The Desdamona Affair by Clyde Allison

Author:Clyde Allison [Allison, Clyde]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2019-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

8

SAFELY OUT OF THE snake-infested suite, I raced down the stairs to the lobby.

(How had I escaped? Simple. I’d remembered, in the nick of time, SADISTO Escape Technique 4486, Krait Attack, Withdrawal From. This Ultra Secret escape technique simply involved pulling a CENSORED from my pocket, adjusting the dial to CENSORED, and then sawing through the door during the ensuing confusion. A child could do it.)

Loping down the stairs, my mind raced as it had never raced before, and in a blinding flash of intuitive intuition I realized that my enigmatic, dark-haired, dark-eyed female fellow passenger in the plane and cab had been none other than Eva de Struxion herself!

Too bad I hadn’t strangled her while I had the means, motive and opportunity.

I dashed into the lobby. Eva was nowhere in sight. I yanked out my Walther PPK, waved it at the desk clerk.

“That way!” he gasped, pointing toward the entrance to the hotel’s dining room.

I raced through the dining room, unavoidably tipping over tables left and right. Waiters, diners, chairs, soup plates and wine bottles went crashing in all directions. I dashed through the swinging doors leading to the kitchen.

Thunk! A waiter went reeling backward, spaghetti and veal parmesan spinning into the horror-struck faces of a row of chefs. I sprinted through the kitchen, heedless of the spilled soup toureens and the cascading pies.

A huge cake loomed before me. I dashed up and over, and then with a squelch, down into it.

“Ow!” squealed a naked girl in fluent Italian. “I’m supposed to come out of the cake—you aren’t supposed to jump in!”

“Sorry about that,” I said, disentangling my foot from her bruised bosom. “Uh, as you were.”

And on I dashed. Out into the alley behind the hotel. Aha! There was Eva—running around the corner, briefcase in hand. I followed her, heedless of the trail of cake icing and spaghetti sauce I left behind me.

Around the corner I plunged in pursuit, just in time to see her duck into a hardware store. Darkness had fallen over Rome, I noted, and the hardware store’s lights were winking out. Also a steel grill was sliding across the entrance.

I plunged through, just as it clanged shut behind me. Trapped! But at least my prey was trapped too. Or was she? I heard a door slam yards away, the faint and rapid click-click of high-heeled shoes.

I ran through the dark aisles toward the retreating sound as—ka-Zam, ka-Zam! A gun roared twice in the dark, sending bright flame and whistling lead plunging at me. I ducked, just as a second and third gun roared behind and to one side of me.

Trapped indeed. Eva (curse her) had led me into a trap. A lethal trap. I slid out my Walther, listened. Silence. Then the scrape of a shoe. Italian leather—a foe! I ducked up, fired twice, ducked down again.

A scream—A thud.

Chalk up one less enemy. Guns flamed and roared on both sides of me. Two foes remaining. I reached up carefully, found a can of paint or something, hurled it.

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