Chapter 13

Mahmoud Taluffah looked down viciously at the naked girl lying at his feet. She was bruised and cut and sobbing. He had beaten her so brutally that she'd fought him savagely afterwards when he'd started to have her and he'd had to rape her without mercy. He'd put real brutality into his pounding of her cunt, paying her for her infidelity which his spies had implied and which she'd confessed under pressure.

His feeling toward her was a mixture of wanting and hating her lying in the arms of another man. He'd fucked her, thinking all the time of her nakedness and the abandon he knew her capable of while the other man fucked her in delight. It had put his heart in a vice and constricted his chest. He was the boss. No woman of his was going to monkey around with him in that way.

He kicked her up her bare behind with his foot and she rolled over and lay there still sobbing. She was beaten and she'd think twice before she indulged her passion with a strange body again. He'd been about to kick her in the quim but then he'd thought of his own future pleasures and restrained himself. He didn't mind giving her pain, but he didn't want to ruin his own sadistic enjoyment.

"You don't do anything I don't know about," he spat at her, glaring at her rounded nudity quivering and heaving at his feet. "Now you've had your punishment and he's going to get his."

They'd seen Raimond and the girl on their way back to Pigalle, driving without caution. They'd been looking for her all night, these two bodyguards who'd got anxious after she hadn't reappeared in the bar. It would be all right by them if it was a put-up job with no fear of their boss knowing and if they could have got their reward for blindness in kind from her body. But she'd purposely given them the slip and at any time he was-likely to summon them or come looking for her. It was more than their lives were worth to keep quiet. As it was they'd got a bawling out which had made them tremble. But then he'd been viciously happy when at last they'd found her and taken her to him, keeping an eye on the man she'd been with as well.

They remembered him from the bar, of course, a big, good-looking fellow who might have been any sort of well-kept, successful business man. Little, doubtless, had he known he was messing around with the mistress of someone as powerful as Mahmoud Taluffah. He soon would.

When it came to a little reglement de comptes like this, the victim was followed and kept under observation until such time as the night was dark enough and the spot quiet enough to enable a beating up to take place without the necessity of a kidnapping to precede it. That was how it was to be with Raimond.

He'd been followed to his home-even his wife had been noted for future reference if necessary-and had been trailed ever since. True, he seemed to lead an odd sort of existence, but it didn't occur to his shadowers that he was a flic. He was, perhaps, just what he seemed to be, a man who didn't need to work, who lived in a very respectable but not millionaire quarter, who could take days off from his office if he wished, who could persuade his wife that he had a lot of business to occupy him and thus spend nights away from her, hanging around the bright lights, picking up beautiful or not-so beautiful women to seduce or be seduced by and then return home as if nothing had happened. The sort of rich, idle Frenchman whom they disliked, these Algerians, although their turn was yet to come and then perhaps they'd show themselves capable of just the same idleness. At the moment, of course, they had the fire of a cause to cover their idleness and destroy it even with the occasional supreme work of a murder.

At this moment there was no idleness. A piece of work was afoot. Raimond had decided to pay a preliminary visit to Martha's just to give it a once-over in preparation for something more in the line of a field day. He was walking, now, through the narrow streets which led to it off from the bright glare and noise of the boulevard.

Except for the bright blaze of light from a cafe every few doors down the street, the street itself was quiet. From the cafes came the explosive noise of pinball machines, jukeboxes, drunken talk and laughter. There was nobody in the street at all.

Raimond was alert; the three men who watched him from the doorway of a courtyard which he was destined to pass couldn't know that he was alert, of course. In the first place they had no idea he was a policeman and in the second they had no idea he was on business and preparing himself for trouble.

The pavement made soft contact with his rubber soles as he walked. He was wondering how he could possibly find out what nights they had these meetings she'd told him about. That would really be a coup to catch them all together, like laying a net for the fish.

This area really swarmed with Algerians, he thought. And not one of them, officially, ever saw anything that went on. People were killed in these streets and when the trouble started the crowds which had been listening and playing and talking and drinking disappeared like forest animals at the sound of a human footfall.

The arm grabbed him from the doorway, closing around his neck and, without even thinking, he rammed back with his elbow. He heard the gasp of pain, moved quickly and felt a blow from what felt like the butt of a pistol graze down the side of his head numbing the path it took on his skull. He kicked out and saw a dark figure recoil as another sprang at him.

He was too quick, much too quick. The side of his hand lashed with a sharp flinging movement at the throat of his adversary, hitting the Adam's apple at the point of full impact.

At the same instant he pulled out his automatic, catching the dull glint of another as he fired at point-blank range. A body fell against him, heavy and clinging in the near-darkness. He pushed it back into the courtyard, catching sight of a little black moustache on the swarthy features.

The other two had gone-just like that. He saw them scuttling round a corner as he himself began to run quickly.

Windows were opening, throwing dull oblongs of light onto the street below, but the noise in the bars was so great that nobody had heard a thing. Nobody rushed into the street to try and stop him.

Round the second quick corner he stopped running. He was slightly shaken and out of breath. The graze on his head felt hot and, putting his hand up, he felt the slight wet patch through his hair.

Now he walked at a good pace, but without any appearance of hurrying. He kept his hand tightly on his automatic in his pocket and watched each doorway and entrance to the street like a hawk as he headed back to the main boulevard. He didn't want to get mixed up in this. There was nothing to be learned from it except that they were up to his game. It was far better that he retained whatever anonymity he still possessed.

Once on the boulevard he crossed to the central island and sat down for a moment on a seat, never once relaxing his vigilance. He wiped his head with his handkerchief and wondered how they knew about him. Then he thought of the girl, Rolande, and wondered if they did, in fact, know everything. There was, perhaps, one way to find out.

He walked fast along the boulevard towards Chapelle until he came to a small, but heavily guarded commissariat on a corner. He looked up and down the boulevard once or twice and then crossed quickly and went in through the doors. He heard the hee-hawing warning of the police van just going off to where he'd come from.

The Algerian had taken the bullet in the shoulder. They'd bandaged him up in the commissariat and Raimond and his chief had left him in the hands of those specially trained to wring any secrets from him. They were waiting, smoking outside a little room from which muffled noises came. They were both fairly humane men in the normal way of things, but this was no time to be squeamish.

After several minutes a man in his shirtsleeves came out and told them that the prisoner had said they had been ordered to beat up Raimond because he'd seduced the girl friend of a man named Mahmoud Taluffah. They had not been ordered to kill him and had had no intention of killing him.

"Would you like to question him yourself, sir?" asked the shirt-sleeved man, and the chief looked at Raimond with a query in his brows.

"No," Raimond said. "Won't be necessary."

"We could bring him in on that," the chief said, taking him aside. "It speaks for itself."

"Trouble is, sir, that his two cronies have spilled the beans by now and he'll be hiding out. Better that they don't know who I am and are allowed to think that we don't know anything about them. Do you think that Arab was telling the truth?"

"Never fails by our methods."

"Well I won't be able to do much for a day except keep in touch with contacts. Better let them think there's no reason to get scared."