Eddie Mazaryk wore no tie, just a three-button black jacket over a white collared shirt. The dark brown wisps of his bangs were held back by a black band, the rest of his hair hung freely down to just above his shoulders. There was no trace of sleep on him. His eyes were dark and hard. All three walked silently.
As soon as they reached immigration they were waved to the side of the room where one entry kiosk stood dormant. A jowly customs official asked Mazaryk for his identification in rapid French. Mazaryk removed a thin wallet from his breast pocket and took from it a card. The official swiped it and asked for a thumb print, which he gave. Mazaryk then unbuttoned his jacket as another officer, a bullish young man bulky with a protective vest and equipment, approached haltingly. Mazaryk calmly watched him, his eyes following the man’s every move.
The official cleared his throat. “Where is your gun?”
“In a shoulder holster above my left hip,” replied Mazaryk in quiet, fluent French.
The officer pushed open Mazaryk’s jacket with one gloved hand and reached inside. He popped open the shoulder holster there and withdrew an angry looking .34 caliber black Beretta. Mazaryk watched his gun as the man carefully passed it to his jowly superior, who scanned a metal barcode at the butt of its hilt with what looked like a supermarket check-out gun. The device beeped twice. The officer watched Mazaryk through heavily lidded eyes.
“What is the purpose of your visit?” he asked.
“Give me my gun,” Mazaryk said in quiet French.
The young man tensed, his hand straying to his hip, but the elder simply returned Mazaryk’s gun and stepped aside to allow him to pass through.
Eddie Mazaryk patiently waited while his teammates went through the same procedure, watching every move everybody made. Once past customs the three were waved though immigration without event. Several officers watched them pass, as did a throng of travelers who had been in the front of nearby lines and seen the men remove their weapons only to have them returned to them.
Thirty minutes later the three arrived at the Noel Bar in Belleville on the right bank of Paris. They drove two blocks beyond it, paid their driver, and exited to the street. They approached on foot.
Mazaryk looked at the dingy building as it rose up before him. It was old and soot stained, the windows streaked and gummy. There was no sign to speak of, but the address was correct. He spat. He pulled out his gun and his other two did the same. He pushed open the door easily and snapped about in every direction as Brander and Ales fanned out to flank him. No one was there. Ales immediately moved over to the stairs and leveled his gun up them. Nothing moved.
Mazaryk heard a shuffling behind the bar and snapped it to sight. He nodded at Brander, who padded to the bar and reached over it as if replacing the salt shaker on the far side of a dinner table. The shuffling behind the bar stopped and they heard a small squeak.
In very polite French, Brander spoke. “Get up young one.”
A small boy rose slowly from behind the bar holding a mop. From where he stood Mazaryk could see only his head.
“Come here,” Mazaryk said, his gun pointing at the child, his voice level. The boy stood frozen, mouth agape.
“You had better go,” Brander said after a moment.
The boy dropped his mop and its handle snapped on the floor. Ales swung his gun around to sight and the boy wailed in fright.
“Come here!” Mazaryk barked.
The boy stumbled out from behind the bar and stood in front of Mazaryk with his head bowed. His breathing was shallow and he was losing his color.
“Where did they go?” Mazaryk asked. The boy started to cry.
“He’s going to faint,” Brander said.
“Where did they go!” Mazaryk snapped.
The boy cringed into a squatting position before buckling into a heap at Mazaryk’s feet.
“Ales, upstairs.”
Ales took the stairs one at a time, sweeping his gun to account for every nook on the way.
Mazaryk stooped to the boy’s level and grabbed his face, bringing the boy’s eyes up to his own. The boy stirred. “Listen to me child. Tell me what happened to the men who own this bar, and we will leave you forever.”
Tears streaming down his face, the boy pointed a shuddering arm towards the door. Mazaryk followed: an envelope was nailed just under the inside handle. They had missed it on their way in. Mazaryk stood.
“Watch the boy. Don’t let him move.”
Brander leveled his massive gun down at the child, who buried his face into the filthy floor and moaned.
Mazaryk ripped the envelope from the nail and tore open one end. Inside he found a damp letter. It read:
Dear Black
Welcome to France.
Why not come dancing?
Frieze: Rue De Montpellier.
P.S.
You Russian Bastards.
-Silver
Ales Radomir came down the stairs and shook his head. Mazaryk looked back at Brander who was watching the sobbing boy intently.
“Time to go,” he said.
————
Club Frieze occupied a massive converted warehouse on Rue De La Forge Royale in the east warehouse district of Paris. It was an old storage building that had fallen into disrepair, indistinguishable from those surrounding it, so neglected that half of the roof was caved in. Where most people saw a haven for derelicts and drug abusers, one enterprising and wealthy young Parisian saw possibilities. He purchased the entire lot, kicked every bum out of it, and went to work. He removed the entirety of the warehouse roof, even the part still standing, and erected a peaked and sloped canvas roofing in its place. At the rear of the building he raised a DJ booth ten feet high on a single, thick steel pole and surrounded it with curved glass. Fully stocked bars spanned both sides of the rectangular building, and round, port hole like windows were embedded every ten feet behind them. To top it off, he literally blew a hole in the front wall for the front door. Three months later he had one of the hottest nightclubs in Paris.
The night was deeply black when Mazaryk and his team approached Frieze and the club stood out like a jewel. Deep, throbbing music and a misty red light escaped from breaks in the tented roofing and out through the jagged front door. All around the club loomed the shadows of darker, derelict buildings, illuminated occasionally by a stray beam. A line of beautiful young men and women waited to get in, all smartly dressed and shivering in the late October night. Many talked on their phones and most of them smoked. Their cigarettes burned brighter here and there like sporadic fireflies as one and then another took a drag. Mazaryk looked upon them for a moment, his breath puffing small, even clouds into the air.
“A nightclub. They think this is some sort of game,” said Mazaryk, his Russian soft and clipped. Brander looked at him and popped a large eyebrow. If Mazaryk’s voice betrayed even a slight annoyance, he was furious. Eddie Mazaryk disliked games not of his own contrivance.
“Let’s move,” said Mazaryk, placing his gun hand inside his jacket as he stepped off the sidewalk.
They bypassed the line and walked directly to the door. As they approached the bouncers there, Mazaryk spoke to Brander. “Take care of them, I’m walking in.”
Brander withdrew his massive handgun from his jacket and leveled it at the nearest bouncer.
“If you move, I’ll kill you,” he said, his voice a base growl loud enough to be heard over the waves of music. All three men manning the door froze and Eddie Mazaryk stepped deftly inside. Brander knew he had at most ten seconds within which he must act before someone screamed. Ales moved in, his teeth clenched, and leveled his own gun at another bouncer. Ales nodded at Brander who swept inside just as the screaming began. It was immediately clipped by the roaring music.
Yves Noel waited inside for Mazaryk. He stood against the bar to the left of the room, about twenty feet towards the back. He leaned over his handgun to shield it from whoever might look his way, but snapped it up as he saw Mazaryk appear and th
en disappear into the crowd just as quickly. He only just managed to duck out of view himself before he saw the towering frame of Goran Brander enter the club. For almost five seconds he had a clear shot at the man but reasoned that if he took it, he would reveal his position to Mazaryk, who couldn’t be more than ten feet away. Mazaryk was the head of the snake. He wouldn’t risk the striker with that prize in reach. Yves ducked again and lost sight of Brander.
Seconds later Yves saw a slim man in a black suit weaving about just in front of him. He turned the man about and jammed the silencer of his gun into his gut, but it wasn’t Mazaryk. The man was drunk and tried to grab Yves in return, but Yves shoved him behind and ducked further, nosing about like a hound.
Mazaryk was nowhere. Yves cursed. All three men of Black would be in by now. He was too late, and they could be anywhere. He only hoped his brothers stalking the perimeter had a better vantage than he did. He should have shot that behemoth when he had the chance. He had Brander in his sights for five full seconds. He swore at himself again as he ducked and weaved, scanning the room.
Tristan Noel did see Brander when he came in and he shot at him twice with his silenced automatic, but the distance was too far and he missed. Yves had ordered them to make their shot clusters quick and precise and then to holster their guns so as not to cause a panic. His diodes slammed against the front wall while the crowd danced on to the blaring music none the wiser. By the time Tristan was able to see the length of the club again, Brander was gone. He shook his head. For a giant, the man was frighteningly mobile.
Dominique Noel had backed into the shadows at the edge of the large room and leveled his gun at the entrance, hoping to drop one or all of them as they walked in, but something was wrong outside. No one was moving in or out and both bouncers had disappeared from view. Had Mazaryk come in? Had Ales Radomir? The club was so loud and the visibility so low and erratic that nothing was certain. Yves had designed it this way so that all communication between Team Black would be cut off, but as the strobe lights kicked on and the entire club plunged into an eerie stop-motion animation, Dominique wondered if it was any advantage at all.
Twice Eddie Mazaryk thought he had one or more of the triplets cornered, and twice it was nobody, and his anger was mounting. Team Black practiced methods of movement, formations that they followed in a fight, and normally they never lost each other. Ever. Still, at times like this, when communication with his team was impossible, Mazaryk was thankful for his striker’s height. They found each other almost at once. Mazaryk grabbed Brander and pulled him down to his eye level and spoke directly into his ear.
“Ales will only be able to hold the door for at most another minute. If the police come here or they turn on the lights, you, at least, will be shot very quickly. I think they are in the corners. That is where I would be.”
Brander started off towards the back corners but was stopped by Mazaryk, who flipped him about again.
“No!” he hissed. “They’ll see you coming. They’ll see any of us coming.”
He looked around himself at the jostling crowd, squeezing into each other and around each other and bobbing up and down in unison like a bucket of worms. He shook his head and snuffed a derisive breath.
“Cowardly French,” he said. “They risk everyone in this building, but we’re running out of time.”
He hung his head momentarily, and for a moment he looked very sad—so sad that Brander was about to speak to him, but then Eddie Mazaryk brought his head up and the look Brander saw in his eyes stilled him. The man had totally separated himself. Mazaryk perceived the flowing masses with a new distance, objectively, as if they were no longer people but mere things, moveable and usable. When Brander saw this he began to unscrew the silencer on his gun.
“They use this chaos against us. It is time we turned the tables,” said Mazaryk as he unscrewed his own silencer. “Go to the door and follow my lead.”
Mazaryk shifted his way to the center of the dance floor, surrounded on all sides by the pressing horde. The music was rising, gaining in pitch, the beat intervals closing. The bass drop was coming and the clubbers sensed it, tensing in anticipation and raising their heads to the elevated booth that was its source as if preparing to receive a blessing. Mazaryk calmly raised his gun at the glass enclosed DJ and fired four times just as the low notes of the drop tapped the sternum of the crowd. The cracks were muffled by the music but not covered completely, like the settling of wood under carpeting, and four of them in a row got the immediate attention of everyone nearby. The mob froze in terror, unable to react for a stretch of moments.
When the DJ booth exploded into a million tiny glass fragments, people fell to the floor and screamed and whoever was still standing in the rear corners of the building, Eddie Mazaryk shot.
If Mazaryk’s gun was a loud pop under the music, Brander’s .50 sounded like a cannon in the music’s abrupt absence. Those still standing under the shower of glass began to run en masse for the door but were immediately turned away by Brander, who sighted the corners opposite him and fired at anything that resembled the triplets. He fired in measured time: blam, blam, blam, blam, a devastating metronome. Three people hit the ground in succession, one lay still, but two writhed about in a grotesque parody of the dancing moments before.
Ales appeared through the doorway already firing in the same direction as his captain, as if the bespectacled sweeper was simply awaiting his cue. He shot a bartender in the face. The impact snapped her head back owlishly and she dropped a drink as she collapsed.
Surrounded on all sides by madmen with guns, most of the clubbers simply dropped to the ground and screamed. Several buried their heads in their shirts and dresses. A handful stood dead still. One girl near Mazaryk screamed herself to her knees. One very drunk man tried to settle the matter by lunging at Mazaryk, who sidestepped him easily and shot him in the face twice. He dropped like a sack of coins.
In the dead space both teams now saw each other clearly for the first time. Ales stood at the door, Brander to his far left. Mazaryk still stood at the dead center of the dance floor. Dominique and Tristan were at either corner opposite the door, Yves near the left bar, twenty paces from his brothers. Everything from the time Team Black walked in until that moment spanned barely five minutes. For a split-second, both teams simply looked at each other. Then, at once, everything happened.
The Russians fired first and the French were forced to move because they took half of a beat longer to sight in an effort to spare as many of their countrymen as possible. Black had no such qualms and fired at everyone standing between them and their targets. Dominique ducked low, his back against the wall under the bar. He was hit by a tooth as he sought a vantage point from which to fire between the jumbles of legs. He watched it in horrified fascination as it bounced off of his arm and skittered on the smeared linoleum floor. Tristan, drunk on vodka and high on adrenaline, walked himself into the middle of the dance floor with a fresh clip in his gun. He shoved men and women to the floor as he shot at Brander and Brander only. It was unbelievable to Tristan that a man of Goran Brander’s size was not yet incapacitated. It was unnatural. He was five shots into his ten shot clip before Mazaryk got a bead on him.
Brander found himself inundated with Tristan Noel’s fire. He managed to flinch out of the direct line of one diode just as a second slammed into a bottle of whisky behind him, exploding it into an auburn colored fine debris inches from his head. With whisky burning his eyes and fresh cuts on his face, Brander leaned heavily on the bar. Above him, another shot struck one of the porthole windows and blew its glass inward and onto the cowering bartenders.
Then Tristan was shot in the shoulder, just above his heart, and his firing stopped.
It had taken Eddie Mazaryk almost six bullets to finally hit the French sweeper. Three people lay screaming on the ground in their wake, brought low as Mazaryk cleaved a clean sight through those that still stood between them. Tristan hitched back with the force of the shot. Yves sa
w his brother get hit and screamed in anger as he propelled himself off of the bar at Mazaryk. Mazaryk turned to aim at him, but Ales got to him first with a single shot to the neck. Yves gargled as he fell to the ground in front of Mazaryk, who hissed at him, his face furious.
“You think this is a game? The blood tonight is on your hands!”
Yves coughed and jerked as Ales stepped forward to finish him off with four shots clustered in the small of his back. The captain of Silver lay still.
Through force of will Tristan still stood, but he was gasping with the pain of his wound. Every breath hitched up high in his chest and would go no further. He could not exhale. His body was failing him, growing numb. His eyes were wild, but his gun was still sighted on Goran Brander. Mazaryk, momentarily distracted by Yves’ charge, was about to finish Tristan when Dominique popped up from the floor to his right. Mazaryk coolly readjusted his aim at this newest threat and fired into Dominique’s stomach. He absorbed it as if he was catching a ball and fell to his knees, but not before unloading two wild shots towards the front of the room. Neither of them hit anyone, but in the second that Mazaryk was forced to duck, Tristan fired once. The diode whizzed past Mazaryk’s cheek and slammed into Goran Brander’s right temple. Brander slumped over the bar, unmoving.
Mazaryk looked at his striker for a moment as he lay draped on the bar.
Dominique Noel still laughed from his knees at his brother’s kill. He spat and moved to speak, but Mazaryk shot him once in the head and he went silent. Mazaryk turned to Tristan, the only Silver man still standing, albeit in a leering manner. He popped out his spent clip and reloaded in one swift movement while Tristan sucked in air and fumbled with his gun. Mazaryk walked around Tristan and shot him three times in the back of the head. He slammed to the ground as if a weight had dropped upon him. Mazrayk turned once again to look at his felled striker, contemplating. Then he turned back to Tristan and fired once more into the back of his head.
The Tournament Trilogy Page 16