by Alex Archer
Something lay by Annja’s left shoe. She looked down. It was a small oblong box with gaudy colors and unfamiliar writing. “Clove cigarettes!” she exclaimed. Some of the other kids at the orphanage had tried smoking them, to hide the vice from the nuns. It never worked. Nothing ever fooled the nuns. “That’s what that spice smell was.”
“Don’t touch anything!” the young man said.
“I won’t,” she said, standing. The tips of her fingers felt strange where they had touched the dead skin, and she felt an urge to wash them. Maybe you never get used to this sort of thing, she thought.
“Shouldn’t we call the authorities?” he asked. He was shaking.
“Not from here,” she said, “unless you feel like answering a lot of questions for some very skeptical police officers. There’s nothing we can do for her now.”
“But we have to do something!”
“Really?” She cocked a brow at him. There didn’t seem any point in keeping up the bubble-head act any longer.
With a musical ripple of sound the front door opened once again.
The young man went tense. Annja looked past him as three men entered the shop. The first was on the small side, at least a couple of inches shorter than she was, wearing a tan suit over a shirt with an open collar. He was trim and moved with unusual assurance and economy. His hair was cropped short and seemed to be light and receding. With him standing in the darker outer room it was impossible to tell more.
The two who came in behind him towered over him. One was lean, dark haired and unshaved, wearing a shiny suit coat over, of all things, a white T-shirt with horizontal blue stripes. The other was more like a granite slab. His suit fit as if he went to a tailor who specialized in circus chimps.
Annja’s life experience had taught her enough to make the two big guys as cheap goons immediately. The smaller man was a different order of being entirely, she knew at once. Not any nicer, perhaps. But he wouldn’t come cheap. Not at all.
“Excuse me,” he said, coming forward. His English was excellent but strongly Russian accented. “Are you Trees, by any chance?”
Then he stopped. Intuition-flash told her he recognized the smell before he saw the body in its graceless supine sprawl on the linoleum.
He rapped out a command to his men. Annja didn’t understand much Russian. But she didn’t need to.
There was no mistaking the intent of the two henchmen as they advanced toward her and the youthful Englishman.
4
Annja kicked the moving block of concrete in the baggy crotch of his suit pants as he reached out a golem arm for her. Sometimes the old ways were best.
It was an easy move to block, as she knew perfectly well. But that old devil perception played the huge Russian false. Her appearance took him in—both their appearances, as middle-class young Westerners, students most likely, culturally conditioned to thoroughgoing helplessness in the face of threats of violence. He wasn’t expecting the attractive young woman with the green-and-brown backpack to plant a boot in the old and dear.
The air exploded out of his huge chow-dog face and he staggered, bending over to clutch at his violated parts. The very hair in his ears seemed to stand up in anguish.
His leaner, darker partner cruised past him. His body language told Annja he’d sized her up as a basically helpless woman who’d gotten lucky. He wasn’t going to mess with an open-handed bitch-slap, but he did feel confident enough to launch a fist in a looping haymaker.
Annja spun away from the blow, clockwise and kept turning into a spinning back kick that caught the man in his wide-open right rib cage. With a loud crack of bones snapping he was catapulted sideways into a pile of crates. All fell over with satisfactory crashing and banging.
The big goon, cursing in a strangled voice—she was fairly sure that’s what he was doing, but all Russian sounded to her like swearing—reached inside his revival-tent-sized suit coat. She knew what that gesture meant.
Turning away, she snagged the ingenue young Englishman by the wrist with one hand. He resisted like a little boy trying to avoid a bath. It did him as much good. She caught a corner-eye flash of his sky-blue eyes going wide as he found himself towed irresistibly after the young woman.
She heard the dapper little Russian shout something. It may have been a command not to shoot, or the big guy, who wasn’t having his best day at the moment, fumbled his piece getting it into action. Whichever way the shattering noise and searing pain as bullets sleeted into her back didn’t happen.
It was a straight dash to the back door of the shop. Because Annja was moving faster, the young man came gangling after her in a sort of high-speed prolonged stumble, devoting more effort to not falling on his face than anything else. In racing flat-out for the door, she placed his body between potential gunfire and hers. It was not an ideal way to protect the innocent, but compromises sometimes had to be made.
As she approached the door she gave the Englishman’s wrist a final yank to keep up his forward momentum. Then she jumped into the air, half-turning to deliver a flying side kick. She turned her hips so that her leg shot out straight behind her as if in a back kick. Under normal circumstances, especially with the momentum of a brisk sprint, she knew it would be perhaps the hardest blow a human body could deliver.
Annja felt the door resist. She feared it may have been bricked over on the outside. Or perhaps it was simply rusted in place by long disuse. For an instant of compressed perception she feared her shin bone would give way before the door did.
Then with a squeal of tormented metal and wood both jamb and hinges gave. The whole door exploded out into the alley in a whirlwind of dust and splinters. It landed with a thud and bounced. Annja belly flopped on top of it. Last of all came the young man, sprawling on top of her. The breath left her body in an ungraceful grunt.
At last the anticipated gunfire ripped the air. A snarling burst of fully automatic fire sounded high-pitched and rang in her ears. A handful of bullets cracked over their heads to splatter against a whitewashed brick wall opposite, and ricocheted with nasty whining moans down the alley. Clutching at random for a grip on the young man, she rolled the two of them violently to the right, to get them clear of the doorway’s fatal funnel.
She had by chance seized an upper arm. Somewhat to her surprise it had a refreshingly wiry tone to it, despite his peaches-and-cream complexion and somewhat soft impression. She jumped upright, hauling him bodily to his feet with her.
“What on earth are you?” he started to say.
“Later,” she said. Grabbing his wrist again like a mother with a recalcitrant child, she ran for the traffic crossing the alley mouth as another burst crashed through the doorway.
“UNCULTURED IDIOT!” Valeriy Korolin snarled, slapping the big man’s sparsely furred head. “How often have I told you not to use that stupid Stechkin? No one can hit anything with a full-auto pistol. Why don’t you use a Glock like a normal human being?”
“But it shoots real fast,” the man replied.
“Augh! Can you miss fast enough to catch up? Anyway, I told you to grab them, not shoot them. How did you ever get out of the Panjsher alive?”
“My colonel always used to ask me that, too,” the big man replied.
“Well, catch them, dammit! You too, Arkasha!”
The lean man with the striped T-shirt beneath his sports jacket rubbed a stubbled jaw. Several other men had come in through the front door. “How, Captain?” Arkasha asked.
“The old-fashioned way. Run after them, very fast. Chase them down. Lay hard hands on them. Bring them to me. Alive!”
The two men stood staring at him. “You are still here, why?” he asked, his voice low, sinuous and dangerous.
They fled.
ANNJA AND HER COMPANION had almost reached the end of the alley when another pair of burly men came running into it.
By this time the Englishman was running on his own. Annja wasn’t sure whether he was actually following her or simply fleeing in
the same direction. Either way served her purpose.
One of the Russians reached to grab her. In a move far more reminiscent of rough flag-football games at the orphanage than her extensive martial-arts training, Annja stiff-armed him. He flew back into his comrade, who in turn slammed back against the green brick corner above the gray stone footing of the building.
Annja risked a lightning glance toward the front door of the shop. Several more overt hardmen milled near the brass plaque of the curiosity shop.
“What in bloody hell is going on?” demanded her accidental companion, stumbling as he stared at the fallen pair. She towed him remorselessly into traffic. Somehow, amid squealing brakes and bleating horns, they made the other side.
“Russian mafiya convention, looks like,” she said.
“And who are you?”
“Probably your best chance at living to see sunset. Come on.”
From the corner of her eye she saw the man she had stiff-armed. He lay on his back, jerking feebly. More to the point, she saw his partner, still half-leaning against the wall, dive inside his own Miami Vice pastel sports coat with one hand. She yanked the Englishman around the corner as a burst of gunfire rattled off the pizzeria at the near end of the block, miraculously missing the plate-glass window. A flyer hit the sidewalk and ricocheted off into the high white sky with a lost-soul whine.
The tourists, locals and vendors on the street showed little reaction as Annja and her companion raced away. Either they think it’s fireworks, or there’s a lot more street violence in Amsterdam than I knew about, she thought.
In a moment they were among a thicker crowd. She slowed. The young man slowed with her. He was breathing hard and seemed aggrieved to see she was not.
“What are you?” he asked. “Some kind of CIA cowgirl?”
She laughed. “That’s the last thing I am. I’m just a tourist with an interest in antiquities. You?”
“The same.” She noticed he wasn’t any more eager to volunteer his name than she was. It was far down on her list of priorities. “What now?” he asked.
She looked back. Several men shouldered purposefully along the street behind them. At least one had his hand ominously inside his coat. “We need to lose them,” she said.
In front of them a bridge crossed one of the innumerable canals lacing Amsterdam. She had no idea which one; the street signs would have meant little to her even if she had been able to read Dutch. It was as much as she could do to know they were inside the Singelgracht, the canal that had once encircled the medieval city, and innermost of the major concentric canals radiating from the arm of the North Sea called the IJ.
Glancing right, she saw the street widen where the space between two parallel canals had been paved over. A crowd of people were gathered there. She heard tinny distorted techno music and voices expanded and garbled by loudspeakers.
“This way,” she said. “We might lose them in the crush.”
Her companion glanced back the way they had come. His color had risen high in his cheeks. He was really very pretty, she couldn’t help noticing, although still very masculine. His was an appearance that put her in mind of the poets Shelley and Lord Byron—though without showing any signs of the latter’s brooding and somewhat sinister nature. She had let his arm go by now. He continued to follow, probably because he had no idea what else to do.
He thinks I do, she thought. Silly rabbit.
“They’re gaining,” he grumbled. She looked back as if rubbernecking in approved tourist fashion. He was right. She could pick out at least half a dozen men, distinguished from the crowd not so much by their attire, which ranged from eighties casual to ill-tailored modern professional, as by their unidirectional purpose. They were like steel marbles rolling through custard, although they did restrain themselves from jostling the burghers and tourists too briskly and drawing further attention to themselves.
“Even they won’t shoot in a crowd scene like this,” she said, mostly because they hadn’t. Not unless they’re sure of their targets, she chose not to say. Why they had been shooting she found more than a bit mysterious. But she didn’t plan on asking them.
Not unless she managed to get one alone for a brief and personal conversation.
The crowd on the wide paved common in front seemed to be protesting something. But the crowd looked like a group of hippies. As she and her reluctant escort worked their way among the protesters she could see the fronts of their signs. She couldn’t read them. They were all in Dutch. They seemed emphatic. They were also very…illuminated, to borrow a term from medieval manuscripts: embellished with fancy borders and scripts, sometimes to the effect she wouldn’t have been able to read them had they been written in English.
There was a platform erected up front, near the end of the commons. A skinny speaker with a rainbow afro that might have been a wig exhorted the crowd in Dutch, vying with the thumping blast of music that was so distorted she suspected it was being piped through an amp from somebody’s iPod. Near the front, an eight-foot-tall black-and-white bipedal cow cavorted, waving its forehooves as if to emphasize the speaker’s impassioned rhetoric.
“Excuse me,” she said, inadvertently jostling a large man with a peace-sign bandanna and an almost white beard.
“Certainly,” he said with a smile. His English was crisp despite his accent. That was something she’d noticed about the people of Amsterdam: most of them spoke English, and most were unfailingly polite. Even when protesting, it appeared.
“What are you demonstrating about?” she asked. Glancing back, she saw several of the Russians standing on the edge of the protest, looking around as if uncertain what to do. If they dived into this crowd the way they had driven through the pedestrians, however crowded together, they would attract way too much attention from the Dutch police standing around looking politely bored in their khaki uniform shirts and dark trousers. “Animal rights?”
“No,” the man said. “I am sorry. We demonstrate here for higher government subsidies to artists. We are all artists here.”
“And craftpersons!” said the woman who stood on the other side of him, a smallish intense woman with a great cloud of kinky white-streaked ginger hair and a severe face.
“Ah, yes,” he said.
“But what about the person in the cow suit?” Annja asked.
“That’s Thijs,” her informant explained.
“Why a cow suit?”
He shrugged. “He does soft sculpture of animals. Last time he was a giraffe. It was truly something to see.”
“Sorry I missed it,” she said. “Thanks.”
The latter was spoken as she moved on with as much purpose as she could muster without calling attention to herself. The Russians had split up and were working their way around both edges of the herd of subsidy seekers.
“What was that all about?” her companion demanded to know. Taken apparently by surprise when she started walking, he had darted a few yards to catch up, fortunately drawing little attention.
“Camouflage,” Annja said. “Also curiosity. I’m a stranger in town.”
She kept her face turned vaguely in the direction of the podium, where a mime had taken the stage and was mugging and making inexplicable circular motions in the air with gloved palms toward the crowd, to the evident annoyance of the speaker.
“Mimes,” her companion said in distaste. “I hate mimes.”
She flashed him a smile. “There’s something else we have in common.”
She kept her eyes moving briskly side to side. Trusting her peripheral vision to alert her if any mafiya goons overtook them on the crowd’s fringe, she mainly scouted for their next escape route.
Ahead to the left, one of the ubiquitous tour boats, low slung with a glass top, had pulled in just short of the commons’ end. The tourists were filing off up a brief stairway of stained white stone to street level. She got the impression this was a shopping stop; there seemed to be no ticket kiosk at the small stone pier.
From n
owhere a hand gripped her bicep. Hard.
5
“A word with you in private, miss,” a heavy voice said in her ear, in English with a Russian accent you could have knocked off in chunks with a chisel.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Annja said. “You say you’re ill?”
She turned her hips clockwise, at the same time rolling her shoulder. It put the whole weight of her body at the gap between his thumb and gripping fingers. Even had he been anticipating the action, which clearly he hadn’t, it was unlikely he could have kept his grip.
As soon as her arm came free she rotated back to face him. He was another tall and rangy sort in a weird, faintly pink sports jacket and dark blue shirt. His breath smelled of lavender pastilles, of all things. He smiled, but it was reminiscent of a shark’s.
“Ill?” he said, trying to not too obviously snatch her arm again. “I don’t have any idea—”
She twisted again, this time even harder. Her left hand, knotted into a fist, drove the knuckle of her forefinger into the Russian’s right kidney with the force of a riot baton.
The air rushed out of him. The color drained out of his fair face, leaving him green beneath his indifferently barbered blond bangs. His knees buckled. She caught his right arm as people turned to stare.
“The poor man,” she said to them. “I think he’s got appendicitis.”
Some warning sense within her tingled. She felt a hand grab her right shoulder even as she readied herself.
She spun back as if startled. Quicker than the eye could follow, she hoped, her right elbow stabbed into the solar plexus of the beefy man who had seized her. His blue-green eyes, slightly slanted, bugged out as he doubled over.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “You poor man. Perhaps there’s a food-poisoning epidemic?” She turned, peeled his loosening hand the rest of the way off her shoulder, twisted it in a discreet come-along and, with pressure on the elbow, drove him face first to the cobblestones. He hit hard—but to all the nearby onlookers, themselves conditioned heavily against violence, it looked like nothing so much as if he had collapsed on his own, and his weight had proven too much for a girl, even a tall, athletic one, to control.