“Robert, don’t. We don’t know?”
“Oh, he’s just a big, friendly American. Just a moment,” he called, getting the door unlocked, even as he wondered how this Fenney knew his name. “You know, this is awfully damned kind?”
The man hit him in the stomach and he felt the pain like an explosion; he hit him twice again, driving him back, filling his mind with astonishment and, by the power of the blows, his heart with fear.
Yet even as he fell, Florry was trying to rise, for the man had just smashed Sylvia across the face with the back of his hand.
The big man hit Sylvia a second time, killing the scream in her throat, and she dropped bleeding on the bed when Florry, having somehow accumulated a bit of strength, assaulted him with a desperate rugby tackle, but it hurt Florry worse than the other and as Florry slid off, a brute knee rose and met him cruelly flush beneath the eye with a sick ugly sound that filled his head with sparks and scattered his will. He began to crawl away to collect himself, but the man dropped onto his back, pinned him with a knee as one pins the butterfly through the thorax to the board, and had his thick hands under his throat. He pulled his head back. Florry felt the strength and the force. He knew the man could snap his neck in an instant. He could hardly breathe. He was gagging.
“Pleased to meet you,
Florry was instantly released and felt the man rise off him. Then a powerful kick slammed against his ribs, lifting him against the wall in the tiny room, flipping him. He tried to scream when a short sharp blow delivered with a boxer’s grace and cunning nailed the exact center of his body and the sound was frozen forever in his lungs. He lay back, his eyes closed, sucking desperately at the air.
The man leaned across the bed and pulled Sylvia up by the hair. He slapped her face hard twice to bring her awake to scream, and as her throat constricted in the effort, he rapped her there lightly to trap it. He pulled her over and her head down.
Florry knew he had to help her. He had to get air, and help Sylvia.
“Please,” Florry begged. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll do anything. Just tell me. I’ll do it.”
The man dropped Sylvia unconscious to the bed and turned to Florry. Florry seized Sylvia’s suitcase from the corner and desperately hurled it, but it was open and the clothes falling from it crippled the velocity of the thrust. The man elbowed it aside contemptuously. He walked over the litter of clothing now spread about the floor and smashed Florry in the face and Florry wasn’t fast enough to slip the blow. Instead, head a mess of confusion and lights, he went down to the floor. The man sat atop him. Florry could feel the hot, excited breath and the heaving heart and the strength and the totality of him, the overwhelming force of him.
“I know it all,” said the man. “The old Jew Levitsky. The guy at Cambridge. He told me. You’re working for the reds.”
“I–I-” Florry struggled with the idea.
“Yeah. He told me, Levitsky himself, your great buddy. And I got
He leaned back, reached into his pocket, and pulled something out. Florry recognized it immediately. It was the confession he’d signed for Steinbach.
“The gold,” the man said. “Where’s the gold?”
“What? I?”
“Don’t fuck around. The gold! God damn it, the gold.” He pulled something from his pocket, snapped it, and a knife blade popped out. He put the icy-sharp point of the blade into the soft skin under Florry’s eye. “I’ll cut you and cut you and cut you. Then I’ll cut the girl. I’ll cut everybody you ever knew. The gold. The gold!”
Florry knew now he was hopelessly insane, his ideas crazed and pitiful, his willingness to hurt absolute and unending.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Florry said. “It’s?”
The man’s eyes widened at this defiance and he hit Florry savagely in the face.
“No,” said Florry, gasping and curling, seeking desperately for something to put between himself and the pain, “no. It’s Julian. Take Julian, don’t take me. He’s the one. Leave us alone, please, I beg you.”
But the man stood above him, looming like some titanic statue. Florry watched as the man’s foot came forward until it covered his face with its black shadow and descended onto his face. He could feel the shoe on his nose and lips, flattening and spreading them, and he could taste the grit and filth on the sole, little flecks and curds of it, falling into his mouth.
Florry’s fingers scrabbled desperately at the floor and the clothes littering it as a single thought filled his head: who will help me now?
Nobody, the answer came. You are alone.
“Lick it,” the man commanded in a hoarse, mad whisper. “Lick it, you little fucker.”
Florry’s tongue caressed the sole of the filthy shoe exactly as his fingers, crawling through the clothes on the floor, touched something hard and recognized it before his mind did.
“The gold,” the man said. “Tell me where the gold is, God damn you or?”
Florry raised Julian’s little automatic, thumbing back the nubby hammer, and fired into the crotch above him and felt the boot come off his face and saw the blood spurt. Florry fired again into the lower belly and into the chest, the gun cracking in his hand. The blood spurted and sprayed everywhere and the man seemed to sink back stunned and disappointed, holding his red fingers before him, and Florry shot him in the throat, opening a hideous wound, the larynx blown to shreds even by a small-caliber bullet at this range. He made grotesque mewling noises. He was spitting blood and it was coming out his nose and spilling down his chest. Florry rose, cupping the pistol with both hands, and fired carefully into the face; a black crater erupted in the crack and flash of the pistol under the eye while brain tissue and red fog rose from somewhere and he fired into the eye, shattering it. The slide on the pistol locked back. It was empty.
In the corridor, somebody was shouting. Florry looked down at the little pistol. It had lain in the pocket of the Burberry all those days since the bridge, packed away in Sylvia’s absurd case, a shell in its chamber, because when he needed to, he could not use it to help Julian.
But Julian had helped him.
42
THE GREEN
Holly-Browning studied the problem. It was a question of angle of approach and at the same time of impending obstacles ? a classic, in other words. It called for a peculiar combination of delicacy and power, the perfect equipoise. It called also for firmness of decision. It was not a time for equivocation, for appeasement, for lack of will. The situation demanded his utmost.
“Five iron, I think, Davis.”
“Yessir. Excellent selection, sir. I’d watch the elms on the left. There’s not much air among their leaves.”
“Thank you, Davis,” said Holly-Browning, taking the club. He laced his fingers together about the grip and let the natural weight of the club head pull the shaft down; it fell, with unerring accuracy, to its absolute perfect placement behind the ball.
Holly-Browning paused, concentrating. He let a wave of power build and build in his blood until it almost sang in his veins and he felt the muscles ache and tremble and hunger for release. Yet still he held it, feeling himself ? this was quite odd ?
At last he lifted his head to follow the straight, clean white flight of the ball as it rushed to the green with just the right kiss of loft and just the right pitch of power; it bounced on the fairway, bounced again, and struck the
