The porter returned to the doorway and bent to retrieve the small case which had fallen from the kidnapped man's hands. A foot appeared from seemingly nowhere to imprison the case on the ground — and when the porter elevated his eyes, he was gazing into the bore of Bolan's .32. He froze, stiffly off balance, and murmured, 'Que veut dire ceci, M'sieur?'
Bolan said, 'You tell me what it means, Frenchy,'
'Je ne parle pas Anglais.'
Bolan pulled the man upright and replied, 'Then I guess I'll have to just shoot you and get it over with.'
'No, I speak,' the porter hastily admitted. 'What is your wish, M'sieur?'
Bolan shoved him clear of the lighted area, scooped up the case and dropped it into his pocket, and joined his prisoner in the shadows of the building. He jabbed the little gun into the man's belly and said, 'Who pulled that snatch?'
Something in the glint of the Executioner's eyes discouraged cuteness. The man sighed and his shoulders slumped and he said, 'This is most dangerous, M'sieur.'
Bolan increased the pressure of the pistol and told him, 'I'll take my chances. Are you ready to take yours?'
The porter sighed again. 'So, they have the wrong man. Non?'
'That's it, and you have the right one. For about ten seconds, Frenchy, unless a flood of words changes the situation.'
The porter shrugged his shoulders and replied, 'C'est la vie, one is as bad as the other. I am not one of them, M'sieur. For two hundred francs I sell my honor and perhaps my life, non?'
'So who did you sell it to?'
'He is called Marcel. He is known for les maisons de joie, comprenez-vous?'
'Joy houses? Yeah, it figures. And where do I find this Marcel?'
Another shrug of the shoulders and, 'Les Caves, M'sieur.'
'The basement joints? Great, there's only about a hundred of them. You have to do better than that.'
'I have seen him about Place St. Michel.'
Bolan patted the man's pockets, found his wallet, and extracted an identity card. He studied the card, then slipped it into his pocket and returned the wallet. 'Okay, I'll check that out, Jean. If I find out you're lying to me, I'll be looking you up. If there's something you want to add, now's the time.'
'There is this maison de joie, M'sieur,' the man replied, sighing, 'on the Rue Galande, near the point where Boulevard St. Michel meets the Seine. Marcel is known at this place. His other name I do not know. He is simply Marcel. He is known there, simply ask for Marcel.'
Bolan cautioned the porter regarding the value of silence and discretion, then released him and watched him quickly disappear into the terminal. A moment later, Bolan was in a taxicab and telling the driver, 'Take me to the nearest subway station.'
'M'sieur?'
Bolan pushed his limited knowledge of the language into a hesitant, 'Conduisez-moi metro proche.'
The driver nodded and the taxi lurched forward, challenging the restricted visibility in a suicidal rate of advance. Bolan relaxed and put his life in the other's hands; he had decided some years earlier that Parisian cabbies employed guardian angels — and there were other considerations more urgently demanding and with an outcome not nearly so certain. Gil Martin had made no favorable impression on Bolan's mind. He had, in fact, formed a definite dislike for the man during that short flight. Nevertheless, Martin had obviously stepped into a Mafia trap laid for the Executioner, and Bolan could not simply stand by and allow another to suffer in his place — not even a Gil Martin.
He pulled out the leather case which had been dropped by the victim, and discovered it to be a wallet. Obviously the betrayed had been about to reward the betrayer, though certainly not to the tune of two hundred francs. In the wallet was Martin's passport folder, a wad of francs, an American Express credit card, and an identification card from American-Independent Studios in Hollywood. A newspaper clipping found in one of the pockets was praising Martin's role in a recent motion picture. So... the guy was an actor.
Bolan had never been much of a movie-goer, and he had never had much interest in screen personalities. He wondered just how big a name Martin actually had in the business, and how much of a fuss would be raised by his disappearance.
An actor. Bolan would like to see him act his way out of this mess. All the bluster and indignation in the world wouldn't... Bolan was staring dumbly at the wallet. The guy had even lost all his identification. The seriousness of the situation for Gil Martin settled into Bolan's bones like the cold fog outside. The name Gil Martin possibly meant no more to the French Mafia than it had to Bolan. What could the guy tell them — what could he say or do to convince them that they had the wrong man? One part of Bolan's mind was hoping that Jean the porter would beat it to a telephone and pass the word; another part feared that he would do so, and that Bolan was advancing into another drop.
Other questions bothered him also. If this had been New York or any other city at home, Martin would right now be lying in his own blood on the sidewalk outside the terminal. Were the Frenchies more cautions — less inclined to open gunplay? Or was there a deeper significance to the snatch?
Bolan leaned forward and told the driver, 'Can't you speed it up? Vite, vite!'
In this fog, subsurface travel would be much quicker than the snail's pace allowed on the streets — hence Bolan's desire to get to a subway. The Paris metro system was superb and easily transited. If Bolan could get to a metro station quickly enough, and if the information supplied by Jean the porter was straight, and if the abductors were being as hampered by the weather as was Bolan's driver — then possibly Bolan could pop up at the right time and place to save the hapless Martin from death... or from a worse fate. It was a wild gamble, of course, but Bolan's entire life had become a series of wild gambles. At least, he knew, he had to try. In the final analysis, Bolan realized, this was the last significant difference between himself and his enemies. He had not yet lost a reverence for innocent lives. To surrender that distinction would place Bolan in the same category as the scum he sought to eradicate — it would, in a sense, mean the loss of Bolan's war, the end of meaning, and another loss for an already losing world.
Yes, dammit, he had to try. He fished in his pocket and came out with the silencer for his revolver and attached it, then carefully tested the breakaway action of the sideleather. The driver was immersed in his impossible driving conditions, and was showing Bolan no attention whatever.
Bolan repeated, 'Vite, vite,' then settled back in the seat and commanded his memory for long-dimmed details of the Paris layout. His last time here had been as a kid soldier on furlough from duty in Germany, and it had been a memorable two weeks.
Now he had come as a combat pro on furlough from some kind of purgatory, and he was not at all happy about being snatched back into hell again.
But if hell it was, then hell it would have to be. He was not giving the Mafia even a semblance of Mack Bolan without a fight.
His destination was a house of joy. If Bolan had his way, it would quickly become a house of woe.
5
Executioner in Paris
Bolan removed his false moustache and sideburns and exited from the St. Michel metro station into a continuing fog, pausing briefly on the boulevard to orient himself. He was in the heart of the university district, not overly far from the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Beaux Arts. St. Michel was a wide avenue of sidewalk cafes and bookstores, though now practically lifeless in the early morning mists. He turned west and into a gradual uphill climb, then down Rue St. Jacques for a block and found Rue Galande. Here was even less life, an almost choking silence, a narrow and fog-enshrouded, street of shops, old hotels, bistros, and a few basement dives affectionately known as Les Caves.
Bolan had been here once, on a pleasant spring evening many years earlier, and to a memorable caveau
