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"Is Dagmar Schroeder in tonight?" Bolan asked casually as he passed the desk.

  The doorkeeper shrugged and shook his head. "Right on through, sir."

  Bolan checked his coat and went through to the bar, a room at the far end of a long passageway with no doors. But the action was evidently in the basement below. From the top of the stairs Bolan could hear a small band that was really wailing, and crowd noises that meant the joint was jumping. A mulatto with frizzy, hennaed hair, a scanty sequined top and an impudent bottom was leaning against the bar.

  "Hi, good-looking," she said lazily in English as he loped in. Bolan assumed Americans were regular patrons here. "You look like I could do with a drink," the mulatto slurred. "What you gonna buy me, man?"

  "I always did go for the subtle approach," Bolan said. "Keep me in the dark a little longer and order for both of us. Beer for me."

  Her name was Sally Ann, and she must have been all of nineteen years old. Downstairs she hooked her forearms over the Executioner's shoulders and draped four-fifths of her body, from the tips of the sequins to the tips of her silver sandals, against his husky frame. The top fifth leaned back with the head tilted and looked him in the eye. That was his guess: he couldn't actually see her doing it because there seemed to be eight hundred people jammed into a space the size of a Lincoln Continental, and the only light in the place came from a single lamp above the piano keyboard.

  Dance was putting it politely. Couples stayed pressed together and shook while the four guys on the stage earned their money. The music was good, not so strident that it was almost impossible to talk.

  "Isn't Dagmar in tonight?" Bolan had to press his lips against her ear to make himself heard.

  "Dagmar?" The whites of her eyes gleamed up at him in the dusk.

  "Dagmar Schroeder. The dancer."

  "I never heard of her."

  "I thought she was supposed to be part of the floor show. There is a floor show, isn't there?"

  "If you can call it that. But it's only on Sundays here. Why mess with her when I'm here?"

  "I have a message for her from her mother," Bolan said.

  "I could add a PS that would help you forget 'hat message."

  "And just how would that read?"

  Her fingers laced together behind his neck, but before she could reply there was a stamping of feet overhead and the guitar player stopped in midsolo. Immediately afterward Bolan heard a succession of sounds that were becoming disturbingly familiar: the noises of violent combat, breaking glass, splintering wood, shouts and curses. "Christ, it's not another police raid, is it?" someone near Bolan asked plaintively.

  Knowing that the Sugar Hill belonged to Charlie, Bolan thought probably not.

  Abruptly light flooded the room from wall brackets on three sides of the floor. He took a quick glance around. Being a private club, the place was exempt from fire regulations. Apart from a narrow doorway in back of the stage that led to a dressing room, the stairway was the only exit.

  There was a lot of yelling upstairs in the bar now. Some of the men on the dance floor forced their way to the stairs. At least one was carrying a razor. A few women screamed. The band had already vanished, but there was a big guy standing on the edge of the stage telling everyone not to panic, that everything was all right. Bolan figured him for an optimist when all the lights went out, including the one over the piano.

  In total darkness there was a moment's frozen pause in which the mayhem upstairs sounded unnaturally loud. Bolan unfastened his jacket and checked that the Beretta, which he had recovered from the hotel safe before he'd left, was sliding easily in its leather. Then, beneath an upsurge of voices suddenly exclaiming around him, he was aware of an undercurrent with a purpose, a whispering, a shuffling of feet. Somebody seized his arm and shoved him toward the stage. He tripped over the edge, cursing, and then Sally Ann's hand, which had stayed in his, jerked him impatiently forward.

  It was one of the things he had noticed in dives all the way from Singapore to Cincinnati: the apparently effortless ability of jazz musicians to take an instant powder at the first hint of trouble, including, no matter how cumbersome, their instruments. The Sugar Hill was no exception. Apart from the piano, the small stage was already clear. A cool breeze blew through the door behind it.

  Quite a crowd of dancers was pushing its way through, but there was no jam-up — just an occasional staying hand and a few murmured warnings. The dressing room was pint-size. Beyond it, signaled by an odor of disinfectant, was a minuscule washroom… and yet this slow stream of customers seemed to be able to pile in there endlessly.

  Bolan soon discovered why. There was a stepladder beneath an open trapdoor in the washroom ceiling… and those in the know, aided by club stewards, just climbed up and disappeared into the night. Clearly it was a tested escape route, established to help members avoid embarrassing encounters with the law. With that kind of organization, who needed fire regulations?

  They surfaced in a narrow lane twisting back toward the Steindamm. The long passage that led to the bar must have penetrated another block, because the courtyard where Bolan's scooter and the exotic automobiles were parked was nowhere to be seen. Sheltering in a doorway while the outflow thinned a bit, Bolan turned to the girl. "Seems I owe you the other half of that drink we left back in there," he said. "Where do you want to go?"

  Flakes of snow mantled the frizzy hair like the frosting on a Christmas tree. She took his arm. "We could try Tondelayo's," she said.

  That was what he hoped she would say. In the circumstances it seemed a reasonable hunch. And if he was going to soft probe, asking questions, it would come easier if he was with a girl who was known at the club.

  "Suits me," he said. "Is it far? We better grab a cab anyway. My parka's still down there — the second one I've lost today! — and you'll catch your death dressed like that."

  "Not far," Sally Ann said. "Around the top end of the Alster, in the Harvesterhuder Weg."

  As the taxi's radials bit through six inches of freshly fallen snow around the lakeside driveway, Bolan risked another question. "You figure it'll be okay at this place… Tondelayo's?" he asked. "I mean, the place belongs to Charlie and all that — they won't wreck it, too?"

  "No, no," the girl said absently. She was staring at the blizzard lancing toward them through the tunnel of light carved by the taxi's headlights. "He's only part owner. Besides, there's a double payoff — city hall as well as the people who muscled in."

  "You mean the… Team… chiseled him out of a piece of the action? And there's protection from the police, as well?"

  Sally Ann let go of his arm. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Ah, c'mon, don't give me that," Bolan needled. "What's the matter? You scared of the Yank or something?"

  "Better to keep quiet about things like that." Suddenly the Danish accent was very strong. "You know something," the girl said, "we haven't had a snowfall this heavy since 84 when I was in school."

  Tondelayo's was on the second floor of a narrow building that was a bakery at street level. "That's one up in favor of the management," Bolan said. "Basements are beginning to give me claustrophobia."

  Freddie Leonhardt had been right. It was a ritzier joint than the Sugar Hill, but only just. The crowded bar was wider, garish tropical silhouettes decorated the walls, and there was waiter service at the tables around the dance floor. The six-piece band onstage boasted a drummer, too.

  "You'll never guess why they opened over a bakery," Sally Ann said when Bolan had bribed their way to a table and ordered.

  "No complaints about the noise, because bakers work nights anyway?" he offered.

  "That, too. No, but the real reason is the smell. You can't tell grass from ordinary tobacco over the odor of baking bread. Not for sure. Did you know that?"

  He shook his head. "I quit school young. So everybody lights up as soon as the ovens are fired?"

  "Or before. Talking of which…" She shot him a sideways glance.

 
"Yeah?"

  "I'm dying for a smoke right now."

  Still playing dumb, Bolan raised a finger to signal a topless cigarette girl wearing fishnet tights.

  Sally Ann's stare mixed scorn and disbelief in equal portions. "You have to be joking," she said. "Shit, I never figured you for a square." She shook her head. Then, compressing her lips, she left the table and flounced away to the ladies' room.

  Two minutes later she was back, still frowning. "Not so cool," she said. "I shot a blank. So what's with you, Frank?"

  "You get a lot of vintage Hollywood movies on TV here?" Bolan queried.

  "I don't dig you. What's the pitch?"

  He grinned. "Question of dialogue. But let it pass."

  She was still angry. "All right," he said. "It just happens that I'm not in the habit of walking around with my pockets stuffed full of marijuana. Where I come from, it just happens to be illegal."

  "Here, too, dummkopf. If you want to be stuffy about it, I mean. If you want to please the lady you're with, you go raise a couple of joints from Joe."

  "I see," Bolan said. "Joe."

  "The guy in the men's room," she said impatiently.

  Bolan rose to his feet. He had no intention of buying drugs for anyone. He was in the business of eliminating the stuff from the planet, or at least making life hell for those who profited from the evil garbage. But «Joe» might give a lead or two about Dagmar. Penny-ante pushers got around and were easily bought. They made great snitches for cops. As for Sally Ann's request, he'd just tell her he couldn't find the pusher or that the guy was temporarily out of stock. Reluctantly he headed for the men's room.

  There were a lot of people dancing now, but not so many that he couldn't identify the different categories of member itemized by Freddie Leonhardt. The only thing the Hamburg stringer had gotten wrong was the proportions: more than half the women were hookers with visiting firemen in tow. There were also a few kids who had apparently come to listen to the band.

  On the far side of the floor Bolan buttonholed a waiter and ordered a second round. He figured another drink or two might make Sally Ann a little more talkative about matters concerning Dagmar and her associates.

  "Right away, sir," the waiter said cheerfully. "Straight Jack Daniel's for two coming up. You'll find the men's room behind the office. Other side of the entrance."

  "Thanks," Bolan said. He took a step, then turned back. "By the way, isn't Dagmar in tonight?"

  The shutters came down over the dark face. "Dagmar?"

  "Dagmar Schroeder. The dancer. I thought she was part of the floor show?"

  "I don't know who you mean. We don't have a floor show. Now, if you'll excuse me, sir…"

  The attendant in the men's room was a fat, bald Creole. By the time the Executioner had waited around for the place to empty, had hedged a little, slipped him ten marks and finally put the question, he had an eight-hundred-word Sunday magazine section piece on the guy's life story. Even then the Creole just shook his pale head. "I is des-o-lated, sir, but it can't be done."

  "But I thought… One of the girls told me…"

  "Sure, mister, sure. But I can't give you what I ain't got, can I? My supplier done let me down."

  "That's too bad," Bolan said, not intending for a moment to buy any grass. He figured posing as a customer was the best way to get the guy's guard down.

  "I know it, friend. You ain't the only one. But Dagmar didn't show tonight."

  "Dagmar! Dagmar Schroeder? You don't mean Dagmar Schroeder the dancer?"

  Down came another set of shutters. He pried them open a crack with another ten spot. "Tallish kid with blond hair. Pageboy cut. Pretty girl."

  The fat shoulders shrugged. "Dunno. Just a chick who comes in and then goes out. Dagmar."

  "You don't know her other name?"

  "Mister, I don't even know if she has another name. I never heard nobody use one."

  And that was as far as Joe would commit himself.

  "You wouldn't know where I could contact her?" Bolan pursued. "Her address? Anyplace she hangs out? It's important. And it's worth another twenty."

  Again the plump shoulders heaved. "Everything's important to someone, right?" The bills vanished. "You could try the Mandrake Root, Willi's Grotto, the Cellar, the Nussdorfer Weinstube. Some of 'em go there, daytimes. Sometimes."

  Bolan didn't know if it was the right Dagmar, but he noted down the names. He'd paid for them, and it was the only lead he had.

  Sally Ann sighed when he returned to the table with the bad news. "Guess we better go back to my place then, but all I have is a sack of low-grade hash from North Africa — none of that knockout Colombian shit that Joe peddles." On Joe's supplier, however, she couldn't — or wouldn't — add a word.

  Bolan diverted his mind from Sally Ann's feminine charms. He had a list of addresses; he wasn't going to find out any more from Sally Ann, however appealing he found her kooky out-of-date image. And he certainly had no intention of passing the rest of the night fighting his way out of a hashish cloud. He asked the doorman to call a taxi.

  It arrived almost at once, etching deep tire marks in the blinding white blanket of snow that filled the street from wall to wall.

  The night was still blisteringly cold. "Keep that heater on full blast," Bolan told the cabbie. "Where am I going to drop you off?" he asked the girl.

  "Drop me off?" She sounded scandalized. "Are you kidding?"

  "Just tell the man the address."

  She snapped out the name of a street on the far side of the botanic gardens and then turned on him furiously. "What kind of a heel are you?" she hissed. "All evening you let me think I scored, and then, when it comes to the crunch, here's Mr. Do-Right telling me good-night without even a kiss on the doorstep! What is this blow-hot-blow-cold routine, for Chrissakes?"

  Bolan wadded a couple of hundred-mark bills and pressed them into her hand. "You'll have the rest of the night to think up an answer to those two questions," he said. "Okay, driver, the light's green."

  The cab's diesel roared as the front wheels scythed through the soft snow carpet, then finally the tires gripped and they moved crabwise into the center of the roadway. "Thank Christ it's at least stopped falling," the cabbie growled, gingerly feathering the pedal.

  They were still making less than fifteen miles per hour when they hit the intersection and the shooting started.

  Chapter Five

  The shots blazed out from two cars. One was at the head of a long line parked between the trees along the sidewalk; its roof, hood and windshield were so deeply covered that it was impossible to identify the make. At one side of the humped white shape a single shallow rectangle of black showed up where a window had been wound halfway down, and it was from the perforated muzzle of an SMG poking through this gap that the deathstream first belched.

  The second car was a dark-colored Golf GTi. It was halted in the center of the cross street, the front and sides hatched open where snow had been clawed away to free glass and door handles.

  Both windows on the passenger side were open, and gunfire flamed out from inside the sedan before the echoes of the SMG fusillade had been swallowed among the white-capped branches of the leafless trees. Two heavy-caliber automatics, Bolan thought, but he wouldn't have laid money on it because he had hit the cab door handle and dived into the roadway, pulling the girl with him, while the burst from the parked car was shattering the cab's windshield.

  The fresh snow cushioned the impact, but the city blacktop was near enough to the surface to bruise knees, elbows, shoulders, and knock most of the breath from Bolan's body. He had bailed out on the side away from the killers beneath the trees because two autoloaders were less lethal than a single submachine gun — especially at a distance of more than twenty-five yards.

  It was a good place for an ambush just the same. An overhead light slung on wires drenched the whole intersection in searing brilliance. The cab, lurching on for only a few yards after the initial volley, was stalled in the ce
nter of the wide space with the driver slumped over the wheel. The hail of lead that smashed through his chest had blasted open a door, and blood dripped darkly from the sill to stain the gray-white tire track below.

  The Executioner and Sally Ann were isolated, half-buried in scuffed snow, fifteen feet behind the taxi. For the moment they were hidden from the marksman with the SMG, but they made perfect targets, black against the sparkling white, for the gunners in the Volkswagen.

  The automatics fired again. Bullets gouged spurts of powdery snow from the unbroken carpet behind their heads. The killers didn't have the range quite right; they hadn't allowed for the «climb» of the heavy handguns, throwing the slugstream high.

  Sally Ann had screamed as she was pulled from the cab. Now she hunched down, whimpering quietly in the shelter of Bolan's body. He lay on his back, the Beretta in his right hand, forefinger curled around the trigger. "Run like hell for the cab when I tell you, lie beneath it and don't move!" he rasped. Sighting coolly as the thugs in the VW tried for the third time, he raised his arms above his head and shot out the overhead light.

  "Now!" he yelled at the girl.

  She scrambled forward, scattering snow, sobbing for breath. A slug nicked Bolan's sleeve. Another took away the heel of his shoe, jarring his left leg. The overhead light faded to orange, turned red, died. Broken glass pattered down onto the cab.

  Bolan was on his feet and running, plowing through the shin-high mantle of white in a desperate attempt to make the opposite sidewalk before the gunmen's eyes, temporarily blinded by the abrupt absence of brilliance, acclimatized to the ghostly half-light that would in very few seconds be reflected from the snow.

  He tripped over the bank of frozen slush piled along the curb, stumbled and almost fell. Then he was vaulting an iron railing to drop down among the pale mounds of shrubbery in the front yard of a house on the corner of the intersection.

  The snow had drifted here, and he got up on his haunches in its numbing embrace. Peering between icy branches, he could make out the dim bulk of the Golf and the cab marooned on a bone-white plain without depth or substance. The second car was no more than the termination of an irregular shape beneath bare trees silhouetted by light reflected from lights in adjacent streets. Above the Christmas-card rooftops a yellow glare from sodium lights in the city center showed up hurrying clouds.