Undercover Sultan

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?”

She was trying to remember where she had left the bag. She ran over those moments in the office—she had been picking up her bag when she noticed the open door of the secret office. And she had gone to close the office door. Had she left the bag on her desk, or taken it with her and dropped it in her scuffle with the stranger?

If she had left it on her desk there was just a faint possibility that Michel might think she had left her bag behind when she left for the night. If she had dropped it in his secret office…

She shook her head. “Just what you’d imagine. My credit cards, money…address book, phone numbers—everything.”

What a fool. And all because she had fallen for a face in a photograph. If she hadn’t had complete brain collapse and decided to print that photograph, none of it would have happened. She would probably have been out of the office before the man even arrived.

Haroun watched her. He was aware of too many contradictions. Why was Michel Verdun chasing a lady of the night with an armed man in tow? What had she been doing in his office if she wasn’t there at his invitation?

“And what of this man? When he finds your handbag with your address—will he make you a visit?”

Mariel shivered. Not before she had gathered her belongings and disappeared, she hoped. She had money in the flat. She would take her things to a hotel and phone Hal for instructions.

He noted the shiver. “What were you doing there?” he demanded.

She looked up at him through ridiculously long lashes, her eyes wary, challenging, but still somehow seductive and, as he expected, parried. “What were you?”

He laughed and lifted a hand, palm facing her, in a sign of surrender. “Eh bien, d’accord!” he said. “We ask no personal questions. Do you think the gun was for me or for you?”

He was looking at her with a devil-may-care glint in his eyes and tilt to his lips that made her heart kick again. She pressed her own lips together and lowered her head.

“I don’t know. You can’t have tripped the alarm, because I turned it off. Maybe he’s had something new installed I don’t know about.”

His eyebrow went up. “You are familiar with his operation?”

“No personal questions, remember?”

“When you saw me, you said, It’s you. And then, Michelle is sick, so if you don’t mind briefing me—”

He looked at her enquiringly, but she only shook her head. He frowned in thought. “Michel!” he exclaimed, looking enlightened. “Ah! I imagined Michelle was a girl you replaced, but you meant—Verdun himself. You thought I was there to meet Verdun, you were playing for time, is that right?”

She pressed her lips together and looked at him. Everything about him seemed to have a glow. His dark eyes, his waving hair, his warm skin. His whole being.

When she made no answer he went on thinking aloud. “And yet you were there to…”

He paused invitingly. They were driving further away from her own arrondissement as they talked. She came out of a kind of daze to realize she was still half lying against the upholstery and he was still bent over her in intimate closeness. Mariel pushed the stranger aside and sat up with a small tug of regret for the loss of the sensual little cocoon she had been inhabiting.

“I want to go home,” she said. “Would you mind paying…?”