The Mammoth Book Best International Crime

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “You want to fucking get that?” said Ivan Crawley, looking up from the lawn.

  “It’s okay,” I called down. “I can guess what it says.”

  He grinned. “You want to climb down, or shall I come up?”

  “I’d like to see you leg it.You could do with the exercise.”

  “You prick.”

  “Come on up and say that.”

  He was already climbing the fence hand-over-hand. He gripped the railing. I stood my boot on his knuckles.

  “Aw, don’t be fucking juvenile,” he said.

  He was right. I unlatched the sliding door, stepped inside and was latching it from the inside as he made it up on the deck. I waved. He swore again. As he fumbled with the latch – mustn’t break mother’s door, now – I walked across the apartment and was headed out by the time he entered, shutting the door behind me on its helpful deadlock. He doubtless had a key. I walked as briskly down the stairs as injury would allow, got into my car and turned the key.

  It didn’t start.

  “He’s an auto-electrician, remember,” said Sonny, leaning on the window. “I watched him pull the distributor while you were inside.”

  “Anyone could do that.”

  “But he did it so quick, bro,” Sonny said. “He’s a natural.”

  “Did Angela’s mother send you out here?”

  “Sent me a text.”

  “Those girls need to get their shit together.”

  “Maybe they have, bro.” He cocked his head. “I mean, are you going to take him on by yourself?”

  Ivan was storming out of the downstairs entrance, silhouetted by the glow of the safety light.

  “I reckon I could,” I said.

  “In the eighties, maybe.”

  I sighed. It was true. “I’ve got her accounts,” I said.

  Ivan was coming round the car towards us both.

  “Sixty-forty?” Sonny said.

  “Don’t be a dick. Finder’s fee.”

  “Sweet.”

  Sonny drummed his fingers on the car door and turned just as Ivan dropped with the intention of taking him square in the chest.Which is how I would have done it, I thought, wincing, but better from the side of Sonny’s bad shoulder. It was not a short fight, but it was fast.

  “Angela should not have engaged your services without telling me about it, Mr Huxley. The last thing any mother wants is to disempower her daughter but naturally, I had to move to protect her interests.”

  Louise Bane stood in her white kitchen stirring her espresso at a graceful angle, like an oarsman. Angela must have got her fine bones from her father. Louise spoke in the same bright tone as her daughter but the effect was more controlling than of good cheer. I imagined she talked the same way whether she was standing in the boardroom or the kitchen. A gardener in overalls was outside cleaning the pool. It was taking him a lot longer than it had to cut the lawn.

  “Well, I’m feeling a little disempowered myself,” I told her.

  “I was acting on the concerns of your ex-employers. They advised that you might need someone to watch your back, what with your injuries and the lifestyle.”

  “I think I’m in pretty good shape, Louise.”

  “Mrs Bane.”

  “Mrs Bane.” I dropped a sugar lump into my coffee and splashed it everywhere. I left the tiny cup alone. “Basically, I feel that I have a right to know when my client pays a someone else to shadow me, especially when it’s a man like Sonny Tewera. It’s unprofessional.”

  “The Chinese have a saying, Mr Huxley: ‘The greatest managers let people work without letting them know they’re being managed at all.’ Built-in redundancy is the secret to successful project management. I’m sorry if your nose was put out of joint.”

  “Ivan’s moved a little.”

  “Well, indeed.” She shook her gold watch around her wrist and frowned. “I don’t know where Angela’s got to. She did promise she’d be here. I’m sorry I can’t offer you the same hospitality. Biscotti?”

  “I think I’ll lay off the sweets.”

  “Ben was very excited to know you’d played at a senior level.”

  “Club level, yes. Is he good, your son?”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  “You don’t watch?”

  “It’s a question of time.Would you like payment now? I assume cash will do.” She counted it out from a bank roll in her purse.

  “That’s a lot to be carrying round.”

  “It’s so convenient.”

  “I guess there’s always more where it came from.”

  She handed me the money and smiled. “That’s right, Mr Huxley. There is.”

  Sonny was at the pub. He did a double-take when I dropped the bills on the table.

  “Cash?” he said.

  “It must be nice being a Bane.”

  “For sure.”

  Parramatta were playing so we watched them lose for a bit. My cell was on vibrate. I felt it shake my pocket once, twice, then three times.

  “You gonna pick that up?” Sonny said.

  I just kept quiet about it.

  Among Partisans

  Carmen Korn

  The screw-cap dropped to the table when Arie pulled the bottle towards himself to drip olive oil onto a crust of bread. It was the first sound at the table since a quarter of an hour. Before they had just sat there in silence looking out into the deep black of the night beyond the terrace. Listening to the cicadas.

  They were tired. Building houses from the ruins exhausted their bodies, although none of them was over forty. But only Arie was used to this hard work. He had already finished his house. The house on whose terrace they were sitting on in silence.

  Arie had been the first to come to the deserted village with its crumbling houses. The houses with the dry stone walls that had been built two hundred years ago and had been left behind two decades ago by people who had gotten tired of carrying the fresh figs to the markets on the coast in August and picking the olives from the trees in November.

  Deep down in the valley a siren was to be heard, its precipitant sounds tumbling over one another. An ambulance, perhaps.The Carabinieri. Jos glanced at Arie, as he always glanced at his friend when sirens ripped the air.That had been so in Germany and in the days in Holland, and it hadn’t changed since they were settled here in Testa di Lucio, the paltry hamlet in Liguria.

  The only one at the table who belonged here was old Bixio, who had come to Testa at the age of eighteen with the partisans. At the time there had been no road leading to the settlement, only a bumpy trail. People coming uphill from Genova got no glimpse of Testa with its odd dozen houses. To this day, Bixio didn’t understand how the Nazis had been able to find it in May 1944. Only he and two others had managed to escape.

  Arie noticed Jos’ glance, as he always did. But he just stared into the candle that stood in an old olive jar and kept on chewing his piece of bread. Only when the valley had fallen silent again did he raise his head and smile at Jos.

  They knew each other since Arie had been sixteen and Jos thirteen years old. Neighbourhood kids. The elder had looked after the younger. Jos had been a dishevelled bird at the time. He had lived alone with his father, who wanted to fall apart because Jos’ mother had gone off and away with another man. Jos had acted out his pain from the loss of his mother in wildness. Wildness that had almost broken his neck. He had fallen off of a tall tree, and Arie had been standing there below and just caught the slight boy.

  “Ancora di vino?” Bixio asked. He had brought a threadbare shopping-bag when he came over early in the evening from his cottage that had been the only intact building in the hamlet before Arie had come and built his. Bixio stood up, bent down to his bag and brought forth another bottle. Without a label, the cork only pressed in by hand. A red wine from Piedmont, behind the mountains to the north. It was good for the young people, gave them strength for the work in the ruins. Bixio was endlessly glad he was no longer alone up here, and he liked to bring up wi
ne from his cellar, where the only other things he kept were the old German army rifle he had captured in the war, and a box with photos and letters his comrades had written from prison before they were shot.

  Bixio poured the dark wine into the glasses, and only Hanna pulled hers away, one of the two women who were with them. Hanna, the saint.What she wanted up here no one knew. She had just been there one day. Maybe she considered the remoteness as cloistral. Hanna was afraid of the world. That was clear to all of them, and they all had a heart for people who had gone astray.

  Every day, Hanna carried away the rubble they found in the houses’ cellars. Carried it in buckets down the road to the first bend, where she dumped it in the nettles. On her way back, she always stopped at the old shrine of the Virgin Mary beside the bend.The picture of the Virgin might have been painted in garish colours, but now it was long since bleached out by rain and sun. Only the blue of the Madonna’s mantle still glowed. Sometimes Hanna placed some small white bellflowers that grew beside the road on the stone still of the small altar. She always stood still for a long time, and most of the times she prayed.

  “Maybe your house will be finished tomorrow,” Arie said to the Dutchman who a year before had driven to the land registry office in Genova together with him to initiate the purchase of the six ruins with their piece of land. Pioneers of the first hour. Testa di Lucio belonged to the two of them. Them and Bixio. “The windows will be delivered tomorrow,” Arie said.

  The Dutchman shrugged his shoulders, a sceptic who no longer believed that things happened at the time they ought to happen. It wasn’t his dream he was fulfilling here, it was his wife Jeltje’s dream.

  Jos had become addicted to Jeltje the day they met. Because of the soft sedate tone with which she spoke German. His mother had sounded just the same.

  “They’ll come on time,” Jeltje said, giving Jos a loving glance, as if he could guarantee the arrival time of the windows. She was the youngest of them all and nonetheless willing to be their shepherd.

  Arie squinted, as if he could illuminate the night beyond the terrace. It was his land down there. He of all people had become a landowner. One and a half hectares that belonged to the Dutchman and himself. A mockery of fate. Hadn’t he fought against the propertied class?

  With all means, Arie thought, twisting his face into a painful grimace. He took the bottle Bixio had put on the table and poured himself wine. He emptied the glass in big gulps and again felt Jos’ gaze. Arie knew that Jos tormented himself even more than he did.

  Later, as they undressed in the room that they shared as long as the others were still sleeping in the house, Jos asked Arie what he had been thinking about when he had distorted his face in pain.

  “You know what it is,” Arie said, full of reluctance.

  “The pictures in my mind are getting more terrible every day,” Jos said. “I’m dreaming of them almost every night.”

  “You weren’t even there,” Arie said, “don’t start assuming blame you don’t have.”

  “I didn’t stop you.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” Arie said. He stretched out on the cot and pulled the sheet up to his chin. A signal that he no longer wanted to talk.

  “Good night,” Jos said and lay down on his bed.

  Arie listened to the long regular breaths intended to make him believe Jos was sleeping. Jos was not sleeping. Both of them would lay awake for a long time, listening to their consciences.

  The windows arrived at a quarter to eight, even though the carpenter had to drive almost an hour on his way up from the coast. Italy remained a land of miracles. The morning shone blue like the mantle of the Virgin Mary, the shadows of the night seemed to have left Jos, too, and Jeltje was happy. The windows were a perfect fit.

  At noon Jeltje wiped the old table they had found in one of the cellars one more time and then set it with six plates.The sunlight danced on the thick white china. Soon it would become too hot inside the house, but Jeltje didn’t want to close the shutters yet, because she enjoyed the view through the shiny new panes so much.

  Only when they had drunk to the new house and the spaghetti they had carried over from Arie’s kitchen was on the plates did Jeltje get up to close the shutters that first jammed a bit and then loudly snapped shut.

  The next disturbing sound came from Jos’ fork that had slipped from his hand and dropped on to the edge of his plate.

  “I was just startled,” Jos said. The others passed over this jumpiness, but Arie was worried. Jos was becoming a bundle of nerves.

  In the afternoon, when they both stood in the smallest of the ruins looking up to the sky largely visible through the broken roof, Arie said: “It’s been years since.”

  “Why are you telling me that?” Jos asked.

  “Because it’s over. None of the dead will come back to life if you crack up now.”

  “I’m afraid they’re going to come and get you,” Jos said. Arie shook his head.

  “That the Carabinieri will track you down, just as the SS did with Bixio and his people.” Jos’ voice sounded breathless, as if he had been running up a hill.

  “You can’t compare that,” Arie said softly. “Bixio’s people were innocent.”

  “They also killed, for a holy cause,” Jos said.

  Arie laid his hands on Jos’ shoulders. “Calm down,” he said. “There’s nothing holy about killing a man just because he has power, and two others along with him who just happened to be nearby.”

  “He had abused his power.” Jos was almost pleading.

  Arie sighed and glanced up at the sky.The roof looked as if the last tiles were ready to fall today.

  They startled when they heard steps behind them. Jos turned first and saw Hanna standing in the opening that once been the door.

  “I’m bringing Holy Water,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Arie said, “we don’t need an exorcist.”

  “This is going to be my house,” Hanna said. “I want God to live in it.” She brandished a blue plastic bottle that still carried the label of Acqua Nori.

  “You can’t have walked all the way to Valesa to get Holy Water,” Arie said, “it would have taken you hours.”

  “The Virgin Mary sanctified it for me,” Hanna said, “down by the bend of the road. I put the bottle before her.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll start with your house,” Arie said, unsure if he wanted Saint Hanna to move into it. He was busy enough with Jos.

  Only when they had reached the old mule trail on their way to check if the creek still carried water farther down did he start to talk again, and what he said made Jos stop abruptly and contemplate his old friend.

  “Thou shalt not murder,” Arie said.

  “It seems that Hanna is driving you crazy,” Jos said.

  Arie climbed up a grassy knoll and looked out across the olive trees. He looked as he was going to deliver a sermon. Then he only said: “Violence is shit. Look what’s happening in Palestine.”

  “What you wanted back then was different.”

  Arie snorted. “Shooting at a big shot?” he asked.

  “I can’t stand you kicking at the framework I‘ve built for myself,” Jos said.

  “Your framework is only patchwork,” Arie said. They had arrived at the creek that was now merely a trickle. They were going to be short of water this August. Arie stepped over the creek without difficulty. In better days it had been wide enough to swim two strokes in crossing it.

  “What is that supposed to be, the Rubicon or the Sea of Galilee?”

  “I don’t get it.” Arie said.

  “Caesar or Jesus?”

  Arie understood. “There’s not enough water to walk upon,” he said.

  “By crossing the Rubicon, Caesar started a civil war,” Jos said.

  “Do you want me to start a civil war?”

  “I want you to be a hero, not a murderer.”

  Arie looked at him in concern. “My boy,” he said and returned to the other bank of the cre
ek with a big step. He felt like taking Jos into his arms.

  “I would like to catch you once more if you were to jump from the tree,” he said. The memory of the wild kid Jos had been at thirteen still softened his heart. But Jos quickly freed himself from Arie’s embrace.

  “Since that day you shot them my breath stops every time I hear a siren,” he said.

  “Yes,” Arie said. “That was horrible.Whenever I look out into the black landscape at night, I see them lying there on the street. All three of them.”

  “And I only think that they’ll be coming to get you, and they won’t care that you’ve renounced violence. They’ll treat you like they did the poor guys down in Genova who opposed globalization.”

  “Stop it,” Arie said. “let’s not burden this day so much. We’ve completed the second house today.”

  He started walking up the mule trail.

  “Jeltje has taken the Vespa down to Valesa to buy grilled chickens.To celebrate the day,” Jos said.Thinking of Jeltje soothed him.

  His mother came to his mind. She had ignominiously deserted him, but nonetheless she had been the first person that came to his mind, back then when he was looking for a hideaway for Arie. But Nijmegen had been too small to hide a wanted terrorist, and too close to the German border. His mother had been put to the test for hardly a day. She had had only a short meeting with Arie and had given him as little attention as she had her son.

  Then the flat in Scheveningen had already become available, provided by an unknown supporter. It had surely been a help that Jos spoke Dutch. Otherwise, Arie would have been even more conspicuous than he was. No town in Holland was big enough to make him invisible. Jos had sighed with relief when they left the country. Suddenly he had become the man who drove the getaway car. It had been a very high tree that Arie had jumped off that time, and catching him had been almost too hard for Jos.

  “I hope she’s going to Rosario’s,” Arie said, “he has the best chickens.”