Bolan was counting them through and, when Celeste and Judy appeared, he said quietly, "You two make ten. Is that all?"
The blonde girl replied, "Yes. Give us a minute to get our coats."
Celeste gave him a hard look and pressed on by. This was one of the things Bolan hated about his work. He wondered how many other sad widows lay in the Executioner's shadow, but he flung the idea from his mind and steeled himself for what lay just ahead.
The roof stairway was creaking into place. Soft-footed women were wrestling with coats and quickly departing the battle zone. All but one. Celeste stood at the bottom of the stairway and gazed toward Bolan.
She thinks I'm going to get it, Bolan decided. She wants to see me get it.
It was time. He moved the safety release on the pistolet rapidly back and forth, assuring no failure, then went quickly down the stairs in a soft descent.
Three men relaxing lazily on a couch directly across the room took his first burst, the drumfire punching them deeper into the cushions as they gawked at him.
Two men at the window spun into the next burst, one of them crashing head-down into a nearby corner, the other going through the window in a shower of glass.
Bolan's death whirl continued unchecked. A bearded Frenchman in a beret, clawing gunleather, jerked his trigger prematurely and shot himself in the belly. Bolan added several more rounds for good measure, and whirled on.
Two men near the stairway had come unfrozen and had guns in hand, firing in a trigger-jerking frenzy at the fastmoving target. Bolan zippered them from right to left, then from left to right, and had to dodge back to avoid their falling bodies. He was feeding a fresh clip to the machine-pistol as he stepped over them and leapt down the stairs to the ground level.
Bare seconds had passed since the first eruption of gunfire. Two rather large men were jammed together in the doorway to the living quarters, both trying to get through at the same time. A gun hand was clear, though, and swinging on Bolan as he sent his own emissaries into the jam, and it dissolved and oozed to the floor.
Moving figures flashed beyond the doorway and a soft male voice inside was crying, "Julio! Julio!"
Bolan sent a figure-8 burst through the doorway and whirled to meet a challenge from the street door. A small man with a wolfish Italian face was poised there, gun cooly raised and spitting and trying to track onto Bolan's movements, the slugs chewing wood behind the elusive target. A raspy voice on the other side was commanding, "Down, Roller, down!"
Bolan helped Roller down, with a zipper across the face that punched him back out the door and sprawling backwards onto the sidewalk. A whistling slug literally parted Bolan's hair as he rolled toward the sound of the raspy voice, and as he came up to the new attack Bolan recognized the big man behind the roaring .45. It was Vito Bertelucci, once a rodman with the old Capone mob and lately missing from American Mafia circles. Bolan made it a permanent absence with a target grouping tightly about the heart. Vito went down without a sound, dead before the fall.
The Executioner stepped quickly to the front door and discharged a short burst into the air, wishing to discourage any rush from that direction but reluctant to spray indiscriminately into the street. Then he went to the other doorway and stepped into Madame Celeste's private quarters.
A well-dressed man sat there, on the floor, staring at him. He held a fancied-up luger in a bleeding hand. "Bolan," he whispered.
"That's right." Another man lay close by, face down in blood, breathing with a bubbly sound. "It seems to be down to you and me."
The luger fell away and the soft voice announced, "I surrender."
"That's nice." Bolan could not help being struck by the ludicrousness of the situation. In all his lifetime of warfare, he had never heard those words.
"Look, I'm a businessman, not a street soldier."
"I guess you're going to die like one." Bolan went on into the room and placed the muzzle of the pistol against the man's head. It was hot. Hide fried, but the terrified man did not move so much as an eyebrow.
"Don't kill me, Bolan. Deal, I'm a businessman, let's deal."
"Okay, start dealing. But damn quick."
"You don't want Paris. No action here, Bolan. The action is south, the Mediterranean Marseilles. Nice, that's the center of action. Evil action, Bolan, your kind of stuff. Narcotics, gun running, white slavery, all of it. That's where you want to be. Not here, not in Paris."
"Who the hell are you?" Bolan asked, curious.
"I'm Tom Rudolfi. You don't know that name? I'm the Ambassador to France, Bolan."
"Sure," Bolan said. "I haven't heard any deal yet, Rudolfi. You have ten seconds, then I have to be splitting."
"Names, Bolan. I'm giving them to you. Aumond, de Champs, Silvaterri. The big three, Bolan. South. Go south."
Bolan said, "Yeah," and slapped Rudolfi's skull with the muzzle of the pistol. The man sagged forward. Bolan stared at him for an indecisive moment, made a face, and went out. A guy was coming in from the street, saw Bolan, and flung himself back outside. Bolan grimaced and threw a short burst that splintered the doorjamb, then he sprinted up the steps.
He glanced at his watch as he ran through the chamber of death; the timing was great; hardly more than two minutes had elapsed since the first shot.
Madam Celeste stood stiffly at the third floor landing. Bolan paused beside her and murmured, "Je regrette, Celeste, je beaucoup regrette."
The woman spit at him. Bolan went on to the roof. Only the blonde Englishwoman was there to greet him. She said, "I don't believe it."
"I do," Bolan replied, moving on across the rooftop.
The woman was trotting along beside him. He asked her, "Where do you think you're going?"
She told him, "You don't think I'm going back to that death house."
"Where'd the others go?"
"I don't know. They just... disappeared."
"You thinking of going with me then?"
"Well... I don't know where to go. The police..."
"Yeah, there's always that, isn't there." Bolan slowed his pace and steered the girl around the clothesline area. Back across the rooftop, a shadowy figure and then another moved through the lighted doorway atop Madame Celeste's. The pursuit was on. Bolan took the girl's arm and hurried her along. The weird sound of French sirens seemed to be homing in from all directions. They reached the steel ladder of the end building and he told her, "Quickly, down."
She said, "I-I don't know if I..."
The sounds of running feet were moving across the rooftop. Bolan heard a gurgle and a whoomp that could only mean a neck on a clothesline. Someone out there in the darkness was swearing softly and with great feeling.
The girl's hand was clutching his with a spasm of fear. He told her, "If you're going with me, Judy, it's now or never. The hounds are loose."
She threw her leg across the parapet and lowered herself over the side, eyes wide on Bolan. He followed quickly behind her.
Thus far the mission had been a huge success. He had blitzed a Mafia hardsite and come away alive, with perhaps an item or two of useful intelligence and, for the first time ever, a soft bundle of spoils.
Now, if he could just make it back across a narrow area of hostile territory, maybe after all there would be a moment or two of R&R in gay Paris. But the Executioner was not setting any plans along that line. The Executioner had learned to live one heartbeat at a time.
9
The Paradox
Bolan was standing at the window and watching the activity in the street. The blonde girl was seated on the bed, legs drawn up to her chest, head resting on the knees. Her breathing was almost normal again as she told Bolan, "This is like a nightmare."