“You do well to fear the yata” Khalil said, advancing, light twinkling off the point like the gaze of a one-eyed basilisk.
“Oh, I wasn't exactly afraid of it,” Julie said. “Just surprised to see it. Rhino horn is not legally traded. Is it genuine?”
“Of course,” Khalil said, feinting and then making a lightning stab at her. “I always kill with the genuine article.”
“I'm sure glad to hear that,” Julie said. That makes that knife extremely valuable!”
The blade darted toward her midsection. Julie spun, and the thing passed harmlessly along her left side. As it passed, her arm snapped down, trapping the weapon. Khalil began a long and elaborate Arabic curse in the guttural dialect of Omdurman, but got out no more than a couple of syllables before Julie's left elbow crashed with piledriver force into the middle of his face.
Blood streaming from his nose and mouth, Khalil stumbled backward, losing his grip on the knife that was still clamped under Julie's left arm.
“I'll just keep this for you,” Julie said, slipping the knife into her belt. “It might reduce its value if we got blood all over it.”
A feint to the midsection drew down Khalil's guard. Fingers folded in protectively, Julie snapped a blow. The heel of her hand caught Khalil where the upper lip meets the nose. Four of his front teeth cracked off clean at the gum line.
“You ought to thank me,” Julie said. “I've corrected your overbite and haven't even charged you for it.”
Khalil fell down screaming. He rolled on the floor clutching his head and whimpering. Bloody foam splattered from his mouth. Julie watched him critically for a moment, then muttered, “That ought to keep you occupied for a while.”
She turned to Sfat. He had regained his feet, and although his balance was just the slightest bit off-kilter, he was still formidable. If rage could kill, then Julie would be dead ten times over. He came toward her on the attack. He was about twice the weight of the slender girl and he was containing his fury now as he backed her into an angle of the wall, just to one side of an indifferent copy of Gainsborough's Blue Boy. There seemed no way she could get out of this one. Shouting an oath in street Arabic, Sfat launched his attack.
Julie had had long preparation for moments like this. Shen Hui's instructions in self-defense had covered all the basics of unarmed combat. He had not been satisfied with that, however, since he accounted himself no expert in the finer points of self-defense. So he had apprenticed her to Olla Khan, a fat-faced master fighter from Isfahan in central Asia. Khan, beguiled by her beauty, had said, “My arrangement with your master is that you will stay with me and serve me in all particulars until you can beat me at unarmed combat. That might take more than a lifetime, my pet.” In fact it took just five months, and Olla Khan ended up in a hospital for his presumption.
And so, now, with Sfat launching his impetuous and ill-considered attack, Julie's problem was not how to cope with it, but which of several different methods to choose. She also had to decide to what extent she wished to incapacitate him, and this in turn depended on her estimation of his value to her alive. In the split of a second she decided that this gross hairy-faced man with the bad breath was of no value to her, and indeed could serve her better dead as a message to his master, Khalil, to stop resisting and start cooperating.
She didn't think all that through consciously. Instead, she opposed his charge with a sword hand, fingers stiffened. Sfat crashed into her hand and was stopped abruptly as the fingers took him high between the eyes, shutting down his pineal gland and. Then going on to break his neck. His eyes rolled up, showing the white, and he crashed to the floor like two hundred pounds of dead mutton.
She turned from him to Khalil. “Ready to go another round?” she asked.
Khalil, his teeth scattered over the floor, had had enough. He mumbled through a bloodstained hand. “Don't hurt me anymore. I'm a dilettante, not a fighter. I'll give you whatever you want.”
“That's what I like to hear,” Julie said. She took a pillow from a nearby bed and stripped off the pillowcase.
“Fill it with good stuff for me,” she said. “Don't put in any worthless crap or I'll have something to say about it.”
Khalil, totally unnerved, couldn't even dream of resistance.
His collapse was absolute. He opened a compartment concealed in the wall behind the bed and picked several precious bracelets, two handfuls of magnificent unmounted gems in a white chamois bag, and a string of glorious baroque pearls, each the size of a pigeon's egg and no two alike. Soon the pillowcase was bulging. Khalil had other objects he wanted to give her, but she stopped him.
“One bagful is enough. I'm not greedy. Besides, I'd need an extra pair of hands to carry it all.”
Khalil recovered sufficiently to say, “If you're finished, then get out!”
“Okay,” Julie said. “This is good-bye, then.” She moved close to him.
He stared at her. The whites of his eyes went a dirty yellow as she advanced on him. He stumbled away, found himself with his back to a bureau. “What are you going to do?” he asked in a shaking voice.
“Just give you a couple hours' sleep. So I can walk out of here like a lady.” She touched a nerve in his neck. He slumped to the floor unconscious.
“Be sure to have a dentist look at those stumps,” she said. He couldn't hear her, of course, but she was sure he'd remember anyway.
Julie went to the dressing-room mirror and checked her clothing and makeup. She repaired her lipstick, which had been smeared in the combat, and found an ugly red stain on the shoulder of her red dress.
Luckily, Khalil had a really smart ermine jacket in his closet. It covered the stain nicely. She left by the penthouse elevator. No one stopped her as she walked out, passed through the lobby, and exited the revolving front door onto Central Park South, where she called a taxi.
11
“How did it go tonight?” Stan asked when she got back to the brownstone.
“Not bad,” she said, dumping her loot into the bed. “A dream night for a thief. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near enough to buy a spaceship with.”
“We don't need to buy one,” Stan said. “I've got a plan that ought to work now that we have some money to play around with. The first thing we're going to need is a spaceship driver.”
“I'd love to talk about it,” Julie said. “But first I need a bath. And I'm famished! Sometimes stealing can be hard work. Oh, by the way, here's a present.” She tossed the dagger onto the bed.
Stan picked it up and admired the gleaming narrow blade and the rhino handle. “Where'd you get this?”
“Just a little trinket I picked up during the evening.”
12
Over the next two weeks, Julie converted the loot from Khalil's apartment to cash, and Stan lost no time putting it to work. There was information to buy, people to bribe, and round-the-clock work by hired technicians to put Norbert into full working condition.
Two weeks to the day after Julie's theft at the Plaza, she met Stan for lunch at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Since it wasn't a workday for her, she permitted herself a cocktail.
Stan was looking pretty well. A shade paler than usual, but still not bad for a man dying of cancer and sustaining himself on heavy doses of the most addicting narcotic substance known to man. His eyes were a little dreamy, but his voice was firm enough as he said, “Julie, we're ready to make our move.”
“Today?”
“That's right. Are you ready?”
She gave him an exasperated look. “Of course. You really don't have to ask me that.”
“Sorry, I didn't mean anything by it.”
Her voice softened. “No, I'm sorry, Stan. I don't mean to snap at you. It's the waiting. It's hard on my nerves.”