One night a party of Palestinian commandos, which had infiltrated across the Syrian border, assembled in a dry ravine two kilometers from the prison. They had brought demolition charges and a 4.2 mortar. Most were experienced men who had taken part in these raids before. By starlight, their faces and hands soot-blackened, they picked their way to the prison wall. The charges were placed and exploded. Inside, the Arab members of the guerrilla organization broke out of their barracks, killed as many guards as they could get their hands on, joined the attackers, and they were all back across the Syrian border before dawn. In the confusion, a number of non-political prisoners also escaped. When the count was taken the next morning, Murray Gold was among the missing.
But he would be quickly recaptured, the authorities thought, if he were truly without money or Israeli connections.
2
Michael Shayne, the private detective, left Mercy Hospital in Southwest Miami by the emergency dock. He was a big man, ruggedly built, red-haired, with a lined face. Even now, with one arm in a sling, he moved with a gymnast’s grace and power and precise control.
His Buick was where he had left it, with the key still in the ignition and the lights on, the door not fully latched. He had brought it in with one arm, in considerable pain. The bumper nudged a utility stanchion. On an ordinary Detroit car, this small knock would have crumpled some of the front steel. But Shayne, who spent a great deal of time in his car and depended on it, had replaced the stock bumper with one of his own design. On more than one occasion, he and his Buick had contended with another car for the same patch of highway. So far these arguments had always been won by Shayne.
Three hours earlier, he had been involved in a collision of a different kind, crashing the Buick into a Cessna four-passenger airplane that was at tempting to take off from an old wind-sock airstrip south of Miami. There were two men in the plane, the Argentine pilot and a slick Italian who was a salesman for a shoe company when he worked legally. Their hand-luggage was double-lined, and forty kilos of unpackaged heroin were recovered from the wreck. Both passengers survived, and would have fifteen or twenty years to wish they had picked a more difficult way to make money. The heroin trade, of course, would continue.
Shayne’s right arm had been broken in two places, above and below the elbow. The lower break was the bad one, and had been set under traction. The hospital had wanted to keep him overnight, but Shayne disliked hospitals and left them as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, in his business it was hard to avoid them entirely.
He inspected the damage he had done to his car. It was less serious than he had expected-one fender, dents in the hood, a few scratches.
Fitting himself behind the wheel, he reached across to the glove box for his cognac flask. He shook it, and was sorry to hear that it was nearly empty.
After emptying it completely, he changed the setting of the seat-belt so it would accommodate his cast. The stick-shift, of course, was on the wrong side, and reaching it would be awkward. But he was in no hurry, and this wouldn’t be the first time he had driven with one hand.
For the last several months, Shayne’s friend Timothy Rourke, the Miami News crime-and-corruption man, had been emceeing a late-night talk show on WKMW, an FM station trying to build an audience. Rourke had always considered sleeping a waste of time. Now, instead of talking with friends in bars between eleven and one, they talked in a studio. Rourke was a needling, argumentative host, and conversations he started usually continued long after the station went off the air. From time to time he interrupted himself to take a phone call. The station had recently doubled his miniscule salary, so it now covered the cost of the liquor and sandwiches consumed on the show.
Rourke assembled his panels at the last possible minute, trying to tie them in to the day’s news events. Shayne had half promised to stop on his way home, after his arm was set, and give a first-person account of the violent occurrence at the airstrip. Throughout the evening, the station had been broadcasting ten-second teasers announcing that a major news story would be broken later on the Rourke show. For background, Rourke had brought in a radical professor from the University of Miami, who believed that heroin should be legalized, and Will Gentry, Miami Chief of Police, another old friend of Shayne’s, who of course believed the opposite. As he drove, Shayne turned on the dashboard radio, which was already set to Rourke’s station. Rourke was talking, in his hoarse, two-pack-a-day smoker’s voice.
“-tonight. Shayne just called from the hospital, and he sounded O.K. One of the luckiest sons of bitches I ever ran into. He totalled their goddamn airplane, took away their guns, left them tied to a tree and drove himself twenty miles to the hospital with a broken arm. Typical night’s work. He’ll be here in five or ten minutes, and he may have a different version of what happened. With Shayne, you never know.”
Shayne held the steering wheel with pressure from his knee, and reached across his body to make the shift. He was on Miami Avenue. There was little traffic, and probably the thing to do was to stay in third. Rourke’s quick summary had been reasonably correct, but the two men in the plane, though they had been carrying guns, had been too frightened to use them. They had climbed out in a daze and followed Shayne’s instructions without protest.
Now Rourke was saying: “And Angie Robustelli said he’ll try and make it a little later. Robustelli-for those who are new in town, that’s Captain Robustelli, head of the Narcotics Division of the MPD, known to romantic reporters on the opposition paper as Mr. Enforcement. He’s been breaking his ass on this drug shtick for the last twenty years, and that’s the point I’ve been trying to make. How many good people has Angie put away? It must be thousands by now. How many stoolies on the confidential payroll? How much junk has he seized and burned? Feed your habit, Will,” he remarked in an aside to Gentry. “Get another beer. I don’t want to put words in anybody’s mouth, but I think I know what Angie’s going to say because we’ve discussed it often enough. I listen to him with disbelief and dismay. You have to admit, Will, that the way we make our user arrests really stinks. Get their confidence and set them up for the bust. It may not be entrapment legally, but that’s what it is, just the same. Stick the bastard in jail for a few years so we can forget about him. He’ll be back on the needle two hours after he hits the street. O.K.-if it worked, that would be one thing. But we all know it doesn’t work. Robustelli is the world’s toughest cop. A really hard man. Dedicated! Twenty years on the job, and what’s he accomplished, after all the violence and crookedness-”
“And deaths,” the Miami professor put in.
“Not to mention the cost in dollars. So there’s just as many addicts as there ever were. Just as much stuff in circulation. Will, I was mugged coming over tonight. I’m not complaining. I know you can’t put a cop on every street corner, that would run into money and you need it for drug buys. I’d say the guy was about two hours into withdrawal, very sick and jittery. He had a knife. I’ve taken knives away from junkies, but not for years. I don’t get enough exercise. I’m told I smoke too much and I drink these bad blends. He was polite with me. He wanted my wallet. I handed him my wallet. He wanted my watch, but they stole that two weeks ago. I carry exactly seventeen bucks. Naturally they’d be glad to lift more, and they might even suspect that I’m carrying a few tens in my shoe. But they don’t press me because seventeen’s enough to get them through until noon tomorrow, and they hurry off to make their connection. We all have different ways to get by. What I do, I have a money-pouch inside my fly, and let’s hope all the H-heads are too zonked out to be listening to the radio this late at night. Seventeen bucks, I’m glad to contribute. I look on it as one citizen’s share of what it costs to maintain the criminal market in heroin. But look, Will. Will, are you listening? I want to see you flounder when you try to contradict me. Mike Shayne knocked off forty K’s tonight. Forty big K’s of unadulterated sh-No, that’s a word they don’t want me to use on the air. Worth millions and millions in street prices, after everybody and his brother, including the beat cop and the desk sergeant, take their cut.”