The Bach Manuscript

by Scott Mariani

  ‘I say we should just waste him now,’ said one.

  ‘You heard what Alek said.’

  ‘I know what he said, I just don’t like it, is all. This guy is bad news. I can smell it on’m like shit.’

  ‘That’s your own ass crack you can smell, Vladislav,’ the other replied, and laughed like a hyena.

  ‘Shut your holes,’ said the one with the swastika. He pressed his gun muzzle harder into Ben’s back, steering him towards the right-hand paternoster shaft entrance, the side for down.

  Ben could never understand why these thug types always seemed to like jamming their barrels into you. Maybe it was some Freudian thing. Or maybe they were just such terrible shots that they couldn’t hit the target unless the weapon was physically in contact with it. Either way, it wasn’t a good idea to get that close to your opponent.

  That was a lesson of wisdom Ben had never needed to be taught. And it was one that someone was about to learn, the hard way.

  Chapter 41

  ‘Move it, English,’ growled the big guy with the swastika.

  Ben asked him, ‘Would it help my case if I told you I was only half English?’

  ‘I’m so gonna enjoy watching you get squished.’

  They were almost at the head of the paternoster shaft. With each step Ben could feel the vibrations thrumming through the old floorboards more strongly. The hidden mechanism that kept the rising and falling lift platforms on a perpetual loop was juddering and thrashing away in the background, drive belts slapping, pulleys turning, cables creaking. Like a giant industrial meat grinder or some kind of fiendish mangle that could chew you up and spit out the bones.

  Ben let his step falter as they got close, and the big guy bumped into him from behind. That much mass took more effort to stop. Momentum that could be used in all kinds of ways.

  Ben put an elbow in his left upper abdomen, hard enough to rupture the spleen and too fast for anyone to react. Then the big man was sprawling towards the shaft mouth and tumbling over onto his face, crying out in pain and surprise and fear all at once as he went sliding on his belly over the greasy floorboards, scrabbling desperately to halt himself. His head and shoulders went into the open shaft, poking in between the platform that had just come rumbling past and the next one rumbling down ten feet behind it. A lightweight, nimble man might have been able to get out of the way in time, but this guy stood no chance. He saw it coming and knew what was about to happen. A shriek burst out of his mouth and was cut short.

  Ben turned away, not because he was squeamish at the sight of a man getting his head squashed like a ripe pumpkin, but because the Skorpion submachine gun that had been poking in his back a second ago was now in his hands and he was swinging around to open fire on the swastika guy’s two astonished comrades before they hit their triggers first. He mowed them down left to right with a sweep of full-auto fire that filled the narrow passage with deafening thunder. They crumpled without a sound or a shot fired, and their bodies collapsed in a mountain of flesh with their weapons under them.

  Smoke oozed from the muzzle of the Skorpion in Ben’s hands. He turned back towards the paternoster. It was making all kinds of different sounds now as the mechanism had suddenly jammed up solid. The part of the swastika guy’s body that wasn’t snarled up between the underside of the descending platform and the lower edge of the shaft entrance was convulsing in its death throes on the greasy boards. The old machinery didn’t have the power to shear through that much flesh and bone. Hidden driveshafts and pulleys were clattering and banging and rattling as if the whole contraption might explode at any second.

  ‘More than one way to get squished,’ Ben said.

  A sound behind him made him wheel around. Alek had heard the shots and was racing to the scene with a gun of his own. The AKM assault rifle was much, much louder in the confined space. It was also much more powerful. Ben threw himself down and rolled behind the heap of the two dead guards to use them as cover, like sandbags.

  Alek opened fire. Ben felt the impacts slamming into the heavy flesh of the dead men, and the little wet splashes on his face as their blood spattered him. Their bulk might absorb most of the rounds, but an unlucky bullet could easily carve its way out the other side and find a path to Ben. Not a good place to be. He pointed the Skorpion up over the top of the mound and rattled off another burst without looking to see where he was shooting. That was enough to drive Alek back down the passage. It was also enough to empty the Skorpion’s magazine. The perennial problem with these greedy little machine pistols was keeping the damn things fed.

  Alek was back an instant later and hosing bullets down the corridor. Ben had the unpleasant realisation that he was no longer fighting Dragan Vuković’s morons. He couldn’t get to the dead guards’ weapons because they were buried under a ton of bullet-riddled meat. It was time to get out of here.

  There was a sudden pause in the gunfire as Alek ejected the empty mag from his smoking assault rifle and slammed in another one. Ben used the brief lull to roll out of cover. The paternoster would have been the perfect escape route, but now it was blocked solid and making terminal noises. He saw a door and crashed through it, with no idea what was on the other side and no time to worry about it.

  He found himself running blind into a storeroom stacked full of drinks crates. The only light in the room was filtering through the grime-filmed windows from the Rakia’s blood-red neon sign outside. By the same light, Ben could see the silhouette of the iron fire escape the other side of the glass, bolted to the outside of the building.

  Behind him, Alek was bursting into the room waving the AKM. Ben shoulder-slammed the window and his leather jacket saved him from being badly cut as the glass burst out in an explosion of shards. Bullets punched through the window frame an inch from his head. He dived through the shattered hole and latched onto the rough, rusted steel of the fire escape and he began to race downwards. The fire escape zigzagged down the side of the building with a plate-steel landing every twenty feet. Ben was two steps from the first landing down when Alek appeared at the window above and let off a rattle of shots that cracked out into the cold night air. The bullets kicked sparks off the fire escape. As Ben darted out of sight and hit the iron landing with a clang, he saw Alek take out a radio handset and start yelling orders into it.

  The fire escape landing had a service door leading back inside the building. Ben booted it hard and it burst inwards. He ran through it, vaulted some garbage sacks near the entrance, sprinted for an internal door and wrenched that one open. The heat and noise of the nightclub hit him like a slap, even though he was still only one floor closer to the riot happening on the ground.

  Over the beat of the music, he could hear screams and gunfire. He was pretty sure that was an unusual sound, even on a typical night at the Rakia. Now he knew the answer to the question he’d been asking himself, whether the shooting on the top floor would have been audible down below. It was. What he was hearing was Osmanović reacting to what he must have taken to be Ben’s signal. The plan was coming apart even faster than Ben had feared.

  Ben muttered, ‘Shit.’ He ran on, tried a door that opened into a stinking toilet, tried another and found that it led to a bare-brick stairwell going down. He raced down the stairs three at a time, heading towards the chaos below. The gunfire down there seemed to have stopped, but he could still hear plenty of screaming. Maybe Osmanović and Nidal had realised the plan had gone south and fled the building. Or maybe they were already dead.

  As he rounded a corner between floors a stairwell door flew open and Ben found himself staring face to face at the big man he’d first encountered outside in the street. The one with the forest beard and steel girder arms. At the sight of Ben a look of puzzlement flashed over his hairy face, then quickly turned to fury. He was carrying a Skorpion subgun identical to the one Ben had used upstairs, except this one was still loaded. He wrestled it off his shoulder and pointed it Ben’s way, an operation that took half a second longer than it t
ook Ben to spin a roundhouse kick that caught his right forearm and sent the weapon clattering down the stairwell.

  The kick should have broken his arm, too, but the giant just scowled.

  Ben backed away a step, like stepping away from a tall building to be able to see all of it. This wasn’t someone he would have chosen to get into unarmed combat with.

  But you seldom got a choice in these matters.

  Chapter 42

  The big man charged. A fist as large and hard as a frozen turkey launched towards Ben with about three hundred and fifty pounds of muscle behind it. Enough thrust to knock a man’s head off his shoulders. But slow. Ben could have sauntered over to the bar and waited in line to get himself a whisky in the time the punch took to get within three inches of his face; then he twisted easily out of its path and rolled the blow right past him. The fist connected with the bare brick of the stairwell wall with a crack like a rifle shot. Brick and masonry dust sprinkled the steps.

  The big man gave a howl. Encouraging to know the creature could feel pain. Ben drove a kick into the barrel of his ribcage and felt a couple of ribs give under the impact. The big man staggered, but didn’t go down. He came at Ben again with pincer hands grasping for his throat, to throttle the air out of him and maybe tear his head off as well. Ben bent his knees and ducked low, then drove up again and forwards with all the force in his legs and rammed the crown of his skull into the big man’s stomach. The big man tottered further back this time, right to the edge of the flight of steps going downwards. He windmilled his arms for balance, but it was like trying to stop a falling tree. He went swaying backwards over the edge. As he fell, a massive claw hand flailed out in desperation for something to grab onto, and found Ben’s sleeve.

  The two of them tumbled down the concrete steps. The guard landed heavily on his back with a wheezing grunt and Ben landed on top of him and rode him like a toboggan to the landing below. His opponent was badly winded now, all the air driven out of his lungs by the sledgehammer blow to his back. Marquess of Queensberry rules would probably have dictated that Ben shouldn’t take unfair advantage of the situation, and instead let him have a moment to catch his breath before they resumed.

  Except Ben wasn’t playing by those rules. He got to his feet and kicked the guy hard under the chin to push his head back and expose the curve of his larynx. Then stamped his heel down hard to collapse his throat. The biggest, meanest creature on earth was nothing if it couldn’t draw air any more. Hit a man hard enough in the throat, and even a single blow can kill him instantly. Ben didn’t settle for once. He stamped four times, until he was certain the job was done.

  The big man’s weapon was lying on the dusty concrete a few steps below. Ben snatched it up and raced onwards to the ground floor. He was halfway down the final stairway when he heard the gunfire resume, and realised that at least one of his backup team was still in the game.

  Ben crashed through the doorway at the bottom of the backstairs and found himself on the edge of the nightclub dance floor. It was deserted, apart from the dead bodies littered over the floor and the men shooting at one another and the last of the punters running in terror from the scene. The strobing of the lights made everything look like stop-frame animation. The noise of the music was ear rending. The staccato rattle of full-auto gunfire was louder. In a matter of minutes, the Rakia had reverted back to its original purpose as a slaughterhouse.

  A long, glitzy bar covered in mirrors stretched the whole length of the far wall. Husein Osmanović was backed up against it. White muzzle flash was erupting from the barrel of his weapon as he sent a burst left, a burst right, and took down another of Zarko Kožul’s men who were entrenched behind some overturned tables across the room. From his angle, Ben could get a better shot at them. He opened fire with the Skorpion. The stream of spent brass arcing out of the ejector port looked like a shower of gold in the light. The overturned tables became colanders as Ben’s bullets punched through them. Two more of Kožul’s men went down.

  Ben couldn’t see Nidal, until he recognised one of the bodies lying a few steps from Osmanović near the bar. Osmanović fired another burst towards the tables, but the survivors there had had enough and were scurrying back in retreat. Ben caught Osmanović’s eye across the room. The Bosniak signalled to Ben. He was grinning wildly from ear to ear, manic with the adrenalin of battle. Maybe he was thinking their mission had been successful, that his money had been well spent, and Zarko Kožul was lying dead somewhere upstairs.

  Ben knew he was going to disappoint him on all counts.

  Suddenly, more gunfire was erupting from another direction, and Ben whirled round to see a whole contingent of the enemy appear from a doorway to the left. Someone yelled in Serbian, ‘Kill them!’

  Ben whipped behind a corner as bullets smacked off the wall next to him. Osmanović went to scramble over the top of the bar for cover. He was halfway there when Ben saw him twist and fall back to the floor. Ben pointed his Skorpion around the corner, returned fire at the man who’d shot Osmanović, and the shooter crumpled and fell. Ben’s gun was already half empty and he thought fuck it and rattled the rest of the mag off at the incoming enemy, taking down a couple more and driving the rest back through the doorway they’d emerged through.

  He looked over at where Osmanović lay under the strobing light. Not moving. Always a bad sign.

  Ben broke from cover and ran across the dance floor. He jumped over one large body, and Nidal’s smaller one, and reached Osmanović. He crouched beside him and rolled him over. Blood was bubbling at both corners of the Bosniak’s mouth, staining his grey beard purple-black under the lights. He was struggling to breathe. Ben tried to help him sit up, but nothing could help that he’d been shot through the lungs. He’d been lucky once; now his luck was out. He rolled his bulging eyes up at Ben and rasped, ‘Tell me … tell me we got that bastard.’

  ‘Yeah, we got him,’ Ben said. ‘Everything went according to plan. You can rest easy now.’

  A big part of Husein Osmanović had already died years ago, after the things that had happened in that damned war. Now the rest of him slipped away in Ben’s arms with a smile on his bloody lips. Sometimes a lie is the kindest thing you can say to a person. Ben felt the life go out of him, and lowered Osmanović’s body to the floor.

  He and the dead were no longer alone. Ben looked up at the semicircle of Kožul’s big men who had gathered round, peering down at him through their gunsights. He rose slowly to his feet, and the gun barrels rose with him. Too many to fight. More were coming.

  Ben put up his hands.

  The dark man Ben knew as Alek came storming over, glancing around at the bodies and the wreckage of the nightclub. Duša followed in Alek’s wake. He barely looked at the bodies of his former associates Nidal and Osmanović, and instead gave Ben a lopsided ‘ha ha, you lose’ kind of leer.

  Alek wasn’t sharing in the snitch’s amusement. ‘Three men!’ he was yelling, gesticulating in anger. ‘Three men did this! And that’s with a tip-off. What if we hadn’t known it was coming?’

  ‘Zarko is going to love you,’ Ben said to Alek. ‘He’ll be so pleased, he’ll probably give you a promotion. New house, new car, maybe an enhanced dental plan.’

  ‘You’re done, English.’ Alek snapped his fingers at his men, as if they were dogs. ‘Let’s go. Move, move.’

  They grabbed Ben by the arms and he was marched roughly outside with guns stabbing at his back. The night sky above New Belgrade was starless and cold, a ghostly mist rising up from the river and shrouding itself over the city. The street lamp opposite the Rakia that had been flickering earlier had now expired and was standing surrounded by a pool of dark shadow. By now the street was almost completely deserted, only a few stragglers from the Rakia still making their hasty exit from the scene. A distraught woman with ruffled-up hair, smeared makeup and a torn dress hanging off her shoulder was staggering about alone in the street, half hysterical and crying out ‘Miloje! Miloje!’ over and over;
but Miloje was either already long gone or he was among the collateral damage still inside, part of the mess that Alek was going to have to clear up before Zarko returned.

  First, though, Alek had other business on his mind. He led the way from the building and down the street towards a waiting black minivan. Ben’s guards followed, hustling their captive along at gunpoint. Ben supposed the minivan was his ride to the junkyard, where his promised fate awaited him.

  Alek was still wearing the white shirt, with no jacket, and he was rubbing his hands and slapping his sides as the chill of the night air quickly got to him. As he walked closer to the black minivan he paused and danced from foot to foot as though undecided about something, then seemed to make his mind up and turned to face his men.

  ‘To hell with this,’ he complained bitterly. ‘I’m damned if I’m driving all the way to the junkyard and freezing my ass off waiting for Dragan to turn up.’ He turned and pointed at Duša, then turned the pointing finger Ben’s way. ‘Change of plan. Duša, cap this motherfucker right here and put his miserable carcass in the river.’

  Duša appeared only too happy to perform the service. After all the good work he’d have done for Zarko Kožul tonight, he was sure to be handsomely repaid. He stepped up to Ben and pointed his gun. The men holding Ben quickly stepped out of harm’s way.

  Ben said to Duša, ‘Remember what I said happens to snitches.’

  ‘Not before it happens to you, moron.’

  Duša raised his weapon and was about to fire, then hesitated and came another step closer. This was his big moment and he didn’t want to foul it up by missing the mark.

  If the snitch came one step closer, Ben intended on grabbing the weapon from him and braining him with it. He’d still get shot anyway, but at least he could go out knowing he’d lobotomised this little bastard.

  Duša halted. His eyes were gleaming under the street lamps. He was grinning from ear to ear. He took careful aim, as though he were a sniper preparing to engage a target a thousand metres distant and not a cheap thug about to execute an unarmed prisoner five steps away.