All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  The Senegalese guesthouse I’d stayed in three blocks north of our RV demanded double the rack rate when I asked to pay cash with no ID. My shopping spree hadn’t left me with enough change to cover that and dinner—but the night porter took pity on me and brought me up a bowl of chere couscous and seasoned meat with tomatoes: “Un cadeau de ma femme.” He brought me a beer—“Un cadeau de moi”—too, and told me just to open the window if I wanted to smoke in the room, which I did.

  Twelve fifteen.

  Lukov was late. While I tried to work out where he was watching me from, a motorcycle cop pulled up. He killed the engine and dismounted, nodding at me as he flicked his visor up and moved past me into the bakery. Six-two, a hundred and eighty-five pounds. He wore the two-tone blue uniform of the gendarmerie, combat boots and a Glock pistol on his hip. I nodded back, waited a beat and moved out across the road to the bar. The junction was ringed with six-story buildings, mostly apartment blocks, all covered with dozens of windows. The crossroads could have been circled with snipers, but I was out of options. I breathed steadily as the gray pavement gave way to the white and green tiled floor of the bar. No shot rang out. The door creaked closed behind.

  Safe.

  I looked around and drew up a barstool at the center sweep of the curved counter. At the far end the barmaid emerged from a narrow doorway that I guessed led to the kitchen. Lukov had been right about one thing: she was quite a creature—all teeth and tits and blond tresses. I ordered a whisky.

  “Tu bois pas l’absinthe?”

  I asked her if, frankly speaking, I looked like Ernest Hemingway.

  “Franchement?” She laughed. “Non.”

  She turned her back on me and I watched her pour the Johnnie Walker Black into a tumbler, and then took in the scene properly. The whole place teetered between nineteenth-century chic and, judging by the clientele, tourist trap. But it was hard not to get caught up in the Parisian vibe: flower baskets hanging from the high white ceiling between fin-de-siècle lampshades, simple wooden tables and plenty of strong drink. It was the kind of place you might come to impress a certain sort of woman. Or to forget one.

  It was busy but not loud, as plates of food found their way to the brunch crowd. A solid murmur of conversation and the click-clack of cutlery on plates and no recorded music. Couples sat by the windows, looking onto Rue de la Roquette. A solitary drinker nursed a beer at the end of the bar near the door to the kitchen, out of which a teenager in cook’s whites—whom I took to be the plongeur—stuck his head to see how many covers he might be washing up. He made a wisecrack as the barmaid bent over behind the bar, and she caught him on the ear with a drying-up cloth as she straightened, sending him whooping back through the narrow doorway. A group of men in body warmers and maroon and mustard trousers—Italians or Spaniards by the look of them—rocked up outside the glazed main door, finishing their cigarettes before diving in for lunch.

  I lifted a newspaper pinned by its spine to a wooden baton hanging from a hook under the bar. When I looked up, Lukov was sitting next to me, grinning.

  “You see?” he said, directing his pitch-black stare at the bosomy beauty behind the bar. “Incredible.”

  “You’re late.”

  “And you,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket, “are a free man.” He slipped me the Greek passport. I covered it with the newspaper and thumbed the pages. It was masterful: worn but not battered; old but well within date; clean but with holiday stamps.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  I looked at the photo page. He’d taken two years off me, too. Maximilianos Ioannides was born in 1977.

  Lukov ordered a demi pression.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing to a table by the entrance I’d just come in through. “More comfortable for lunch.”

  I followed him to the table and sat with my back to the wall. Lukov faced me. Neither of us spoke until the waitress had put his beer down in front of him and retreated behind the bar.

  “So?” I said.

  “So, you asked Sergei to sell for five million. Da? To be honest, Sergei thought that was a bit, uh, trop. But, my friend, you are going to get more than you bargained for. Of that I am sure. The world and his wife and his whore and her lover want your Benjamin.” I sipped the whisky and said nothing. “They all want it.”

  I looked around the bar. The tourists were still smoking outside. The lone drinker still nursed his demi.

  “Who’s they?” I asked him. It was a question I’d been asking myself a lot recently.

  “Everybody. The Americans want it because the Israelis do; the British, because it’s you. Even the fucking Lebanese want it because they’re shit-scared of being screwed by the Israelis.”

  “What about the Russians?”

  “Not yet.” He grinned. “But not nyet. There is an auction.” His black eyes flashed at the thought of it. “I think they will offer big money, Max McLean. Maybe double.” He fiddled with his beer glass. “But they want to see it.”

  “No way, Sergei. They have the serial number and they’ve seen Mann’s passport, right? That’s enough.”

  “Relax,” he countered. “It’s no big deal.” He removed his phone from his coat pocket. “Just a photograph. That’s all. You keep the note. They see the note. They see the, how do you say, inscription? Everyone is happy. Nali?” I shook my head. “Please.” His shoulders slumped. “Sergei is trying to do you a favor.” Lukov blew out hard and rubbed his scalp.

  “Is that a fact?”

  “OK,” he conceded. “Sergei is trying to do himself a favor. They see the photograph, the price doubles.” He took a long pull on his beer. “Fifteen percent of ten million. They’ll close tonight. And then, my friend, we are both rich.”

  “You’re already rich, Sergei. And besides, I thought the Russians loved you.” I tried not to sound irritated, but I should have known that Lukov would want to milk this for all it was worth.

  “Da. They love me. All of them. But they don’t trust you, my friend. Not one of them. One day Max McLean is sending Russians to their grave; the next he wants to do business with them. That is strange, if you are a Russian.” He looked up at me again and waved his phone toward me. “It is strange if you are Sergei, too.”

  I rolled my shoulders and steadied my breathing. Suddenly he looked old and worn-out, a black-eyed weasel washed up in a Parisian bar. Maybe women just took pity on him. Or maybe there were some things I’d just never understand. I leaned in.

  “What’s strange, Sergei, is that my picture is in the fucking newspaper.” I took another sip of whisky. “And, anyway, I don’t have it on me,” I lied. “So you can’t take a photograph now.”

  As I sat back, Lukov shuffled his chair closer to the table as if we were connected to each other by an invisible cord. “But you could get it,” he said, leaning closer to me. “Think of the money.”

  “Don’t fucking play me.”

  “Please,” he begged. I scanned the bar. The tourists outside trooped in and filled the remaining table by the window. The barmaid laughed. The plongeur reappeared and cracked a dirty joke. “One more day. The Russians are serious. But they want a photograph. That’s all.” His demeanor had changed. Happy-go-lucky Lukov sounded like the one thing he never was: desperate.

  “You promised them a photo, didn’t you?” He hesitated, and then nodded. “And they’ve threatened you, haven’t they?” He nodded again. That was serious. Only people who didn’t need Lukov threatened him. And everybody needed Lukov. “Who are they going to pay double for, eh?” I leaned in again and brought my face close to his. “Benjamin Franklin or Max McLean?”

  “No.” He swallowed hard. “I swear. The bill. Only the bill.”

  Shielded from the rest of the bar by the bulk of his coat, our exchange went unnoticed by the other customers. He smiled and tried to reassure me the deal, his de
al, was legit. But something wasn’t right. Lukov wasn’t right. I finished the whisky.

  “Which Russian is it,” I asked him, “that wants to play ball?”

  “Sergei cannot tell you that. There are rules.”

  “Twenty-five percent on the note.”

  “Please, do not ask me this.”

  “Fifty percent. A name. A description. Anything.”

  Nothing. Lukov tried not to look at me. But we were so close now our noses were almost touching.

  “Do you know what I think, Sergei?” I carried on. Lukov stared past me and chewed his lip. “I don’t think you know. In fact, I don’t think you have the first fucking clue who you’re really dealing with. So let me help you out. Small guy, nicely turned out. Black wool coat. Black gloves. Expensive aftershave.” Then he looked at me, unblinking. “Nasty cut on his right temple, which I gave him a few days ago.”

  Lukov rocked back abruptly in his chair, but my right hand caught him round the windpipe. I dragged him back across the table toward me, my thumb and fingers closing around his trachea. He attempted a scream, but I squeezed harder and felt the cartilage in his throat begin to collapse. He nodded and I relaxed my grip and he slumped back in the chair, hands to his throat. Eyes wild, he sat there staring at me, sweat breaking across his brow, teeth gritted against the pain.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” I warned. “Did you negotiate using this phone?”

  He paused, and then dropped his chin to his chest.

  “Da.”

  Careless prick. I picked up his phone and dropped it into his beer.

  “Do they know about the Greek passport?”

  “No. Sergei’s scout did it.” He glanced over his left shoulder toward the bar. “He works here.”

  Fuck.

  “OK, Sergei. Time to go. The deal’s off.”

  “No,” he said, rising to his feet. “Please.”

  I shook my head and he backed away from the table, staring at me. He was standing by the window where the light was strongest, silhouetted against the winter sky. The sound of lead licking glass filtered above the lunchtime banter. A fragment of the shattered pane twisted like a jagged diamond in the bar light. Frozen to the spot, black eyes fixed on mine. The bullet entered the back of his head and severed his tongue at the root before exiting out of his jaw. Teeth, bone and brain blew out onto the table. His head jerked forward from the force of the shot, unbalancing him, so that he fell lengthways in front of me.

  He was dead before he hit the floor.

  13

  Pandemonium.

  The shot came from high left. I dived right, over the table, toward the bar. Lukov’s beer glass and my whisky glass shattered on the tile floor. The diners turned in their chairs. The barmaid saw Lukov laid out, the thick crimson bloom spreading onto the tiles beneath his head.

  Screaming. Someone shouted, “Sergei! Non!”

  I stood. Left hand on the bar. Vaulted. On the countertop. Over the edge. I fell onto the floor, trapped between the bar and the wall behind it. Out of sight, chairs scraped on tiles. Tables overturned. Heels clicked. Men shouted in French, Spanish, English. The blond barmaid crouched beside me, blocking the way to the kitchen, hands over her head, sobbing insensibly. My left hand on the back of her neck.

  “Move! Allez! Vite!” I shoved her forward. Head down. Back stooped. She stumbled, fell. My eyes on the floor. In front of her: black clogs, white trousers. I looked up. Lukov’s scout, no doubt. His hand emerged from behind his back. Makarov pistol.

  I leaped forward over the fallen waitress and tackled the boy around the waist. He hit the wall but held on to the pistol. We fell together. He was on top of me, over my back. I pivoted and he spun with me. His gun hand arced over us, and he loosed a shot at the ceiling.

  Falling plaster. More screams. People running.

  I sat up. He scrabbled backward, trying to recover himself, and raised the pistol to my chest. Too close. I lunged, knocking his arm aside with my right hand and grabbing the underside of the little semiauto with my left. I twisted the barrel up hard as I bore down on him, turning the muzzle away from my chest. The weapon discharged under his chin, and he was finished.

  I got on my knees and turned about, peering round the side of the bar. Boot to my temple. Fuck. I rolled back and looked up. The lone drinker at the bar was on his feet, a Taser in his hand. I grabbed at his ankle, but he sidestepped. The oversized black barrel aimed at my chest. I rolled, but was blocked by the end of the bar. I heard a shot, a flat, deafening pistol report. The lone drinker flinched and grunted and turned away from me. Blood stained his upper arm. Dropping the Taser, he produced a machine pistol from under his trench coat and began firing toward the open street door. The motorcycle cop I’d brushed past outside earlier was in the fight. From his position by the entrance he dived for cover behind a tangle of upturned tables, firing into the room as he fell. He’d winged the man trying to kill me, and was being shot at in reply.

  I leveled the Makarov and drew a bead on the middle of the lone drinker’s back. A have-a-go-hero diner went for me. Hard kick to my arm. The Makarov spun out of my hand. I lay prone and he went at my head. I dodged. His foot hit the wood of the bar with enough force to break his toes. He buckled. I swept his legs from under him and he crashed down onto a barstool face-first, hitting his head with a crack. He didn’t get up.

  I crouched. The cop and the lone drinker couldn’t get a clear shot at each other. One of the Spaniards broke cover from under the table where he’d been hiding. The cop brought his Glock round and dropped him with a bullet to the thigh. He fell, screaming.

  Glock.

  Glock.

  That wasn’t right. French motorcycle cops use SIGs. And they don’t wear combat boots. Fuck. The lone drinker fired behind himself, blind, trying to hit me. A rack of absinthe bottles above the bar exploded into a shower of emerald fragments. The air filled with the reek of wormwood.

  More shots. Rifle rounds, coming from outside. The plaster, paintings, shelves began to disintegrate. I got back behind the bar and threw myself headlong through the doorway into the kitchen, and looked up in time to see a silver flash of steel. Right arm up. Block. My forearm swept aside the deep, flat blade of a meat cleaver thrown from across the room.

  The chef stood there, switching a long-bladed Sabatier from his left hand to his right. I scrambled to my feet and he sized me up, left foot forward, knife drawn up behind his head.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  He wasn’t. It was a good throw. But not good enough.

  The blade embedded in a bag of flour on a shelf to my left, close enough to my ear for me to hear it slice through the paper. The chef froze. His timing was split-second perfect. I reached around, grabbed the handle and tugged the blade free, keeping it moving in a semicircle across myself as I spun the blade around. I brought the point to bear behind me into the stomach of the lone drinker, who’d followed me through the door into the kitchen. He buckled, a foot of steel in his guts.

  I turned and twisted the blade around and up and pushed it harder into him, through him, so that the point stuck fast in the doorframe. We stood close, touching, locked in a final embrace, like blood-sodden lovers fucking in a doorway. The machine pistol clattered to the floor. His fingers scrabbled at my face, seeking but not finding eyes to gouge. His own collapsing weight drove the cutting edge up. His belly split. His guts unraveled into the room and fouled the air with the stench of bile. His arms went limp, and as the light guttered out of his eyes he hissed in Russian.

  “Yob tvoiu mat, McLean.”

  “No. Fuck your mother.”

  I wrenched the knife free. He fell, covered in his own gore, with a snarl on his lips. I drove the blade into the back of his neck. Whoever he was, he died like a dog.

  The chef was cowering against the back wall. There were no window
s, no doors to be seen; no visible exit at all—though there must have been one in the kitchen somewhere. The jet-engine drone of industrial extractor fans filled the room. Back in the bar the fusillade continued, muffled by the kitchen walls. Pistol rounds, rifle rounds, and then the erratic rat-a-tat-tat of an assault rifle, like corn popping in a pan. I bent down to pick up the machine pistol—a Russian SR-3MP—and checked the mag. Empty. I dropped it. The barmaid stumbled through the doorway and tripped over the disemboweled assassin, collapsing like a heavy-headed wheat stem. I dragged her to one side and rolled her into the recovery position. She was still breathing, but her hair was matted with blood. Whether it was hers or one of her customers’, there was no time to check.

  A dozen frantic, shouting civilians followed her into the kitchen. I considered who among them might be harboring a grudge or a weapon, but they were too wrapped up in their own private hell to worry about anything other than themselves. No one broke ranks; no one confronted me. But the fact they’d made it safely through the doorway meant I could, too. I dropped my shoulders, braced myself and headed back into the maelstrom.

  La Fée Verte had been transformed from a classic Parisian café into a shit show of a close-contact firefight. Who was shooting at whom was hard to unravel; but why they were shooting at each other was, I suspected, folded up in my jeans pocket. The Russians, and God only knew who else, had tracked Lukov to the bar.

  The phony cop had gotten himself behind the crook of the counter and was busy firing at two sets of new arrivals. In the sheltered doorway of the bakery on Rue de la Roquette three men in headscarves emptied AKs through what remained of the French windows into the dining area. Erupting in the air: shards of glass, chips of floor tile, splinters from tables and chairs and window frames. Screaming on the floor: trapped civilians marooned between islands of broken glass and half-eaten steak-frites. There were casualties, too, but, as was often the case, fewer than seemed likely given the volume of fire raking the building. Down the side of the restaurant, on Rue Basfroi, another gunman crouched behind a parked car, respirator over his face, suppressed M4 carbine in his shoulder, taking single aimed shots at the phony cop—who’d ducked to reload his Glock.