Columbus (21 page)

I can feel Detective Gerard turning in my direction. I block him out, keep my eyes on my target as I drop one hand behind my back and return it fisting my Glock.

“Mr. Walker?” I hear Gerard say, confused.

I turn my eyes just enough to see Bowler Hat hesitate, his brain working out that I am raising a gun and he is going to be too slow to stop me.

The manhole cover clanks down hard on the ground as my two pigeons recognize the moment is at hand and sprint away like track stars.

Surprise is slipping quickly, and a professional killer knows the wise move is to close the distance to the mark as efficiently as possible. I abandon all pretense, break character, and charge Coulfret, arm raised stiff.

He spots me coming and is smarter than his men, puts it all together in an instant, how I flushed him out and am now moving in to finish the job.

A threatened animal’s instinct is to break for home, shelter, security, the place he feels safest, and Coulfret does the same, spinning on a dime and darting back for his front door.

Gunshots break out around me as the bald mustachioed heavy or maybe Bowler Hat or any of a half-dozen thugs I’m ignoring try to squeeze a shot off at me, but I remain focused on the prize and pull the trigger and a puff of red mist explodes as I wing Coulfret just as he bursts through his door.

There is nothing I can do but follow.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE STENCH IS A BEING, ALL-ENCOMPASSING, A PHYSICAL PRESENCE, AS POWERFUL AS A KICK TO THE STOMACH.
Despite my precautions—I rubbed mentholatum under each nostril, the way coroners do when dealing with corpses—the manure trapped in the building has successfully battered my defenses. All I can do is push it to the side of my brain, treat it like a wound, like pain, and ignore it as best I can.

I thought Coulfret might have mounted an assault as soon as I barreled through the door, but only a blood trail leads down the corridor to my left. Instinctively, I spin around and double-bolt the door. He turned this building into a fortress, which I can use to my advantage to keep his men at bay. If there are other ways inside, I hope this at least buys me enough time to finish my work and somehow escape.

The blood streaks on the concrete floor are more splashes than drops, and though I didn’t see exactly where I hit him, it had to have been more than a glancing blow. He’s not going to last long without medical attention, and maybe not even then. My first thought is to take my chances and concentrate on getting the hell out of here, but I have to know this is over, know Coulfret is dead, know the contract has been lifted. If I don’t see it with my own eyes, if I don’t finish him, I’ll always be looking over my shoulder. This has to end now.

I hear pounding on the door behind me, big angry blows like someone is trying to put his foot right through the steel, but the locks are holding as I continue to stalk down the hall. It’ll take them some time to break it down, but I don’t know how much. I don’t know if it’ll be enough. The red streaks become even more prominent on the tile, more defined as I follow them, picking up my pace.

The blood trail ends at the closed doors of the elevator.

Stairs. There has to be a stairwell nearby. I know he went down to the basement, the place he’s most comfortable, and if he thinks I’m going to walk into the elevator car and wait for the drop, then the blood loss is affecting his head.

I fumble with a door nearby, nothing, then a second gives way, and I’m in the stairwell. I slow my breathing and deaden my footfalls as I soft-step down the stairs. I may be exactly where I don’t want to be—in the mouth of the monster—but his wounds even the playing field and I am going to see this through now or die in his basement like all the others.

He wanted to send me a message, but I have a message to send back, one that reaches beyond these walls to the world within a world where I have my flag planted. My message is this: if you put paper on me, if yours is the signature on the contract, if you pay a hit man to hunt and kill the assassin known as Columbus, then you’re signing your own death certificate.

I kick open the basement door, hoping the explosion of sound will draw a shot, but no volleys come my way. The blood trail is thicker now, large splashes of crimson leading from the elevator to the end of the hallway. The smell of shit pervades every pore in my skin. My eyes fog up, and I do my best to blink away tears.

The blood streaks end in a foot-wide puddle-and lying next to the mess is the body of Alexander Coulfret. He has stopped just outside a door marked simply “24,” and I know it is the room he grew up in, the one he lived in for so many years.

And this is how you die in our business. Not gloriously, not surrounded by your loved ones, not in a peaceful bed with a priest giving you your final communion. No, you die on the street with your throat punctured by a stiletto blade. You die humiliated in the bathroom of a fishing-supply store. You die on a rooftop flopping forward, caught in mid-stride. You die on the stinking floor of a stinking basement just a few feet from where you first learned to walk.

Coulfret’s body shudders. He is not dead, not yet. A cough starts from somewhere deep inside his chest and comes out as a gasp. He rolls over as slow as a glacier and turns so I can see his face. Blood covers his lips and I’m reminded of the whore who took the pictures, the one with the lipstick smeared across her teeth. His complexion is the same as hers, and any color he once had is in full retreat. It turns out my bullet found the side of his neck, and he can no longer raise his hand to cover the wound; he’s too weak to even try to keep the blood inside.

I’m shocked he made it this far, lived this long with a wound that severe. It’s a testament to Coulfret’s strength, an additional volume chronicling his force of will. And yet it’s also cause for alarm. When the mortally wounded live this long, it’s usually because they have something left they want to say, some unfinished business they wish to complete. Coulfret still breathes because he has a message to send me.

“You’re Columbus,” he croaks out, spraying blood when he hits the last syllable.

I don’t answer, and his eyes are only focused in my general direction.

Another coughing fit racks his body, and it takes me a moment to realize he’s not coughing. The bastard is laughing. It’s an unnerving sound, a devil’s chortle.

With every bit of his strength, he pounds out his last words. “You think killing me frees you?”

His eyes shift again, this time to the door to his father’s apartment. For a second, I think he is finished, but he has three words left to say.

“The contract pays.”

Footsteps pound the stairwell at the same time as the elevator dings. Coulfret’s men have finally knocked down the front door and infiltrated the building and, despite the smell, seem determined to check on the boss’s health and then hunt me down.

Before the men fill the basement like roaches, I kick open the door marked “24” and disappear inside the janitor’s apartment, Coulfret’s childhood home.

The contract pays. The fucking contract pays. The goddamn fucking contract pays and all this was for naught. I am under it now, choking on it, swimming through shit of my own creation, and it will be impossible for me not to drown.

He must have set up some sort of trust where the contract pays out to the first man who returns with my scalp. That’s what he wanted to tell me, what he wanted me to know before his eyes glazed over. I am Sisyphus with his rock, Tantalus with his grapes, and despite the fact I took the stairs, the elevator still collapsed thirty feet with me inside. I thought there was a chance out of this life with Risina, but that image is a mirage, a cruel trick of the mind. I am never going to break the water’s surface, never going to breathe clean air. Even in death, Alexander Coulfret has made sure of that.

A contract killer has a bullet with my name on it, but not these men and not today. Their footsteps are a stampede outside the door as they congregate around Coulfret’s dead body. In a moment, they’ll be coming through this door and every door in the building, trying to find me.

Inside Coulfret’s kitchen, covered by a throw rug, I find what I’m looking for: an old-style floor drain. I pull the manhole cover tool from my pocket and pop the metal grate, then ready the heel of my boot to knock the copper pipe away. One, two, three kicks and it falls back, hanging limply like a broken arm. I drop through the floor into the sewer, just as the door to Coulfret’s apartment flies open.

I have half of a minute head start. I hope it’ll be enough.

The sewers are pitch-dark, but there is a pinpoint of light fivehundred meters away and I realize it’s from the manhole cover on the neighboring block, the place the pigeons and I first unloaded the manure. We must not have put it back all the way, a mistake I don’t usually make, but occasionally a mistake can be a savior.

Since I’d spent a great portion of the morning in these sewers, I’m slightly familiar with them, another advantage I should have over my pursuers. I know to run at a crouch to avoid overhead piping, and I know the walkway near the walls is relatively flat and so I set out as quickly as I can toward that sliver of light.

It grows sharper, more pronounced as I approach and grip the steel ladder leading up to freedom. I hear voices, amplified off the stone but still far away, screaming about grabbing a flashlight, screaming about the smell, screaming about my escape.

“So this is Italy? Kinda what I thought. Old buildings and old people.”

We’re in Siena, a small town an hour outside Florence. It’s quiet and confined and a bit isolated, and we sit in the tiny dugout basement of a traditional restaurant. There’s only one stairwell descending to this level, and I sit facing it.

Archibald Grant has flown in for the occasion, namely to mollify his newest partner. He looks up from where he’s picking at a bowl of pasta, wipes his mouth with his napkin, then clears his throat.

“So this french fry put paper on you and told you after you popped him that it pays no matter what?”

“That’s it.”

“Yeah . . . I’ve heard about something like this before. It’s rare and it’s tricky, but there’s a way around it.”

“I’m listening.”

“This Cole-Frett . . . he got family?”

“All dead.”

“Wife, spouse, nieces, nephews?”

“No.”

“Loyalists in the organization?”

“I don’t know. I know of one I heard about. A guy who helped him with his original coup. Martin Feller.”

Archibald writes the name down in another one of those coil-wire notebooks.

A shuffle by the stairs draws our attention and Ruby descends into the room, smiling. Even with her arm in a sling, she has her bounce back. As she takes a seat at the table, Archibald flashes her his grin.

“What’s shakin’, baby girl?”

“Ready to eat a goddamn burger at Blackie’s.“

“I hear that. I been out of the country for all of twenty-four hours, and already I feel a bit wobbly. Why the fuck can’t they cook up a regular burger and fries here, man?”

I just shrug.

“Goddamn. Okay, anyway, what’d you hear about fallout from Paris, Ruby?”

“The organization’s in complete disarray. That whole neighborhood’s locked down tighter than Leavenworth. Not only did you kill the boss . . . a French cop was killed there too. Shot down in the street just outside the building.”

This is news to me. I wonder if Detective Gerard tried to interfere or, just as likely, caught a stray bullet intended for me. I liked that fat man; listening to him on the street talking to Bowler Hat, I realized the chatty, dim personality was an act, a weapon to uncover whatever he was trying to dig up. Underestimating him was my mistake, but I guess it doesn’t matter now. If he suspected I was anything more than the writer I pretended to be—the more I think about it, the more likely it must be—well, I guess that suspicion died with him.

Archibald breaks my reverie, still addressing his sister. “You know who filled the power vacuum?”

Ruby shakes her head. “No, but I get the strong sense Coulfret wasn’t all that well liked by his men.”

Archibald turns to me. “Okay, you see? This might not be as desperate as it seems. He may have extended the contract even after he’s down in a box, but he still has to have someone physically pay out the transaction. Could be his lawyer, could be a fence . . . or could be this Feller you mentioned. Whoever it is . . . that’s the person we need to negotiate with. Not the way you do it, with that Glock of yours. The way I do it . . . ”

Ruby finishes his sentence. “. . . with that silver tongue.”

“You know it.”

“I’m not much on sitting and waiting. I’ve been running around with paper on me for too long and I have to admit, I don’t like the feeling.”

“Give me three days. I’ll hit Paris and shake the bushes.”

“And me?” Ruby asks.

“Bite into a burger at Blackie’s.”

“Say no more. I’m out of here.” She stands, smiling again. Any residual effects of what she told me about her fear of dying seem to be forgotten. She is her old cavalier self, and if it’s an act, like Detective Gerard’s dummy bit, it’s a good one. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she’ll come through this after all. She certainly doesn’t seem bitter that I excluded her from storming Coulfret’s building on the Rue de Maur. She wouldn’t have been much help with that bum arm anyway.

I stand, and she looks disappointed when I offer her only my hand.

“I’ll see you back in the forty-eight, Columbus.”

“Yeah. Thanks for everything.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She heads across the room and ascends the stairs.

As soon as she’s out of earshot, Archibald whispers conspiratorially. “What d’ya think?”

“Of Ruby?”

“Yeah, of Ruby. Who the fuck else would I be talking about?”

“I like her.”

“You think she’s gonna make it as a professional?”

I keep my voice even, walking the line between telling him what he wants to hear and what he doesn’t. “How the hell should I know? She worked through some tight spots— ”

Archibald holds up his palms and stands. “Say no more.”