Dealbreaker Read online

  He looked around. On the building beside the café was a three-story building with a faded sign decorated with more of the annoying Arabic curlicues and the word Hotel. “We’ll try there.” His stomach rumbled. “And then we’ll see if anyone around here has anything decent to eat.”

  #

  The soldiers’ afternoon patrols turned out to be quick, infrequent, and perfunctory, the kind of patrols men go on when they know they’re simply marking time and don’t want to risk catching a bullet before they’re ordered out. Razz wasn’t expecting them to be any more alert once darkness fell, especially with the tension rumbling through the whole territory. In fact, he gave it even odds they would stay tucked into their bunkers and barracks and avoid the streets completely.

  At which point the big question became whether wandering locals might crimp up the job. Fortunately, they didn’t look like they were going to be a problem, either. The streets started clearing out around sundown, with people heading home or to whatever passed for entertainment in the area. Mukhtaar closed his shop at the same time as everyone else, joining up with some of the men who’d visited him earlier that day. From the group’s cheerful voices and bursts of laughter, it sounded like they were planning to make a night of it.

  Razz decided to wait until eleven o’clock anyway, just to make sure the Brits didn’t have any surprises up their sleeves. Then, he and Cutter slipped out of the hotel and headed across the deserted street to Mukhtaar’s shop.

  Chubb locks were a classic design that dated back to the previous century. But old-fashioned or not, they were still among the trickiest locks on earth to pick, and it took Razz six attempts to get the damn thing open. Normally, a single bungled attempt was all a burglar got, since the first failure froze the lock where it was and make a second try impossible. Fortunately, Razz had one of the special regulator keys necessary for resetting the pins and cylinder. Eventually, after more sweat and muttered curses than the job should have required, he and Cutter were inside.

  The safe, as he’d predicted, was much easier to crack. A minute of careful work, and it was open. Grinning with satisfaction, he pulled out the scrolls, laid them out on one of the tables, and unfolded his cheat sheet.

  None of them was the one the Collector wanted.

  “Check ‘em again,” Cutter urged.

  “I’ve checked ‘em three times,” Razz shot back, glaring down at the scrolls, his stomach doing slow somersaults around whatever the hell that stuff was they’d eaten for dinner. “It’s not here.”

  “It has to be here,” Cutter insisted, the frustration in his voice edging toward dread.

  Razz didn’t blame him. The Collector had made it clear from the moment he burned in those shoulder brands that the consequences of failure would be quick and certain death. “You want to come look?” Razz snarled. “A hundred says you won’t do any better.”

  “Okay, okay, let’s think this through,” Cutter said, looking around. “Mukhtaar said they’d found some other stuff along with the scrolls. Maybe it got mixed in with that lot.”

  “Oh, for—” Razz strangled off the curse. “You see anything else around here that looks like a scroll?” he demanded, waving the beam of his penlight around the shop. “Do you?”

  “No,” Cutter conceded. “But maybe it’s not a whole scroll. Maybe it’s just a fragment that got tucked away under something else.”

  Razz rolled his eyes. “Right.”

  “I don’t see you coming up with any bright ideas,” Cutter snapped.

  “Then go look,” Razz snapped back, glaring around the shop and trying to think. If they didn’t want to go back to the Collector empty-handed, he’d better come up with something, and fast.

  All right. The scroll wasn’t here. So either it had never been here, or else it had been moved again. If it had been moved, someone might have left a notice or receipt saying where it had been taken.

  His eye fell on a stack of paper scraps beside the cash register. A collection of orders or notes, he decided as he focused his penlight on them. Most of them were written in Arabic, but a fair number included some scribbled English.

  It was a long shot. But right now, long shots were all they had. Holding the penlight between his lips, he began methodically going through the notes.

  He’d just found something highly interesting when Cutter muttered a startled curse. “Found something,” he said, peering into one of the taller pots. “Bring the notes, will you?”

  “What is it?” Razz asked, scooping up the cheat sheet and crossing to his side.

  Cutter gestured at the jar. “Take a look. There—inside—right up against the wall.”

  Frowning, Razz shined his light into the jar. It looked like every other jar they’d seen since landing in this God-forsaken corner of the world.

  “About midway down,” Cutter prompted. “Right below that grayish ripple. See the broken piece?”

  Razz stiffened. Peeking out from a layer of the inside glaze was a corner of what looked like cloth or leather. The same cloth or leather, in fact, as the scroll Mukhtaar had shown them earlier.

  “They didn’t just hide it in the jar,” Cutter said in a self-satisfied tone. “They hid it in the jar. Clever.”

  “Yeah, they were a whole family of Einsteins,” Razz said. There were three characters showing through the broken section of glaze, and they definitely looked like the first three on the Collector’s sheet.

  But this was no time to go off half-cocked. Fortunately, they didn’t have to. A little careful poking, and he should be able to free enough of the scroll to be sure. Pulling off his hat, he reached for his switchblade—

  “Here,” Cutter said, sliding his own hidden knife from its wrist sheath and holding it out, hilt-first.

  “Thanks.” Razz put his hat back on and eased Cutter’s knife into the jar.

  Three minutes later, he had the first row of characters exposed. Two painstaking minutes after that, he had confirmation. “That’s it,” he sighed, putting the cheat sheet back in his pocket.

  “About time,” Cutter said with a grunt, getting a grip on the jar’s mouth. “Gonna have to break the jar, I guess. You want to do it here, or back in our room? Never mind.” Without waiting for an answer he lifted the jar over his head.

  “Easy—easy,” Razz snapped, jumping forward and grabbing his arm. “We’re not breaking it. Not yet.”

  “Why the hell not?” Cutter demanded, twitching his arm back. “If you think we’re lugging this piece of junk all the way back to Paris, you’re nuts.”

  “No, we’re breaking it, all right,” Razz assured him. “But we’re breaking it tomorrow.”

  In the dim reflected glow from his penlight he saw Cutter’s forehead crease. “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all.” Razz jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “I found a note over there. Another of Mukhtaar’s buddies is bringing in a bunch of coins and gems tomorrow for him to stash while he gets them appraised.” He pointed at the jar. “If something disappears from the shop tonight, we’ll probably scare him off and he’ll go hide the stuff somewhere else.”

  “Okay,” Cutter said slowly. “What if whatever he’s got is worthless?”

  “Can’t be more worthless than nothing, which is what we’ve got to show for this job right now,” Razz said sourly. “Come on—what’s one more day going to matter?”

  “And if this guy’s late?” Cutter countered. “I’m not sitting around this dump all week.”

  “If he’s not here by tomorrow night, we just take the jar and go,” Razz promised.

  Cutter’s lips puckered in indecision. Then, with a scowl, he set the jar back down on the table. “Okay,” he said. “But you’d better be right.”

  “I am,” Razz assured him. He patted the jar. “And just to be on the safe side, we’ll take turns watching the shop tomorrow to make sure no one walks off with this.”

  “I thought Mukhtaar said he couldn’t sell any of it.”

  “Yeah,
he said that,” Razz said darkly. “We’ll watch the place anyway.”

  “You’re the boss.” Cutter yawned. “Come on—let’s lock up and get back.” He gave Razz a sly, lopsided grin. “By the way,” he added, jerking his thumb back toward the jar. “You owe me a hundred.”

  #

  The morning dawned bright and hot, and by ten o’clock Razz was already sweating.

  The day didn’t get any better.

  The food was still strange, the people were still noisy and smelly, and their one brief moment of triumph, when Cutter went out foraging and came back with some bottles of real beer, quickly faded away when they discovered how watery and tasteless the stuff was. Between the food, the heat, and the boredom, it was about as miserable a day as any Razz had spent outside of an actual war zone.

  Though that non-war-zone status could change at any minute. According to the newspaper Razz had read on the flight from Paris, the Brits had had enough of the place and announced they were ending their old League of Nations Mandate. It was now up to the newly-minted United Nations to decide how to handle the increasingly vociferous demands that the Jewish survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust be given a homeland of their own.

  Those demands weren’t sitting well with the current Arab occupants or with the cluster of well-armed Arab nations surrounding them. Razz had had enough experience with negotiations to know that neither side would be completely happy with whatever the diplomats came up with, and he suspected that whichever side was unhappiest would be prepared to take the dispute directly to the streets.

  Still, that could have a bright side, at least as far as he and Cutter were concerned. A war in Palestine could go on for years, and people in the middle of a prolonged conflict always needed more goods than official supply lines could get to them. That meant a black market, and if the two of them could get in on the ground floor they should be able to turn a pretty penny on the deal.

  Assuming, of course, that the Collector allowed them to leave France.

  Razz scowled, wiping the sweat off his forehead as he peered out their second-floor window at the entrance to Mukhtaar’s shop. The sooner they came up with a way to get the squid-armed bastard off their backs, the better.

  Mukhtaar was apparently a very popular man. At least fifty people went into his shop during the hours Razz was on watch, most of them staying only a few minutes but some disappearing inside for up to an hour. The group who’d barged in on them the previous day was also back, at the same time as before, and remained inside for nearly an hour and a half. Apparently, Mukhtaar had some kind of regular meeting or drinking party going.

  Razz had started out the day hoping to identify whoever it was who was supposedly bringing in the coins and gems in Mukhtaar’s note. Unfortunately, that plan turned out to be a wash. There were a sprinkling of people around wearing European-style clothing, but the overwhelming majority were decked out in Arabian robes and head-scarf things. Even a moderately large bag or coin purse tucked away beneath the robes would be impossible to detect from Razz’s distance, and he soon gave up even trying to spot any telltale bulges.

  What he was sure of—what he damn well absolutely had to make sure of—was that none of Mukhtaar’s visitors that day emerged with a package big enough to hold their jar and its hidden treasure.

  #

  The sun went down. The noise of the city lingered briefly afterward, the heat of the day lingered somewhat longer.

  And finally, it was time.

  In Razz’s experience, a given lock was usually easier to open the second time around, and this one was no exception. A single bit of magic with the picks, a satisfying turn of the cylinder, and they were in. Smiling tightly, his mind dancing with images of gems and rare coins, he pushed open the door.

  And felt a sudden tingle on the back of his neck. Something was different. Something was wrong. He peered into the darkened shop, a breeze whispering past his ear—

  He tensed. A breeze? But the shop had only one door, and the windows last night had all been shuttered. Where the hell was a breeze coming from?

  And then his brain caught up with him, and he ducked into the shop, breaking to the right to get out of the potentially lethal framing of the doorway as his hand darted beneath his jacket and emerged with his .45. He peered into the gloom, thumbing the hammer into cocked position, and spotted a ragged-edged, window-sized hole beside the coffee urn. If whoever had dug through the shop’s back wall was still here—

  “Freeze!” Cutter snapped from the left side of the doorway. “Hands where I can see them!”

  There he was: a shadowy figure crouched behind one of the tables near the back.

  Right beside the jar he and Cutter had come here to get.

  “Stand up,” Cutter continued, starting toward the figure through the maze of other tables. “Keep those hands open.”

  “Please, effendi, I meant no harm,” the figure pleaded as he straightened slowly to his feet. “I was passing and saw that someone had broken into this place—”

  “And thought you’d help yourself,” Cutter cut him off. “Shut up and move to your left. Come on, move it.”

  “Of course, effendi, of course.” The figure stirred.

  And suddenly snatched up the jar and lifted it in front of his head and torso.

  Razz caught his breath. “Don’t—” He strangled off the reflexive order.

  But it was too late. “Ah,” the intruder said, his terrified pleading abruptly gone. “So it is my jar that you’ve come for. I thought as much.”

  “Like hell it’s your jar,” Cutter growled, increasing his speed. “Put it down and—”

  He stopped, coming to an abrupt halt as the figure’s right hand reached behind him and emerged with a small gun. “Careful, old boy,” he warned softly. “Shoot me and you risk damaging the treasure. I, on the other hand, have no such reason to hold back.”

  Razz hissed out a breath. He was right—in this light even a crack marksman would have trouble hitting his target without damaging the jar, and a .45 slug blasting through the hidden scroll could easily destroy whatever it was the Collector was looking for. And neither he nor Cutter was a crack marksman to begin with. “Take it easy,” he soothed. “There’s no need for anyone to shoot anyone else.”

  “I agree,” the intruder said. “Just lower your guns, there’s a good chap.”

  “Sure,” Razz said, lowering his aim a little. “Cutter?”

  Cutter muttered something vicious, but also lowered his aim. “Happy?” he growled.

  There was a hint of movement by the back wall. Razz flicked his eyes that direction and saw a shadowy figure standing framed in the hole. “Ari!” the figure whispered urgently. “Come. Come!”

  “It’s all right, Ephraim,” Ari said, backing that direction, the jar still held like a shield in front of him. “Go home. I’ll deal with this.”

  A sudden thought struck Razz. Ari was holding the jar as a hostage. Maybe Razz could do the same with Ari’s partner. He shifted his aim—

  Too late. Ephraim had already disappeared from the opening, and over the faint sound of a distant car Razz could hear the other’s rapid footsteps as he ran into the night.

  Razz felt his lips curl back from his teeth in contempt. He would never have abandoned his partner like that, especially not in the face of two-to-one odds. Damn coward.

  Cutter was apparently thinking the same thing. “You sure know how to pick your friends,” he commented sarcastically.

  “Ephraim’s not exactly a friend,” Ari said, still backing toward the hole. “Easy, now.”

  Razz looked back at the hole, measuring it with his eyes. “You realize you’re just wasting everyone’s time,” he pointed out. “There’s no way for you to work your way out that hole without putting down your gun or the jar.”

  “Or both,” Cutter agreed. “So what do you say we all put our guns away and discuss this like civilized gentlemen?”

  “Sorry,” Ari said. “Finder’s keepers, and
all that.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Cutter growled. “You came in that hole. You know what it’ll take to get out again.”

  “Not necessarily,” Ari said. “Maybe I’ll just kick at the edges and make it bigger.”

  Cutter snorted. “Now you’re being ridiculous. The wall’s way too thick for that.”

  “I’m glad you noticed,” Ari said. He was right in front of the hole now. “So you’ll realize that I don’t have to worry about this.”

  And dropping his gun on top of the coffee urn, he plucked a grenade from his waistband, pulled the pin with his teeth, and lobbed it across the shop toward them.

  Razz snarled a curse, wartime reflexes kicking in and throwing him into a diving leap to the side. As he flew past one of the tables he grabbed the edge and pulled it over. It landed on its edge on the floor beside him, stacks of cloth and pottery bits raining down across his head and body. Wrapping his left arm around his face, he braced himself for the blast.

  Nothing happened.

  Razz frowned, belatedly starting to count down the seconds. Surely the grenade should have exploded by now. “Cutter?” he called.

  “Damn it,” Cutter swore, and there was a clatter of pottery and coins from across the shop as the other scrambled to his feet. “Get up. Get up.”

  Cautiously, Razz raised his head above the level of the overturned table, the movement creating his own clatter of artifacts. “Dud?”

  “Practice grenade,” Cutter snarled, rushing toward the door. “Come on.”

  The street outside was still quiet. Either no one in the neighborhood had heard the commotion, or else they’d learned it was best to ignore such things. “Which way?” Razz whispered, straining his ears for the sounds of footsteps.

  “You go left; I’ll go right,” Cutter said. “You spot him, whistle.”

  Razz nodded and took off down the street, his eyes on the row of shops alongside him, decocking his .45 for safety but keeping it ready in his hand. Behind Mukhtaar’s shop, he knew, was a narrow alley whose only exit this direction was at the next cross street. Unless Ari broke into one of the other shops along the way that was his only way out. If he had gone to ground in one of the shops, all Razz had to do was double back into the alley when he reached the cross street and look for signs of a break-in.