He wondered if the foot belonged to Masha or her husband, Ernst.
Abel considered heading straight out of the city. It was the safest tactical move, but with no money and identification, he wouldn’t get far. And he would likely freeze to death before long anyway. He had to risk returning to his flat, but when he came in sight of it, he couldn’t force his feet to carry him across the street.
“Sie kann hier nicht schlafen.” You can’t sleep there, a voice barked at Abel from a window and he lurched out of the doorway he had been huddling in, a frozen marionette with tangled strings.
He stood in the street until headlights blazed through the increasing snowfall and a horn blared at him. Then he stumbled across the road towards home.
- 6 -
“I’m surprised to see you alive,” a gravelly voice said from the dark room.
Abel froze, staring at the single red eye glaring at him. As his vision adjusted, he made out the hulking shape of the Fat Man. A dog began barking furiously in the apartment next door, the racket carrying easily through the thin walls.
“You hung up on me,” Abel said, trying to sniff past the smell of the other’s cigarette smoke to detect the odor of gangrene.
“You don’t look well,” the Fat Man said.
Abel turned on a reading light, but the Fat Man sitting at Abel’s desk remained in shadows.
“Who is Mister White?” Abel asked, setting the briefcase down on one guest chair as he sat in the other. The Fat Man held out the pack of cigarettes, but Abel shook his head, afraid to show his shaking hands.
“Where did you hear that name?” the Fat Man asked.
“You know who he is then?”
“If you found his name, then it is already too late.”
“Who is he?” Abel asked, breathing deep. There was no rotting smell. He thought he might be safe for the moment.
“Why don’t you ask Mr. Bierce?” the Fat Man suggested.
Abel flinched at the name. “Tell me who he is.”
“When you called, I thought it certain you would meet him tonight.”
“Would I be alive if I had?”
The Fat Man’s bald head shook slowly, connected to his massive shoulders by drooping jowls. “No.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke. “But you do not look well.”
Abel shrugged. “Amateurs,” he said. “I’ll have that cigarette now.”
The Fat Man rose and offered him the pack. Abel slipped one free, his trembling almost unnoticeable.
“I will have a drink and you will as well,” the Fat Man said, fetching a bottle of brandy and two glasses from a shelf.
Abel lit and the Fat Man poured before moving to sit on the edge of the desk. He wore a three-piece suit, very old world, the glittering length of a gold watch chain stretching across the immense expanse of his vest.
Abel had heard that he suffered from gout and wondered if he carried a gun.
“I will speak and you will listen, and then we will plan. You have heard the name of Mister White and you are already on borrowed time.”
“You said that already.”
Abel dragged deep, the smoke mixing terribly with the bilious taste in his mouth as if giving it life, making it airborne. He sipped and swirled the brandy, sighing as the warmth slid down his throat and through his chest.
“Who watches the watchers?” The Fat Man mused, carefully tasting his brandy. “A rhetorical question, but important in that it juxtaposes with my next question. When you were young, did you eat your peas and Brussels sprouts?”
Abel raised an eyebrow, finishing his glass. “Was that rhetorical too?”
“Did you clean your room? Did you mind your mother?”
“Do we have time for this?” Abel asked, pouring another for himself and wondering how many the big man had drunk already.
“What did your mother say when you did not mind her?”
Abel started to interrupt again, but the grim expression in the other man’s eyes belied the levity of the questions.
Exhaling smoke, the Fat Man spoke through the cloud. “Never mind, I shall tell you what my mother said. She said that she would tell Mr. Haeckel and he would pay me a visit when I went to sleep.”
The Fat Man stood and began pacing, his steps heavy. “He was an old man who lived several houses down the street, hideously maimed in an industrial accident and blind in one eye. Just an old man, yet my friends and I crafted terrible tales about him and ascribed powers to his ill-fitting glass eye in its bed of yellow pus. It got to the point where none of us would so much as walk past his house if we were alone.”
He paused to look out the window at the street below.
“I had forgotten Mr. Haeckel until just recently, convinced I had left him behind with distance and years. But I realized with your call tonight that he was not left behind at all.”
The Fat Man turned around and his face had gone slack with horror, so dramatically that Abel thought he was having a stroke.
“Mister White is the Boogeyman,” the Fat Man whispered. “Like Mr. Haeckel long ago, but all too real.”
Abel stood and slammed his drink down on the desk, sloshing amber liquid onto the dark wood. “What the hell is this?”
“You and I have not eaten our Brussels sprouts. But worse for you, Abel, you have not cleaned your room or minded your mother, and I’m afraid she—or he, in this case—told Mister White.”
“You’re fucking insane,” Abel said, heading around the desk for the drawer hiding his Go Bag.
“Who watches the watchers?” the Fat Man asked. “And who do they tell when an operative goes bad? Very, very bad?”
Leather satchel in hand, Abel looked up to see the Fat Man pointing a small, black pistol at him, tiny in his giant fist.
“Put the bag down on the table and sit behind the desk,” the Fat Man said. “When Mister White arrives, I will give you to him and tell him what you have done.”
“You’re dirty—” The pistol jerked sharply and Abel stopped speaking.
“Not like you, my boy, not like you, and I will be able to explain my own involvement away into nothing. Now sit.”
Abel dropped the bag on the desk and sat in the chair, still disturbingly warm from his unexpected guest.
The Fat Man moved around the desk and topped off Abel’s drink. “Finish this, if you wish. Have more. I’m not sure it will help, though, when Mister White comes for you.” He slid the drink to Abel, leaving a wet trail. “But it might.”
Abel downed the drink in one long swallow that set his throat on fire and eyes watering. When he looked up, the fat man was staring down at the briefcase on the guest chair.
“Why is this dripping?” he asked.
Abel’s mouth twisted into a tight smile as the Fat Man bent to fumble open the catch with his free hand and lift the lid. A coppery musk of blood filled the room as he staggered back, eyes wide.
“Mister White is already here,” Abel said.
“But…but…you’re still alive.”
Abel leaned back in the soft chair. “Maybe he wants you too, Herr Gruebel.”
The Fat Man lifted the pistol and considered risking a shot, then turned and fled out the front door. Abel heard his thundering steps in the hall and then on the stairs.
- 7 -
The clock struck midnight, and Abel stirred in the tiny cone of light from the reading lamp. The level in the bottle had descended considerably, and he sat with an empty glass in one hand, a 9mm Spanish Llama pistol in the other.
Two hours had passed, and he had not heard a sound, save for the building creaking in the wind.
“Fuck you, Mister White.”
He stood, having utterly failed to make sense of the evening. It felt as if he were trapped in one of the CIA’s Cold War LSD experiments. The brandy didn’t help, but he needed it to steady his nerves.
He carried the briefcase into the tiny bathroom and tossed the thing into the claw-foot tub, where he proceeded to douse it with rubbing alcohol, brandy and anything else
that he thought might burn.
Smashing the smoke detector with the butt of the Llama, he lit a match and tossed it into the tub.
A cloud of bright flame whooshed up and he staggered back in surprise. Anyone looking in the tub would see the remains of the case, and forensics would be able to find blood traces, but any tells he had left on it would be gone. The apartment itself was under a false name and untraceable to him, no matter if he went to Geneva or Munich.
Once he was certain the fire was contained in the tub, he moved through the flat, grabbing essentials for his flight. The aroma of roasting pork wafted from the bathroom, and he briefly pictured pied du cochon—baked pig’s foot—the chef’s specialty at his backstreet haunt. His stomach rumbled, and he realized he had not eaten since lunch before remembering what was cooking in his tub.
Abel doubled over and vomited a hot stream of bile and brandy.
He had meant to stay and feed the small, charred bones of the foot into his toilet, but urgency won out over tradecraft and he took a jacket and hat out of his closet instead.
“Goodbye, Vienna,” he said with a last look around the flat. Go Bag in hand and pistol in his jacket pocket, he stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him.
“Es riecht lecker,” an old woman’s voice drifted down the hall. It smells delicious. Abel turned to see his neighbor peeking out of her door. She backed into the apartment as a series of barks erupted behind her. “Er wird nicht aufhören.” He won’t stop.
“I’ll leave a plate outside your door when it’s finished cooking,” Abel said over his shoulder before hurrying down two flights of stairs to the street door. “Don’t let the dog get it.”
Munich or Geneva, hell, even Stockholm, whichever has the first flight out.
He stepped out into the cramped street, and his ears pricked up at a distant, panting sound. He glanced into the alley adjacent to his building.
A grotesque Buddha sat cross-legged in the snow, his bald head glistening as the flakes melted on his scalp. He was globular, morbidly obese, his immense stomach plumped out to absurd proportions on his thighs, and his skin was so white it was nearly blue.
The illusion of his snow Buddha-hood would have been complete if the Fat Man had not been silently weeping.
Abel pulled the pistol from his pocket and held it low by his side, stopping a good ten feet from the naked man.
“What the hell are you doing?” Abel said.
The fat man looked up and struggled to open his eyes against lashes that had frozen shut with tears.
“I…I…I…,” he stammered through chattering teeth.
Abel noticed a dark discoloration in the snow beneath the Fat Man as he lifted his huge belly with both hands, revealing the railroad spikes driven through both of his crossed ankles and into the ground.
“Puh…puh…please…” he whispered, but Abel was already running away from him towards the main thoroughfare. His hat flew off his head and he didn’t break stride, consumed with an overriding, animal need to escape.
A taxi was idling at the curb as a couple disembarked. Abel nearly ran them down in his haste to catch it.
“Flughafen,” Abel barked.
As the taxi pulled away from the curb, Abel was gripped with the conviction that Mister White was driving the car. That the head he could make out only in silhouette would turn around and he would see a pallid, murderous face staring back at him. He pressed the barrel of the Llama against the back of the driver’s seat and asked, “Mister White?”
“Huh?” the driver asked.
“You heard me, Mister White.”
An oncoming car flashed headlights across the taxi’s windshield, and Abel saw the man’s dark skin and Rastafarian hair.
“Jesus,” Abel said as he shuddered and sank back into the seat. The ride was slow and almost peaceful, the snow diffusing the city lights into a sea of glowing orbs. The car’s heaters embraced him with their warmth, and he unbuttoned his coat with one hand, stuffing the pistol back in his pocket, soothed by the metronomic sweep of the windshield wipers.
The old-fashioned ringing startled him, and it took him several moments to realize it was a telephone sounding off beside him.
Abel frantically patted the car seat looking for the source
The ringing stopped.
“Was ist das?” The driver asked over his shoulder.
“A cell phone,” Abel said as his questing fingers picked up the rectangle of smooth plastic. “Excuse me,” he said, switching to German. “Es ist ein handy.”
It twisted in his hand and Abel almost dropped it. But it was just the vibration as it began ringing again.
The screen read CALLER UNKNOWN. Abel wanted to throw it out the window.
“Is it yours?” the driver asked.
“Nein.”
The driver held his hand back over the front seat and Abel handed it forward. The driver answered the phone, “Hallo?”
After a minute of conversation the driver hung up and pulled cautiously to the curb, sliding a little despite his care.
“What the hell are you doing?” Abel said.
The driver smiled and held up a hand in a relax gesture. “De last passengers, dey left it in de car.”
His English was worse than his German.
Light filled the vehicle as another pulled up behind them. Abel twisted to see another taxi slide to a stop.
“Dey follow the GPS,” the driver said, already getting out of the car. The door slammed shut, and Abel was frozen with indecision.
Steal the taxi? Wait for the driver? Get out and run? His thinking was muddied by terror, and he wished he had not consumed so much brandy. Get out and shoot them all?
His breath fogged the rear window as he tried to watch his driver talking to the person who emerged from the other car. He wiped at it frantically, leaving smears, obscuring the figures.
Anything could be happening back there.
Normally he would immediately follow training and take the simplest route to break contact, but he was terrified into immobility. Utterly uncertain. It was as if he had been manipulated into a position where his years of experience were useless.
He reached for the door handle and pulled, but the door was locked. Holding the gun, he fumbled at the door until he found the button and heard it unlock. He reached for the handle just as the driver’s door opened with a blast of cold air, the driver huddling inside quickly.
Abel pivoted in his seat and lifted his pistol. “All right, Mister—”
The Rastafarian cab driver turned, eyes white and huge as he saw the pistol.
“Drive,” Abel said.
“What? You can have—”
“Drive or I’ll blow your motherfucking head off!” Spit flew from Abel’s mouth.
The driver turned and keyed the ignition, starter engine screaming as he turned it over too long in his panic.
“Drive!”
The driver stomped on the gas and the tires spun up a rooster tail of slush. Suddenly they caught and the car surged forward, fishtailing.
Right into the path of an oncoming lumber truck.
Abel screamed as he looked at the blinding headlights and the half-seen grille grinning like a mouth full of metal teeth.
The sound of the head-on collision was like nothing he had ever heard, and he slammed into the back of the front seat, teeth clacking shut on his tongue, ribs cracking, vaguely aware of the taxi rocketing backward in an uncontrolled spin until it crashed into an immovable object and hurled out a deadly swath of hub caps, shards of metal and exploding tires.
Stunned, Abel was unable to give any meaning to the time it took to pull himself up from the back seat. He wiped at something stuck in his hair. His mouth was filled with the taste of pennies, and a steady spatter of hot liquid hit the back of the front seat as he beheld the driver.
A two-by-four had crashed through the windshield like a spear, impaling the driver through his mouth and penetrating out the back of his sku
ll, exploding like a brain, blood and bone grenade, until the wood lodged itself in the rear window. The impaled Rastafarian hung from the two-by-four, eyes still open wide and white.
Abel dragged himself across the seat to the door and used both trembling hands to open it. He sprawled forward into the snow, his hands shooting out to either side in the slippery wet, landing face first in the road with his feet still tangled inside the vehicle.
It took years to pull himself completely from the wreckage until he flopped full-length in the road. In the next century he was able to lift his head by painful degrees, focusing his eyes with a herculean effort.
He saw a pair of black boots surrounded by white, just inches from his nose.
He tried to say, “No.”
CHAPTER TWO
Bare branches scratched at the windowpane as the Russian countryside huddled under its first major snowstorm of the season. Warm in his study, Lewis sipped his tea and watched the video from the dead-drop website as his calico cat Piotr patrolled the perimeter of the room.
A naked man sat inside a mirrored cube maybe ten feet on a side. His face was black and blue, nose horribly swollen and crusted with blood. His pale ribs showed contusions indicating the likelihood of broken bones. There was no escape for the prisoner from the sight of his own degradation.
Lewis had seen such injuries before. Seen them in person in his younger days. But the years had rendered the memories diffuse, and seeing wounds in such glistening detail made him shift nervously in his seat.
According to the time code running at the bottom of the screen, it had been two days since the man had awakened to find a straight razor beside him and heard the first emotionless command from what Lewis took to calling “The Voice.”
“Shave off every inch of hair from your body, Abel.”
Lewis started at the name and leaned close to the screen.
After hours of pleading and pounding on the walls, Abel complied, weeping and trembling. When he missed a spot, The Voice was there to remind him. As a result, he was left with scratches over much of his body. His eyebrows were scabbed hyphens, and his groin looked like hamburger.
Mister White: The Novel Page 2