by Derek Haas
“He said he needed to be alone.”
“Convenient.”
“Yes.”
I look over at the bodyguard, who keeps a smug expression on his face. “You think he wanted to be caught?”
“He didn’t pay me enough to think.”
I shake my head. It is frigid outside, but my face feels warm, flush with blood.
“You speak to him since?”
“Not a word.”
“Goddammit.” I look at the prison, shaking my head.
Brueggemann speaks up. “You will let me go now, yes?”
I nod, and he doesn’t wait for more. He spins and marches back in the direction of the town without a backward glance.
Carrots or sticks.
I stand against a wall in the prison yard in Lantin, waiting for Doriot to come out. I am dressed in the yellow jumpers assigned to all Belgian prisoners, my hands in my pockets, my toes numb from the cold. Mostly, the night is as black as coal, but occasionally the moon makes a brief appearance before ducking back to safety.
Often in doing what I do, there is information I need, or travel arrangements I must have, or access to a building I must be granted. I can’t do it alone; I rely upon strangers to get me the things I require. And so I have to decide in each instance which avenue is the best to get me where I want to go: the carrot, or the stick? A bribe, or a threat?
I didn’t want to take too long to get to Doriot. That bearded man is still hunting me, and the way he worked over Ryan suggests he got ample information before he shot him in the back. I own a home in Positano along the Amalfi coast of Italy, and I imagine the man who flushed me in Naples surely went there next.
An official visitation with Doriot would’ve been insufficient. Three feet of bulletproof glass separating us would render any threat moot. I had to get inside where I could work him close.
It didn’t take me long to find out which bar the Lantin guards frequented. A place known simply as “The Pub” featured television screens showing rugby, soccer, and cricket, with taps that served Stella, Jupiler, Hoegaarden and Leffe. I stood at the bar and mumbled to a waitress in English and watched the shifts change and the prison guards mope in for three straight days. I didn’t know Dutch and only minimal French, but I’ve found reading faces is as important as speaking. I wanted a sap, a guy with the most hang-down expression stamped on his mug like an advertisement for desperation. And I wanted a guy with a family.
On the third day, I clocked the same man coming off the night shift, a sad-sack, overweight guy with a moony face expressing a permanent look of bewilderment. On my way out, I asked him for a lighter in English without making any hand gestures and he produced one from his two-pocket shirt. He spoke English, or at least understood it, and that would help.
He rode a Vespa and I followed him from a casual distance until he reached a tiny apartment resembling a college dormitory. His wife barked at him from a window before he even cut the engine of his bike. She was holding an infant. He would do.
I stood in his living room when he came out of his bathroom, wiping his hands on his pants. His eyes had trouble conveying to his brain what he was seeing, a stranger in his living room, holding a pistol in one hand and a stack of cash in the other. His wife was in the bedroom, breast-feeding the baby.
“I need a favor from you.”
His eyes wouldn’t leave my hands, as though his neurons had stopped firing, his mind had shut down. Finally, he searched my face for some sort of sign he wasn’t hallucinating.
“I’m going to need you to get me inside the jail and bring a prisoner to me in the north yard, alone.”
He blinked, but nothing came out of his mouth.
“If you do this for me, you’ll have the ten thousand euros in my right hand and you’ll never see me again. If you fail, or you fuck me in any way, then your wife and your baby are going to get what’s in my left. Nod your head if you understand.”
Carrots or sticks. Sometimes, if you want to be sure, you choose both.
I can hear Doriot coming before he rounds the corner. He is spitting curses in French, propelled against his will by the moon-faced guard I threatened. He had probably just racked out for the night in his cot and was surprised to be awoken, singled out, and shuffled outside to the yard.
He turns the corner and his eyes peel open, all signs of sleep vanishing. His adam’s apple bobs as he swallows dryly. He reels back against the guard, but the man holds him there, firm.
“Hello, Doriot.”
Doriot tries to swivel his head to meet the guard’s eyes. “He’s a killer! He’s here to kill me.” But the guard just shuffles away.
“That’s debatable. Why’d you sell Ryan down the river?”
It doesn’t matter what his response is, I’m watching his eyes. His French accent is thick; it seems to pull his whole face down when he speaks, but his eyes don’t waver or blink. “I didn’t . . . you have no right accusing me of this thing, Columbus.”
“Your client wants me dead.”
His eyes slide back and forth, like he’s puzzled, searching for an answer. “What is this you’re telling me?”
“The man who hired me to put a bullet in Anton Noel.”
“Yes?”
“He’s upset.”
“Why should he be upset? You fulfilled the contract.”
“It was sloppy.”
There is a glint of hope in Doriot’s eyes now, like he can sense we aren’t on the same page and his life might be spared because of it. “Sloppy? What is this sloppy? My client would have cared nothing if you’d blown up a rail platform with five hundred people on it just to kill that bastard Noel.”
I chew on this, turning it over in my mind so I can see it from all angles. The little man in front of me isn’t faking his response. I believe him. Or at least I believe he isn’t involved. But that’s a far cry from his client not being involved. His client might have been equally upset with Doriot and not used his services for this particular bit of cleaning up.
“Why’d you let yourself get thrown in here?”
“Reasons that have nothing to do with you.”
“You see how easily I got to you?”
He lowers his eyes. “Yes. That does concern me. Yes.”
“What is your client’s name?”
“You know that I cannot—”
“If he’s happy as you say he is, then he’ll never know I was barking up his tree. If he’s not happy and hasn’t included you, then it’d be in your best interest for me to get to him. Before he gets to you.”
I can see the wheels turning behind his eyes as he maps the various moves in his head like a chess player trying to envision the board ten plays ahead. Finally, he nods.
“His name is Thomas Saxon. He’s an American. I have worked for him more than once. He is a hard man.”
“I know all about hard men. What city?”
“Atlanta.”
“All right then.” I nod at the guard, who comes back over, looking relieved. He starts to whirl Doriot back the way he came.
“Wait,” the little man says, and the guard stops for a moment. Doriot looks over his shoulder at me. “What happened to Ryan?”
“Shot in the spine in the Naples train station.”
He gnaws on his lip for a second, then nods at the guard. As their footsteps recede and the prison yard falls silent, I turn my eyes up to the nameless moon right before it disappears behind a cloud.
CHAPTER FIVE
HE’S TOYING WITH ME.
I’ve seen the bearded man twice since leaving Belgium. First, I thought I’d lucked into spotting him at the Gatwick airport. I was walking through the terminal, heading to catch a cab to Heathrow, airport-hopping so I could fly directly to Atlanta. I took a turn at the last moment, realizing the taxi stand was to the left, and I caught his reflection behind me in the glass window of a coffee klatch.
I have trained myself not to flinch. Ever. Not to hesitate, not to give a moment’s pau
se. He had scented my trail faster than I thought possible, but now he’d made a mistake. I lined up in the taxi queue, checked my wrist like I was looking at my watch, and then ducked into the baggage claim so I could stand behind the carousel and watch the only two entranceways into the room. He never came through the doors.
I waited patiently, then quickly bought a tan coat from an Austin Reed store and pitched my gray one in a trashcan. It wasn’t much, but maybe it would steal me a moment, and sometimes a moment is all I need.
I didn’t see him again that day. I switched flights and holed up at the Savoy on the Strand, spending two days in the lobby reading, watching the door. He never showed and I started to doubt whether I had actually seen him in Gatwick. It had only been a moment, a split second, just his face some forty feet behind me, and how could I be sure, really sure it was him?
Because my life had always relied on these moments of perspicacity. If I started to doubt them now, I might as well quit, really quit. I might as well head back to Rome, scoop up Risina Lorenzana and try to disappear where no one would ever find us. But I couldn’t do that, not now. Someone with a gun was looking for me and in my experience, hiding would only delay the inevitable. Instead of trying to outrun him, never knowing when he’d catch me, I needed to turn my boat and steer into him with everything I had. Let the crash determine which of us swims away free.
I saw him the second time in Atlanta at the Lenox mall. I pitched my tent at the Sheraton in Buckhead and headed to the shops to give my wardrobe an overhaul. It was teeth-chattering cold in Georgia, and the tickling at the back of my neck told me to ditch everything I’d worn in Europe and start over, buy casual clothes and blend into the background, especially if I was going to be spending time in the South.
I was riding up an escalator, exposed, vulnerable, when I saw him on the first-floor landing, looking directly at me. Smiling. If he wanted to pop me there, he could have. Hell, he should have. Which begged the question, how many times had he gotten this close since Naples and not finished the kill? I instinctually ducked down to tie my shoe, riding out the rest of the escalation below the shooter’s sight line. I kept low, acting like I was tugging my socks up and practically crawled into Macy’s like a crab darting across the sand. I didn’t want to get cornered in a store with only one entrance and exit. I needed options, quickly.
The department store had its own escalators in the center of the clothing area, but standing exposed and upright on a moving staircase is a dangerous game, as I had just been reminded. Instead, I ducked to the back of the store and zeroed in on a pair of elevators, usually reserved for women with strollers. Doors were just closing as I hustled aboard and pressed the button for the bottom floor of underground parking.
I waited there for over an hour, in an obscure corner with no traffic, freezing my ass off. I didn’t see him again.
In my hand, I’m holding a Nokia pre-paid cell phone I picked up at a mini-mart near the Holiday Inn in Decatur where I’m now staying. I employed every anti-surveillance technique I know in driving away from Buckhead, veering on and off the highway, racing red lights, making unexpected turns, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t been followed, but I’m not positive, goddammit, and this fucker has me doubting myself in ways I have not doubted in a long time.
And yet, if he wanted to kill me, if that was his end game, then he made a colossal mistake in not doing so when he had the chance. If he’s so fucking smug that he’s choosing to play games, choosing to reveal himself so that I know he knows where I am, then I’m going to pluck whatever weapon he comes at me with right out of his hands and ram it down his fucking throat. Toying with your target is a novice’s play, a cocksure move intended to intimidate your mark into making a mistake. But there are flaws to this play, and chief amongst them is that he has given away information about himself.
My pursuer carries a knife in his left sleeve, I’m sure of it. In the two instances where I spotted him, I took in the folds of his jacket, and both times, the left sleeve bunched up near the wrist opening, then smoothed out toward the elbow. It wasn’t much, and I’d only had a second to look, but it was there.
Maybe he has been paid not just to kill me, but to stick me up close, to disfigure me, a vendetta killing. I’ve heard of bagmen taking this kind of work, not just ending a mark’s life, but disgracing him in death, pissing on his grave. Come to think of it, it would require the killer to work in close, and maybe that’s why he’d been aiming low in the train station in Naples, when the bullet skipped off the pavement by my feet. Maybe he had been aiming for my knees, hoping to wing me so he could carve me up like beef at the slaughterhouse. Or maybe I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.
I dial a number from memory, look at the digital clock next to my bed, and wait for her to answer.
“Ciao?”
“Risina. It’s Jack Walker.”
Her voice warms immediately. I can feel the smile through the phone line.
“Buongiorno, Jack. I was just opening the store.”
“I thought you might be. Do you have a moment?”
“Yes. Yes. How are you?”
“I’m . . . fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I don’t? I’m tired, I guess.”
“Where are you?”
“The States. East Coast.”
“It is late there.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m very pleased you called. I was thinking about you.”
“I’m glad you were. I think about you too much.”
She laughs. It is a sound low in her throat, as soothing as a touch. “You can never think about me too much, Jack.”
I wait for a moment, and there is an odd comfort in the silence, like the distance between us has been erased. I don’t know why I feel the compulsion to say what I’m about to say, but the words come out of me before I can decide against them.
“I was just remembering a story I read once. Something from when I was a kid.”
“Yes?”
“Maybe you can figure out for me who wrote it.”
“I can try. It is a children’s story?”
“Well, I read it when I was a kid, but I’m not sure where or how I came across it. I’m not sure how old I was when I read it. A lot of those years are blurry for me.”
“It’s a famous story?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I haven’t come across it in a long time. But some things in my life made me think of this story, and I thought maybe I’d tell it to you and see if you’d heard of it. I’m not even sure if it’s very good or particularly profound.”
“Well, now I’m definitely intrigued. Let’s hear it.” I hear the sound of her leaning back in the desk chair, and I picture her with her knees pulled to her chest and one arm around them, holding them tight, those venerable leather-bound books surrounding her like a theater audience. “I haven’t unlocked the shop door yet and Alda is not coming in until after lunch. My ear is yours.”
“Okay. Well, here goes. I don’t remember the name of the story. And the main character doesn’t have a name. In fact, that’s the point of the story . . . I think . . . anyway. . . . ”
“I’m listening. . . . ”
“Well, this guy, just a normal guy, he kisses his wife good-bye, leaves his house, dressed like he’s going out for a jog, but he’s not, he’s actually got his kid in his arms, a little boy, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler who looks just like him.
“And every day they do this . . . he and his kid take a walk together, all over the city. Or rather, he walks, pulling a silver wagon with his kid buckled safely inside. And they walk everywhere, I mean everywhere, looking at the fire trucks and the police cars and the ambulances and the construction trucks; and all the time, the dad’s pointing out this thing and that thing and the kid’s taking it all in like a sponge.
“The dad’ll pull him for hours, for miles, end up in neighborhoods nowhere near his own, and everyone that pass
es them on the sidewalk or in the street looks at the two of them longingly and thinks that this father and this son who resemble each other are just a little part of the world that is right. That all the death and mayhem and war and assassinations and everything else wrong in this world is pulling them into the blackest of abysses, but this thing, these two walking by, father and son, these two are what’s honest and true and hopeful. And maybe they’re the only two, you know? Maybe everybody else has a little blackness in his life, but it all fades away to white, because when people spot this guy and his son walking down the street, they just can’t help but smile.”
I can hear her breathing, but she doesn’t cough or sigh or interrupt. I can’t remember the last time I’ve talked this much, but the words continue to tumble out of my mouth like an avalanche.
“And they’re on this block a good mile from their house and the dad is in the middle of telling his son about this big cedar tree on the end of the street he likes to visit, that the tree probably looks to the boy like it’s taller than a skyscraper, and right there, right in the middle of his sentence, the man’s left arm seizes up on him, his breath catches in his throat, and he falls down dead. Heart attack, no warning, right there on the sidewalk. He topples over like someone shot him and lies face down on the concrete.
“The kid doesn’t know what’s going on, he’s only two and a half. Is the father playing some sort of game with him? That’s all this kid knows. So he calls out to his dad, ‘Da-ad. Da-ad.’ You know, like it’s a song, like it’s a game. But his father doesn’t, his father can’t get up.
“‘Something is wrong’ registers in the kid’s brain . . . even caught in the middle between two and three, this message comes through loud and clear, but he can’t get out of the silver wagon, he’s stuck there, buckled in tight. He starts blinking tears, crying in that way toddlers cry, his lips curved in an ‘o,’ his wail silent then strong then silent again as he can’t catch his breath to pound it out.
“And then a man comes up, this homeless guy, this guy who reeks of alcohol and cigarettes and the kid thinks at first maybe this man will help him, help his dad, who is still lying face down on the sidewalk, but the raggedy man descends like a vulture, his eyes darting, he barks at the kid to ‘shut the hell up’ as he’s rifling through the father’s pockets and there’s not a damn thing the kid can do about it.