Up until now I had hoped to be able to defend myself without killing him. But I saw that was impossible. I drove the rigid edge of my right hand into the base of his throat with a lethal karate chop. The blow was hard and clean. His neck snapped, and he was dead, probably without ever knowing what killed him. His body sagged to the floor, the head twisted grotesquely to one side. I pulled myself up and stood there, straddling his body.
I could hear the shower going in the bathroom. The deep pile carpeting on the bedroom floor had muffled the sounds of our struggle. It seemed obvious to me then that Helga Von Alder had lured me to the bedroom, knowing that Agent Z1 was going to make an attempt on my life afterward. As good as she had been with me in bed, I could never forget that she and her sisters were all experienced actresses.
On the other hand, I reminded myself, there was still the possibility that she was innocent. Z1 had known I was seeing Helga this evening and could have tailed me to the apartment. If, as I now suspected, he had orders to kill me, he could have slipped into the room from the terrace while Helga and I had been making love, and she wouldn’t have known any more about it than I did.
If that was true, I couldn’t let Helga appear from her shower and find a man I had killed lying on her rug. There could be no explanation that would satisfy her without blowing my cover. If I did that, the only lead that AXE had on the case, the Von Alders, would be worthless. There was only one thing I could do — turn the body over to Hawk, who had all the facilities at his command for discreetly disposing of it.
I bent down, hoisted the corpse up by the arm-pits, dragged him across the room and through the terrace doors, and dumped him outside. Then I hurried to the bedside phone to call Hawk. We had to talk without a scrambler.
“This is serious business,” I said as soon as he answered. Speaking tersely, I filled him in on exactly what had happened, improvising a code as I went along. I concluded by saying, “My friend and I will be leaving here shortly. Can you handle the mopping up operation?”
Hawk understood. “Leave the arrangements to me,” he said, “But do drop in and see me later tonight.”
“I plan to,” I answered and cut the conversation short when I heard Helga turn off the shower in the bath.
A few minutes later Helga came into the room, wearing a sheer black negligee that revealed every superb detail of her body. I was again stretched out on the big bed, sipping champagne from my glass. Fortunately, the death of Agent Z1 had been bloodless, and there was nothing in the room to indicate the struggle that had occurred there only moments before. If Helga had been in on the plot and had returned expecting to find me a corpse, she gave no indication of it. Instead, she cuddled up on the bed beside me while I poured her a glass of champagne.
“A amore,” she said, touching my glass with hers.
“A amore,” I agreed.
After we had drunk, I swung my legs off the bed, and said, “Come on Dumpling, I’m going to take you out to dinner. Man does not live by amore alone. At least, not this man.”
The restaurant we chose was a small, dimly lit French place not far from Helga’s apartment. It was still snowing outside but the restaurant was warm and cheery, and the service and food were superb. But I really wasn’t hungry, since all through the meal, I kept visualizing the grisly scene that would be taking place at Helga’s apartment as Hawk had the body of the dead AXE agent removed.
Helga didn’t appear to notice my preoccupation, and she ate heartily, chattering vivaciously throughout the dinner. Once she made a mock pout, the same gesture Maria had made when I left her on Whiskey Cay, and said, “Dumplink, let’s take a weekend trip somewhere, so we can be alone. You went off with Maria. Now it’s my turn.”
The kind of joking competition that existed among the girls amused me. “What did you have in mind?” I asked.
She made a vague motion in the air with her hand. “Mexico. Spain, perhaps. The south of France. After all, the jet is just sitting idly in the hanger. We might as well make use of it.” She suggested this as casually as if she were talking about a taxi ride across town. And I could see that she was serious.
“Well see,” I said, keeping my options open since I didn’t yet know what kinds of complications there were going to be from the death of the AXE agent.
Helga nodded and then surprised me by suddenly turning serious. It was a mood I never expected from any of the giddy Von Alders.
“I’ll tell you something, Tony,” she whispered, her fingers intertwined with mine as we sipped our cognac. “I get vibrations from you, vibrations of great strength. It’s what I’ve spent all my life looking for in a man. The gentleness of a caring lover and the strength of a man of authority. Sometimes you find one thing or the other. But both— never! That’s very good.” She frowned and said slowly, “Once I tried to explain what I was looking for to a man I know. He was gentle but not strong, and he said I felt the way I did because I had never known my own father. He said I was looking for a lover and a father-figure all in one. Do you believe that?”
I shook my head. “I never speculate about things like that, reasons for feeling. The feelings themselves are what count.”
“I think so, too,” she agreed. “But I do think about my father sometimes, and I know Maria and Elsa do, too, although we never speak of him.”
“And you don’t remember him at all?” I asked.
“No. Only what Ursie has told us. He was killed in Berlin during one of the Allied bombing raids in World War II. My sisters and I were very small then, and it was only a miracle that Ursie got us out alive.”
She smiled and brightened up again. “But life has been good since then,” she said.
Later, when I took Helga back to her apartment, I stopped in long enough to make sure Hawk had removed die body from the terrace. Of course he had attended to the matter. As I left Helga, she reminded me again that she wanted us to take a weekend trip together. I promised to let her know. Then I went downstairs and took a taxi to AXE headquarters.
Six
AXE’s New York office was on the Lower West Side of the city in a warehouse in the dock area. The cab driver wasn’t too happy when he heard the address. I guess he thought I was going to mug him en route, because I heard him sigh with relief when we pulled up in front of die place. I over-tipped him and got out. As I.started across the sidewalk, he leaned out the window and asked, “You sure this is the place you want, buddy?”
I waved him away. His feelings were understandable. The whole waterfront area was dark and deserted. The building that housed AXE headquarters was blacked out except for one lighted room in the front of the building. What the cab driver couldn’t know was that all the other dark windows in the building were painted over to conceal the bustling activity that went on inside twenty-four hours a day and that men with powerful infrared telescopes observed the street outside constantly. Actually, the cabbie couldn’t have been safer anywhere in the city than right there, outside the most powerful counterintelligence agency in the world.
The night security man on duty in the lighted front office, which looked like an ordinary warehouse office, pressed a buzzer under his desk, and I passed through an iron door to a manned elevator. The sentries with their telescopes in the upstairs windows had already cleared me with both men while I was still approaching the building.
“Hawk left orders to take you to the basement as soon as you came in,” the elevator operator said. The car descended.