The Russian’s little eyes opened wider and a slow smile of satisfaction crept over his face.
I let myself look hopeful and apprehensive.
“Well, well,” he said, taking my shirt front with a ham-handed grasp. “Suddenly your memory is returning, eh?”
He shook me back and forth, and I let myself go limp.
“Where is he, pig?” he thundered.
I shook my head. “Only if you promise to let me go afterward,” I said.
The Russian slowly unclenched his big hand and smiled slowly, obviously at my naïveté.
“All right,” he said smoothly. “All right. We don’t want to kill you. All we want is a little cooperation.”
Little naive me smiled in gratitude at his generosity. “I can’t tell you where he is, but I can take you there,” I said. “I only found out tonight. The place was pointed out to me by someone who saw him there.”
Crew-cut did all but lick his chops. “Move,” he commanded. “There’s no time to waste.”
Inside the Mercedes limousine again, they settled back on either side of me, guns still out and ready. The chauffeur, my paint box still on the seat beside him, moved the big car from the curb and I began to direct him up and down streets and avenues.
I put on a good act of searching for the place, looking for landmarks to help me. Actually, I was desperately looking for a spot that would give me a chance. I could feel their impatience growing as I kept the car going up and down side streets, around corners and across boulevards.
I knew I couldn’t keep the charade up much longer and then, suddenly, I found it, a dark street running alongside one of the old bidonvilles, the tar-paper and tin-can slums that once infested the city.
During World War II, Casablanca had been a thriving port, and, at the war’s end, hundreds of thousands of Arab migrants had descended on the port, lured by the promise of easy work. They set up unsightly, unsanitary slum areas that soon virtually overran the city. First the French and then the Moroccan governments attacked the problem and cleaned up many of the bidonvilles.
A number still existed, however, houses made of sheets of tin and tar-paper, nothing more than four walls and a roof, without facilities of any kind. The one I’d found was typical of its kind, its streets mere narrow passageways between the ramshackle huts.
“Stop!” I cried out.
I moved quickly and had the door open before the car came to a halt. The two Russians followed on my heels as I started into the bidonville. I caught a glimpse of the third one coming around the hood of the Mercedes, still keeping his chauffeur’s uniform smartly buttoned up.
I moved down one of the passageways, past houses that leaned in four directions at once. Suddenly I halted outside one shack, the door ajar, and I was sure untenanted. The interior was pitch black.
“In there,” I whispered to the Russian.
He motioned to the chauffeur to go around to the other side of the shack.
“Watch him,” he told the other Russian, gesturing to me as he carefully started to enter the shack, pressing his back tight against the rickety, tin sheet of a door.
As Crew-cut started to move slowly into the blackness of the shack I glanced at the other Russian. He had the gun on me but his glance kept darting to the shack. It wasn’t great but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.
I moved my forearm, slowly turning it as I tightened the muscles. I felt the stiletto release and drop silently into the palm of my hand. My legs tensed, coiled springs of muscle and sinew.
I watched the Russian. His eyes flicked over to the shack. It was but a moment, but the moment was all I needed.
I threw Hugo underhanded, with all my strength, diving to the right at the same instant. The stiletto went into his belly and I heard him suck his breath in sharply.
As I’d figured, his finger automatically squeezed down on the trigger, and he got off one shot before he collapsed. Only I wasn’t there. I was racing down one of the black, narrow passages that stank of urine and rotted food and of everything else.
Crew-cut would be out and after me now, as would the one masquerading as a chauffeur.
I heard their harsh shouts as they split up to take different passageways. They were making things easier for me. But I heard other sounds as the slum-dwellers began to wake. I reached a spot where two passageways bisected.
I could hear Crew-cut’s footsteps racing after me and I looked around desperately for something to use as a weapon. A piece of tin, half-peeled from one of the shacks, caught my eye. It was thin but stiff, its edges jagged as a hundred slivers of broken glass.
I grabbed at it and pulled it free, feeling the blood spurt from my hands where they dug into the jagged edge. The small sheet of tin in my hands, I dropped to one knee in the deepest shadows against the shack.
Crew-cut emerged from the passageway and halted, peering up and then down the bisecting passage.
The mind is a funny thing, and suddenly I was seeing a little boy a long time ago standing on the shore of a lake and skipping flat stones far out across the water. It was the same motion, a short, hard flick of the wrist. I took aim and let the sheet of tin fly.
Crew-cut turned just as it slammed into his face, the jagged edge a hundred bits of tearing, ripping metal. Blood leaped from his face. He screamed in pain, dropped the gun and threw both hands up to his face.
I dived for the gun, grabbed it and pressed it against his stomach. I fired twice, the shots partially muffled in his clothes.
Now there was only one Russian left and I moved back into the shadows of the shack. I had only moments to wait.
He came racing down, saw the inert form of Crew-cut sprawled in the intersection and whirled, blazing away at every corner. He was firing wildly but furiously, and the slugs were zinging into the tin all around me.
I dropped to a prone position and fired back.
He staggered as my shots tore into him, but he stayed on his feet, still firing back, and now he had a bead on me.
I felt one slug tear through my collar, and I rolled over to come up against the shack.
Steadying my arm against the tin wall, I risked the time to aim, and my shot caught him right between the eyes.
He did a backflip and lay still.
I walked over to him and his uniformed chauffeur’s coat had ripped open to reveal the reason for his durability. He was wearing a steel, bullet-proof vest, the kind the European cops wear for riot duty.
I looked at the gun in my hand, tried the chamber and saw it was empty. The torrent of shots had set the neighborhood to waking, and lights and shouts filled the air.
I ran, tossing the useless gun away, as dawn lightened the sky, and I heard the sudden, sharp wail of a police siren nearby.
I wanted to retrieve Hugo but there wasn’t time to go back, not with the Casablanca cops just around the corner. I found my way through the bidonville and back to the Mercedes where, I saw happily, the keys were still in the ignition.
As I slid behind the wheel and drove off unhurriedly, I passed two police cruisers, lights flashing and sirens wailing beneath the fast-rising day.
I headed for Marina, but Aggie’s place was on the way, and I turned off to pull to a halt across the street from her apartment. If she hadn’t left yet I’d drive her to the airport myself.
I bounded up the steps and saw the door to her apartment ajar, the sight a sudden mixture of hope and fear, hope that it meant she’d cleared out fast, fear that it meant she hadn’t been fast enough.
I pushed the door open slowly. It was the fear that won out.
Aggie Foster would never see Akron, Ohio, again. She lay on the floor, half-dressed, her throat nearly slashed in two and, as it had been with the Russian, with the same, curving arc.