He was armed; strangely so. He held one of the two Toledo swords he’d yanked from the wall. The other lay at his feet. With a thin smile he kicked it my way. “Here,” he said. “I have saved your life and killed your friends. Perhaps that means we are square.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “This is your last day on earth, whatever you may think.” I picked up the second sword.
“Very well,” he said. “As you wish. But in the meantime, a bit of sport? The only kind of fair fight you can have with a man with one arm?”
“Sure,” I said. “Cutting your guts out will be more fun than shooting you anyhow. I...”
He attacked. And from the first I knew my bravado action was not going to get me far. I hadn’t fenced in years, and these things were a lot heavier than epees.
His attack was tough stuff: strong, vicious, expert. I was in trouble almost immediately. Bad trouble. The kind you die from...
Chapter Twenty-Three
We engaged in quarte; he immediately changed the engagement to tierce, the better to show me how fast he was. That wrist of his, well, he’d had to develop that one hand to make up for the loss of the other. I’d made allowance for that. I just hadn’t made allowance for how much he’d develop it. It was strong, quick, supple. The point was a blur.
He beat and disengaged, showing me how strong that hand was; then he raised the wrist, joining his forte to my foible, and lunged strongly. I parried in sixte and retreated, giving him some room. He followed, feinting, the arm in perfect form, the hand in supination. We engaged, again in tierce; he cut over the point with a sure and supple move and damn near got me in the throat. I parried and retreated again.
“You were,” he said, “going to cut my guts out.”
“Right,” I said. The sweat was pouring down my temples. Don’t try fencing in a wet suit. What you get in padding doesn’t make up for what you lose in agility — and in body water.
I wasn’t going to win this one in a fair fight. That was becoming evident.
I didn’t give a damn. Not about fair fights, not about gentlemanly sportsmanship, not about any of that stuff.
What I was going to do was win.
I had one advantage on him. He’d overcompensated monstrously for that black eyepatch. But there’s no way in the world that you can completely make up for the loss of the parallax vision you get from having two eyes in good functioning condition. I was amazed at the depth perception he had. It was as good as mine — almost. What I was banking on was tiring that one eye of his; single eyes tire more quickly.
I tried a cut over and disengage on him; he parried nimbly, smiling. And I moved to his left, circling like a boxer. Away from that one good right eye.
His smile vanished; I knew I had made a point. His lips set grimly, he attacked again, and I barely beat back his powerful lunge. His recovery was the most startling thing about him; speed, power.
And still I moved to my right and his left. He let out a curse and lunged again; this time he pinked me in the arm. Damn it, I thought, that puts a deadline on things. A short one. That arm would tire, and fast. I had to make my move, my go-for-broke move, and do it quickly while I still had the strength to make it.
I threw away the rule book. I jumped up in the air, screeched like a banshee, swung the sword with both hands and leaped to his left again. At the same time I came down with the heavy blade, forte against forte. It shocked his hand; he was off balance when it hit. I screeched again like a demented karate master and threw my sword at him as hard as I could. He parried, but barely; and it kept him off balance just long enough. Just long enough for me to shake Hugo out of my sleeve into that left hand and, jumping in from a southpaw stance, run Hugo all the way along his forearm, drawing blood all the way. The bright blood shocked him; it was his blood this time. It was his life. He dropped the sword and looked at me through out-of-focus eyes.
There was a single shot from a small gun, close behind me.
And a red blossom sprouted in the middle of his forehead. The glaze stayed in his eyes. His expression didn’t change in the slightest as he pitched forward on his face.
I wheeled, Hugo still in my hand.
Sonia Schwartzblum stood in the doorway, a smoking 7mm handgun in her hand. The expression on her face changed very slowly from one of utter hatred, as she looked down at the dead man, to... I don’t know... a kind of dazed shock as her eyes sought mine out. She was wearing a wet suit much like mine, and her bare feet left puddles on the teak floor and priceless Persian carpet.
I just stood there, speechless, the adrenaline still up, my hand quivering with Hugo gripped tightly in it. “Sonia,” I said. “Beautiful Sonia.”
“I... I’ve never killed anyone before, Nick,” she said. “I had to. I... I know you wanted him for yourself. But Leon and I had a prior claim.” Her green eyes were brimming with tears, but I knew better than to assume they were tears of remorse.
“Yes,” I said. “I guess you did. And Leon was right: he was Schindler. And he was up to the same kind of tricks as before.”
She stepped forward then and hugged me, going easy on the ribs. “N-nick. I brought your fins and oxygen tank up. The last guard, I told him I was bringing him a drink of ouzo from the shore. It had chloral hydrate in it. I...”
“Good,” I said. “But the arms boat — it was landed tonight. In Egyptian waters. It...”
“No, no,” she said. “Leon got the word to the right people. It was torpedoed off Malta this morning. If anybody wants it he is going to have to dive for it.”
“Great,” I said. “That means it’s all wrapped up.”
“Here?” she said. “Komaroff? Alexandra? The others?”
“All dead,” I said. “It’s a long story. And the only thing we have left to do is sink the Vulcan. Sink it, or maybe it’d be better to bum it.”
“But... this...” She pointed down the hall at the art treasures. “I don’t understand. How can we...”
“It’s either that,” I said, “or take the chance that the Globalarms files — either in the file cabinet, or in the form of the microfilm Schindler killed Corbin for — can still fall into somebody else’s hands, and wind up doing the same old business at the same old stand. I think I’d like to see it all stop here — all this arms wildcatting, the meddling with the affairs of every country that shows the smallest signs of instability... No, honey. I’d say let’s put it to the torch.”
“I’m sure you know best,” she said. “Come on, I’ll help you.”
We got ourselves a nice bonfire going, with the flames roaring upward and setting masts and sails afire, before we made ready to go over the side. We put the two crewmen in the skiff Shimon and Alexandra had come over on and set them adrift in the still waters of the bay; then, hand in hand, we just stepped over the side of the Vulcan and swam lazily away out to sea. We had a feeling that some other island might turn out to be a little more hospitable at the moment, given our circumstances. I didn’t exactly have the latitude and longitude memorized, but I had a pretty good idea of where we were, and islands dotted the area like ants on a picnic blanket. It didn’t seem to matter; any direction but south would bring us to someplace interesting, and we weren’t in any hurry to be anywhere... “Sonia,” I said when I pulled close to her, “are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“What’s that, Harry darling?”
“It’s Nick.”
“No, it’s my Harry. And I’m Vicki Weiner, and I had Leon get us a whole new set of papers to prove it.”