When the hooker crossed back toward the Audi, Carter dropped into a crouch and moved over the sidewalk to the line of parked cars.
The hooker was doing a real number. She had the short skirt balled around her waist, the merchandise pumping through the open window practically in the guy’s face.
“What are you, cheap?” she was taunting.
“Get lost, whore.”
“Who you calling whore...”
All of it took no more than three seconds. Carter yanked open the passenger side door and dived across the seat.
“Head just like that,” he hissed. “Don’t move. Hands on the wheel.” For emphasis, he thumbed the hammer back on the Rommer.
“What’s this, you her pimp?” the little man snarled.
The hooker took off. She hadn’t seen a thing.
“Start the car, nice and easy.”
“Fuck you.”
Carter cradled the man’s head with his free hand and ground the barrel of the Rommer viciously into his ear.
“All right, all right!” He started the car and eased slowly from the curb.
“Turn right,” Carter barked. The man turned. Three blocks farther on, Carter spotted a deep alley. “In here.” He reached over and killed the headlights as they turned. “Stop here!”
They stopped and Carter pocketed the keys. Practically in the same movement he opened the door and shoved the man out. He had barely sprawled, when Carter had him up against the wall, his legs spread.
“Look, I don’t know—”
“Shut up.”
A fist in the kidneys brought a painful grunt but no more words. A search gave him a fat wallet, a passport, a credentials case, and a Heckler and Koch UP70 automatic pistol.
Inside the credentials case was a badge and an ID card identifying the man as Bruno Lunt, detective inspector, shield G4991411, St. Pauli District, Hamburg.
Carter shook his head in amazement. “What do the police want with me?”
“Routine.” The little man shrugged. “Picked you up at the airport. Suspicious acting.”
“On whose authority?” Carter asked.
“My own.”
“You just lounged around the airport, spotted a suspicious character, and followed me?”
“That’s right.”
“And what flight was I on?”
“Lufthansa 4113 from Belgrade...” He clamped his jaw shut, but it was too late.
Carter gave him another good shot in the kidneys and he went to the ground. The Killmaster put his foot on the back of the man’s neck, and ground.
“I’m the police, you fool!” the little man cried.
“I don’t give a shit. Someone spotted me getting on the flight in Belgrade and phoned ahead, right?”
No words, but a lot of wriggling. Using his hair, Carter bounced the man’s forehead a few times on the bricks, then returned his foot to the back of his neck.
“Right, Bruno?”
“Yes, Jesus, yes...”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I never know. I just get a call from Berlin now and then. It’s always surveillance. I report, I get an envelope.”
Carter thought this over. It was a good guess that little Bruno had already made Otto; von Krumm was far from unknown. But that might not pose a problem if the count moved out fast.
“Get up.”
Bruno crawled to his feet. Carter pushed him to the rear of the car and opened the trunk.
“What’re you going to do?”
“More important, Bruno, what are you going to do?”
Carter took his State Department ID out and waved it in front of the little man’s eyes just enough so he could read the official seal and not the name.
“You might not know who those callers are in Berlin, Bruno, but I think you can guess. I’m into something big, bigger than anything you’ve ever known. The report you’re going to file is that you lost me tonight. You got that?”
“Ja, ja.”
“If I hear different, and I will hear, I’ll have the West German BfV on your ass like flies on shit. You got that?”
“I lost you right outside the airport.”
“And my friend?”
“What friend?”
“Good. Stick to shaking down hookers, Bruno. One of those phone calls will put you in a grave someday. Get in the trunk.”
The little man scrambled in and Carter shut the lid.
Back at his own car, he waited until von Krumm came by again, and fell in behind the cream-colored Mercedes.
He was big and he was tough, with a muscular build and dark, faintly cruel good looks. He looked as if he could chew nails and stomp any man twice his size for relaxation.
There was something about the man that made you look twice at him, something hard, impressive, and commanding. There was an all-consuming demand in his eyes, the straight, thin, unsmiling line of his mouth, the almost catlike way the muscular six-foot-three-inch form balanced lightly on the balls of his feet.
He leaned tiredly against the wall of the corridor as he pressed the bell of Apartment 6D and then waited. But not even the lines of exhaustion in his face could mask the intensity of his concentrated attention. This was a man who was used to waiting, but at the same time, a man who could spring into action instantly, with no perceptible lag, when action was required.
There were footsteps inside the apartment. A peephole in the door slid aside and a disembodied eye examined the man in the corridor. After a second or so, the peephole snapped shut. Two locks ground noisily and then the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.
A woman stood framed in the doorway. Her age was indeterminate. She could have been anything from twenty-five to forty. Her grooming was perfect. There was no flaw that any man could have found in her makeup. Her figure was a thing of beauty. But like the man in the corridor, her eyes were tired, cynical, and all-knowing. There were no illusions left in her.
“Come in,” she said quietly.
She walked from the door, not bothering to close it. He moved in behind her and closed it gently himself.
One shelf of books in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase swung out, and from behind it she took a velvet bag. He joined her at the table as she carefully unwrapped the bag. It opened, and the overhead light danced off a jewel-encrusted watch, two diamond rings, a necklace, and a matching pair of diamond earrings.
The man screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his right eye and carefully examined each piece.
“He wants thirty thousand,” she said.
“Impossible. I can’t move them without completely remounting every piece, and the stones in the rings will have to be recut.”
He folded all the pieces carefully back into the velvet bag and slipped them into his pocket. Then he took a thick roll of bills from another pocket and counted out twenty thousand American dollars in one pile. He put another twenty one-hundred-dollar bills in a second pile and pushed it across the table to her.
“Your commission.”
“Latos called from Marseilles. He’s got a big score.”
The man shook his head. “Tell him to hold off for a while and take nothing else. I have to be out of the country for a week, perhaps longer.”
She moved close enough to press her breasts against his arm. “Can you stay tonight?”
“No,” he replied, rising and moving toward the door.
“But it’s been so long,” she pouted.
“I must leave the day after tomorrow, and there is much to be done.”
The door closed behind him before she could argue.
On the street, he paused to light a small cigar. Behind the match and the spiraling smoke, he checked every car, every movement, every window as far as he could see.
Only when his animal instincts told him it was safe to move did he cross the street and get behind the wheel of an ancient Opal.