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before the murder job, and that I should take his place on the last walk back
to his apartment."
I couldn't help saying anxiously, "Oh, but you shouldn't have taken the risk.
Supposing they'd changed the plan. Supposing they'd decided to do it as you
walked down the street, or with a time bomb or something!"
He shrugged. "We thought of all that. It was a calculated risk, and it's those
I'm paid for taking." He smiled. "Anyway, here I am.
But it wasn't nice walking down that street, and I was glad to get inside. The
Mounties had taken over the flat opposite to Boris, and
I knew I was all right and simply had to play the tethered goat while the
sportsmen shot the wild game. I could have stayed out of the flat, hidden
somewhere in the building until it was all over, but I had a hunch that the
goat must be a real goat, and I was right, because at eleven o'clock the
telephone rang and a man's voice said. 'Is that Mr. Boris?' giving his assumed
name. I said, 'Yes. Who is dat?' trying to sound foreign, and the man said,
'Thank you. Telephone Directory here. We're just checking the subscribers in
your district. Night.' I said good night and thanked my stars I had been there
to take the bogus call that was to make sure Boris was at home.
"The last hour was nervous work. There was going to be a lot of gunfire and
probably a lot of death, and no one likes the prospect of those things, even
if they don't expect to be hit. I had a couple of guns, heavy ones that really
stop people, and at ten to twelve I
took up my position to the right of the door in an angle of solid masonry and
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got ready just in case Uhlmann or one of the hoodlums managed to bust through
the Mounties across the passage. To tell you the truth, as the minutes went by
and I could imagine the killer car coming down the street and the men piling
out and running softly up the stairs, I wished 1 had accepted the Mounties'
offer that one of their men should share this vigil, as they called it, with
me. But it would have been a five-hour tête-à-tête and, apart from not knowing
what we would talk about during all that time, I've always had a preference
for operating alone. It's just the way I'm made.
Well, the minutes and the seconds ticked by, and then, bang on time, at five
minutes to midnight, I heard a rush of rubber soles on the stairs and then all
hell broke loose."
James Bond paused. He rubbed a hand down over his face. It was a gesture that
was either to clear his mind's eye or to try and wipe some memory away from
it. Then he lit another cigarette and went on.
"I heard the lieutenant in charge of the Mountie party shout, 'It's the law!
Get 'em up!' And then there was a mixture of single shots and bursts from the
chopper" he grinned "sorry, sub-machine-gun, and, somebody screamed. Then the
lieutenant shouted, 'Get that man!' and the next moment the lock blew off the
door beside me and a man charged in. He held a smoking machine-gun tight
against the hip, which is the way to use them, and he whirled from right to
left in the bed-sitter, looking for Boris. I knew it was
Uhlmann, the ex-Gestapo man. One's had to get to know the smell of a German,
and of a Russian for the matter of that, in my line of work, and I had him in
my sights. I shot at his gun and blasted it out of his hands. But he was
quick. He jumped behind the open door. The door was only a thin bit of wood. I
couldn't take a chance on him having another gun and firing first, so I
sprayed a wide Z
of bullets through the wood, bending my knees lower as I did so. Just as well
I did this, because he fired a quick burst that nearly parted my hair when I
was almost on my knees. But two of my bullets had got him, in the left
shoulder and right hip as it turned out, and he crashed down behind the door
and lay quiet.
"The rest of the battle outside had disappeared down the stairs after the
gunmen, but a wounded Mountie suddenly appeared at the entrance to my room on
hands and knees to help me. He said, 'Want a hand, feller?' and Uhlmann fired
through the door at the voice and and, well, he killed the man. But that gave
me the height of Uhlmann's gun and I fired almost as he did, and then I ran
out into the center of the room to give him some more if need be. But he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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