Dark Men

by Derek Haas

  I put my arm around Risina, and she leans into me. For just a few short breaths, we’re back in that fishing village halfway around the world. Maybe this is all we’ll have for a while.

  “I thought the idea was to kidnap someone he loves . . .”

  “It is. But he doesn’t love her.”

  “He didn’t have to set it up for her like that. He could’ve run off.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So that means something.”

  “He loves the process, not her. He loves the mousetrap. He loves setting up all the pieces and knocking them down. He cooked up the dummy fall at the same time as he plotted out the actual kill. Brought her in on the tandem and made the whole thing one piece, you see? First the kill, then the fall . . . two parts of the same job. In his mind, they were always one. He doesn’t care about her . . . he gets off on the complication.”

  Risina frowns. “But he thought to do it that way. It has to be a sign of . . . well, at least affection if not love.”

  “Maybe. But it’s not enough for what we need.”

  She starts to speak, but I get there first. “When I first understood which way this was breaking, I thought maybe I could enlist Carla to help us find Spilatro and hurt him. The way he treated her, faking his death, bringing this world into her life and then walking away? He left her holding the bag. I thought maybe she was bitter and we could use that bitterness. But she’s not. And she’s not the opposite either. She’s not accepting. She’s just . . . finished.”

  Risina nods. The old man stands and collects his pieces. His lips move, but his words are lost in the wind.

  “So we still have nothing. After all this?”

  “I didn’t say that. She gave us a great deal more than we had before we found her. We know Spilatro was married, we know he was in the army, we know he worked in software sales, at least for a while. We have ways to find him.”

  “And we know how he thinks.”

  I smile. Risina’s intuition continues to surprise me. “That’s right. Now we know how he thinks.”

  We’re going to get to him through his friend, the army buddy who brought him into the game. I notice I’m thinking in plural pronouns again, “we” instead of “I,” and I like the way it sounds in my head. The tandem didn’t work for Doug and Carla, but they’re not us, not even close to us, and Carla served only as a convenience to him. He was using her for cover, that’s it. That was her utility for him.

  We’re not like them at all. Carla said she saw a future for them in the moments before that future was wiped away, but he was the one who caused that plan to fail. It’s different for Risina and me. We can pull jobs together, back each other’s play, watch each other’s back. I fell in love with Risina because of the animal inside her, just below the surface. She has more sand than I imagined back in Rome. She demonstrates it over and over. It’s like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, even though she’s not wearing any. We’re not like them. We. Not I. We.

  A tiny piece of information can be like a keyword to unravel a code. Based on Carla’s story, I know approximately how old Spilatro is, and I know his army buddy’s name, Decker, and I can guess a pretty accurate timeline of when they must have been in the service together. From there, it’s a reasonable amount of digging to cross-reference the two names, and if the names are false, as I’m sure they will be, then it’s a bit more cumbersome but not unconquerable to find similar names who served in the same unit. Most hit men aren’t too creative in coming up with their aliases.

  This is fence work, but most of the fences I know seem to be missing or dead. About that, K-bomb was right. I do have bad luck with fences.

  Still, there is one I know who can be of service and is alive and free: the one in Belgium who has a new appreciation for handing out favors.

  Doriot meets us two days later in a barbershop in the basement of the St. Regis. A pair of brothers own the joint, having taken over from their father, good guys, and when I reached out to them to use their place for an after-hours meeting, alone, they didn’t hesitate to give me a key. A thousand-dollar tip on a shave and a trim didn’t hurt to solidify the deal.

  “I told you providence would smile on me for treating you respectfully, Columbus, and here I am in New York City, the Big Apple, so what can I do for you and how much can I be expected to earn? Not that I am only in it for the money since I like you so much, but business is business as I’m sure you understand.”

  “I need a file on a guy.”

  “Twenty thousand,” he says immediately.

  “Give me a fucking break. Twenty thousand . . .”

  “I have a ten percent relationship with my hitters, Columbus. This is what I make . . .”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Okay, fifteen . . .”

  I could press him to twelve but I don’t want to hurt his feelings before he goes to work for me. I’d rather cough up a few extra grand than have to worry about his effort.

  “Fifteen’s a deal but I don’t want to decide on a play from your file and then find out the information is lacking.”

  He shakes his head vigorously, feigning offense. “I do this right for you, you maybe come back to me for more work. I see how this goes. You’ll have a file so filled with truth you can lay it on top of the Bible.”

  “All right then.”

  “So who must I find for you?”

  I give him everything I know about Decker and Spilatro as I regurgitate my conversation with Carla.

  “How much time do I have?” he asks when I’m done.

  “Three weeks enough?”

  He frowns as though he’s thinking about it. “Are you sure you can’t come up to eighteen?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m just asking the question. I’ll start right away. You’ll see. You have never worked with a fence like me. This file will be like Brussels chocolate.” He does that chef thing of kissing the tips of his fingers.

  “I need one other thing.”

  He pauses at the door, then surveys the barber implements surrounding us. “If you tell me you need me to trim your hair, then I’m afraid you will have to come up with the twenty thousand after all.” He produces a short laugh that sounds more like a smoker’s cough.

  “I need to rent a house upstate until your file is ready. Somewhere in the country, somewhere back from a road, somewhere no one’s gonna visit, even a mailman. Leave a key and an address for Jack Walker at reception tomorrow and you can have your twenty.”

  He smacks his lips and raises his eyebrows.

  “You sure you don’t want a haircut too?”

  “Just the keys.”

  He smiles and heads out the door.

  I want to see her kill something.

  The house is a good find, a fifteen-minute drive inside the property line from a dirt road only marked by an unassuming gate. I walked the fence line on our first few days and it’s over five miles from front to back and side to side. Doriot suspended mail service while we’re renting the place, and I have yet to hear a car engine anywhere in the vicinity.

  The woods surrounding the house are as thick as a blanket and teem with life. Deer, badgers, squirrels, woodchucks, robins, sparrows and quail go about their days foraging and fighting. I need to see her kill something. I don’t care about the hunt or her ability to keep silent or her ability to hold the gun steady or her nerve in pulling the trigger. It’s the after I’m worried about, the after I need to see. How she reacts to blood spilled by her own hand. Will she be like Spilatro and shy away from the mess? Or will she be like me and seek out another opportunity? And which do I really want?

  “Why do you carry a Glock?”

  “It’s a good, lightweight semi-automatic that’ll hold seventeen bullets in the clip and one in the chamber. It’s made of polymer so it doesn’t warp in bad weather and it takes just a second to slam in another clip if you’re in a spot.”

  She smirks and racks a round into the chamber.
Her eyes narrow in a mock display of gravity, like she’s playing a character in an action film, and then she laughs.

  “You still think this is fun and games?”

  “I think you need to break the tension sometimes or this would all be overwhelming.”

  “Sometimes you have to rely on that tension, use it to heighten your senses.”

  “Or break it to relax.”

  “Who is teaching whom here?”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t look at me like that. You want me to say I’m scared, I’ll say it without shame. I’ve been scared since the moment you came back from the bookstore with that look on your face. I haven’t stopped being scared. If I paused to think about it, I’d probably start screaming and I don’t know that I’d be able to stop. But I’ve always been good at learning and I’ve learned by watching you. I keep the fear inside and I make jokes and I laugh and I talk back and I try to look cool and all of that is to keep the fear choked down. So let me do this my way, please. I don’t ask much of you and I pay attention, but you have to let me do this my way.”

  I move in and pull her into me and we stand in the forest as the world falls silent. I’m not sure if I’m holding her or she’s holding me, and when we break, her eyes are wet.

  “Can you at least make the jokes better?”

  She starts to react, then realizes I’m having fun with her. “You shouldn’t do that when I have a pistol in my hand.”

  “You haven’t even taken the safety off.”

  She looks down at the grip and when she does I snatch the gun from her hand.

  “Oldest trick in the book.”

  She starts laughing, hard. The woods come to life again.

  A squirrel darts into the path in front of us. It’s a bit wary and cocks its head to the side to give us a once-over. It sniffs the air, hops twice more across the path, and rears on its hind legs again to gauge whether or not we present a threat.

  Risina stops, levels her gun, and before I can say anything, she pulls the trigger, once, twice, three times, missing the first two shots low before she corrects and sends the creature pinwheeling backward, tumbling end over end like a bowling pin, its hide a mess of blood and fur.

  “Anything else you want me to kill?” she asks, unsmiling.

  I study her face, and she breaks eye contact to saunter off. I’m starting to think I don’t need to worry about the after. Maybe, instead, I should be worrying about what I’ve created.

  He’s waiting for us in the cabin.

  That fucking bastard Doriot must’ve sold us out, and I never saw it coming. Didn’t even have an inkling it was coming. I’ve grown too fucking seat-of-the-pants on this whole mission . . . except it’s not really a mission, is it? Christ, I should be shot in the head. Ever since I brought Risina into this and I didn’t have a fence and I thought I could call in favors and I thought the name Columbus still meant something, it has been one thing after another and I still haven’t learned. And that’s the rubber meeting the road right there. Columbus. The name carries no weight. Not anymore.

  When I was incarcerated in Waxham, I learned a term called “chin-checking.” Roughly translated, it describes a gang leader who returns to his neighborhood after time in the joint. While he was gone, some young buck stepped in to fill his shoes in the power vacuum. The ex-con has to reassert his authority by walking up and punching the new kid right in the fucking mouth. Chin-checking. Hello, I’m back. I thought stepping back into this life would be like I never left, except I did leave, and memories are short. Doriot used to be afraid of me, but he’s not anymore. If I get through this, Doriot’s gonna learn a new term.

  I open the cabin door and a cell phone is standing up on the table like a scar. Risina senses something is wrong the way animals perk up whenever a predator roams nearby. The phone rings before I can say anything to comfort her.

  If he wanted to kill us, he could’ve shot us when we walked inside the door. If he wanted to plant a bomb in the phone, then we’re already dead. But in my experience, people call when they want to talk.

  Risina shakes her head but I press the green button on the phone.

  “Hello.”

  “You’ve been asking about me.”

  “You wanted to flush me, here I am.”

  “You presume to know my intentions?”

  “I know a few things. I’ll learn more.”

  “I’ll help you out. Here’s a fact about me: I’m smarter than you.”

  “That why you missed me outside the restaurant in Chicago?”

  “Who says I missed?”

  “It was sloppy.”

  “Accidents are sloppy by nature. And sloppy by design.”

  “And the police at Kirschenbaum’s house?”

  “Now looking for a murderer who happens to fit your description.”

  “Not exactly the way you drew it up.”

  He chuckles, and the sound is disturbing in its confidence. “You don’t sound sure about that.”

  He’s right. I don’t. Even this conversation feels like I’m being spun whichever direction he wants me to go.

  “You want—“

  But I cut him off in a clumsy attempt to gain control. “What’s your play?”

  “I don’t—“

  “Why kidnap Archie Grant? Why call me out by name?”

  “You gonna let me finish?”

  Is this how boxers feel as a round slips away? Right hooks coming but you’re just too slow or tired or old or rusty to get out of the way?

  “Is he alive?”

  “Check the phone.”

  The phone beeps in my hand, an incoming text message. I click on it without hanging up the line and there is a picture of Archie holding a New York Times with a photograph of a blazing inferno on the front page—fire trucks out and about, spraying the flames down, and I have no doubt if I drive to a newsstand, it’ll be today’s paper. Archie looks defiant in the photo, a fuck you face if I ever saw one. I put the phone to my ear again.

  “Satisfied?”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “He doesn’t feel like talking.”

  “What’s this about? Why the games? You want me, here I am.”

  “You contact my wife again and I’ll blow Mr. Grant up in front of you. You’ll walk around a corner or step off an elevator and he’ll be tied up sitting in a chair. You’ll barely have time to register what is happening before parts of your friend slap you in the face.”

  “Come on. You wanted to flush me? You flushed me. Let’s finish this out in the open.” Flailing. Too tired. Stumbling.

  “You’ll be out in the open, Columbus. You won’t know where I’ll be.”

  “Just tell me what this is about. I don’t mind spinning in circles, but at least tell me why I’m spinning.”

  And right when I don’t think he’s going to say anything else, he surprises me. “Dark men.”

  I’ve heard that expression once before, in a hotel room in the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles, from the lips of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Nominee for President, Abe Mann, moments before I killed him. “When I had my problem with your mother, some dark men made that problem disappear. You understand about dark men, I take it . . .” he had said.

  He went on to tell me about the men who were the real players behind the politicians, the dark men who moved the representative’s mouths like ventriloquists, the dark men who wouldn’t let their candidates, candidates like Abe Mann, leave the game. So the Speaker of the House hired a killer named Columbus and designated himself as the target. His only escape was death, and I was his suicide method.

  The dark men must not have been happy about that decision. All this time I was worried about someone in law enforcement tracking me down, but now I see my anxiety was misplaced. I killed the man I was hired to kill, but I upset the dark men who wanted him alive so they could keep pulling his strings. It seems they’ve held his death against me all these years and now they’ve hired Spilatro t
o exact their revenge. He went to them with my name and they said “bring us his head.” This changes everything.

  Risina and I leave the house immediately, and instead of planning our next move, I just drive. The sun is heading west, dropping toward the horizon, so fuck it, I drive into it headlong, the light fierce in my eyes but maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe I deserve it. Maybe I’ve stuck to the shadows for too long and need to spend a little time with the sun in my eyes. Maybe some light will clean my fucking head.

  Risina is pensive as she fights the urge to speak. Farms roll past the window, looking properly pastoral. After a moment, she pivots toward me. “What did he mean by dark men?”

  “An old job. I probably upset a few apple carts.”

  “So these men want revenge?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they hired Spilatro to kill you?”

  “I think so.”

  She nods. “Why him?”

  “I think he went to them with my name.”

  “You think Archie gave you up?”

  I chew on the inside of my lower lip, and a new idea takes shape in my head.

  “I don’t believe so . . . I think there’s a second explanation.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “What if these dark men work for the government? The CIA?”

  “And . . .”

  “And Spilatro was a soldier.”

  “So?”

  “So . . . what if he never left the military?”

  We pull into a Hampton Inn somewhere outside the Berkshires. I switch cars at a used car lot, paying too much but not enough for the salesman to remember us. I choose a room at the inn on the first floor, in a corner with two windows and an outside door nearby in case we need to split in a hurry. I may not be all the way where I was three years ago, but I’m starting to take the smoothness off the edges.

  After we make some bad coffee in the four-cup maker provided by the inn, Risina and I take a moment to sit and rest and think.

  “You have that look in your eye.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That same look you gave me that last day in our house before we headed to the US. You look like you want me to leave.”

  “We’re entering new territory here. I’ve spent my professional life in a world I understand. A world of outlaws. Government agents are a separate entity entirely. They have resources I don’t have, access I can’t imagine. We have to work around the law . . . they break laws with impunity.”