I walked across the bridge, holding onto my hat to stop it being picked off by the rough gusts blowing off the river. Half way across, I stopped and gazed thoughtfully down into the black waters of the Vardar River. Anna and Eleni passed slowly behind me. When the tail lights of the van pulled up on the far side, I followed.
A few restaurants lined the south bank, but the pavements were deserted. I followed the road down between a looming chain hotel and a municipal car park. I was ten minutes’ walk from the police station now. The street was wide and although well lit, the lamps were high and gave a cold, fluorescent sheen to the concrete and glass walls of the hotel. The perfect place for a killing. So where were the killers?
The traffic was lighter here, vehicles coming up fast, so at least I had a chance of sensing if one of them decelerated. Anna and Eleni had pulled over just beyond a bus stop, and I walked quickly to get past them. Now there was a small park to my right. I stilled my breathing and shook out my arms to let the tension go, and all the time my eyes flickered over the slabs of gleaming steel and glass sliding along the road beside me. Three minutes since I’d crossed the bridge. Time enough, if I’d been spotted.
I had.
A BMW, cruising towards me on the opposite carriageway. A face staring at me from the rear window, lips twitching in speech, finger pointing. Anna was ten yards behind me. The BMW slowed and drew in towards the kerb, making space for a U-turn. I reached to adjust my dog collar, lest they be in any doubt that I was Father Daniel.
I watched for their move. The park was unfenced, but there wasn’t much cover for the first twenty yards, just a statue of a group of soldiers leaning towards the sky.
A long blast on a horn. I turned. The BMW was heeling across the traffic, windows gaping. In the passenger seat I saw the big, impassive face and dark eyes of the man who had tried to crack open my skull in Syrna Street. Haclan Adjani.
I sprinted for the statue, got its broad plinth between me and the BMW. Doors slamming, the car surging away from the kerb. I ran straight into the park and watched the BMW’s lights swing right at the corner and follow the road round. Footsteps behind me, right and left. The BMW drew up on the far side of the park, three or four hundred yards away. I ran through lines of low hedging and skirted a bandstand that stood in a blaze of light in the centre of the park, its white colonnades so clean and new they looked like plastic.
I headed into a brake of ornamental trees, though their slender trunks would give scant cover. Two men were running in from the place where the BMW was parked. I saw a dart of orange, heard the vicious snap, the bullet whining as it split the cold air ten yards to my left. A second shot from the men behind me crunched into the bark of a tree to my right.
I hit the side road along the rear of the hotel. They were still over a hundred yards away, and it takes luck to down a running man with a handgun at that range. I was tempted to use the Sauer to keep them honest, but then they’d know for sure I wasn’t Father Daniel and the longer they harboured doubts on that score the better. I dashed across the street without bothering to zigzag. The headlights of the BMW shone from the corner. Which way now?
Cast-iron railings separated the sidewalk from a strip of concrete paving along the wall of the hotel. I looked left and right for a way into the building. . . There! A delivery bay with a down ramp barred by a pair of high gates. I raced towards it. Locked – and too high to climb quickly enough. Haclan got out of the BMW and stood watching me, one arm in a sling across his stomach.
I was stranded on a narrowing stretch of pavement, my pursuers fanning out along the edge of the park behind me. One of them crouched and raised the snout of his weapon. His bullet whanged off the crossbar of the railings and a chip of cast iron struck my cheek. A second bullet snapped into the wall, just about head height. A jolt of adrenalin booted at my heart. I ran – towards the BMW, because I was facing that way, and because Haclan wasn’t firing. He’d stepped out of the car merely to enjoy the spectacle. They loosed off round after round, like shooting at a pellet-scarred tin soldier rattling along a rail at a fairground booth. Time ticked down, my legs slowed, my arms took turns to reach ahead of me. My mind rehearsed the moment of impact, the heavy slug tearing flesh, parting nerves, splintering bone.
Then I saw something. A skylight. One of a row set in the paved area on the other side of the railings, but this one wasn’t like the rest. Brown, tatty at the edges. Twenty paces away. I slowed to a jog. It was broken, repaired with a square of chipboard and a bit of plastic sheeting. Bullets whirring and snickering. . . I took it all in: the height of the railings, the blunt shapes of the spikes. Ten paces. The opening, just wide enough, the chipboard brittle. Three paces. The possibility that I’d misjudged. Two paces. The fact that I had no choice.
I seized the third spike back from the broken skylight with my right hand and vaulted, putting all the power I could through my arm to turn forward momentum into height. I felt my weakened ribs crunch as I torqued through the air, but I got one foot on top of a spike, released my grip, and caught my balance for long enough to take aim at the skylight. It didn’t look so big now but I was on my way, battering feet first through the square of chipboard, splinters tearing at my arms, the frame flying past, plunging down and praying for a safe passage and a soft landing.
I got neither.
My left shoulder crashed against the frame of the skylight and a jag of chipboard gouged a furrow in my neck, then snagged the tip of my ear and ripped through the cartilage. I landed off balance on a concrete floor, and the square of plastic sheeting slipped out from beneath my feet. I slammed down on hip and elbow, lay there with my bones throbbing, blood dripping over the dog collar and pooling on the floor.
I rolled onto my side and pulled myself upright, groggy and stiff but more or less intact. I reached for the Sauer, but it wasn’t there. Dislodged in the fall. There was a dim glow from the street, but not enough to see much. I’d make an easy target if I turned on the light so I searched the floor with my hands, but couldn’t find the gun.
I tried the door. Locked. It was strong and close-fitting, the kind a hotel chain fits on a room where hazardous materials are stored. Shadows lunged across the room. I looked up to see the wan streetlight blocked out by the figure of a man peering over the railings.
The room was lined with racks of steel shelving, holding mops, brushes and boxes of cleaning products. I found a bottle of bleach, and another of bathroom cleaner with a nozzle and trigger top. Two men were now climbing the railings above the skylight. I emptied the bottle with the trigger top and filled it with bleach, adjusted the nozzle to give a jet, then climbed the shelves to one side of the skylight until I was hunched against the ceiling. I held my breath and stayed very still.
Voices, feet scuffing concrete, the rasp and click of a clip being loaded. I could sense their reluctance to lower themselves into this dark basement, even though there was probably nothing down there but a priest unconscious on the floor. After a moment, the silhouette of a head appeared in the opening. A gun inched uncertainly forward.
I reached up and aimed the nozzle at the face behind it, squeezed. There was a roar and the gun-hand shot backwards. A second gun appeared and fired twice into the floor. I dropped the bleach and stretched up for the shooter’s wrist, got it in one hand, grabbed it with the other, then swung down off the shelves. He didn’t have time to brace himself. His head and shoulders scraped down through the skylight and my bodyweight did the rest. His head cracked into the floor, and his body flopped after it like a puppet with the strings cut.
An engine running in the street, a shout. Haclan, regrouping. I flipped on the light and saw the butt of my Sauer beneath the shelving rack. The lock was a good one and it took three carefully aimed shots before I could barge the door open.
I stepped out into a dimly lit passage and saw a uniformed man retreat smartly from the corner ahead of me. If he’d been sent to investigate, then someone else would already have called the police, and th
ey didn’t have far to come. I ran along the low, narrow passages around the basement until I found the service lift. It was jammed open by a wheeled hopper full of bags used by guests to send their clothes for cleaning. I shoved the hopper into the lift and hit the button for the top floor. While the lift trundled upwards, I searched through the laundry bags and found a couple of T-shirts to mop the blood from my arms and neck, then sorted out a black polo-neck sweater that would cover the dog collar, and a fawn overcoat. My trousers were ripped but I couldn’t find a replacement and the overcoat would cover the worst of the damage.
On the top floor I encountered a party of well-dressed diners making their way along the corridor from the passenger lifts, following signs for the Skyway Restaurant. I hurried past them, T-shirt clamped to my neck. I took a flight of stairs that led to the roof, ran to the parapet above the back wall of the building.
The BMW had driven off. I worked my way around the roof and noticed that on one side of the building there was a walkway which gave access at third-floor level to the shopping mall next door. I moved on to the front of the hotel and looked down at a short arc of brightly lit asphalt that curved in beneath the canopy over the entrance. A group of porters had gathered, one of them giving orders and pointing. A man and a woman came out and were bundled hastily into a waiting taxi. No sign of the BMW, nor of Anna and Eleni’s van. As I changed into my new clothes, the darkness was cut by the keening of a siren, then a series of jabbering pulses as the approaching police vehicle cleared the traffic from a junction. Time to move on.
I ran back down and rode the service lift to the third floor, reasoning that the police would expect a fugitive to use the stairs and would shortly have them covered. I found the entrance to the walkway and stepped between rows of glass-fronted cabinets with sensually posed perfume flasks, wristwatches reclining on Alpine swards, crystal swans necking beneath cones of halogen. This surreal scene gave way to a galleried shopping arena, with a few groups of people browsing the brightly lit shopfronts. I thought I might bleed to death before I found the lavatories, which were hidden by an artful trompe l’oeil of a curved wall.
Once inside, I stripped to the waist and sluiced cold water over my ear and neck. My shoulder was livid and swollen where it had banged against the frame of the skylight, but nothing was broken. The ugly, ragged scrape in my neck pulsed as blood pumped in the carotid artery – a splinter of chipboard had missed it by millimetres. My arms were cut up, too, but the only really troublesome injury was the inch-long nick in my already-damaged ear, which bled with joyful copiousness whenever I pulled the T-shirt away. I rinsed the cloth, tore it into strips and bandaged my head, then redressed. The overcoat was a fancy cashmere, and from the collar down I could pass for a wealthy Skopje businessman; from the collar up I looked like a desperado who’s run head first through a barbed-wire fence and been patched up by a passing drunk. I could have done with the shabby hat, but it was probably sitting in a labelled evidence bag in the back of a police car by now. It couldn’t be helped. I’d been here too long already.
I went back into the mall and left by the main entrance, then turned towards the river. I went cautiously, head down, dawdling at corners to check for followers. On the embankment road, a bus came past and I ran for the stop. The driver waited, though when he saw my ripped-up neck and soggy bandage he looked as if he wished he hadn’t. I rode the bus for several stops, then got out, crossed the river and walked back towards the old town.
39
I bought a black watch cap to hide the bandage and holed up in a cluttered little café just off the souk. I had nothing to do now but wait for Anna’s call. The proprietor juggled a huge spit of chicken meat onto his grill and tended it lovingly while talking football at me in broken English. It was clear from the collection of greasy posters and flags pinned to the wall behind the counter that his first love was FK Vardar Skopje and his second Aston Villa. Having nothing to contribute to a conversation about either, I nodded or shook my head on cue, and was rewarded with the first serving from the spit, served in a hot flatbread with sliced tomato and a powerful-smelling garlic sauce.
‘No bottle, no!’ he ferociously declared, smearing it onto the bread with the back of a spoon. ‘I make myself. Julian Joachim, best striker in England football, yes?’
‘For sure.’
‘Left foot, right foot, head. Always in the net!’
The hot, spicy food and loquacious company were soothing as the touch of a mother’s hand in fever. I found myself thinking of all the cafés I’d visited over the last few weeks – Maria’s, the Royal outside Wellingborough Station, the lorry drivers’ haunt by Harwich docks, and now this place that already felt so familiar – and they strung themselves together in my memory like knots in a cord, markers of moments when the chaotic trajectory of my life intersected briefly with normality. Moments of respite. . . Yet also reminders of how far adrift I was, how hurled about and swept along and consumed by the dark and insatiable appetites of my enemies. I’d aligned myself with the power of a mother’s love, of her anguish. But still, I’d left another body on the floor of the hotel store room. Dead? I hadn’t even checked. Either way, I was a killer. And I felt gloomy, then, because I did not know where being a killer would take me next.
The proprietor came over with a glass of red wine.
‘For you. We drink now. To Vardar! To Aston Villa! Hurrah!’
‘Hurrah,’ I said.
‘You sad man,’ he observed. ‘Maybe Birmingham fan!’
I laughed with him and slugged the velvety wine that smelled of blackberries and warm earth. He refilled my glass and we drank again. Wasn’t this how life should be? An exchange of camaraderie over chicken and red wine. The trivial circumstance of human kinship. I looked up at my host’s generous, piratical features and grinned at him. It doesn’t take so much to be a happy man, I thought. Aston Villa, cheap wine, a willingness to make your own garlic sauce. The phone buzzed in my pocket.
‘James, we thought you must be dead.’
‘Very much alive, thank you, Eleni.’
‘We lost them. It was my fault. We followed the car, but then—’
‘Where did you see them last? Are you there now?’
‘Yes. They had another car near the station. We followed that one. The BMW was too fast. It was a Volkswagen. . .’ I heard her consulting Anna. ‘A Volkswagen Passat. Grey. I got it mixed up with another car.’
‘Give me the address, I’ll come and find you.’
I ran into the street and found a taxi. Thirty-five minutes later, I was crouched in the back of the little van, Anna’s haunted face turned towards me, Eleni clutching a map in both hands. It was upside down, I noticed. ‘We heard the shooting,’ she said. ‘Dear James, what happened to your neck? And your ear?’
‘It’s fine. Tell me what happened.’
‘The BMW waited by the park until we heard sirens, then it left and we followed it to a place near the railway station. Most of them got into the grey car that was waiting and the BMW drove off.’
‘Did you see who drove it? The man with his arm in a sling?’
‘No, he got into the grey car.’
‘The BMW was probably stolen. Show me where they went.’
‘They crossed the river on Belasitsa, then took the main road east, Alexander Makedonski, here,’ said Eleni, her large white finger fluttering uncertainly over the map. ‘They came off at Andonov-Chenko and we followed them for about two kilometres. Left onto Alija Avdovikj, then left again, Durmitorska Road. But when the car stopped, a family got out.’ She looked anxiously at Anna. ‘The streets are so dark. All I could see was the red lights on the back of the cars.’
‘You did your best,’ said Anna. ‘Did we really think we could follow these men to their front door? We’re university lecturers, not policemen or spies. It didn’t work, that’s all.’
‘Eleni, show me where you think you started following the wrong car.’
‘The junction of Andonov-C
henko and Alija Avdovikj. There was so much traffic, I couldn’t—’
‘Look at the route,’ I interrupted. ‘They followed Alexander Makedonski out of town, then took a smaller main road, then perhaps Alija Avdovikj. There are plenty of other exits off Alexander Makedonski but they chose this one. Which tells us they were heading for this area.’ I circled it on the map. ‘I’d say they’re holed up somewhere less than five minutes’ drive from here.’
‘Maybe thirty streets,’ said Anna, starting the engine. ‘How long will it take, do you think, James? Half an hour?’
‘Eleni should go back and get the Fiat,’ I said. ‘They might have seen the van.’
‘Anna, do you want me to stay?’
‘No. Call me when you get to the apartment.’
‘Good luck, my darling Anna,’ she said, and bundled herself out into the street.
I climbed into the passenger seat and worked out a route that zigzagged back and forth across our search area. It would take two hours at least. All the stiffness and soreness in the various damaged bits of my body was gone. I dared not tell Anna, but I really did feel that Haclan was close.
It was a district of light industrial units, most of which were locked up and looked disused. High walls topped with broken glass, fenced-off yards with warehouses, sheds, office huts, lock-up garages, unlit corners, barriers formed by stacks of timber or piles of sand or skips full of rubbish. . . Every turning seemed to have a dozen places you could hide a car. We crawled along the broken roads, the van’s wipers thumping from side to side, laying drifts of gritty slush against the edges of the windscreen, further obscuring our view of these obscure places.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 26