Duel of Assassins Read Free Page B

his tipsy
idea.
    “Zu-pa!” answered the girl on his left, Lise—straw
blonde, nicely freckled, smiling while licking off a foam mustache.
    “With you everything is ‘super.’ What do you say, Silvie?”
    The dark-haired, slightly more serious girl on his right
shook her head: “Orlo, you want to kill yourself, I don’t care. But think of
little Lise. She will be sad forever.”
    “Ha! Nothing makes Lise sad.”
    “Okay, maybe not sad forever—”
    “Maybe only till I find a new big love,” giggled Lise.
“Maybe a week.”
    “You lovely ladies don’t understand. It’s not for me to do
such a crazy thing. I must think always of my big future, and of Papa’s business.
No, this is for our brave and crazy American to do. Wake him up, one of you, so
I can tell him.”
    The three turned to the young man across the table, just now
lounging back precariously in his cafe chair. Only a long dimpled jaw and
muscular smile were visible below a black felt cowboy hat, tipped comically far
forward. Silvie reached and lifted the hat.
    “Okay, I’m awake,” he said, grinning at them out of his
long, handsome, adolescent mask of a face. The voice was husky and melodious,
the mouth frankly sensual, the light-blue eyes playful against a deep Alpine
tan. Despite the boyish appeal, he looked to be past thirty, clearly older and
more experienced than his companions, none of whom knew his real identity.
    “But you don’t listen to us, Jack. We are boring you?”
    “I heard every damned drunken word, Orlo. I’ll try your
little stunt tomorrow, as soon as the chair lift starts running up to Hohe
Salve. If the weather isn’t too shitty.”
    “But Jack! Orlo was only making a joke.”
    “Jack”—known to Soviet intelligence as Marcus Jolly—righted
his chair, reached into a jeans pocket and fished out a wad of Austrian
banknotes, peeled off a dozen and tossed them onto the beer-puddled table.
“Orlando may be joking, but twelve thousand schillings says I’m serious. What
do you say, amico ?”
    The Italian grabbed up the notes, shook them dry and handed
them to Lise. “Keep these. It’s not much, but I’m afraid our crazy friend will
need them for the hospital.” He turned to “Jack.” “Okay, fifteen thousand. But
you wake up tomorrow, you want to change your mind, it’s plenty okay with me.”
    Marcus shook his head and reached for a fresh half liter of
beer. “What do you mean, ‘wake up’? Who’s going to sleep?”
    *
    Orlo’s stunt didn’t scare Marcus, it excited him. He’d been
getting stale down in Lugano waiting for something to happen. Not trying
something truly balls-out demented once in a while, going for the blood rush,
now that was frightening. If he ever reached the time of his life that
he counted all the costs and balked at barriers in his path like a skittish
steeplechaser, they might as well just take him out and shoot him.
    Oh, there were plenty of crazy and dangerous things beyond
Marcus’ sphere of daredeviltry—a host of circus stunts, for instance. But only
once could he remember being afraid to try something he wanted desperately to
do.
    He’d been fourteen, showing off for a couple of girls at the
local plunge with his self-taught repertoire of forward and backward
somersaults. Suddenly a bunch of country club kids, collegiate types, had
showed up, and several big, musclebound characters took over the diving boards.
Marcus had tried to compete, but was plainly outclassed.
    This one bleach-blond guy kept bouncing up and down on the
high board, making the fiberglass twang like a bass guitar string. When he had
everybody watching, he had bounded straight up and grabbed his knees in a tight
backward tuck. There was a collective gasp all around the pool—you could see
the big kid was not going to clear the board.
    And he didn’t. He finished the somersault cleanly and banged
both feet right back on the end of the vibrating board. It twanged again as he
arced up and out into a