him before he became less poverty-stricken also visited him in prison. Usually detainees are allowed no visitors, but this man presented police papers from the city of Miami, and stated that he wished to interrogate the prisoner on some criminal matter. What was actually said between them, we have no way of knowing. The escape happened a week later. So you see why I must be careful. One has heard accounts of police corruption in this country.”
“What name did he give?”
“Those records were destroyed in the explosions. The commandant was killed. Two of the survivors remember the visitor, but their descriptions differ. They agree that the name commenced with a J sound, Jennings, Jenny. The first name was Will.”
“Will Gentry?”
“Perhaps. Do you know such an officer? Is it likely?”
“I know him, and it’s damned unlikely. But go on.”
“I’ve been assigned to this business for a matter of months. I take it a little too personally, I’m sorry to say. This man tried to fool us, claiming the protection that has been earned by genuine victims of persecution. It was an affront to the memory of the millions who perished. Now if he is to succeed, after all, and live to a prosperous old age with good food and liquor and corrupt young women, it would be painful to me, in the extreme. So here I am. I have been convinced that he would come to Miami. I believe that immediately after his escape he recovered the hidden drugs and managed to slip across the border. How? It couldn’t have been simple, because it is my firm conviction that we had totally smashed his group. Every person who had the faintest, most cobwebby connection with that scoundrel.”
“Why Miami? It’s true he comes from here, but it’s also true that everybody knows him.”
“First because of his Miami visitor,” she said. “If here is where the money came from, here is where the drugs will be delivered. Second.”
Shayne had followed her story carefully. Now he was trying to bring back the dimly-lit scene in the parking lot the night before-the two cars, the Ford with its trunk lid raised, a glimpsed figure struggling to lift a woman’s body. Murray Gold? Gold had always been a man who committed his crimes behind a screen of lawyers. The funny cap, the beard, the quick lift of a shoulder. It seemed almost as unlikely as her other idea, that Will Gentry had visited Gold in an Israeli prison. “Second,” the woman repeated.
Her hand was at her mouth, and she was showing signs of returning distress.
“I’m sorry as the devil, but I think I am going to vomit again.”
She ran into the bathroom. The door slammed. She retched violently, and the toilet flushed.
6
Inside the bathroom, the woman who was using the identity of Esther Landau-she was the wife of the Sheik Muhammed al-Kabir, and a strong sympathizer with the Freedom Front-flushed the toilet again. She let the tank fill and flushed it once more, to cover the half-hearted choking noises she was making.
And that was enough, she decided. It was hard to vomit convincingly without feeling sick. Earlier, to maneuver Shayne into a motel room, she had swallowed a fast-acting emetic, but she wasn’t putting her long- suffering stomach through that torment again, and there wasn’t anything left to come up.
She gave her reflection in the mirror a small smile. So far, everything had meshed like the works of a fine watch. Shayne’s phone call from Washington, which had frightened her at first, had actually helped; he had given her identification folder no more than a quick glance, after all the trouble they had put themselves to, changing photographs.
She listened at the door. She didn’t want the man to make any more of those sudden phone calls. She had convinced him, she thought, that the dead woman in the back of the car had been someone named Gerda Fox, one of Murray Gold’s procession of Israeli mistresses, but Shayne was no fool, and she knew that his mind was working. He impressed her, this American. There was strength and competence beneath his quiet manner, and something else. A hint of passion, if that was the proper word. Given the right occasion, he would catch fire, and like fire moving through brush, he would be impossible to stop.
Even with his immobilized arm, he was as graceful as a cat. The movement of muscle across his chest had been delightful to watch. She was unaccustomed to big men, and she had been stirred by him. She had even considered-for only a moment, she was glad to say-maneuvering herself beneath the covers of that bed, still wearing the personality of the Israeli policewoman, and maneuvering Shayne’s large body in beside her. She herself, though she had never been allowed the freedoms that were considered by Israeli women to be theirs by right, was a woman of the twentieth century. She subscribed to western magazines, which kept her aquiver with reports about the worldwide sexual revolution. She agreed with this in theory, but until recently there had been pitifully little she could do to put it into practice. From this moment on, however, things were going to be very different.
She took the pistol out of her purse, and started the water running hard into the basin to cover the sound she made changing clips. As she had been shown, she cleared the harmless blank round out of the chamber, replacing it with one that looked the same, but was nevertheless deadly. She smiled. Fuad had overdone the agony, pretending to be shot in the stomach, and Shayne, even with nine-tenths of his attention on the road, had come close to seeing the deception. She reminded herself again that it was a sharp man she was about to kill, and her hand had better not tremble.
She slid the pistol back carefully, and wadded up handkerchiefs to wedge in around it. When she reached, she wanted her hand to close naturally on the handle. She was an amateur here, whereas the man in the other room was clearly skillful with guns.
Her head felt suddenly queer and light. It would be the first time for her, ever. She had to do it, that had been made plain by everybody. She had asked to be included in the main action, and they had smiled. A woman? It was a galling reflection to her, that in the hated nation of Israel, women were required-not permitted, required-to serve in the army, elbow to elbow with men. Presumably they were also allowed, in certain circumstances, to initiate the sexual encounter. Among her own people, it was a different story. The women could show their faces at last, after centuries of agitation. But while the men talked and acted, they were expected to make the soup and keep their eyes modestly lowered.
The thought had always made her angry. Now if she could focus on it she could carry this off without wishing it didn’t have to happen. She had been a soldier for one hour, Esther Landau, once an army lieutenant, now a police agent, who had come to a foreign country, entirely on her own, with a gun, to hunt a fugitive. The real Esther had had hair on her legs, a straight bar of eyebrows-an unattractive woman, probably. Did Israeli women make up their eyes? Probably not. Nevertheless, she took out a brush and worked on her eyelashes.
Perfume? Unnecessary. She looked at herself once more. In another moment, she would kill a man.
Shayne was at the TV set, flipping channels, with the sound down. “Better?” he said, causing the picture to dwindle and disappear.
“Somewhat, I think.”
“Cognac?”
“No!”
She sat in a chair this time, setting the purse on the floor so she could touch it with her right hand. Shayne stayed across the room. She had been advised to shoot him twice, aiming first at the bulk of his body, to knock him down, and then at his head, to kill. But if she missed with her first shot, he would be on her like a bolt of lightning. So she had to get him to come to her.
“You were beginning to tell me something,” Shayne said.
“It’s gone. Remind me.”
“About why you expected Gold to come back to Miami.”
“For this reason. I searched his residence after the arrest, most carefully. There was painfully little, a scattering of checks and bills and memos to himself. And one letter. Mr. Shayne, move nearer to me. I haven’t the strength to speak loudly.”
Shayne moved to the edge of the bed and sat down there. This was no improvement, for his weight was forward and he was watching her closely.
“If he received any other mail, he didn’t save it. It was from a girl here who signed herself Helen. No
