When I looked down, she had the guy’s head on her lap and a little purse gun in one hand. He had a big wound in the thigh and he’d lost a lot of blood. “We don’t have much time to lose,” I said. “Go get the car and pull it up at the head of the next street over. I don’t remember the name of it; there’s a vespasienne just above it, or there was the last time I was here...”
“But Harry, you said you’d never been to Nice before...”
“Never as Harry Archer,” I said. “Explanations later. We’ve got to get your pal here out of the area before the flics arrive. Do as I say.”
“All right, but... here, my gun...”
“I’ve got one. I took the gun off the guy I killed downstairs. It’s okay. His chum ought to be far, far away by now.”
She looked up at me with those sea-green eyes. “I... okay.” She let me take the man over; then she bolted for the door, agile in her flat sandals. I could hear their soles flapping all the way down the stairs.
I turned to the man. “This,” I said, “is going to hurt me as much as it does you. But we’d better do it anyhow. If I can get you up to my shoulder...”
He looked up and said, “It’s all right.” Then his eyes widened. They narrowed again, scanning my face. He had a long lean face, the face of a high-metabolism, overactive, driven man. There was a small scar under one eye. “You... give me your hand first. Please. I...”
I put one hand in his; his was cold; shock.
And damned if he didn’t slip me Will Lockwood’s funny handshake. Just as the sirens went off down the way.
“Well, for chrissake,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And you know me. We worked together four years ago in the Bahrain Gulf. I...” But he looked lousy. I put one finger over my mouth: Save it for later; we’ve got to get out of here first. Know him? Of course I knew him. Leon Schwartzblum. One of Israel’s toughest and most reliable undercover boys. He’d switched services as the need for his talents had demanded — he’d been one of the guys who got Eichmann out of Argentina — and now he was working this gig with me. Or had been. That leg wound was going to put him right out of this ballgame, leaving me pretty much where I’d started.
“Right on, buddy,” I said. “More later. But bite down hard right now; I’m going to try to get you up on my shoulder. Hang in there.” But I knew he would anyway. He was the hanger-inner type if ever I saw one.
Carrying a badly wounded man in a Morgan isn’t easy. We had to put him in my lap, and between my ribs and his thigh, it didn’t help anything.
Vicki was silent for quite a while, shifting gears expertly, racing style, and really moving up into the hills behind Nice. It was a road I’d never travelled, but I had some idea where she was going. They’d have a meeting place stashed close by, a place with a radio...
“What do you know about doctoring?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, her eyes on the road. “But we have a friend I can call...”
“I’ll be all right,” Leon said, but from between clenched teeth. He understood the need for her fast driving, too. “Sonia,” he said. “This is Nick Carter.”
“Nick Car...?” She turned her eyes to us. “B-but...”
“As you said,” I told her, “we’re all phonies here. Sonia? I kind of liked Vicki, somehow.”
“She is... my sister,” Leon said. “She has been our contact aboard the Vulcan. She has had the bulk of the dirty work so far.”
“I was trying to talk Leon into letting me go,” she said. She bit her lip, then went on. “I saw myself being a little fool, turning into the sort of vain and stupid and capricious person they were, just from being around them all the time. Today — I was so stupid and mean, playing with you like that...”
“Okay,” I said. “No problem. Besides, Constantin’s dead.”
“Dead? But he was not one of them...”
“But he followed me, and they took him for me in the dark. I ran into the somebody afterward, a minute or so later, and stuck a shiv into him. He...”
Leon tried to sit up some. “Nick. Did you see his hands? Did he...”
“Did he have a little Star of David tattooed on the web between thumb and forefinger? Yes. Why?”
He just nodded, though. “I knew it. I knew we would run into them here. The opening moves are over in that particular search. You hear, Sonia? It is the endgame. We are getting close. We...”
But she was paying attention to the road, and a good thing too; it was winding and twisting, and all the curves were banked the wrong way, and there wasn’t any shoulder above a sheer drop. I decided not to look down. Presently she turned into a big gap in a long row of trees on the shore side of the road, and we slowed down as the car’s tires hit gravel and crunched loudly, throwing rocks up against the mudguards.
Watching the “friend” — who turned out to be a brawny nurse — patch up Leon’s leg, with him grinding the molars but smiling, I decided he was more extraordinary than previously thought. We could only make small talk until she left; but then it seemed time to open up. We had to decide what we could do to patch up the operation.
“You were,” I said, sipping the straight scotch Sonia had handed me, “going to tell me about the guys with the tattoos. You...”
She handed Leon a drink, too. “The Sons of David,” she said. “They are the pilot fish of the people Leon and I are here to smelt out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Israel,” Leon said, taking the ball, “has her own crackpots, fanatics — whatever you choose to call them. We also have our own traitors and renegades. We are a small country, but already we have a little of everything one can expect to find in a much larger country.” He sat up in the bed and pulled a pillow behind his back.
“There is a type of mentality I can only call suicidal. Fundamentally suicidal. Capable of orienting the entire organism around the prospect of its own death. In a way you’d have to say Hitler was an extreme example of this sort of already extreme mentality. The one thing you could reliably predict, given the first organization of the German war machine, was the eventual sight of Germany in ruins and rubble, her people demoralized, many of them homeless, starving. In a way you have to say that Hitler did everything he possibly could to ensure that this would happen. Every foolish move that he made, with such a bold and confident air, only hastened the arrival of that day in that bunker in Berlin. He had gone out of his way — perhaps more than any man in history — to make enemies, the stronger and more unforgiving the better...”
“I get you,” I said. “It’s one way of looking at it.”
“Nick,” Leon said. “Our parents managed to live through Auschwitz. My father once told me that the only thing that saved them was being able to take an objective view. Any other view ended in madness. Sonia and I have had to turn certain switches inside our minds off from time to time. We have had to...”
“I understand.”
“All right. These people — the Sons of David — are people who cannot wait for the next war with the Arabs. They want one right now — and one to the death. You know what that would mean, given the present odds as of the Yom Kippur War...”
“Ouch,” I said. “And... omigod.” I told them about the Hong Kong incidents — the hijacked shipment of arms, the lost microfilm, everything. “I couldn’t understand their actions then, though, and I can’t understand them now.”
“Oh” Leon said. “The... mutilation of the victims? A biblical thing, Nick. The ancient Israelites, in the period of the Books of Kings, were a very warlike people. King Saul was a mighty warrior. Kind David was even mightier. And those were not wars fought with tournament rules. Following a Jewish victory the conquerors would circumcise their fallen foes. The soldiers collected foreskins the way the American Indian often collected scalps. These Sons of David leave their own stamp of victory and I’m sure the location of the cuts is no coincidence. Someone knows some history. I make no apologies for a barbaric time.”