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“Now!”
He stood up and leaned close. Her perfume was intoxicating. She reached a hand behind the back of his head, curled her fingers into his hair, and pulled him almost to her lips. “Asa?” she whispered.
“Yes, ma’am?” His mouth was dry, his heart hammering his ribs.
“Did the Coast Guard teach you how to cock an automatic pistol?”
36
DAZED BY PAULINE GRANDZAU’S perfume and dumbfounded by her question, Asa Somers asked, “Why, ma’am?”
“Do you know how to cock that gun?” A whisper. Fierce.
“Yes.”
“I want you to go to the drunk. Take the automatic from his shoulder holster and cock it and bring it to me.”
“Wh—?”
“My hand is not strong enough to pull the slide, and my own gun is not heavy enough to stop those two . . . Don’t look at them!”
Somers glanced at the sleeping drunk. “When?”
“When the shooting starts.”
“Wh—?”
“Now!” She tipped the table on its side so the thick wooden top was facing the two big men like a shield. She kicked her leg high. Her dress flew open. As Somers dived toward the drunk, he glimpsed her snow-white thigh encircled in black lace. He saw a tiny pistol in a half holster, which she drew and cocked in a blur of motion. The shooting started before he reached the drunk, two quick shots like snapped sticks and a sullen Boom! back from a heavier gun.
The gunshots sent everyone in the place diving for the floor and woke up the drunk, who slapped groggily at Somers’s hand. She was right about it being a big automatic—a Colt Navy M1911. Somers jerked the slide, chambering a round. Then he grabbed the revolver before the drunk could and leaped back to Fräulein Grandzau, who by then had fired two more shots. One of the men was down on the floor with a pistol half fallen from his fingers. The other was charging them with a gun in one hand, a knife in the other, blood on his shirt, and murder in his eyes.
Fräulein Grandzau took the automatic in both her tiny hands. She fired once.
The .45 slug knocked the man’s legs out from under him and he went down with a crash.
She turned to Asa, her eyes oddly detached, as if she had left the room earlier.
“Good job, Asa. Now ve auf Wiedersehen before the police.”
Everyone else in the bar had scattered or was still hugging the floor. She led hi
m onto a veranda and down rickety stairs into an alley, back onto Bay Street, past the liquor row of shacks and stables converted to warehouses that were receiving crates and barrels even at night, and onto Frederick Street.
“Who were they?” asked Asa.
“Two Russians who wanted to kill us.”
“How did you know they were Russians?”
“I know Russians.”
Ahead, at last, was their Lucerne Hotel.
“Is it O.K. if I hang on to this?” Somers asked. He opened his coat where he had slipped the drunk’s revolver into his waistband.
“Yes,” she said. “You earned it. Go get some sleep. I have to cable Isaac.”
“No you don’t.”
