The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  “You’re the best we’ve got.”

  “The sky isn’t dark,” McCall said.

  “Of course it is.”

  “No, it’s a very deep blue, almost black, but not quite.”

  “It’s predawn.”

  “But when we started walking there were lights in the stores and the buildings.”

  McCall looked down the attractive boulevard. Now there was no traffic at all. He looked up. There was a figure standing on the terrace of a building a hundred yards away. He was silhouetted—but against what? There was no moon. McCall turned back to Control. He was facing away from him, looking up at the Dom Knigi building. There was a thin trickle of dark blood oozing down the back of his neck. McCall reached for the Sig Sauer P227 pistol on his right hip.

  The holster was empty.

  “Control!”

  “What is it?” Control asked. “What’s wrong?”

  He turned back to McCall. His face was streaming blood, out of his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He had a twisted smile on his lips. Then he pitched forward. McCall caught him, bringing him gently down to the sidewalk, looking up.

  He caught a glimpse of the assassin standing on the terrace, holding a high-powered rifle. But now there was a red sunset behind him, bathing him in blood. He couldn’t see the man’s face. He wasn’t tall, but when you hold a sniper rifle with a MARS scope you don’t need to be tall or strong or fast. You only need to be accurate. The assassin disappeared into the crimson smear of light behind him. McCall looked down at the dying man in his arms.

  He wasn’t there. There was a child’s doll in his arms, stringy brunette hair stained with blood, painted eyes in a ceramic face. The face was cracked and fractured and the little fissures kept on growing, splitting the face wider apart.

  The sound was barely audible.

  McCall awoke in an instant, senses alert. He was bathed in perspiration. His breathing was erratic and he quieted it and remained very still. He heard nothing. What had the sound been? A creak on the hardwood floor of his living room? An elbow inadvertently nudging an ornament on a shelf? A hand picking up some of the M&M’s from the glass bowl? It had been insignificant, but that small noise had risen up through the layers of his nightmare like a swimmer desperate to reach the surface.

  McCall’s left arm ached. He touched the old bullet wound just above the shoulder bone, where the bullet had gone through the fleshy part. It had left a ragged scar, because it hadn’t been stitched up properly. He looked at the bedroom window. It was gray outside and threatening rain. The bullet wound usually ached in wet weather.

  He threw off the covers, reaching under the bedside table. The Sig Sauer 227 that had been in the dream—or hadn’t been in his holster in the dream—was clipped to the bottom of the bedside table. He unlatched it with no sound, the weapon falling gently into the palm of his hand. He got up, wearing dark boxers, watching the open bedroom doorway for shadows. Nothing moved. He padded over to the doorway, moved into the living room, gun outstretched in both hands.

  The austere living space was deserted. His eyes swept over the bookshelves, lots of leather-bound books, a few thriller paperbacks. An annotated Sherlock Holmes Volume I was open on a bottom shelf, with a slim heavy dagger bookmark at a page in The Hound of the Baskervilles. There was a Tiffany lamp on a middle shelf and a few ornaments on the shelves purchased from flea markets in different parts of the world. There was a large glass ashtray; a gift from a foreign president from the days when McCall smoked. There was a wet bar with some bottles and glasses set up on it. Next to the wet bar was a table on which stood a magnificent Mark Newman bronze sculpture, a naked sea nymph looking as if she had just arisen from the ocean walking a long eel on a leash with its tail flowing out behind her. A little surreal and probably not to everyone’s taste, but McCall liked it. There was a leather couch with a wooden top and leather armchairs, a big-screen TV, the low coffee table with its bowl of M&M’s and a large book about Venice, his favorite place. Next to that was a yellow writing pad. At the end of the coffee table was a laptop with a pile of stacked DVDs beside it and some headphones. Splash of color from an easy chair—a bright orange Frisbee sitting on it. There was a chess table in a corner with two straight back chairs where the defenders of the Alamo faced their blue-uniformed Mexican opponents across the black-and-white glass chess squares. They were all beautifully painted.

  None of the Alamo defenders or their Mexican attackers had been disturbed.

  Nothing had been disturbed.

  McCall moved on silently into the kitchen. Deserted. For the hell of it, he opened the microwave. The Smith & Wesson 500 revolver was in there.

  There was the sound of faint traffic from outside. A siren echoed from a distant tragedy, but nothing else. In the silence McCall sat down at the kitchen table. He looked out the kitchen window. The sloped roofs were washed with sunlight.

  He set the Sig Sauer P227 on the table.

  He was alone.

  But he knew that someone had been in his apartment.

  * * *

  The antiques store was two blocks from Luigi’s, on West Broadway just below Broome. The sign above the green doors read: ANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES, MOSES RABINOVICH, PROPRIETOR. When you stepped inside it was like stepping into another world. There were large statues everywhere, some elegant, naked porcelain women, some grotesque, gargoyles and dragons with lolling stone tongues, lamps with male and female figurines on them. Colonial rocking chairs rocked in all of the corners. There were antique pieces of furniture, and one exquisite coffee table inlaid with a battle scene of gray-and-black knights fighting red-and-black knights across a green mosaic battlefield. There were exquisitely painted horses on various shelves, including an Indian warrior on a Palomino sitting outside a porcelain Indian village with sand-colored tepees. A brass plaque above it read: Don’t be afraid to cry. It will free your mind of sorrowful thought.—Hopi. There were vases on tables that looked like they’d been stolen right out of Tutankhamun’s tomb and others that looked like they’d been won at Coney Island. There were at least a hundred clocks on bureaus and desks, on shelves, mounted on walls. All of them read different times and few of them were ticking, the treasure being a grandfather clock with the sun chasing moons across its face, which had a deep, sonorous pendulum. There were glass cabinets of knives and bayonets from World War I and II and tarnished medals with faded ribbons on them. Flintlock rifles stood in glass cabinets along one wall. There were delicate pill boxes and snuff boxes in varying colors on a cascade of small shelves. The store smelled of musk and damp and sawdust, although there was none on the hardwood floor.

  McCall liked the aroma of the place. It reminded him of a bazaar he’d visited once in Tangier. All that was missing was the scent of the fruit. Of course, someone had been trying to kill him in that bazaar, which left the sense memory somewhat lacking in warmth. He walked over to one glass case in which there were twenty handguns, most of them Remingtons, some Colts, all of them pre-1900. There was one particular Colt Revolver that interested him. It was a Model P Peacemaker, Single-Action Cavalry Standard with a 7½-inch barrel, also known as the Frontier Six-Shooter. It had a revolving cylinder holding six bullets. It was the 1873 model, but it had been adapted in 1877 to take 44-40 Winchester caliber cartridges instead of Colt 45 bullets so as to be cross-compatible with the Winchester Model 73 rifle. Acid-etched on the barrel on the left side was Colt Frontier Six-Shooter. Moses had assured him it was in mint condition. It was also a tad over $2000, a little out of McCall’s price range for a decorative item. But he came to visit the gun in its glass case on occasion.

  Old Moses shuffled over to him. He moved with obvious pain. He had tarnished baseball trophies on his cluttered desk at the back of the store, but it was hard to think of him as a young man hustling for fly balls in the outfield and sliding into second with a stolen base. It was arthritis, he had told McCall, which had traveled down the sciatic nerve in both legs. But he never complained about it. His fingers
had been spared the disease, which was a good thing, because he did very delicate work with them. Old Moses was more than just an antiques dealer. Your family heirloom clock stopped? He’d fix it. Your cuckoo clock would not make a peep? It cuckooed heartily once Moses had finished with it. Your watch stopped and it wasn’t the battery and you didn’t want to take it to Goldberg’s Jewellers on the corner because it cost you the price of a new watch to have it fixed? Moses would fix it for five bucks. He always looked the same, because McCall had never seen him dressed any differently. He wore dark jeans, penny loafers with no socks, a white shirt with a brown cardigan over it that had seen better days. It was hard to tell how old he was. Probably north of seventy, but he could have been older. McCall always found his voice somehow soothing.

  “You look, Mr. McCall, but you never ask me to take the Peacemaker out of the case and show it to you.”

  “When the time is right,” McCall said.

  “You have handled many guns in your career.”

  It was a statement, although McCall had never talked to the old man about his former profession.

  “This is a beauty to have and admire, but never to fire,” Moses said. “Although I can supply you with a box of ammunition for it.” He wasn’t giving up. “You want me to take it out of the display case? Feel the weight of it in your hand?”

  “Not today, Moses.”

  A bell tinkled from within the bowels of the store. McCall knew it was a back entrance to the place. It was not normally open to the public.

  “Excuse me,” Moses said, and shuffled back to where the store was gloomier, most of the lights on the various lamps there extinguished, except for the modern black enamel lamp on Moses’s desk. There was an alcove behind the desk, which led to the back door and a storage room. Moses disappeared.

  McCall walked over to one of the shelves of clocks-of-the-world, still relaxed, but his awareness of tension had kicked in. There had been nothing in Moses’s two words—“Excuse me”—to indicate anything out of the ordinary. No hint of concern or apprehension. But it had been the shift of focus in the old man’s eyes. A weariness that had come over them, however momentary. He was an old Jewish man who lived surrounded by other people’s pasts, and the Jews had suffered a lot over a couple of thousand years, and he knew this was not going to change. It was the way of the world.

  McCall could hear soft voices in the alcove, but he could not see anyone from the shelves of clocks. He strolled over to an old-fashioned rolltop desk, the kind you see Santa Claus sitting behind in his North Pole workshop on Christmas cards. McCall looked at the price tag. Santa would have to be selling toys to afford it.

  From this vantage point, McCall could look into a large, ornate mirror with gilt trim that had angels playing harps on the top of it. In reflection, he saw Moses talking to two young men. They had been at Luigi’s the night before, in that alcove, drinking Pinot Grigio, laughing with their pals and having a grand old time. They were dressed in sharp business suits, red ties, black shoes that gleamed with polish. One of them sported an ostentatious gold watch chain. Their voices were never raised above a low murmur, although Moses appeared to be getting a little agitated with them.

  McCall took one step to the left. Now, in the gilt mirror, he could see the man who’d caught his attention in the alcove at the Italian restaurant the night before. He could see he was of medium height, slim, with the coiled tightness of an athlete. He was dressed in a gray pinstriped suit with a red-and-gold tie and a red kerchief neatly folded in his breast pocket. He was looking through the alcove into the main part of the antiques store.

  He was looking at McCall.

  McCall did not give a flicker of interest or awareness. He moved again, to a Colonial rocking chair, checking the price, giving the chair a gentle rock. He glanced sideways at the mirror. In it, he could see that the man had lost interest in him. Old Moses shuffled over to his desk, opened the top drawer, took out a white envelope, and handed it to one of the young turks. They looked Russian to McCall, but not quite—Chechen, perhaps. More volatile, more deadly. The young Chechen put the envelope into the inside pocket of his coat and shook Moses’s hand deferentially. Then he and his young partner walked to the back door. As they opened it the bell tinkled politely again. The older man hesitated a moment, looking into the antiques store, then nodded at Moses and walked out, closing the door behind him.

  When Moses came back, McCall was sitting in the rocking chair, gently rocking back and forth.

  “You’re paying them protection,” he said.

  “Of course. They protect me from bad men. They are bad men themselves. But no young punks off the street will try to rob me. No homeless man or woman sleeps in my doorway. Not that I would really mind. I walk home at night and back to the store in the morning without fear of being attacked.” He shrugged. “It is the price you pay for doing business in this neighborhood.”

  “You’re not the only store owner they visit?”

  “Oh, no. They are very thorough.”

  “Do they extort money from Luigi’s?”

  “No, they like Luigi. They leave him alone. But the other restaurants, they pay for a good night’s sleep.”

  “How much do you pay them?”

  “Nothing that will send me into bankruptcy. I need the protection.”

  “I could offer you that.”

  “Why should you? I am an old man you chat with, perhaps wonder about, who is he, where did he come from, what’s the story of his life? But you don’t ask. Because it does not matter. You have your own business to conduct, whatever that is. I have mine.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  Moses shrugged. “I call the police, perhaps they go and find these men and say something to them. Perhaps these men leave me alone. Then I pay the police.”

  “Most cops don’t take graft.”

  “It does not matter who is my protector. I pay one group, or the other. It gives me peace of mind. It is the way it is.”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  Moses smiled. “I shouldn’t be ending my days in a musty antiques store, watching people look and touch, but not buy. I should be able to run home and back to the store. I once batted .368 in the Appalachian League, the Greeneville Astros, in Tennessee. Tennessee of all places! Can you believe that? With seventeen triples that season. Even Mickey Mantle never had seventeen triples in a season! Now I take a walk around the block once in the morning, once in the afternoon, so I don’t end up in a wheelchair. I kiss my wife when I get home and she cooks the greatest kasha for me. You know what kasha is?”

  “Buckwheat grouts cooked in water, like rice, mixed with oil, fried onions, and mushrooms. Kasha varnishtas is good, too.”

  “Yes, my wife makes the farfalle with a touch of ginger. Luigi should eat his heart out. Do not worry about me, Mr. McCall. Life is good.”

  “It could be better.”

  He shrugged. “Always.” The old man put a gentle hand on McCall’s arm. “Be at peace with yourself.”

  Easier said than done, McCall thought.

  He glanced at his watch.

  “I’ve got to get to work.”

  He walked to the front door, opened it, turned back.

  “If I wanted to find those men, where would I go?”

  Moses shrugged. “I do not leave the store. I wouldn’t know.”

  “You know.”

  The old man shrugged again.

  “Always so good to see you, Mr. McCall.”

  McCall nodded and closed out the past behind him.

  * * *

  It was a good lunchtime crowd. McCall was behind the bar, mixing drinks with deft hands as fast as the servers put down their chits. But then, Bentleys Bar & Grill was always packed. It had long windows looking out on West Broadway with the name BENTLEYS inscribed on them in flowing gold script. The booths were dark red leather with black trim, lots of tables, Tiffany lamps on counters, the whole place oozing warmth and camaraderie. Most of the crowd
was young, from the financial district, lots of stockbrokers, paralegals, attorneys, bankers, and a good smattering of tourists. McCall knew Bentleys paid no protection. The owner, Harvey, was a close friend of the mayor of New York. Not worth the trouble to extort money from. Small business owners were the neighborhood ticket.

  The long mahogany bar went along the back wall, glasses hanging from the racks above, bottles in niches and in wells beside the sinks. Two bartenders worked it, one of them serving the patrons who sat at the bar or who couldn’t wait for one of the servers to find their table, the other just mixing the server’s orders. Right now, that was McCall. But he made an exception for the blond, curvaceous young woman who now eased her way between two occupied stools and gave him a big smile. The two men sitting at the stools didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they’d died and gone to Heaven.

  McCall knew her name was Karen Armstrong because he’d asked for her ID when she’d first come in months before, right after Thanksgiving, with her friends. She looked borderline twenty-one, but the license had assured him she had been twenty-two on February 19 that prior year. She was wearing a blue blouse, unbuttoned to show enough cleavage just short of arrest, a gray miniskirt, black shoes with one-inch heels. He hadn’t been able to place her perfume, but it was something from Dior.

  Elena Petrov had worn the same perfume.

  “I can’t find my server, Bobby,” she said, apologetically.

  All his life he had been called Robert, never Bob and certainly never Bobby. But he was living a different life here, in a new identity. As far as anyone at the restaurant knew, his name was Robert Maclain. He let the people he liked in the neighborhood—Luigi, Moses, the Asian grocery store owners—know his real name was McCall. But his credit cards, the passport he was currently carrying, his Shell card, his New York library card, said Robert Maclain, and everyone in Bentleys, from Harvey, to the other bartenders, to the servers, to the patrons, all called him Bobby.