Dark Men

by Derek Haas

“She joining us?”

  I shake my head.

  He turns to her. “What’s your name, darling?”

  That’s something we hadn’t yet discussed, and I curse myself for not thinking to do it sooner. There is an art to a fake name, and we should have decided on one a long time ago, before we entered the country. I’m hoping she doesn’t answer, but one thing I’ve learned about Risina, she rarely does what I think she’ll do. I may not have thought of a name for her, but she has.

  “Tigre,” she says, not missing a beat, her accent thick.

  I feel warmth rise up in my chest, though I keep my face blank. A tiger is a goddamned tiger. Since Smoke located me in that bookstore, I’ve thought I was the tiger, the hibernating predator who recognized the familiar scent of prey after a long lay-off. What I hadn’t thought about, what I hadn’t considered until just now, is that Risina, too, is a tiger. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Am I relieved she is more like me than I thought, or disappointed?

  Kirschenbaum seems satisfied and spins back to me.

  “You two working a tandem?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How can I help you, Columbus?”

  “You know my work?”

  “I’ve been following you since your early days with Pooley. I never met the guy but his reputation was solid. It’s too bad he had his ticket punched. You were with Bill Ryan after that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Too bad about that one, too. And now Archibald Grant.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’ve had some bad luck with fences?” He says this matter-of-factly, and pops the cigar back in his mouth. I’m starting to understand how Kirschenbaum made such a name for himself. I feel like maybe I stepped under the ropes and into a ring, except we’re going to spar with words instead of boxing gloves.

  “That’s why I’m here. Archie’s been taken.”

  “I heard. That’s why you approached my gate. Where I live. With no appointment. No warning. Just walked up to my front gate.”

  “Like I said, I want information.”

  He spins to Risina again. “Can you get me a glass of water, honey?”

  She doesn’t move, just smiles. He turns back to me, now grinning. He raises his eyebrows like he took a shot at shaking her, and no harm done. Then his face turns grave again. He’s switching tones and moods and expressions so fast, it’s dizzying.

  “Information costs.”

  “It always does.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know everything about a contract killer you represent named Spilatro.”

  He doesn’t blink. “I know quite a bit about him.”

  “That’s good. Now I know we’re not wasting each other’s time.”

  “Here’s a tidbit to wet your whistle. He doesn’t do the work you think he does.”

  He’s telling me this so, like any salesman dangling a carrot, I’ll bite. Instead I duck his jab . . .

  “Do you know his real name?”

  “As sure as I know your real name ain’t Columbus. And you’re originally from Boston. And your first fence wasn’t Pooley but a dark Italian named Vespucci. And . . .”

  Fuck, is he good. He’s jabbing, jabbing, jabbing, trying to stagger me. To throw him off his rhythm, I interrupt. “And if I were here to find out what you know about me, I’d be impressed, but I’m not, so I could give a shit. I want you to give up Spilatro.”

  “So you can kill him.”

  “Possibly.”

  “How much you guesstimate giving him up is worth?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’ll take her.”

  He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at Risina. The air in the room cools instantly, like a chill wind blew in through the vents. He puffs out a cloud of smoke and watches me through the haze.

  I narrow my eyes but otherwise check my emotions. I hope Risina won’t react, won’t drop her wall, but Kirschenbaum doesn’t give her the chance. He brays out laughter, a harsh, barking sound that, like his voice, seems to come from deep inside him.

  “You should see your face right now. Jesus. I’m just fucking with you. Something tells me if I tried to take—what’d you call yourself again, babe? Tigre?—something tells me if I tried to take her, Tigre would stick a knife down my throat.”

  “Try me,” Risina says, coolly.

  “Nooooo, thank you.” He holds his hands up innocently, then turns back to me as his smile fades. “Two hundred thousand.”

  “How do you want the money?”

  “Bank transfer. You have a cell phone?”

  I shake my head. He fishes one out of his pants pocket, moving quickly and deliberately, not at all concerned that one of us is going to shoot him for putting his hands where we can’t see them. He punches some numbers into the panel and then flips the phone to me.

  “That’s my accountant’s number. Have your bank call him and work it out.”

  “Okay. Transfer goes through in the morning . . . I’ll pick up the information on Spilatro tomorrow night. Where do you want to make the exchange?”

  “I’m sure as hell not going to write anything down for you. You know where I live, so come on over and we’ll pour drinks, clink glasses, and have a powwow. You’re invited this time.”

  I flip him back the phone.

  “Keep it,” he says and starts to toss it again my way.

  “No thanks. I’ll remember the number.”

  “Of course you will, Columbus.” He bolts up quickly and, without shaking hands, heads for the door. “Tomorrow night then. And like you said to me so colorfully, you come in with guns leading the way and you’ll be dropped.” He takes one last look at Risina and says, “That goes for you, too, honey. You mind if I call you ‘honey’?”

  “You can call me whatever you want as long as you give us what we’re looking for.”

  “What part of Italy are you from?”

  “The part that ends in an ‘a.’”

  He smiles at that—or it could be a sneer—shoots a finger-gun her way, turns the knob, and heads out, only a cloud of smoke left behind to let us know he was here.

  “How’d I do?” Risina asks when we’re sure he’s gone.

  “You’re a natural,” I say, and I’ll be damned if I don’t mean it.

  Eight minutes later, and we’re out of the hotel without checking out, leaving Ridgefield until tomorrow night.

  After breakfast at an all-night diner, we hole up in a chain bookstore in nearby Danbury, a two-story anchor to a shopping center. The place isn’t crowded this time of day, and a clerk with “Janine” on her nametag points us upstairs to the fiction shelves where we can get lost in the maze of bookcases, couches, and corners.

  Risina flits among the titles like a butterfly, stooping over here or standing on her tiptoes there to read an author’s name or a jacket blurb. She looks over the books, and I look over her.

  Why aren’t I more concerned? Or better yet . . . why don’t I feel guilty over what I’ve done? I’m like a condemned prisoner who, instead of slinking off to a cell to live out his sentence, drags someone down the hole with him. I’ve lived sleeping with one eye open for so long, why would I ever wish wary nights and watchful days on someone else? But it’s not that simple, and here’s the part I have trouble admitting. This job is dangerous, yes, it is haunting, yes, and it exacts a moral toll, yes, but it also holds an allure that is almost impossible to understand until you’ve hunted a mark, ended his life, and escaped without a soul knowing you are the shooter. It’s a drug, a high, a tonic. It’s not a delusion of grandeur, because it is grandeur itself.

  What I realize now is I want someone to share the experience with me. It’s one thing to tell these details to a stranger, another to discuss everything with someone who is there, going through the same swings, the same highs with me.

  Was I lying to myself when I justified bringing Risina along by saying she was already in the game so she mi
ght as well learn the rules? Or was I, once more, putting myself first?

  “How much time do we have?” she asks, her finger inside a David Levien novel.

  “All day.”

  “Good.” She heads to an overstuffed chair at the end of an aisle, back to a faux-paneled wall, plops down, and starts reading.

  Another answer is possible. The reason I found Risina, or maybe the reason she found me: she’s been a tiger all along and only needed someone to unlock her cage. She’s a natural. A predator.

  And if that’s the case, what happens when she first tastes blood?

  The gate buzzes open, and Risina and I pull our sedan in and park near the front door. I’ll admit, I’m troubled by the one sentence Kirschenbaum jabbed with: He doesn’t do the work you think he does. I didn’t know where he was going with that, but I didn’t want to chase my tail either. He wasn’t lying to me—he definitely knew something about Spilatro he didn’t want to come right out and say. But what? He doesn’t do the work you think he does. I did bite the carrot after all.

  Smoke died in an accident the same way this contract killer operated in the past. I have the files that prove it. Spilatro killed Smoke, but he meant to kill me. He has to be the guy who put my name on the paper, the guy who kidnapped Archie. So why would Kirschenbaum say Spilatro doesn’t do the work I think he does? What other work does Spilatro do?

  Efficiently, Risina and I cross to the entrance and don’t have long to wait as a mustachioed guard opens the door and points upstairs without saying a word. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place him and he has me wondering: did Kirschenbaum plant him somewhere else around us? Was he in the hotel? The bookstore? Have we been watched from the moment we left his front gate? And if this guy was trailing us and I didn’t pick him up, then how many other men did K-bomb put on us? Kirschenbaum didn’t have the career he had by flying by the seat of his pants, and maybe what I mistook for calm bravado in our hotel room was actually informed caution.

  I’ve got a feeling of foreboding I’ve learned to trust over the years, but I don’t want to look back at the guard and give away any hesitation, so I head up the staircase. Risina is in front of me and maybe that’s what’s making me jumpy . . . we’ve been on someone else’s turf together before, but this is the first time that someone’s known we were coming. My intuition told me that Kirschenbaum’s play would be to give me what I want, that he’s a bottom-line opportunist and the percentages were to give up information on Spilatro rather than risk a confrontation with me, but maybe my intuition is rusty and I’m going to find out I’m wrong the hard way.

  We make it to a long hallway with wood floors and the first thing I notice is that the guard—where did I see him before?—didn’t follow us up and, in fact, there are no other guards visible on the second floor. I know Kirschenbaum platoons his security but I don’t know where they position themselves in the house, and the whole thing is starting to reek like a corpse.

  Risina looks back at me for guidance. She knows instinctively not to ask questions aloud, and I nod her forward toward the cracked door that spills light at the end of the corridor. I think she picks up something on my face because she blanches a bit, swallows hard, and then keeps moving.

  I’m acutely aware of our breathing, the only breathing I can hear in the house, and the front door opens and closes downstairs, I’m sure of it. What the hell are we walking into? If I could think of where I saw that guy, maybe without the mustache, maybe with different color hair or no hair, goddammit, I’m coming up blank . . . I can now glimpse a four-poster through the crack in the door, so this must be the master bedroom, and I touch Risina on the elbow to let me pass and enter first. She steps back and my heart pulses now, a welcome feeling, a fine feeling, and maybe Risina feels it too because she looks alert and spry.

  The guard didn’t frisk us, which is unusual but not unheard of in this situation, especially since we’d made contact and been invited here by the man we’re meeting. I wouldn’t have given up my gun anyway and we might have had a problem downstairs, but it doesn’t matter now and I pull out my Glock from the small of my back and I don’t look but I know Risina is doing the same.

  Three more feet to the door, and there are voices, but they’re television voices, two idiot anchormen blathering on about some reality star and that seems incongruous with the man in our hotel room, what he’d be watching on a weeknight, just one more square peg that doesn’t fit. So much for not coming in with guns out . . .

  I push the door open wider and the bedroom is empty, but there’s an open set of French doors leading out to a deck on the right and maybe he’s out there, but why wouldn’t he have signaled us or had someone show us in?

  This is not right and there’s no use for pretense anymore.

  “Kirshenbaum?”

  No answer. As I move to the deck, I tell Risina to watch the door.

  The deck has some patio furniture, the rustic kind of chairs with green cushions surrounding a slat-wood table, and Kirschenbaum is out here all right. He’s wearing a plastic bag over his head, held tightly around his neck by an elastic cord, and his hands are tied behind his back and strapped to his feet. A lit cigar is in the ashtray in front of him.

  I hear sirens in the distance headed our way and in that moment it hits me where I know the guard. I’ve seen him twice before, and goddammit, I should have recognized him. I used to be a fucking expert at breaking down a face, noting the eyes and the ears and the parts you cannot disguise, but I used to be a professional contract killer and now I don’t know what the hell I am.

  The first time I saw him was in a construction vest on scaffolding outside of the Third Coast Café, except he wore a dark beard and blond hair, and the second time was without facial hair, or any hair at all: the big bald guy who came into Archibald’s office and asked us our business, the guy I fucking let go because I thought he was nobody important.

  There can only be one answer. The man who let us in was Spilatro, and he’s been playing me like a violin since I got to Chicago, or maybe before that, maybe since Smoke pulled a safety deposit box out of its slot and caught a flight to find me.

  “What is it?” Risina calls from the doorway and I realize I need to snap out of it and move now if we’re going to escape.

  “K-bomb’s dead.”

  “What?” she asks, alarmed.

  “Spilatro’s framing us. Let’s go.”

  I take her by the elbow and just poke my head into the hallway when a pistol cracks and bullets pound the doorway next to my head. I feel Risina duck back and I spot blood fly and goddammit, if he hit her . . .

  We spill backward into the room and her cheek is scratched to hell but not from a bullet, rather from splinters from the door and she looks angrier than I’ve ever seen her, like the blood on her cheek brought the tiger to the surface for good. Multiple pairs of feet pound up the stairs down the hall, and I catch a quick look at them as I fire a few rounds back, popping the first guy flush and stopping the rest, and maybe they don’t know the boss is already dead, and maybe they don’t hear the sirens as they close in on us.

  Spilatro wasn’t with them, though, I’m sure of it. The son of a bitch must’ve planned the whole thing. He framed us with both the cops and the bodyguards, hoping we’d get caught in the crossfire. He bolted out the front door as soon as we went up the stairs—that was the door opening and closing I heard—and he’s probably a mile away by now.

  I hear scuffles down the hall and maybe the guards hear the sirens outside, which grow nearer, louder by the second. Risina and I are going to have a chance, but it’s going to be a slim one and we have to do it soon, we have to make our move in those moments of inevitable confusion as the cops make their way on to the scene but don’t know exactly what they’re rolling into.

  I see the bubble lights now, a pair of cruisers, that’s it, and they blitz through the gate, knocking it off its hinges, then roar up the driveway, pinning our rental sedan in front of
them as both sets of doors fly open and uniformed police officers spill out, guns drawn.

  I hear the front door open and one of the bodyguards shouts something and the cops yell back, and that’s what I’m looking for . . . a little contact so I can change the pace.

  I bust out the bedroom window glass and fire over the cops’ heads, BAM, BAM, BAM, into their patrol cars, BAM, BAM, BAM and I hear the front door slam shut and a scared guard scream “he’s fucking shooting!” and then the downstairs explodes as the cops retaliate with indiscriminate, panicked firepower.

  “Outside! Grab the cigar!” I scream at Risina and she dashes out and back in as quickly as a cat, the cigar held out to me.

  I snatch it out of her hand, jam it in my mouth as I collect the sheets off the bed, puff, puff, wadding them up, puff, puff, getting the end of the heater to glow red like a coal in a stove, and then I hold it to the end of the sheets and it doesn’t take long, they start to burn, and I toss them to the curtains, which catch fire and go up too as flames curl toward the ceiling and lick the molding.

  Confusion is as big a weapon to a professional hit man as a gun, and the more obstacles you can throw at your pursuers the better your chances of survival.

  We’re out on the patio as the room goes up. We step past K-bomb’s dead body and I plant both hands on the railing and hop it, drop from the second story to hit the grass and spring up without tumbling, and I don’t have to look back to know Risina does the same.

  “Don’t shoot a cop unless you have to,” is all I have time to say, as we reach the front of the house, and I peek around the corner. The cops are out of their cars, and the two in the near sedan have moved up behind our rental to use it as cover. Smoke starts to pour out of the top floor, and the cops have their firearms pointed at the front door, waiting for the men inside to make a move.

  I wait, wait, wait, and then I get the break I expect, the front door opens and one of Kirschenbaum’s men shouts, “we’re unarmed! We’re coming out! No one’s firing! It’s a goddamn inferno in here!”

  “Keep your hands up or we will shoot!” shouts back the closest officer, more than a little distress in his voice.