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CHAPTER ONE

The fog was a thick gray blanket of wetness as the police boat slid slowly through the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The coast of France was a mile to our stern, and up ahead we could see the riding lights of the big cargo vessel this launch was pursuing. I crouched in the starboard scuppers, my hand wrapped around an M-16 automatic rifle. 

Me, I'm Cherry Delight. I'm a redheaded chick who works for N.Y.M.P.H.O.—the New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organization—and right now I had been assigned to work with the French police against the Mafia boys who were having themselves a ball by smuggling stolen guns out of France to points south, east, and north. Right now I was also cold and wet and generally miserable. The raw wind was cutting through my thin garments and coating my girlish flesh with droplets of what seemed to be ice water. 

A French flic out of Marseille was at my right, crouched over as I was, his eyes trying to pierce the fog, to see through those grayish drops of mist to the deck of the Mafia boat. It was no go, these mists were far too thick. 

Still, the police launch slid forward, faster. 

The throbbing of the cargo ship's turbine engines was thick, heavy, its sound flooded the night, drowned out the twin Rolls Royce engines that powered this police launch. We edged closer, closer. 

“Be ready, ma'amselle," whispered my companion. 

I lifted the M-16. 

The night erupted in dazzling light. The police launch had switched on its big flood-lamp, the night was gone, it seemed like day. I saw the other boat clearly, even through the mists, and the side of the deck that faced us, where three men who had been walking, stood now, staring at us in disbelief. 

"Arretez. Stop!” the loudspeaker bawled. The three men dove for the deck. 

I stood up, so did Marcel Ferrand, the policeman beside me. I caught the gleam of his gun-barrel as it lifted. 

And then all hell broke loose. 

Guns exploded all along the starboard side of the cargo ship and a rain of lead swept the deck of the launch. I lifted my automatic rifle, fired back, but I was shooting blindly, I saw only the red flashes from the guns on the freighter's deck, the men themselves were protected by the high sides of the solid rail. 

Still, I saw one man go backward, screaming. 

And then another rose to his full height, arms up-flung, as he toppled forward to lie across the rail molding. But always those other guns were talking, flinging death across the launch's deck as the devil himself might swing a deadly broom to wash away all life. 

The launch had a forward gun, a small deck can non. Two men had been stationed there, but the first hail of lead had found them and they lay crumpled at the base of the gun that was to have put a shell in the side of the Mafia boat. 

Shots shattered the flood-lamp. I heard glass tinkle and shower down upon the deck. A man rose up near the forward hatch, his right arm held high. I turned the M-16 toward him, let it chatter at his dim shape. 

That man died in the act of throwing. 

But not soon enough, for I sensed rather than saw the grenade he was tossing, and heard it thump and roll across our deck. I swung to leap at it, to try and cover it with my body, to protect the lives of the policemen. 

Again, I was too late. 

A red rose blossomed into life as the grenade exploded. 

The force of that explosion flung me against the cabin. I lay there for a second, hearing a man yelling in agony. Red hate blossomed in me, I whirled and aimed the M-16 at the deck of the cargo vessel and held it there until my clip of cartridges was empty. 

By this time, the launch engines had stopped and we were drifting aimlessly. Marcel Ferrand lay on the deck at my feet. I bent over him, touched his clammy face. His eyes were wide, staring. He was dead, I told myself numbly. 

"Damn them!" I whispered brokenly. 

Another explosion rocked the launch. The Mafia men had uncovered a deck cannon of their own, a 2 -pounder gun that had been hidden in a collapsible shed, and was now engaged in systematically shelling the launch. My body shook to the reverberations of that deck gun even as I ducked to avoid flying splinters and shards of metal. 

"Hey!" I yelled when I could. “Let's get the hell off this thing! They're going to sink her." 

It was scarcely seamanship talk, but I figured it would get the message across. Even the waters of the Mediterranean would be preferable to staying here to be killed by a shell or a fragment of flying metal. 

I dropped the automatic rifle and stepped to the top of the railing. I poised there a moment, then dove down into what seemed like utter blackness. An instant later, cold wetness closed around me. 

Deep I dove, until I discovered that my lungs were about ready to burst, so I arched my back and swung about, swimming as fast as I could underwater. I didn't want to be caught under the launch when it sank, or anywhere near it when the fuel tanks blew. 

Finally I surfaced, a hundred feet away. 

The launch was going down stern first, it was on fire and those reddish flames lighted up the entire area. I could see Mafia men crowding the side of their own ship as it moved away, and made out the big grins of satisfaction creasing their faces. I was so mad, I actually trembled in that chilling water. 

"I'll get you for this," I vowed. “You won't get away with it. I'll find some way of stopping you." 

My common sense told me it would be better if I found some way of saving my own life. I was at least a mile, maybe more, from the shoreline. All around me was the Mediterranean. This inland sea may not seem big on a map but when one is in it, without a boat and with land so far away, it is immense. 

The launch had disappeared in a sputter of sparks and hissing water. The Mafia vessel was gone, moving away into the fog and out of sight. I yelled a couple of times, but I must have been the only living thing anywhere around, for there was utter silence in answer to my shouts. 

I began to swim. 

After a time, I slid out of my jacket and let it sink. I had already regretfully kicked off my shoes—they were brand new, they were Herbert Levines and had cost me a bundle on Fifth Avenue—and so I swam along in my pantyhose, turtle-necked sweater and miniskirt. Soon the miniskirt went, too. 

It was dark. Damn dark! There were stars in the vast sky overhead, but no moon. I had never felt more alone, I told myself. I swam on and on, in a sidestroke that I hoped was putting distance between me and the sunken launch. 

Time was an eternity of movement through those waters. Every once in a while I felt like saying to hell with it, and letting myself go down to join the police boat on the bottom. But I love life too much to give in that easily. I gritted my teeth, cursed my aching muscles, and swam on. 

After a while it dawned on me that I might be swimming in the wrong direction. I almost gave up, right then and there. Instead of the Riviera, I might well be heading toward Algeria. And I knew damn well I would never make Algeria. 

I think I wept a little, too, but the saltwater of the Mediterranean washed the saltwater of my tears away. And I cursed Mark Condon, too. 

Mark Condon is my bossman in N.Y.M.P.H.O. It is he who gives me my assignments. Like this one I was on. 

He had taken me to dinner at the Top of the Sixes, the dirty rat. I had been in a silver lame evening gown, I remembered, with nothing under it. Mark had been attentive as always, the darling, but there was an air about him that should have warned me. Normally, I am very receptive to these emanations Mark Condon gives off, which alert me to the fact that I am going to get a dirty deal, one way or another. 

Over the cocktails, Mark had asked, “How'd you like to go to the Riviera, Cherry? Spend some time in the sun and get yourself a lovely tan?” 

"Mark, angel! I'd love it!” 

Well, honestly! I thought he was inviting me to accompany him on a kind of vacation. We would loaf in the sun, go out for boat rides, eat fabulous meals, and then spend the evening dancing. Making love would follow, natch. 

Over the sirloin steaks, he said, “The Mafia is smuggling guns out of France and into Algeria and Morocco. They steal the guns first, so they don't cost The Family anything. Those emerging African nations—Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria to name a few—need guns. They can buy them cut-rate at Mafia prices." 

I listened with half an ear, unfortunately. 

"Interpol is very concerned about this gun smuggling. The French police are worried about the thefts of those gun shipments. They've been working hand in hand, but they haven't gotten anywhere." 

"Now Interpol is not like your ordinary police force. Actually, it's not much more than a seven-storied building in the Saint Cloud suburb of Paris, and only about a hundred and ten or twenty men work there. What Interpol is, is a gigantic computering service that deals in crime and criminals. It services one hundred and seven nations, but none behind the Iron Curtain. 

"Well, ordinarily, Interpol doesn't send out requests for help, but their Secretary-General has been in touch with our bossman, I understand. Interpol has been working hand in glove with the French police on this gun smuggling bit, but they find they've been stymied by the Mafia. And so..." 

Mark Condon paused and drew a deep breath. 

I nodded dreamily, studying Mark's profile and telling myself how surprised he was going to be when I took off the silver lame gown later at my pad. 

"Now they want some help. They need an outsider, someone who isn't known to the Mafia in that corner of the world, to help them find out how the Mafia know when and where to hijack the guns they smuggle out of France and turn over to their agents in Algeria and Morocco. Also, of course, to help stop that smuggling." 

I sat up straighter, the light finally starting to break. My gaze sharpened. “Mark, are you trying to tell me something?” 

He looked somewhat shamefaced, spreading his hands apologetically. “I thought you knew," he muttered weakly. 

"Knew what?” 

"That you were the one selected to go to the Riviera, to act as that outsider, to work with Interpol." 

I sat back and stared at him. “And all the time I thought you were asking me to go on a vacation.” 

He smiled weakly. “It'll be a vacation of sorts. You'll have plenty of time to lay around beaches and that sort of thing." 

"You've got to be kidding?" 

Memory fled away before the coldness of the waters. I was chilled to the bone, I was getting weaker, and it grew harder to lift and dip my arms. But I gritted my teeth, thinking how Mark Condon had painted this job. Lying around beaches, indeed! Here I was like to drown and nobody the wiser. 

I was so tired, I rolled on my back and floated. The stars glinted down on me, the way they had the night Mark and I had walked home to my apartment after that meal. I'd been so angry with him, I slammed the door in his face and took off the silver lame gown all by my lonesome. 

I was sorry about that, now. At least I could have died remembering the love scene Mark Condon and I might have had. Instead, I recalled how lonely my bed had been. 

I owed Mark Condon one. 

The mere idea of that made me mad. I damn well wouldn't die here in all this water! I'd swim to Algeria if I had to, just to spite him. And—oh! How sweet revenge would be when I next confronted him. 

I rolled over and began swimming again. 

Suddenly I felt stronger. It may have been that the little rest was giving me my second wind, or I was so mad my very emotions fueled me with energy, but I swam and swam, telling myself I was not tired, that I would make it, that I was going to make my bossman sorry for what he had done so sneakily. 

Why couldn't he have come right out with it, as an order? But oh no! He has to do it with frills like a swell dinner and a promise of lovemaking afterward that never did materialize. I gritted my teeth and moved my arms and legs like an automaton. I was going to show him! 

I saw lights, after a long time. 

They ran in a thin little row all across the horizon ahead of me. My heart thudded wildly. That was a shoreline! I would be able to crawl up out of this water and fall there, a limp mass of girl flesh that would do nothing but breathe and let the tiredness ooze out of it. 

I trod water, letting some of my lost energy come back, moving just enough to keep my bod afloat. I still had a good swim before me, but it was nothing compared to what I'd done. I waited, taking deep breaths of the cool air, then decided I might as well finish up my exercise for the night. 

Those last few hundred yards were the toughest of all, they took the remaining spark out of me. I was leaden, almost dead on my feet when my foot touched sand and I fought the water around me to stand upright. I staggered forward, walking through that last stretch of water, and when all I could see was sand ahead of me, I fell face-down and just lay there. 

No matter if I got sand in my hair or on my face. The ground felt so good, I wanted to hug it. My eyes closed, I was almost out cold. But I was alive and breathing. 

It may be that I would have fallen asleep there at the edge of the sea. I know it was at least a quarter of an hour since I'd dropped, and my eyelids were like lead weights. All I really wanted to do was sleep. 

Then some big bully kicked sand on me. 

I opened one eye and saw a pair of male feet in Dingo boots and slacks. I rolled one eyeball so I could see more of the man. He was a big man, well over six feet, and proportionately broad and husky. He had flat cheekbones and close-cropped blonde hair, and looked like a Prussian general. 

"Ah, you're alive," he said. "I'm not sure," I muttered into the sand. 

He hunkered down, stared at me. After a moment his hand came out, touched my wet turtleneck. It was plastered to my body as was the pantyhose I wore with it. 

"You have been swimming. A silly thing to do, really, in those clothes. But you are an American, and Americans do silly things.” 

“Not this silly. My boat sank."

"Oh!” 

He looked concerned, and moved his head to scan the sea where a number of yachts and speedboats rested at their anchors. 

"Not there," I told him. “Away out. Miles and miles." 

Now he looked worried. “You might have drowned!" 

"And don't I know it." 

"You really ought to get out of those clothes. It's summertime, but tonight is rather raw." I guess he saw me shiver, because he hooked my armpit with a big hand and lifted me to my feet in one easy motion. 

His blue eyes were kindly as they ran up and down my figure. He could see almost all of it, my clothes were so tight to my flesh. “You will come with me. I will take you to my room, where you can have a hot bath. I shall order some food, you will eat, and then sleep." 

"Where is this place? I mean, I know it's the Riviera, but what part of it?” 

"Saint Tropez. Or almost. This is Tahiti Beach." 

We had set out from Marseilles in that police launch, which had covered a good many miles, apparently, before it moved to the arrest. I was roughly ninety or so miles from Marseilles as the crow flies. All my possessions were in Marseilles, and so I glanced down at myself ruefully. 

"If I take my clothes off to dry, I won't have any thing to wear," I murmured, almost to myself. 

"Tahiti Beach is noted for its nudism. You'll be right in style. Many women go topless to parties and dances here." 

“But not bottomless, too. And I'll be bottomless." 

His muscular shoulders in the lightweight shirt lifted and fell. “Sometimes they do, the young ones when they have good figures." 

I smiled up at him. "Well, there isn't much I can do about it now, is there? It's getting colder, standing here. And as you've already noticed, I'm soaked to my girlish skin.” 

His hand caught my elbow. “Come then. We will amend this." 

Did he always speak as though he were reading a book, very carefully in precise English? I wondered a little about him as we moved across the sand. We went slowly because I was in my panty-hosed feet and the sand was like hands reaching between my nyloned toes to slow me down. 

“You are German, aren't you?" I asked after a time, when we were in sight of the little stuccoed shops and houses making up this little town. 

"I am. My family is Prussian, but they left East Germany when the Russians occupied it." He spoke the word Russian as though it were dirty in his mouth and he wanted to spit. "We escaped to Switzerland. I was not yet in my teens, then. I had not served in the army, though my father had, and his father before him." 

He spoke proudly, as of a long tradition. “My name is Von Clausewitz, and I am descended from the Karl von Clausewitz who wrote so much on military tactics. But the name I use today is merely Karl Klauss." He shrugged, added, “Today, the world has no room for the nobility.” 

"It's gone out of style," I murmured sympathetically. 

"When the time came for me to choose a career, I selected soldiering. But with a difference. I did not enlist in an army of any nation. I became a freelancer, a mercenary. I served for a time in the French Foreign Legion, before it became a thing of the past. Algeria, French Morocco, Viet Nam before the Americans went there, I fought in all those places." 

We walked along what passed for a sidewalk, beside houses built with their doors on the street. Here and there in the windows we saw lights burning behind pulled-down shades. There was merrymaking from the other end of this little town, where the hotels and restaurants were, but it was a muted sound that blended with the little waves rolling up on shore so that it seemed like only a faint humming. 

“Where are we going?" I wondered. 

“To a little private house, that has become a pension with the passage of time, when the family lost most of its money and had to turn publicans to survive. All one needs is a house, here on the Riviera, to make money. You rent out rooms at exorbitant rates to the visitors and—you are suddenly well to do. 

He turned in at a door recessed from the building wall, that fronted directly on the sidewalk. Taking a key from his pocket, he opened the door and ushered me into a narrow hallway where the smell of onion soup was a faint fragrance in the air. 

"C'est moi," he called out, "seulement Charles." 

We moved up the narrow little staircase, listening to the creaking of its ancient treads. A giggle worked itself up into my throat as I turned my head to glance down at him. 

“Don't they mind your bringing a girl here?” 

He chuckled, "If they did, they'd lose their customers. And when it comes to new francs or morality, a hardheaded Frenchman will always choose the money. The flics don't bother us. Why should they? They get paid their salaries, they know people come to places like this for a little fun and games, that visitors are the stock in trade." 

He opened a door on a room that looked out over the beach. It was fairly large, it held a bed, a bureau, a washstand with an earthenware bowl and pitcher, and there was a frayed rug on the floor. The walls were whitewashed, there were two pictures hanging on frayed cording on those walls, and a mirror above the bureau. 

It wasn't the Waldorf, but the people who came to stay in places like this rarely used these rooms except for sleeping or making love, faire zig-zag, as a true Frenchman would put it. So all it really needed was a reasonably comfortable mattress. 

Karl Klauss went to the bureau, opened a drawer. It held bottles of all shapes and varieties. His blue eyes twinkled as he turned to me apologetically. 

"We do not have any ice. So would you care for a glass of wine? I have some good Calvet Burgundy here." 

"Wonderful. But I want to get out of these wet things." 

He laughed and gestured. “Be my guest, as you Americans say." He turned his back, selected two glasses and began pouring. 

There was no screen to hide behind so I just lifted off my sopping turtleneck and draped it over a chair-back. This left me naked to my middle, for I had been wearing no brassiere. I pushed thumbs under its elastic waistband and slid down my pantyhose, stepping out of them. I reached for a towel hanging on the rack beside the washstand. 

Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw Karl turning to stare at me. His eyes went over my nudity very slowly, very carefully. I am a delightful redhead, if I must say so myself, I have a thirty-eight inch bust and demand C-cups when I don a bra. My waist is only twenty-five inches, and my hips go about thirty-six. I am a member of the Femmes Fatales of N.Y.M.P.H.O. Oh, yeah. My pubic bush is a flaming scarlet, like fire. 

I moved the towel around lazily, thinking about Mark Condon and how he had left me high and almost dry, last time we had met. This Karl baby looked like pretty much of a man to me. 

After what I'd been through, I felt I needed consolation. So I let the towel drop and hang from a hand as I accepted the wine with the other, standing there stark naked and letting him look all he wanted. 

I lifted the glass when he toasted our meeting. I sipped, then asked, “What was a handsome buck like you doing out there on that lonely beach tonight, when you could have been having yourself a ball with some local beauty?” 

A shadow touched his eyes. 

He said, “I was thinking. I am engaged in a business deal, and I needed to go over various aspects of the deal, out there under the stars where I could think." 

My girl-girl intuition told me he was lying, but I thought nothing of it at the time. Only later did I realize why he was on that beach at that spot and by himself. Much later. 

"What sort of business deal?” I cooed. 

His big shoulders shrugged. "I'm here in France as a purchasing agent." 

I stared at him, hoping I was keeping a poker face. It couldn't be! Finally I said as lightly as I could, "Let me guess. You've been a soldier of fortune all your life. You've fought in Morocco, in Algeria, in Viet Nam with the French, and in some of those emerging African nations. 

"You're here to buy guns!" His eyes got angry.