Rainy Night To Die

by Caleb Pirtle III

  She had no choice.

  It was a law as old as the first light to touch a barren earth.

  Kill.

  Or be killed.

  She had borne the brunt of Nikolay’s anger for the final time.

  He would never touch her again.

  She would no longer bear the bruises delivered by his fists.

  But did it really matter?

  Who would believe her?

  A judge?

  Pauline knew she would never see a judge.

  Her trial would take place in either a back alley some night while a splinter of moonlight touched her face or on the cold, winter shores of the Ukraine River while a bitter rain tried to wash the demons from her tortured soul.

  One bullet.

  Her skull would crack.

  Would she see death before death found her?

  Spies did not die with honor.

  They just died.

  Were buried.

  And soon forgotten.

  It was as if they had never left their footprints upon the same dirt that would hold their graves.

  Pauline felt isolated.

  She was alone.

  She couldn’t run.

  There was no place to go.

  They would find her.

  The Russians had eyes in every corner of the city.

  They were watching.

  Always watching.

  They were watching her.

  Her life began in one flicker of firelight and would end in another.

  Who’s Pauline Bellerose?

  Don’t know.

  Didn’t she use to sing somewhere?

  The blues, I think it was.

  Whatever happened to her?

  She just vanished one night.

  Wonder where she went?

  Wonder if she’s still alive?

  I haven’t heard Pauline sing in years.

  Her songs could break your heart.

  Wonder who’s heart she broke for the last time?

  Odessa was a city of broken hearts, splintered loves, and sordid secrets.

  Her life and death would be two of the lesser ones.

  London would no doubt miss the information she had gathered and smuggled out to them.

  London would not miss her.

  She was simply a name in an account book.

  Tear out the page.

  She was no longer around.

  Petrov’s blood had splattered her face.

  It had soaked her pink robe.

  She had not bothered to wash her face.

  She was still dressed in the robe.

  Its belt had been tied loosely around her waist.

  She had feared Petrov would tie it around her neck.

  All strength had fled her.

  She sat calmly as if on a remote island, far removed from the reality that surrounded and condemned her.

  Through a crack in the bedroom door, she could see the naked body of Nikolay Petrov.

  He had not moved since he crumpled heavily onto the floor.

  He had tried to hold his blood in the palms of his hands and push it back into his body.

  Too many holes.

  Not enough hands.

  She did not check to see if his heart still had a beat left.

  His face had turned waxen.

  He had bitten his tongue when he fell.

  Petrov kept staring at her.

  As she walked around the room, his eyes followed her.

  The light had not left them.

  It was only a reflection from the Victorian lamp shining above him.

  She placed pennies on his eyes.

  THE SUN LEFT the earth early during the cold, rainy days of November.

  Already the day was turning dark.

  She felt as if she was sitting in a waiting room.

  Death was coming.

  She thought death would have arrived by now.

  Death didn’t wear a mask.

  Usually it had a mundane face, the kind few ever bothered to look at, the kind no one ever remembered.

  But death knew her name.

  Death had been counting the days.

  At four minutes past six, she heard the first knock.

  Pauline did not move.

  There it was again, another knock.

  Then another.

  On the fourth knock, Pauline stood, straightened her shoulders and walked to the door.

  She knew who was waiting on the other side.

  When the door was opened, she saw the dark-haired Daemon standing in the hallway, a heavy leather coat wrapped around her shoulders.

  She had once been beautiful.

  Scars had taken the beauty away.

  She left it in a Russian prison.

  The guards released her when they no longer had any use for her.

  Daemon looked older than she was.

  Her face had been twisted into a perpetual frown.

  She walked with a slight limp.

  Her electric green eyes could cut a man to the quick.

  Daemon started to speak.

  Pauline stopped her with the wave of a finger.

  “We have a problem,” she said.

  Rainy Night 9

  SAND SAT IN a red, faux leather chair beside the hotel window in the shank of a dreary afternoon, watching a cockroach crawl out from behind the aging gray drapes and move hurriedly across the window sill.

  A living creature.

  That’s all it was.

  Never sure about today.

  Never concerned about tomorrow.

  Looking for someplace warm.

  Looking for something to eat.

  Roland Sand and the cockroach were a lot alike.

  Wasn’t sure where they were.

  Didn’t know what might or might not happen next.

  Trying to survive on their wits.

  Their wits were running low on odds.

  Alastair Reagan reached from the side of the bed with a shoe in his hands and snuffed out the cockroach with one quick and sudden blow.

  “No need to kill him,” Sand said.

  “He carries diseases,” Reagan replied sharply.

  “Don’t we all?”

  Reagan cocked his head and stared at Sand, his eyes clouded with curiosity.

  “You’re a strange one,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “You’ll travel halfway around the world to kill a man in cold blood, then dine on escargot and champagne and sleep like a baby from midnight to dawn.” Reagan shook his head in disbelief. “Yet, you have the audacity to criticize me for taking out a cockroach.”

  “He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “What about the poor bastards who have the misfortune of sticking their heads into the crosshairs of your rifle?”

  Sand took a deep breath and leaned his head against the back of the chair. “This is how it works,” he said.

  It’s a cruel world out there.

  You have the good.

  You have the bad.

  None are among the innocents.

  We commit our sins.

  We pay the price.

  I don’t decide who sins.

  Someone else does.

  I’m given a target.

  I’m given a place where I can locate him.

  I’m given a high-precision bolt-action MAOA3 sniper rifle.

  I have one shot.

  He may live.

  He may die.

  The odds are in my favor.

  Reagan reached inside his suit coat pocket and pulled out a hand-carved Falcon Briar pipe.

  He packed it with Amphora tobacco.

  “What if you make a mistake?” he asked.

  “I’m not paid to make mistakes.” Sand’s eyes never left the rain falling outside the hotel window.

  “What if you kill the wrong man?”

  Sand smiled.

  It was filled with sarcasm.

  “In my business,” he said. “There are no w
rong men. They are all guilty of something.”

  Reagan touched the tobacco with a flame from his Alfred Dunhill lighter. “So you are given a bullet and told to play God.”

  Sand shook his head.

  “There’s a difference,’ he said.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “God gives life.” Sand shrugged and watched the rain run down a leaded windowpane. “I’m paid to take it.”

  Reagan leaned forward.

  His tone turned serious.

  “Does it ever get to you?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Killing someone.”

  Sand’s laugh was dry and devoid of humor.

  “I know the poor bastard, as you say, who sticks his head into the crosshairs of my rifle.” He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand beside the bed. “I’d feel worse if I killed the cockroach.”

  Reagan tilted his head and watched a puff of smoke slowly rise toward the ceiling. “So I guess this mission is different for you.”

  “In what way?”

  “You’re not here to assassinate anyone.” Reagan rubbed a stray tobacco leaf off the tip of his tongue. “This time, they sent you to save someone.”

  “There’s no difference,” Sand said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Before we leave here, someone will die.”

  “And you’ll pull the trigger?”

  Sand grinned. “Only if I’m lucky,” he said.

  “You’re a decent man in an unsavory position,” Reagan said. His voice was sincere. “I wish you the best?”

  “What about you, Reagan?”

  “When you walk out of that club tonight with Pauline Bellerose, my job is finished.” Reagan stood, opened the window, and dumped the tobacco into the rain. “You’ll be headed for parts unknown in Romania. I’ll be headed home. I’m good at running an operation, Sand. But your end of the equation leaves me a little queasy. I bleed easily. I’m retiring next year. I want to be around to collect my pension and gold watch.”

  “It’s overrated,” Sand said.

  “Retirement?”

  “A gold watch.”

  “You ever had one?”

  Sand’s eyes lit up with a smile. “I’ve had three,” he said. “Took one off a drug dealer in Mexico, one off a General south of Baghdad Iraq, and one from a man who thought his three kings could beat my full house of deuces and trays. Pawn shop has them now.”

  SAND KNEW HE was a lot like the lingering shadows of a dying day that lay saturated with grief and discontent just outside the window.

  Dark.

  Dreary.

  Cold.

  Miserable.

  He didn’t mind the assignment.

  It was his choice.

  He could have turned it down.

  He didn’t mind the lack of amenities in a drab little walkup hotel near the oceanside of Odessa.

  He had stayed in worse places.

  He would again.

  He didn’t even mind the danger.

  After all, he wasn’t the only one in town carrying a weapon.

  What did the Russians know about Pauline Bellerose?

  Had they connected her to the sheet music in London?

  Did they know what was hidden in the notes?

  Had they figured out yet she was a spy?

  Would they let her simply walk out of Ukraine?

  Was she already in their custody?

  Was she already dead?

  What would he know by midnight that he didn’t know now?

  “Got the correct time?” Sand asked Reagan.

  “Seven forty-three.”

  “We’ll be leaving soon.”

  “It could be a long night.” Reagan was nervously rubbing his hands together.

  “Or a short one.”

  Sand sat back in the chair and whistled a slow, mournful melody.

  “What’s the song?” Reagan asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Where’d you learn it?”

  “Heard it at a funeral once.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  Sand shook his head and tapped his fingers on the windowsill.

  The yellowed paint was beginning to peel.

  The faint aroma of mildew smelled like wet cotton left too long in the field.

  “Wasn’t my funeral,” he said.

  Rainy Night 10

  ROLAND SAND LIVED in two distinct and different worlds.

  One was real.

  The illusion resided in his imagination.

  He moved easily and often through the narrow doorway that led from one to the other, from dark to light, from the beginning of time to the end.

  At the moment, he was lodged in reality.

  He felt the chill on his face.

  He saw the rain turn from snow to a drizzle that clattered off rooftops and hung on the edge of buildings like a ghostly mist.

  He watched strangers cross over narrow streets to keep from passing a huddle of Russian soldiers gathered beside a small bakery and café, its windows lined with loaves of baked bread and pastries covered with coats of icing as white as the thin layer of snow had been.

  Faces without names.

  Faces lined with concern.

  Or was it simply anxiety?

  What would tomorrow bring?

  Why worry about tomorrow?

  They had not yet learned what yesterday had given them, or had forgotten the past altogether in a city damned by hardships handed out by a country that did not own it.

  A police car raced through the intersection, its lights flashing, throwing blue and red shadows against the dark gray brick.

  Someone was in trouble.

  Someone was dying.

  Police sirens always told the same story.

  It was never good.

  Sand looked down on the sidewalk below.

  A Russian officer laughed at a pretty lady in a bleached topcoat.

  She wrapped a red scarf over her head and looked the other way.

  He stepped toward her and blew her a kiss.

  She turned quickly into the bakery.

  Sand thought he heard a bell ring when the door closed.

  But maybe he had just stepped into the illusion for a moment.

  He preferred his imaginary world.

  No pain.

  No guilt.

  No grief.

  No contrition.

  Just a man, a rifle, a bullet, a target.

  On the desert of Iraq, Sand could see the target clearly in his Trijicon ACOG rifle scope.

  He could see the man sweat, blow clouds of cigarette smoke from his lungs, maybe laugh, maybe mouth a curse word or two.

  He saw the head split open like a melon left too long to ripen on a back porch, warmed by the summers of his youth.

  The sound escaped him.

  The image in the scope always turned abruptly dark like the wick in a candle burned out.

  The world beyond him through the looking glass looked as if it were the sudden end of a long winter day.

  Nothing more.

  Nothing less.

  Sand never saw a man die.

  If he didn’t see it, then maybe it didn’t happen, and sleep would come without dreams to disturb a conscience covered with scar tissue from past condemnations.

  The demons left him alone.

  The demons were scared of him.

  That’s what the psychiatrist said, but Sand never knew whether the doctor was serious or not.

  He never asked.

  Ignorance was not a bad place in which to live.

  But now Sand walked on the same sidewalk with death.

  They weren’t old friends.

  But they recognized each other.

  Death always bore the same smell, the aroma of cheap perfume from a five and dime store.

  Sweet.

  Sickening.

  It lingered in his nostrils long after the sound of the shot had died away.

 
He saw the light flicker, then fly from a man’s eyes when death overtook him.

  The eyes were always asking why.

  Sand could not understand it.

  The eyes knew why.

  They just couldn’t accept it.

  The demons were still frightened of him.

  But they tagged along just the same.

  They were waiting for him to die.

  The demons wanted the last laugh.

  Sand glanced again at the digital clock.

  The time was eighteen minutes before nine.

  Time to move.

  Pauline Bellerose would be waiting for them.

  Or did she know her cover had been blown?

  Had she even been told that someone was coming for her?

  Or had the Russians already removed her from the stage, from the city, from the land of the living?

  THE STREETS WERE empty when Roland Sand and Alistair Reagan walked out of the hotel a few ticks past nine o’clock.

  The snow had been washed from the skies by the rain, but a light coating of ice lay thinly veiled across the brick in the streets.

  It crunched beneath their footsteps.

  The street lamps were dim.

  The bulbs in more than a few had been broken.

  They walked within the shadows of buildings that had borne the brunt of heavy Russian shelling.

  Was it last week?

  Was it ten years ago?

  Did anyone remember?

  The city was dark.

  Clouds were thick overhead, and no splinter of moonlight touched the drab, somber avenues of Odessa.

  Sand heard sounds of jazz spilling out the doorways of tiny street corner bars and cabarets.

  It was jazz without joy.

  A woman squealed.

  A man cursed.

  A glass broke.

  Maybe it was a bottle.

  The music played on.

  For a lost moment of time, there was no war erupting in Ukraine, only quiet, uneasy streets and sounds from a muted saxophone that stirred the blood of the living and mourned the passing of the dead.

  A Russian patrol car eased down the street.

  Its headlights cracked through the darkness.

  Sand and Reagan slipped into the darkness of an alley and waited for the Russian military police to pass them by.

  They had no legal authority in Odessa.

  The police took it anyway.

  In earlier days, some complained.

  A few threw rocks.

  None of them were ever seen on the street again.

  In Ukraine, men had a nasty way of dying long before they took their last breath.

  Prison was little more than a grave with bars.

  A cat squalled.