out the glass. Two more kicks cleared out the broken shards still remaining in the woodwork. “Now!”

Julie clambered out. I followed right behind her. The fire escape was rusty and soot-covered. Below was an alley. I heard a shout come from the street end.

“I’ll go first,” I said to Julie. “We don’t know what’s up there.”

As quietly as we could, we mounted the metal rungs. The shouting grew louder.

Black against black, the dark shadows of the fire escape melted into the soot-blackened bricks of the building. As long as we were on it, we couldn’t be seen from below.

Three stories down, the kitchen door burst open. One of the men who’d come into the bar after us ran out into the alley. In the spill of light from the open door I could see him clearly as he peered both ways.

He shouted, “Did they come your way?”

Someone yelled back at him, “Try the fire escape!”

I heard the screech of rusting metal as he leaped up and caught the bottom rungs of the vertical ladder at the lowest stage of the fire escape. It descended protestingly under his weight.

I urged Julie on. We were now on the fifth landing and that was it. The roof was in front of us. I lifted Julie over the edge onto the asphalt-tarred surface. Pausing to catch my breath, I looked around. In the starlight I could make out a cluster of half a dozen vents and chimneys from the building’s heating system.

“Over there!” I pointed them out to Julie. “Wait for me over there!”

Julie picked her way across the rooftop. The ledge across the edge of the roof was about two and a half feet high, with a stone coping topping the bricks of the building. I ducked down behind the ledge and waited. He was in a hurry — and he was careless. As he came scrambling over the top of the ledge, I straightened up and hit him along the jaw with a sidearm swing, my two fists clenched together. It was like pole-axing a steer.

I ran toward Julie.

“Let’s go,” I panted.

Together we stumbled our way across the rooftops toward the end of the row of adjoining buildings. Every forty feet or so, we crossed from one roof to another, scrambling across the low partitions. We made it to the far end. Cautiously I peered over the edge.

Down on the street below, silhouetted by the lamplight, a man waited by the alley entrance.

Julie touched me on the arm. “How are we going to get by him?”

I looked around. In the middle of the roof of the building was a shed-like structure. I knew that the door inset into it had to lead to a stairwell.

Crossing to it, I pushed against the door with my shoulder. It didn’t budge. I smashed against it. It gave way slightly. I slammed full force into the door and the lock gave way.

“Can you see?” I asked Julie.

“Barely.”

“Then follow me.”

Step by step, putting our feet down on the inner edge of the steps to keep them from creaking, we descended four flights of stairs. I stopped. Julie leaned against my back. “What’s the matter?” she whispered.

“I think it’s time I loaded Reilly’s gun,” I told her.

It took me only a moment to break open the cardboard box and push six bullets into the chambers. The rest of the cartridges I dumped into my pocket. I started down the steps again. In a moment we were at the foot of the stairs, around the turn from the front door. I held Julie back.

“Stay here out of sight until it’s quiet. Don’t come after me. Just get to your car and get the hell out of the neighborhood! Got it?”

Julie didn’t try to argue with me.

I left her standing there, hidden by the bend of the stairs, and made my way to the front of the corridor. There was a door leading to a pocket-sized vestibule. The upper half of the door was stained glass except for a small center panel of clear glass. The outside door, I could see, was solid oak. I wondered who was waiting beyond that door for me.

Well, I couldn’t wait forever. With Reilly’s gun in my right hand. T opened the inner vestibule door — and almost jumped ten feet! The vicious snarl scared the hell out of me because it was the last thing in the world I expected.

The cat was a big one. He was an old torn, scarred by years of alley fights, with one ear hanging down, almost severed by some rival who must have been as tough as he was. He crouched in the corner of the vestibule, spitting at me angrily, mad because he couldn’t get in or out. God knows how long he’d been waiting there.

I made gentle sounds at him. Slowly I edged my way toward him, ready to duck if he showed even the slightest sign of leaping at me. Slowly he responded. I don’t think anyone had made a friendly gesture toward him in years.

It took almost five minutes before I could get close enough to him to reach out my hand. For a moment I thought he was going to slash at it with his razor-sharp claws, but he didn’t. And then I was stroking his fur and scratching him under the chin. I finally dared to pick him up in my arms, and he weighed at least fifteen pounds if he weighed an ounce.

Outside the door, I heard two men talking. A deep voice said, “Alright, I’ll wait here. If that son-of-a-bitch shows up, he’s in for trouble!” Then there was silence. Whoever he had been talking to apparently had left. I waited a full sixty seconds before I opened the door and casually started to walk down the four steps that led to the sidewalk.

I held the cat high in my arms, my face turned away. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the burly stranger standing with his back against the wall of the building next to the alley mouth. For a moment he stared at me and then turned away. You just don’t expect a man walking out the front door of a house with a cat in his arms to be anything more than another peaceful householder. That’s what caught him off guard. Before he could get a good look at my face, I was abreast of him, and by the time recognition took place, it was too late!

He started to raise the gun in his hand, but by then I was already flinging the big, fighting tomcat straight into his face!

Fifteen pounds of nasty-tempered, raging alley cat with claws like barbless hooks gouging at his eyes made him forget everything else in sheer terror! The man let out a scream as high pitched as the tomcat’s furious yowl and began fighting off his furry assailant.

The tom clawed with blinding speed at the man’s face, and I got a quick glimpse of a row of deep, bloody furrows suddenly appearing from his forehead to chin, and then I was gone, running down the street and around the corner into the darkness.

I ducked into the first alleyway I spotted. Halfway down, I vaulted over a broken-slatted wooden fence, finding myself in a yard littered with rusted metal cans and broken bedsprings. I finally made my way between two, narrow, old wooden houses and came out onto a street.

I walked slowly to the corner. I was two blocks away from where I’d started. Back there I could see half a dozen men gathered in a group. Lifting Reilly’s pistol, I aimed above their heads and began a rapid fire.

I wasn’t trying to hit them. I just wanted them to see the muzzle flash as I shot at them. They scattered.

Turning, I ducked away down the street, drawing them after me, but I had a head start of two blocks and no one’s going to catch me when I’ve got that kind of a lead!

Ten minutes later I was casually sauntering down Olney Street when a battered Volks pulled up alongside me.

“Can I give you a lift?” Julie leaned out the window.

I got into the car. “I told you to get the hell out of the neighborhood!”

“Not if I have to leave a friend behind.”

“You mad at me?”

I had to admit I wasn’t.

Julie’s old Volks sputtered its way back across town to her apartment. Halfway there she asked, “What do we do now, Nick?”

“Find Alexander Bradford,” I said out loud. To myself, I added silently, “...and kill him!”