Where Dead Men Meet

by Mark Mills

  It was a stupid question, glib and lazy, but the man smiled, amused by the notion. “I’ve had dealings with both, and I can tell you they are not as different from each other as they would like to think.” He paused before adding, “Beware the man who tells you he knows what’s best for you; he usually starts by stealing your rights.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I did.”

  I doubt it, thought Luke.

  The man offered his hand. “Bernard Fautrier.”

  With tensions rising across the continent, and with Italy and Germany effectively lost to dictators, Paris had become the clearing house of Europe, the place where the real business was done. The city was swarming with agents of all kinds, and the currency of the moment was information. They had received firm instructions at the embassy to rebuff then report any approaches made, but Luke was in a restless, contrary mood.

  “Luke Hamilton,” he replied.

  “Not French?”

  “English.”

  The man released Luke’s hand and switched languages effortlessly. “Your French is impeccable. So is the accent.”

  “Madame Vallet will be thrilled to hear it.”

  “Madame Vallet?”

  “My teacher. And we both know my accent is atrocious.”

  The man ignored this challenge. “You don’t look English. You are too …”

  “Dark?” Luke offered.

  “Yes, and the mouth is too strong. Where are you really from?”

  Maybe it was the ghostly presence of Sister Agnes, both in his thoughts and on the giant painting before them, but when Luke finally replied, it was with the sort of honesty one reserved for total strangers. “I don’t know. I’m an orphan. I was brought up by nuns.”

  The man looked shaken by this news. “Your parents?” he asked tentatively before raising his hand. “No, don’t tell me. You never knew them.”

  “No.”

  “You were a baby and it was 1912.”

  Luke had had enough; the game had gone too far. “Bravo,” he said tersely. “You’ve done your research.”

  “It was a question.”

  “Listen, nothing I know is worth buying.”

  “I’m not buying.”

  “Neither am I,” Luke replied. “So let’s just call it a day, shall we?”

  He turned and left, skirting the strange iron fountain that flowed with mercury rather than water. He hadn’t noticed before, but the coins tossed in by visitors were floating on the silvered surface of the round pool.

  Chapter Three

  Borodin was a cautious man. He had learned his lesson young, just shy of his nineteenth birthday, on a wet and windblown night in Ragusa. The scars that had decorated his midriff ever since were an unsightly reminder of the dangers of dropping one’s guard, even for a moment, even when you thought you knew exactly where you stood with people.

  He had learned another lesson a few months after the attack: that he drew no satisfaction from the act of vengeance. The thrill lay in the hunt, in the slow decipherment of motives, of shadowy ambitions and betrayals. Watching a man die by your own hand was an altogether different experience. He wasn’t a natural. That first time, he had emptied the contents of his stomach onto the floor beside the cooling corpse, feeling better for it only because his revulsion suggested he wasn’t a soulless psychopath, but simply a pragmatist looking to stretch out his life as long as possible.

  Well, that pragmatism had managed to add another forty-odd years to that life, and he saw no reason to let up now. It was the reason he poked his head into the concierge’s front room, as he always did when returning to his building on Rue Brochant.

  “Good evening, Thierry. Did anyone call for me while I was out?”

  Thierry’s fat fingers were fiddling with the brass guts of a door lock. “One day I’ll say yes, Monsieur Fautrier.”

  Maybe, but only if prompted. The concierge was about as quick-witted as a packhorse. It amused Borodin to know that Thierry thought of him as a sad, lonely, deluded old man. He caught the odor of Isabelle’s cooking. “Smells like pork tonight.”

  “Belly. Straight from the plate to here.” Thierry patted his paunch and laughed.

  It was a long climb to Borodin’s apartment, and it seemed to have gotten longer over the year he’d been living here. Really? Another floor? There was no mistaking when you arrived, because there was nowhere else to go, only left to his apartment or right to the Chavigniers’. Their young son, Emile, was usually to be found at this time of the evening playing on the landing, because its terrazzo floor offered a perfectly smooth surface for the boy’s marbles. Borodin enjoyed his brief exchanges with Emile. It felt like practice for the grandson he might one day meet, although not if his daughter had anything to do with it.

  Emile’s absence sharpened his senses, but he relaxed when he spotted the small shard of paper, barely visible, tucked low down between the jamb and the door. It told him that no one had entered his apartment while he was away.

  Closing the door behind him, he dropped his keys into the chipped porcelain bowl on the console table.

  “If you even flinch I’ll kill you,” came a voice at his shoulder. Far too close to risk making a move, not even for the gun so tantalizingly within reach, taped to the underside of the console table.

  A hand searched him—a knowing hand that went straight for the stiletto he always wore in a scabbard above his right ankle. That one small act was enough to narrow the field down to his very closest associates, his own people. The hand also discovered the Browning pocket pistol tucked into the back of his waistband. He didn’t draw much comfort from the fact that he wasn’t dead already—it only meant they wanted answers first—but at least it offered him a slender lifeline, a chance to stall and confuse the man now propelling him toward the sofa with a firm shove between the shoulder blades.

  He must have come in through one of the windows, via the roof. Unless, of course …

  Stay focused on the immediate danger, he told himself. There’ll be time enough to figure out the mechanics later.

  The man remained standing behind the sofa. An unseen enemy. “Put your hands on your knees. Move them and I’ll shoot.”

  “Do that and they’ll hear it next door. You should know, he’s a big man with a bad temper.”

  “Was he?”

  Borodin felt his shoulders sag under the weight of the past tense. “The boy?” he asked, dreading the reply.

  “The boy put up more of a fight than his father.”

  Little Emile, with his ready smile and jug ears, snuffed out before he had a chance to show what he was really made of.

  “You didn’t need to do that.”

  “Yes, I did,” came the voice. “You’re obviously getting soft in your old age.”

  “If you’re lucky to live as long as I have in this game, you may find yourself going the same way.”

  “I’m not falling for that. I was warned about your tricks.”

  “Oh? By whom?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is you’ve had three days to finish the job.”

  “I made contact today.”

  “I know. I saw you with him.”

  And Borodin recalled the three “tourists” who had piqued his suspicions in the Spanish pavilion earlier. The slim, nervy woman in the eau de Nil dress could be dismissed, but he was fairly certain that one or the other of the men in question was now standing at his shoulder. The younger and taller of the two, he guessed—the one in the fawn twill jacket and the panama hat, who had been examining Picasso’s painting of Guernica with an air of almost theatrical indifference.

  “Make contact, win his confidence, wait for instructions. Those were my orders.” He was pleased with the response, even though it earned him a sharp clip on the back of his head with a pistol butt.

 
“Lies,” the man hissed.

  Borodin rubbed his head. More than anything, it was to test just how strict the rules were about the hands remaining on the knees. “We’re obviously speaking to different people. I assumed you were here with the instructions.”

  “My instructions are to find out why you haven’t finished the job, and then to finish it myself.” He didn’t need to add what this meant for Borodin.

  “Kill him? That’s absurd. Do you have any idea who he is?”

  “Who cares?”

  “Think of the two people you fear most in the world, because that’s who cares; that’s who I answer to. The only people … always directly.”

  “Lies.”

  True, but there was a new note of uncertainty in the man’s voice, and no accompanying blow to the head this time. Borodin pressed home his advantage. “Listen, my friend, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m pretty sure you’re on the wrong side of it. And believe me, that’s not a place you want to be.”

  Casting them both as victims of some grander intrigue seemed to have the desired effect. He could almost hear the information being digested, tested.

  “He said you’d try and mess with my head.”

  “Let me guess … Petrovic.”

  There was no guesswork involved. If nothing else, Petrovic was the only person within the organization who knew where he lived.

  “No.”

  Not convincing. A feeble effort to throw him off course. He could have challenged it, playing for more time, but he had a sudden vision of Emile, his skinny arm swinging like a metronome as he lined up a shot on the landing.

  “Then do what you’ve come to do,” he said. “But at least allow me to look you in the eye when you do it.” Turning slowly, resignedly, he plucked the silenced pistol from its hiding place beneath the sofa cushion and shot the man once in the throat.

  There was a time when he would have leaped over the back of the sofa, but his arthritic hip had long since put paid to such acrobatics. Rounding the sofa, he gathered up the handgun and crouched beside the man. He lay flat on his back, gurgling and twitching grotesquely, both hands clutching his throat, heels drumming against the wooden floor. The panama hat lay a little distance away.

  Borodin recovered his Browning and the stiletto from the man’s jacket pocket. “That was your life,” he said. “And this is for Emile.”

  As he eased the tip of the blade between the man’s ribs, it struck him for the first time in his long career that revenge could, in fact, taste very sweet indeed.

  He didn’t linger. Once the body was still, he made straight for the windows, taking care not to place himself in view of anyone who might have the apartment under observation. He had always made a point of checking the window locks before going out, and all were still intact. Moving on, he found no signs of forced entry in any of the other rooms. This suggested an accomplice, someone on the outside to reset his crude little paper alarm once the front door lock had been picked.

  The bedroom offered the best view of the street below, and he finally spotted her at the café on the corner. Not all of her, just a pale ankle and the hem of her eau de Nil dress, barely visible beneath the edge of the awning that, from this angle, masked most of the tables out front.

  The leather holdall was ready and waiting behind the false back he had built to the cupboard beside the kitchen sink. It contained everything he required for a swift getaway: a change of clothes, a pair of shoes, a washbag, a substantial quantity of cash in various currencies, along with three passports in different names (impeccably forged by an old Armenian who ran an antiquarian bookshop on the Île Saint-Louis). He gathered together the various weapons he kept secreted around the apartment, and then stripped the dead man of his trousers and jacket. His last act before leaving was to pack the novel and the reading spectacles lying on his bedside table.

  It was a long while since he had thought of anywhere as home, and he felt little sense of sorrow as he pulled the front door shut behind him. Besides, he had only himself to blame. Petrovic had instructed him to kill the Englishman, and he had hesitated, detecting something in Luke Hamilton’s face, his bearing, that chimed with dim, disturbing memories from long ago. Answering to curiosity, he had then broken the cardinal rule and made contact with the target.

  That Petrovic had taken out insurance against such a possibility reeked of more than his reputation for efficiency. There were other factors at play, shadows shifting at the back of the stage. If Petrovic had known the truth about Hamilton’s identity, he would never have assigned Borodin to the job in the first place. No, a mistake had been made, had been recognized as such, and now was being rectified. The order to kill him could have come from only one place: the top.

  He felt a cold hand clutch at his heart. He might have cheated death upstairs just now, but he was as good as dead, destined to see out his days glancing over his shoulder. He pictured a simple life of honest toil on his cousin’s sheep station in Australia … and saw a car approaching in the shimmering distance, throwing up a plume of dust in its wake. No, they would hunt him down, search him out. It would be a point of both pride and principle for the Karaman brothers, men known for never leaving a loose end.

  The solution came to him as he was crossing the darkened courtyard, and it stopped him momentarily in his tracks. He saw what he had to do, saw with absolute certainty that Luke Hamilton, alive and well, was the only bargaining chip available to him. There might even be some money in it—a lot of money if he played his hand correctly. The plan taking shape in his head left no place for the nostalgic sentiments that had given him pause before and almost gotten him killed just now.

  “Eating out, Monsieur Fautrier?”

  Thierry stepped jauntily from the shadows, swinging a bunch of keys in his hand. Borodin would have replied in the affirmative if it weren’t for the leather holdall he was carrying. “Dropping some old clothes off with a friend who needs them more than I do.”

  Thierry frowned. “Is that blood on your jacket?”

  Borodin couldn’t resist leaving the concierge with a line he could dine out on for the rest of his days. “Not my jacket—the jacket of the man I just killed.”

  Thierry laughed. “Oh, dear, I suppose I should call the cops.”

  The speed and wit of the response surprised Borodin. Maybe he had underestimated Thierry all this time. “Tell them it was self-defense.”

  “Don’t you worry, Monsieur Fautrier, I’ll even stand as a character witness at your trial.”

  “There isn’t going to be a trial. I’m fleeing the country.”

  Thierry was still laughing as Borodin heaved open the wooden door and stepped outside onto the pavement.

  He thought about pulling the brim of the panama hat down over his eyes, but the night had drawn in enough by now that it wasn’t necessary. Judging from the reaction of the woman seated at the table in front of the Café Metropole, she took his appearance at face value: the hat, the jacket, the gray flannel trousers, discernible in the gloaming, but only just.

  Nodding for her to follow him, he set off at a brisk pace toward Square des Batignolles. A quick glance saw the woman settling her account with Gustave, the cadaverous waiter who served Borodin his coffee and croissant most mornings. Another glance established that she was in pursuit and had him firmly in her sights as he entered the small park at the end of the street.

  The timing was ideal. The dog walkers were long gone, driven off by the thickening dusk, and it would be a good while yet before the drinkers, lovers, and other reprobates began to make an appearance. He picked a hiding spot beside the graveled pathway, and when she finally appeared—slowing to a hesitant walk and hissing a name he couldn’t quite make out—he stepped silently from the bushes and punched her in the side of the head.

  Not too hard. Just enough to knock the fight out of her. He needed to know exactly
who and what he was up against.

  Chapter Four

  Luke had heard the anecdote before, and it had changed with every telling, shifting shape under Fernando’s embellishments. Improbably, a rabbi had now been added to the cast of characters.

  Fernando claimed to have gotten the story straight from the horse’s mouth: a society lady who was woken one night in her bed by the intimate kisses of a man. She knew it couldn’t be her husband, because he was away in Lyon on business, but she wasn’t sure at first just which of her many lovers it might be. She soon rejected the Romanian sculptor. Where was the rasp of his thick stubble between her thighs? As for the young Polish composer, well, it wasn’t impossible, but he had always been a bit squeamish about that sort of thing. And the rabbi (who wasn’t at all squeamish about that sort of thing) seemed an unlikely candidate, what with it being a Saturday night. Stumped, she was about to slide her hands beneath the covers in search of clues, but it was so good, so very good, that in the end she just lay there and allowed herself to be transported to a place she had never been before. When she finally awoke, she was alone, and none the wiser.

  The next morning, after breakfast, she telephoned each of her lovers in turn and established in discreet, roundabout ways that none of them had been the mysterious visitor. This left the only other two people present in the apartment at the time: her seventeen-year-old stepson and the maid. Cornering the stepson in his bedroom, she asked, “Did you enjoy yourself last night?”

  The boy blushed with embarrassment before finally blurting out, “You won’t tell Father, will you?”

  “Of course not,” she replied.

  “I’ve never done it before.”

  “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

  “I promise. It’s the first time I’ve slipped out at night, and I was back before sunrise.”

  Amélie gave a loud gasp. “It was the maid?”

  Fernando spread his hands. “Who else? The boy was out on the town, living it up.” He caught their elderly waiter’s eye and signaled for another bottle of wine.