Killing Is My Business

by Adam Christopher

  Or so he thought.

  Tonight at eight o’clock Falzarano and the boys would be enjoying their Chianti and linguine and talking about good times in the old country and someone was going to come and interrupt their dinner with a little light machine-gunning. Sure, Falzarano brought a lot of men with him, but all you had to do to get past them was bring more bullets.

  It was going to be a massacre and the Bacchanalian wouldn’t be open for business for quite a while. Falzarano, on the other hand, was going to be just fine, because I was going to be there to save his life.

  This is where things got a little twisted. I asked Ada why Falzarano didn’t just die in the restaurant along with the rest of his boys, and the answer was one I didn’t like, along with the rest of all this.

  Falzarano had to survive, because I was going to kill him later. I was going to use the restaurant attack to get into Falzarano’s employ, and then all I had to do was hang around and wait for the word and then I’d get to work. The call in question might come tomorrow. It might come at Christmas. It didn’t matter, because when it came I’d be at Falzarano’s elbow and I’d be able to do the thing and then get out and the client would be so happy they’d insist on making a sizeable voluntary donation to a numbered bank account somewhere in a country that didn’t ask a lot of questions.

  And while I was catering to Falzarano’s every whim just like the rest of his hoods, I’d have the opportunity to look around his house and put my metal nose into his business. The client, whoever they were, wanted to know what Falzarano was up to. Why, I didn’t know, considering they were just going to send up the flag when it was time to remove Falzarano from the equation anyway. What did it matter if he spent his days in the house knitting sweaters?

  That, however, was not my business. Killing was my business and it was a business I was good at so all I had to do was stop and wait and watch and have a look around and then when Venus was in conjunction with Mars and a black crow crowed three times on a red sky morning or whatever, I could get to the real work. This is what I did for money and, as Ada was fond of reminding me, a robot has to earn a living somehow.

  I looked at the Bacchanalian and I shook my head and then I drove around the corner and parked under a tree where the shade was nice and the street was quiet and I reached over to the paperback book on the passenger side.

  I started reading and I tried not to worry too much about what would happen if it all went wrong at eight o’clock tonight.

  There was a lot riding on the fact that I was supposed to keep Zeus Falzarano alive.

  10

  At seven thirty that night I sat at my table in the Bacchanalian. Falzarano’s entourage had the place to themselves but they didn’t book the whole joint out; it was more that other customers were quietly discouraged at the door by the maître d’. The fact that he made no such attempt when I made my entrance suggested that he either liked the idea of a robot eating a fancy dinner at his restaurant or that he knew who I was and what I was doing here.

  The inside of the place was quite nice. The doorway was a squeeze for a robot of my proportions and once inside I could see the joint was pretty tight in a way that most customers would call cozy. Personally I would have preferred a little more elbow room but I knew the place was due for redecoration in a little under a half hour anyway.

  The front part of the restaurant was narrow and there were four tables lined up in a row running from the front to the rear. Once you hit the fifth table, the place opened out at the back with enough room for three tables abreast in four neat rows that kept going back until they hit the door for the kitchen and the restrooms and a small bar that was more for show than for sitting at.

  As I’d seen from the outside, the front wall of the restaurant facing the sidewalk was made up of little rectangles of imperfect glass set into a lattice of wood that was painted black and that bulged out in the middle. The amount of wood and the bubbles in the glass made it hard to see out and hard to see in. Maybe that was the point. There was more of this Olde Worlde charm on the inside, where the black painted wood crawled over the walls and the low ceiling. Maybe this was what restaurants in Sicily looked like. I had no idea. All I knew was that Zeus Falzarano’s favorite table was the one in the window.

  At seven forty the place was full with Falzarano’s boys sucking down spaghetti like it was rationed up at the big house and sucking down fine Italian wines in shades of red from thick crystal glasses that glittered and glowed in the candlelight. The candlelight did nice things to the front windows too, the imperfections catching the moving light and shining it back into the room. The place was cozy when it was empty and when it was full it was hot and loud. There was hardly enough room for the waiters to dance around the tables but they did it all the same.

  And while there must have been thirty people enjoying themselves inside there were at least that many stationed outside on the sidewalk and across the street and down on every corner in a two-block radius. I’d watched them set themselves up earlier, a troop of dark men with dark hair and wearing dark suits leaning against lamp posts and storefronts and not doing anything except watching and smoking and feeling the weight of the guns they had hidden inside their expensive tailored jackets.

  Once everyone was in place outside, the others had filed in from the back, through the kitchen, and Falzarano had headed straight for the table at the window. Two of his men went with him. I don’t know how he picked them. Maybe there was a roster. It seemed like a good position to be in. You got to eat the finest Italian food in the city and whisper sweet nothings to the big boss about what a great job he was doing these days and how his taste in wine was truly excellent.

  I was at the fourth table from the front, the last one before the restaurant widened out. The staff had been very accommodating, the maître d’ even sending one of his white-jacketed minions to fetch the big carver chair from the back so I had something a little sturdier to sit on. It creaked underneath me but it would do. I sat facing the front. Before me was a table with two of Falzarano’s boys, then an empty table formed some kind of buffer zone, and then there was the table in the window. Falzarano sat on my right, his back to the wall of the restaurant. One of his boys sat opposite the boss, the other sat with his back to the front windows.

  I played with a breadstick or two and I ordered a bottle of something nice and as the sommelier fussed over it next to me I watched the man I was here to save.

  Zeus Falzarano lived up to his name. I agreed with the sources who said he looked younger than he was. He was a big man. He sat at the table with his stomach pushed against it and the third of his double chins sagging over the collar of his shirt. He had a thin gray moustache and the hair on his head was thin too, but he’d brushed it sideways and plastered it down with something and I had to admit it didn’t look too bad considering what he had to work with. He had a big hooked nose and eyebrows like tropical caterpillars and when he laughed, which was often, I saw he still had all of his teeth.

  He looked like a mobster and he looked like he was proud of it. The two boys with him were tall and dark and handsome and they were clearly aficionados of their boss’s hair cream, the way they’d sculpted their own coiffures, shining like wet plastic in the candlelight. The boys wore dark suits that were exquisitely tailored around the shoulders and they laughed and drank and ate with their boss. I turned up my audio receptors but heard nothing except the fussing of the sommelier at my left elbow. He was telling me all about the history of the region of the wine he had brought to show me and I just nodded and let him keep going. He had a nice warm accent and he burbled in a pleasing, discreet way.

  Then he stopped. I looked up at him and he was holding the bottle in the crook of his arm and waved it near me like a young father showing off his newborn son and heir.

  “Do you wish to … ah, taste the wine, signore?”

  The sommelier was a young man with long hair that very nearly but not quite touched his collar. He seemed good at his
job, although I wasn’t the best judge of that, and he looked eager to please although there was an expression floating over his face like he was trying to remember if he’d left the gas on back in Florence.

  I gave him my best smile but I’m not sure he saw it, so I just said, “I’m sure that’ll be fine,” and I let him get on with extracting the cork and letting the wine flow and I went back to watching Falzarano.

  It was now seven fifty-two.

  Eight minutes.

  Falzarano and his boys were enjoying their party. I watched them drink and smoke and talk and not really do much eating.

  Seven fifty-five.

  I stood up. I had to push my table a little to make room and the legs squealed against the floor but nobody heard. The restaurant was busy and noisy and by now any passing interest in a robot like me having a nice Italian meal had evaporated.

  I waited for a waiter to get out of the way and then I slid down the aisle until I was at the front of the restaurant. As I passed the third table from the front the two hoods there suddenly got very interested in me. They didn’t get up but they stopped talking and stopped drinking and their eyes were on me all the time and each of them had a hand reaching inside a jacket pocket.

  I reached Falzarano’s table. The two boys sitting with their boss looked up at me and kept drinking with a feigned disinterest. The old man was talking and he didn’t stop. Nor did he look at me. He was busy telling his boys a story and nothing was going to interrupt that.

  Seven fifty-seven.

  Falzarano’s story finished when he took a mouthful of wine and when he was done swallowing he held the glass up to the candlelight and swirled the red liquid within and then he put the glass down. Then he looked at me with lips squeezed together like the wine had been lemon juice and not a Chianti that cost a hundred bucks a cup.

  “I know you?” asked Falzarano. His voice was deep and rich and he had an accent to match. He asked the question in a way that suggested he wasn’t interested in my answer. Then he lifted his glass and took a sip and while his face was buried in the glass I saw him look at me with eyes that were a bit wider than they had been before.

  Seven fifty-eight.

  His two boys took this as their cue, which was fine by me, because I was going to need a little room in exactly two minutes. The hood with his back to the window stood first. He buttoned the front of his jacket and then he held his hands politely crossed in front of his middle like he was the best man at a wedding. His friend on the end of the table stood as well, but this guy used one hand to pull back his jacket and the other to retrieve a nine-millimeter cannon which he pointed in my direction.

  Seven fifty-nine.

  I kept my optics on the boss and I gave him a little bow. Falzarano’s eyes glittered as he gave the top of my head a once-over. That was fine. I was a robot. Oftentimes people’s eyes glittered when they got close to me, like I was some kind of celebrity.

  “Mr. Falzarano, it’s a real pleasure,” I said.

  Falzarano cocked his head and then he picked up his napkin. He unfolded it and took some time doing it, and then he dabbed at the corners of his mouth like a man with nothing better to do. Then his head went over in the opposite angle like a dog listening for his master and then he opened his mouth to say something else.

  If he said anything, I didn’t hear what it was. Because as he opened his mouth the clock struck eight and then the shooting started.

  11

  That Olde Worlde frontage of the Bacchanalian restaurant exploded in a shower of thick glass shards and splintered black wood and from beyond the ruined portal came the fast snare-drum rattle of a machine gun. More than one, in fact, and possibly more than two as well.

  Falzarano’s boy at the front went down first, collapsing forward under the weight of the exploding window frame and the hail of high-caliber bullets. The table buckled under him but stayed upright. The bullets had torn through the man’s upper torso and had kept going, ripping up his pal opposite who was thrown backward like he’d been tackled by line defense, the black nine millimeter that had been in his hand now spinning uselessly in the air. He fell onto the table behind him but there was nobody to catch him, as the two hoods sitting there were now missing their heads after the broadside caught them side-on. Their bodies sat jerking in their chairs as the fusillade began to disassemble the corpses with appreciable violence.

  I assumed people were shouting but it was impossible to hear over the machine guns, even with my systems. The air was thick with flying lead and dust and smoke and glass and wood as the men out on the sidewalk raked the restaurant with gunfire, reducing tables and chairs and silverware and waiters and Falzarano’s boys alike to so much particulate matter.

  The barrage didn’t seem to be letting up even though everyone was surely dead by now.

  Except for Zeus Falzarano. He was safe and sound and protected by six feet ten inches of steel-titanium alloy. The wall against which he had been settled was recessed a little, which gave him a microscopic amount of cover from the front windows. That let him survive the initial tornado of debris after the shooters had opened up but in the chaos he ducked forward and down, which put him square in the way.

  That was okay. It brought him closer to me and that was just where I needed him.

  As the bullets came in through the gaping void where the fancy front windows had been, I stepped into the firing line and pushed the table and the dead guy slumped over it out of the way. Then I grabbed Falzarano and shoved him in front of me. I wrapped two arms around him and squeezed his bulk in. He seemed to get the picture and he kept his head low.

  My chassis was between him and the shooters and the shooters didn’t stop—in fact, they even shot a little harder, aiming squarely at me instead of panning back and forth like an office fan on a hot afternoon. Among the smoke now flew big orange sparks, around me and the man I was protecting. They lit up the smoke like flares and they fizzed and glowed like someone had set off a whole bunch of fireworks inside the wreckage of what had once been the best Italian restaurant in town.

  I could feel it too. The bullets came hot and fast and they ricocheted off my back and into what was left of the walls and the ceiling and they peppered the floor and I’m sure a whole lot went right back out the maw and into the street. My suit was history. My skin was fine. I was made of an alloy that people at the Pentagon kept inch-thick files on and that the boys at NASA really wanted a closer look at. I’d need a buff and polish but I’d be fine so long as the punishment didn’t last too much longer. The shooters on the sidewalk would run out of ammunition soon enough.

  Whether they did or whether they figured their job was done, the bullets stopped coming in a single instant like someone had shut off a tap and the next thing I heard among the crackle of flames and the tinkle of falling glass was the slamming of a car door, once, twice, three times, and then that same car laying down rubber and blasting off down the street at a rate of knots.

  And then it was quiet.

  I stood up and loosened my grip on Zeus Falzarano. He was still breathing. I straightened up and he did too. He looked around the empty space in front of him that had once been a restaurant and was now a tangle of bodies and body parts and kindling, all salted generously with crumbled glass fragments.

  Then he turned around and looked up at me. He still had the napkin in his hand and with a dazed look he drew it up to his mouth and dabbed the corners again. He had a gash on his forehead that was leaking and the blood was pooling in his impressive eyebrows. He kept dabbing at the corners of his mouth before he realized he was bleeding and then he gasped and he applied the napkin to the cut.

  I turned around, pushing debris out of my way with my feet. There were people outside on the street. Now that the shooters and their getaway car had gotten away some other cars had stopped in the middle of the road, their drivers and passengers half-out, balanced on running boards and hanging on doors as they stared open-mouthed at the scene before them. There were peop
le on the sidewalk too, on both sides of the streets, looking and pointing and waving at others but all the while keeping the space in front of the restaurant clear, maybe wary of a gas leak or fire or something equally dangerous.

  I didn’t blame them. It looked like a bomb had gone off.

  Among the crowd were the rest of Falzarano’s entourage, who had peeled out of their alcoves and shadows and street corners and had come running, but only after the shooting had stopped, and not to save their boss but to check on whether they needed to find new employment in the morning. I figured that would probably be the case regardless of whether their boss was alive or dead—either their paychecks just got stopped rather suddenly, or Falzarano was going to be furious they spectacularly failed to stop the attack and would fire them anyway. But for the moment, the men just stood and stared at the smoking crater that had been the restaurant and then they looked at each other and they started shouting and shoving at the crowd to get them out of the way.

  Then came the metallic rattle of car-mounted bells and flashing lights and from both ends of the street the sound of cars and trucks coming. Police, fire, ambulance, the works, roaring to the scene, converging on what was clearly the start of World War Three.

  The lights and the bells seemed to snap Falzarano out of his daze. He looked around the wreckage, his eyes moving from one body to the next to the next, the realization that a sizeable chunk of his staff were dead slowly dawning.

  He looked up at me with his rheumy old-man eyes and his jaw hanging a little slack. Then that jaw snapped shut and the eyes narrowed.

  “Get me out of here,” he said.

  “Follow me,” said I.

  12

  I took Zeus Falzarano through the back of the restaurant, pushing rubble aside as I led the way. I stepped over bodies and Falzarano did the same.

  I was parked out back. I showed him to my car and even held the door open for him. Then I got in and I drove away from the restaurant and the lights and the sirens and the gathered crowds.