He laughed emptily, and his eyes glistened like lacquered pebbles.
I said, “How? How did you do it?”
“I got my ways.”
“What ways?”
“You never mind. You tell me where the figurine is, we fix it up. Maybe I even give you some of the money. What you say, Connell?”
“Even if I knew where the figurine was, you’d kill me the minute I told you. You’re a scavenger, Dinessen, and you’re not about to share four hundred thousand Straits dollars with me-especially not if you’ve framed me up for your goddam killing.”
His face grew darker. “You don’t tell me, I kill you very slowly, Connell. Like I said before. Then I take your body and put it with hers.”
“You’ll never get away with it.”
“That’s what you think. Maybe I shoot your balls off, hah? How would you like to die with no balls?”
A trembling, impotent rage, borne of fear and futility, rose inside me to wash away some of the pain in my head. Dead man, I thought. You’re a dead man, Connell. I had been pulled and shaped and molded, by circumstances and mistaken conceptions, into the exact center of this whole treacherous business-and it no longer seemed as if there were a way out. All the avenues of escape were blocked now, all the roads to freedom and noninvolvement effectively barricaded; I was dead from three different directions.
Dinessen was a small-time mercenary who had gotten enmeshed in something that was far out of his league-just like La Croix. But unlike the Frenchman, Dinessen was a predator, a fighter, a hardcase. One look at the flat, fixed, scavenger eyes that lay beneath the overhanging ledge of his forehead told you that he would kill and kill again for this one big chance at the brass ring; four hundred thousand Straits dollars was more money than he could ever hope to see in his lifetime running second-rate cargo and smuggling second-rate contraband, and human life mattered not at all stacked against that kind of fortune. He had murdered Marla King, apparently had framed me for it as a future precaution, and with or without the Burong Chabak he would carry out his threat to maim and then kill me.
That was one roadblock.
And even if I managed to get free of Dinessen somehow, there was Tiong. When he walked into Number Seven Tampines Road at nine tonight, and found Marla King’s body, and found Dinessen’s frame-whatever it was-I would be as good as hung. With concrete evidence, and despite the fact that I had given him the address in the first place, he would rationalize in that righteous cop’s mind some reason for my having killed her.
Two roadblocks.
And then there was Van Rijk. I had missed his telephone call tonight, and because I had, he would suspect something-still another double-cross-and he would put his bodyguards down on me for fair. With Marla King dead, he would want me as badly as Tiong.
Three roadblocks.
And no more roads.
Dead man, any way you looked at it.
But you don’t give up, you can’t give up. The rage and the injustice burn inside you, scream inside you, and you know you’ve got to make some kind of effort, no matter how small or how useless. Self-preservation demands it, the spark of hope demands it. You’re not dead and you can’t give up until the final breath, until the one bullet bores hot and bright through your brain, until you face the ultimate darkness-or the ultimate light…
Light.
The lamp on the desk.
There was sweat in my armpits, and I could feel it rolling in cold-hot streams down my sides. My heart fluttered and jumped in irregular tempo. I kept looking at Dinessen, but I could see the lamp now, too, at the periphery of my vision. It was just at the edge of the scarred teak desktop, some three feet to my right, and the bulb was exposed under a flared ceramic shade. It was the only illumination in the office; night was full-born outside, and neither moonshine nor whatever night lighting Dinessen used for his buildings penetrated the bamboo blinds.
I couldn’t see it from where I knelt on the floor, but I was thinking of the door in the wall behind the desk-the door which had seemed to be a couple of inches ajar when I had looked at it minutes earlier. It would lead into the warehouse, I thought, and the warehouse would have another entrance, another way out under a concealing sable cover. The door was some distance away, and a big gamble — but it was not as far away, nor as big a gamble, as Dinessen and a forward rush in an effort to disarm him; you don’t run into the muzzle of a German Luger, not at point-blank range, not even in sudden darkness.
Dinessen shifted slightly on the window shelf, and the blood still suffused his face. I didn’t have much more time. As if to confirm my thoughts, he said, “I don’t wait much longer, Connell. You start talking or I start shooting. I don’t fool around now.”
I raised full up on my knees, slowly, spreading my arms as if imploring. “One last time: I don’t have the figurine, I don’t know where it is, I don’t have any idea what La Croix meant when he said we were the only two people who knew its location-” and I threw myself sideways at the desk, slapping at the lamp with my extended right hand.
It flew off the teak surface amid a flutter of dislodged papers, and the ceramic shade and the bulb shattered with a brittle, splintering sound on the concrete floor. The hot, stale-aired office dissolved immediately into a wall of black.
Chapter Twelve
I threw myself backward, turning my body, and batted the cane-backed chair out of the way. It bounced and clattered into the far wall. Light flamed briefly from across the office, like a match being struck. Dinessen shouted something, but the words were lost in the hollow roar of the Luger. A bullet ricocheted off the concrete flooring somewhere on my right as I moved in a scuttling crawl toward the door behind the desk, trying to get my feet under me.
Two more muzzle flashes cut momentary holes in the darkness. I staggered upright, heard one of the pellets slap into the wall high above my head. The other cut into the doorjamb, spraying splinters into my face, and the room was filled with the stench of burnt gunpowder and the dying echoes of the shots when I hit the door with my shoulder, sent it banging off the wooden wall in the warehouse beyond.
Dinessen fired a fourth time. Pain seared through my trailing right arm, numbing it, and then I was through into the warehouse in a jerky, spindle-legged run. Shadowed mounds and masses of goods filled the high-ceilinged enclosure, stacked on pallets or on suspended platforms or on the concrete floor itself. A blue light burned above a shipping counter to the right, and its eerie illumination groped ineffectually at the heavy blackness.
I veered to the left, away from the light and away from a wide center aisleway that bisected the warehouse into two long halves. Dinessen was still in the office, and I could hear him moving and bawling something incoherent in Swedish. I ran along the row toward the side wall, looking for an opening between pallets of slender boxes marked with Chinese characters. I found one finally and squeezed through into a cleared area between that row and the next one, and then ran along there a little way until I reached several skids of thick, coiled hemp rope. Footsteps slapped uncertainly on the concrete as I dragged myself over the rope into another cleared space and crouched in the pocket of darkness on the other side.
Dinessen had stopped moving now, and I knew that he was somewhere near the office door, listening, trying to pinpoint my location. The silence in the warehouse was acute and charged with tension. Until he moved, I knew I couldn’t take the chance of moving either. I felt trapped and helpless. I had no weapon, and in the ebon enclosure there was nothing I could see to use effectively against a handgun. It was a long way to the far end of the storage area; even if I could get there, I did not know the exact positioning of the loading doors, or of any other possible exit. And there was the strong chance that if I did manage to locate a way out, the door or doors would be locked in such a way that I wouldn’t be able to open them easily.
I wondered how long it would be before Dinessen thought to turn on the lights.
