Columbus

by Derek Haas

  Mallery turns back, grits his teeth, and recognizes an advantage. There is traffic in the one-way street up ahead, and he doesn’t have to stop. He zips up a lane of his own creation, between idling cars and the rigid curb. I slam on my brakes and just catch a blur as a Vespa whips past me, Ruby atop it hunched over the handlebars like a jockey on a thoroughbred, and then she rounds the corner moments behind Mallery. At least one of us chose the right vehicle.

  Fuck this. I hop the delivery truck over the curb and ride up the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians, bouncing on faulty hydraulics like I’m inside a washing machine. I spin the wheel and the truck responds, swinging to the right, somehow keeping on all four tires, and my fears are realized, no sign of Mallery on his bicycle or Ruby on the Vespa and a cluster of additional traffic ahead. I roll up a block, my head on a swivel, eyes scanning everywhere, and I catch just a glimpse of an overturned moped lying like a felled beast in the middle of the street of the adjacent block.

  I jump out of the truck without bothering to throw it into park, ignore the foot traffic on the sidewalk, and as I get closer, I can see Mallery’s bicycle also lying flat on its side, looking alien in that way bicycles do when they’re not upright, half on and half off the curb, front tire spinning.

  Again, I’m stymied, no sign of the big man or Ruby Grant, and then I hear the distinctive crack of a pistol firing. It came from somewhere up and to my left, and I duck my head and sprint inside the residential building in front of me. Something is troubling about that crack; Ruby prefers a high-caliber weapon, a .44, and the crack sounded sharp, quick, more like the pop of a kernel of corn, and I’m not sure about any of it, what exactly I heard, what was an echo, what was amplified, but that damn butcher better not have a gun. I’ve been with him twice before and never known him to carry a firearm.

  I fly up a flight of stairs, mounting them two at a time, and almost shoot Ruby in the head. She’s crouched against a wall, looking amused, like she is expecting me, and what took me so goddamn long, and isn’t this whole affair a lot of goddamn fun. I don’t know how she does it—I’d like to think it’s all a façade—but I’ve been around her enough now to think maybe she’s found some way to swallow the strains of our chosen profession and fuel it into something else. What? Passion? Maybe she’s wired differently. Maybe she just enjoys it. Maybe I’m more like Ruby than I’d care to admit.

  She smiles as I lower my gun and ease my index finger off the trigger.

  “He’s carrying a pea-shooter. Got a shot off at me and ducked around the corner.”

  I look above her head. A fresh bullet hole is plugged into the wall.

  “He have a way out?”

  “I don’t think so. Just got a quick scan of the building when I headed inside, but I think those stairs behind you are the only way down.”

  She taps a ceramic “Fire Emergency Exit Plan” sign next to her head. The writing’s in French but the map is clear: it displays the floor plan with a broken line showing a route to the stairs behind us in case the building goes up in flames.

  I see something else on the map and point to it. “It’s not the only way up.”

  Her face falls, now inspecting the sign while wrinkling her nose. “How much time you think we have?”

  She’s talking about police response time—someone reported the delivery van stolen, someone witnessed the chase, someone spotted the overturned Vespa and bicycle, someone heard the gunshot.

  Still, it’s a lot to add up for even the most opportune French police officer. So before enforcement becomes a nuisance, I’d give us. . . .

  “Fifteen minutes. Maybe more if we’re lucky.”

  “Dammit.” She pushes away from the wall and we stalk toward the corner, instinctively deciding that I go high and Ruby take low. We swing around the bend in perfect synchronicity, prepared to duck and fire at the same time, but Mallery isn’t waiting for us.

  I kick open the door to the roof, catch just a glimpse of the sun reflecting off of metal, and pull Ruby back as a tempest of bullets pounds into the open door frame. A second late, and we would’ve both caught taps to the head.

  “Well, that was your one chance,” I call out.

  “Go to hell, you lying son of a whore.”

  I can see him through a wedge in the doorway. He has his gun hand up but keeps throwing glances over his shoulder, at the roof’s ledge.

  “Don’t do it, Mallery. You’re too big of an oaf to think you can jump across that alley.”

  His face loses color as he realizes I can see him, and he sprays the doorway with another volley of bullets.

  “Can he make it?” Ruby whispers.

  I shrug and then peer through the slit where the door is hinged to the wall, where I can see it on his face. I was hoping for resignation but instead he has resolve, and he’s measuring out the steps it’ll take him for an adequate runway before he launches.

  Ten steps. It’s not going to be enough. He’s just too big and I doubt he has much experience in long-jumping and he keeps the gun pointed at the doorway, but he’s going to have to lower it and turn his back on me to make the leap. He breathes once, twice, filling his lungs with oxygen, psyching himself up. Now or never.

  I shoot him square in the back, toppling him before he takes his fourth step. He spills forward, headfirst like he’s trying to dive into a swimming pool, five feet short of the ledge.

  Ruby and I approach cautiously, but I know from the way he dropped, the bullet took his life immediately. The leak on this faucet is plugged. Or so I think.

  “Let’s skedaddle,” Ruby says, but there are two objects out in front of Mallery’s body. He must’ve been clutching both of them when he fell. One I knew would be there: his weapon, a little Browning automatic.

  The other is his phone.

  I stoop, pick it up, and look at the face. It only takes a moment to realize what Mallery had time to do while he held us off at the stairwell door.

  “What is it?”

  “He texted his brother.”

  The text reads: ROBERTO ROSSI’S A FRAUD. TELL COULFRET.

  I look down at Mallery’s body. Somehow, his chin is up and his corpse is looking at me. I’m not certain, but I think he is smiling.

  An ambush is information and timing, but a footrace boils down to improvisation and speed. I have Mallery’s phone in my hand and there has been no return text, so I’m hoping his brother Luis hasn’t yet received the message. Surely he would’ve tried to call or text back. Maybe I’m lucky and he doesn’t have his phone with him.

  Ruby and I scamper out of the building without hearing any sirens and finally something is going right for us and maybe good luck can build up like bad luck or at least keep the hounds at bay.

  We arrive at an empty cab stand with two idling taxis and time moves no slower than when you’re reliant on someone else to drive you somewhere.

  “Nothing on the phone?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then we jump this bastard before he gets the message. Easy as pie.”

  “I haven’t had a good pie in a long time.”

  “Well, don’t look at me,” Ruby says. “I wouldn’t know where to begin to bake a motherfucker. But I’m sure it’s easy.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  “Look, even if this boy gets the text . . . he calls your mark and. . . . ”

  “He can’t call. Coulfret doesn’t use phones. Mallery told me that when I first saw him texting his brother.”

  “Even better. But let’s say he gets to your mark, and warns him you’re on to him, that doesn’t give the big boss a whole hell of a lot more than he already had.”

  “He’ll have my face.”

  “What?”

  “Passport photo. The brother is a forger . . . phony passports.”

  “That was your in?”

  “That was my in.”

  “Goddamn.”

  The cab pulls over near the Bastille and I throw a wad of euros over the seat and we’re out
the door. The plan, if you can call it that, is to move backwards from the Rue de Maur to Mallery’s apartment. If Luis is coming to warn Coulfret, maybe we can intercept him along the way.

  It’s a ten-minute walk, even at a hurried pace, but there’s no sign of him and the phone in my hand remains silent. I plug in the code to the security gate I saw over Roger Mallery’s shoulder the first time I came here, and Ruby and I step into the courtyard. Luis has two ways to exit his building, twin stairwells at either end of the entrance. I choose east and Ruby takes west, and we enter the stairwells simultaneously.

  The corridor is darker than I remember, but that may be a mind’s trick; I was in control the last time I was here, and I am on the defensive now . . . ever since Roger Mallery rode by at the most inopportune time in this city of millions and sometimes coincidence is just coincidence but it’s unlikely, I realize now in this lightless stairwell, damn unlikely. Occam’s razor would be slicing the shit out of this one—the most reasonable explanation is that Mallery was tailing me, and I don’t know where my head was but I didn’t spot him and that may be the most worrying development of this entire fucking affair.

  I turn up the second flight of stairs when the hallway lights up in a bluish glow and my hand vibrates, indicating an incoming text on Mallery’s phone.

  Three words: GOING FOR HELP. And right then I hear a gunshot, definitely Ruby’s gun, and a scream of pain, definitely Ruby’s scream.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I think and maybe say aloud, but I’m already breaking out of the stairwell and sprinting the length of the hall, passing dozens of apartment doors, one of which is opening to investigate the commotion but I cannot hesitate, just plow through the west stairwell door and Ruby is on her back on the landing with a butcher’s knife buried in her arm, just below the shoulder.

  She’s not shrieking, just angry, steeling herself to yank out the knife.

  “No!”

  “What the fuck do you mean, ‘no!?’”

  Well, if she’s healthy enough to snap back at me, then she’s going to be okay.

  I pull my shirt off. “Use this to stanch the bleeding,” and before she can bark at me again, I toss her my hotel key . . . “Room 202. Bag under the bed.”

  I’m already flying down the stairs when she yells, “Drop his ass, Columbus!” after me.

  A footrace may be improvisation and speed, but now it’s just speed and he’s got a block and a half on me as I blast out of the building and sprint after him.

  Unfortunately for Luis, his brother was the athlete in the family.

  The street is mostly deserted this time of day, and I have my gun out and up and am running with it like it’s a relay-race baton. Sprinting like this, the trick is to never put my finger inside the trigger guard, not until I mean to shoot. And I’m not going to take a wild shot, not unless I have to, not unless he gets close enough to the Rue de Maur that I have no other choice.

  I close on him now like a wolf after a rabbit, and he takes a mad right around a corner, leaping in front of a pair of Vespas, causing their drivers to brake, lose control, and slide out on the pavement.

  I follow behind, hurdling the lead bike like a goddamn Olympic athlete while maintaining my speed. I don’t know these streets that well, certainly not as well as Luis, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to have to take a left to cut into the Rue De Maur if he’s going to have a chance at reaching Coulfret’s building. I duck to the lefthand side of the street like a sheepdog guiding his charges into a pen, and Luis makes a mistake, the biggest mistake a man can make when he’s being pursued by someone who wants to kill him.

  He looks over his shoulder.

  There are two reasons this is a bad idea. The most obvious is that he is no longer watching where he is going, no longer looking at the sidewalk in front of him, and any slight crack in the pavement could send him sprawling.

  The second and equally devastating reason is the man being chased gains a glimpse of how much ground his pursuer has made up, spots the look of conquest on his enemy’s face, realizes the hopelessness of his goal. It’s enough to sap the energy out of even the fittest of men.

  Luis takes one quick look over his shoulder and I see his eyes go wide, his adam’s apple bob, and a look of panic spread across his face. Like I mentioned with his brother, panic can cause two things.

  He stutter-steps, giving up precious ground, stumbles a bit, throws his arms out to gain his balance, and is successful enough to keep moving forward.

  But the panic gave me all I need. I overtake him in a dead run, and raise the gun when I’m a foot away. One step, two steps more, and I fire close, right into the back of his head.

  He drops like a stone, and I only stop long enough to snatch up one thing from where it fell on the pavement before I’m up and running again. I don’t know if anyone is following me.

  I’m not going to look over my shoulder.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  RUBY LIES ON MY BED WITH HER EYES SHUT.

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Just don’t.”

  “I wasn’t going to say a word.”

  “You get him?”

  “Yeah. And his phone. I tossed both his and his brother’s into the Seine.”

  Ruby nods, expressionless.

  “But I’m uneasy about the computers in his apartment. I couldn’t risk going back there, and once the police look into the dead bodies, they’re going to find—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She hasn’t opened her eyes. And now that I move around the bed, I see she’s dressed the knife wound with the kit from my bag.

  “Why shouldn’t I worry?”

  “I took care of it.”

  “How?”

  “I threw all their computer shit into the fireplace and lit it up.”

  “With a knife sticking out of your arm?”

  “Nah, I yanked it out before you got out of the building. Used your shirt to tie it off, like you said.”

  She opens one eye to take me in, see if I remain shirtless. I’m wearing an oversized hoodie I found in a souvenir shop three blocks from where I overtook Luis. Even at close range, I avoided getting his blood on me, and raised no eyebrows in the store.

  Ruby closes that eye again. I move to the bathroom sink and splash water on my face. It hits me at once, the weight of it, the near miss of having my face out there, the near miss of Coulfret knowing exactly who is gunning for him, and another pair of dead brothers who dipped their toes in a dangerous world, got caught in the maelstrom, and drowned. I don’t know how long I stand at the sink with the water running. Seconds could be minutes could be hours.

  “You know how you told me you were thinking about quitting the business?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I got something to admit to you.”

  “Oh-kay. . . . ”

  “Fuck it if you don’t want to hear it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  That eye opens again to gauge my face, to see if I’m mocking her. Satisfied, she resumes. “When I banged through the door on his floor, all of a sudden, he was in the doorway, looking at that gun in my hand. And I don’t know what to say but I flinched.”

  “Well, hell, that’s nothing. It happens to all of us.” Not true, but it felt like the right thing to say.

  “Jesus, it’s not that. I don’t give a shit about that. I mean, I would’ve liked not to have flinched, because that’s what allowed the frog to bury his knife in my arm, and caused me to miss, so yeah, I’m not happy, but no, that’s not what I’m spilling my guts about.”

  She waits to see if I’m going to interrupt, but I keep my mouth tight. Her voice falls quiet, like the words are coming from a place deep inside her.

  “When he got the knife in me and I dropped my gun and went down . . . well . . . I was scared. Not a little bit scared, mind you. I was terrified. It was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like the clock stopped and the only thing I was thinking was ‘pl
ease don’t let him go for my gun.’ My mind was telling my body to fight, claw, scratch, but it was like there was a complete and total disconnect and I couldn’t move.

  “I’ve never felt that before. I thought I was going to die here in Paris in some crappy apartment building and no one would ever know why or who I was or what I was doing. I’d just be a Jane Doe or whatever the hell they call it here. I was really, bone-deep scared. ‘Please don’t go for that gun, please don’t do it. . . . ’ That’s all I could think.”

  Her eyes are wide now, searching my face. I open my mouth, but she interrupts before I can speak. “Goddammit, Columbus . . . lie to me. That’s what I need to hear right now. Just lie to me.”

  I start to speak again, but decide against arguing. Instead, I give her what she wants.

  “Everyone gets scared,” I say without a hint of conviction.

  She turns her eyes to the ceiling and looks at nothing, her face tightening. The lie stays in the air a long time.

  The train is cramped and crowded and smells like life. It is a good way to hide in plain sight or to lose oneself in the dark recesses of the mind. People shuffle on and off like ocean waves, constant, unaware of the sameness in their differences. I can ride for an hour without looking up, without moving from my seat.

  Fear like the fear Ruby experienced is a costly motivator. It causes one to make ill-conceived choices, give in to irrational decisions. It can cause a person to overplay his advantage, like Noel’s wounded driver trying to steer into me, or it can cause paralysis, a complete abdication of thought and function, like Ruby on the Mallery stairwell. And once fear takes hold of a person, it nests, laying eggs and defending its territory with sharpened claws. It becomes a drug, a fix, something the host thinks is necessary in order to perform. It’s the opposite, though . . . hollow, a false high, a placebo.

  I was going to use Ruby to lure him out, play off of that one nugget I found in the police reports. Get to him through his nose. Use what I’d learned from Risina regarding the rare-book world and apply it to the rare-wine world. Get her to pretend to be a high-end merchant, offer him a wine he couldn’t refuse, a taste of a 1921 Petrus, and be there when he accepted the invitation.