Rourke had gone off the air and the station was no longer taking calls. Shayne’s operator tried to locate Gentry, without success. Shayne finally talked to a homicide lieutenant and gave him a description of the Oldsmobile and its driver, and where they had last been seen.
Then he turned off the expressway and headed for home.
4
Rashid Abd El-Din, a dark young man with a pencil-line mustache, wearing a black turtleneck, black slacks and sneakers, had been watching for headlights. When they turned in from the street, he swung over the marble balustrade and dropped lightly to the grass.
He moved on the balls of his feet, soundlessly. He was built like a scimitar-a rather sentimental woman had said that about him once, and he liked the metaphor. The scimitar, with which his people had driven to the Pyrenees and Vienna; forged from Damascus steel (Rashid himself had been born not far from Damascus), and ground to a fine edge that could take the whiskers off a goat or the head off an enemy. Of course at this moment, after two years of starchy prison food and enforced idleness, he was no longer quite as narrow as a scimitar. Never mind; a few weeks of desert marches would bring him back to his usual trim.
The car rustled across the gravel and parked, as arranged, under the single outside light at the end of the six-car garage. Six cars! And all enormous-black, gleaming Cadillacs and Lincolns, none with a mileage reading in five figures. What did they do with cars in this rich country when they travelled 10,000 miles, take them out in a field and abandon them to the crows?
This car, having been stolen off the street earlier in the evening, was considerably less costly. It had once been white. The paint had been patched here and there, with no effort to match shades. One patch on the roof was considerably lighter than the rest.
Rashid focussed his energies on the man at the wheel. He could become a problem, this old man. Rashid had known him six months, had studied him intensely, but he was still a puzzle. His name was Murray Gold, a prominent gangster, a Jew.
Gold came out holding a pistol. At the sight of the drawn weapon Rashid felt a perverse stir of pleasure. There had been little chance for action in prison, until those final minutes.
“Is that truly a gun?” he said in lightly accented English, smiling. “I had begun to believe we were friends.”
“Don’t be dumb.”
At the best of times the Jew looked slightly weary. Now he looked tired enough to fall asleep where he stood. All the vertical lines of his face had lengthened. His glasses had slid down his nose. He had no more flesh than a sparrow. He had stopped shaving in prison, producing a scraggly beard which after their joint escape he had dyed a depressing shade of brown. In his cocky American sporting cap he looked a little disgusting-to tell the truth, more than a little. Unlike some in the movement, Rashid had nothing against Jews except that they had had the poor judgment to designate Palestine as their so-called homeland, on the basis of a dubious reading of history. They were like roaches. You couldn’t reason with them; stamp on them was all you could do.
“I’ve done some driving tonight,” Gold said. “A few things worked out, a few things didn’t. I’ve got the guns. Let’s finish right now.”
“Finish in what way?”
“I give you the guns, you give me the heroin.”
“No,” Rashid said coolly.
“The big rule with that stuff is, get rid of it fast. I’m beginning to feel itchy. This is a bad part of the world for me, I want to get out.”
“The morning after tomorrow morning, in accordance with plans.”
“One of the reasons for having plans is so you can change them.”
“But the gun,” Rashid said gently. “We are working so closely together. Why does a gun appear suddenly between us? There is a saying among Arabs that when you take out a gun, you should be ready to use it.”
The two men, adversaries and co-conspirators, examined each other. The exhausted old man was trying hard to look dangerous. A joke! Rashid was surrounded by sleeping friends. The last thing Gold would do now was shoot anybody-and in spite of the Jew’s reputation, Rashid secretly believed he was incapable of shooting.
With a sigh, Gold put the pistol into the waistband of his disreputable pants.
“I almost fell asleep about six times. Is there any chance of getting some coffee?”
“Of course. But your battered automobile-on this property it seems absurd. I believe you should unload the guns and park on the street.”
“We’ve got some talking to do first.”
“Then come in over the garage. Two of our people have been sleeping here. Will it bother you to be outnumbered?”
“I can probably handle it, if I can stay awake. I need more sleep these days than I used to.”
Rashid led the way after another glance at the bearded Jew. The number one professional criminal in the United States, supposedly! In prison, he had been so lacking in definition that he had seemed to blend with the walls. An interesting man, all the same. But what did he want? Surely not money alone? During the violence at the end, he had turned his face aside, his hands in his pockets. There were guards who had beaten him with bamboo rods. Apparently he forgot and forgave. He let somebody else kill them.
Upstairs, Rashid awakened one of his friends, a student named Sayyid, and told him to make coffee. Sayyid gave Gold a malevolent look, widening his nostrils. This one hated Jews when he went to sleep, and he hated them when he woke up, and in between he dreamed about strangling them and blowing them to bits with explosive. A second Arab, a Syrian pilot named Fuad Sabri, was asleep in a bedroom. Rashid would use him only if he had to.
“I begin to understand,” Rashid said. “The guns are not in your car. You unloaded them elsewhere.”
Gold nodded, and picked a chair in which he would have the wall behind him. “You’ll love them. Ten brand-new Thompsons, with the grease still on. Two hundred rounds of ammo. You’re going to want more. It’s standard. 45 caliber, look up a gun store in the yellow pages and they’ll sell you all you can carry, no questions asked.”
“Thompsons. I would like to see them.”
“When the time comes,” Gold said. “And I’m going to be cagey about that. Not that I don’t trust you.”
“You don’t trust us?” Rashid said, surprised.
Gold laughed. “You people are so strange. I never met anybody like you.”
Rashid opened his hands. “In what way are we strange? We want our country returned to us, nothing more. We are willing to die for this.”
“I’m not willing to die to keep it away from you, I can tell you that,” Gold said. “I just want to make sure you come through on your end of the deal. I know how you feel about handling heroin-”
“It will be consumed by Americans. Why should we care what Americans choose to inject into their bodies?”
Sayyid came in with the tiny cups. Rashid asked the Jew if he minded Syrian coffee.
Gold shrugged. “I’m getting used to it. I wouldn’t want you to think I like it. It’s like the Front for the Liberation of Palestine. I’d prefer to work with a Jewish organization, but in my case you’re the only game in town.”
They sipped ceremoniously.
“Ugh,” Gold said. “I mean, delicious. Now if we can talk business, I want to move up the timetable. I didn’t think we could get everything organized here in less than three days. But we’ve been making good headway and the sooner we get it over with the better, for both of us. I’m sorry to say I ran into some trouble tonight.”
“Of what kind?”
“Rashid, believe me, you don’t want to know. As far as I can tell, I took care of it O.K. But the longer we hold off, the more chance there is of that kind of thing happening. I’m too known. It’s not the cops I’m thinking about. We’ve got good protection there, as I told you. Our man couldn’t be in a better spot to look out for us. It’s the bondsmen. They took a bad bath with me, over a million bucks, and they’d like to get some of it back. Or some satisfaction if they can’t. They’re not in the business of killing people, but they know people who are. So do it tomorrow morning, Rashid. I urge you strongly.”