by Lee Child
It was close to three o’clock, and therefore technically morning. But I didn’t want to appear quarrelsome. So I just said, ‘Hello.’
She said, ‘Did you know that word is a recent invention?’
I said, ‘What word?’
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It was developed as a greeting only after the invention of the telephone. People felt they needed something to say when they picked up the receiver. It was a corruption of the old word halloo. Which was really an expression of temporary shock or surprise. You would come upon something unexpected, and you would go, halloo! Perhaps people were startled by the shrillness of the telephone bell.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they were.’
‘Do you have a telephone?’
‘I’ve used them,’ I said. ‘Certainly I’ve heard them ring.’
‘Do you find the sound to be disturbing?’
‘I always assumed that was the point.’
‘Well, goodbye,’ the woman said. ‘It has been most pleasant chatting with you.’
Only in New York, I thought. The woman moved on, with her old dog by her side. I watched her go. She headed east and then south on Second Avenue and was lost to sight. I turned around and got set to head west again. But twenty feet ahead of me a gold Chevy Impala jammed to a stop in the gutter and Leonid climbed out of the back.
FIFTY-THREE
Leonid stood on the kerb and the car took off again and then stopped again twenty feet behind me. The driver got out. Good moves. I was boxed on the sidewalk, one guy in front of me, another guy behind. Leonid looked the same but different. Still tall, still thin, still bald apart from the ginger stubble, but now he was in sensible clothes and he had shed his sleepy demeanour. He was in black shoes, black knit pants, and black hooded sweatshirt. He looked alive and alert and very dangerous. He looked like more than a gangster. More than a brawler or a hoodlum. He looked like a professional. Trained, and experienced.
He looked like an ex-soldier.
I backed up against the wall of the building next to me so that I could watch both guys at once. Leonid on my left, and the other guy on my right. The other guy was a squat man somewhere in his thirties. He looked more Middle Eastern than East European. Dark hair, no neck. Not huge. Like Leonid, but compressed vertically and therefore expanded laterally. He was dressed the same, in cheap black sweats. I looked at the knit pants and a word lodged in my mind.
The word was: disposable.
The guy took a step towards me.
Leonid did the same.
Two choices, as always: fight or flight. We were on 56th Street’s southern sidewalk. I could have run straight across the road and tried to get away. But Leonid and his pal were probably faster than me. The law of averages. Most humans are faster than me. The old lady in the summer dress was probably faster than me. Her old grey mutt was probably faster than me.
And running away was bad enough. Running away and then getting caught immediately was totally undignified.
So I stayed where I was.
On my left, Leonid took another step closer.
On my right, the short guy did the same thing.
Whatever the army had failed to teach me about staying out of sight, they had made up for by teaching me a lot about fighting. They had taken one look at me and sent me straight to the gym. I was like a lot of military children. We had weird backgrounds. We had lived all over the world. Part of our culture was to learn from the locals. Not history or language or political concerns. We learned fighting from them. Their favoured techniques. Martial arts from the Far East, full-on brawling from the seamier parts of Europe, blades and rocks and bottles from the seamier parts of the States. By the age of twelve we had it all boiled down to a kind of composite uninhibited ferocity. Especially uninhibited. We had learned that inhibitions will hurt you faster than anything else. Just do it was our motto, well before Nike started making shoes. Those of us who signed up for military careers of our own were recognized and mentored and offered further tuition, where we were taken apart and put back together again. We thought we were tough when we were twelve. At eighteen, we thought we were unbeatable. We weren’t. But we were very close to it, by the age of twenty-five.
Leonid took another step.
The other guy did the same.
I looked back at Leonid and saw brass knuckles on his hand.
Same for the short guy.
They had slipped them on, fast and easy. Leonid side-stepped. So did the other guy. They were perfecting their angles. I was backed up against a building, which gave me a hundred and eighty degrees of empty space in front of me. Each one of them wanted forty-five degrees of that space on his right and forty-five on his left. That way, if I bolted, they had every exit direction equally covered. Like doubles players, in tennis. Long practice, mutual support, and instinctive understanding.
They were both right-handed.
First rule when you’re fighting against brass knuckles: don’t get hit. Especially not in the head. But even blows against arms and ribs can break bones and paralyse muscles.
The best way not to get hit is to pull out a gun and shoot your opponents from a distance of about ten feet. Close enough not to miss, far enough to remain untouched. Game over. But I didn’t have that option. I was unarmed. The next best way is either to keep your opponents far away or crush them real close. Far away, they can swing all night and never connect. Real close, they can’t swing at all. The way to keep them far away is to exploit superior reach, if you have it, or use your feet. My reach is spectacular. I have very long arms. The silverback on the television show looked stumpy in comparison to me. My instructors in the army were always making puns about my reach, based on my name. But I was facing two guys, and I wasn’t sure if kicking was an option I could add in. For one thing, I had lousy shoes. Rubber gardening clogs. They were loose on my feet. They would come off. And kicking with bare feet leads to broken bones. Feet are much punier than hands. Except in karate school, where there are rules. There are no rules on the street. Second thing, as soon as one foot is off the ground, you’re unbalanced and potentially vulnerable. Next thing you know, you’re on the floor, and then you’re dead. I had seen it happen. I had made it happen.
I braced my right heel against the wall behind me.
I waited.
I figured they would pile on together. Simultaneous launches, ninety degrees apart. Arrowing inward, more or less in step. The good news was they wouldn’t be trying to kill me. Lila Hoth would have forbidden that. She wanted things from me, and corpses have nothing to offer.
The bad news was that plenty of serious injuries fall short of fatal.
I waited.
Leonid said, ‘You don’t have to get hurt, you know. You can just come with us, if you like, and talk to Lila.’ His English was less upmarket than hers. His accent was rough. But he knew all the words.
I said, ‘Go with you where?’
‘You know I can’t tell you that. You would have to wear a blindfold.’
I said, ‘I’ll take a pass on the blindfold. But you don’t have to get hurt either. You can just move on, and tell Lila you never saw me.’
‘But that wouldn’t be true.’
‘Don’t be a slave to the truth, Leonid. Sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes it bites you right in the ass.’
The upside of a concerted attack by two opponents is that they have to communicate a start signal. Maybe it’s just a glance or a nod, but it’s always there. It’s a split second of warning. I figured Leonid for the main man. The one who speaks first usually is. He would announce the attack. I watched his eyes, very carefully.
I said, ‘Are you mad about what happened at the railroad station?’
Leonid shook his head. ‘I let you hit me. It was necessary. Lila said so.’
I watched his eyes.
I said, ‘Tell me about Lila.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I want to know who she is.’
‘Come with us, and ask her:
‘I’m asking you:
‘She’s a woman with a job to do.’
‘What kind of a job?’
‘Come with us, and ask her.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘An important job. A necessary job.’
‘Which involves what?’
‘Come with us, and ask her.’
‘I’m asking you.’
No answer. No further conversation. I sensed them tensing up. I watched Leonid’s face. Saw his eyes widen and his head duck toward in a tiny nod. They came straight for me, together. I pushed off the wall behind me and put my fists against my chest and stuck my elbows out like airplane wings and charged them as hard as they were charging me. We met at a singular point like a collapsing triangle and my elbows caught both of them full in the face. On my right I felt the short guy’s upper teeth punch out and on my left I felt Leonid’s lower jaw give way. Impact equals mass times velocity squared. I had plenty of mass, but my shoes were spongy and my feet were slick inside them from the heat and so my velocity was slower than it might have been.
Which reduced the impact a little.
Which left them both on their feet.
Which gave me a little more work to do.
I spun back instantly and clubbed the short guy with an enormous roundhouse right to the ear. No style. No finesse. Just a big ugly punch. His ear flattened against his head and took some of the force away, but plenty more went straight on through the crushed gristle into his skull. His neck snapped sideways and he hit his other ear with his own far shoulder. By that point I was squelching back the other way in my lousy footwear and driving my elbow deep into Leonid’s gut. Same place I had hit him in Penn Station, but ten times harder. I almost popped his spine out of his back. I used the bounce to jump in the other direction, to the short guy again. He was hunching away and ready for a standing eight count I put a low right in his kidney. That straightened him up and spun him around towards me. I bent my knees and drove forward and butted him between the eyes. Explosive. Whatever bones my elbow hadn’t broken gave way and he went down like a sack. Leonid tapped me on the shoulder with his knuckleduster. He thought it was a punch, but in his depleted state a tap was all he could manage. I took my tune and wound up and aimed carefully and dropped him with an uppercut to the jaw. His jaw was already broken from my elbow. Now it got broken a little more. Bone and flesh spattered out in a lazy red arc and showed up quite clearly in the street lights. Teeth, I figured, and maybe part of his tongue.
* * *
I was a little shaken. As always. Excess adrenalin was burning me up. The adrenal gland is a slow son of a bitch. Then it overcompensates. Too much, too late. I took ten seconds to get my breath. Ten more to calm down. Then I hauled both guys across the sidewalk and into a sitting position against the wall where I had been standing. Their hooded sweatshirts stretched a yard long as I was hauling on them. Cheap clothes. Disposable, in case they had gotten soaked with my blood. I got the two guys positioned so they wouldn’t fall over and choke and then I dislocated their right elbows. They were both right-handed, and the odds were that I would be seeing them again. In which case I wanted them out of action. No permanent damage. Three weeks in a light cast would fix them up, good as new.
They had cell phones in their pockets. I took both of them. Both had my picture. Both call registers were blank. There was nothing else. No money. No keys. No material evidence. No clue as to where they had come from. No likelihood that they would be in a position to tell me anytime soon, either. I had hit them too hard. They were out for the count. And even when they woke up there was no guarantee they would remember anything anyway. Maybe not even their names. Concussion has unpredictable effects. Paramedics aren’t kidding around when they ask concussion victims what day it is and who the President is.
No regrets on my part. Better to err on the side of safety. Guys in fights who think ahead to the aftermath usually don’t get that far. They become the aftermath. So no regrets. But no net gain, either. Which was frustrating. Not even the brass knuckles fit my hand. I tried both sets on, and they were way too small. I dropped them down a storm drain twenty feet away.
Their car was still idling on the kerb. It had New York plates. No navigation system. Therefore no digital memory with a base location. I found a rental agreement in the door pocket made to a name I had never heard and a London address that I assumed was fake. In the glove box I found instruction manuals for the car and a small spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen. The notebook had nothing written in it. I took the pen and walked back to the two guys and held Leonid’s head steady with my left palm clamped down hard. Then I wrote on his forehead with the ballpoint, digging deep in his skin and tracing big letters over and over again for clarity.
I wrote: Lila, call me.
Then I stole their car and drove away.
FIFTY-FOUR
I drove south on Second Avenue and took 50th Street all the way east to the end and dumped the car on a hydrant half a block from the FDR Drive. I hoped the guys from the 17th Precinct would find it and get suspicious and run some tests. Clothes are disposable. Cars, not so much. If Lila’s people had used that Impala to drive away from the hammer attack, then there would be some trace evidence inside. I couldn’t see any with the naked eye, but CSI units don’t rely on human vision alone.
I wiped the wheel and the shifter and the door handles with the tail of my shirt. Then I dropped the keys down a grate and walked back to Second and stood in a shadow and looked for a cab. There was a decent river of traffic flowing downtown and each car was lit up by the headlights behind it. I could see how many people were inside each vehicle. I was mindful of Theresa Lee’s information: fake taxis, circling uptown on Tenth, downtown on Second, one guy in the front, two in the back. I waited for a cab that was definitively empty apart from its driver and I stepped out and flagged it down. The driver was a Sikh from India with a turban and a full beard and very little English. Not a cop. He took me south to Union Square. I got out there and sat on a bench in the dark and watched the rats. Union Square is the best place in the city to see them. By day the Parks Department dumps blood-and-bone fertilizer on the flower beds. By night the rats come out and feast on it.
At four o’clock I fell asleep.
At five o’clock one of the captured phones vibrated in my pocket.
* * *
I woke up and spent a second checking left and right and behind, then I fumbled the phone out of my pants. It wasn’t ringing, just buzzing away to itself. Silent mode. The small monochrome window on the front said: Restricted Call. I opened it up and the colour screen on the inside said the same thing. I put the phone to my ear and said, ‘Hello.’ A new word, recently invented.
Lila Hoth answered me. Her voice, her accent, her diction. She said, ‘So, you decided to declare war. Clearly there are no rules of engagement for you.’
I said, ‘Who are you exactly?’
‘You’ll find out.’
‘I need to know now.’
‘I’m your worst nightmare. As of about two hours ago. And you still have something that belongs to me.’
‘So come and get it. Better still, send some more of your guys. Give me some more light exercise.’
‘You got lucky tonight, that’s all.’
I said, ‘I’m always lucky.’
She asked, ‘Where are you?’
‘Right outside your house.’
I here was a pause. ‘No, you’re not.’
‘Correct,’ I said. ‘But you just confirmed that you’re living in a house. And that right now you’re at a window. Thank you for that information.’
‘Where are you really?’
‘Federal Plaza,’ I said. ‘With the FBI.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Your call.’
‘Tell me where you are.’
‘Close to you,’ I said. ‘Third Avenue and 56th Street.’ She started to reply, and then
she stopped herself immediately. She got no further than an inchoate little th sound. A voiced dental fricative. The start of a sentence that was going to be impatient and querulous and a little smug. Like, That’s not close to me.
She wasn’t anywhere near Third and 56th.
‘Last chance,’ she said. ‘I want my property.’ Her voice softened. ‘We can make arrangements, if you like. Just leave it somewhere safe, and tell me where. I’ll have it picked up. We don’t need to meet. You could even get paid.’
‘I’m not looking for work.’
‘Are you looking to stay alive?’
‘I’m not afraid of you, Lila.’
‘That’s what Peter Molina said.’
‘Where is he?’‘Right here with us.’
‘Alive?’
‘Come over and find out.’
‘He left a message with his coach.’
‘Or maybe I played a tape he made before he died. Maybe he told me his coach never answers the phone at dinner tine. Maybe he told me a lot of things. Maybe I forced him to.’
I asked, ‘Where are you, Lila?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ she said. ‘But I could have you picked up.’
A hundred feet away I saw a police car cruising 14th Street. Moving slow. Pink flashes at the window as the driver moved his head right and left.