ALEXANDRA SELLERS – Undercover Sultan (страница 6)

At the corner she turned to cross the street and risked a glance back. Two women were offering their wares to him, jointly and severally, and they didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer. Her smile died as a totally unfamiliar jealous rage swept through her.

She had whirled instinctively, ready to charge back towards the cosy little group, almost before she realized it. Then she took a deep, surprised breath. She had never been jealous before, and here she was, furiously proprietal about a man whose photograph she had first seen less than an hour ago! Was she going crazy?

Maybe it was just the effect of the danger. Danger heightened the emotions, she had always heard that. But still she stood glaring down the street as he smiled his regrets and passed the hungry hookers by. One of them glanced up and saw Mariel staring, saw that the man was following her, and started screaming at her in very pungent street French.

“Get off my beat, putain!”

“Va-t’en, vache!” Mariel called back, partly for the hell of it, and partly to stay in character in case anyone was watching.

Perhaps a little too much in character. The two hookers erupted with fury at her show of defiance and took after her. Fortunately the light had changed. Mariel ran across the busy street, followed by the cat burglar, who was followed by the two enraged women.

People in cars began to honk encouragement as the drama unfolded in front of them. And on the opposite side of the street, a block behind, she saw Michel’s gunman turn the corner, take one look in their direction, and instantly join the chase.

Maybe she should have sacrificed a little of the character of her part, Mariel reflected. No one ever ran the four-minute mile in three-inch stilettos, she was pretty sure of that.

The cat burglar caught up with her, grabbed her arm and kept running. This caused the hookers to scream like wounded banshees, but a glance showed her they at least were losing interest in the chase. Maybe she had crossed the frontier of their territory now.

The man with the gun, which he was now obviously holding in the pocket of his sweats, wasn’t losing interest. He was pounding along, barely a block behind.

Fortunately, her car was around the next corner. Breathless, Mariel could only point wildly to the right as they approached the next street. The cat burglar understood and, keeping his grip on her arm, half dragged her into the turn.

Her car was halfway along the narrow, dark street. Mariel reached for her backpack, then gave vent to a breathless screech.

“What?” said the stranger.

“My bag!” she panted. “I left—my bag—no—no—keys!”

“Where?”

“In the—office,” Mariel croaked.

Luck, she had called it? Where was the luck in escaping if Michel knew who had been there?

Three

They had slowed their steps, but now they heard the sounds of running footsteps behind them, and the stranger grabbed her arm again and set off across the street at an angle. She just saw the shadow of the mouth of the alley before they were in it.

It was pitch-dark, and their entry was the trigger for some frantic scuffling near some piles of refuse. Mariel hoped it wasn’t rats.

The cat burglar seemed to have eyes as good as his namesake, because he led her safely through the alley past all impediments before her own eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. When they got to the other end a glance behind showed them the gunman framed at the entrance. A moment later they heard clanging and cursing, so his eyes weren’t as good as the stranger’s, either.

They crossed another narrow street and plunged into another laneway. They were in a very old part of the city, the walls all worn, dark brick, the streets twisting and narrow. But the other, though he wasn’t gaining, managed to stick on their tail.

Mariel was panting heavily when the stranger dragged her into another narrow opening. Now she could hear a pounding like thunder. The drum of doom, she thought a moment later. Because this time the lane led into a cramped courtyard, and there was no other exit.

“Oh my God!” Mariel panted. “Is there a fire esc—”

A sound from the stranger silenced her. He was staring around in the darkness, and now pressed his finger lightly to her lips. “This way,” he whispered in her ear.

It was only then that she saw the little group of teenage boys clustered around a doorway, deep in shadow, murmuring amongst themselves. The stranger’s confident hand clasped her wrist and drew her in that direction. Before Mariel had time to wonder, the door opened a crack, pushed from the inside, and music came pounding out.

The cat burglar leapt the last couple of feet and grabbed the door as the kids, glancing nervously at him, slipped through one by one. Mariel entered in their wake as the stranger held the door and prevented its closing. He followed her inside.

The music was loud and raucous, and that was nothing compared to the crowd. Mariel forgot all her troubles for a moment of wonder. Compared to what the women in here were wearing, her own outfit was a model of respectability. She had never seen so much big hair in her life, and the fingernails were longer than the skirts. And as for the eyes! Spiders were nothing to these women—most of them seemed to have tame lemurs on their lashes.

One or two of them were eyeing the stranger’s snug black get-up with extremely frank approval. “Chéri!” said one, her popping eyes rivetted to his groin.

“He’s a cat burglar!” Mariel told her waspishly. Since in French the phrase for cat burglar was mount-in-the-air, she received some wide-eyed looks of envy and approval.

“I believe you! Comme elle a de la chance!” a big, dark-eyed blonde cried, one wrist to her forehead in an excess of sensibility, faking a faint. “My dears!”

Mariel was starting to smell a rat.

But it was only when a clone from The Wild Ones, Marlon Brando from the black biker’s cap down to the chain boots, groped her own butt, crying, “My God, you are so subtle! I love subtlety!” that the penny finally dropped.

“Thank you!” she muttered, as the cat burglar grabbed her hand again and started beating a path to the entrance door across the room.

“What are you drinking?” Brando shouted over the din.

“Scotch?” Mariel called hopefully, because she sure could use a drink.

Brando looked delighted. “I’ll be right back! Wait for me! Don’t disappear!”

She smiled helplessly at him as the stranger, still ruthlessly grasping her wrist, dragged her through the crush of dancing, gyrating male bodies.

“I’m pooped! Can’t we stop for a quick drink?” she pleaded, as they arrived at the edge of the crowd a few feet from the door.

A large and burly bouncer was evicting the three blue-jeaned kids who had entered through the back door with them. “We only wanted to watch!” one was protesting.

The stranger stared at her disbelievingly. “A drink?”

“Marlon Brando over there offered me a scotch. I sure could use something. And let’s face it, the way we’re dressed, Michel would never find us in here.”

He grabbed her wrist again without answering and set off. The bouncer watched incuriously as they ran out past him and up the steps of the areaway. They emerged on a broad boulevard with plenty of traffic, where a taxi screeched to a stop almost before the stranger lifted his hand.

They scrambled in, and Mariel fell back against the upholstery, half panting, half laughing. It was only as she heard the stranger murmur “Le Charlemagne” that she realized she had missed the moment for separating. They ought to have said goodbye and each taken a separate cab.

“Is that your address?” she asked.

“But of course,” he said, so blandly she didn’t know whether to believe him.

“I think we should separate now,” she said, though her heart wasn’t in it. As the lights of Paris flickered past, light and shadow falling over their faces in a strange tempo, she gazed into his face and felt suddenly that she was in a dream. A dream she had dreamt a thousand times before without ever quite remembering.

“Separate?” he repeated, in soft protest. “Ah, no, ma petite, I cannot be separated from you yet.” He bent over her, where she lay slouched down against the cushions, his face close. Her pulse hammered a protest. She lifted a hand to his chest, whether to hold him off or draw him closer, even she didn’t know. His lips moved closer.

“Stay with me tonight,” he murmured.

This was the handsomest man in the world talking to her. Mariel’s heart did a shaky back flip. Lust struggled with common sense, which reminded her that she didn’t even know his name. And that he might well be in the enemy camp. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, her heart protested, but common sense told her she couldn’t be certain that he was Michel’s enemy.

“I think I should get out,” she murmured, half to herself. “Driver—” she called, but the stranger put his fingers to her lips to silence her.

“Where will you go?”

“Home, of course.”

He shook his head. “Without your handbag? Where are your keys?”

“The landlady will let me in, and I have a spare key hidden.”

“What besides your keys was in the bag?”