Claws raked my back; fingernails and teeth sank into my flesh; hands, arms, and thighs clutched at me. Her mouth was bloody from biting my shoulder. More than once I had to slap her to make her let go. Her moans turned to snarls. One moment she cringed beneath me, the next she fought me savagely, striking me with her fists in violent fury until I matched it with my own anger, and then she made sounds of delight and pleasure. Finally, after an eternally long spasm that shook her uncontrollably, she collapsed completely. The savagery went out of her.
Her body became langorous; it burned with the warmth of fulfillment In the dark her sigh was like the purring of a cat, deep and full and content.
I groped for my trousers and took out my gold-tipped cigarettes and my lighter. The flare of the flame lit her eyes. In the yellow of the small light they were green slits.
“Give me one,” she said, reaching out I gave her the cigarette I’d lit and took another for myself.
“Why did you try to kill me?” I asked. Her head was on my shoulder. She exhaled, holding the cigarette away to look at its tip glowing in the dark.
“I can’t tell you,” she said.
“I could make you talk.”
“You won’t” Sabrina said, almost casually. “You’d have to hurt me too much.”
“If I have to, I’ll kill you,” I told her.
Sabrina lifted herself on one elbow and tried to look into my face. I flicked the lighter on. The tiny flame was more than enough. She looked deeply into my eyes and touched my cheek with her fingertips. She took her hand away.
“Yes,” she said soberly. “Yes, I think you would.”
“Why did you try to kill me?”
“I was told to.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. There was a telephone call.”
“You do things like that when someone calls?”
“I have to,” she said. She turned away slightly. “Put out the light, please.”
I snapped the lighter shut. We were in darkness again, with only the indirect glow of the street fight coming in through the windows to make darker shadows in the gray around us.
I reached up to touch her face. My hand felt her neck. There was a thin chain around it I felt a tiny, flat metal pendant. I moved my hand up to her chin and then to her cheek. It was wet. Sabrina was crying.
“Please don’t make me say any more. I really don’t know any more,” she said, shivering against me.
“What has Alexander Bradford to do with it?” I asked.
“Bradford?”
Sabrina suddenly moved away from me. In the dark I made out her silhouette moving around the room. She went through a doorway and disappeared.
I got to my feet and turned on a lamp. By the time Sabrina came back in a negligee, I was fully dressed, ready to go.
“You’re not leaving now?” She was disappointed.
I nodded.
“Will you come back?”
“Perhaps.”
She came up to me. There was nothing remote about her now, nothing impersonal. The game had been played, and I had won. Sabrina touched me on the cheek meekly.
“Please come back,” she said. And then, as I opened the door to the street, I heard her swear softly, despairingly.
Chapter Six
I came down Mount Vernon Street, turning on Charles Street on my way back to the hotel. At that time of night — it was after three o’clock in the morning — the street was deserted. The old-fashioned, black-painted, cast iron street lamps were on, forming pools of light with large patches of dark in between. I kept to the outside of the narrow sidewalks until I got down the hill to Charles Street.
There’s something menacing about a city in those early hours. There seems to be danger lurking in every alleyway, in every dark entrance and at every corner.
If I had been more cautious, I would have walked along Beacon Street around the edge of the Public Gardens, but that’s the long way around, and cutting through the Gardens at a diagonal is a lot shorter. So that’s what I did.
The path takes you first to the lagoon and then part way around it before you come to the small bridge that crosses over the narrowest part of the pond. The path is very close to the willow trees that border the water’s edge. The weeping willows are old and huge, thick and very tall, so their branches hang down heavily to block out most of the lamplight. The elms and maples, too, are big. They provide huge patches of darkness, and the grass is well kept and short-cropped. It bides footsteps completely.
Not until he was on the asphalt path only a few feet behind me did I hear the slap of his shoes on the pavement as he made his final rush. The walk down the deserted streets had sharpened my senses, made me totally alert. Without conscious thought, I dropped to one knee as soon as I heard the sound of his feet. His blow went over the top of my head, missing by only inches. The momentum of his attack crashed him into me, knocking me sprawling on my face.
He was a big man. I rolled away from him, scrambling off the pavement and onto the grass. He sprang for me again before I had regained my balance.
Whoever he was, the only thing he had going for him was his size and his strength. He wasn’t very fast and he didn’t know much about how to kill a man quickly or silently.
I fell onto my back when he made his leap. I barely had enough time to draw my knees up to my chest. As he flung himself on me, I uncurled both legs with all the power of my thighs, catching him full on the chest. The impact flung him over my head. It should have broken half a dozen of his ribs. If it did, he didn’t show it.
Twisting to my feet, I turned in time to see him stand upright. He was more cautious now. In his right hand he carried a length of lead pipe.
He came at me for the third time, swinging the pipe first one way, and then trying a backhand stroke with it to catch me off guard. I dove in under the swing of the lead pipe. My shoulder caught him at the knees, knocking him down. I scrambled away as fast as I could.
I didn’t try to close in. To do that with a man of his size would be sheer suicide. He was more than a head taller than I am. You’ve seen a football lineman towering over the others, his shoulder pads making him look gigantic. That’s how this one looked, only he wasn’t wearing shoulder pads. It was all his own muscle.
I moved crabwise to one side, legs apart, balancing on the balls of my feet. My assailant heaved himself upright. He took a step toward me, his arm going back for another blow. I took a short step, leaping high in the air, my right leg lashing out in a furious kick.
Karate and savate and Thai foot boxing have one thing in common. They all make use of the fact that a man’s legs are stronger and more lethal than his arms.
The thin edge of my shoe sole should have caught him flush on the chin, just under the ear, with the force of my leg and body behind it. If you do it right, you can split open the thick canvas of a heavy, sand-filled punching bag.
I missed.
Not by much. My foot scraped along his jaw as he moved his head away a fraction of an inch, but that fraction was enough to save his life.
He lunged back at me with the lead pipe, sideswiping me along the rib cage, knocking the breath out of me. A fire of pain spread out along my ribs, knocking the breath out of me. I tumbled away in a rolling fall.
He let me get to my feet. Gasping, I moved backward away from him. He stepped menacingly toward me, measuring me for another blow. I gave ground, not letting him get set, keeping him from that one instant he needed to strike again. Step by step I retreated, staying just out of range of his powerful swing.
I didn’t want to kill him. If I had, I would have shifted Hugo into my palm the moment I heard his footsteps. I wanted the man alive so I could get him to talk. I wanted to know who’d sent him after me. This was no ordinary mugging. A mugger would have been long gone once his first attack had failed.