The Vulcan Disaster

Chapter Nineteen

That was it for the moment. I flicked the flash at Zvy’s body and picked out the shape of his gun with the silencer on it. I bent — cursing the ribs, which were giving me fits — and picked it up; then I snuffed the flash and jammed it in a back pocket.

There was another gunshot up there — but this time from a smaller weapon. A Saturday Night Special, for all I could tell. They go pop, while the big guns make your ears ring.

I’d recognized that first pair of shots, though. At least I thought I did. There is only one gun louder, or more powerful, than the .357 Magnum, and that was the .44. This hadn’t been any .44. It hadn’t made me flinch and the .44 is the only one that makes me flinch. No, 357 was it, and I’d bet a Webley-Vickers...

Shimon was out there in the night. Stalking Vicki and her boyfriend. Or me?

Well, it didn’t matter, I decided. I didn’t care who he’d been chasing. Now the tables were going to be turned. I was going to wind up chasing him. And this time, I was going to catch him. And bum him. I caught myself grinning in the dark.

The little gun went pop again.

I slipped forward and stuck my head out the window; I counted to five and moved out on the balcony.

There was no sign of life up there.

I shoved the gun in a pocket and headed back toward the door. If he tried to come down via the nest of balconies, the way I’d gone up, they’d see him and pot him; now I knew one or the other of them — Vicki or whoever Leon was — was alive, and armed. Okay. That meant he’d have another way out, and it’d likely be the way he’d taken to get inside the building. The way Zvy had taken when he’d come in and surprised Constantin. I headed for the main staircase of the old building.

When I cracked the door, paused, and finally stepped out into the stairwell, though, there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

I decided to force the issue.

I pulled the gun back out again and tiptoed cautiously up one flight. Then I paused at the landing and listened for sounds. Nothing. Even more cautiously than before, I headed up again.

At the top of the stairs I stepped back and kicked in the door... and almost got shot for my pains. The little gun across the way went pop again and a slug sang its way past my head into the wall. I hit the floor fast — and wished I hadn’t.

“Hey,” I said. “Vicki. It’s me. Harry Archer. The guy with the gun is gone.”

“Harry?” The voice was nervous, tentative. “What are you doing here?”

“I... I got jealous and followed you.” I’d explain later. “The man up here — the one with the pistol — he’s gone. I checked everything out.”

“Harry... can I trust you?”

“You’d better. Anyhow, you’d better do something quickly, shoot me or trust me. The cops’ll be here in a matter of minutes.”

“Could you come up? I mean... there’s someone wounded here. I...”

“Hang on a second.” The balconies were so close together that high up that the housewives could have had regular conversations over hanging out the wash. I got up, painfully, went out to the balcony, tensed up, and jumped across.

As I did, the rail on my balcony — some sort of stucco stuff — gave way underfoot. The broken pieces went clattering down into the alley. I hit the next rail hard, hung on with both hands and it held. I climbed up, aching and cursing.

They were in darkness inside. I pulled the curtains and as Vicki flipped the light on — a single overhead bulb, and a dim one at that — I pulled a piece of beaverboard off what had been a rotting closet and laid it over the window opening.

When I looked down, she had the guy’s head on her lap and a little purse gun in one hand. He had a big wound in the thigh and he’d lost a lot of blood. “We don’t have much time to lose,” I said. “Go get the car and pull it up at the head of the next street over. I don’t remember the name of it; there’s a vespasienne just above it, or there was the last time I was here...”

“But Harry, you said you’d never been to Nice before...”

“Never as Harry Archer,” I said. “Explanations later. We’ve got to get your pal here out of the area before the flics arrive. Do as I say.”

“All right, but... here, my gun...”

“I’ve got one. I took the gun off the guy I killed downstairs. It’s okay. His chum ought to be far, far away by now.”

She looked up at me with those sea-green eyes. “I... okay.” She let me take the man over; then she bolted for the door, agile in her flat sandals. I could hear their soles flapping all the way down the stairs.

I turned to the man. “This,” I said, “is going to hurt me as much as it does you. But we’d better do it anyhow. If I can get you up to my shoulder...”

He looked up and said, “It’s all right.” Then his eyes widened. They narrowed again, scanning my face. He had a long lean face, the face of a high-metabolism, overactive, driven man. There was a small scar under one eye. “You... give me your hand first. Please. I...”

I put one hand in his; his was cold; shock.

And damned if he didn’t slip me Will Lockwood’s funny handshake. Just as the sirens went off down the way.

“Well, for chrissake,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And you know me. We worked together four years ago in the Bahrain Gulf. I...” But he looked lousy. I put one finger over my mouth: Save it for later; we’ve got to get out of here first. Know him? Of course I knew him. Leon Schwartzblum. One of Israel’s toughest and most reliable undercover boys. He’d switched services as the need for his talents had demanded — he’d been one of the guys who got Eichmann out of Argentina — and now he was working this gig with me. Or had been. That leg wound was going to put him right out of this ballgame, leaving me pretty much where I’d started.

“Right on, buddy,” I said. “More later. But bite down hard right now; I’m going to try to get you up on my shoulder. Hang in there.” But I knew he would anyway. He was the hanger-inner type if ever I saw one.

Carrying a badly wounded man in a Morgan isn’t easy. We had to put him in my lap, and between my ribs and his thigh, it didn’t help anything.

Vicki was silent for quite a while, shifting gears expertly, racing style, and really moving up into the hills behind Nice. It was a road I’d never travelled, but I had some idea where she was going. They’d have a meeting place stashed close by, a place with a radio...

“What do you know about doctoring?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said, her eyes on the road. “But we have a friend I can call...”

“I’ll be all right,” Leon said, but from between clenched teeth. He understood the need for her fast driving, too. “Sonia,” he said. “This is Nick Carter.”

“Nick Car...?” She turned her eyes to us. “B-but...”

“As you said,” I told her, “we’re all phonies here. Sonia? I kind of liked Vicki, somehow.”

“She is... my sister,” Leon said. “She has been our contact aboard the Vulcan. She has had the bulk of the dirty work so far.”

“I was trying to talk Leon into letting me go,” she said. She bit her lip, then went on. “I saw myself being a little fool, turning into the sort of vain and stupid and capricious person they were, just from being around them all the time. Today — I was so stupid and mean, playing with you like that...”

“Okay,” I said. “No problem. Besides, Constantin’s dead.”

“Dead? But he was not one of them...”

“But he followed me, and they took him for me in the dark. I ran into the somebody afterward, a minute or so later, and stuck a shiv into him. He...”

Leon tried to sit up some. “Nick. Did you see his hands? Did he...”

“Did he have a little Star of David tattooed on the web between thumb and forefinger? Yes. Why?”

He just nodded, though. “I knew it. I knew we would run into them here. The opening moves are over in that particular search. You hear, Sonia? It is the endgame. We are getting close. We...”

But she was paying attention to the road, and a good thing too; it was winding and twisting, and all the curves were banked the wrong way, and there wasn’t any shoulder above a sheer drop. I decided not to look down. Presently she turned into a big gap in a long row of trees on the shore side of the road, and we slowed down as the car’s tires hit gravel and crunched loudly, throwing rocks up against the mudguards.

Watching the “friend” — who turned out to be a brawny nurse — patch up Leon’s leg, with him grinding the molars but smiling, I decided he was more extraordinary than previously thought. We could only make small talk until she left; but then it seemed time to open up. We had to decide what we could do to patch up the operation.

“You were,” I said, sipping the straight scotch Sonia had handed me, “going to tell me about the guys with the tattoos. You...”

She handed Leon a drink, too. “The Sons of David,” she said. “They are the pilot fish of the people Leon and I are here to smelt out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Israel,” Leon said, taking the ball, “has her own crackpots, fanatics — whatever you choose to call them. We also have our own traitors and renegades. We are a small country, but already we have a little of everything one can expect to find in a much larger country.” He sat up in the bed and pulled a pillow behind his back.

“There is a type of mentality I can only call suicidal. Fundamentally suicidal. Capable of orienting the entire organism around the prospect of its own death. In a way you’d have to say Hitler was an extreme example of this sort of already extreme mentality. The one thing you could reliably predict, given the first organization of the German war machine, was the eventual sight of Germany in ruins and rubble, her people demoralized, many of them homeless, starving. In a way you have to say that Hitler did everything he possibly could to ensure that this would happen. Every foolish move that he made, with such a bold and confident air, only hastened the arrival of that day in that bunker in Berlin. He had gone out of his way — perhaps more than any man in history — to make enemies, the stronger and more unforgiving the better...”

“I get you,” I said. “It’s one way of looking at it.”

“Nick,” Leon said. “Our parents managed to live through Auschwitz. My father once told me that the only thing that saved them was being able to take an objective view. Any other view ended in madness. Sonia and I have had to turn certain switches inside our minds off from time to time. We have had to...”

“I understand.”

“All right. These people — the Sons of David — are people who cannot wait for the next war with the Arabs. They want one right now — and one to the death. You know what that would mean, given the present odds as of the Yom Kippur War...”

“Ouch,” I said. “And... omigod.” I told them about the Hong Kong incidents — the hijacked shipment of arms, the lost microfilm, everything. “I couldn’t understand their actions then, though, and I can’t understand them now.”

“Oh” Leon said. “The... mutilation of the victims? A biblical thing, Nick. The ancient Israelites, in the period of the Books of Kings, were a very warlike people. King Saul was a mighty warrior. Kind David was even mightier. And those were not wars fought with tournament rules. Following a Jewish victory the conquerors would circumcise their fallen foes. The soldiers collected foreskins the way the American Indian often collected scalps. These Sons of David leave their own stamp of victory and I’m sure the location of the cuts is no coincidence. Someone knows some history. I make no apologies for a barbaric time.”

“They killed a good friend of mine. I got one of them. I want the other.”

“You shall have him. If I have to kill him for you.”

“You do and I’ll wait until that leg’s cured and I’ll break the other one for you. I want him myself.”

“He’d do it too, Leon,” Sonia said, smiling. “Harry — I mean Nick — is very tough.”

“I know,” Leon said. “All right. But now what are we going to do? We’ve got to make plans, and amended ones at that. This leg... well, the original idea was to get me aboard as part of the galley help. I was a sous-chef in a three-star restaurant once; Sonia was to create an opening there, as she created others in the past. Not yours: that young man simply couldn’t take any more of Mlle. Komarova.” He turned to her and took her hand. “Sonia? Do you still want out? Because...”

“No, no,” she said. “Not now that I know who is going to be working with me on the boat.” Her eyes went to me once; her face flushed.

“You’re sure? Because a greater burden will be upon you now...”

“No, no.” She reached over and took my glass; her fingers touched mine as she got up and went to the sideboard. The house was small, isolated, lived-in. It was high above the bay and, I figured, there ought to be some kind of view of the Mediterranean by dawn.

“Okay,” I said. “But what did the Sons of David want the shipment for? To arm their group and start a war?”

“Yes, and, being the fanatics they are, when their plans were foiled they murdered everyone who, in their opinion, had double-crossed them. This of course meant Meyer, for one, and of course you did the job for them on the Vietnamese gentleman who started the whole thing, and who was the real double-crosser.”

“The General?”

“Yes. And then, as your Mr. Hawk suggested, the whole thing passed into the hands of a third group.”

“Who? Komaroff?”

“That’s what we’re not sure. But, as Hawk says, Komaroff’s activities have undergone certain changes of late. Where once he sold arms to both sides, to anyone, now he is getting choosy; and in the present case he is choosing the side of the various terrorist groups on the Palestine Liberation Organisation list. He has been selling them every surplus arm he could get his hands on. And on credit, which was not his practice before. He has definitely taken sides.”

“What do you think caused the change?”

“We’re not sure. But, as Sonia said, the Sons of David are like the pilot fish that follow a shark. The trouble with the Nazi mentality they exemplify is that it tends to seek out kindred minds, regardless of left or right. Fanatics of the left are more like fanatics of the right than either is like anyone else. And they understand one another. They are like different drawers in the same desk.”

“So?”

“Sonia has not been to sea with Mlle. Komarova for some months now. The great lady” — his tone was sarcastic — “has disappeared from view. Perhaps with some lover so disreputable she dare not show him to the world, perhaps to some dope den. In the meantime, all this has been happening. We suspect Komaroff has found new friends, and that they accompany him as advisers.” His brows rose in perplexity. “Or as captors?” He shrugged. “Something decidedly odd is happening. And it is your job, and ours, to find out what it is.”

I looked outside. There was a pink tinge in the dark sky. It’d be dawn in moments. My God, where had the time gone to? “Meanwhile,” I said, “what are your boys up to?”

“Among other things, we’ll be staying in contact. The Sons of David being here... your friends Shimon and Zvy, incidentally, are — or were? — among the top ‘hit men,’ I think you call them, in their organization. Anyway, their being here means that we are very likely right, all of us: the trouble is aboard the Vulcan. All three of us — you, I, the Sons of David — have independently come to that conclusion. Thanks to various sources, we have at least a vague idea as to the itinerary of the Vulcan in the next few weeks. We will contact one or the other of you from time to time. In the meantime we are keeping an eye out for the missing ship.”

“You mean it’s still out there? Hasn’t been unloaded yet?”

“Yes, or so we think anyway. Under what name, what flag... who knows? But we’ll know before long, we think. And Nick: the people aboard the Vulcan, the dangerous ones, the ones who are influencing Komaroff...”

“Yes,” I said. “I was going to ask you to go on a bit more about them.”

“Among them is a man whose original name, some time back, was Kurt Schindler...”

I whistled. Schindler? Alive? The highest-up man in the hierarchy of what Mr. Himmler called the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem — an even bigger wheel than Eichmann himself.

“Ah,” I said, after I’d thought about that a bit. “So you haven’t changed agencies after all. You’ve got a little personal stake in this too, just like me.”

“Worse,” Sonia said. She was standing by the window. “I want Schindler myself, as bad as you want Shimon. But Leon, he lives for this thing. He needs this... this holy cause of his the way a flower needs sunshine. He...”

“That’s very good,” Leon said. His face was drawn and pale, but there was a thin smile on it. “That’s it, my dear. It is a kind of tropism by now. Instinctive. I think Nick understands, though.”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess I...”

“Harry,” Sonia said from the window. “I... I mean Nick. Look.” She was pointing out across the suddenly visible bay. The rosy-fingered dawn was right on schedule, and the blue bay curled at the foot of pink mountains below us and to the west of us as her hand pointed down the coast toward Monaco and Italy. “It’s here,” she said. “It’s early. I...” The words trailed off. I stood and looked where she was pointing. Just inside the mole I could make out the classic lines of a great three-masted sailing ship. The Vulcan had arrived.