Nothing.
‘Drugs?’
Nothing.
The FBI, MI6, a lurid murder, a dangerous fugitive with a garrote in her overnight bag, all on Cyprus. Cyprus. Not known for terrorism. Cyprus. Not a major drug route. Cyprus …
And then all the pennies dropped at once and a shiver went right up my spine. ‘Please tell me it’s not Russian money laundering.’
My insides had gone cold. My nether parts, which had been optimistic a moment ago, now retreated into my body.
‘Oh, uncool, Agent Delia, very uncool.’
‘You’re scared?’
‘Of Russian mobsters? Of Russian mobsters inevitably linked to the fucking FSB and the GRU and maybe protecting billions – not millions, billions with a “b” – in untraceable mob cash? Nah, why would that worry me?’ I laughed a humor-free laugh. ‘Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, Delia! I thought we were playing with some pedos and refugees. I didn’t know we were walking into fucking Mordor!’
Goddamn if she didn’t look disappointed in me. And goddamn if it didn’t bother me. No man wants to look like a coward in the eyes of a woman with those eyes. But while the prospect of impressing a beautiful woman is compelling, sheer terror is more so.
‘The two things are not necessarily separate,’ Delia lectured. ‘Anyway, they have no reason to come after us yet, it would be needlessly risky.’
I gaped. ‘No reason? Those guys don’t need reasons, all they need is a dirty look. Needlessly risky? These aren’t tax accountants, fucking hell, Agent Delia, murder is their go-to, it’s their first base!’
And you’re not even going to sleep with me, despite the fact that it would probably be the greatest night of our lives. I did not say. But definitely felt, with a surge of righteous indignation.
‘Joe Burton wouldn’t be scared off,’ she said.
That was a low blow. Joe Burton is my detective, my main character, my meal ticket. ‘Yeah, well, Joe Burton only has fictional balls, and they don’t hurt as much when someone slices them off.’
‘I’m going to shower and get dressed,’ she said levelly. ‘You can be here when I come out, or you can run. Word of honor, I’ll give you a twenty-four-hour head start in recognition of services rendered.’
She turned and glided away to the bathroom, snagging an outfit from the closet as she went. I heard the bathroom door lock, so, sadly this was not to be one of those scenes where I would go in, find her showering and we would have steamy, wet sex. Evidently I am not Bond, James Bond.
No one ever admits to being asleep, lacking a sense of humor, or having no imagination. Everyone thinks they have an imagination, but few do, and fewer still are capable of pro-level imagination, the kind of imagination a clever criminal, or novelist, might need. Without imagination the first cave men would still be in the first cave, because it takes imagination to wonder what’s over the next hill, or to conceive of a cure for disease, or to imagine strapping on a rocket and flying to the moon. Many good things come from imagination.
But imagination is to fear as gasoline is to fire.
My professional-level imagination began painting pictures of fists in my face, and knives at my throat and me dragging my neutered, bloody body into an emergency room, holding my testicles in my hand while leafing frantically through a Greek-English phrasebook for, ‘Would you please re-attach these and could you also recommend a good seafood restaurant?’
I was just tough enough to face down a refugee thug in a camp with lots of people in earshot. But I knew my limitations. Professional killers were not my thing, not my thing at all.
Twenty-four hours head start? In twenty-four hours I could be halfway to anywhere. Fuck the writing career, I could start over with a new identity, new passport, move my money out of Luxembourg …
I’m not proud of what happened next.
I stood up, grabbed my flash drive and bolted as I heard the sound of the shower.
FOURTEEN
The hotel was six stories of rooms, plus the lobby level, plus the lower beach-facing restaurant level, eight floors in all and Delia’s room was on the top floor. I had taken the elevator up and since the elevator was at hand, having just disgorged a tourist family with a tumble of luggage, I took the elevator down. Also it seemed better to meet some tatted-up Russian thug in an elevator rather than a stairwell.
The elevator stopped on four and I nodded politely to a woman with a baby in a buggy and held the elevator door for her. I was fleeing but that was no excuse for lack of manners.
The elevator stopped next at the lobby level, where I stood back politely to let baby and buggy get off.
Three tourists, Germans, were waiting impatiently to get on and impeded my exit for just a moment. A moment during which I spotted the man from the Land Rover and a second man with him, the driver. The man I’d first seen had head and face shaved to identical quarter-inch bristle-length, pale unhealthy skin, and wore a too-small blue jacket over a tan Polo shirt with the oversized pony logo.
The second man was bald and more generously bearded, which can sometimes make a fellow look jovial, though not on this occasion. He wore a sports coat over a yellow floral Hawaiian shirt.
They were not especially big men, both stood a few inches shorter than me, but they had zero-fat bodies, lean shapes practically vibrating with pent-up kinetic energy and the sort of eyes you expect to see looking back at you from the alligator tank at the zoo.
They might have been law enforcement, but that was not what my radar was screaming. Cops are all about dominance but they generally do it from a stance of reserved confidence. They are trained to hold back until challenged, they don’t go looking for trouble. But these two boys? They were definitely looking for trouble. They scanned the crowd in the lobby, glanced toward the big, red-carpeted main stairway, toward the line of pensioners heading down that staircase to the restaurant, at each of the knots of people reading books in the lobby or sipping cocktails in the lounge.
They were hunting, and no prizes for guessing who they were hunting.
I slipped into self-effacing mode, a slight ‘oh, I forgot something’ gesture, a stab at the elevator buttons, tilt the head down to conceal the face and try to disappear behind the three Germans, two of them middle-aged men and the third a woman who might have been a daughter of one of the men, or … Well, there really wasn’t time to spin out the many possibilities.
I had punched the sixth floor which was of course labeled eight. The Germans were going to three.
The elevator door began to shut.
Then Bristle spotted me. Worse yet, he saw that I saw that he saw me. We had one of those electric moments of recognition, rather like a mouse must have with a cat.
Bristle yelled something terse and Slavic and lunged.
The German woman reached to hit the ‘open door’ button for him but I batted her hand away. The door closed with Bristle’s hand three feet from the gap.
The Germans all gave me dirty looks and muttered German disapproval.
‘Sorry,’ I said as we rose, ‘I have Tourette’s of the hand.’
I smiled sickly at them. They glared at me and turned their backs and the elevator rose at a leisurely pace and … stopped on the second floor.
There he was: Bristle. He wasn’t even breathing hard from having raced up the stairs and hit the button.
He got on, bringing the smell of too much cologne with him. There was no way I could get off. Rather than turn toward the door and present his back to me, he stood facing me, eyeballing me right over the German’s shoulders as the door closed behind him and we rose again.
The Germans would get off on three. And then he, Bristle, was going to kill me. That realization – not a guess but a certainty – dumped adrenalin into my arteries. He was three inches shorter than I, but ten years younger, far more fit, and a professional at the job of thuggery.
My only hope was to get off on three with the Germans.
‘Wo ist die Orchesterprobe?’ I yelped in
German. Which translates as ‘Where is the orchestra practice?’ Because a million years ago in high school I had taken a year of German, and apparently finding orchestra practice was a central concern of German texts in those days.
‘Wo ist die Toilette?’ I asked and leaned close to the nearest German man, who recoiled from the lunatic American, and huffed in a way that rather undercut my attempt at cross-cultural outreach. Three sides of the elevator car were mirrored and I caught a glimpse of a scared-looking fellow I recognized as the guy in my shaving mirror.
The elevator was slowing.
‘Juden Raus!’ I cried, which is a phrase that would have been familiar to Germans in Nazi Germany, perhaps less today. I also yelled, ‘Sheisse! Schweinehund! Weinerschnitzel! Auslese!’
So, ‘Jews out!’ followed by shit, pig-dog, breaded veal and a term used to describe a wine made from late-harvested grapes.
It’s not often that I regret paying little to no attention in high school.
The door opened, the Germans fled, I fled with them and a fist grabbed the back of my shirt and yanked me back with more force than I’d have thought could be generated by a single human being.
I slammed against the back of the elevator cage, smacked my head against the framed poster advertising spa services, and started to yell, but only started because he hit me with a short jab that caught me on the side of the mouth, snapped my head sideways and caused stars to swirl in my field of vision. My knees wobbled.
The next thing I saw was his knife.
FIFTEEN
I remember the first gun anyone ever pointed at me. More than two decades later, and I could still draw you an accurate picture.
I was pretty sure I would remember this knife as well. If I lived long enough. It was a foldable blade, but the kind that locks in place. A four-inch piece of matte black steel, which doesn’t sound very big until you consider that the distance between the carotid artery and open air was about an eighth of an inch.
I remembered that I had bought brass knuckles. I remembered that brass knuckles do not trump knives. I remembered that, in the time it took me to fish the stupid thing out of my pocket, I would be bleeding out.
The Russian yelled something that sounded like, ‘Wheesos!’ Probably not a term of endearment.
I lashed out with a wild kick and caught Bristle’s knee as the door closed behind him. He swung the knife, side to side, not aiming, just keeping me back as he absorbed the pain in his knee and decided between cutting my throat and burying his blade in my eye socket.
I kicked again and he swung the knife and sliced right through my Zanellas. I felt something cold on the skin of my shin.
I yelled, ‘Fuck!’ Because that always helps.
He reached behind him fumbling for the emergency stop button, but he missed, shrugged it off and I could see his fatalistic ‘oh well,’ and knew he was going to do it right here, right now.
‘Tipear tu miraysh,’ he said. Only in Russian.
He didn’t grin evilly the way bad guys do in movies. He didn’t care about me enough to grin, this was nothing personal, he was just taking out the trash.
He kicked expertly at the inside of my left knee, collapsing me into a lopsided bow, used his left forearm to push my face back and expose my neck and ding!
An entire gaggle of giddy Brits, two women and two men, none older than twenty, none remotely sober, piled in, oblivious to the fact that I was about to have my throat cut, oblivious even to the fact that the elevator was going up, not down to the bar.
Bristle folded his knife back against his wrist and made a show of straightening my collar.
‘You are too drunk, my friend,’ he said.
Ah, the glottal vowels of Russian-accented English.
‘He’s trying to kill me!’ I said in a shrill voice. ‘He’s got a knife!’
There are few things more awkward than a fart on an elevator, but this was one. The drunk Brits gaped around at me, at the Russian, at each other. And then one of the women giggled, and one of the men said, ‘Cheers,’ because Brits can’t go two minutes without a vacuous ‘cheers,’ and Bristle and I glared at each other, as I yelled, ‘I am not kidding, this is not a joke! He’s really trying to fucking kill me!’
Bristle made the universal sign for drinking and grinned and then the bastard threw an arm around my neck, pulling me down to him and said, ‘You must eat food when drink, yes, my friend?’
Humans suffer from three related mental quirks: confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and cognitive dissonance. People see what they expect to see, see what they want to see, and have no problem dismissing facts they know to be true but don’t like. My career as a con man had relied heavily on all three syndromes. But at the moment, they were keeping my fellow elevator passengers from seeing the screamingly obvious.
The elevator stopped on at the top of its route, Delia’s floor, where Special Agent Delia would certainly rush to save me if I could only … But if I got off I’d be all alone with Bristle McKnifeski in an empty corridor. The drunks stayed on and we were joined by a Muslim family, a steel-gray-haired man with a Saddam mustache, his hijabed wife and a six-month-old baby in the wife’s arms. Counting the baby there were now eight and a half souls crammed cheek to jowl in the stuffy hot elevator, all facing away from me and the python arm around my neck.
But it would be okay, I told myself, because no way even a Russian hitman was going to complicate his boss’ life by murdering me with six and a half witnesses present.
Probably.
We began our descent and I suddenly spun in place, banged into Saddam’s elbow and twisted free of Bristle’s grip.
I wormed my way backward, face to Bristle, shouldering my way to the front of the cage, pushing past legs and shoulders and bellies, ready to jump to light speed the instant the door opened. That tipped the scales for Bristle. Given a choice between six and a half witnesses and me possibly escaping, he chose witnesses.
He thrust his knife between two of the Brits and stabbed at me. I shied away like a New York City tourist seeing his first New York City rat, and the blade rather than burying itself in my heart went through the gap between my arm and chest and sliced skin on both sides. I bellowed like a water buffalo. Then – finally – everyone started screaming and yelling. Including the baby.
Bristle, angry now, used his shoulder to shove the hijabed woman and baby aside, but the elevator was too crammed with bodies, and I was using them as human shields; the only other alternative being to let the bastard stab me.
Chaos! Screams and roars and a terrified whinny (me) and the blade stabbed into the door so hard it left a dent in the steel. We were panicked cattle now, surging, cowering, banging on walls, yelling in three languages.
‘Suka blyad!’ Russian.
‘Kiss ekhtak!’ Arabic.
‘Ah ah ah ah!’ English. Of a sort.
Knife fighters don’t like to be reduced to nothing but stabbing, but there would be no razzle-dazzle here, so Bristle stabbed and Saddam took it in the shoulder. Bristle stabbed again and cut the fleshy part of my right palm. He stabbed and one of the British women yelled, ‘You cut me, you fucking wanker!’
The elevator car rocked on its cable. The light flickered. There was blood smeared on the door, blood dripping down mirrors. My feet slipped in blood and probably saved my life as the next thrust went right past my nose. But not in slow-motion as it would have done in a movie.
The mother in the hijab wrapped herself around her baby and screamed curses as her husband roared in pain and outrage and punched Bristle, not a great punch, a short, weak punch that caught Bristle on the side of the head. Bristle did what came naturally to him and stabbed the knife into the man’s stomach. Buried it to the hilt.
Then as the stabbed man sank to his knees, shocked, tearing at his shirt to get at the wound, Bristle climbed over him, foot planted on shoulder, pushed himself up and over, banged his head against the ceiling and stabbed at me as the bleeding man sank away benea
th him. I did the crazy thing and pushed myself right at him, head lowered, a desperate bull trying for a kill as the matador stumbled. My head hit Bristle’s chest, harder than he might have expected because I had some leverage pushing off.
Bristle’s feet tangled in the fallen man’s limbs and he staggered back, slamming one of the British men hard.
The Brit yelled, ‘Right then!’ and brought a hammer fist down on the crown of Bristle’s head.
And ding!
The door opened and screaming, raging, blaspheming, blood-smeared people tumbled out onto the marble floor of the lobby. I planted a foot on Bristle’s face as I climbed over him, a rat deserting the good ship USS Elevator with all deliberate haste. Women and children could take care of themselves, it was jibbering cowards first on this Titanic.
I ran, slipping and stumbling, but with great conviction, chased by screams and shouts. Across the lobby, out the glass doors, running through a blur, heading into the night toward the parking lot where … goddammit! Delia had driven!
Rule Number Fucking One of fugitive life – always have a car! Always have a way out!
Behind me came Russian voices. Bristle had joined up with Baldy and I was running flat-out, downhill, scattering sleeping cats, careening toward the water and the lights of town too far south.
Then, I no longer heard steps behind me, and I spared a millisecond for a glance. A glance at the tan Land Rover that now plowed through the automated gate guard of the hotel parking lot and veered off the road onto the grass verge.
It would be an exaggeration to describe what I was doing as ‘thinking’ but my jumbled brain-flashes went something like this:
Lights!
Open cafés!
Won’t stop ’em!
Water!
I’m in decent shape but I’m not a great runner, though panic was shaving seconds off my time. But I am a fair swimmer and I figured if I could just get across the rocks that formed the shoreline here and dive into the black waves I could almost certainly outswim the Russians.
For the first time in my life I yelled, ‘Police! Police!’ And, ‘Policia! Au secours!’ for the benefit of Spanish and French speakers.
A Sudden Death in Cyprus Page 13