worry about him. I'll get the doctor.'
He replied, 'Okay,' and paced nervously about the room for a moment, then he went back to the bed and told Martin, 'I'll be leaving you now. Uh... guess I don't have to say it... but... well, I'm sorry for those lumps.'
The actor winked his one good eye. 'Lumps I can take. You just watch it, eh?'
Bolan said, 'Yeah,' and chewed his lip for a moment. He hated to leave the guy this way. Mafiosi could be persistent hunters. Sanity dictated, however, that he get out and let the guy have some medical attention. He dropped Martin's wallet on the bed and told him, 'You'll be needing this. The girl has your passport.' He spun about, stepped past Nancy Walker, and went toward the door.
'Bolan!'
He halted and turned back. 'Yeah?'
'Maybe you better take that passport. You know?'
'No, I...'
'You could fake it out, you know that by now. And the French cops already have egg on their face over me. You be Gil Martin for a while and I'll take a rest. I needed it even before this.'
Bolan hesitated, thinking about it. Martin was thinking in terms of cops. Bolan's mind was occupied with Mafia.
The girl was staring from one to the other of them, a quizzical half-smile prettying her face. She told Bolan, 'I heard what he called you, and the message now is loud and clear. His offer makes sense.' She tossed him the passport folder. 'Trade. Give me yours.'
'Take all the identification,' Martin urged. 'Money too, if you need it. Or use the credit cards. Just don't go wild, I'm not that wealthy.'
A warmness was spreading through Bolan's gut. He had almost forgotten the feeling. It was damn nice, if for only a fleeting moment, to feel the touch of genuine friendship. On that note of warmth he traded wallets and passports with the actor, thanked the girl with his eyes, and got out of there. He figured the trade at about fifty- fifty, in terms of personal danger. Some of the mob had egg on their face over the Gil Martin mix-up also; others of them might still be sniffing along that false trail, and it was this consideration that tipped the decision for Bolan. If the mob came looking for anyone, he wanted them to find him, not some poor defenseless Hollywood type who couldn't even spell kill.
The more he thought of the set-up the better he liked it. Let Martin stay down and out of the line of fire, at least until the action had swirled away into another part of the world. When the time was right Martin could present himself to the police, explain what had happened, reclaim his place in the world, and relate a true-life adventure which would fill columns of free publicity for a long time to come.
As for the girl, she had a battered but very much alive movie star in her keep for a few days... and who could say how that relationship would ultimately work itself out?
Bolan returned to the metro and found his way to the glitter-side of Paris. As Gil Martin he checked into a large hotel on the Champs-Elysees, left stern orders as to his right to privacy, and turned over the key to the airport locker so that his bags could be picked up. Then he ordered a rental car, to be kept at his disposal in the hotel garage, and went up to his suite for breakfast, a lingering shower, and a tired tumble between the sheets.
As his eyes closed on Chapter One in Paris, the time was barely nine o'clock on the autumn morning of Bolan's first day in France. Already it had seemed a lifetime. The days ahead were to seem as epochs in that strange life-as-death eternity which had come to characterize the bloody pathways of Mack Bolan, the peoples' gladiator and high executioner — and now, in certain Parisian neighborhoods, L'Americaine Formidable.
Silent rage vibrated across the telephone connection as Quick Tony Lavagni awaited the verbal reaction from the man at Castle Farms. His fingers were going numb on the instrument and he had moved the other hand up to help support the growing weight of it when the cutting voice finally found words of expression.
'I thought I told you,' came the hot-ice response, 'that I just wanted him spotted and tailed. When did I tell you, Tony, that I wanted Bolan snatched and hustled off somewheres?'
'That was their idea, Mr. Castiglione,' Lavagni explained in humble misery. 'I told those jerks how to handle it, but they had to get ambitious. I tried to tell 'em this Bolan wasn't no ordinary number, but they just had to find it out for theirselves. I told 'em...'
'Fuck what you told 'em!' Arnie Farmer yelled. 'Now you listen to me, Tony, and you make sure you get it right this time. You take that black judas of yours, and you take a crew — a full crew, you hear? — and you get your ass over there. You shake that goddam place apart and you shake that bastard loose, you hear me? And you bring 'im back here in one piece. Now is there anything hard to understand about that, Tony?'
'No, Mr. Castiglione. I got it.'
'Great. I hope so for your sake, Tony. How many frogs you say bit the dust over there?'
'I get it about six or seven, plus one of Monzoor's personal crew — a boy name of Shippy Catano.'
'Uh huh. And so how many are you taking with you, Tony?'
'I guess I better take at least a dozen.'
'You shithead! Whattaya mean, a dozen! Now, Tony, listen to me! You ain't thinking! Don't talk to me any dozen! Listen, you get out here, you hear me? Bring Fat Angelo and Sammy Shiv, and I guess you better bring that nigger. A dozen! Listen, brains, I want that boy! You hear?'
'I hear, Mr. Castiglione.'
'So get it out here, and I mean right now. We're going to plan this thing to the last step, and we're gonna do it all ourselves. No more Frenchmen, you hear? Those guys fight with their feet and fuck with their face, and I guess they must think with their balls. I don't want nothing more to do with 'em. You hear?'
'Yessir, Mr. Castiglione, I hear.'
'You better be here in one hour.'
Lavagni assured his Capo that he would, and grimly rung off. He turned to Wilson Brown with an angry scowl and told him, 'Arnie Farmer thinks he wants Bolan. Listen, Wils, I'm up to here with that guy. It's come down to this, Wils — it's him or me. You hear me? It's him or me.'
'I hear you, man,' the big Negro replied, grinning. 'But I guess you better tell it to Bolan.'
'I'll tell 'im, Wils. You think I can't tell him? You think I been that long off the street?'
The grin left the black man's face as he followed Quick Tony out of the room. He was feeling a bit sorry for his boss. Lavagni would tell it to the devil himself rather than face Castiglione with another failure. Yeah. That Bolan cat sure better look out. Desperation could make a mean enemy. Wils Brown knew it. Wils Brown was an expert on desperation, man.
In Paris, a dream was in the process of crumbling, an empire which never had been was now in danger of never being, and Thomas 'Monzoor' Rudolfi was an unhappy and shaken man. America's silent ambassador to France, serving the subsurface society, Rudolfi was a forty-five-year-old lawyer and American citizen. He had lived in Paris since the early sixties and was officially regarded by the French government as a broker and advisor to American business interests in France.
Rudolfi moved in the best circles of Parisian society, maintained a chateau near the city which was frequently the scene of lavish weekend parties, and he kept a townhouse within sight of the Arc de Triomphe. He was close to many highly-placed government officials and politicians, was on a first-name basis with various French industrialists and financiers, and was frequently seen at social functions involving the higher echelons of France's cultural mediums. A bachelor, his name at various times had been linked with certain female notables of the theatre, films, and the fashion world. Thomas Rudolfi, a blood nephew of one of the founding fathers of La Cosa Nostra in America, had found the good life in France.
His had been a career of frustration, however, all the foregoing notwithstanding. Monzoor was a man of little personal wealth or power in the family hierarchy, though he in fact orchestrated a wide variety of the syndicate's interests in this area of the world. The Mafia, in its worldwide operations, resembled a feudalistic monarchy with strong imperialistic leanings, with each feudal chief, or Capo, an autonomous imperialist in his own right. Foreign 'territories' had been staked out, cultivated, and jealously guarded by individual American families — then welded together for mutual strength under La Commissione, or the Council of Capos. This council, naturally, was U.S. based — and this brand of imperialism was even more invisible than the behind-scenes maneuverings on home soil.
