by Derek Haas
It seems brother and sister have a civil relationship and nothing more.
I search through drawers and cabinets, but the house is sterile, like a museum. If the cats are here, they’re hiding. There’s barely a sign two women live in this house, very few personal items. It’s as though Gosia is more of a caretaker than an owner. Her presence in the house is as an employee for her brother, someone to watch the place while he lives in the country.
She’s not a strong route to get to her brother, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be useful.
The weak target the weak. The wounded attack the wounds of others.
Olmstead meets me in a furnished flat in King’s Cross and hands me the keys. The place is spare, on the first floor, down from the sidewalk, with no security except for a lock on the door. “Acceptable?” he asks.
“Perfect.”
I hand him a Post-it note with a crude drawing on it. He appraises my rough sketch, and I see he’s intrigued. “How soon you thinking then?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Afternoon’s fine?”
“Earlier the better.”
“One o’clock then. You’ll be here?”
“Yep.”
He tugs the front of his tweed cap and jogs up the steps to Field Street before he disappears into the pedestrian crowd. I peer around at the simple furniture, the thick walls, the lack of personal detail.
When they come, I’ll only need to sell them for a second.
When they come, I’ll be ready, though not the way they’re thinking.
The spring is an important part of a trap, the bait is too, but they’re both worthless if the trap is not properly camouflaged.
The weak target the weak. The wounded attack the wounds in others.
Gosia parks a Land Rover and approaches her house in Clifton Villas from the north, on the path that borders the canal. I lurch from between a pair of parked cars and block her way. She stutter-steps and looks up from the glow of her phone to see what foul creature stepped into her path.
“He’s a shithead,” I bark at her, and Gosia has me pegged as a crazy person. She gives me a wide berth as she returns to her phone, but I block her path again and she reels from the alcohol on my breath. “He’s fucking her and he’s a shithead and I’ll, I’ll, I’m gonna do something about it!”
She stops and pulls her purse strap tight to her shoulder.
“Step away,” she commands in a Polish-accented hiss, and I slyly smile, trying to play it as creepy as I can.
“I know him. I know you.”
She’s had enough. She holds her hands in front of her as though she’s stumbling around in the dark, warding off evil, ready for anything, and she hisses again, “I mean it. I’ll call the police.”
“I know you, Gosia.”
She stops cold. “What’d you say?”
“Gosia. Sister of Piotr. Piotr, who is fucking my girlfriend Madeleine!”
She studies me, looking for some recognition, but she’s stumped.
“You tell him . . .” I let out a belch and theatrically wipe the back of my arm across my shiny lips. “You tell him if I see him, he’s a dead man. You tell your brother that!”
“You need to go, mister.”
“Mister Walker,” I say to her loudly, drawing stares from windows now. “Better yet, you tell him Jack Walker on Field Street in King’s Cross. Tell him to come so I can kick him in the ass.”
I drunkenly kick the air.
She flinches.
With a speed she can’t see coming, I grab her throat, my hands digging red blooms into her neck, and I get an inch from her face so my hot, stinking breath will be remembered for a long time. “You tell him I’ll kill him.”
She reacts as I hope and shoves me away, hard. I stumble back and smash my hand into a parked car with a loud thump, so loud I might’ve put a dent into the rear door, and then I wince, howling, cradling my left arm in my right.
“AAAHHH!” I scream, saliva flying.
She spits back at me, her face twisted with rage, “Stay away from me!” but she’s not waiting around to see if I’ll recover. She hurries by, casting cautious glances over her shoulder as she rounds the corner to her street.
A couple of neighbors cross the road toward me, but I growl at them and hustle away, holding my limp arm across my chest as I flee.
Madeleine’s eyes widen when she sees me in her doorway. “Aww, what happened?”
“Fractured my arm being an idiot.”
“Oh, you poor baby,” she says, and ushers me into her flat.
My forearm is in a plaster cast, just the fingers and thumb protruding from the gap above my palm.
“Come inside, come inside. Let me take care of you.”
I move into the tiny living room, decorated as if a teenage girl lives here, all bright colors and soft lighting and poster art on the walls.
“I’m fine, thanks for inviting me over. I wasn’t sure if you would answer my text.”
“No, no, of course I wanted to see you. I’ve been—”
A second woman steps into the room, putting my plan in jeopardy or at least making it a little messier.
“This is my roommate, Sarah.”
Sarah smiles at me, a Cheshire cat’s smile, a canary-swallowing smile. She has dark eye shadow and dark lashes and dyed black hair and a tiny head above a too-long neck so she looks like a raccoon hiding in a hollowed-out tree trunk. “This is the one,” she says, and it sounds sexual the way she says it, practiced, like she could take any four words and make them lewd.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, but my thoughts are recalculating like a GPS system when you take a wrong turn and the map needs a few seconds to find a new route.
“I’m not staying,” Sarah says, as if she reads my thoughts. “So you can relax and get what you came for.”
“Oh, stop,” Madeleine squeaks.
“Call me if you need anything. I’ll just be at the Hopper.”
“Will do, love.”
Sarah gives me one last seductive look and is out the door. Her footsteps recede.
Recalculating. Recalculating.
The weak target the weak. The wounded attack the wounds of others.
“Something to drink?”
“Sure.”
I need to wait a few minutes, fifteen to be safe, make sure Sarah doesn’t come back for a forgotten scarf or a hat or keys.
“Whiskey?”
“Sure.”
She clinks a couple of ice cubes into a highball glass and pours from a bottle of Jameson. Not my brand but I’ll work with what I have. I take the glass and sip.
She pours herself the same drink and downs it like a shot, refills it.
“Sarah’s fine. She’s staying here for what was supposed to be two weeks and is going on a year. We take care of each other. She was attending nursing school but that might be put on hold. She works at a jewelry store, not nice jewelry but a little better than costume, yeah?” She holds up a hand to her ear. “Like these.”
I look at a pair of strange loops that vaguely resemble Saturn.
“Do you want to sit on the couch?”
I look at my watch and it’s time. I take no pleasure in what I’m about to do, but the doctor takes no pleasure in plunging a needle through the skin, no pleasure in snapping a bone into place. It’s a painful means to a painful end but the weak target the weak and the wounded attack the wounds of others.
“I don’t like you with that man,” I say, and take a step forward.
She stops cold, blinks. “What?”
“The man. The Polish man.”
“What the fuck’re you on ab—” but before she finishes the sentence, I devastate her with a right cross that rises out of nowhere like a summer storm whipping across a farm. She reels back, equal parts shocked and in pain, like she innocently reached into a sleeping bag and a scorpion stung her.
“What are you—” but I hit her again, this time with my left, my cast, and she flips onto
her back as though I pulled a rug out from underneath her feet.
I jerk back, holding my cast across my chest with my right hand, in pain. A scream gurgles in her throat, wells up for a foghorn blast, her face distorted with anger and fear and confusion, inflamed, and then she lets it go, a wail, a head-splitting, eardrum-shaking shriek with a higher pitch and more force than I thought could escape a human throat.
I don’t need to do any more damage, this is enough, her purple eye, her cut cheek, her split lip are enough. She raises her feet and kicks wildly in my direction, slashing the air and flailing without pause. Her scream only grows in strength, and I hurry out the door, pulling my hoodie over my head because though I do want to get caught, I want to pay for this, not here and not by a good Samaritan.
I want Malek’s men to come for me.
The air is still in the flat below Field Street.
I can see what is happening as easily as if it were playing on a stage in front of me. Madeleine’s roommate, Sarah, comes home and finds her friend disheveled on the floor, her cuts bleeding, her eye swelling, and there are some “Oh my Gods” and “That bastards” and Madeleine climbs to her feet, infuriated.
Sarah pulls up her cell to dial 999 but Madeleine stops her, grabs the phone out of her hand, and says “No, no, no,” and Sarah pleads “Maddy, honey, we have to call the police,” and Madeleine repeats “No!” pounding the word like a flat black key on a piano, and Sarah says “But that prick can’t get away with this,” and Madeleine turns her red-hot eyes on her roommate and growls “He won’t.”
And then she calls Piotr.
I’m in the bathroom when they come.
I wasn’t planning to be. I was going to stand in the kitchen, my back to the door, stirring a pot of spaghetti, caught off guard, that was my plan.
But I had to take a piss. So I took a break to relieve myself, finished, and I’m washing my good hand in the sink when the front door is kicked off its hinges.
I’m caught flat-footed, vulnerable, but I still put up a fight.
I was going to scald one of them with the spaghetti water so they’d be extra pissed later but lucky for them, I’m away from the stove.
I make a good show of fighting back, get a few elbows and knuckles into the taller of the two, maybe break his nose, but I didn’t hear it crack so I’m not sure.
Finally, the other one gets my good arm behind my back while the taller one throws a couple of right crosses to my head. The problem with playing possum is that I keep getting my jaw realigned, my face pummeled. It’s a strategy that has its drawbacks; namely, it’s fucking painful, and my ability to handle it has receded over time. I hang my head, go limp. It doesn’t take much of an act.
They slap me awake, march me through the apartment, up the short flight of stone steps, banging my forehead into the metal railing for good measure, then force me into the back of a town car, where a third thug is waiting with a gun cocked.
He puts it to my temple, and if I miscalculated, then this is the end of it, the end of me, but the weak target the weak and the wounded attack the wounds in others.
I sit in a chair in a linoleum-tiled room, a drain in the floor beneath my feet, blood dripping into its metal maw from a wound where my teeth cut into my lip. Rain jackets, thick coats, hats, scarves, and gloves hang from hooks on the walls; galoshes and hiking boots scatter the floor. A weed eater, garden shears, gloves, and a looping green garden hose rest on shelves in the corner.
The space is wide, kitchen-size, and light filters in from the glass inside a door in the corner. This is a “mudroom,” a place to kick off all your rainy, dirt-caked, soiled gear after you come in from the garden or the back fields or the dirt trails outside the house in Maidenhead.
There’s a large sink and a small coil of hose next to it, along with a steel brush, for getting the bigger chunks of mud from old boots. Three men crowd the room, surrounding me like a wolf pack, the two who worked me over when they seized me, and the third who held the gun to my head. He’s still fisting his weapon.
They’re waiting for the boss. No one bothers to hand me a cloth to let me put pressure to the cuts on my face. They want to show the boss what they’ve done, that they’ve followed orders. They’re puppies yearning for pats on the head. Good boys, good.
I look them over but don’t say a word. They didn’t cuff my hands. They don’t have my feet tied to the chair. They think I’m the idiot who manhandled the boss’s mistress. They think they have strength in numbers. They’re half of the six-man unit from Polish Special Forces here to protect Piotr Malek, but he or they are making the mistake made by so many confident men: using defensive weapons for offense.
My arms hang limply from my shoulder, the left forearm hanging low from the weight of the cast.
The air stirs as the other three guards enter, followed by the man himself, Piotr Malek in the flesh, finally, his face a topography map of wrinkles, his eyes dark and intense, like black holes to his soul, sucking light and life from the room. He’s the alpha wolf, the predator, the carnivore, but at his core he’s a weak, spiteful man who marches defenseless men into an oven and burns them alive.
The mudroom is large but this many bodies strains its capacity and the air thickens and warms, like inside a greenhouse. The men form a circle around me, schoolyard bullies waiting to get a few kicks in on the defenseless weakling.
The weak target the weak. The wounded attack the wounds of others.
Piotr Malek kneels in front of me and wipes his fingers in the blood collected in the grate at the top of the drain. He examines the red tips of his fingers then rubs them into his thumb like he’s rubbing away grease or dried glue. His eyes find mine and try to consume them.
“Do you know who I am?” he asks, always the prelude to a beating.
“You’re the dickless prick who is fucking my girl,” I respond.
Instead of enraged, he seems amused. “You harass my sister, then you give a black eye to a girl you just met, and I can’t help but think this is your plan, yes? To meet me? And you think I would fall for this ruse, for this absurd bullshit, yes?”
I don’t say anything, but the wheels turn in my head. Recalculating, recalculating.
“Is he armed?” he asks the man nearest him in Polish, the one who has the gun to my head, and that one answers, “No,” or at least I think that’s the exchange they make, but my Polish isn’t too good. I could use a tutor.
“So here I am, you’ve met me,” he spreads his arms wide and two of his men take a step back to give him room, like actors yielding the stage to a soliloquist. “Now what, you piece of garbage? You want to come at me? You want to smash that broken wing into my face? Is that what you want? I’m right here.”
The tension in the room boils as though someone cranks the dial on a stovetop. All of Malek’s men are poised, none more so than the one with the gun cocked in my face. I think each of them wants me to try, wants me to lunge for their boss, because the weak target the weak and the wounded attack the wounds in others.
The way I die is not in a mudroom bought and paid for with the burning flesh of political dissidents.
“No?” Malek asks as he struts like a red-tipped rooster. “No? Nothing to say? Then I’ll ask you two questions. Who are you and who do you work for?”
I glare at him balefully, like I’m having a hard time keeping my eyelids open. When he thinks I’m not going to answer, I whisper softly.
“What’d you say? What’d he say?” he asks, but his men shake their heads. No one could hear me.
I raise my chin up, meet his eyes. “I said, Strzep sobie kapucyna,” which roughly translates to “Go jerk yourself.” I’m not sure if I got the pronunciation correct, but it’s close enough to make Malek’s eyes shimmer like a heat cloud passes between us. Then he wallops me with enough force to tip my chair over so I fall on the floor like a ship capsizing after a rogue wave.
I land hard on my side and his eyes light on my cast and his boot comes d
own hard on it, a weak man targeting my weakness, a wounded man attacking my wound, and I scream to make it seem right, and I reach my right hand over to knock his boot away, a natural reaction for someone who has his broken arm crunched under a boot, but my arm is not broken, it was never injured, I never cracked it on the side of a car in front of his sister. No, instead, in the disarray of Malek stomping my forearm and in the confusion of my screaming and flailing and what can only be taken for a pathetic attempt to protect my wounded limb, I jam my right-hand fingers into the opening Olmstead designed when he built this cast and the plaster breaks up along two fault lines built into the hard white structure so the cover falls off completely. In that instant, I have my Glock in my hand and the element of surprise on my side.
I shoot the one holding the gun before he realizes what happened so his face has no reaction when it caves in on itself. Blood and brain spatter into the eyes of the two men flanking him, the ones who pummeled me in the flat on Field Street, so I drop them with the next two shots before they have time to wipe their eyes.
I’ve learned in these situations—when bullets fly in close quarters—it’s best to keep in perpetual motion. If you stop or freeze or pause, bullets find you.
I dive toward the three fallen bodyguards, away from the three others, and Piotr Malek still has half a plaster cast under his boot and stares down at it like he’s trying to understand how the magician went from the cabinet to the stage wing.
I wedge my body between two of the capsized bodies, using them like sandbags in a World War II bunker, and site on Malek but one of his men actually steps in front of him and takes the bullet. I have no idea who this man is or what psychological shortcoming compelled him to sacrifice his life for his boss’s like he’s in the goddamned secret service, but this is the first time in my long career I’ve seen a hired man act as a human shield for the scumbag who pays him a weekly wage. Good for you, moron. I’m honestly impressed. Mystified, but impressed.
The remaining gunmen pull Berettas from shoulder holsters and spray ammunition while they back toward the outside door, screaming in Polish. What they’re saying I have no idea. Malek turns his back on me and bolts like a rabbit trying to escape a coyote. He doesn’t wait to see if his guards cover him or lead him out, he just grabs a pair of garden shears off a hook as he runs out the door.