Blood of the Assassin - By Russell Blake Page 0,10

favored with his attentions. Instead, he was waiting for the idiot clerk from the police department that he kept on the payroll – mainly so he could justify to his superiors in French intelligence that he was doing something besides spending their money and enjoying the Berlin nightlife.

At thirty-seven years old, Jean-Claude was in the prime of his career, such as it was – the truth being that even though the French maintained a spy network, there wasn’t a lot to challenge him in Berlin. He waxed nostalgic about the good old days, when in his imagination he could have been darting furtively down darkened alleys, meeting Soviet moles, danger behind every door. Unfortunately, he’d been born too late for that, and had to content himself with doing grunt work that was beneath him, running a network of informants who did little more than offer tidbits of gossip and data he had no interest in. Still, as long as the French government was willing to pay to collect it, he would, biding his time until he could return to a nice comfortable desk in Paris once he’d done his obligatory stint in the field, and wait for his father to die, leaving him a nice endowment and a lavish flat in the sixteenth arrondissement.

He ran nimble fingers through his thick black hair and then pursed his lips, wondering what the hell the German could have for him that required this ungodly hour for a rendezvous. He stared at his hand, holding the cigarette in the affected way he had seen in the movies, and decided that he would give the clerk twenty more minutes and then leave the little studio apartment he kept for meetings; the ingrate could damned well wait until morning if he wasn’t going to be considerate enough to be prompt.

The intercom buzzed at him like an annoyed insect, startling him as he fumed over Heinrich’s rudeness – very typically German, he thought bitterly. Not pausing to endure the ritual of asking who was there at four-twenty in the morning, he pressed the black button that unlocked the front door and then paused at the hall mirror to consider his appearance. Thin, handsome, he had been told that he looked like a Hollywood star – Leonardo DiCaprio, although Jean-Claude thought he was better looking than that. DiCaprio looked soft, whereas Jean-Claude in his mind radiated brooding danger, as befitted a master of the clandestine world. He stubbed out his smoke in a crystal ashtray on the side table and sucked in his cheeks, turning his face to inspect the effect on his profile.

A thud at his apartment door pulled him from his ruminations, annoying him even further. Was the man raised in a barn? Couldn’t he at least attempt to be quiet? Jean-Claude moved to the peephole and looked out, but saw nothing except for the empty hallway lit by a couple of cheap lamps left over from the industrial revolution. Puzzled, he listened at the door, and then pushed his ear against the wood to better make out any sound in the hall.

He was about to go back and push the intercom button again when he heard it. A scratching sound.

“Heinrich?” he called out softly, his voice betraying his puzzlement.

Nothing.

Another faint scratch. Nails on the door. And then a groan. Almost inaudible.

Jean-Claude swung the door open and practically fell over the German’s inert form collapsed across the threshold, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. Jean-Claude’s eyes widened in alarm, and he instantly regretted not having brought his pistol – not that there was any obvious threat. He stepped back and kneeled, taking care to avoid the blood.

“Heinrich! What happened? Are you all right?” he whispered, registering even as he asked that Heinrich was far from all right.

The German murmured at him unintelligibly. Jean-Claude stood and then bent down to haul him into the apartment, anxious to avoid any unwanted scrutiny from a light-sleeping neighbor. He got his hands under Heinrich’s arms and dragged him in, and then held out his hands, covered in blood, as he moved to the door and kicked it closed behind him. Pausing for a moment, uncertain what to do, he stepped over the wounded man and moved into the small kitchen to rinse his hands.

“Good Christ, Heinrich. You’re bleeding like a...” Jean-Claude bit his tongue. Heinrich undoubtedly knew he was losing blood.

He moved back to the German and pulled his overcoat open, and saw a bullet wound high in the