“You might shake him. You might not. Someone knows the name of Keith Brown. They could find you elsewhere. How much do you have to be in Paris over the next few weeks?”
“Quite a bit,” admitted Shannon. “I have to go through several times, and we have to bring Marc’s stuff down from Belgium to Toulon through Paris in two days.”
Langarotti shrugged. “They might not find you. We don’t know how good they are, or how many of them. Or who. But they might find you a second time. Then there would be problems, perhaps with the police.”
“I can’t afford that. Not now. Not with Marc’s consignment sitting in the truck,” said Shannon.
He was a reasonable man and would much prefer to have negotiated with the one who had placed the contract on him. But whoever it was had chosen to do it the other way.
Shannon would still have tried to talk to the man, but first he had to identify him. There was only one man who could do that for him: the man who had taken the contract to kill him. He put this to the Corsican, wh
o nodded somberly.
“Yes, mon ami, I think you’re right. We have to take the hit man. But first he must be lured out.”
“Will you help me, Jean-Baptiste?”
“Of course,” said Langarotti. “Whoever it is, it is not the Union. It is not my people, so I am your man.”
They spent close to an hour with a street map of Paris on the table in front of them. Then Langarotti left.
During the day he parked his Marseilles-registered truck at an agreed prearranged spot. In the late afternoon Shannon went to the reception desk and asked the way to a well-known restaurant a mile away. He was within earshot of the hotel clerk who had been described to him by Langarotti. The chief receptionist told him where the restaurant was.
“Within walking distance?” asked Shannon.
“But certainly, m’sieur. About fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.”
Shannon thanked him and used the desk telephone to make a reservation in the name of Brown for ten o’clock that night. He did not leave his hotel all day.
At nine-forty exactly, carrying his overnight bag in one hand and a light raincoat over the other arm, he left the hotel and turned up the street in the direction for the restaurant. The route he took was not direct. It led down two streets even smaller than the one in which the hotel was situated. As he walked, he left the other pedestrians behind and entered streets in the first arrondissement which were dimly lit and where no passersby came his way. He dawdled, passing the time staring into lighted shopwindows, killing time until the hour of his restaurant reservation was long past. He never looked back. Sometimes, in the quiet, he thought he could hear the soft slap of a moccasin somewhere up the dim-lit streets behind him. Whoever was there, it was not Langarotti. The Corsican could move without disturbing the dust.
It was past eleven when he reached the dark black alley he had been told was there. It led to his left and had no lights in it at all. The far end was blocked by a row of bollards, making it into a cul-de-sac. On each side the walls were blank and tall. Any light that might have entered the alley from the other end was muted by the bulk of the French truck that stood parked there, empty but with its rear doors open. Shannon walked toward the truck’s gaping back and, when he reached it, turned.
Like most fighting men, he always preferred to face danger rather than knowing it was somewhere behind. He knew from past experience that, even when moving backward, it is safer always to face the danger source. At least, then, you can watch it. Moving up the alley with his back to the entrance, he had felt the hairs on his neck prickling. If the psychology was wrong, he could be very dead. But the psychology had been right. Keeping to empty streets, the man behind him had stayed well back, hoping for just such an opportunity as now presented itself.
Shannon tossed his bag and raincoat to the ground and stared at the hulking shadow that blocked the vertical streak of lamplight from the end of the alley. He waited patiently. He hoped there would be no sound, not in the center of Paris. The shadow paused, assessed the situation, and evidently checked Shannon for a gun. But the sight of the open truck reassured the hit man. He assumed Shannon had simply parked it there for discretion’s sake and had been all this time returning to it.
The shadow in the alley moved softly forward. Shannon could make out the right arm, out of the raincoat pocket now, held forward, holding something. The face was in shadow, the whole man was a silhouette, but he was big. His form stood dead center in the cobbled cul-de-sac, stopped now, raising his gun. He paused for several seconds as he aimed, then slowly lowered it again, straight-armed, down to his side. It was almost as if he had changed his mind.
Still staring at Shannon from the shadow-black face, the man slowly leaned forward and went onto his knees. Some shots do this to steady themselves. The gunman cleared his throat, leaned forward again, and placed both his hands, knuckles down, on the cobbles in front of him. The metal of the Colt .45 clattered on the stones. Slowly, like a Moslem facing Mecca at the hour of prayer, the gunman bowed his head, staring for the first time in twenty seconds not at Shannon but at the cobbles. There was a light splashing sound, as of a liquid running fast onto cobbles, and finally the man’s arms and thighs gave out. He slumped forward into the puddle of his own aortic blood and went to sleep, quite gently, like a child.
Shannon was still standing against the doors of the truck. With the man down, a shaft of lamplight came from the lit end of the alley. It glistened on the polished black sheen of the four-inch bone knife handle that protruded upward from the mackintoshed back of the man on the pavement, slightly left of center, between the fourth and fifth ribs.
The Cat looked up. There was another figure against the lamplight, small, spare, motionless, still standing fifteen yards from the body at the point where it had made its throw. Shannon hissed, and Langarotti padded noiselessly down the cobbles.
“I thought you’d left it too late,” said Shannon.
“Non. Never too late. He could not have squeezed the trigger of that Colt at any time since you emerged from the hotel.”
The rear of the truck was already laid with a large sheet of tough industrial plastic over a canvas tarpaulin. The tarpaulin had loopholes all around the edge for easy lashing into a bundle, and plenty of cord and bricks were stacked at the far end. Each taking an arm and a leg, the two men swung the body up and inward. Langarotti climbed in to retrieve his knife, while Shannon shut the doors. He heard them securely locked from the inside.
Langarotti climbed into the front seat and started up. Slowly he backed out, down the alley and into the street. As he swung the truck around before driving off, Shannon approached the driver’s window.
“Have you had a good look at him?”
“Sure.”
“You know him?”