The attackers stared at him solemnly.
Silently they turned and ran down the deserted street.
The night's chilly cold radiated from the sidewalk. Carter awoke in the brittle stillness of it, knowing he should get up, knowing he'd be stiff, maybe even ill and out of action if he didn't.
Couples hurried past him, sneers in their voices as they circled distastefully away. They thought he was a drunk, or a deadbeat, or maybe worse. A few cars passed, their bright lights sweeping the sidewalk. Music and laughter blared out onto the sidewalk as up and down the street bars and restaurant doors occasionally opened and closed.
Carter stood up. A wave of nausea washed over him. With shaky hands, he dusted uselessly at his jacket. He grabbed for the wall to steady himself.
As another car slowly drove up the street, he stepped into the alleyway. There he found Wilhelmina in an inky shadow. He dropped the Luger into his jacket pocket and stumbled back to the lighted sidewalk. The beating had been expert, designed so the body would not forget.
He patted his pockets for a cigarette. The car was small, yellow. The nausea returned, this time accompanied by faintness. His knees turned to water, but his mind still worked.
The yellow car was a Mazda, and it had slowed to a crawl in front of him.
Suddenly the knees buckled. Dizziness engulfed him. He forgot the cigarette and the yellow Mazda. Once more he fell unconscious to the cold sidewalk.
When he awoke, he was troubled by dreams of being dragged. They were indistinct dreams complicated by his being cozily back in his hotel room bed, the sun shining bright and innocent through the window, and bandages and assorted smelly ointments covering parts of his body.
Gingerly, he stretched. Felt the sore muscles ripple. The pain made him smile. He was alive at least. He moved his bones and joints. Nothing broken.
He flung back the covers and sat up. Nude, he walked carefully, and then with more confidence, to the bathroom.
He relieved himself, then stared into the mirror. White bandages made a patchwork of his bearded face. He pulled the bandages off. Abrasions and cuts, but nothing serious. He returned to his bedside table to check his watch.
It was eleven forty-five. He'd slept a long time, maybe twelve hours. What was necessary to revive his battered body. When professionals go to work on you, recovery isn't fast or easy, but it helps to be in the extraordinarily trained condition of a Killmaster. He looked around the room. His ct was open, the clothes from last night neatly hung. He picked up the telephone.
"Yes, sir?" the clerk from yesterday said from downstairs.
"Any messages for me?"
"I'll check."
There was a moment of silence, then the eager young man was back.
"Nothing, sir. Sorry."
"Did a man driving a yellow Mazda bring me in last night?"
"As a matter of fact, my coworker did mention that. A pleasant fellow. Helped you to your room. Called the hotel doctor."
"Any name? I'd like to thank him."
"No, sir. Said he was just a Samaritan. You'd been attacked by one of the rough waterfront gangs."
Carter sighed. The samaritan was obviously the man in the yellow Mazda. That's where the dragging part of his dream had come from.
As if in a haze he remembered being hauled to his feet and half dragged, half pulled to the small car. He remembered the door's banging shut, opening his mouth to thank his benefactor, then passing out again.
The stranger was a real puzzle, impossible to identify at this point. Carter had never had a good look at the man's face. He didn't know age or even hair color because the man wore the tam-o'-shanter low to the ears. Didn't know the car's license plate. Didn't know why — or whether — the stranger was following him.
"Anything else?"
"Well… there is one more thing. But I don't know whether it's still important…"
"Rocky Diamond?" Carter said, suddenly alert.
"It's not much," the young clerk warned, "but I remembered what you said about asking around, and one of the maids said she'd seen a man like you described. He came in drunk with a woman to visit one of our guests. He ordered martinis with a dash of Pernod at the bar. The maid didn't remember which guest they were visiting. Anyway, they laughed all across the lobby to the elevator. Very undignified, she thought."
"Did the maid hear him say anything?"
"Christchurch," the hotel clerk said, pleased that he could deliver information to a guest who paid so generously. Money may not buy love, but it regularly buys cooperation. "He mentioned Christchurch. The woman hung on his arm and begged him to take her along, too."
Carter grinned.
"I'll be damned," he said.
Eight
Consistent with a city founded by nineteenth-century English gentlemen, Christchurch was tweedy rather than trendy. Formal flower gardens decorated the manor houses of the rich, while tidy flower beds of snapdragons and posies dotted working class bungalows. Storybook swans swam in streams and ponds. Picture-postcard schoolchildren wore loden green blazers and carried traditional field hockey sticks.
Christchurch's pace was slow, almost casual. It was a reflection of upbringing that emphasized good taste, not how many cars were sold today, not how much money would be made tomorrow. Business flourished without frenzy. Financial success was admired but not flaunted in the most English city outside Great Britain.
Nick Carter thought about this as he spent the next two days quietly working his way across the city of more than 300,000. There were more restaurants than bars. Christchurch was a city of shopkeepers, all with small eccentricities in the English way to set their establishments apart.
He went to Grimsby's Restaurant housed in a converted medieval-style church. To the gaudy Shangri-La, which promised in plastic what the movies had provided in celluloid. To the Oxford Victualling Company decorated with old wooden booths and iron gooseneck lamps. To the Waimairi Lounge where young marrieds on the way up talked rugby and politics. And to various Chinese, Mexican, Italian, American, English, German, and any other kind of ethnic bar or restaurant the fertile mind can contrive.
It made him tired and gave him indigestion, but he continued. Even in a city of 300,000 individualists. Carter knew that it was only a matter of time until perseverance would pay off. With luck.
It was dusk of the second day. Rosy-checked youngsters of European descent rode bicycles through Christchurch's Cathedral Square.
The town hall and the Anglican cathedral dominated the parklike area. Seagulls circled and called overhead. Unemployed teen-age Maori hoys stood on the corner, their shoulders hunched, smoking cigarettes. Their dark Polynesian faces with the handsome flat bones were sullen and discouraged in the fading light. All was not perfect in this English inspired paradise.
Carter strode past them, past the square, past the Savoy Hotel to continue his methodical search. He wore a Fleet Street suit imported from London and a jaunty attitude that covered his growing discouragement. His beard was beginning to look like the affectation of a monied businessman rather than the sloppiness of a penniless derelict.
The next stop was the Wyndham Club, a posh three-story hotel hewn of fieldstone. There were heavy brocaded drapes at the arched windows and an obsolete footman at the front door. The footman bowed and touched the brim of his cap as Carter mounted the steps. Proper clothes and the right attitude bought you respect, if not peace of mind.
The smells of expensive whiskey, brandy, port, and old wood perfumed the air of the first-floor paneled bar. The bartender wiped a white cloth across the shining bar and smiled appraisingly at Carter.