Bloody Passage - Jack Higgins [53]
His eyes traveled over the women casually. He started to turn away and at that precise moment, the fat woman leaning against the wall seemed to regain her senses. She cried out incoherently and lurched forward, grabbing at Simone and pulling down the hood of her burnous.
Masmoudi turned. Simone seemed to feel his eyes burn into hers. He stood there staring at her in the silence, then said something to Sergeant Husseini, who walked into the crowd very quietly, scattering the women roughly on either side of him.
The fat woman pawed at him, smiling archly. He pushed her violently away, grabbed Simone by the arm, and propelled her in front of him through the crowd. She fought to control the panic that surged inside her, for fear would not help her now, and schooled herself to play her part.
She kept her head down, Masmoudi tapped her under the chin with his swagger stick and she looked into the dark eyes. "What are you, Italian?" he asked in that language.
She shook her head and said in a low voice, "No, colonel, I'm from Marseilles."
"Ah, a Frenchwoman." He switched to excellent French without any apparent difficulty. "How the hell do you come to be here with this heap of filth?"
"An old friend invited me to stay with him in Tripoli for a while. When I arrived, he'd moved on." She shrugged. "I'd very little money. It didn't last long."
"And then you met Zingari."
She managed to sound angry. "The swine didn't tell me it would be like this."
"Never mind. It may well prove a most fortunate occurrence for both of us." He took her arm and said casually over his shoulder, "All yours, sergeant."
Husseini gave them enough time to get clear then shouted something unintelligible that was drowned in the immediate uproar as the two groups rushed together. Simone glanced over her shoulder. It was an incredible sight, a scene from hell with the damned pulling and tearing at each other in a shouting, struggling, heaving mass of bodies in the light from the floodlamps.
"Don't look back," Masmoudi told her. "That's feeding time at the zoo. Something to keep the animals happy. Not for you."
"Don't you believe in the equality of men then?" she said. "I understood you were a Communist."
He opened the garden gate and pushed her inside. "A magnificent absurdity. God made some men big, some small among other things."
"God?" she said. "Does he still enter into your scheme of things?"
They had reached the steps leading up to the veranda of the house and he paused, turning to look at her, a slightly quizzical frown on his face. "I think there is more to you than meets the eye, little flower," he said.
Her mouth went dry. This was not the man she had expected. Handsome, shrewd, even gentle if he wanted to be, she was sure of that. He in no way filled Zingari's description.
She said desperately, trying to be coy, "Hidden depths."
"Who knows?" He smiled faintly, opened the front door and led her inside.
It was comfortably furnished, but no more than that. A soldier's room. Table, chairs, a large divan piled high with cushions, shelves filled with books.
As he closed the door, he took her handbag from her and dropped it on a chair. There wasn't a thing she could do about that and he slipped his arms about her waist from the rear, pulling her close against him.
Quite suddenly he flung her forward across the cushions of the divan, holding her down with one hand and considerable strength. He pulled up the burnous, slipped a hand under the hem of her skirt and felt for the springblade knife.
"What have we got here?"
He pulled it away roughly, the surgical tape tearing free so that she cried out in pain. He held up the knife and sprang the blade. He laughed then, his mouth wide.
"Oh, a young lady of considerable depth, I can see that." He flipped the knife across the room to bury itself in a cupboard door.
"I didn't know what to expect," Simone said. "I only wanted to protect myself."
As he released