Retribution (12 page)

He patiently waited for her to recover in order to ready her for the next plateau of abandon.

Early that evening Naim Shabaan phoned the number Jean-Paul had given him. Jean-Paul said that Claudine had seen the American
at the cemetery and had followed him back to his hotel on the rue de Rennes. She hadn’t told Jean-Paul anything else.

Naim turned to Hasan in the apartment on avenue du Maine. “This Yankee pig is staying in a hotel only five minutes’ walk from
here.”

“I think it’s time we carved some pork,” Hasan said.

“Tonight,” Naim agreed. “He’s coming too close to us.”

They waited until 2:30
A.M
. before heading for the hotel in order to be reasonably sure that the American would be there—asleep. The tall, thin Senegalese
night clerk stared with terrified eyes at the muzzle of Naim’s pistol. Yes, he had a master key. Yes, he would be
pleased to accompany them up in the elevator to room 34. It was while they were traveling up in the elevator that he told
them he was a Moslem and had children back in Dakar who were dependent on the money he sent. He hoped to live long enough
to see them again.

Dartley did not hear the key turning in the lock. The rattle caused by the door being pushed in against the bolt only disturbed
his sleep a little. Naim tried to kick the door in, failed on his first kick, and again on his second. Hasan charged the door
with his right shoulder and ripped the bolt out by its screws. He fell halfway into the room as the door gave way beneath
his weight.

The first of Naim’s kicks woke Dartley, the second sent him rolling from the bed. He bounded across the room to where a glass-fronted
wardrobe stood against the wall, a few feet from the door handle. He knew that in a matter of seconds that door was going
to burst open and that he had no gun. He tipped over the wardrobe, a heavy old-fashioned one, on its two legs nearest the
door. When the door burst open, he gave the wardrobe a heave.

As Hasan scrambled to his feet to shoot into the bed, the heavy piece of furniture crashed down on him and pinned him beneath.
His pistol fell near where Dartley stood. The American picked up the weapon and fired around the doorpost into the corridor
outside the room. He heard a gasp, then a moan of pain. Dartley fired once more and stepped into the open doorway as much,
as he could, with the wardrobe pinning the man
to the floor. One of the men he had seen at the training stables in Ireland stood behind the drooping night clerk, whom Dartley
had hit twice with his bullets.

Using the wounded African as a shield, Naim fired twice at the American, missing the first time and hitting him in the right
arm with the second shot. The American staggered backward. The backs of his knees caught on the end of the bed and he fell
onto it, changing the gun to his left hand as he did so. Naim’s third shot would have drilled him in the gut if he had not
fallen on his back. The American rolled so fast off the bed that Naim’s fourth shot buried itself in the mattress.

At that moment the night clerk fell lifeless at his feet and Naim could not rush into the room because of his body and because
of Hasan still pinned under the wardrobe. Naim made his way cautiously into the room. He saw a door opened about an inch at
the other end of the room, which he guessed was the bathroom. He loosed two shots at waist level through the door’s plywood
panels.

Dartley was stiffened back against the wall with a small extension of tiles protecting him. Using his left hand, he fired
once at the Palestinian and missed. The searing pain- in his upper right arm was making it impossible for him to see clearly
and think straight. He had a better shot at the one on the floor. He fired again and missed again.

Seeing that Hasan was in danger and that he could not easily dislodge the American from the bathroom, Naim pocketed his gun
and used all his strength to push
the wardrobe off Hasan’s prone body. He pulled him into the corridor by the ankles, over the African’s corpse. There were
people in the corridor, but they rushed back in their rooms and slammed the doors when he looked at them. The elevator door
was still jammed open. Hasan was getting his senses back and weaving unsteadily on his feet as Naim pressed the button for
the ground floor.

In the lobby Naim chased away a man from the telephone switchboard by waving his pistol. Hasan was walking well. A woman in
a nightgown and two men in pajamas stood outside the hotel and called for help. Naim let them see his gun. They ran.

Dartley pulled on his shirt, jacket, pants, put his feet in his shoes and headed down the stairs. He had heard the elevator
leave and, according to the floor indicator, it was nearing the ground floor as he left his room. There were people on the
staircase to whom Dartley shouted, “They’re in the elevator!” His gun was in his pocket and the blood had not yet soaked through
his jacket.

He had left nothing of consequence in the room. All his papers, which were false anyhow, were in his jacket. The clothes he
left behind were untraceable. Dartley did not travel with laundry marks or items from small-town stores. A man at the telephone
switchboard in the lobby dived beneath the desk when he saw Dartley coming. There were three jokers in their nightclothes
hopping up and down outside. Up the street a way he saw the two Arabs get in a taxi.

He hailed one himself and was gone before the police sirens had started to sound.

Dartley had told the driver to go to Gare du Nord in order to get him moving quickly. Now he pushed a twenty-dollar bill into
the driver’s compartment and said, “Find me a woman.”

The driver went to Gare du Nord and cruised the area. It was after three in the morning and nobody could be expected to look
their freshest, but the women on the street and alone at tables in all-night cafés looked none too good to Dartley as he peered
out the open taxi window.

“No addicts, no drunks,” he said to the driver.

The man laughed. “They’re
all
addicts or drunks, monsieur. That’s why they’re on the street at this hour.”

Dartley settled on a chunky woman with an open country face who seemed steadier on her feet than the others. She tried to
quote him prices for various services, but he hushed her and sat her in the cab with him.

“Money is not important,” he said. “I have plenty. I need you all night. But first I must go to an all-night pharmacy because
I need French letters.”

“Here we call them English letters.”

“Right. Do you know one?”

She directed the driver and they waited outside while he went in. He bought the condoms just in case,
although he did not think he would be needing them. They would not sell him penicillin but he did get a disinfectant salve
and adhesive waterproof bandages which would keep the blood in. Having paid in French money and ignored the sales clerk’s
remark that blood was soaking through his right sleeve, he went back to the taxi and told the woman to have the driver take
them to a place where the rooms had private bathrooms. She was pleased at the choice of an upscale hotel. Dartley gave the
driver another twenty-dollar bill. There was no way to make a taxi driver forget him more quickly than to wildly overpay him
in dollars—enough to make it look like the American visitor might have been victimized by the Paris driver.

He gave her French money to pay for the room and stayed in the background himself because by now his whole right shoulder
was soaking in blood. This was the kind of hotel where male guests tended to be furtive. They were in the elevator before
the woman noticed the blood.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered urgently.

“A scratch.”

His judgment proved good. She was a no-nonsense sort who insisted on dressing his wound after washing him down. She then rinsed
the blood from his shirt and jacket after he had emptied its pockets.

“They may not be dry by tomorrow,” she said, “but better have them wet than stained with dried blood.” She pointed to the
pistol he had removed from the jacket. “Did you kill anyone?”

“Why?”

“The police could say I was an accessory to the murder.”

Dartley gave her an icy smile. “The police will be the least of your worries if you open your mouth to anyone about this.”
He could see from the expression on her face that he had frightened her. He pulled out five onehundred-dollar bills, tore
them in half and held out five pieces to her. “You get the other halves tomorrow.”

She took them willingly and looked him in the eyes as she nodded that they had a bargain. “I have pills,” she offered, rooting
in her purse. She handed him a small plastic cylinder.

They were penicillin tablets, six altogether. He swallowed the lot and decided not to ask why she needed them. “You get these
from a government doctor?”

She shook her head. “A young doctor just starting out. He’s poor and not a bastard to working people.”

“Maybe I’ll give him some dollars in the morning.”

“I’ll take you to him,” she said.

“All right. Lie on the bed. Get some sleep.”

In two minutes she was snoring and Dartley began to think over his situation for the first time. He knew how they had found
him in his hotel room—he had been horny and therefore stupid about Claudine. His whole right arm was now one throbbing ache,
his wrist hurting more than the actual wounded part. The bullet has passed clean through the flesh on the outside of his upper
arm. It had not been a .45 or a 9 mm slug, more probably a .38 from another Llama pistol like the one
he had picked off the hotel room floor—and like the one he had taken from the dead man at the ruined castle in Ireland. He
had dumped that gun before taking Morton Schiff’s private jet to Paris. But the two surviving Arabs had held onto theirs,
no doubt since they had not passed through customs. According to Frankie Grady in London, they had been taken to Ireland by
fishing boat. They were probably transported to France the same way. Well, he had taken one of their lives and two of their
three guns. They had to be feeling the pressure. They had plenty more guns. It was their lives they would be worrying about.

Naim and Hasan saw the bar on a side street off Pigalle, a place small, dirty, and threatening enough to keep the tourists
out.

“I’ll go in first,” Hasan said. He did better in places like this than Naim, who had a kind of stiff air in them which made
people wonder if he wasn’t a policeman or some kind of informer.

“She’ll have a black sweater, big boobs, smokes American cigarettes, and drinks Kronenbourg beer.”

“I remember,” Hasan said and headed for the bar.

Naim looked after him and let his right hand drift to the coat pocket which held his gun. This was not the way Naim had wanted
to do things. He had given Jean-Paul and his Direct Action friends a lot of money in a lump sum, instead of piecing it out
by performance. That had been a mistake. Jean-Paul hadn’t backed out on his part of the agreement exactly, but he
was saying how things would be done. Naim intended to change that.

This nameless woman whose description he had repeated to Hasan for maybe the tenth time had brought something from Germany
for them. He was not sure what, but any military-grade weapons would be welcome, since it seemed almost impossible to find
anything for sale in Paris. Jean-Paul said he would find it much easier in Marseilles, and Naim intended to try there. It
was frustrating to have plenty of money and find nothing to buy.

This woman in the bar had bought stolen stuff near a U.S. base in Germany and crossed the border into France. Naim had not
wanted to meet her, saying Jean-Paul should collect and deliver it. Jean-Paul could see no good reason to take such an unnecessary
risk. If Naim wanted the stuff, the woman would be at this bar. If he didn’t show up, that was all right—they could use it
themselves. Knowing the possibility of a trap, Naim anxiously watched the bar front from a doorway across the narrow street.

Inside Hasan looked over the whores and they ignored him. They seemed to be mostly lesbians having a good time together, with
no wish to let some dumb john spoil their fun in here. A few dull-eyed men gave him a careful stare—junkies wanting to buy
or sell. A few faces that turned his way showed they didn’t want Arabs here, but none were inclined to push the matter with
someone as rough and tough as Hasan.

He ordered a
marc
and bought a bottle of
Kronenbourg for a lady with large breasts and a black sweater down the bar. After a few moments he joined her.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“A friend of Jean-Paul’s. You have something for me?”

“All the way from Germany.”

“Give it to me now,” he said. “I have to go.”

She leaned across the counter to the bartender, who appeared to know her, and said to him, “Hold my drink. I’m going outside
for a minute.”

Hasan followed her outside, this time drawing curious looks from both the hookers and addicts, who were wondering what kind
of transaction was taking place. She spotted Naim immediately.

“Friend of mine,” Hasan assured her.

So she pulled up her black sweater to reveal a large-cupped pink bra. From each lace-trimmed pink cup she lifted out a green
grenade and handed them to him. Hasan stood astounded on the sidewalk while she went back inside the bar without a word.

Naim argued at first, however Hasan persuaded him to stay away from airports. Even if they reached Orly before word of the
latest attack spread there, they might still be netted by the permanent watch maintained there, at every other airport, and
at major ports and train stations.

“We would deserve it too, for being too lazy to drive,” Hasan said. “Who’s going to believe two Arablooking
men with Greek passports headed for Marseilles? For Athens, maybe—except we don’t speak Greek. Not Marseilles. And if we come
up against anyone who can talk Greek to us, it will be at an airport. You fly, I’ll drive.”

“It’s a long way,” Naim complained. “About eight hundred kilometers.”

“Better that than thirty or forty years when they check your fingerprints and visual descriptions at airport security.”