The Vulcan Disaster

I slipped forward and stuck my head out the window; I counted to five and moved out on the balcony.

There was no sign of life up there.

I shoved the gun in a pocket and headed back toward the door. If he tried to come down via the nest of balconies, the way I’d gone up, they’d see him and pot him; now I knew one or the other of them — Vicki or whoever Leon was — was alive, and armed. Okay. That meant he’d have another way out, and it’d likely be the way he’d taken to get inside the building. The way Zvy had taken when he’d come in and surprised Constantin. I headed for the main staircase of the old building.

When I cracked the door, paused, and finally stepped out into the stairwell, though, there wasn’t a sound to be heard.

I decided to force the issue.

I pulled the gun back out again and tiptoed cautiously up one flight. Then I paused at the landing and listened for sounds. Nothing. Even more cautiously than before, I headed up again.

At the top of the stairs I stepped back and kicked in the door... and almost got shot for my pains. The little gun across the way went pop again and a slug sang its way past my head into the wall. I hit the floor fast — and wished I hadn’t.

“Hey,” I said. “Vicki. It’s me. Harry Archer. The guy with the gun is gone.”

“Harry?” The voice was nervous, tentative. “What are you doing here?”

“I... I got jealous and followed you.” I’d explain later. “The man up here — the one with the pistol — he’s gone. I checked everything out.”

“Harry... can I trust you?”

“You’d better. Anyhow, you’d better do something quickly, shoot me or trust me. The cops’ll be here in a matter of minutes.”

“Could you come up? I mean... there’s someone wounded here. I...”

“Hang on a second.” The balconies were so close together that high up that the housewives could have had regular conversations over hanging out the wash. I got up, painfully, went out to the balcony, tensed up, and jumped across.

As I did, the rail on my balcony — some sort of stucco stuff — gave way underfoot. The broken pieces went clattering down into the alley. I hit the next rail hard, hung on with both hands and it held. I climbed up, aching and cursing.

They were in darkness inside. I pulled the curtains and as Vicki flipped the light on — a single overhead bulb, and a dim one at that — I pulled a piece of beaverboard off what had been a rotting closet and laid it over the window opening.

When I looked down, she had the guy’s head on her lap and a little purse gun in one hand. He had a big wound in the thigh and he’d lost a lot of blood. “We don’t have much time to lose,” I said. “Go get the car and pull it up at the head of the next street over. I don’t remember the name of it; there’s a vespasienne just above it, or there was the last time I was here...”

“But Harry, you said you’d never been to Nice before...”

“Never as Harry Archer,” I said. “Explanations later. We’ve got to get your pal here out of the area before the flics arrive. Do as I say.”

“All right, but... here, my gun...”

“I’ve got one. I took the gun off the guy I killed downstairs. It’s okay. His chum ought to be far, far away by now.”

She looked up at me with those sea-green eyes. “I... okay.” She let me take the man over; then she bolted for the door, agile in her flat sandals. I could hear their soles flapping all the way down the stairs.

I turned to the man. “This,” I said, “is going to hurt me as much as it does you. But we’d better do it anyhow. If I can get you up to my shoulder...”

He looked up and said, “It’s all right.” Then his eyes widened. They narrowed again, scanning my face. He had a long lean face, the face of a high-metabolism, overactive, driven man. There was a small scar under one eye. “You... give me your hand first. Please. I...”

I put one hand in his; his was cold; shock.

And damned if he didn’t slip me Will Lockwood’s funny handshake. Just as the sirens went off down the way.

“Well, for chrissake,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And you know me. We worked together four years ago in the Bahrain Gulf. I...” But he looked lousy. I put one finger over my mouth: Save it for later; we’ve got to get out of here first. Know him? Of course I knew him. Leon Schwartzblum. One of Israel’s toughest and most reliable undercover boys. He’d switched services as the need for his talents had demanded — he’d been one of the guys who got Eichmann out of Argentina — and now he was working this gig with me. Or had been. That leg wound was going to put him right out of this ballgame, leaving me pretty much where I’d started.

“Right on, buddy,” I said. “More later. But bite down hard right now; I’m going to try to get you up on my shoulder. Hang in there.” But I knew he would anyway. He was the hanger-inner type if ever I saw one.

Carrying a badly wounded man in a Morgan isn’t easy. We had to put him in my lap, and between my ribs and his thigh, it didn’t help anything.