Blowout Read online

  She paused fractionally before she continued. Bolan was seething with questions, but it seemed best to let the vein run out. "They wrecked the place," she said, "and then they started on Charlie. Beat him up and then put the boot in when he was down. He managed to get hold of some wire on the floor and all the lights fused when he jerked it. Then he… he made a run for it, but they caught him." She bit down hard on her lower lip and her eyes closed for a moment. "They cut the tendons at the back of his knees with a razor," she said.

  "That must have been Charlie I tripped over when I came through the door. If they hamstrung him, it's true — he'll never walk again," Bolan said.

  "I told you. They do what they say. It always happens when…"

  "Don't tell me," Bolan cut in. "When the Yank's involved. So who's the Yank?"

  "Well, he took over when they began to ease out Kraul, didn't he?"

  "You tell me. He's American? So what's his name? It wouldn't be… Lattuada, would it? And who the hell's Hansie?"

  Suddenly she shook her head violently. "I don't want to talk about it," she cried. "Leave me alone. Why are you asking me all these questions? Who are you, anyway?"

  "Let's just say an interested party," Bolan replied.

  She was staring at him. "Oh!" she gasped. "You're hurt!"

  He was, too. Technically. Although he hadn't noticed, blood had run down his left arm and congealed between the fingers of his hand. He remembered the knife or razor or whatever it was that had nicked his sleeve as he'd made his fleeting appearance on the stage of the Coconut Grove. Sure enough, the shirt was stuck to his skin just below the elbow and the muscle was stiff. He grinned. "It can't be serious," he said, "or I'd have fainted. Allow me to introduce myself. Mike Belasko of World Review."

  For the first time the girl smiled. It looked good. "Dagmar Schroeder," she said.

  "Nice to know you, Dagmar. You mentioned an audition…?"

  "I'm a dancer."

  "A stripper?"

  She shook her head. "Specialty. I… don't wear too much to start with."

  Bolan's lips twitched in a smile. A plump woman in a black dress and a starched white cap was standing by the table, notepad and pencil at the ready. "Two coffees, good and hot," he said, "and two schnapps."

  "And a sandwich," Dagmar added. "Bratwurst on rye with butter."

  "Make that two," Bolan told the woman. He'd had no lunch, either.

  There was a column faced with mirrors beside the table, and the girl was staring at her reflection. "My God!" she exclaimed. "My hair! I must go fix it this minute." She stood up, clutching the edges of her torn silk top. "No wonder that waitress stared!"

  "That goes for me, too. But we can't leave together. We'd lose the table. You go ahead, Dagmar. I'll stay and hold the fort."

  He watched her walk away. In a far corner of the cafeteria a three-piece string orchestra sawed through Tales from the Vienna Woods. When Dagmar walked, her dancer's legs swung from the hip, but they were slightly bent at the knee. There was no corny swaying of her backside. This was a body, even after the humiliations of a donnybrook, that was aware of itself and what it could do, confident and almost arrogant in that knowledge.

  The waitress had brought Bolan's order. Over the roar of the conversation and the clatter of crockery in the huge cafeteria, he was conscious of the fact that the three-piece had finished Strauss and was starting to dismantle Weber.

  But music wasn't what was on his mind. What kind of conspiracy had he gotten himself mixed up in? Who were Hansie and the Yank and poor, loose-legged Charlie Farnsbarn? Was he right, thinking there could be a connection between Ferucco Lattuada and what sounded like some kind of German protection racket? Above all, if it was the menacingly named Team that had attacked Charlie, who were the guys fighting them? Friends of the hamstrung club owner? Men working for the mysterious Kraul? That was the next question he had to put to Dagmar.

  Come to that, where was the girl? It seemed a long time since she'd left the table. Could she have passed out in the ladies' powder room? Abruptly Bolan got to his feet and made for the arch behind the cashier where the Damen and Herren signs hung.

  There was a large woman in spectacles behind a table on the far side of the arch. She wore white coveralls and was reading an evening paper spread out on the table-top. "Not that way!" she protested in German. "You can't go in there! Yours is on the left. Can't you read?"

  "A blonde," Bolan said, "about twenty-four. Medium height. She was wearing a black parka and something green underneath it that was torn. Her face was all bruised. Did you see her come in here ten, maybe twelve minutes ago?"

  "Of course I did. I see everything. She was in a mess, poor young thing! I can't think…"

  "Is she all right?"

  "I guess so," the woman said, looking up over her spectacles. "She seemed fine. Gave me fifty pfennigs when she left."

  "She left?" Bolan yelled. "Which way did she go?"

  "You just missed her. She went down those stairs leading directly to the street half a minute ago."

  He was already halfway down them himself. There was a line of cabs standing in the center of the roadway behind the entrance to the subway station. The cold struck him like a blow. Through snowflakes that were beginning to drift down again, he caught sight of a green sleeve as Dagmar Schroeder closed the door of the leading cab and it moved away.

  "Taxi!" the Executioner shouted, stepping into the street, waving. "Taxi!"

  A heavy hand fell on his arm. "A moment, Meinherr, if you please," a voice said in English. "I am a house detective employed by the management and I have to inform you that I have observed you attempting to leave without paying for a meal that you ordered." The voice was somber. "I have to ask you to accompany me to the director's office…"

  Chapter Four

  It was crazy, Bolan fumed to himself. A goddamn house dick of all things! He tried to break free, but the grip on his arm tightened as the guy mouthed the formula required by the law. He was a big guy, too, as tall as the Executioner and three times heavier. Dagmar's cab was already halfway down the Konigstrasse, and the lights had changed. An icy sidewalk was no place to try out techniques of unarmed combat. Besides, the guy was only doing his job. Bolan accompanied the man to the director's office.

  The bill came to thirteen marks eighty. He rounded the sum out to fifteen marks, to placate the outraged waitress, and left. Back on the street, he went to the nearby department store and bought a new parka. It was snowing heavily now, and the traffic had begun to snarl up as the streetlights flickered on to shine through the whirling flakes. He took the subway back to his hotel, carried a fifth of Jack Daniel's up to his room and settled down in a comfortable chair so that the two of them could mull over the events of the past few hours.

  First, though, he had to clean up. His shoulder was stiff and bruised where the blackjack had struck, but the skin wasn't broken. He was black-and-blue where whatever it was had thumped into his back during the chase down the alley. The wound on his arm was the worst, and that was three times nothing at all: a deep cut but clean, easily fixed by a shower, a dab of disinfectant and a strip of plaster. Once it was done, he poured himself half a tumbler of bourbon and put his feet up.

  So, he thought, what had he gotten himself into? There seemed to be some kind of Mafia-style protection racket going on in St. Pauli, maybe in other Hamburg neighborhoods, too. That would have to be checked.

  Lattuada was a Mafia hood who had certainly been involved in that racket — among others — back home. His presence could simply be a coincidence. Or something much more. Circumstantial support for the latter came from Dagmar Schroeder's mention of the Yank. But that, too, could be a coincidence. Since he happened to be tailing a fellow countryman when he met her, it was natural to make the connection, but he could be wrong: it could just as well be the nickname of some local punk.

  Other questions looking for an answer: who or what exactly was the Team? Was the Yank their boss? Who was Hansie? Who
was Kraul and how was he being "eased out"? What, if anything, had all this to do with Arvell Asticot?

  Most important of all: why had the girl run out on him?

  She was shit-scared. That was obvious. But there was something else, some undertone Bolan had sensed while she'd talked. What was that she'd said — and then hesitated? Yeah. They wanted to take me with them. The Yank doesn't like witnesses, and they didn't know I was… What? Somehow tied in with the guy?

  Why had she clammed up just then? And on which side of the battle were «they»? The Team or the others? Whichever, why was it so vital to get the girl away? If it was just to silence a witness, they could have killed her before he had intervened.

  One thing anyway was clear: whether or not Dagmar was allied to the Yank, whether or not the Yank was Lattuada, she was in there someplace with an angle; she was involved one way or another. More, Bolan thought, than just as an outsider who showed for an audition and found herself in the middle of a gang war.

  Dagmar, in fact, was the one link between all the unanswered questions. He had to see her again and demand some answers. But how do you set about finding one young woman in a city of nearly two million people, if she wants to stay hidden? That was the toughest question of all.

  The only lead he had was the name of the two other clubs she had mentioned, both of them belonging to the owner of the Coconut Grove. She wouldn't be at either of them tonight, that was for sure — not in the state she was in. But the management at one or the other might know her address.

  Might. She knew the owner, but that didn't necessarily mean she was a regular at either. Or that they would release her address to a stranger if she was. She'd said they were both classy joints with house bands. It was on the cards that a dancer applying for a floor show audition would be strictly backdoor material anyway.

  But leads were there to be followed. First Bolan checked the phone book. As he expected, her name wasn't in it. Before he went prospecting, however, he figured it would be smart to fill himself in on the local scene by using the one contact he had in Hamburg.

  Freddie Leonhardt was the West German correspondent for World Review, the photonews weekly for which Mike Belasko was supposed to be a roving reporter. Michaelson, the magazine's foreign editor, was an ex-CIA field agent who played along with the deception because he was a golfing buddy of Hal Brognola's. From time to time high-powered diplomatic think pieces were published under the Belasko byline to keep the cover alive. And all World Review stringers were under a permanent obligation to offer every possible facility to Belasko any time he hit their territory.

  In the case of the Hamburg man, there was a two-way interlock. Leonhardt's father had been a member of the Gehlen Organization — the Nazi intelligence service coopted after World War II by the OSS and later the CIA for anti-Soviet work in the American zone, and especially West Berlin. Subsequently the son, too, was asked to pass occasional items of information on to Langley.

  Bolan knew of Freddie Leonhardt's CIA connection, but the German was unaware of Belasko's real identity, and he had no idea that the life of the warrior with the cold blue eyes was dedicated to the eradication of crime and terrorism.

  The only thing wrong with the setup from the Executioner's point of view was that he couldn't stand the guy at any price. Freddie had been to school in England, and then to Oxford, something he never let you forget. His English was fluent, all right, but it was so «British» that it would have made the queen of England reach for a blue pencil and rewrite his dialogue.

  Freddie wore suede loafers and a yellow wool vest under his Prince of Wales checks. He kept his handmade cigarettes a hygienic distance from his face with the help of an ivory holder. A fob watch on a strap nestled in his breast pocket, there was a gold identity disk on his left wrist, and his graying hair curled just the right amount at the nape of his neck. It might have worked if he had been tall and willowy, but the image tarnished some when the cultured drawl on the telephone turned out to be no more than five feet four inches off the ground and inclining to plumpness.

  Bolan thought him a dilettante, pretentious and unreliable. But he did know his stuff. He was a good journalist and he had an in. Bolan called him at his home, a nineteenth-century town house on the Isestrasse.

  "But, my dear chap, anything at all," the unctuous voice intoned. "Didn't know you were in town, actually. Head office is getting bloody slack with the old service messages. But anything I can do to help, just say the word."

  "There's a five-language brochure called the Hamburger Vorschau that I picked up at the hotel reception," Bolan said. "Tells you were to go, what to see, how to eat well and so on."

  "Yes, old boy. They have them everywhere. Produced for the information office."

  "Yeah," Bolan said. "The thing is, I want to check out two clubs, and they don't appear in the nightlife section. Or the phone book, for that matter."

  "Well, you've come to the right door, squire," Leonhardt said. "On Hamburg nightlife yours truly is the jolly old expert. What are the names of these haunts of sin and the almighty dollar?"

  "The Sugar Hill and Tondelayo's."

  There was a slight pause before Leonhardt replied, "Are you sure you have the names right, old boy?"

  "Pretty sure. Why?"

  "Well…" The voice was guarded.

  "Well what?"

  "Well, I know them, of course. But I mean to say… my dear chap, you're not likely to find anything we can use for the rag there. They're run by blackies for a start."

  "You mean they're specifically colored clubs?"

  "Well, no, not exactly. Just the management and the band and some of the girls. But there's everything that goes with that. You know."

  Bolan didn't know and said so.

  "They're the kind of places that are not quite," Leonhardt explained. "I mean no one above the rank of assistant press attaché would dare go there. Drugged cigarettes under the counter in the men's room. Jew-boys and their rag-trade birds who think they're cutting a hell of a dash. Daughters of the bloody Kraut aristocracy — what's left of it — on the prowl for spade dick. Middle-class radicals slumming in the cause of racial equality. Actually, some of the girls are practically tarts."

  "You don't say!"

  "Tondelayo's is smarter than the Sugar Hill, but they're both… well, not to put too fine a point on it, not much better than high-class whorehouses with music."

  "I don't aim to put any kind of a point on it," Bolan said. "I just want the addresses."

  "But the kind of people you want wouldn't be seen dead in either of them."

  "What kind of people do I want?"

  "Well…" Again the German sounded dubious. "Deputies, policymakers, johnnies in the diplomatic corps, the people you write about. If you ask me, you want something a little higher up the social scale. Try Die Insel, for example. All the top brass go there."

  "Just give me the addresses," Bolan said.

  Leonhardt sighed audibly. "The Sugar Hill's in a courtyard off the Albertplatz — that's a square behind the Hauptbahnhof, the main railroad station. Tondelayo's is on this side of the Alster near the radio station." He spelled out the addresses.

  "Fine," Bolan said. "Are they genuine clubs? I mean, do they check membership?"

  "Actually they do. They ask to see your card and check it against a list at the door. Something to do with the drink laws and the fire regulations."

  "I'm surprised you should know such a thing, a guy of your standing," Bolan said sourly. "Does a foreign press accreditation get you past the door at a private club?"

  "No."

  "Does a Hamburg press card?"

  "Yes, as a matter of fact it does."

  "Good. So grab yourself a cab, come on over and lend me yours."

  "My dear fellow, I can't possibly do…"

  "That's an order, Leonhardt," Bolan said curtly. He hung up.

  * * *

  The Albertplatz was off the Steindamm, the tree-lined square where the Executioner had
watched the man from the Cadillac report on the wreck of the Becker Cafe. And where he had first heard the name of Kraul mentioned. It was also the place where he had witnessed the young guy in the beat-up Opel so obviously, to a trained eye, keeping watch on the Cadillac, too.

  He had seen neither the man nor the car since. Police shadow, private eye or lookout for Kraul, whoever he was, the tail remained just one more mystery in the web of intrigue surrounding the Executioner.

  For his second visit to the square, Bolan again rented the Honda scooter. The snow was falling faster, and windshields were icing up. The streets risked becoming choked with stalled traffic, and the lightweight machine was easy to maneuver, to park and, if necessary, to wheel home if conditions became impossible.

  The courtyard where the Sugar Hill was located was behind the church. It was a long, narrow slant of cobblestones fast whitening under the snowfall, where the double rank of parked cars surprised Bolan by its exotic flavor. He saw Ferraris, Stingrays, Jaguar coupes, an AC Cobra and a huge vintage Hispano-Suiza among the run-of-the-mill Fords, Volkswagens and Mercedes-Benzes blanketed by the whirling flakes.

  There was a glass canopy over the club entrance, which was at street level, and there was a black guy with a Jamaican accent installed in the hallway behind an open membership register. Since there was no question of checking names against a list, Bolan was able to flash Leonhardt's press card and keep his thumb over most of the photo.

  "Glad to have you with us, friend," the Jamaican said in English. "Always happy to see the gentlemen of the press. The bar's right on through." The bouncer standing behind him was black, too, but he didn't say anything.