The Accident Man

by Tom Cain

  A few minutes later, she was left with a short, almost boyish crop. She looked at the mirror again, happier this time. Then she picked up each box of hair color in turn, holding it by her face before coming to a decision.

  She filled her basin with warm water, bent down, and dunked her head. Then she shampooed in the black dye. Now came the boring part: She had to wait twenty minutes for the dye to work properly. So she sat on the edge of her basin, smoked a Marlboro, and watched the world go by.

  The couple who’d had sex emerged from their cubicle. The woman dashed to the mirror to check her face and hair, while the man scowled at her impatiently. Neither of them seemed too interested in romance. Alix wondered if it had been a professional transaction. She decided probably not. A decent hooker would at least have pretended she’d enjoyed it. That way the John might pay for a second helping.

  The dealer’s trade slackened off for a few minutes. He tried to persuade Alix to buy, then settled for a broken English conversation about the difficulties of doing business with clients who were, by definition, screwups. Alix sounded like she knew what she was talking about. The dealer was impressed.

  “You sell powders too?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Something else.”

  A pair of blonds walked in, teetering on four-inch stilettos, and for a second the ladies’-room babble fell silent. The two newcomers were identical, but eerily, unnaturally so in their doll-like perfection. They had wide turquoise eyes, perfect little noses, and puffy, pouty lips. They looked around with blank indifference, as if long since bored by the effect their looks had on the world around them. Either that, thought Alix, or their faces had simply been stuffed with so much Botox they were no longer capable of any expression at all.

  The dolls stood next to Alix in front of the mirror, bitching about the man they were with. Bitching in Russian. One of them glanced at Alix in the mirror and attempted a puzzled frown.

  “Ya znayo vas?”

  She was asking, “Do I know you?” but now it was Alix’s turn to look wide-eyed and clueless. “Sorry,” she said, making her accent as all-American as she could manage. “I don’t understand what you said. But I sure love that twin thing you’ve got going.”

  The two dolls turned back to their own reflections and swapped a few catty observations about dumb Yankees. They fixed their hair, smoothed down their microscopic frocks, and headed back out to the club. As the door swung shut behind them, Alix let out a little laugh, a mix of amusement and sheer relief.

  “They were quite a pair, huh?”

  Alix looked up to see a fresh-faced, smiling girl, barely out of her teens, wearing jeans and a cropped top. She had clear blue eyes and a dusting of freckles across her lightly tanned face.

  “You American?” Alix asked.

  “No, Canadian. I come from Winnipeg. My name’s Tiffany.”

  “Hi, Tiffany, I’m Alexandra. Look, could you do me a little favor? Could you just look outside the door to see if the guy at the corner table is still there?”

  “Sure.” Tiffany walked to the door and looked out. “You mean the cute dark-haired one, with, like, a white shirt and a gray jacket?”

  Alix smiled. Cute wasn’t a word she’d thought of applying to Carver. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the one.”

  “Hang on, be right back.” Tiffany disappeared through the door. Twenty seconds later she returned. “You know what? He really is cute. Kinda rough around the edges, but I like that. He’s a lot cuter than my date, that’s for sure. Anyway, so I asked if he wanted some company. He said he was waiting for someone. I think he really likes you.”

  At last, the time was up. Alix rinsed out the dye, then crouched down beneath the hand dryer and blasted her head with hot air. It only took seconds. That was one big advantage to going so short. She just needed one last touch.

  She checked out the other women standing next to her. There was a punky looking rock chick a couple of basins down with a tub of clear styling gel. That would do. Alix leaned toward her and pointed at the gel. “Please?” she said. The girl nodded.

  Alix scooped her right hand into the gel, rubbed her hands together, then started scrubbing her fingers back and forth through her hair to make it look fuller, choppier. Then she stepped back from the mirror and turned her head from side to side to scrutinize every angle before leaving the room.

  “That was worth the wait,” said Carver, when she got back to the table. “You look amazing.”

  “You think so?” asked Alix. “It feels kind of strange to me, like there’s nothing there anymore. Still, if you like it, we should drink to my new style. . . .” She summoned a waiter. “A bottle of Cristal, please.”

  A minute later there were two full champagne glasses on their table and a pale, clear bottle sitting beside them in an ice bucket.

  “Na zdorovye!” Alix said, raising her glass.

  For a second she looked at the golden, bubbling liquid, felt the icy chill of the glass against her fingers, and caught the sharp scent of the drink in her nostrils. She realized she had never felt more alive, more keenly in tune with her senses. The realization of what she had done that night still horrified her, but the truth remained: She had looked death in the face and survived. She felt possessed by an intense awareness of the fragility of existence. She wanted to squeeze every drop of life she could from every moment that was left to her. And she was going to start right now.

  Carver looked at the woman sitting opposite him. The black hair made her seem stronger, more complex. Her blue eyes shone even more brightly against that dark frame and her bone structure was revealed in all its elegant perfection. He wondered what might have happened if they’d met in anything like normal circumstances. Then he chuckled to himself. A girl like that? She wouldn’t have given him a second glance.

  He tried to keep things low-key. “So, you want to eat?”

  Alix drained her glass. “Eat? No way! I want to dance. Come on!”

  She got up from her chair and tugged at Carver’s arm.

  He frowned, nervously. “Did you say ‘dance’?” The possibility hadn’t occurred to him. So far as he was concerned, the club was just a place to avoid pursuit.

  Alix laughed. “Of course I’m going to dance. And if you won’t dance with me, Mr. Shy Englishman, I’ll find someone who will. And he’ll take me in his arms. Our bodies will rub together. We’ll . . .”

  “I get the picture,” Carver said. He looked at the dance floor. It was heaving with bodies. If anything, they’d be less conspicuous among the crowd than sitting to one side at an open table. “Okay. Let’s dance.”

  18

  The manhole cover budged an inch, just enough to shift it out of its housing. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then it moved again, right out of the hole, and came clattering to a rest on the sidewalk.

  Grigori Kursk winced as the pain shot through his cracked ribs. He breathed heavily. That hurt too. Then he hauled himself out of the manhole and back onto the streets of Paris.

  He spat on the sidewalk, trying to get the taste of muck out of his mouth. He’d swallowed half the Paris sewer system. He’d need shots for cholera, dysentery, tetanus—anything the doc could find.

  What else? His hearing was gone: The explosion had temporarily deafened him and left his eardrums ringing in angry, shrieking protest. He’d been wearing lightweight body armor, but the blast had still hammered his rib cage and battered his skull. He hadn’t had a headache like this since the last days in Kabul, drinking away the shame of defeat with homemade potato vodka. He felt nauseous, dizzy, spacedout, concussed. Well, screw that. Kursk had been hurt a lot worse than this and kept fighting. He’d probably smelled as bad too. But it was one thing stinking when you were sitting in a foxhole at the ass end of Afghanistan and everyone else stank just as bad. In the middle of Paris, it wasn’t so smart.

  Kursk looked around. He was standing on a wide avenue. Up ahead he could see ramps leading up onto a freeway, but there was barely
any traffic. Behind him there were some rail yards, half lit in orange and gray. A few railway workers were wandering between the freight trucks. No one seemed to be doing too much work.

  Kursk knew what he had to do. He slumped to the ground, leaning back against a lamppost by a bus shelter. Then he waited.

  People came by. Three railway workers at the end of their shift, glad to be on their way home, shouted at him, told him to get a job and have a bath. One of them was about to aim a kick in his direction when his pal held him back. “Hey, Paco, you crazy? You’ll never get the smell off your boot!” The men walked off laughing.

  Kursk waited.

  It took about twenty minutes before he got what he wanted, one guy by himself, about Kursk’s size but flabby. He wouldn’t know how to defend himself. Kursk could tell just by looking at him.

  As the man walked by, Kursk got up and walked toward him, just another drunken bum begging for a few coins. The man’s eyes widened in alarm. He tried to act tough. “Piss off, tramp!” Kursk grinned and came a few steps closer. The man turned and walked away fast, trying to maintain his dignity, not wanting to run. Kursk caught him in a few steps, grabbed the man’s head, and twisted it, snapping his neck, then caught him as he fell.

  Kursk felt another stab of pain slice through his upper body. It settled into a relentless, grinding ache as he dragged the man’s body to the side of the road and dumped it by the rail yard fence.

  It hurt Kursk when he pulled off the man’s jacket, pants, and shirt. It hurt when he got out of his own sodden, stinking, shredded clothes. It hurt when he got dressed again. Everything he did hurt.

  He went through the man’s wallet and pockets: thirty- five francs in notes and another nine or ten in small change. That was plenty.

  Kursk left the man slumped against the fence in his old, sewer-drenched clothes. It would be a while before anyone realized he was dead. No one was going to go too close to a guy like that.

  He set off down the avenue, walking under the freeway. Beyond it the streets narrowed. They all looked the same: endless apartment blocks, four or five stories high, occasional bistros, bars, and shops. There was a public toilet on one corner. Kursk put a couple of francs into the slot, let the metal door slide open, and went in. He washed himself as best he could in the basin, soaping his face and scalp, and rinsing the filth out of the cuts that crisscrossed his shaved head, enjoying the sandpapery abrasion of the stubble against his palm.

  When he’d finished, he looked in the mirror. It wasn’t too bad. He looked like a tough bastard who’d been in a fight and couldn’t give a damn. Kursk grinned at the thought of all the bourgeois Parisians who might see him and feel a prickle of fear. He took his capacity to intimidate for granted, the same way a beautiful woman assumes she will turn men’s heads. A walk down the street was a parade of his powers.

  Kursk left the toilet and looked around for a phone booth. He shoved every coin he had into the box and dialed an overseas number. It was a while before anyone answered.

  He spoke in Russian: “This is Kursk. Get me Yuri. Yeah, I do know what time it is. Just shut up and get me Yuri.”

  19

  Can I have one of your filthy cigarettes?”

  Papin grinned. “I thought you did not smoke.”

  The operations director grimaced. “I don’t usually. But tonight I think I’ll make an exception.”

  Papin reached for his Gitanes, then held up his hand for a second before placing it to his own telephone earpiece. He frowned with concentration as he listened, then spoke briefly into the mic that dangled by his throat. Another nod, a quick good-bye, then he turned off his phone.

  “I am afraid I have more bad news,” Papin said, handing over a cigarette, then flicking on his lighter. “There has been a killing in the Marais. One of the finest mansions in Paris has been turned into a slaughterhouse. An exploded car. A body in the gateway. Two more bodies in the hall. Two more again upstairs. And human remains from the explosion scattered like confetti across the courtyard. The dead men were armed with submachine guns. These men were professional killers, who were themselves killed. So I ask myself, why would killers be in Paris tonight?”

  “All right, you’ve made your point.”

  “Then follow me.”

  They drove to the mansion in the first gray light of the false dawn. Papin flashed a badge at the police officers guarding the gate and keeping back the increasing crowd of rubberneckers attracted by the flashing lights of the vans and squad cars massed in the road outside the gates. Inside, Papin had a brief, angry conversation with a bull-necked man in an ill-fitting suit with sweat patches under the arms.

  “That was the detective in charge of the case,” Papin told the operations director, by way of explanation.

  “I gathered. What was his problem?”

  “He wants to remove the bodies so that they can be examined as soon as possible. I told him he can have them in five minutes. So let’s not waste time. Tell me everything.”

  They walked up to the first body.

  “You know him?” asked Papin.

  “Yeah. His name was Whelan, ex-Para. Seems fairly obvious what happened. Someone arrives at the front gate, Whelan goes to take a look, gets shot.”

  They walked farther in, saw the burned-out shell of the bombed car. The detective was standing by the shattered remnants of the driver’s side door. “Regardez,” he said, and pointed inside. The two men looked in and saw the charred steering wheel. There was a plastic restraint clipped to the wheel. A fragment of a severed hand was still inside it. The rest of the body was in pieces all around the courtyard. A crime-scene investigator was photographing each piece.

  Papin reached for his cigarettes. He offered the pack to the Englishman. “Another?”

  “No, I’m all right, thanks, seen worse.”

  They walked into the building and saw the two men sprawled on the floor of the hall, their blood a vivid crimson splash against the black-and-white tiles.

  “Nichol, Jarrett, also Paras,” said the operations director. “They came as a crew with Whelan and two others.”

  “Maybe you should think again about your hiring policy,” said Papin.

  “Don’t worry. We hire the best. That’s why these two are dead.”

  “You know who did this?”

  “I’m pretty certain. I’ll know for sure when I see who’s upstairs.”

  The men went into the dining room. The operations director winced when he saw Max.

  “The one in the jeans is the fourth member of the crew, McCall. I imagine you’ll find what’s left of the fifth man, Harrison, down in the yard.”

  “And the other man, the one I suspect you know well?”

  “His name is Max. That’s what I called him, anyway. I couldn’t tell you what his birth certificate says. We weren’t on real-name terms.”

  “Alors, who is? Have you noticed the interesting variation between the deaths in this room and those downstairs?”

  “Of course. Max and McCall were hit by a three-shot burst of automatic fire; the others were killed by separate shots. My guess is your firearms people will find that those came from a SIG-Sauer P226. If they did, the shooter is known to me as Carver. He’s the only person that could have done this, except for one minor detail. He’s supposed to be dead.”

  “Assume he is not. Can you describe him, please?”

  “He was wearing a bomber jacket, T-shirt and jeans, all black, and he was riding a Honda XR400 dirt bike, also black.”

  “You know this because?”

  “I paid for them.”

  “I see. Did you pay for his accomplice also?”

  “No. Carver always works alone.”

  “So why are there two weapons?”

  “No idea.”

  “Please, do not waste my time, huh? Either this man Carver came in with his favorite gun—a gun, you know, with twelve rounds in the magazine—fired four shots, then for some reason decided to pick up a completely different
weapon; or there were two different people, firing two different guns. Alors, Charlie, what do you think?

  He looked back at the Frenchman. “I don’t know what happened here. I’m not even sure it was Carver. He was meant to have been disposed of immediately after the operation was over. As far as I was concerned, he had been.”

  “But if he survived this disposal . . .”

  “Then he would be a very angry man.”

  “And he would seek revenge?”

  “That would be my assumption, yes.”

  “Had he been here before?”

  “No.”

  “Did he even know of the existence of this place?”

  “No.”

  “And yet your Mr. Carver apparently manages to find this house, out of all the houses in Paris, and kill all the people inside, using two different guns. Then he disappears without a trace. You are right, Charlie. You do hire the best. Maybe that is why you could not dispose of him as easily as . . .”

  “Damn! The computer!”

  “Pardon?”

  “Max had a computer, a laptop.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And look at the table. It’s not there. That bastard Carver has got our computer!”

  Papin paused to gather his thoughts. Then he spoke with the forced, patronizing calm of a man trying to take the heat out of a situation. “Perhaps we are rushing to an assumption too easily, huh? Tell me, how did you intend to kill this man, Carver?”

  When the operations director replied, his emotions were back under control. “Two Russians, a man and a woman, names of Kursk and Petrova. They work out of Moscow. But they’re dead too. We blew their apartment to smithereens.”

  “Was this apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it certainly exploded. But there was no one inside. No dead, no wounded. So far as the public and the media are concerned, it was just an unfortunate accident, a leaking gas pipe, nothing to worry about.”