by Derek Haas
“Even fighting this fever, I’m moving at a full sprint, plowing across the street and if a car slams on its brakes to keep from mowing me down, I don’t hear it. An assassin isn’t supposed to get his heart rate up, is trained to stay cool and collected, but my ticker is revving like a Lamborghini and my eyes are damned near blurry from the extra adrenaline accompanying my blinding headache and the gun in my hand feels like it’s made out of cement.”
“My God. . . . ”
“The elevator car is almost to the ground, is just starting to slip below the surface and the mark and his half dozen bodyguards begin to disappear, first their feet, then their knees, and at that moment, all of them at once look at me, this wild man, red-faced, fisting a gun, sprinting across the street toward them like a guided missile and I can see their faces react, the two closest to their boss try to shove him down while stepping in front of him and then their torsos are disappearing and I have one shot, one chance in a million to thread the needle, an incredibly difficult shot even if all conditions are in my favor and I’m not half-dizzy with sickness. . . . ”
“Yes? Yes?”
“And so I hit the ground, belly up, focus everything I have on my mark so that I can tell you how many freckles he has on his forehead, point the gun and pull the trigger just as the elevator dips below street level, gone.”
Mallery is half-on, half-off his seat. His eyes are bulging, wide with anticipation, like a fish approaching a worm.
“What happened?”
“I missed.”
“Ha ha ha ha! You missed? What do you mean, you missed?”
“I missed.”
“Oh my God, you are too much. You and this story. This is the proverb, eh? The one who got away, ha ha ha ha?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Mallery looks back up at me, delighted there is a coda. “But you just said you missed!”
“I missed then. But he went home and I took some aspirin and killed him in his bed that night.”
“Ha ha ha! Ha ha! Oh, you are destroying me here . . . ”
Luis speaks up from the door, holding an Italian passport in his hand.
“Roberto Rossi.”
“You should hear this story, Luis! This guy—”
Luis is smiling but his eyes are suspicious.
I stand up and take the passport from him, stumbling a bit so they’ll think I’m inebriated. Roberto Rossi is the name Luis chose for me, a good one, as common in central Italy as John Smith. His work is professional, astute.
“You know what you’re doing,” I say to Luis. It never hurts to get a compliment in when someone is eyeing you warily.
“I’ve forged a few.”
“I can tell.”
Mallery stands, looking over my shoulder. “I may be the athletic one in the family, but Luis got all the brains. His work is perfect. That passport will not be questioned.”
I pay Luis the five thousand euros and fend off Mallery’s protests to stay for one glass more. Passport in hand, I leave the way I came.
Like I said, the key components in an ambush are information and timing. I’ve set the hook in Roger Mallery, and although I believe I could have persuaded him to talk about his principal employer Coulfret, Luis remains a wildcard, the smart brother, the one who does the work and keeps to the shadows.
Information and timing. And if I do my work properly, I’ll continue to remove Mallery’s defenses before he has a chance to engage them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IF I WERE SVOBODA, AS SOON AS I RECEIVED WORD LLANOS WENT DOWN WITH A KNIFE TO HER WINDPIPE IN FRANCE, I’D HOP THE NEXT FLIGHT TO PARIS. I’d immediately head to a bank near the Charles de Gaulle airport where I keep a safety deposit box loaded with weapons. Assassins store pistols, bullets, clips, knives all over the world, always near the airports. Airport security being what it is has made traveling by air the most vulnerable time for a professional hit man, which is why I would get myself armed as quickly as possible. And if I didn’t personally have a stash of weapons in Paris, I would arrange one through a capable fence.
Next, I’d use contacts in Paris, either with the morgue or the police or the underworld, to arrange a viewing of Llanos’s body. I’d want fifteen minutes alone with the corpse. I’d examine the fatal wound and try to reconstruct in my mind the way it had gone down. Since I’m a Silver Bear, the “shelf above the shelf” as Archibald put it, I’ve been on the dispensing end of enough wounds to grasp a good idea of how this death unfolded.
If I were Svoboda, I’d now have a bit more knowledge about my mark, the man named Columbus I’ve been paid to kill. I’d know that for whatever reason, my target switched from his normal weapon of choice, a Glock handgun, to an inferior weapon, a stiletto blade. I’d know he used a neck shot, a straight puncture to the throat instead of a risky slashing motion. I’d know that he got the jump on the woman who was assigned to kill him. I’d know that he’s better than I might have been told.
Then I’d look at Llanos’s face—milky, empty—and I’d think about my quarry doing that to her, punching out her ticket when just the day before she had been young and lithe and alive. I’d think she was doing the same job I was hired to do, the same job I’m doing now, and my target discarded her like she was waste. I’d let my hatred build like a kindling fire, stoking it, fanning it, until it consumed every cell in my body.
And then, if I were Svoboda, I’d leave the stale trapped air of the morgue to walk back into the mottled throng of Paris. I’d close my eyes, breathing in the night, focusing my mind, feeding off my hate.
Then I’d open my eyes again, set my jaw, and begin to hunt.
Mallery is digging into a roasted duck at a sidewalk restaurant named the Café de la Comedie near the Louvre. The hand that holds his carving knife is blemished with the brick hue of bloody knuckles. Earlier, I watched him pound that hand into a gray-haired man’s face in a warehouse next to a chocolate shop. I didn’t quite catch why the gray-haired man deserved his beating, but as soon as he saw Mallery step through his door, the look of resignation on his face told me he knew it was coming. The old man took it pretty well, all in all.
I’m standing by the bar, drinking an Italian beer, watching him.
His phone buzzes, and he picks it up, reads something on the screen, then tries to work his thumbs over the little buttons, sending a text back. I wait, and eventually he gets up.
Sure enough, he spots me as he’s heading to the bathroom.
“Roberto!”
I shoot him a cold look and he immediately clams up, his eyes as round as bicycle tires. “What?”
The best thing to do in this type of situation is to keep him off-balance, defensive.
“What were you doing with your phone?”
“Texting. . . . ”
“Does Coulfret know you do that?”
He puzzles over that one. “I just text with my brother. I don’t ever put anything on here that—”
“You ever see Coulfret use a mobile phone?”
“No, but—”
“That’s because mobile phones lead to arrests.”
“But I—”
“Never mind. I need your help.”
It helps to shift directions like this, keep him back pedaling.
“What do you mean?”
“Come if you’re going to come.”
“What about my bicycle?”
“Leave it, goddammit.”
And with that, I head out of the restaurant and into the street.
I can smell him before he reaches me. He must’ve slapped cash onto the table to cover his bill, made sure his bicycle was properly locked, and then hurried to catch up to me.
I don’t look over my shoulder, don’t acknowledge him, just keep walking forward. He whispers from behind me. “What are we doing?” Then catches up so we are walking side by side.
“A job.”
He makes his fingers into a gun just like I did the day before, wiggles his thumb, and repeats, �
�A job?”
“Yes.”
“Holy mother of Mary. What’s the job?”
“To take down a target. Stay in the shadows.”
He steps out of the sunlight closer to the wall, but can’t manage to fit his whole body into the shade, as big as he is.
“Who is the target?”
“A woman. A hundred times out of a hundred I’d do this job alone, but Coulfret wants to see how you’ll do.”
Mallery swallows like he’s trying to force down an egg. “Coulfret wants you to use me?”
“What’d I just say?”
“This woman. Who is she?”
“The wife of a man who shouldn’t have tried to extort Alexander Coulfret.”
“My God.”
“Two of us working together is known in the game as a tandem sweep. That’s what we’ll be doing. . . . ”
“I don’t have a gun. I have a knife, and I have these. . . . ” he says, rubbing the scabbed knuckles of his fist.
“You won’t need either of them.”
“But— ”
“Just use your head and do exactly as I tell you, when I tell you, okay?”
“Yes, of course. What do you think? I do not listen? I will listen.”
We round a corner, and fifty yards away stands a farmer’s market selling fresh produce and meat and spices.
I hold up a Polaroid, a picture of a woman at a distance. “This is our target. She’s in that market now. She won’t leave it alive.”
Mallery looks back and forth from the photograph to my face to the photograph, trying to commit it to memory like he’s studying for exams but it’s all happening too fast.
“Now here’s your role in this . . . are you ready?”
Without hesitation, he nods.
“Shooting the target is easy, I could do it in my sleep, it’s never a problem, listen!”
He’s still riveted by the Polaroid in my hand and when I bark at him his eyes jump back to my face.
“The getting away is the problem, it’s always the problem, it’s the difference between more jobs or a life in prison or worse, so the escape has to be planned and precise and if you fuck this up in any way, I’ll kill you myself.”
He shakes his head; he won’t fuck this up, he swears.
“Okay, good. Now you’re the pigeon, the possum, the flop, okay? The misdirection, the diversion. You’re where everyone casts his eyes so he doesn’t see what’s going on up the magician’s sleeve.
“I want you to walk into that farmer’s market and find the woman. When you see her, I want you to turn to the nearest produce stand and start in with a coughing fit. Can you cough?”
Immediately, he produces a cough so loud I think he’s going to rattle a window.
“Not now, goddammit!” I say through gritted teeth and he stops like someone jerked a needle off a record. “Okay, while you’re coughing, you won’t hear anything except maybe the soft report of a silenced bullet, but out of the corner of your eye, you will see this woman drop. Do not look at her, don’t you dare fucking look at her.”
He shakes his head again; he won’t look at her, don’t worry about that.
“When you see the woman hit the ground . . . ” I wait for a few pedestrians to pass, acting casual, and Mallery follows my lead. As soon as they’re out of earshot . . . “When you see the woman hit the ground, I want you to stop coughing and walk away as calmly and as quickly as you can in that direction. Can you do that?”
He nods; he can do that.
“Now listen to me and listen to me like you’ve never listened to anything in your life. Do you know the story of Lot’s wife? From the Bible?”
He shakes his head and I act like I’m even more frustrated with him.
“Well, you’re going to want to look back, see if anyone’s following you, see if a crowd has started to gather around the body, see if someone is fingering you or me or calling for the police, but you don’t look back, don’t do it, don’t do it if the Madonna herself appears in front of you and screams at you to look back, do you understand me? You don’t give any person at all a reason to remember your face. You just walk the fuck out of there, return to the café we just left, order yourself a glass of wine, and you fucking sit there until I come and get you, do you understand?”
“Yes. I walk away.”
“You walk away.”
“Yes.”
“Good, now let’s see what you’re made of.”
I clap him on the back and we set off for the market. He swallows hard, like he thought he’d have more time to prepare himself but here we are. It’s sparsely crowded with local housewives picking up their daily bread and whatever vegetables and meat they plan to cook in the next couple of days. Few tourists are in this neighborhood this time of year, but the late sunset has brought in quite a few afternoon shoppers.
Our target is near a fruit stand, picking up and squeezing oranges. From where I hover over Mallery’s shoulder, I can see him stutter-step as he recognizes her from the photo, a big clumsy signal a trained target would pick up on as easily as someone yanking an alarm. But we’re in luck, the mark keeps picking up those oranges, in her own world when she should be paying attention to the wolf on her doorstep.
Mallery spins in place, wheels on a cheese seller’s stand, and starts coughing like his lungs are exploding. It’s a pretty damn good distraction, and most of the heads in the market spin in his direction, including the one belonging to our mark.
I come up beside her, my hand inside my coat pocket, and when she drops suddenly, Mallery does as instructed, he stops coughing and books it out of there, heading left out of the stand.
Usually, I would keep moving to put as much distance between the scene of the crime and myself before witnesses start tripping over themselves to see what happened. But I wait, following Mallery’s ample gait with my eyes, watching to make sure he fights that urge and doesn’t look back. Don’t look back, don’t look back, I’m willing him with my eyes and he doesn’t turn, he does as he’s instructed, and he rounds the corner at full stride.
When he disappears, I reach down and help the lady to her feet.
“You all right there, missy?”
“That’s Ruby to you,” she says with a smile.
When I reach the Café de la Comedie, Mallery is sweating. There is an empty glass in front of him, and I’m guessing he’s drunk at least half of a bottle of wine. He almost upsets the table in his hurry to greet me, eager for my approval.
“It’s done, correct?”
“Yes,” I smile. “You did well.”
“Just as instructed.”
He’s like a dog. Unsatisfied with just a pat to the head, he needs a scratch behind the ears.
“Yes.”
“I did not look back.”
“Good. Then no one will have followed you.”
“I heard sirens. Sitting here. Waiting for you. I was worried.”
I had seen police blowing past on the way to a motorcycle accident up the road. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I’m glad Mallery believes the sirens belong to our affair.
“Never worry about me. Only yourself.”
“We will do this again?”
I shrug. “We’ll see what Coulfret says.”
“You will tell him about today? How I composed myself?”
“Of course. Have another drink.” I grab the waiter as he passes and order a fresh bottle of wine.
“I can’t believe it,” he says, true wonder in his eyes. “He usually uses me for. . . . ” and he makes a couple of punching motions, a jab, an uppercut. Then pops one of his big fists into the other hand. “But this. . . . ” He shakes his head. “How much, do you mind my asking?”
“How much what?”
“How much do you collect for a kill?”
I’ve got him now, though he doesn’t know it.
“A hundred thousand Euros.”
His eyes light up, filled with dollar signs. “Maybe I can . . .
maybe he’ll use me more for. . . . ”
“Maybe. We’ll see what Coulfret says.”
A couple of glasses more and he’s relaxed, giddy, speaking maniacally, the adrenaline getting the best of him.
It only takes a nudge from me. Information and timing.
“Let me ask you a question. I heard Coulfret faked his death a few years back.”
“Oh, yes. Brilliant.”
“Why would he need to do that?”
“You don’t know this story? A story-teller like you?”
“Please.”
“How much time do you have?”
“At least another bottle of wine’s worth.”
“Done!”
And he pounds the table as a third bottle arrives.
Alex Coulfret’s first love wasn’t a woman, but a building. He grew up in the Eleventh arrondissement, a block away from the Bastille, in a Haussmann-era residential edifice on the Rue Saint Maur. The building had twenty-two apartments, the smallest of which belonged to his father and mother. The apartment was in the basement, and they’d never have been able to afford if it hadn’t been for his father’s position as resident supervisor, a nice way the French have for saying “custodian.”
The older of two brothers, Alex often accompanied his father on the daily tasks involved in keeping twenty-one tenants of a nineteenth-century building satisfied. Leaky pipes, peeling wallpaper, backed-up sewer lines, cracked windows, chipped floor tiles, faulty wiring, elevator repairs . . . Alex and his old man took care of all of them, working odd hours, always at the beck and call of the residents. In a building where everyone was of the same social stratum, the lower class consisted solely of this one family in this one apartment.
Alex spent his childhood learning every inch of that building. The crawl spaces, the roof, the rest of the basement with its clattering laundry machines, the copper pipes running behind the walls, the tiny balconies facing the courtyard, the floor drains leading down to the sewers. The residents looked on him and his brother with genuine affection, always ready with a pat to the head or an offered piece of peppermint candy. There were few children in the building, and the ones who were around Alex’s age went to private schools and had their own sets of friends.