Flashpoint (18 page)

    Automatically I reached for the.38 in my shoulder holster. It was gone. This job was sure hell on guns. I swallowed hard to subdue incipient nausea, then fingered a Ping-Pong-ball lump under my ear. I pushed myself up to hands and knees, hung on until the dizziness subsided, and made it to my feet. Sweat drenched my face as I grabbed the back of a chair to retain my uncertain balance, but the unsteadiness dissipated.

    Feet wide apart, I shuffled to the apartment door. It was locked, and from the outside. My celluloid pick was no help. Second thought convinced me that if Abdel was still patrolling the corridor outside, I didn't want to see him now. Not without my.38.

    But I had to let Erikson know about Talia's being manipulated out of the action" by the Turk. The elephant-clock told me that she already had a half hour's head start. I headed for the telephone. I had dialed the first three numbers of Erikson's office phone before my scrambled brain began to function properly. If Erikson could bug Talia's phone, so could Iskir Bayak, and with his suspicious nature, he was a damn sight more likely to have bugged it. If I called Erikson from here and Bayak was able to listen to the conversation, the whole operation would be blown.

    I replaced the receiver.

    But I had to let Erikson know somehow.

    I had to get to a safe phone.

    I went to the balcony's french double-doors and opened them. A reviving damp breeze flowed over me. It was raining again, and the street below glistened with reflected light from its rain-wet surface. There was another balcony above my head. I leaned over the guard rail and looked downward with the rain blowing in my face. A duplicate balcony extended outward from the apartment below.

    I could go up or down. The bottom of the balcony floor above me was three feet above my upstretched hand. I'd either need something to stand on-and nothing was available-or I'd have to balance myself atop the half-round guard rail before I could grip the iron uprights supporting the concrete on the balcony. I was hardly in shape to perch on the rail and lean out into space while trying for a secure handhold on wet, slippery iron and concrete. I doubted that I'd be able to muscle my entire body weight up the balcony's concrete facing even with a good handhold.

    So it had to be down.

    I didn't give myself time to think about it.

    I went over the railing and eased myself downward with both hands gripping the cold iron uprights and my toes anchored to the platform rim. I took a solid hold, then removed my toes from the edge and hung freely, extended at full length. I clenched and unclenched my palms, dropping in short jerks until the heels of my hands reached the bottom of the vertical iron bars.

    I swung myself cautiously in a gentle, pendulumlike movement. The tip of my shoes scraped against the guard rail below. I knew the balcony floor was a drop of only three feet. The trick was to fall inside, not outside, the railing.

    Too hard a swing forward and I'd lose my balance upon landing and fall backward with a good chance of smashing my head against the guard rail grillwork and knocking myself out again. Too easy a swing and I could look forward to a quick glimpse inside each lighted window as I clawed the air on my way down to the street.

    My pendulumlike momentum built up until I felt it was right, and then I let go. My feet hit concrete, all right, but my kidneys struck the iron railing painfully at the same time. I had slightly underdone the forward swing. The kidney-contact threw me forward sharply, and I landed on hands and knees in a puddle of water that was trapped in a slight depression on the unlighted balcony.

    I scrambled near the french doors out of the worst of the rain and massaged my wet, abraded palms. Sudden light from inside the apartment flooded over me. I ducked instinctively, thinking I'd been seen. When nothing happened, I straightened slightly so I could look into the apartment through glass curtains covering the double doors.

    A fat, middle-aged woman in a quilted robe was placing a towel on the floor. Her hair was in curlers and her face was greasy with cream. She went to a low, cabinet-style stereo set and placed a large record on the turntable. All I could think of was that if she settled down for a music session in the room, she had me trapped on the balcony.

    I tried the door latch quietly and found it locked. I reached for my wallet and extracted my celluloid pick. Martial music blared forth from inside the locked french doors. Then a male voice boomed forth in a tone of command from the stereo set.

    "We'll now do the cross-body bend in four counts. Take your position, please. Feet spread and arms extended. Bend from the waist, left hand to right toe at the count of
one,
upright at the count of
two,
right hand to left toe at
three,
and back to starting position at
four.
Are you ready? Now… in time to the music, please.
One, two, three…"

    I looked inside again. The fat woman had tossed her robe to one side. Beneath it she was totally nude. Jiggling breasts and buttocks looked like four pale basketballs attached to a flesh-covered barrel. Jellolike quivering accompanied each movement as she strained to reach her toes with the opposite hand. Each time she managed halfway down her shin.

    My position had changed unwittingly to that of Peeping Tom. I tried the pick on the lock as the booming voice from the record player issued new instructions. "The bicycle exercise now," the exercise master announced. "Down flat on the rug."

    The lock on the french doors was an old-fashioned type that wouldn't permit insertion of the pick. The fat woman had lowered herself to the towel on the floor with an audible thump. She stretched out on her back, elevated her chubby legs, and pedaled furiously as the music-cadenced
"one, two, three, four"
issued from the speaker.

    At least she was in no condition to pursue me. I wrapped my handkerchief around my knuckles and broke the glass near the lock. It smashed into a hundred tinkling fragments, and I reached inside and turned the lock.

    The woman had frozen with her legs still upright at the sound of the breaking glass. Her massive bare behind and furry slit pointed right at me as I stepped inside. Her mouth shaped itself into a round
O
as I sprinted across the room, but no sound emerged. I manipulated the chain bolt on the apartment door, stepped outside, slammed the door, and took off down the corridor.

    I avoided the elevator in case Abdel was monitoring it. I raced down the stairs in case the fat woman recovered quickly enough to get to her telephone and sound the alarm, then slowed my pace as I approached the street.

    There was no Abdel, and no alarm.

    I found a drug store and called Erikson. "My guess is that she's out of the picture now," I concluded after telling him about Talia's departure.

    "If that really was her passport you saw, you're probably right. Would she head for Bayak's place?"

    "Not likely. He wants her underground now. Out of the country, even. Our little bird has flown and I'll bet it's the Turk's intention that she keep right on flying."

    "I'll put out word to every transportation terminal with emphasis on the airports," Erikson said. "Meantime you'd better get over here, Earl. It sounds like we're getting too damned close to the payoff, and we still don't know what the score is."

    I left the drug store and headed for his office.

    

    

    McLaren was waiting with Erikson when I arrived. He gave me a sardonic grin as he stared at the lump that still persisted behind my ear. Erikson wasted no time on levity. "We've located the girl at Kennedy," he said without preliminary. "She purchased a one-way ticket to Damascus on a flight that leaves in three hours."

    "And I suppose you'll just stand around and let her take off?" I said. Neither man answered. "Why are you letting her leave the country?"

    "Don't you read the papers?" McLaren inquired. "It's a free country."

    "We're watching her," Erikson chimed in.

    "Watching her? What the hell good is that? We know we're getting close to the time of this hijack, but what do we know about it? Not even the location. I don't think the girl knows everything about Bayak's business, but she damn sure knows more about it than we do. And she could tell us."

    McLaren's eyes were upon my face. "Could?"

    "Could be made to."

    "Like?"

    "Like pick her up, grab her hypodermic, sit her down in a corner until the skinful of dope she's carrying now evaporates, and in six or eight hours she'll tell you her sins back to her fifth birthday."

    McLaren grimaced at Erikson. "You do come up with these direct-action types."

    "Give me an alternative if we're going to get anywhere with this thing," I challenged them.

    The office was quiet for a moment. "There's Doc Walsh's private clinic in Queens," McLaren suggested. "Ol' Doc owes us a favor or three." He was watching Erikson. "I could have the girl paged at the flight desk, asked to step into the airline-terminal office, and whisko- Long Island via very private car."

    "It sounds like a winner to me," I said.

    "Well, chief?" McLaren said. "Can do. Can do easily if you say the magic word."

    "I don't like it," Erikson frowned. "If anything went wrong, the UN angle alone would splash us on every front page in the country. Let alone the mysterious disappearance of a damned attractive girl."

    "You think Bayak's going to the police?" I argued. "No way. If you don't step in, Talia may never reach Damascus, anyway. She's expendable in the Turk's plan right now." I waited for that to sink in. "You might be the means of keeping her alive." I thought of Chryssie spread-eagled to the four corners of the bed in the tenement flat. I still hadn't raised a hand to the man who had authorized that.

    "Thanks for appealing to my better nature," Erikson said. "What would your role be if we did this?"

    "I'd borrow a.38 from you, hustle over to Bayak's penthouse, and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing when he had Abdel put the chop on me. It's what he'll expect to hear. Then business as usual."

    There was another silence. "Somehow the thought of you running loose over there with a.38 does nothing for my blood pressure," Erikson said at last.

    "Bayak knows he needs me," I said. "I'm the only one still wired into this operation. Sure, he's planning on stopping my clock, but not until I've pulled his marshmallows out of the fire."

    "Wish to God we knew what the marshmallows were," McLaren grumbled.

    "Give me the gun and I'll get going," I suggested. "One thing I should have mentioned before. Bayak must be paying off everyone in that building. His safe has been blown once, and I put two bullets into the air there the other day, yet he's never been asked to leave."

    "We'd tip him off if we tried to shake anything out of the apartment-building people now," McLaren said. "Later, maybe."

    Erikson gestured toward the hidden room. McLaren went toward it, activated the concealed latch, and disappeared through the revealed door in the wall. He was back at once and handed me a well-oiled.38 and two clips. I loaded one and dropped the other into my jacket pocket. "Like you're getting to be expensive to keep in armament," McLaren said to me. I ignored him.

    "Have her picked up," Erikson said to McLaren. "But with discretion, damn it. Handle it yourself. I've no desire to have my hide nailed up on a barn wall."

    "Nothing to it, chief," McLaren said confidently. "You coming out to the clinic when we get her settled?"

    "I'll be there. I want to talk to you a minute, Earl." He waited until McLaren left the office. "What do you know about the magazine office next door to us?"

    "Only that it's there," I said innocently. "Why?"

    "Two detectives burst in here past Jock this afternoon with a woman who screeched hysterically in my face that I was raping her daughter. I can tell you it was damned embarrassing. When we got it straightened out that it wasn't me, the troupe went down the hall and played the same bill next door."

    "Girls will be girls," I remarked. "Are you regretting a lost opportunity?" Erikson snorted. "How do I get in touch with you out in Queens if necessary?"

    He unlocked a drawer in his desk, took out a metal box which he also unlocked, found an address book, and wrote down an address and telephone number. "Don't overreach yourself with these people," he cautioned me as he returned the metal box to his desk.

    "I'm all right as long as they think they're dealing with the mobster you set me up to be," I said. "See you."

    

    

    I left the office three minutes after McLaren and took a cab uptown. In the private elevator on the way up to the penthouse I had an unpleasant thought. If Abdel had been outside Talia's apartment, my mysterious disappearance could have made Bayak suspicious. I had to act more suspicious than he did.

    When the elevator doors parted, it wasn't Abdel who stood there. It was a smaller man I'd never seen before. He had a gun in his hand, but I brushed past him as though I didn't even see it. Bayak was sitting at the far end of the sunken living room, his pudgy hands steepled in front of his face and his shrewd black eyes studying me from above his pressed-together fingertips.

    "Where the hell is that big tub of lard, Abdel?" I yelled at him across the combined distance of the two rooms whose length resembled a train station.

    "He will be here presently," the Turk said suavely. "Come and sit down."

    "Sit down? I'll-"

    "Calm yourself," Bayak interrupted me.