Assault on Soho

Danno lit a cigarette with angrily shaking hands and said, 'You remember what we agreed to in the car last night, that Arnie the Farmer is a rotten bastard.'

'Yeah that's onething I remember.'

'Well, what're you going to do about that, Nick? I mean, this Bolan deal. You heard what the old bastard said. They're thinking of turning over your job to Bolan, I mean the job that's yours by rights. And even if Arnie gets to Bolan first, you know he's not going to see you up there on the hard arm, you know that. It only takes one guy like that to squeeze you out forever, Nick. And that job is yours, by rights.'

'By right, yeah,' Nick Trigger muttered.

'Well, I guess we know where we stand.'

'I guess we do. Listen, Danno, I guess we are in the same boat. Now I don't know what happened last night and I don't give a damn. We're in the same boat and I guess we better start doing some bailing.'

'I'd like to show Arnie Farmer what a monkey feels like,' Danno said. 'You just can't let him get to Bolan first, Nick.'

'Don't you worry, he won't. And neither will Leo the Pussy.'

'You got something in mind, Nick?'

'You could say that, Danno. Yeah, you could say that.' Nick Trigger, as a matter of fact, had quite a lot in his mind.

Bolan and Ann reached the Tower Hill district a full hour in advance of the appointment with Leo Turrin, and Bolan prowled the streets of the area relentlessly for most of thirty minutes, getting the feel of the land. Then he parked at a tour bus station and told the girl, 'They'll let me get in there, all right. The problem will be in getting out with my head still on.'

'But you can't go walking about in there,' she protested. 'Someone will recognize you, and then we shall see a CID convention at London Tower.'

He smiled and told her, 'Most people aren't all that observant. How often have you walked past a friend on the street without noticing him? Those people in there will be looking at crown jewels and British history, and they'll all be wishing they had four eyes to take it all in. They won't be looking at me.'

'The staff will,' she assured him.

'To them I'll just be another bloody tourist,' he replied, grinning. 'Look, stop worrying. This is my kind of warfare.'

She was scruffling around in the glove compartment. 'At the very least you can wear these,' she urged, handing over tinted lenses in weird wire frames. 'They're adjustable, so no excuses.'

He chuckled and slid the earpieces out and bent them onto his temples, then stared at her owlishly through the tinted lenses. 'How's this?'

She cried, 'Oh Mack!' and threw herself into his arms.

They lingered in a kiss, then he gently disentangled himself and told her, 'Stay loose now. Get this car moving and keep circling. Try to make it past here at least once every five minutes. But at the first sound of gunfire, you skedaddle and damn quick. Don't worry about me, in find a way through. If we get split up, meet me at the museum. I doubt that anyone will be expecting me to show up there again.'

She nodded and slid her arms back around his neck. 'Don't you dare get yourself killed,' she whispered. 'I doubt that I could survive it.'

He chuckled, kissed her again, and left her sitting there with saucer eyes. He glanced back, saw that she was crying, and threw her a reassuring wave, then mingled in with a tour party which was just then debusing.

It cost him four shillings admission to the grounds, and he paid another two shillings for access to the interior areas. He had almost a half hour to kill, and he used this time for a casual look around at the fabulous complex, once the castle of William the Conqueror. He saw the room where the Little Princes were smothered and visited the Armories in the White Tower for a glimpse of King Henry VIII's armor. Then he went back onto the grounds where he engaged in a friendly conversation with a colorfully costumed Beefeater—the name given the Tower guards. The guy showed him the clipped-wing ravens, and told him that they were the symbol of the tower.

Bolan thought, yeah, those ravens were a symbol of the time, too—like old Charles' Sadian symbol. Civilized men had that same frustration constantly with them, that same clipped-wing freedom of the ravens. Throw away everything that makes you a man, man, and then be a man.

Nuts, Bolan thought. He hadn't been able to settle for the clipped-wing type of existence urged upon him by the Pittsfield cops; he'd decided to be an eagle… and now here he was practically a dead duck, despite his brave reassurances to Ann Franklin.

The time was ten twenty. He wandered back and found the scaffolding where crowned heads had rolled, the final stop for kings and queens who'd found the power of reigning a bit too heady. Men never learned anything, Bolan was thinking. The scramble for power and the lusting for wealth would never end, it would go on and on as long as ravens had clipped wings.

He was in a hell of a mood and he knew it. The Tower had done it to him, it had done something that all the macabre atmosphere of Museum de Sadehad failed to do, and Bolan was beginning to get a glimmer of what old Edwin Charles had meant. The whole God damned world was bathed in blood, it had soaked into the earth behind every footprint of mankind, and the screams and groans of the tortured and the revolted and the shit-upon still lived on in every movement of the wind.

Yeah, dammit, that was what Charles had meant.

The agony of mankind was only mirrored in the offbeat flesh routes that some men pursued. The reality of that agony would not be found in some pathetic devil's pantings over sado-masochistic pornography. The reality was buried in the core of that worldwide panting for power over other men's lives and the ruthless acquisition of wealth for the few at the expense of the many.

Thank you, Edwin Charles, Bolan said to a memory. You've reminded me what I'm all about.

And then it was 10:25 and Leo Turrin was making a quick approach with a very worried face.

Bolan muttered to himeslf, 'And here we go again. Another jug of blood for the ravens.'

Chapter Eighteen Showdown at De Sade

Bolan shoved the glasses up onto his forehead and told Leo Turrin, 'I hope this turns out to be worth the risk.'

'I don't know about that,' the little Mafiosoreplied glumly. 'This has turned into an Olympic Game called get Bolan, and it's anybody's game at the moment.'

Bolan said, 'That means you brought a convoy.'

'DidI. It would be funny if it wasn't so damned serious. You may have a hard time believing this, Sarge, but right now you've got four big mean Mafia crews protecting your hide.'

'You brought them with you?' Bolan asked, his eyebrows rising into unhappy peaks.

'No other way. Arnie's head party is swarming all over. I smell a shootout, brother against brother, and all because of your hide, buddy.'

Bolan chuckled. His tensions were leaving him. He said, 'Okay, let's make it quick, then. I wouldn't want to miss the party.'

Turrin took him by the arm and walked him along the scaffolding of Execution Row. 'Okay, first the poop on Edwin Charles. Brognola hit a blank there right away. Charles' army folder has a classified seal on it, and the British won't even talk about him. Via our own army intelligence, though, Hal learned that this guy was retired with honors 15 years ago, with the rank of Brigadier.'

Bolan's eyes sparkled and he said, 'Bingo.'

'Well, maybe it means something to you. Not to me. Here's the interesting part. Charles went back on the active list briefly in 1960, at the age of sixty-three. How about that? He served for eight months, then retired again. Our intelligence on him ends as of four months ago when this same old man was re-activated again, assignment undisclosed—buried somewhere beneath that security seal.'