The estate was a large rambling summer house overlooking the water. It had a swimming pool on one side and a set of swings and a slide on the other. Its only landscaping was a few low shrubs and flower beds. The grass was dry and brown from lack of water. In the driveway was an old Ford station wagon with its hood up.
Michael was ordered to hold his empty pistol and pretend that he and Neil, who was armed with a loaded automatic rifle, were guarding Philip and Jeanne, who preceded them up the gravel walk to the front door with their hands clasped behind their heads.
A little man with glasses opened the door, gun in hand, to Michael’s knock and hail. “What’s all this?”
“Some new booty,” Michael answered sullenly.
Philip and Jeanne pushed their way in past the little man. Michael, with a tense glare back at Neil, followed them.
“I say, who are you?” the little man asked Neil.
“Michael’s cousin,” Neil answered, smiling and holding the automatic rifle casually pointed at the little man’s stomach. The living room had two couches, some handsome carved wooden chairs, and a piano.
“Oh, really? Where’d you come from?”
No one else appeared to be in the room. Neil saw Philip lower his hands, remove the revolver he had wrapped up and tucked in as part of his belly, and move toward a doorway at the far end of the room. When the bewildered little man turned to watch, Neil hit him in the neck with a karate chop and dropped him to the floor.
Neil crouched back against the closed front door watching Philip approach the doorway at the far end of the room. Jeanne came up to him.
“My gun,” she said softly to Neil, and he remembered and pulled the automatic out of his belt and handed it to her. At the far end of the room Philip disappeared through the doorway, and there was a bang that made Neil swivel his gun to the right: the wind had blown a shutter loose and it had banged alongside a window there. As he watched, still tense and trying not to tremble, it banged again. Philip came back from the far room.
“Kitchen,” he said. “I’d say it’s quite well stocked.”
“Call your friends,” Neil said to Michael. “Ask them to come down here.”
Michael glared at him without replying. Neil swung his rifle toward his stomach.
“Jeanne,” he said. “Go into the kitchen and start getting the food into boxes and bags. Michael, I’m waiting. Call your friends.”
Michael turned and walked slowly over to a second doorway off the main room. As Neil followed he saw that it led off into a hallway with a closed door and a stairway to the second floor. Michael stopped near the stairway and called:
“I say! Larry! Rick! Tolly!” he shouted. “Come down and have a chat! It’s me, Mike.”
A door opened upstairs.
“Welcome home, old buddy,” an American voice said. “What brings you back so soon?”
“I brought you a lady, Rick. Tall, dark, long hair. I know how fond you are of long hair.”
“Be right down.”
“Ask who’s around,” Neil whispered to Michael, the muzzle of his rifle digging into his back.
“I say, Rick, who’s here today?” Michael yelled up the stairs. “Is Tolly around?” A silence followed, then Rick’s voice puzzled: “What d’ya mean, ‘Is Tolly around?’ You know that Tolly…” The voice stopped and left only an ominous silence.
Neil raised the butt of the rifle and slammed it into the back of Michael’s head; he crumpled in a heap on the floor. Neil ran up the stairs two at a time and burst into the room the voice seemed to have come from. A skinny young man, apparently Rick, was standing at a bureau, groping in the top drawer.
“No! Don’t!” Rick yelled and dropped the gun back into the drawer. Neil flattened himself against the wall inside the door.
“Who else is in the house?” he asked. Rick looked around nervously, first at Neil, then at the door.
“There’s Arthur, I think, and Larry and the Pussycat—”
“Arthur’s a little man?” Neil asked.
“Yes?”
“Where’s Lar—”
Two shots rang out from downstairs. Neil ran to the door, then turned back on Rick, who still stood frozen but now with both arms stretched toward the ceiling.
“Don’t shoot!” he said again.
Enraged by the delay, Neil walked over to where Rick was standing and drove his fist into his face, sending him crashing back against the bureau and to the floor. He grabbed the pistol from the drawer and, carrying the automatic rifle in one hand like a handgun, rushed back to the head of the stairs.
“Phil!” he shouted down.
There was no answer. Michael’s legs were still visible at the foot of the stairs. The silence brought forth from Neil a low moan of anguish. Two shots and silence: Philip must have been hit by some newcomer. He edged over to the railing at the top of the stairs and peered down. Still no sound.
“You down there,” Neil shouted. “I… I… I know you got Phil, so I want to surrender. I never wanted to be part of this…” Neil wanted to get the man—Larry was it?—to talk, to focus his attention on Neil. Perhaps he didn’t know Jeanne was in the kitchen. Oh, dear Lord, please don’t let him have shot Jeanne.
“Throw your gun down the stairs!” a deep male voice commanded from the living room.
Neil took out Rick’s gun and tossed it down the stairs. It bounced twice and came to rest near Michael’s feet. Neil noticed that the door to the other downstairs room was now open. Come on, Jeanne, he’s talking to me. Shoot the bastard.
“Now come down with your hands up over your head,” Larry commanded next.
Exactly when will he be able to see me? Neil wondered. He took a step down the stairs. Then another. Where are you, Jeanne? he wondered, prayed. A third step. Two more and my legs will be in sight. He won’t shoot until he can hit my belly. A fourth step. No more. Something, pray it’s not death, must be stopping Jeanne from shooting from the kitchen. He had to get Larry to move. He took a fifth step down, then took the last seven steps in two long strides and lunged through the farther door in the corridor, rolling away from the doorway. Two shots whizzed past him, pounding into the wall by the stairway.
Neil got to his knees, glanced quickly around the room, and stopped, stunned. Katya was sitting on the bed only six feet away, naked. She looked at him with as much surprise as he guessed he must be looking at her.
“Can you see anyone?” Neil whispered. She responded with a barely perceptible nod. “Is Lisa here?” he asked next.
Katya shook her head and whispered, “They never got her.”
Remembering the layout of the living room, Neil added, “Is he behind the couch near the front door?” Again Katya gave a barely perceptible nod.
Positioning himself by the doorway, he steadied the rifle with both hands, then reached around the corner and sprayed off a three-second blast toward the spot where he remembered the couch to be. He heard a muffled scream, then the sound of movement.
“He went toward the kitchen,” Katya whispered.
Neil stood up, took two quick strides across the hallway to the living room, and hesitated. As he started to peer into the room the bam-bam-bam of three quick shots blasted out from the kitchen area. He ran into the living room, rifle at the ready, and crouched behind one of the ornate wooden chairs. He saw two bodies on the far side of the room near the kitchen, one partially hidden behind the end of the second couch, only its bare legs visible. The first, he realized sickeningly, was Philip, and for a horrifying moment the bare legs of the second looked female. A movement at the kitchen door caught his eye, and Jeanne stood there, her automatic at waist level, her eyes on the man she had apparently shot, blood spreading in a wide red splotch on the shoulder of her white cotton blouse.