Severance Kill

by Tim Stevens

TWELVE

  They’d sat in the car for ten minutes, watching the entrance of the restaurant Nebe from across the street. A steady stream of people passed in and out, more leaving than arriving at this hour.

  Nikola and Max both had prepaid phones. They took Calvary’s number, and he theirs.

  To pass the time Calvary said, ‘Are the two of you related?’

  Nikola gave a faint smile. ‘We are cousins.’

  To Max he said, ‘But you grew up in Minnesota.’

  Max turned to stare at him. ‘St Paul. How the hell’d you know?’

  The rounded vowels, the singsong delivery. ‘Lucky guess.’

  ‘Yeah. Whatever.’ He gave Calvary a curious look. ‘My parents took me there when I was a baby. Three years old. The borders had just opened up and they got the hell out of Czechoslovakia. But I kept in touch with my big cousin here, always wanted to come back. Arrived here two years ago.’

  ‘To fight the good fight.’

  ‘Hey, you don’t need to make fun of us, man.’ The kid’s anger was genuine. ‘You’ve got your priorities, we’ve got ours. This asshole Blazek has screwed up more people’s lives than you could imagine. He needs to be taken down.’

  ‘I wasn’t making fun,’ said Calvary, quietly. He thought: nice one. You’re alienating the only people in this city who might be able to help you.

  *

  Calvary walked through the doors into the clatter of cutlery and crockery, the din of conversation. The place was dimly lit in red, the tables crowded.

  Somebody touched his arm and he turned. A man sharply uniformed in a tuxedo had stepped up and was appraising Calvary, his expression chilly.

  Calvary slipped a banknote out of his wallet and held it folded between two fingers. ‘Speak Russian?’

  The man shrugged, looking as if he wanted to spit.

  ‘I’m looking for Bartos Blazek. Is he here?’

  The man shook his head. Too quickly. Stepped back. Calvary brandished the note.

  ‘I’m not asking for an introduction. I just want to know if he’s here. A nod will do fine.’

  A faint lifting of the eyes, past Calvary’s shoulder. Calvary looked round. Over the diners’ heads, through the hovering layer of smoke, he saw some sort of balcony. A mezzanine level.

  He turned back to the maitre d’. ‘He up there himself?’

  The man took the money, not quite snatching it. He leaned in again.

  ‘His son. Janos,’ he said in Russian.

  Calvary fished out his phone, texted Nikola and Max. Janos Blazek is here.

  He was making his way between the tables when a reply came from Max: Watch yourself. He’s dumb but mean.

  Calvary thought about texting back I know, but didn’t.

  A central flight of steps led up to the balcony that projected from the mezzanine. The bottom of the steps was crowded with people queueing to go up or come down. Waiters squirmed through, holding loaded trays precariously above their heads. Calvary headed for the steps.

  An arm gripped his wrist.

  As he began the instinctive manoeuvre to break free and counterattack, the other man pulled him close and pressed into the small of his back a hard steel object which he didn’t need to see to be able to identify. Another man appeared at his side, a third loomed ahead, at the foot of the steps leading up to the mezzanine. He jerked his head indicating up the stairs.

  The maitre d’ must have tipped them off.

  Calvary began to climb the steps, the gun pushed into his back. The two men took up positions on either side of him, the gunman bringing up the rear. They led him into the depths of the mezzanine. Ten or twelve booths lined the walls at the back on all three sides, the booths themselves insulated by partitions as high as a man’s shoulder. Access to them was through an opening about two people’s width across. All the booths were full and gold flashed from within some of them, rich laughter swirling like cigar smoke. The booth they were heading for was directly in the centre at the back.

  They stopped at the entrance to the booth. Inside, still seated, were four men and three young women, pneumatic and feline, bleached blonde. Directly opposite Calvary was a lean man in his twenties in expensive but nasty clothes: light grey shiny three-piece suit, pink and white striped shirt with gold cufflinks, no tie. Calvary recognised the face from the encounter outside the hospital and in the bookshop. From the photos on the wall of the office. Janos Blazek.

  Janos’s eyes were chips of blue, and slightly bloodshot as though he’d been drinking. They came into focus. c/fodth

  He stood up, staring at Calvary. Triumph chased fury across his face.

  He said something in Czech, raising his voice to be heard over the din. Calvary shook his head. ‘Russian or English.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Janos spoke English. His accent was thick and guttural.

  Calvary said, ‘I’m the guy who skewered your friend through the throat on the tram. And wrecked your daddy’s BMW.’

  The barrel of the gun drilled deeper into the area over Calvary’s left kidney. He realised, suddenly, that Janos had been one of the masked men on the tram. Realised it from the way Janos’s teeth clenched when he mentioned the man he’d killed.

  ‘I’m looking for the man you kidnapped,’ Calvary said. ‘Give him to me and I’ll leave you alone.’

  Janos didn’t like Calvary’s reply because his face darkened and his fist slammed the table top, dislodging a glass. ‘You do not speak until I tell you. This man. Why he is important to you?’

  So they didn’t know. It was a bargaining chip. Calvary felt a flash of optimism.

  ‘Tell me where I can find him, if you still have him, and I’ll tell you why he’s important.’

  His face showed he was struggling with his anger. Then he said, ‘We have him.’

  Janos wasn’t going to reveal any more, and it wasn’t worth trying to get him to. Calvary knew he had to get away, as far away as he could, and quickly. The advantage he had was that four of them were inside the booth and only three outside, so the odds were better than they appeared, but they weren’t going to stay that way for long.

  Calvary glanced at the man on his right, one of his escorts up the steps. Beyond him he saw that a waitress had negotiated the traffic on the steps adroitly and was speeding over, trays in both hands carried at waist height and laden with tiny shot glasses, each crowned with flame. She was heading for the booth immediately to the right of Janos’s.

  Calvary made his move.

  *

  Darya flicked the spent butt end into the street and sat bolt upright.

  Men were swarming from cars towards the entrance of the restaurant like bees funnelling into a hive at the command of their queen. The cars were high-end ones. The men looked like athletic thugs. The drivers moved the cars — four of them — into a tight barrier along the pavement outside the entrance.

  ‘You see that?’ she almost shouted.

  In her ear Tamarkin’s voice was shockingly close. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but they look like gangbangers. The Blazek crew.’

  She knew of Blazek. Everybody who spent time in the city did.

  ‘They must have something to do with our man. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise.’

  Tamarkin said, ‘I agree.’

  They had followed the Fiat expertly after the first visual contact had been made, checking occasionally with Yevgenia that they were in fact following the signal she was monitoring. They’d taken up position at either end of the street, watching the Fiat until Calvary emerged, alone, and entered.

  She couldn’t go in after him herself. She would stick out as though she were radioactive. And she wanted Tamarkin out here as well, in the other car, in case either the Fiat departed and needed following, or Calvary left the restaurant on the run. Not that she had any idea what he was doing there in the first place.

  So she had sent Arkady in. He was young and trendy enough to be inconspi
cuous in a setting like this restaurant.

  Arkady was trying to update them, but the overwhelming noise coming through his feed made his words unintelligible. In a moment a text message came through from him. Can’t see the target, but there’s some sort of scuffle going on upstairs.

  She texted back, her fingers labouring over the tiny keys. Men pouring in. Keep out of the way. Safety first.

  Part of her hoped he’d ignore her.

  *

  In the booth, Janos started to speak. Calvary cut across him loudly.

  ‘Hand over your prisoner and we’ll forget about — ’

  He didn’t finish the thought because it was always a surprise to the opponent when you attacked while you yourself were in mid-sentence, just as it was when you hung up a phone and cut your own voice off. Calvary shot out his arm and grabbed one of the trays from the waitress, hoping like hell it didn’t spill on to her. She was grasping it loosely and he managed to snatch it away, brought it whipping across and tilted it at the same time so that the glasses of burning sambucca sprayed into the booth like tiny splintering fireworks. He continued the movement of his arm and the edge of the tray cracked into the face of the man at his side with the gun. The burning spirits wouldn’t cause any real damage but they had shock value and would impart pain. It bought Calvary enough time to use his legs to piston himself off the outer wall of the booth and crash blindly backwards into the man behind him, who went down, shouting. Calvary twisted round and gripped the gun-arm by the wrist and gave it a quick rotational jerk. The man screamed. Calvary caught the gun with his other hand and hauled himself up, dragged the gunman across in front of him.

  The momentum of his pistoning action had driven Calvary back towards the steps and the two men outside the booth had been slow to react, so they were only now coming forward. Calvary yelled at them to stay back as he got a forearm across the gunman’s throat and jammed the ba cjamnowrrel of the pistol in his ear.

  Pandemonium now as the patrons started to see the gun and began funnelling towards the steps. Calvary moved aside to let them pass. On the floor below, people were starting to notice and point up at them.

  Calvary stood, his back to the stairs, hoping to Christ there weren’t any more of them down there, his arm exerting pressure on the gunman’s trachea so that he hissed and gasped. The shark’s fin of the pistol sight cut into the external canal of his ear. Five or six feet away ahead and to the right and left were Janos’s cronies, the women screaming and cowering behind them. All three of the cronies had drawn handguns, all attempts at discretion discarded. In the booth Janos had risen and was roaring, wiping at his neck and face with a handkerchief. Another man was leaning on the table in the booth, clutching his face and moaning.

  On the floor below, the diners were on their feet, women screaming, a wedge of panicking bodies driving towards the doors.

  Calvary moved quickly, shuffling back and dragging the gunman with him, slipping his fingers inside his suit jacket and coming out with a wallet and putting it in his own pocket before getting his arm around his neck once more. The gunman was trying to nurse his injured wrist with his other hand, a pathetic keening issuing from between his clenched teeth. Calvary assumed they would be more circumspect about shooting at him once he was down among the crowd. Not that he thought they’d give a damn about civilian casualties as such, but it would be bad public relations.

  In two movements Calvary put his foot in the small of the gunman’s back and kicked him forward before using both legs to launch himself in a backward flip over the banister of the balcony. Deliberately falling backwards was a highly unnatural manoeuvre for a human being to carry out and he’d never been especially good at this type of acrobatics, but he didn’t exactly have a lot of options available.

  Someone fired, and they were close because he felt the whine of the bullet past his face as he dropped into space. He got the move almost right and landed on his feet, but with the centre of gravity off so that he was leaning backwards, arms wheeling. He tumbled back, landed on his backside on one of the abandoned tables, found his balance once more and plunged low into the crowd struggling for the exit, keeping himself at the height of their waists. It might have been putting them at a terrible risk, but Calvary had calculated that the men up on the mezzanine wouldn’t start firing indiscriminately into the crowd as long as he was completely hidden in its midst. As he moved he thumbed the safety on the pistol and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket.

  Someone in the throng had seen him land with the gun, and there was yet another renewed wave of screaming as the crowd started parting for him. It was making him more visible. Calvary saw them, then, at least four men, possibly six, forcing their way in against the outflow of the crowd. Clearly Janos’s crew, though God knew how they’d managed to arrive at the club so quickly.

  Calvary got rough then, shoving his way through the crowd at a stumble, angling away from the direction of the exit and towards the row of low windows set in the wall facing the street. He could feel the presence of Janos’s men behind him on the floor as he broke free on the perimeter of the crowd and tucked his head down to turn himself into as much of a ball as he could.‹ coulke /span›

  He dived straight at the window.

  The pane gave in a cascade of fragments that flashed brilliantly in the neon vista outside as Calvary burst onto the street and hit the pavement hard, rolling on his shoulder. He sprang to his feet, feeling the tiny insect-stings of shards in his cheeks and neck. In the heat of the moment it was difficult to tell if he had been cut badly.

  Passers-by reeled away in astonishment and the part of the clientele that had barged its way through the exit shouted and pointed. He turned left down the street and ran without looking back. He was aware that he was more exposed out there than he had been in the restaurant.

  Calvary pounded along the pavement, at one point cannoning off a stout man in evening wear and catching his angry shout in his slipstream. He suddenly veered off the pavement on to the road and although it wasn’t particularly busy he managed only by a few inches not to get his knee smashed by the bumper of a taxi cab. Then he was dodging cars in a maelstrom of horns and contorted faces until he made it to the other side and dived right down a narrow sidestreet. The narrowness of focus was almost exhilarating. Nothing mattered now, nothing, except that he get as far away from the restaurant as possible.

  Finally Calvary ducked into an alley and leaned with his hands on his knees and sucked long, gulping breaths, his face stinging and his hammer-blow heart threatening to pound a hole in his chest. He took stock.

  He was alive. He had a wallet belonging to one of the enemy. An extra gun.

  And he knew he’d been set up.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Target has left the building.’

  Yevgenia’s voice in her ear pulled Krupina back from the sight on the pavement. The doors of the restaurant had been broken off their hinges by the press of bodies. People were spilling and sprawling out.

  Sirens cut the air, high above the hubbub.

  She’d seen the target, Calvary, come through the window like an aquatic creature bursting through the smooth surface of a lake. Had seen him roll and gain his feet and take off. She had yelled in Lev’s ear and pointed and he’d swung the Audi round. Too late. The first of the escaping diners were surging across the road. Lev couldn’t dodge them, not even by veering on to the pavement. The surge turned into a flood. The Audi sat in the road, hemmed in by bodies.

  ‘He’s heading east.’

  Krupina said, ‘Gleb?’

  ‘Here. I’m free. I’ll make a loop round the back, head him off.’

  In the rear view mirror, past the frantic crowd, Krupina saw Gleb’s Toyota peel away at the end of the street.

  A hand slapped her window. She saw Arkady and jerked her thumb at the door behind her. He pulled it open with difficulty, squ fze="eezed in.

  ‘What happened in there?’

  He was out of breath. ‘Gunfire.
Target got away. Looked unharmed.’

  ‘Got away from whom?’

  ‘I don’t know. But before I got out, a group of flash-looking types were being hustled down from the balcony and out the back. Young, rich. Gang types. They looked hurt.’

  Gang types, again. Blazek’s men.

  She didn’t know what the connection was. Couldn’t waste time thinking about it now.

  The road ahead was clearing and Lev began to ease the Audi forward.

  ‘Yevgenia, talk to me.’

  *

  Nikola answered at once.

  ‘I’m on the corner of — ’ Calvary did his best with the Czech pronunciation. ‘Four, five blocks from the restaurant.’

  ‘What happened — ’

  ‘Just get here. And don’t call Jakub. Don’t answer any calls from him.’

  He rang off before she could ask why. Because he may have set us up. Because the Blazek reinforcements got there too quickly. They must have been tipped off beforehand.

  He huddled in the alley, watching the road. The shouting was distant now, but the sirens were getting louder. An ambulance flashed past.

  He pulled out the wallet he’d taken off the gunman. Cheap, imitation crocodileskin. Four credit cards in shades of gold and platinum, a wad of high-denomination koruna notes.

  A business card with a name — Marek Zito — and a mobile phone number.

  He pocketed the items. Focused his thoughts on the big problem. The looming one.

  Set up. He ran through the possibilities.

  Nikola and Max had tipped off Blazek. Hardly feasible. They’d rescued Calvary earlier. Why not just feed him to the wolves back then?

  Jakub, the unknown quantity. This was more likely. But why? Was he one of Blazek’s men, working undercover inside the guerrilla newspaper? Calvary couldn’t believe it. The paper was too minor and irritant for Blazek to bother with, surely. And even if he was threatened by it, there were more direct ways a man like him would deal with the matter.

  A third possibility was surveillance. Calvary, Nikola and Max might have picked up followers on the way to the restaurant. But he doubted Blazek’s crew had th ks city wase skills to track him such that he failed to spot them. They weren’t trained intelligence operatives, from what he could gather. Also, how had they got on to the Fiat in the first place?