Steel flickered and gleamed briefly in the weak backwash of light and Henriques coughed. The knife buried itself to the hilt in the base of his throat. He jerked violently, arching over backwards, as if a heavy electric shock had passed through the steel girder. The gun flew from his hand and curved earthwards in a long crazy curve. It seemed to take an age to fall and I couldn't look away from it. I didn't see it land, but I saw sparks on the line below as steel struck steel.
I looked back at Henriques. He'd straightened and bent slightly forward and was staring at me in perplexity. His right hand reached up and pulled the knife clear and in a moment his shirt front was saturated in the pumping blood. His face twisted in a snarl, a snarl already tinged with approaching dissolution, and he raised his right hand up and back over his shoulder. The blade no longer gleamed in the lamplight. He leaned back to give impetus to his throw, and then tiredness came into the dark and evil face and the knife slipped from his dying hand and clattered to the concrete below. The eyes closed and he slipped to one side, slipped right over until he was beneath the girder and held only by his locked ankles. How long he hung like that I couldn't later say. It seemed a very long time. And then, at last, in a weird slow-motion sequence, the ankles slowly unlocked and he fell from sight. I didn't see him fall, I couldn't see him fall. But when at last I did look I saw him far below, his broken body hanging limply over the gleaming ram of a gigantic hydraulic buffer. For Henriques' sake, wherever he was now, I hoped the shades of his victims weren't waiting for him. I became vaguely aware that my cheek muscles were aching. I had been smiling down at the dead man. I had never felt less like smiling.
Sick and dizzy and trembling like an old man with the ague, I made my way back across the girder by crawling on my hands and knees. I took me a long time I think, and I'll never be clear how I managed the six foot jump from girder to platform, even although it was easier this time for the chain was there for my hands to catch. I staggered through the grille door to the fire-escape and half-lowered myself, half-collapsed on to the platform. The night air of London had never smelled so sweet.
How long I lay there I don't know. I can't remember whether I was conscious or not most of the time. But it couldn't have been long for when I looked at my watch it was still only ten minutes to four.
I pushed myself to my feet and made my way wearily down the fire-escape. When I reached street level I didn't even bother looking for my Webley, it might have taken me long enough to find it, and the chances were that some part of its mechanism had been damaged in its long fall. I would have been very surprised if the guard I'd disposed of hadn't been carrying a gun. I wasn't surprised. I didn't know what make of automatic it was but it had a trigger and safety catch in the usual position and that was all I wanted. I started to climb the fire-escape again.
I made the last two flights to the roof of the station on my hands and knees. Not from the need of stealth or secrecy, I just couldn't make it any other way. I was as far through as that. I rested for a bit with my back to the wall of the passenger lounge, then walked slowly across the concrete to the hangar in the far corner.
A faint wash of light shone weakly through the open doors: it would be invisible from below, for the hangar doors opened on to the centre of the heliport. The light came not from the hangar itself but from what was inside it — the big twenty-four-seater Voland Helicopter that the Inter-City Flights were now operating on their new routes.
I could see the control cabin thrust away over the nose of the helicopter, and it was from there that the light was coming. I could see the head and shoulders of the pilot, hatless and in a grey uniform jacket, in the left-hand seat. In the right-hand seat sat Dr. Gregori.
Circling the hangar I came to the side door and pushed it back slowly on its oiled tracks. It made no sound. The base of the short flight of portable steps leading up to the open passenger door in the centre of the helicopter's fuselage was less than twenty feet away. I pulled the automatic, safety-catch off, from my coat pocket and crossed to the steps. If you could have heard a blade of grass growing then you could have heard me going up those steps.
The passenger cabin was also lit, but the illumination was poor — one single overhead lamp in line with the door. I poked my head cautiously through the doorway — and there, not three feet away, sitting with wrists bound to the armrests of the first of the backward-facing seats, was Mary. The bruise above her eye had swollen to duck-egg proportions, her face was scratched and deathly pale, but she was wide awake and staring directly at me. And she recognised me. With my soot-blackened and battered face I must have looked like a man from Mars, one, moreover, who's just managed to walk away from the smashed-up remains of his flying saucer. But she recognised me immediately. Her lips parted, her eyes stared wide and I at once raised finger to mouth in the age-old gesture of silence. But I was too late,
I was a lifetime too late. She had been sitting there in the black thrall of a hopeless and defeated misery and grief, with the bottom dropped from her life and nothing left to live for, and now her husband, whom she surely knew to be dead, had returned from the land of the dead, and the world was going to be all right again and if she had not reacted, immediately and instinctively, then she would not have been human.
"Pierre!" Her voice was part shock, part hope, all wonder and joy. "Oh, Pierre!"
I wasn't looking at her. My eyes were on one place only— the entrance to the pilot's cabin. So was my gun. From up front came the sound of a dull blow, then Gregori appeared, one hand clutching a gun, the other above his head to steady himself as he peered through the low archway. The eyes were narrowed but the rest of the face still and cold. The gun, curiously, was hanging by his side. I shifted mine slightly till it centred on his forehead and increased the tension on the trigger.
"The end of the road, Scarlatti," I said. "And the end of my long wait for you. There'll be nobody coming here to-night. Only me, Scarlatti. Only me."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Cavell!" Gregori hadn't realised who I was until I had spoken and now the swarthy face paled and he stared at me like a man seeing a ghost which, for Gregori, was exactly what I was. "Cavell! It's impossible!"
"Don't you wish it were, Scarlatti? Into the cabin and don't try lifting that gun."
"Scarlatti?" He didn't seem to have heard my order, the second shock had staggered his mind already reeling from the first. He whispered, "How do you know?"
"Five hours since Interpol and the F.B.I. gave us your life history. And quite a history it is. Enzo Scarlatti, onetime graduate research chemist who became the big-time Czar of American crime in the Mid-West. Extortion, robberies, killings, machines, drugs, the lot — the great king-pin and they could never lay a finger on you. But they got you in the end, didn't they, Scarlatti? The usual, income-tax evasion. And then they deported you." I advanced two paces towards him, I didn't want Mary in the line of fire when the war started. "Right into the cabin, Scarlatti."
He was still staring at me, but his face underwent a subtle change. The man's resilience, his powers of mental recuperation, were fantastic. He said, slowly, "We must talk about this."
"Later. Inside. Now. Or I'll drop you where you stand."
"No. You won't. You'd like to, but not yet. I know when I look at death, Cavell. I'm looking at death now. You wish me to come and sit down in a chair and then you will kill me. But not until I am in that chair will you kill me."