address-merely the date and Miami.”
She could have invented something, but Gold and Rashid had decided, discussing what she was to say, that she should stick closely to the truth. No one could be sure exactly where Shayne stood, or how much he knew. There actually had been a Gerda Fox, and she had actually been a Shin Bet informer. Gold’s opium-into-heroin laboratory had actually been set up in the galley of a fishing boat. The letter she was describing now was real. They had laughed about it in Beirut.
“It was illiterate and childish. That is his pattern, it is in his dossier. He confined himself to girls below the age of twenty. From indications, this was one of them, it seemed perhaps the last before he left this country. She was having difficulties at school, at home, she longed to see him and squeeze him, et cetera. Oddly enough, she was a policeman’s daughter. She asked Gold to tell her where to look, and she would go into the files through her father and remove or destroy evidence against him, so he could come back and she could do various sexual things to him which I won’t repeat. Did he need money? She had some saved. And I thought to myself-if he came to Miami, wouldn’t he notify her? He could use her to carry messages, to find him a secure place. He would have to be careful about old acquaintances. I thought this Helen would be a good one to start with, in any event. Do you think it’s enough?”
She played with the flap of her purse. Shayne’s eyes were on her every minute. She had a horrible thought suddenly that something had made him doubt she was Israeli. The earrings? She regretted those. Perhaps she would have to lay the purse in her lap and shoot through its bottom. But she had bought it in Paris, she would hate to spoil it.
Shayne scraped his thumbnail across his chin. “Half the people in the drug world inform on the other half. They’re jittery right now. If Gold killed a woman last night, that steps up the pressure. He can’t hang around and feed it into the market a bag at a time. It all has to hit at once. We can wait till that happens and trace it back. There are a few people I can lean on. But there may be a faster way.”
He continued to watch her with those penetrating eyes. She sat forward, bringing the purse up from the floor. The pistol inside had shifted, and she couldn’t locate the grip.
“If that was Murray Gold I was chasing,” Shayne said, still working on moves which her two bullets would prevent him from making, “why would he drive down to Homestead to pick up ten tommy guns?”
“Tommy guns?” Rashid hadn’t known that Shayne knew about those. “This doesn’t fit into my theory at all.”
“See if you can make it fit. Did Gold grow a beard in Israel?”
“Not while I watched him. Perhaps in prison. I can cable and find out.”
“You can buy beards at a hair-store. But if that woman was Gerda Fox, and Gold knew she was the one who turned him in-if she knew the name of the buyer here-”
He stopped to think again. “He bought the guns from a master sergeant. I’m not really sure how many, but he paid three thousand in cash, and submachine guns go for about three hundred apiece. For ten guns, you need ten men. You don’t take ten men along on a drug buy. The hell of it is, I had him right in my fist. But I tried to be too tricky, and I lost him.”
She had adjusted the pistol so it was pointed at Shayne. The safety was off.
“Mr. Shayne, you keep throwing fragments. What do you mean, you lost him?”
“I had a helicopter on him, and the engine conked out. He was up around Boca Raton at the time. That doesn’t mean he stayed there.”
Alarm bells began clanging. Wait. Wait.
All at once she thought of the danger she was in. Of course the plan had been worked out to minimize the danger, but if Shayne and his helicopter hadn’t linked Gold to the Arabs, it was no longer necessary to kill him. She had been keyed up to do it, but it was a relief not to have to.
And then she had a better idea, having to do with the money. It was mad, and most unlikely to work, but what a coup if it did! It would prove to a few people, including her almighty husband, that Arab women were not altogether as helpless as they looked.
“Then we’ll be working together?”
“It seems so,” Shayne said, still studying her. “Unless you can think of something else you ought to tell me, I’ll be moving.”
“Mr. Shayne, if you knew how relieved! All the piled-up sleepiness has caught up to me suddenly.” This was true; she had had no sleep the night before, after Rashid had come into her bedroom, and now she was having trouble keeping her eyelids up. “How would it be if I simply stay here? If you’ll get off that bed I’ll fall into it. Three hours at the most. Three hours would make an enormous difference.” Also true! Everything was scheduled to take place during the next three hours. “My dress will be dry by then. Phone me or come back for me.”
“I’ll see what I can find out about the girl. First name Helen. A cop’s daughter. I’ll ask some people.”
Good; that would take him out of Miami. He had a few more questions, and to make him go she acted as though she was about to fall asleep in the chair. They stood up together. She pretended to lose her balance, and touched his arm. She would like to see him undressed.
But not now, unhappily. Even if she could have thought of a way to bring it about, there was too little time.
After he left she waited at the closed blind, peering through the thin slit between blind and window-frame, and saw his Buick pull out, return to the street and turn north. He was apparently in every way a careful man. A moment later he was back, cruising slowly past to make sure he had left her in safety.
But Rashid was equally cautious. He had parked elsewhere, and came among the motel cars on foot. He rapped quickly. Smiling, she let him suffer out there in the open, where the world could see him. He would be furious, she knew.
He shook the doorknob. Would it disturb this strange creature, she wondered, if Shayne had taken away her gun and left her dead on the floor? Not for more than a moment, probably, and then only because it would entail a change of plan. He would prod her with his toe, walk out and never think of her again. And that made her almost as angry as he was when she opened the door and he came storming in.
“What in the devil’s name have you done here, woman?” he demanded. “You let him walk away unharmed.”
No woman likes to be called woman in that tone of voice. “I decided not to shoot him,” she said calmly. “Those magnificent shoulders and narrow hips.”
Really enraged, he slammed her in the face with his closed fist. It was a serious blow. He had entered her sexually a half dozen times in Beirut, and apparently he thought, incorrectly, that that entitled him to do this. She fell against the television set, and somehow the contact turned it on. The voices came up first, followed by a picture of four American women with beautifully groomed hair, sitting at a table discussing the population explosion.
She still had her purse in her hand. Sitting up, she took out the gun and let Rashid look into the muzzle.
“Or perhaps you think I was unable to change the bullets,” she said. “That I am too ignorant to understand the mechanism, unlike Israeli women. Shall I press the trigger and convince you?”
He waved to show her that the gun didn’t intimidate him. But she noticed that he was careful to move no closer.
“No, no. Merely tell me at once how it happened. Up to a point it went off perfectly. You were alone together. I watched the window for your signal, that you had done it and I should drive in to pick you up. Instead, he drove away, in a car with a radio telephone. And I find you here partly undressed.”
“It was necessary to wash my dress.”
“And because of those narrow hips and so forth-”
“We discussed making love, but decided against it. It would have been a mistake to kill him. The helicopter last night had a failed engine. He knows nothing about us.”
Rashid thrust his head forward. “He told you that.”
“Convincingly. If I put the pistol away, will you hit me again?”
“No, I was angry. Turn off that noise.”
As much as she would have enjoyed hearing intelligent American women talk about the best way to avoid becoming pregnant, this was not the time, she agreed.
Rashid put a cigarette in his mouth. After shutting off the television, she came up to him, removed the cigarette and kissed him, forcing her tongue between his lips, daringly. He responded with less than his usual
