Russian Roulette (10 page)

The Swiss looked modestly at his plump fingers. ‘It was unfortunate – after I had got the information from him, Kramer tried to jump me. I had to shoot him. Looking back, it was the best thing. He would only have made trouble, by sending someone after me. That would have been tedious, not like dealing with a bungling amateur like you.'

Simon began to see the inside – his fists opened and closed inside his pockets. Fragonard went on imperturbably.

‘You were hardly able to even get this far safely – didn't you fall into the dock in Finland?' His tone was a calculated insult.

Simon took a step nearer and snarled at him.

‘Fell? … you damned liar, you know well enough what happened, considering that it was you that half-choked me and then threw me in!'

Fragonard's head jerked up and his eyes needled into Simon's.

‘Choked? … what nonsense is this?'

For answer, Simon dragged down one side of his cravat to display the marks on his neck. ‘See those … that's what your fat little fingers did. If I'd known it was you, I'd have punched your blasted head all the way from Helsinki to Moscow!'

His temper was welling up now. Far from being a physical coward, his army service had shown that in the heat of the moment, he could be as pugnacious as the next man.

But Fragonard's reaction was curious. He got up from his chair and stood facing Simon. His face seemed a little paler as he said, ‘I never left the ship in Finland.' He was not so much defending himself against Simon's accusation as talking to himself. His arrogance had changed to a sudden wariness.

‘Are you sure you were attacked?'

‘Sure? Of course I'm bloody well sure. Do you think I don't know when I'm attacked from behind, throttled into coma and then half-drowned? I suppose you deny ransacking my flat and my cabin as well!'

Fragonard stared at him. ‘In London, yes. I wanted to see if Kramer had given you written instructions about contacting Pabst. It would have saved me killing him for the information … but on the ship, no – I had no reason to go near your cabin.'

He was rattled now. He stalked up and down on his short legs, smacking a fist into the other palm.

Abruptly he sat down again, with the chair backwards. ‘No matter – this is a complication, but is no concern of yours … in fact
nothing
is a concern of yours! I called you here tonight to make it clear to you.'

‘What the hell do you mean?' demanded Simon truculently.

‘Keep off! That's what I mean, Mr Smith. I should have warned you to mind your own petty business before you left London, but I got to Kramer too late to book a passage from Tilbury. That's why I had to fly to Copenhagen to join the ship.'

He leant back, holding the chair rail and stared contemptuously at the Englishman ‘I repeat, keep off, little boy.'

Simon was speechless with rage for a moment. His slow anger at last was exploded by Fragonard's manner, and eventually he found his tongue ‘You cheeky bastard – who d'you think you're ordering about? You've got the bloody nerve to tell me to mind my own business – business that you cut into by way of a murder – to hell with you, chum!'

Fragonard remained impassive, looking up at the enraged man with the same supercilious expression.

‘When you have finished your over-dramatised performance, Smith, remember that I shall not hesitate to kill you like Kramer, if you take one more step toward trying to contact this man Pabst.' He ended on a note of finality which suggested the matter was closed.

Simon was really angry now. He took a step nearer the chair, shot out a muscular arm and grabbed the top rail. He shook it – and Fragonard – rhythmically in a frenzy of rage. The Swiss was rattled about like a pea on a drum as Simon shouted, in time to his shaking, ‘You – lousy – murderous – insulting – little – swine!! I'll do what I damn well like, you ponced-up old goat!'

He let the chair down with a bang and brought his face close to the other man's in defiance.

Fragonard was white with evil. After a pregnant moment of absolute silence, he spat straight in Simon's face.

Beside himself with disgust, the younger man returned the typically continental insult with a typically British one. He took a swinging punch at Fragonard's face and caught him at the side of the left eye. The smaller man was literally knocked sideways, off the chair and on to the floor. He staggered across the room and fetched up with a bang against the wardrobe.

Even as Simon fumbled for a handkerchief to wipe the spittle from his face, his anger cooled and he felt ashamed at having been so violent to a man twenty years older and half his size.

He need not have worried.

When he looked up over his handkerchief, the Swiss was facing him in a half-crouch, his face twisted with hate. He was clutching a small pistol and the little black hole in the end was looking Simon right in the eye.

Fragonard had a red flush around his eye already. His voice was breathless with passion. ‘No one does that to Jules Fragonard … I would kill you here and now, if it were not so – so inconvenient!' His words quivered with venom.

If Simon ever had any doubts that here was Kramer's assassin, they vanished now. He was a hair's breadth from the same fate at the hand of this psychopath.

His own anger collapsed into his boots. He stood deathly quiet, the handkerchief still at his lips.

He was afraid – a fear so acute that it seemed unreal. He had known almost the same feeling leading a platoon down a street in Nicosia, knowing that any second a sniper's bullet could smash him out of existence.

But this was no distant sniper – this was an enraged man, right there behind that little black hole. Simon stood paralysed.

Slowly, still crouching, Fragonard moved back to his chair and slid onto it, the rail against his chest. He held the automatic high, its snout poking over the top of the chair. His bald head, his little beard and the long woollen dressing gown should have been comic, but no one felt like laughing.

‘You young fool!' he hissed, his voice tight with frustrated reprisal. ‘If only I could teach you a lesson! … but you so much as think of interfering in my arrangements and I will kill you with the greatest of pleasure!'

Simon slowly lowered the handkerchief. He was astounded and sickened by the change to hate and evil in the little man, who had become almost a figure of gentle fun over the past few days.

Fragonard was continuing his string of offensively framed orders.

‘You will not write, telephone or contact this man Pabst in any way. You will do nothing except keep your nose clean and be a good little tourist … confine yourself to tumbling girls on your bed and I might overlook your incredible stupidity this evening!'

Once more, the words, delivered in the most insulting way imaginable, spurred Simon's temper into action. His fear fell from him, especially as Fragonard's pistol had dropped during the speech. It was replaced by icy, calculating rage.

Fragonard began to speak again. ‘Now get out and …'

The words ended in a gargling cry as Simon's foot smashed up to land under the soft seat of the chair. He caught the other man off balance and tipped him clean over backwards.

Fragonard still had an iron grip on the gun and Simon lunged after him to tear it from his grasp, but it was unnecessary.

As the older man flew full-length across the carpet, his head hit the skirting board at the edge of the communicating door. There was a sickening crack and he lay still, the pistol falling from his limp fingers.

For an awful moment, Simon thought he was dead. The fact that, half a minute before, Fragonard had been within an ace of shooting him was forgotten.

He knelt by his side and was immensely relieved to hear a heavy snoring breath come from the stricken man.

Simon slipped his arms around Fragonard's chest and heaved him up against his own chest, lugging him to the bed. He laid him flat and was even more relieved to see him stir and moan a little.

His gaze fell on the pistol, now lying against the wall. At least he could get rid of that – then he would be comparatively safe from the murderous little man, as Russia was the last place on earth in which to replace illicit weapons.

He picked it up by the trigger guard, with the vague notion of avoiding fingerprints, then looked around for somewhere to dispose of it. There seemed no where suitable in the room – then his eyes fell on the bathroom.

He went in and stood on the thick, ancient seat of the lavatory. There was an old-fashioned cast-iron cistern level with his face. He prised up the cover, ignoring the trickles of rusty water that ran down his wrist, and dropped the automatic inside, well clear of the siphon.

Jumping down, he pulled the chain to make sure that the gun wasn't fouling the mechanism, then went quickly to the bedroom entrance. Fragonard was groaning loudly now and trying to push himself up on one elbow. His injury seemed to be much less serious that it had first appeared.

‘There's more where that came from, chum;' growled Simon with a touch of bravado. He felt suddenly sick and longed for his bed. All the delayed effects of the evening's drinking and emotions rushed over him as he slipped out and shut the door behind him.

Chapter Seven

Simon awoke to a painful drumming in his head. At first, the thoughts that penetrated his hangover tried to convince him that it was only the pounding of blood in his tortured arteries, but gradually he was forced to accept that someone was actually pounding on his door.

Opening his eyes, he was momentarily surprised to find that he wasn't in his own Bayswater room. Then the fog cleared away sufficiently for him to grasp that he was in Moscow and that his watch showed five thirty; presumably a.m.?

The knocking again conveyed a sense of urgency through the door. Stumbling into his dressing gown, he tottered across the room, the journey seeming to take half a day. As he reached the little passage alongside the bathroom, he heard Elizabeth's voice.

‘Simon, please, let me in!'

The hope that she had come to seduce him did not even flicker through his mind. Early morning and the events of the night before had chased any lust from his mind. Even when he opened the door and had the luscious brunette almost fall in on him, dressed only in a revealing black and pink negligee, his mood remained one of fuddled resentment.

‘Liz – what the hell? It's only half five!'

His voice trailed away as he saw her face through his own red-rimmed eyes. She was dead white and without make-up, looked like a corpse.

‘Didn't you hear the commotion … listen!' she quavered.

Her usual poise had gone. Fighting off the dark-brown feeling that threatened to engulf him, Simon heard something above the buzzing in his ears.

In the corridor, he could hear the muffled tramp of feet and men's voices.

‘What's going on?' he muttered, but Liz had broken away and run to the window. Heedless of her revealing silhouette against the light, she threw open the two frames and leaned out. Immediately, the sounds of an engine revving, metallic scraping noises and voices shouting in Russian came up to the fourth floor.

Simon shuffled across, clutching his maroon robe about him in an apology to modesty.

Looking down – which gave him momentary nausea – he saw half a dozen figures apparently wrestling on the waste ground inside the Chinese Wall. From that height, they were curiously foreshortened and looked like Japanese dolls.

‘They woke me up a few minutes ago!' gabbled Liz Treasure. ‘Isn't it terrible, the poor man!' Her voice rose in a wail.

Simon rested his head in his hands and closed his eyes for a second.

‘Isn't what terrible,' he asked dully, then leaned out again and refocused with an effort.

The lethargy left him as if iced water had been thrown in his face. The ‘wrestlers' had parted and he saw that they had been struggling with a stretcher. Some of them were blue uniformed militia, the rest hotel staff. On the stretcher lay a still figure dressed in a vivid yellow outfit.

Simon swung around to Liz, who had been hovering behind him, trying to see over his shoulder.

‘Who is it – what's happened?'

‘Poor Monsieur Fragonard … he's dead!'

She wailed again and put her knuckles to her mouth.

Simon found time to compare her with the heroine of an old silent movie. Then he turned back to the window, his hangover forgotten.

The men below were carrying the stretcher across a few yards of barren, weed-strewn ground to a grey ambulance, which was providing the engine noises.

‘How do you know it's him?' he called ungrammatically over his shoulder.

She leant on his back, trembling. He was momentarily conscious of the pressure of her soft body.

‘Those lime-coloured pyjamas … they're his. I saw them when he opened his case at the Customs. And anyway, he's directly below his window … and he's dead!'

As her voice shrilled at the end, the fact of death was convincingly proved down below, as one of the militiamen took a blanket from the ambulance and spread it over the body, covering the face.

As they slid the stretcher into the back of the vehicle. Simon swung back into the room and took Elizabeth by the shoulders.

‘You shouldn't have looked, dear … come and sit down.'

She looked at him with a sudden wildness. ‘That's not it – it's the police I'm afraid of … they'll be all over us … they'll …'

She got no further as there was a violent rapping on the door and it was pushed open without more ado.

A thin, cadaverous-faced man stood there, dressed in an ill-fitting blue uniform with wide red epaulettes on the shoulders. He held a military-style cap in one hand.

Behind him hovered a bleary-faced, unshaven Gilbert, barefooted and dressed in an exotic kimono.

Liz Treasure gave a little squeal and hugged herself across her prominent bosom. She ran for the door, aware at last of the transparency of her outfit.