“What’s the signal?” I growled.
He knew what I meant. He tried to shake his head. I pressed harder with Hugo. The point stung him into speech.
“The window... window... shade...” he gasped.
“What about it?”
“If... if you’d gone along...”
“Out with it!”
“I’m to leave it alone. Otherwise... I pull the blinds... Venetians... closed.”
I let him feel Hugo’s edge cut a thin gash along his jawline. It was no worse than what he’d do if he cut himself shaving, but it must have seemed to him as if I’d just slit his throat.
“For God’s sake!” he burst out. “I swear... swear I’m telling... telling the truth!”
Perhaps he was. There was only one way to find out, and that was to walk out of the building with the shades untouched. Which meant I couldn’t leave him behind to get at them.
“Let’s go,” I said, prodding him.
“Go?” He was in a state of paralyzing fear.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I told him. “Not unless you force me to. On the other hand, I can’t leave you here.”
I took the knife away from his throat. He nodded his head. “Yes. Yes, I see what you mean. Of course.”
“Am I going to have trouble with you?”
He shook his head. “No.” He took out his handkerchief, touching it to his throat. It came away spotted with a few drops of blood. I saw his eyes grow wide.
We walked out of the room and down the corridor. Together we rode down in the elevator, together we walked through the lobby of the building. It was after five o’clock. The lobby was deserted. Together we went out the front door and we walked, almost arm in arm, across the street into the lobby of the building on the far side.
They wouldn’t be able to get to me here, I knew. For the time being I was safe. I stopped and swung him about.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
His eyes queried me. He didn’t know what I would do to him next.
“John Norfolk,” he answered. There was still a tremor of fear.
“What do you do, John? Aside from trying to bribe people?”
“I’m an investment banker,” he informed me stiffly, but his lips trembled as he spoke. He didn’t know that all I felt toward him was scorn — and a little pity. He just wasn’t tough enough to do the job they’d sent him to do.
“Goodnight, John,” I said. For a moment he didn’t believe that I was letting him go. Then, hastily, almost as if he were doing his best to keep from breaking into a run, he left the building.
Boston is a strange town. It’s so damn old and the streets are so narrow in the oldest section that a number of buildings have been erected over what were once lanes. Legally, they have to leave access open to the public, so the lanes have become ground floor central corridors, leading from one end of the building to the other. By law, the exits and entrances of these buildings must be kept open twenty-four hours a day, every day in the year, so the doors are never locked.
Because of the slope of the land, in some of these buildings, you’ll actually go up or down half a flight of stairs, make a turn or two, and then continue along the public access corridor. Legally, it is still a city street.
Such a lane ran through this building. I went in the opposite direction from John Norfolk and presently found myself coming out a revolving door into an alley. I made my way through the alley to Washington Street.
I was more careful now than I’d ever been. I knew that in minutes they’d be on my trail. I also knew that they had a considerably larger organization than either Hawk or I had originally estimated. How large remained to be seen, but I sure wasn’t going to make the mistake of underestimating them again.
At Washington and Summer Streets, I ducked into the subway station, went down and dropped my quarter into the slot of the turnstile.
Boston’s Green Line trains are not trains — they’re trolleycars. Two and sometimes three of them travel coupled together. I went up from the lower level to the main level and took the first trolley that came along.
Unconsciously I was heading back to my hotel, planning to get off at Arlington Street station. And I did, then realized that I’d made a mistake. A very big mistake.
The trolley had slammed shut its doors and was gone down the tunnel when I looked around the platform and saw them. Not just the two who’d been following me and who got off the trolley when I did, but two others who must have been staked out there from the time they threw their net around the hotel earlier that afternoon.
And there I was, right in the middle of an ambush.
Chapter Eight
Behind me the tracks of the trolley line were level with the platform. There was no third rail because the power line ran overhead.
To my right, the escalator rose to the Arlington Street level, its steps moving in a slow, endless procession. Aside from the fact that one of their men was positioned right beside it, the escalator was a trap. Pinned between its narrow walls while it hauled me slowly upward, I’d have no chance to escape even a bad marksman.
To my left were stairs that would take me to a second level, then along a corridor whose tiled walls ran without a break for more than half a city block to wind up finally at the Berkeley Street turnstiles. If I made it past the grim-faced young man standing threateningly at the foot of these stairs, I would certainly be trapped in the corridor on the level above. With only an eight-foot width to move in, and with the corridor running almost a hundred yards, I’d be a helpless target in a ceramic-lined shooting gallery! I crossed that one off my list, too.
Which left just one way to go, and because they weren’t expecting it, I got away with it.
I sprinted down the platform toward the man at the foot of the Berkeley exit, pulling Wilhelmina from her holster.
There was no mistaking what their orders were this time. His hand came from behind his back, a pistol gripped in his fist. Arm extended, he brought his gun to eye level. Without missing a step, I fired from the hip. I wasn’t trying to aim. All I wanted to do was to distract him. I fired again, and then a third time, the boom and whup-crack of the Luger blasting echoes off the walls, reverberating the length of the station.
He was new at the game. I don’t think he’d ever really tried to kill anyone before. He flinched at the sound of the shots, his own going astray.
I was almost up to him, still firing as I ran, when he suddenly sagged to the concrete floor. Behind me there were other furious echoes as the three men began to shoot at me.
I leaped into the tunnel mouth, racing as fast as I could into its protective darkness. The firing went on. An occasional ricochet off concrete walls whined its way down the length of the tunnel past me.
Then the firing stopped. In the silence I heard the shouts and the pound of feet in hot pursuit. They weren’t going to give up so easily!
The ties on the tracks weren’t spaced right for the length of my stride. I had to adjust to them. It wasn’t completely black. There were lights built into the walls every thirty to forty feet. But the bulbs were low wattage and so covered with years of soot and dirt stirred up by the passing trolleys that their glow was even further dimmed. It’s damn hard to run like a gazelle under those circumstances.
I ran about 200 feet and cut between the steel girders separating the inbound from the outbound tracks. I wanted to be facing incoming trolleys — I’d be able to spot their lights before I heard their rumble.
There was the terrible stench of ancient debris. The dry dust floating in the air clogged my nostrils. I could feel soot begin to settle on my face. My eyes watered from the sting of grit as the tunnel draft blew microscopic-size particles under my lids.