One Damn Thing After Another

by Dan Latus

  ‘Bobrik,’ Leon said then, to no-one in particular. ‘He will want to begin the negotiations.’

  ‘He’s the guy behind all this?’ I asked.

  Leon nodded. ‘Do you have a gun?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Do you want one?’

  I was inclined to say no, but in that case what was the point in me being there? It seemed more than possible that there would be a firefight.

  ‘What are you offering?’ I asked.

  ‘What are you used to?’

  He seemed to take it for granted that I was no stranger to firearms in my walk of life, which was only partially true. Usually, I avoid carrying a gun. Usually, I avoided running into guns, as well. But I knew that would be difficult this time, if the previous afternoon’s events were an indicator of what was likely to happen.

  ‘I use a Glock pistol, a Glock 19, when I need it.’

  Leon pulled open a hatch set in the floor of the vehicle and rooted around until he found what he wanted. He handed me a Glock 19 and some ammunition. I checked the gun, loaded it and put it away.

  After we had been travelling for about fifteen minutes, Gregor pulled into the side of the road and turned to speak to Leon. I gathered we were as close as he felt it sensible to go. We piled out and began to trudge through the snow again. Not far this time, though. Gregor led us into the cover of an open-sided shopping arcade and began to point out the geography ahead.

  As luck would have it, two men came out of the doorway Gregor was indicating. They climbed into another truck on big tyres and drove away.

  ‘Now there are certainly only four left,’ Leon said with satisfaction.

  The unspoken consensus seemed to be that things were looking up.

  Chapter Ten

  IT WASN’T MUCH OF a lock on the front door but Gregor didn’t waste time doing anything clever with it. He produced a tyre lever, inserted it and cracked the lock. We were inside within seconds. After that, very dim occasional lights showed us the way through the shadowy interior.

  The store might well have been disused, as Leon had said, but it was still full of stuff. Whoever had called it a day on trading had not got around yet to clearing the contents. We skirted sofas and filing cabinets, rounded mountains of cartons and mattresses, and kept on heading towards the area at the back of the ground floor where voices could be heard. As agreed, I stayed behind the others. This was their fight, not mine, but they needed someone to watch their backs.

  There were four men playing cards in an old store room, smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of beer while they played. We could see them through little windows set in the interior wall.

  The room was one of half a dozen in a row on the far side of the store. Leon used sign language to send Lenka one way and Gregor the other, while he kept the door to the main room covered – and I kept them all covered. They were looking for Olga. They wanted to know exactly where she was before they made their move.

  I watched and saw Lenka try a door that wouldn’t open. All the others had opened easily. I saw her look through a window covered with metal mesh, and then turn to give Leon a thumbs-up sign. She had found Olga.

  Gregor and Lenka returned to Leon’s side. A brief whispered conversation followed. Then Leon led the way into the main room. It was a tense few moments. I waited anxiously for an eruption of gunfire.

  It didn’t happen. Instead, there were raised voices – a bit of shouting and yelling – and then silence. I hung back and waited.

  It was as well I did. Gregor had got his arithmetic wrong. There was a fifth man.

  I watched him sauntering along to the store room, and I closed up behind him. As he reached the entrance, I stuck the Glock in his back and urged him forward. He was quick-witted, and rational. He sized up the situation fast, made no protest and headed through the doorway.

  Leon relieved him of a gun, which he added to the pile he had collected from the others. Then he had him join the rest of the gang at the table. A brief interrogation began, which I couldn’t follow in any detail. Basically, Leon asked questions, and one or other of them responded. It was tense, but entirely reasonable. Nobody had gone berserk and the guns had been made safe. We’d had it easy.

  I didn’t know what Leon had in mind now, or how this thing would end, but it was going well so far. We had found the missing sister. We had captured all the men who had abducted her, except the two who were leaving as we arrived. Game over, so far as I was concerned. Leon didn’t really need anything more. Maybe some information, but that was all.

  That was the way I was thinking. As I said, I didn’t really know how it would end, but end it suddenly and inexplicably did.

  Leon glanced at Lenka and Gregor, and nodded.

  Then all three of them began shooting. There wasn’t much noise. They were using suppressors. And it was all over in a second or two, with five dead men slumped over the table. I watched, paralyzed by shock, as Lenka and Gregor walked quickly around the table, firing a head shot into each corpse to make sure.

  ‘Let’s get Olga and go,’ Leon snapped to the others, before turning to me.

  I couldn’t believe what I’d just witnessed. It took a few moments for my brain to process what my eyes had seen. But then the message got through.

  I stared hard at Leon, aghast at the sudden and unexpected violence. ‘Jesus Christ, Leon!’ I croaked. ‘What the hell have you done?’

  ‘It was necessary,’ he said, stooping to start collecting the empty shells.

  This wasn’t what I’d signed on for. Incredulity and horror gave way to anger.

  ‘Necessary? What the hell’s wrong with you, man? You can’t do stuff like this!’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Leon said evenly.

  He looked me in the eye, a look without emotion. Lenka and Gregor had moved alongside him. I was suddenly aware that I had to be careful here. One more corpse could easily be arranged.

  Lenka spat something at me scornfully. I stared hard at her, knowing what she meant but not prepared to back down.

  ‘In my country,’ I said carefully, ‘we think badly of people who shoot unarmed prisoners. And we believe in the law.’

  ‘This is not your country, Frank,’ Leon said calmly.

  ‘It’s not yours, either!’

  Lenka added something contemptuous.

  ‘My sister thinks we should shoot you, as well,’ Leon said, grinning now.

  ‘I gather that.’

  ‘Give me your gun,’ Lenka demanded.

  ‘Fuck off!’ I said. ‘I’m keeping this as long as you have a gun.’

  Leon laughed and turned away.

  Gregor kicked down the door of the room where Olga was being held. She was on her feet, ready to leave, and the others wasted no time getting her out of there. Then Leon led us all out of the room, and out of the store.

  I went with them because realistically there was nothing else I could do. Leon and Lenka were both right. This was not my country any more than it was theirs. I was a fool ever to have got involved with them. But I was also aware of how vulnerable I was.

  While Gregor went off to get the vehicle, the rest of us shivered and sheltered from the renewed snow in the entrance to another building a little further down the street.

  ‘This is Frank, an Englishman,’ Leon told Olga. ‘He has been helping us.’

  I had been aware of the curious glances coming from her. Now I turned to look at her and nodded. She smiled back and reached for my hand. For a moment, she held it in hers.

  ‘Thank you, Frank,’ she said in English, in a halting, kindly voice. ‘Thank you all so much,’ she added, turning to the others. ‘I knew you would come for me.’

  It wasn’t much, but it sounded like the voice of humanity.

  Starting to feel conspicuous, we moved on rather than wait for Gregor to return with the vehicle. Lenka was back-marker. I helped Leon shepherd Olga through the snow. She wasn’t strong on her feet. I didn’t know if that was just h
er or because of her ordeal, but either way we had to hold her up and keep her moving. It wasn’t easy in the deep snow.

  Thankfully, Gregor arrived with the vehicle a few minutes later. It was a relief to get inside and feel how well the heater was doing its job. Lenka took charge of her sister then, while Leon rode shotgun and Gregor drove. I was a spare part. I didn’t mind. There was a lot to think about, especially from the last hour.

  I had begun to feel I was well out of my depth. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do, or to think. What had happened back there in the old department store was just plain wrong. I was in no doubt about that. I shuddered to think what my old mate Bill Peart, a DI with the Cleveland police back home, would think – either of what had just happened, or of my involvement in the first place.

  That said, I could also understand Lenka’s contempt for me. I had been found wanting. My concern now was that she and her brother might come to feel that keeping a witness like me alive was not in their best interests. So staying alive was actually a more pressing issue for me just then than wringing my hands over the killing of five violent men who had declared war on Leon and abducted his innocent sister.

  I watched Olga during our journey, and sensed again how different she was to her brother and sister. There was a calm and poise, a goodness even, about her that radiated throughout the vehicle. She was quiet, unobtrusive; yet she was also the centre of attention. She seemed to mean a great deal to the others, which helped to explain some of the ruthless single-mindedness with which they had gone after her abductors.

  Our journey lasted the best part of an hour, and it took us into another part of the city that I didn’t recognize at all. We were well off the usual tourist routes, and into a district of large, detached villas set in their own grounds. I knew we had crossed the river, the Vltava, that runs through the middle of the city, and climbed a hill, but after that I had lost my bearings. We were somewhere out west, possibly Střešovice, I thought, trying to recall the map I’d left behind.

  It was something of a miracle that we could move at all on a night like that, but Gregor kept us going, manoeuvring around the countless stranded vehicles, floundering at times as the whereabouts of the road beneath the snow became a mystery. Occasionally we caught sight of people struggling along on foot, but we saw no other moving vehicles.

  Finally, we left the line of the road to pass through a stone gateway and head along a short drive towards a big, old house that sat in quiet dignity beneath its blanket of snow, awaiting the return of its master. Gregor drove around the back and brought the vehicle to a shuddering halt. We were there at last, wherever it was.

  We clambered out, sinking into snow that was knee-high on me, and headed for a big door that was helpfully illuminated as if in welcome. As soon as I passed through the entrance I realized this must be Leon’s home. The apartment he had taken me to earlier was something else, his bachelor pad, perhaps, or accommodation for business visitors. But this house felt different.

  Old and comfortable, warm and quiet, I sensed that it was not a place where casual guests or new acquaintances would ordinarily be taken. Perhaps I had moved up a notch or two in his estimation, despite my feeble objections to what had happened in the old department store.

  As we entered the house, domestic help arrived to look after Olga. She consented happily to be taken away from us by the two women who came to fuss over her. She needed a bath and a rest, she said with a weary smile. It was understandable.

  But apart from fatigue, she showed no signs of having been injured physically or damaged mentally by her ordeal. Nor did she seem concerned by the fate of her captors. To me, all that suggested a certain psychological resilience, despite her apparent surface fragility. It was a trait that seemed to run in the family.

  Before she left us, Olga made a pretty little speech, first in Russian and then, for my benefit, in English.

  ‘I wish to thank you all, everyone who took part this evening. It was wonderful when I realized that people had arrived to help me. You, Leon, my dear brother, and you, Lenka, my beloved sister, I thank you both so much.’

  Leon smiled, visibly touched. ‘I hope you never doubted that we could come for you, Olga. I am only sorry that it was necessary.’

  ‘And you, Mr Frank,’ Olga added, turning to me with a charming smile, ‘you who I have never seen before in my life, I thank you, too, from the bottom of my heart.’

  ‘Thank you, Olga,’ I said, feeling a bit of a fraud. ‘But I did very little. If anything, I impeded the others.’

  Even without looking, I knew that Lenka would be nodding her head at that. But Leon objected to my modesty and sang my praises, further embarrassing me.

  ‘I needed help,’ Olga said in conclusion, ‘and you came – all of you. So thank you again. Now I will take a bath, and then sleep, I think. It has been a long night.’

  Then she was gone. It was as if we had been visited by royalty. The light in the room dimmed when Olga left us.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘ANY NEWS FROM THE airport?’ I asked Leon.

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing good. It is still closed.’

  ‘When it reopens, I’ll make my own way there. I must get back home.’

  ‘My offer is still good, Frank.’

  ‘Thank you, Leon, but I won’t be accepting it. This … this life. It’s not for me.’

  ‘You disapprove of what happened tonight?’

  ‘I do. I told you that at the time.’

  He sighed. ‘It was either that or let them go, Frank. And if I’d let them go, they would have been back at our throats in a couple of hours.’

  ‘You could have turned them in to the police.’

  He just shrugged. He didn’t have to tell me how absurd that suggestion was. What would the Czech police have made of one lot of Russians attacking another lot? How likely was it that they would have launched an investigation rather than simply deport the whole damned lot of them? Even if they had investigated, how far would they have got?

  In practical terms, Leon had done what was in his own best interests, and his family’s best interests. I was just out of my depth here, tired, battered, bruised, and in danger of losing my moral compass. I needed to go home.

  ‘Get some sleep, Frank,’ Leon advised. ‘We all need to do that. In the morning, we will see what can be done to get you out of Prague.’

  ‘It’s morning now,’ I said, yawning.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said with some surprise, glancing at his watch. ‘Come! I’ll show you to your room.’

  Shamefully, perhaps, I got my head down in a wonderfully comfortable bed and went to sleep without any difficulty. When I awoke several hours later it was fully light, light but grey. The snow had stopped altogether, but looking out of the window I could see we really didn’t need any more. The bare-limbed trees in the grounds looked quite beautiful set so starkly against the deep virgin snow. I almost expected to see a sleigh pulled by reindeer come flying through the scatter of birch and the more distant fir trees.

  My room was en-suite. So I took a shower and then re-dressed in the same old clothes. My possessions were minimal now, as I had lost my travel bag somewhere along the way in my mad retreat with Lenka. So I contented myself with emptying my pockets and then putting the few things I still possessed back in again. There wasn’t much. Just the Glock Leon had given me, my passport and wallet, and a few odds and ends. It didn’t matter. I had all that I really needed.

  Then I went to see if anyone else was up and about. I found Olga alone in a dining room, finishing her breakfast. She looked up at me with a welcoming smile.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Frank!’

  I smiled back, surprised and pleased to see her. ‘How are you feeling this morning, Olga?’

  ‘I am very well, thank you. I hope you are, too?’

  I nodded and assured her that I was, observing the conventional civilities. ‘Is Leon around?’

  ‘Not at the moment. Please help yourself t
o some breakfast.’

  She waved a hand to point me towards a nearby table, where almost anything a reasonable person might fancy for breakfast was laid out waiting. I took a glass of orange juice and helped myself to scrambled eggs and toast. Then I added a couple of rashers of bacon. By the time I had taken a seat at the table, a pleasant young woman had appeared to ask if I would like coffee or tea. It was five star service in the House of Leon. A life of luxury, marred only by the things that went on around the edges.

  ‘Leon has gone to talk to the police about yesterday’s attack on the hotel,’ Olga confided.

  But not about his sister’s abduction, or the bodies in a disused department store, I assumed.

  ‘You’ve heard about that already?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  She couldn’t have had very much sleep, I was thinking. Nor could Leon. As for Lenka…. Well, who knew? She was the one I hadn’t seen after our arrival here. Perhaps she had mounted an all-night patrol outside the house.

  ‘When Leon returns, we are all to go to England,’ Olga added, beaming with evident pleasure at the thought.

  I smiled back. Perhaps she didn’t care for snow, and would be glad to get out of it. Perhaps she had seen more than enough of it in Russia. Or perhaps she just wanted to go somewhere safer.

  ‘I am so pleased,’ she added, ‘that you are coming with us, Frank. I will be able to practise my English on you.’

  ‘Your English is perfect, Olga,’ I assured her. ‘You don’t need to practise any more.’

  ‘No, no! It is not true. You seek to flatter me, Frank. That will not work.’

  I smiled again. I couldn’t help it. She was a lovely little thing, so innocent and happy seeming, despite what had happened to her the day before. Yet, endearingly fragile though she appeared, she also had to be tough. She had come through her ordeal in good spirits, and seemingly untroubled by it.

  But I felt I ought to tell her how things stood with me. I didn’t want any misunderstanding.

  ‘I don’t know what Leon has told you, Olga, but I won’t be travelling with you. As soon as the airport reopens, I’ll be leaving you and making my own way back to England. I have a ticket, you see.’