Columbus

by Derek Haas

  I run my hand through her hair again, splay it out against my chest, unsure what to say. After a moment, she takes my fingers back in hers.

  “I’ve learned there can be a great distance between perception and the truth. And I know there are things about you you wish to keep a mystery from me. Just know that I won’t rush to judge you, Jack. The one thing I will never do is judge you.”

  The shower is therapeutic, and the pain in my side from the bullet wound has diminished to nothing more than a twinge. I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time, for as long as I can remember, actually.

  I can see it now, like a map unfolded in front of me. There is an end to this, to this life. I can shed it like a snake’s skin. Throughout adulthood, I’ve felt like this job defined me, was a part of me, was inside me. But I see it now, I can see it, goddammit, maybe for the first time.

  I haven’t left it, haven’t escaped it, because I didn’t want to leave this way of life. I never cared about the money; it was the challenge and the skill and the craft and the power I devoured like an addict. And after years of doing the job, of sharpening my abilities, of mastering my prowess, of forgetting Jake, the only woman who knew me as something other than a killer, I’d lost any measure of what my life could be without it.

  But Risina changes that. Is she an ideal? Is my desperation for human contact coloring how I view the woman asleep in the bed outside this bathroom? Am I purposely turning a blind eye to her faults, creating in my mind a Madonna void of blemishes, when the truth must fall far short?

  The answer is: I don’t give a damn.

  I am out of the shower, dried and dressed, tying my shoes when she stirs.

  “You are leaving?”

  “Yes. Take your time. Order breakfast to the room.”

  She sits up, unselfconsciously. I can’t help but look at her, drinking her in. Like her laughter before, it is an image I know will sustain me over the next few weeks, as I finish this and free myself.

  “Do you think you will be long this time?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I don’t know.”

  “Is there danger you will not come back at all?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I know what those scars are, Jack. There’s a bullet wound in your side. Old bullet wounds in your shoulder and on your chest. I can only imagine what made the other marks.”

  She says it matter-of-factly, with no malice in her eyes.

  “I will be back. I promise.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I will tell you everything when I return.”

  “I believe that too.”

  I head for the door and reach for the handle.

  “Jack. . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “Be sure and bring that first edition Lewis and Clark with you when you come back to me.”

  She is grinning and her eyes are merry.

  “I will.”

  I pull the door behind me and walk away from the room, down the corridor, alone. My smile disappears by the time I reach the street.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ALEXANDER COULFRET IS GOING TO BE A DIFFICULT MAN TO KILL.

  Without a fence, a middleman, to put a file together, I am learning the craft on my own. I have a new respect for the job Vespucci, Pooley, and Ryan did, the job Grant and Doriot still do. I suppose I could have phoned Archibald Grant in Chicago and seen what blanks he could fill in regarding Coulfret, but I just don’t want that particular string tied any tighter. I already owe the man enough.

  When I’ve needed information in the past, I’ve either stolen it from the shadows, or I’ve compelled someone to give it to me against his or her will. In those instances, the information I seek is specific—the location of a particular mark on that given day, say—and I don’t have to worry about returning to the source again.

  But compiling a background file on a man, a large dossier so I have myriad choices of how and where and when to strike, requires a much different approach.

  I start in the offices of Le Monde, posing as an American film writer. My former fence Pooley once explained people will do anything to help you if they think there is an outside chance of being immortalized. People from all walks of life—waitresses to senators—would open up to him and spill their secrets as he appealed to their vanity, claiming to be a screenwriter, a reporter, a novelist, a film producer. I intimate I am researching a script centering on Parisian crime, a French Connection for the new millennium, and I need background information on a man named Alexander Coulfret.

  A public relations woman escorts me to their catalog room, where every article, every scrap of paper, including reporter’s notes in some instances, has been added to an enormous database. The woman, BeBe, is genial and coquettish. She sets me up in a cubicle, asks if I need anything to drink, hands me her card, and then leaves me alone with the computer.

  Hours later, I emerge from the building with the following information.

  A young man named Alex Coulfret was arrested twice in the nineties, once for robbery and once for stabbing a man with a knife, though the victim made a full recovery. Both articles mention jail time, but there is no followup reporting to indicate whether or not Alex was found guilty or whether he served. Both arrests occurred on the east side of the city, in the Eleventh arrondissement, near the Bastille. Information about the perpetrator is scant, a “white male in his twenties” the full extent of the description.

  Only one other occurrence of the name appears in the newspaper, a mention in the bottom of that article from 2003, the one I found when I first punched the name Alexander Coulfret into Google back in Archibald’s apartment. I barely glanced at it before, but now I study the details a bit more closely. A train leaving Paris crashed into a stranded bus just outside the city, killing twelve people. Listed alphabetically among the dead: Alex Coulfret. The article is maddeningly short—no other details emerge about the victims—like it was written just before the evening deadline. I check the next day’s edition and find no mention of the crash; the story was swept away by the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

  These buried facts are tiny seeds, just specks of information, but they start to grow into a portrait of the man who paid the contract on my life. First, I’m guessing he was born in or near the Bastille district; the connection between the two arrests indicates proximity, familiarity. Second, the types of offenses certainly keep in line with a low-level member of a criminal organization. Not every arrest makes the paper. I wonder how many more crimes Alex committed or was arrested for in his early adulthood. Third, a man who has the resources to hire a trio of professional killers also has the resources to fake his own death, to land his name on a list of the deceased following a fatal public accident. The short time—ten years between Le Monde mentions—gives me pause.

  I’ve been in a position to observe the inner workings of organized crime many times. Most mafias operate similarly: loyalty is rewarded; men rise through the ranks by some combination of battle-tested fealty and unfettered nepotism. Usually, this process can take an entire lifetime, and even then, a man’s stupidity or nerve can hinder him from rising past a low-level position within the enterprise. That Alex Coulfret ascended from armed stick-up man to a position powerful enough to fake his own death in such a relatively short time means my enemy is most likely intelligent, artful, and ruthless.

  If I’m wrong, and the three mentions aren’t as colorful as I’m suggesting, then it does me no harm to assume the man is formidable. But I don’t think I’m wrong.

  The next avenues I plan to investigate are the local police files on Coulfret. Perhaps they have more details tucked away in the back of a detective’s cabinet than in the database of the newspaper. Maybe the police know all about the man and are actively hunting him now, as I am.

  I call BeBe at Le Monde from a pay phone near the Bastille and enlist her help in introducing me to a friendly police detective in the eleventh district. She is mor
e than happy to do so; she knows just the man with whom I should speak, a detective named Gerard. How soon would I like to get started?

  I hang up after agreeing on a meeting point and walk toward that creperie. I notice a young boy who can’t be more than six or seven, holding on to his father’s hand, coming toward me on the sidewalk ahead. The boy has to take two steps just to match his father’s pace, and the man never looks down at his child, lost in his own world. My mind turns to that silver wagon with the dropped handle. Why is that image so damned important to me? Why is it always on the edge of my mind, waiting like a stranger in the shadows, prepared to leap out and suffocate me at a moment’s notice?

  I think I know the answer, though I don’t want to face it. Years ago, my father hired me to kill him, though I didn’t know all the details until the end. I thought I had mentally closed that door, put it behind me, walled it off, but maybe it can never fully be closed. At one time I thought I had control over the past, could shut it off from my mind like turning off a faucet, but I was wrong. Maybe it will always be with me, breaking its valve and pouring out whenever I’m vulnerable. Maybe. . . .

  I catch a flash of silver ducking into a fabric shop across the street.

  Something was off about it, something a little conspicuous, like a signal, and I cross the Rue Sedaine quickly, without thinking, reliant on years of heightened instinct. I know it’ll be a problem ducking into an unfamiliar store and there will be a delay as my eyes adjust from light to dark, but my feet carry me on, almost involuntarily.

  What did I see? A piece of clothing? The flash of sunlight reflecting off of a gun barrel? I was too entranced in watching that kid and his father and that silver handle in my head and now I’ll have to grit my teeth and enter the place and if the Argentine woman wants to shoot me again then she should’ve pulled the trigger while my mind was on that boy who couldn’t remember his name.

  She didn’t, though, and I’ll rely on my intuition as I pop through the door and scan the room. The fabric shop is small; there’s no one inside except an elderly Persian woman behind the cash register, but a carpeted stairwell with a sign pointing up reading “shawls” in English looms next to her.

  I have my Glock in my hand as I head up the stairwell, trying to keep my footfalls silent, but the noise is deafening in the oppressive quiet of the store.

  An uneasy feeling tightens my throat and I can feel the short hairs on the back of my neck rising. I’ve made many mistakes since taking that file from Ryan outside the cathedral in Turin, but this takes the fucking cake, plodding up a narrow stairwell toward a dimly lit second floor with a possible assassin at the top. If I get shot, I’ll go down pulling the trigger. If I get jumped, I’ll go down swinging. I’m ascending the final step, and there is an armed woman up here, but not the one I thought.

  “She’s here.”

  Ruby Grant, Archibald’s sister, stands next to a tiny window, peering down at the street. She nods for me to join her, and when I do, I catch a glimpse of another woman, this one with inky hair, stalking quickly down the sidewalk, searching, confused. I’ve seen her before, in a library in Chicago. The last time we met, I was ramming the back end of a yellow cab into the front end of hers.

  Below, the woman breaks from our sight line and is gone.

  Ruby appears amused, like she’s in the middle of telling a brilliant joke.

  “That’s Llanos.”

  “Yeah. . . . ”

  “She got to Archie.”

  “Got to him?”

  “Well, got to talk to him, I should say. Archie’s good at talking. Always has been. He put her on your trail, then put me on hers.”

  “He’s starting to rack up too many favors.”

  “He likes you.”

  I’m not sure how to respond to that, and Ruby sees it on my face. Her grin grows as effortlessly as an exhale, what must be a family trait.

  “So you flew all the way here to warn me?”

  “Don’t go gettin’ ideas. Professional preservation. At this point in the game, you being dead doesn’t do my brother much good.”

  “What do you think me being alive does for him?”

  Ruby shrugs. “Something I guess Archie will figure out at a later date.”

  She nods out the window. “So how you want to handle this?”

  “I’m going to drop her. Quietly.”

  “I know that. I’m just asking if you want me to tag-team with you.”

  “No. I’m afraid I already owe your family too much for my own good.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I turn to head back down, hurrying so I don’t lose the trail of the woman who came here to kill me.

  “Columbus. . . . ”

  I stop.

  “See you soon.”

  I nod and clomp heavily down the stairs, afraid she’s probably right.

  Llanos is half a block in front of me, addled. She was good enough to pick up my trail without alerting me, but not good enough to keep from losing the scent when I zigged when she thought I would zag. One mistake. As is the case so often in what we do, one mistake is the difference between Llanos living through the day and never seeing tomorrow’s sunrise.

  She checks the street signs, watches the shadows, and I can see resignation manifest on her face. She lost me, even though she’s not sure how. She retraces her steps, bewildered, and then hurries in a trot toward the Rue de Lappe and the crepe shop where my meeting with the police detective is supposed to take place. So she must’ve been listening in on my call or wrenched the information from the PR woman at the newspaper, BeBe. I hope it is the former.

  If I am going to ambush her, it is best to do it now, before she reaches the creperie a few blocks away, before the officer I’m supposed to be meeting witnesses the shooting.

  An ambush is all about information and timing. I know where she’s headed, which allows me to dart over a block to the south, then up the street at a sprint, then over again to arrive in front of her. The timing centers on waiting until the final possible moment to take the first shot, to remove her defenses before she has a chance to engage them.

  I stop at the corner, waiting for Llanos to materialize in front of me. She’s as oblivious as a rat sniffing cheese attached to a metal spring. I estimate I have thirty seconds before she emerges. The street is mostly deserted, so I’m not concerned about witnesses; perhaps the driver of a passing car will see something, but usually the shock of violence, the cacophony of a gunshot, gives me the freedom to hustle away unnoticed from the scene.

  A door opens next to me and a crowd starts to spill out on to the sidewalk, children and parents and grandparents, and it is some sort of celebration complete with balloons and streamers and laughing and singing and they are passing me, heading for the corner directly in front of me, the intersection of the Rue de la Roquette and the Passage Thieré where I plan to take Llanos’s life.

  She should be approaching any second now and she’ll be surrounded by the crowd, but she won’t be protected, and as I instantaneously form a new plan, my hand moves from the Glock inside my shoulder holster to the blade I keep near my waist.

  The seconds slow and the world stops spinning and the children freeze in mid-smile as my senses warp like they’ve been jolted with electricity and Llanos steps out from the street into my view, and she’s ignoring the festive families, looking straight ahead when she should be checking around every corner instead of hurrying to make the next block.

  I cut through the crowd like a scythe and her periphery vision kicks in as I approach with the blade in my hand and she’s a moment too late as I swing my arm in a fluid arc and the stiletto smashes into her throat at the precise point above where her windpipe disappears below her sternum.

  I don’t break stride, keep moving, cross the street and duck a right, heading for the little bastion that started a revolution. When she falls to her knees, clutching her throat, trying to keep the blood from spilling out through her fingers, when the first child s
creams and when the parents pull all the boys and girls and grandparents away, hoping they haven’t seen too much, I will be gone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE OFFICER SMILES WARMLY WHEN I GREET HIM, HALF STANDING BEHIND A WEDGE OF A TABLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CREPE SHOP AT THE END OF THE RUE DE LAPPE. He has ordered a croque monsieur, devoured the first triangle and is two bites into the second when I shake his hand.

  “You are Mr. Walker, yes?”

  “I am. Thanks so much for meeting me.”

  “It is my pleasure, my pleasure. Ms. Lerner tells me you are a writer?”

  “Yes. . . . ”

  “Very pleased to meet you. My name is Gerard. I too write a little fiction. Nothing published as yet, but I am delighted to say a little printing press from Lyon has been in contact with me recently and has expressed interest in reading my next submission.”

  He is a round man, with wide shoulders and only a hint of a neck, constructed like a snowman. Somehow, he takes bites of his sandwich while maintaining the cadence of his speech, and words tumble out of him at the same time as his food disappears from his plate. It’s fascinating to watch, like a magician with a rabbit, and I have a hard time paying attention to what he’s saying.

  “But they say writing is to write what you know and my occupation as an officer in Paris has led to many, many interesting stories, I can assure you, so let me, may I ask, what type of writing is it you do?”

  “Well, a little bit of everything but mostly film writing.”

  He pats his heart affectionately, a theatrical swoon. “Ahh, it is my dream, yes? Hollywood, movies, your words on the silver screen, yes? And what is it you have written that I might know?”

  “Well, nothing that’s been produced as yet, but that’s why I’m here. Hoping to collect more information about organized crime in Paris.”

  He winks, as happy as a child opening a present. “A French Connection, yes? That is what Ms. Lerner intimated to me, and I immediately said ‘ah, yes’ because you see I have been working on a crime story as well as I’m sure you can imagine. I hope you do not steal my story, no, ha, ha, I’m certain that there is plenty of crime to go around, certainly in Paris, yes?”