by Tom Wood
He was no threat to her because she was no threat to him in return. So perhaps whatever was addling her brain had helped her in this way. A random stranger could be dangerous in all sorts of ways and in none of those ways was Victor a danger to her. Perhaps, on some level, with the drugs affecting her thought processes and her consciousness releasing control to the ancient mind, she had become like him. Perhaps that ancient mind recognized the regret he carried and knew it could be useful. Exploited for its own benefit.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He gestured with his chin. “Wherever this road takes us.”
She seemed happy enough with this non-answer and they walked in silence for a time. He kept his pace slow to better take in all facets of his surroundings, to better listen and look out for threats. This seemed to suit her. He didn’t imagine she could move with much speed even without the drugs. Her legs were thin and long and she wore boots with thick soles, giving three or more inches to her height, but she had a slow gait. He couldn’t imagine her moving fast, except maybe in a club high on narcotics and dancing hard.
Cars passed by every now and again. Wherever they were it was far from where he had left his enemies, but those enemies had tracked him down once when he should have been protected and could do so a second time. He wondered if he would ever feel safe again.
At an intersection, she asked which way he wanted to go and he pointed left because he recognized the scent of food, the unmistakable aroma of fatty meat, spices. He wasn’t hungry—although it could be wise to load in some additional calories—but food meant a place to clean and somewhere he could leave the girl.
Concrete tower blocks formed a backdrop for an all-night café that was nestled between two roads that fed into a traffic island. Rectangular and low, with a car park that was mostly empty and bright lights that revealed a large, mostly empty interior. As they drew closer he made out a scattering of staff and disparate diners, some alone and some in small groups.
Despite the late hour, despite the scant number of patrons, it was loud. Only Victor and the staff serving behind the counter were not high or drunk or both. That made people loud enough, but someone played music from their phone to worsen the din. Victor almost winced at the awful, repetitive beats but the girl with the huge eyes was bobbing her head the moment they were through the door. The smell was good, though. Kebabs and moussaka and hearty soups.
Victor looked out of place in his suit and the beanie, and the lights were so bright and harsh it felt like the blood was glowing red to each and every set of eyes.
“Take a seat,” he said to the girl as he veered toward the men’s room.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to clean up,” he said.
There was too much ground to cover without being noticed by CCTV or some of the patrons, so Victor chose the latter, angling the bloody side of his head from the single camera and accepting that meant some of the customers got more of a look at him than he would have liked, but it was the better option.
Inside, the bathroom was clean and bright and empty. Victor made his way to the far end of the shelf of wash basins and peeled back the beanie. Blood had dried and crusted in his hair, in the hat’s fibers, to his skin, and he grimaced as he split the resulting scabs. Fresh blood seeped from his ear, from his scalp, and he bunched up paper towels to compress the wounds and soak up the excess. He used hand soap and water to clean as best he could, dried himself with more paper towels, then used more still that he pressed over the wounds as a makeshift dressing, using the beanie hat to keep the dressing in place.
It was a decent enough job, he concluded, washing out his mouth.
Hinges squealed as the swing door opened.
“What the. . .?”
A teenager with difficulty focusing stumbled in before Victor had chance to clean the mess he had created. The sink was orange with watered-down blood and blood-soaked paper towels surrounded it in a gory halo.
“Special effects,” Victor answered in Bulgarian. “For a movie.”
“Awesome,” the teenager slurred as he unzipped his flies.
Victor cleaned the sink and collected up the plastic liner from the bin that contained a decent amount of his DNA. He tied the bag closed and took it with him back into the restaurant proper.
The girl with the huge pupils was eating a savory pastry, banitsa, and sipping from a bottle of beer. She had chosen the worst table in the café. It lay in the center, equidistant from the door, the counter, the windows. There was no way he could sit down with any chance of making a decent effort to watch for threats. He could have her move, of course, but she was no longer alone. Three young men sat on the three other seats at the table.
A rapid-fire discourse was well underway by the time Victor neared. Only one saw Victor’s approach. That young man sat next to the girl. He didn’t realize Victor was heading to the table, however, until Victor was almost there. The girl hadn’t told them she had company. Maybe they hadn’t asked. Maybe she had forgotten all about Victor.
He did a quick evaluation of the three. No threats, because they were civilians and no civilian could ever be a threat to him, but that wasn’t why he was evaluating. They were inebriated, but he detected no hostility from them, no dark motives. The girl seemed quite happy too. There was nothing in her body language to suggest she wanted them to leave her alone. She was comfortable in their company. Four young people who had all had good nights, now soaking up the excess alcohol and making new friends. Although Victor had little experience of normalcy, he recognized it here. It reminded him of late nights sharing burgers with his small crew of degenerates and delinquents. They had mostly eaten other people’s scraps, however, thrown away and left to rot in garbage cans in the back alleys behind similar establishments. Even now, decades later, Victor didn’t like to waste food.
The young man who noticed his approach didn’t linger in his gaze and no one else looked up. The girl was saying something about the bus, the isolated stop, but nothing about him. Nothing about a man with a bleeding head.
Victor headed to the exit, content that she would be okay, that she was safe with the three young men, that she would forget all about him if she hadn’t already. And if she didn’t, there was no conceivable harm in her holding onto so little information about him. He would remain an enigma to her, perhaps only re-emerging in dreams she didn’t quite comprehend.
He kept sight of her in the reflection of the window glass as he approached the door. She was eating and drinking. Talking. Laughing.
He no longer existed.
The door was halfway open when her head tilted up.
He continued through the door so there would be no time for her gaze to linger on him, for her to call out or for him to respond within. The door fell shut behind him, with it a lingering sense of loss he didn’t understand.
The night was growing colder, the rain harder. His head and his ear hurt worse after he’d cleaned the wound. Come morning, he would find a veterinary surgery, pay a nurse to stitch him together until he could find a doctor to do a better job and then a cosmetic surgeon to do it all over again. Then, when he had put enough time and distance between him and his enemies, he would seek out an expert in scar reduction. There was a German surgeon in Vienna he had heard of but hadn’t used before. He kept track of such specialists in the same way he kept track of forgers and arms dealers. Only amateurs waited until they needed one before doing the research.
At some point, he would have to decide what to do about his employer. The employer that had started him on a road that had ended with a shard of glass carving its way around his skull.
He stared at the traffic island and the circling headlights of late-night drivers. Each vehicle could contain another team of assassins. Victor was neither armed nor rested enough to have any chance of overcoming a second kidon. It had taken everything he had to survi
ve the first one.
No tires squealed. No suppressed shots rang out. No assassins.
He was alive for another second, another minute.
Should he kill Procter? Perhaps.
It was a decision for another time. He was a long way off from the luxury of having the opportunity to decide on how to answer that particular question. He was still only hours away from the team who had almost killed him. He had killed several of them, wounded at least one more, but he hadn’t wiped them out. They could be organizing backup. It could already be on its way. The reach of Mossad was unequaled, as was that organization’s thirst for restitution. They would not forget him. He would be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, however long or short that might prove.
Gone by dawn, whatever happened.
The door opened behind him. The girl followed.
“Hey,” she said again. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t turn around to face her because she was powering to overtake him, to block off his escape.
She stood before him, young and thin and weak and utterly convinced of her own immovability. The huge pupils demanded answers.
He added the plastic liner to a neat pile of garbage. “I needed some air.”
She wasn’t convinced. “I thought you were running off and deserting me.”
“Perish the thought.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” he said. “How’s the food?”
“The best.” Her pupils seemed even larger, if such a thing was possible. All thoughts of him abandoning her, of her anger, had disappeared. “Greasy, cheesy pastry is the best food there’s ever been in the history of the world. Like, ever.”
“That does sound pretty good.”
She gestured. “Come get yours before someone else eats it.”
For a moment, he wasn’t sure what to say. “You bought me food?”
“Duh. Of course I did.”
She rolled her eyes at him, as if he was stupid, as if the answer had been obvious. Maybe it was to her. Maybe people bought her food all the time. Victor couldn’t recall the last time anyone had bought him anything.
She took his hand and led him back into the café.
Inside, everything was different.
Three
The three young men were no longer at the table in the center. They had moved to seats along the east wall, which was where every patron now sat. The three weren’t eating because they had left their food behind. No one was eating because all the food had been left behind. Salads and kebabs were abandoned on other tables or scattered on the floor between. Beer and boza and soft drinks mixed in swirling puddles.
No one was eating because four guys were robbing the café.
They all wore dark clothing. Not a uniform exactly but a deliberate effort to hide their identifiable features. One wore a balaclava that had no doubt been rolled down just before they had decided to initiate the attack. Another had his hoodie up and tied tightly so it obscured most of his face. Sunglasses furthered the obstruction. The other two both wore baseball caps pulled down low to shadow their eyes and bandanas pulled up over their mouths and noses. One bandana was plain black. Half a skull and jawbone decorated the other.
All were armed. One with a large hunting knife. Two had pistols. The fourth had a pump action shotgun with a shortened barrel. No doubt done by hand with a hacksaw so it could be hidden under his jacket.
They must have entered while Victor had been cleaning his wound in the bathroom. He would have noticed them otherwise. He should have noticed afterward too, but his attention had been on the girl and the young men sitting with her. A few seconds’ distraction. That’s all it took, he knew.
They had some competence, because they had managed to usher the customers to the east wall without shouts and screams, and all in the time it had taken Victor to step outside and converse briefly with the girl. They were slick, they were practiced. They had robbed before and often. They could work a crowd, fast and without unnecessary violence, without alerting passersby. Experienced, but not stone-cold pros because no professional of any worth would rob a such a place.
“Shit,” the girl said.
Not loud, not obvious, just a breath, an exhale, but loud enough for the closest robber—the one in the balaclava—to hear.
The shotgun muzzle swung their way and he gestured with it. No shout. No scream. No words at all, but the message was obvious: get over there.
The girl hesitated. She was high, but her senses weren’t completely dulled. She was scared.
Victor placed a palm on the small of her back.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “It’ll be okay.”
Lies, because she had every reason to worry and he could make no legitimate guarantee, but lies were effortless for him and she wanted to believe him. She didn’t want to be scared. No one did.
He ushered her to the closest free booth to make sure she sat down first, to make sure she didn’t box him in. She shuffled all the way around until she was opposite him. He placed his hands on the table so the guy with the shotgun didn’t have to tell him to do so. The less contact they had, the less noticeable Victor would be to them.
“Don’t worry,” he said again—little more than a whisper—because the girl was shaking.
As angry as she was scared, he noticed. Her eyebrows were pinching together so hard the skin between them was reddening. “I can’t believe this,” she muttered.
“Quiet,” he said, lips almost motionless. “Don’t draw attention. Let them get on with it.”
Victor sat and watched the four as they robbed the restaurant. Aside from his pastry getting cold out of reach, he was untroubled by proceedings. He was neither scared like the rest of the customers and staff, nor angry like the girl. It was an inconvenience, but nothing more. The police would be called, sure, and they would arrive, but he would be long gone by then. There would be enough witness statements from the staff that the investigating officers would have no need to seek him out, no need to wonder who he was or what he was doing. He could be on his way, out of Bulgaria, out of Europe altogether. He pictured going south for a while, across the Mediterranean and into North Africa, waiting in the heat of Casablanca for the heat from his enemies to cool down. This incident would be forgotten in time, pushed to the furthest reaches of his mind as were most his experiences, most of his life. Only what was useful, what was necessary, remained at the forefront of his consciousness where it could be accessed as required, where remembering might teach him a lesson he might not otherwise have heeded when that lesson could keep him alive a little longer, to see the next sunrise.
Gone by dawn, whatever happened.
The leader was the guy with the knife, he saw. The guns were crowd control. No chance of heroics from a member of staff on a pitiful wage or a manager trained to do exactly as commanded and get the danger over with as soon as possible. The one with the shotgun was the least experienced or had the most nervous disposition. With the big gun, with the balaclava, he was frightening the customers, but he was as scared as they were. The balaclava soaked up the sweat from his face, but he had to wipe his eyes every so often to keep his vision clear. The two with pistols were almost certainly related. They were almost the same height, almost the same build, and they were looking out for one another more than they were for the other two. Brothers, no doubt. One was so calm he seemed bored. The second was neither calm nor bored, and he was weak, Victor noticed. He began holding the weapon out at arm’s length but as the seconds ticked by the muzzle was lowering.
Two minutes, Victor told himself, beginning to end. He couldn’t know for sure exactly when the robbery had begun while he was outside, but the window of time was small. No more than a minute. They knew enough to ignore the customers, even though there could be more to gain through wallets and phones than the cash registe
r. It burned too much time, required too much proximity. It wasn’t worth the risk.
Late teens or early twenties. Victor couldn’t be positive of their ages given the semi-hidden faces, but they were all young. Childhood friends, perhaps. Low aspirations and low outgoings. They wanted quick cash. Maybe a couple of thousand lev at the high end. Small change to Victor, but a decent score to low-level thieves. An incredible profit for the time investment. An hourly rate far superior to Victor’s own, he concluded with a stab of indignation. He either needed a raise or a change of career.
The girl was shaking more. Victor could feel the tremors through the table between them. One of her knees was a piston of rage beneath it.
“Keep calm,” he whispered. “It’ll be over soon.”
It could be over at any point. It would be over moments after Victor decided to end it. The nervous guy with the shotgun was wiping his eyes more often, blinding himself every few seconds for a couple of seconds each time.
With almost no effort Victor could time his movements to be on his feet at the exact moment the guy with the shotgun had his eyes closed. An instant later Victor would be so close that when the guy opened his eyes the shotgun would already be coming out of the single hand now holding it.
Click. Boom.
Pellets and what remained of nervous guy’s skull would be embedded in the polystyrene ceiling tiles, transformed into an abstract of blazing red and glistening pink by the exploding balloon of blood and brain chunks.
The shotgun was pump action, so there would be a slight delay as Victor racked the next shell before killing the first of the brothers, the closest, the weak one, then another delay that would give the remaining brother a moment in which to react, to turn, to shoot if his reflexes were exceptional. Small chance of that, because there were maybe eight or nine people on the entire planet who could react that fast, and one of those eight or nine was Victor, and even with the remote possibility the calm brother was among that tiny fraternity, he didn’t have the training, the experience or the resolve to actually put those reflexes to use. The sound alone of a firing shotgun in a confined space would overload his nervous system. He would still be in shock, he would be statue still, as the next cloud of lead made an unholy mess of his ribcage and shredded the organs behind.