Sfat lifted his arms, hands formed into blades. He bent his knees, feet pointed outward, and Julie recognized the typical fighting stance of a Saudi karate fighter. It was a technique that had its limitations. Sfat advanced, mincingly for so large a man, and his bearded face was set in a mask of cruelty. As he came within range his left hand darted out, the finger's shaped like a hawk's head.
She was ready for it, had been anticipating it. She ducked under the swooping blow and, with a short, economical kick, connected with Sfat's left kneecap. He had been turning as she kicked, and some of the force of the blow was lost. Nevertheless, it was enough to take his feet out from under him. He fell heavily, and Julie pounced.
But this time he caught her unawares. Sfat's clumsy fall had been feigned, and as she came leaping at him his arms and legs were drawn up cat fashion, and he lashed out, expecting to catch her in the solar plexus. She had seen her danger a moment before his counterstroke, however, and turning in midair, managed to avoid his flailing limbs. Her stiffened elbow caught him in the pit of the stomach, knocking the air out of him, and in the second it took him to recover, she rolled away and regained her feet.
Khalil had been watching all this dumbfounded. Now, belatedly, he stirred into action. He stepped forward, crouching in a classic knife fighter's pose. The weapon he carried in his right hand and low against his body was a
“You do well to fear the
“Oh, I wasn't exactly afraid of it,” Julie said. “Just surprised to see it. Rhino horn is not legally traded. Is it genuine?”
“Of course,” Khalil said, feinting and then making a lightning stab at her. “I always kill with the genuine article.”
“I'm sure glad to hear that,” Julie said. That makes that knife extremely valuable!”
The blade darted toward her midsection. Julie spun, and the thing passed harmlessly along her left side. As it passed, her arm snapped down, trapping the weapon. Khalil began a long and elaborate Arabic curse in the guttural dialect of Omdurman, but got out no more than a couple of syllables before Julie's left elbow crashed with piledriver force into the middle of his face.
Blood streaming from his nose and mouth, Khalil stumbled backward, losing his grip on the knife that was still clamped under Julie's left arm.
“I'll just keep this for you,” Julie said, slipping the knife into her belt. “It might reduce its value if we got blood all over it.”
A feint to the midsection drew down Khalil's guard. Fingers folded in protectively, Julie snapped a blow. The heel of her hand caught Khalil where the upper lip meets the nose. Four of his front teeth cracked off clean at the gum line.
“You ought to thank me,” Julie said. “I've corrected your overbite and haven't even charged you for it.”
Khalil fell down screaming. He rolled on the floor clutching his head and whimpering. Bloody foam splattered from his mouth. Julie watched him critically for a moment, then muttered, “That ought to keep you occupied for a while.”
She turned to Sfat. He had regained his feet, and although his balance was just the slightest bit off-kilter, he was still formidable. If rage could kill, then Julie would be dead ten times over. He came toward her on the attack. He was about twice the weight of the slender girl and he was containing his fury now as he backed her into an angle of the wall, just to one side of an indifferent copy of Gainsborough's
Julie had had long preparation for moments like this. Shen Hui's instructions in self-defense had covered all the basics of unarmed combat. He had not been satisfied with that, however, since he accounted himself no expert in the finer points of self-defense. So he had apprenticed her to Olla Khan, a fat-faced master fighter from Isfahan in central Asia. Khan, beguiled by her beauty, had said, “My arrangement with your master is that you will stay with me and serve me in all particulars until you can beat me at unarmed combat. That might take more than a lifetime, my pet.” In fact it took just five months, and Olla Khan ended up in a hospital for his presumption.
And so, now, with Sfat launching his impetuous and ill-considered attack, Julie's problem was not how to cope with it, but which of several different methods to choose. She also had to decide to what extent she wished to incapacitate him, and this in turn depended on her estimation of his value to her alive. In the split of a second she decided that this gross hairy-faced man with the bad breath was of no value to her, and indeed could serve her better dead as a message to his master, Khalil, to stop resisting and start cooperating.
She didn't think all that through consciously. Instead, she opposed his charge with a sword hand, fingers stiffened. Sfat crashed into her hand and was stopped abruptly as the fingers took him high between the eyes, shutting down his pineal gland and. Then going on to break his neck. His eyes rolled up, showing the white, and he crashed to the floor like two hundred pounds of dead mutton.
She turned from him to Khalil. “Ready to go another round?” she asked.
Khalil, his teeth scattered over the floor, had had enough. He mumbled through a bloodstained hand. “Don't hurt me anymore. I'm a dilettante, not a fighter. I'll give you whatever you want.”
“That's what I like to hear,” Julie said. She took a pillow from a nearby bed and stripped off the pillowcase.
“Fill it with good stuff for me,” she said. “Don't put in any worthless crap or I'll have something to say about it.”
Khalil, totally unnerved, couldn't even dream of resistance.
His collapse was absolute. He opened a compartment concealed in the wall behind the bed and picked several precious bracelets, two handfuls of magnificent unmounted gems in a white chamois bag, and a string of glorious baroque pearls, each the size of a pigeon's egg and no two alike. Soon the pillowcase was bulging. Khalil had other objects he wanted to give her, but she stopped him.
“One bagful is enough. I'm not greedy. Besides, I'd need an extra pair of hands to carry it all.”
Khalil recovered sufficiently to say, “If you're finished, then get out!”
“Okay,” Julie said. “This is good-bye, then.” She moved close to him.
He stared at her. The whites of his eyes went a dirty yellow as she advanced on him. He stumbled away, found himself with his back to a bureau. “What are you going to do?” he asked in a shaking voice.
“Just give you a couple hours' sleep. So I can walk out of here like a lady.” She touched a nerve in his neck. He slumped to the floor unconscious.
“Be sure to have a dentist look at those stumps,” she said. He couldn't hear her, of course, but she was sure he'd remember anyway.
Julie went to the dressing-room mirror and checked her clothing and makeup. She repaired her lipstick, which had been smeared in the combat, and found an ugly red stain on the shoulder of her red dress.
Luckily, Khalil had a really smart ermine jacket in his closet. It covered the stain nicely. She left by the penthouse elevator. No one stopped her as she walked out, passed through the lobby, and exited the revolving front door onto Central Park South, where she called a taxi.
11
“How did it go tonight?” Stan asked when she got back to the brownstone.
“Not bad,” she said, dumping her loot into the bed. “A dream night for a thief. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near enough to buy a spaceship with.”
“We don't need to buy one,” Stan said. “I've got a plan that ought to work now that we have some money to play around with. The first thing we're going to need is a spaceship driver.”
“I'd love to talk about it,” Julie said. “But first I need a bath. And I'm famished! Sometimes stealing can be hard work. Oh, by the way, here's a present.” She tossed the dagger onto the bed.
