Blowout Read online

  The lies that could be framed by those sexy lips!

  She was sitting at the table, demolishing a steak. Almost without realizing what he was doing, he shook his head and ran his fingers absently through her short, springy hair.

  Zuta shrugged him off a little impatiently. "Not now, darling," she said. "I had a late session at the beautician's and I have to go soon to chat up some big-time types at the bar. Be a lamb and fetch my purse from the sofa, would you?"

  Bolan's eyebrows rose. Was it his imagination, or had her ardor cooled significantly. Was the prize bull about to be demoted and put on the shelf reserved for fatted calves? He stopped pretending to paw the ground and went to get the purse.

  He feigned sleep when she came to bed around three o'clock. She made no attempt to wake him. in the morning she was gone.

  The next day was colder and equally damp. But there was no wind, and by the time he had showered and shaved, the atmosphere had thickened to a fog that was dense enough to hide the traffic lights at the end of the street. Looking at the halos around the still-lit streetlights, Bolan junked the idea of another fact-finding walk around the saloons of St. Pauli; it would be simpler, and quicker, if he hired a native guide.

  He took his billfold from his hip pocket to look for Heinrich Alberts's number. The billfold was empty. The cabbie's business card was gone. So was the rest of his money.

  He frowned, tapping the thin leather envelope against his teeth. She must have taken it while he'd slept. What the hell — Alberts would take one of his remaining American Express checks. He'd simply look up the guy's home number in the phone book.

  He sat down by the breakfast table and opened the fat Hamburg directory. He was leafing through the A's when glasses and cups on the table jingled and the whole room vibrated as a jetliner flying very low roared overhead. Poor bastard, Bolan thought, glancing out the window at the fog veiling the streetlights. Rather him than me, heading for the short Fuhlsbüttel runway in this shit. Then, looking back at the phone book, his eye fell on a newspaper lying beyond it on the far side of the table. The paper was folded back to an inside page, an early edition of the current daily, and there was an item at the foot of column six lightly ringed in pencil. He saw the modest head, HAMBURG CABDRIVER'S MYSTERIOUS DEATH, and picked up the paper. His German was good enough for him to translate:

  Hamburg police were today seeking clues to the attacker or attackers responsible for the death of Herr Heinrich Alberts, 48, the owner-driver of a city cab. Herr Alberts's body was discovered in a secluded part of the botanical gardens by a patrolling police officer whose suspicions had been aroused by the sight of an empty taxi abandoned in a nearby street with the engine running.

  The cabdriver had been brutally assaulted and then battered to death with an iron bar. The police captain in charge of inquiries told our reporter, "Assaults on cabdrivers, here, as in the rest of Europe, are on the increase. But this seems an apparently motiveless killing. Alberts had no enemies and there was a considerable sum of money in his cab. Yet the attacker must have been a professional wearing gloves, for there were no fingerprints on the murder weapon." Herr Alberts, who worked from a cab stand outside the Atlantic Hotel, leaves a widow and a daughter aged 18.

  Bolan's fingers were shaking as he put the paper down. The muscles in his jaw rippled in anger.

  The gloves, of course, spelled Hansie. But who gave the orders?

  He didn't know if the paper had been deliberately left there for him to see, or whether it was an oversight. He wouldn't gamble on Zuta being forgetful; he figured she did very little that wasn't premeditated.

  He went into the bedroom and took his jacket off its hanger. The big wallet in which he kept the few papers he still had was in place in the inside pocket. But it was as empty as the billfold. The American Express checks, along with the rest of his folding money, had vanished. So had the few coins he kept in the ticket pocket.

  As a man wanted on a murder charge and hunted by the underworld, the loss would imprison him, in the sense of restricting his movement, almost as much as a locked door, even if he was wise, unknown to Zuta, to the secret of the attic passage.

  Why was he suddenly being written out of the script?

  Because he wasn't sticking to the rules. Her rules. Although he hadn't told her what happened there, she knew he had been to Aumühle, even though she had «advised» him to stay put in the apartment.

  Since he had made no accusation at the time, she should also know that he couldn't have seen her getting in or out of the Cadillac at the Mühlenteich Club.

  But she couldn't be one hundred percent certain.

  And, as he was beginning to find out, odds of ninety-nine to one weren't short enough to qualify as a dead certainty in the lady's book. They just qualified the runners as dead.

  That must have been the reason why Alberts had been killed the night before, not because they knew he was to pick up Bolan by the gas station at eight o'clock, but in case the Executioner had confided in him, in case the two of them had seen her at the club, in case the cabbie could make the link between Zuta, Lattuada, Hansie and their racket.

  Which left him where? He wasn't positive, but most likely in the doghouse.

  So what kind of event, he wondered, was the high jump, and how long was the drop? About as far as it was to the quicklime beneath the trapdoor in the death cell?

  Were they, in other words, simply aiming to hand him back to the law in a neatly tied package and hope he'd go down for Dagmar's murder? Or was some more sinister end in view, the kind that involved a secluded part of the botanical gardens?

  There was a more immediate question. How the hell was Bolan to react when Zuta came back up to the apartment? Would he be expected to perform as if nothing had happened? Or was he supposed to have taken some kind of hint from the newspaper story. Maybe, like him, Fraulein Krohn was trailing a decoy…

  There seemed to be something special on at the club. The band was there, unusual for lunchtime, louder than usual, too, jazzier. The street was choked with cars, never mind the fog. The gorilla brought lunch at midday, which Bolan tossed down the john, and told him Zuta would be occupied with special guests until late that night. In fact, she never returned to the apartment at all.

  Hell, Zuta wasn't actually sadistic; she was just businesslike. She didn't watch the animals destroyed when they had outlived their usefulness; she rang the vet and went out for the day.

  Bolan was in a quandary. The obvious thing was for him to make a break for it. But he had to have some money. Maybe he could put the bite on Freddie Leonhardt, promising that the magazine would repay him.

  Bolan returned to the phone. The line was dead. No amount of jiggling would produce a dial tone. Evidently the wires had been cut or a plug had been pulled out someplace. And he didn't even have coins for a public pay phone!

  Final surprise: the Beretta and the throwing knife had vanished from their customary hiding place beneath the clothes in his dresser drawer. That did it. Okay, the Executioner thought grimly, so this is where we move into the open-warfare phase.

  What was being planned for him? Well, he wasn't going to wait and see. It was time for the condemned man to bust out. But first he was going to take a long, hard look at that red leather diary.

  He crept up to the attic floor and made his way along the concealed passageway to the house. This time he gave the whole place the once-over before he settled down. The garage was empty, but there was a smell of coffee in the sterile kitchen. They must have had it sent in from outside.

  Upstairs Bolan found two bedrooms. One was unused; in the other there was a king-size unmade bed with rumpled sheets. The bathroom was still misted with condensation and the steamy air was heavy with the scent of expensive cologne. No prizes, he thought, for guessing where his hostess had entertained her "special guests."

  There was a cabinet-size portrait in a leather photo frame standing on the night table. "For Zuta — my love!" read the heavily inked dedication
slanted across the lower right-hand corner. And the face staring soulfully out at Bolan was the face of Ferucco Lattuada.

  So much for all that innocence. So much for the pretense of knowing nothing about "this man Lattuada." So much for those persistent «inquiries» among the know-it-alls at the club, none of which, strangely enough, had produced anything specific.

  When he got the safe open, as far as he could see, and he had rigged some telltale pointers, the red leather diary was exactly as he had left it. That indicated that Zuta didn't make entries everyday.

  He determined to break the lock. Hell, he was getting out, anyway. He went into the kitchen and found a knife. Slipping the blade beneath the lock and levering, he popped open the hasp. When he opened the book, he saw at once that he had struck oil.

  There was a spread of two pages for every day of the year. Many of them were blank; more still were covered with Zuta's obsessively neat, back-slanting handwriting. He had guessed right, too. She hadn't been able to resist the "what a clever girl am I" routine, and it was all down there — dates, places, figures, details of operations — in an easily decoded personal shorthand. Plus identifiable initials for the cost.

  He flipped through the past few weeks, catching a line here and there.

  Coconut Grove taken apart by HS plus four. Visited Blue Lagoon with L: 2,500DM. HS returned to Grove to collect 1,000DM. L thinks we should talk C.McF into letting us have a piece of Tondelayo's.

  The sums quoted weren't enormous — one thousand deutsche marks was less than six hundred bucks — but if the collection was weekly, if there were several dozen contributors, and if you added tied-in liquor sales and the huge profits from drug distribution, the total would be, well, interesting. He turned more pages.

  HS on milk run delivers two warnings (Club Hawaii and Bobbies). The Millpond: L suggests we triple our normal demand. 3,000DM collected from Becker's widow. L thinks we should attempt to bring Bremen into line.

  Suddenly Bolan stopped reading. What was somebody trying to pull? Because he remembered: Lattuada couldn't have spent the afternoon in bed with Zuta, in this or any other Hamburg house. He was in Bremen. Bolan had overheard him talking to Hansie about it in the saloon. I gotta meet with the Wallmann mob in Bremen. Have to talk some sense into their fuckin' mouthpiece. And then: Back from Bremen on Thursday, 7:35 at the main station.

  Today was Wednesday.

  Since the mobster wasn't due back in town until 7:35 p.m., all at once it looked to Bolan as though that love nest number up in the bedroom was some kind of setup.

  Of course she could have allowed herself a siesta with just Lattuada's photo for company. After all, she liked tall, lean men. Or she could have jumped in the sack with someone else and not troubled to remove the picture, except that Zuta, however crooked she might be, always did things with a certain style and that wouldn't be cool. No, now that he thought about it, that Sicilian mug gazing out over the artfully mussed covers, with the used bathroom beyond, was just a little too pat. Something smelled. And if it was a case of walking open-eyed into a setup that looked suspicious even before things started to move, then Bolan wasn't going to play. The setup couldn't relate to him, okay, because Zuta didn't know that he knew about the secret passage and the house beyond it. But whatever it was, he wanted to stay clear.

  More research among the pages of the diary — even if, as he hoped, they threw light on the fate planned for him — would have to wait. He would take the book back to the apartment and do a few more minutes of reading before he finally split. Backing out of the obsessively neat living room, he made for the broom closet.

  That was his first mistake.

  He got wise to the second as soon as he was back in the apartment, sitting down at the bureau with the diary. Opening the red leather book he saw ruefully that, whatever happened, he wasn't going to be able to replace it and pretend it had never left its home base in the safe. Forcing the lock with the kitchen knife had buckled the thin gold locking plate that closed over the pages.

  The knife!

  All the blood in his body seemed to drain down to his feet, the way it does when the organism is brought face-to-face with the realization that it has made some especially dumb play.

  He had left that damning knife on the polished top of a small table in the hallway outside the kitchen. Stuffing the dairy under his mattress, he hightailed it back to the attic corridor like a swallow that had missed out on the migration. Hansie Schiller was waiting in the hallway when he opened the closet door. Three men built like diesel trucks stood behind him.

  "Been expectin' you, sweetie," the big thug jeered. "Fancy pulling a stroke like that without even letting the boss know you knew! Never mind. Me and the boys got exactly what you need."

  He held up one hand, the forefinger and thumb pincered over the bone handle of the kitchen knife. The fingers of the other hand were wrapped around the rubber-covered butt of a blackjack.

  It was dark when he came to, and the inside of his head was hammering like a shipyard on overtime. But a beating at the hands of the bad fairy didn't entirely account for the taste in his mouth or the feeling behind his eyes when he sat up on the bed and swung his feet to the floor. He knew from experience that his current state of mind wasn't just the result of a simple KO. He had been drugged and kept under sedation for some time.

  Which meant he was being kept under wraps. But for what?

  Bolan looked around. Everything was familiar. He was in the apartment above the club. He stood up shakily and fought his way through the colored stars to the living room and the entrance door. As he expected, it was locked, and it opened inward, so there was no point charging it with his shoulder. He pulled at the handle, but it came away in his hand and left him worse off than before.

  The phone was still dead. He went to the window and pushed up the sash. Halos circled the streetlights again and the air was moist and cold. But this time there was no row of bricks below the window ledge, no strip of stone jutting out from the facade, just a sheer brick face dropping forty or fifty feet to the sidewalk. The nearest drainpipe was yards away.

  It was when a newsboy walked under one of the lights with his placards flapping that Bolan got the message. EUROPEAN CUP — HAMBURG VS PRAGUE: RESULT, the red letters on one side spelled out. And on the other he read: RITTER HERO OF HAMBURG SUCCESS.

  He caught his breath. The soccer match, and the local team's chances of winning it, had been headlined in Wednesday's paper. It was to be played, one hour ahead of local time, in Czechoslovakia on Thursday afternoon.

  If the game was already over, and the result printed, this must be Thursday evening. Bolan had been trapped by Hansie Schiller early Wednesday afternoon: he had been out for the count for twenty-eight hours or more! He looked at his watch. Yeah, it was already six o'clock.

  So, once more, what the hell?

  He remembered the one card left in his hand, the one thing they didn't know. He'd brought the red leather diary with him, the first time he'd returned to the apartment the previous day. And, luckily, he had hidden it before he'd walked back into Hansie's welcoming arms. If he had any luck at all left on his side, Zuta wouldn't have missed it yet.

  He went back to the bedroom and felt beneath the deep mattress where he'd stashed the book. Lady Luck still smiled on him. The diary was there all right.

  Reluctant to advertise the fact that he was conscious and alert again, he resisted the temptation to switch on the apartment lights. He took the diary into the bathroom, where there was no window, and pulled the cord operating the fluorescent lights in there. He opened the book and began to read.

  The material between those red covers was an eye-opener.

  For starters, it was obvious that Lattuada had been Zuta's lover from the day he'd hit town over a month ago. And although — reading between the lines — the torch had cooled down some, she still liked tall, lean guys and she kept the bed warm for him when there was nothing more exciting around.

  Which wasn
't to say that Lattuada had the same freedom. Bolan recalled his hostess calling Dagmar Schroeder a little tramp. It was clear from the entries dated a couple of weeks earlier that she'd been savagely jealous of the blonde, even after Lattuada's liaison with her was over. On the day Bolan rescued Dagmar from the Coconut Grove there was a short entry that read: "L is seeing the tramp again. He says because he is sore over some business deal. I wonder."

  Bolan turned the page. The entry for the day he wanted to date Dagmar, the day she refused to see him, was underscored. He read: "Caught them together! I heard her apologize for some kind of double cross and then proposition him. The tramp must go."

  He knew then what he was going to find next, but he didn't expect it to be quite so casual. Among a collection of details about club membership, bulk buying and audit problems appeared the laconic line: "HS settled the tramp affair. Useful for eliminating MB?"

  For MB read Mike Belasko? Yeah, that was Zuta all right: take the decisions but keep the hands clean. Nice lady.

  There were no further references to the warrior until the day he escaped from the courthouse: "MB outwitted police. Team to survey." And then later: "HS instructed — seek and capture." There was only one entry for the day he finally met Zuta. It read: "MB! L will learn that two can play his game!"

  The Executioner grinned wryly. So much for Mack Bolan's electric charm. What it came down to was that he'd been taken on a whim to make a mafioso jealous.

  On impulse he leafed back to the day he himself had hit town, reading: "Distributors must learn that it doesn't pay to pocket the proceeds. EM to be eliminated publicly as a lesson to others."