Lawless (17 page)

Matt staggered toward the glint of the revolver. Hardly a hair out of place yet, Lepp grinned like a white-toothed wolf and snapped over onto his belly. He grabbed Matt’s leg in a vise of two hands and used his adversary’s own tactics—a lift that sprawled the American on the floor.

The back of Matt’s head hit the corner of one of the low tables. Behind his eyes he saw patterns of light like the shellbursts in a Whistler nocturne. He groaned, extended his right hand toward the revolver. The gun was tantalizingly close, but he couldn’t quite reach it.

Lepp had regained his feet. He was breathing a trifle roughly.

“Let’s see—how you—paint—with a ruined hand—”

Frantically, Matt started to draw his fingers back. Lepp’s bare heel slammed down. He missed Matt’s hand by an inch. The impact made the Prussian grimace and scream, “Little
bastard!”
He leaned over, grabbed Matt’s hair, banged his head on the corner of the table. Matt’s left hand flopped out. Lepp laughed and stamped on it.

Matt didn’t want to yell but he couldn’t help it. He brought his hand toward his side just as Lepp hammered his heel down again. A miss. The Prussian grew even more enraged. He started stamping with greater force but less control. His knee rose and fell, the foot moving so fast he seemed to be doing some kind of mad dance. Matt managed to keep jerking his hand out of the way.

He shoved his right hand outward again. His fingers brushed the revolver’s hatched butt plate. Lepp kept slamming his heel down,
crash
and
crash.
Concentrating on the gun for a moment, Matt didn’t pull his other hand away fast enough. Lepp’s heel caught him. He yelled. Then his face contorted with rage. He extended his arm until he thought it would tear from its socket. But he caught the butt of the LeFauchaux and brought the gun back across his body and fired upward once, twice, three times.

The first bullet pierced Lepp’s left ribs. The second missed. The third tore into his groin. Shrieking, the Prussian was knocked backward. Blood poured over the flapping hem of the kimono. He sat down in a corner, shuddering violently. The light went out of his eyes the moment his spine settled into place.

Matt’s right forearm began to shake. He grew aware of voices bellowing in the corridor. Smoke from the revolver floated past his face. For a moment longer he stared at the dead man. The anger in Matt’s eyes became disbelief, then consternation.

He rolled onto his stomach and hid his head, fighting sickness. He’d never killed anyone before. And to kill a man as he had—to blow huge, grisly holes in him—God almighty, that was a vile thing, no matter what the justification.

“What’s going on in there, Colonel? Who fired that shot?”

The commotion outside wrenched him back to reality. The gnome or someone else was battering at the door. The hinges looked as if they might tear loose from the wood any second.

Matt lurched to his feet. A ringing in his ears diminished. He stowed the revolver in his belt and pushed tangled hair out of his eyes. His left hand throbbed.

In a moment he was kneeling beside Strelnik. He put his ear close to the little man’s mouth. He felt faint, warm breath.

“Sime, can you open your eyes? Sime, it’s Matt.”

He shook Strelnik’s shoulders several times and got only a slight groan for his effort. All at once he was unbelievably angry. Who
was
this man who dared to make him feel responsibility he didn’t want? He could have died in this room, for God’s sake! As it was, the Prussian had come close to destroying his hand, then turned him into a murderer, and he wasn’t out of danger yet. Far from it.

The door shivered, struck hard again from the outside. Wood was splintering around the top hinge. The concierge’s shrill voice joined the others, howling questions and threats. Fear quickly diluted Matt’s shameful anger.

He lifted Strelnik to his feet. Fortunately his friend didn’t weigh much. He slipped an arm around Strelnik’s waist, then looped Strelnik’s arm over his own neck and half carried, half dragged him through Lepp’s incense-laden bedroom.

He had no trouble locating the escape route the beefy young man had used. A door stood ajar—a door leading to a short hallway that in turn opened onto the landing of a rickety outside stair. The staircase was attached to the building’s rear face.

The stair swayed and sagged in an alarming way as Matt stumbled downward with his burden. Rain lashed his face and made the steps slippery. Several times he almost lost his balance. When it happened on the second-floor landing, he grabbed the rail with his right hand. Rotted wood gave and broke.

He teetered on the edge, gasping, and would have plummeted into space if Strelnik’s legs hadn’t given out. The dead weight of the little man pulled him backward, out of danger.

Finally he reached the ground. A policeman’s whistle shrilled in the darkness. To his left, lanterns bobbed in a passageway leading back to the Rue Cujas. Strident voices called for him to halt. He yanked the revolver and fired two shots over his head. The voices went silent. The forward motion of the lamps stopped.

Strelnik’s free hand plucked at Matt’s Overcoat. Rolling his head around and gulping air, the little man was waking.

The rain slacked off suddenly. “Come on, Sime, we can make it,” Matt whispered, not fully believing it.

He sank to his ankles in mud and garbage as he helped Strelnik stagger through the darkness. All at once a grim thought occurred to him. Now that “Herr Gruen” was dead, his real identity would not remain a secret, nor would that of his killer—the gnome would see to that.

In the garden on the Rue Saint-Vincent, a bedraggled and badly shaken Matthew Kent accepted a glass of wine from Dolly. Leah Strelnik hugged and kissed her bruised husband. Hovering nearby with a lamp, Madame Rochambeau demanded to know what madness was being perpetrated by those who were—forthwith—no longer tenants.

Matt looked like someone who made his living by street robbery. He ignored the landlady, finished the wine and stumbled into the hall leading to his quarters. Dolly followed.

He could barely flex the fingers of his left hand, and the entire back of it was mottled with purple and yellow patches. His spine hurt. So did his arms and his groin.

Yet none of that mattered. All that mattered was the man he’d left dead in the Rue Cujas—a member of the Prussian diplomatic mission.

He made up his mind. “Dolly, pack whatever you need for travel. We’re taking the first train to the Channel.”

She stopped a pace behind him, looking as if she doubted his seriousness.

“Damn it, I told you what I did to that man! The Prussians will turn this city on its head till the police give them satisfaction.”

She hesitated only a moment longer. “All right, love. All right—we’ll go.”

He slashed the air. “In half an hour! Less, if we can.”

She nodded, slipped by him and vanished down the hall. He rested against the wall and rubbed his eyes.

The Strelniks had come in and overheard. Leah said, “You’re going to England?”

“Yes, and you’d be wise if you woke Anton and left with us,” Matt advised.

Madame Rochambeau’s lamp glowed somewhere beyond the garden door. They heard her approaching, asking her repetitious questions. Matt was astonished at Strelnik’s reaction to his statement.

“You’re right. We’ll come.”

Leah’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Now, now, no objections. Remember, I could be held as an accomplice.” He almost sounded pleased.

“Accomplice?” Madame Rochambeau repeated in an alarmed voice. “Who’s an accomplice? Me? I insist that someone inform me about the reason for all this commotion!”

But no one did; it wasn’t safe. So the landlady lurched into view and stood in the garden door, her expression rather forlorn.

Matt was surprised at Strelnik’s ebullience as well as his recuperative powers. The little man looked as if he’d been dragged through the Paris sewers but said he felt remarkably good. On the frantic flight back across the Seine, he’d gasped out the story of his captivity. Part of it remained a mystery. Lepp had refused to say how the Prussians had found Strelnik’s original hiding place. There were hints of an informant, but nothing specific.

Once on the Rue Cujas, Strelnik had been subjected to a long and severe beating interrupted by periods of questioning. He thought the questioning had gone on for three or four hours. Finally, when he continued to deny any knowledge of documents dealing with the Hohenzollern candidacy, Lepp had stepped in, slapped him a few times and contemptuously said Strelnik’s silence didn’t matter; he knew an easier nut to crack: Leah.

“My God, Matt, I thought it was a cheap bluff” was the little man’s only comment on that.

After the initial abuse, he hadn’t been treated too badly, though he had been forced to swallow endless doses of some narcotic, which kept him pacified. Now that all the horrors were behind him, he seemed happy as a child with candy.

He clapped his younger friend on the shoulder. “I am a man who makes quick decisions in a crisis. I feel like a dead man reprieved. And I don’t care to flirt with reversion to the other state.” There was an emphatic nod of his head for Leah’s benefit. “We’re going.”

“Going?” Madame Rochambeau bleated from the doorway. Her jowly face was far less truculent now.

Strelnik sniffed. “Precisely, madame. You ordered us to do so.”

“In the heat of anger a person sometimes says—”

Dolly poked her head into the corridor, her voice overlapping. “What about your paints and things?”

For the first time, Matt thought of the Matamoras canvas. Leaving that was like leaving a part of himself, like abandoning a precious child of his imagination. It pained him to shrug. “I’ll write and ask Fochet to send everything if we get out safely.”
Fochet who’d never gotten around to talking with her.

“Matt, are you sure?”

“Yes! The paints and the pictures don’t matter now.”

In truth they mattered very much. He hated what had happened tonight. He hated himself for making the choices he’d made, and he hated the necessity of making them, even though he could have made no others. That was the goddamned trouble. He could have made no others.

An uncontrollable bitterness crept in as he added, “Oh, but pack that cartoon of us that Auguste did, will you? After spending several years of my life in Paris, I’d like to take something with me—something besides a hand that may be useless.”

With a melancholy look, she disappeared into their rooms again.

Strelnik and Leah rushed away to pack. Matt stood leaning against the wall, studying his numb hand. He heard Anton wake with an anxious cry.

“Leaving,” Madame Rochambeau murmured. “I won’t have any more income.”

He listened to her heavy footsteps retreating across the garden, and her murmured exclamations over the sudden financial calamity. He closed his eyes, thankful just to rest a moment longer.

Little Anton’s voice made him think of his promise to marry Dolly. He’d fulfill that promise. Stop wallowing in self-pity; stop speculating about whether things would have come out differently if Fochet had remembered to speak to her. The promise had been given. Besides, a part of him did want to go through with it.

But another part of him felt deep regret—the part that would be squeezed and shorted.

He heard Fochet.

A priesthood.

Priests are celibate for a very good reason. They can’t successfully serve both God and the flesh.

I’ve seen such a choice tear many a talented young fellow apart
—

Goddamn it, if Fochet had only spoken to her!

Ah, what was the use? That was past. Finished.

The whole confused situation seemed summed up in two facts. He thought the Matamoras painting was the best work he’d ever done. And he had to leave it behind.

Before he and Dolly and the Strelniks set off through the darkness, Matt apologized to Madame Rochambeau for the trouble they’d caused. He gave her half of his remaining money—a decent sum—and she lapsed into maudlin murmurings of regret about their departure. Matt didn’t tell her they were going to the Gare du Nord. When the police called, as they surely would, she could honestly deny any knowledge of their destination.

She was so agreeable now, she readily consented to carry a message to a woman who worked at the Café Guerbois. She did say she hoped the message had nothing to do with Mr. Strelnik’s subversive interests or the mysterious turmoil of the past couple of days.

“No, it’s personal, not political,” Matt assured her. “Just tell her I said the obnoxious German customer would never bother her again. She’ll be pleased to hear it. She’ll probably give you a complimentary carafe of wine.”

“She will?” Madame Rochambeau’s brows shot up. “Perhaps I’ll take my friend Alice when I go.”

She dabbed her eyes. “I must say, Mr. Kent, you’re really a very—a very nice young man—for an American. But you certainly do get involved in some curious affairs.”

He smiled to hide hurt. “I do, don’t I? Not always on purpose, though. Goodbye, Madame Rochambeau.”

A
NIGHT LOCAL
carried them northwestward. Amiens, Boulogne, Calais. Matt was still feeling the physical and emotional effects of the struggle in the tenement. The memory of it was clear enough to start him shivering and bring Dolly’s hand over to clasp his.

The two of them were sharing one of the benches in a second-class compartment. Strelnik and his wife sat opposite. Anton was a blanketed bundle in his mother’s lap. Both parents were unusually quiet, and Strelnik’s face had lost its earlier enthusiasm. Had grown somber, in fact. Matt wondered if the little man was contemplating the family’s troubled past or its doubtful future. Either way, he felt sorry for his friend.

Repeatedly, his thoughts returned to the Rue Cujas. To stop it, he rested his forehead against the compartment’s outer wall, shut his eyes, tried to doze. It proved easier than he’d expected. Suddenly he was in the midst of a dream fully as vivid as his memories of Lepp’s pied-à-terre.