He paused, holding her back from the edge, and began again, the tongue and the rose, working in counterpoint like fingers on a fine golden instrument. Margritta made music, whispering and moaning as the warm waves built inside her and crashed through her senses.
And then there it was, the white-hot explosion that lifted her off the bed and made her cry out his name. She settled back like an autumn leaf, full of color and wilted at the edges.
He entered her, heat against heat, and she clung to his back and held on like a rider in the storm; his hips moved with deliberation, not frantic lust, and just as she thought she could accept no more of him, her body opened and she sought to take him into the place where they would be one creature with two names and pounding hearts, and then even the hard spheres of his manhood would enter her, too, instead of being simply pressed against the moistness. She wanted all of him, every inch, and all the liquid he could give her. But even in the midst of the maelstrom she sensed him holding himself apart, as if there were something in himself that even he could not get to. In their cell of passion she thought she heard him growl, but the noise was muffled against her throat and she could not be sure it wasn’t her own voice.
The bed’s joints spoke. It had spoken for many men, but never so eloquently.
And then his body convulsed-once, twice, a third time. Five times. He shivered, his fingers twisting the tangled sheet. She locked her legs around his back, urging him to stay. Her lips found his mouth, and she tasted the salt of his effort.
They rested awhile, talking again, but this time in whispered voices, and the subject was not London or the war but the art of passion. And then she took the rose from where it lay on the bedside table, and she followed the trail down to his restirring hardness. It was a beautiful machine, and she lavished it with love.
Rose petals lay on the sheets. The candle had burned low. Michael Gallatin lay on his back, sleeping, with Margritta’s head on his shoulder. He breathed with a faint, husky rumbling noise, like a well-kept engine.
Still later, she awakened and kissed him on the lips. He was sleeping soundly, and did not respond. Her body was a pleasant ache; she felt stretched, re-formed into his shape. She looked at his face for a moment, assigning the craggy features to memory. It was too late for her to feel real love, she thought. There had been too many bodies, too many ships passing in the night; she knew she was useful to the service as a refuge and liaison for agents who needed sanctuary, and that was all. Of course she decided who she would sleep with, and when, but there had been many. The faces blended together-but his stayed apart. He was not like the others. And not like any man she’d ever known. So call it schoolgirl infatuation and leave it at that, she thought. He had his destination, and she had her own, and they were not likely to be the same port.
She got out of bed, carefully so as not to awaken him, and went naked into the large walk-through closet that separated her bedroom from the dressing room. She switched on the light, chose a white silk gown, shrugged into it, then took a brown terrycloth robe-a man’s robe-off a hanger and draped it around a female-shaped dress dummy in the bedroom. A thought: perhaps a spray of perfume between her breasts and a brush of her hair before true sleep. The car might be coming at seven in the morning, but she recalled that he liked to be up by five-thirty.
Margritta walked, the well-used rose in hand, into the dressing room. A small Tiffany lamp still burned on the table. She sniffed the rose, smelled their mingled scents, and put it into a vase. That one would have to be pressed between silk. She drew a contented breath, then picked up her brush and looked into the mirror.
The man was standing behind the screen. She could see his face above it, and in the second of calm recognition before terror she realized it was a perfect killer’s face: devoid of emotion, pale, and quite unremarkable. It was the kind of face that blends easily into crowds, and you do not remember a moment after seeing.
She opened her mouth to call for Michael.
3
There was a polite cough, and a peacock’s eye winked fire. The bullet hit Margritta in the back of the skull, precisely where the assassin had aimed. Her blood, bone, and brains splattered onto the glass, and her head thunked down amid the vials of beauty.
He came out, snake-quick, dressed in tight-fitting black, the small pistol with its silencer gripped in a black-gloved hand. He glanced at the little rubber-coated grapple hook that clung to the terrace’s railing; the rope trailed down to the courtyard. She was dead and the job was done, but he knew that a British agent was here as well. He looked at his wristwatch. Almost ten minutes before the car would meet him beyond the gate. Time enough to send the swine to hell.
He cocked the pistol and started through the closet. And there was the bitch’s bedroom, a low candle flickering, a shape in the sheets. He aimed the pistol at its head and steadied his wrist with his other arm: a gunman’s pose. The silencer coughed-once, then again. The shape jumped with the force of the bullets.
And then, like a good artist who must see the results of his craft, he pulled the sheets away from the corpse.
Except it was not a corpse.
It was a dress dummy, with two bullet holes in its blank white forehead.
A movement, to his right. Someone fast. The killer panicked and twisted to get off a shot, but a chair slammed against his back and ribs and he lost the gun before his finger could squeeze. It went into the folds of the sheet and out of sight.
He was a big man, six-three and two hundred and thirty pounds, all beef-bred muscle; the breath left his mouth with the roar of a locomotive bursting from a tunnel, and the chair’s swing staggered him but didn’t put him down. The killer tore the chair out of his combatant’s grip before it could be used again, and kicked out, his boot hitting the man’s stomach. The kick drew a satisfying grunt of pain, and the British agent, a man in a brown robe, crashed back against the wall holding his gut.
The assassin flung the chair. Michael saw it coming in the flex of the man’s hands, and as he dodged, the chair broke to pieces against the wall. Then the man was on him, fingers clenching around his throat, digging savagely into his windpipe. Black motes spun across Michael’s vision; in his nostrils was the iron odor of blood and brains-the scent of Margritta’s death he’d smelled a second after he’d heard the silencer’s deadly whisper.
This man was a professional, Michael knew. It was man against man, and only one would be alive in a matter of minutes.
So be it.
Michael quickly brought his hands up, breaking the killer’s grip, and smashed the palm of his right hand into the man’s nose. He intended to drive the bones into the brain, but the killer was fast and turned his head to deflect the strike. Still, the nose crumpled and exploded and the man’s eyes were wet with pain. He staggered back two steps, and Michael hit him in the jaw with a quick left and right. The killer’s lower lip split open, but he grasped the collar of Michael’s robe, lifted him off his feet, and hurled him through the bedroom door.
Michael crashed into the hallway and into one of the suits of armor. It fell off its stand in a clatter. The Nazi assassin came through the door, his mouth streaming blood, and as Michael tried to scramble up, a kick caught him in the shoulder and flung him another eight feet along the hall.
The killer looked around, his eyes glinting at the sight of armor and weapons; for an instant his face had a shine of reverence, as if he had stumbled into a holy shrine of violence. He picked up a mace-a wooden handle with a three-foot-long chain attached to an iron ball of jagged spikes-and whirled it gleefully over his head. He advanced on Michael Gallatin.