She had a point. The gun she was holding looked like it could blow your head off. If she had to have a gun at all, Alice would need one she could keep in her purse, one that looked like a toy, like the Western ladies used to have. One that looked as if the worst it could do was give you a nasty rash if fired from point-blank range. Something stylish.
I sighed. 'What's going on, Alice?' I asked.
'Plenty,' she said.
'Where's Sean?'
'Gone to Cannes.'
'Shit,' I said.
'I understand you have orders to kill him.'
'My wife . . .'
'I know about that. I'm sorry.'
I nodded at the hoods in suits. 'What's with Bleep and Booster?'
'They've changed sides.'
'You mean they've turned Queen's evidence.' Bleep and Booster snorted.
'Not quite. It's a long story, Dan, and it's none of your business.'
'Of course it's my business. My wife is . . .'
'Your wife is dead.' She let it sit for a moment, while my stomach fell away. Then the merest hint of a smile. 'Or at least she should be if these guys are to be believed.' It was, I thought, an astonishing little cruelty. 'How long has it been?' she asked.
It wasn't addressed to me, though I could have told her to the minute. The bigger guy, in a black linen suit with a white T-shirt below, shrugged. 'Don't matter,' he said. 'Michael won't let 'im live. You know what he's like.'
Alice nodded.
'How would you know what he's like?' I asked, though I think I already knew.
She came across the room. She ran a hand down the side of my face. If we'd been somewhere else, and there hadn't been a gun in that hand, it might have been pleasant. 'Oh, Danny,' she purred, 'you're so innocent, aren't you? I saw it in you right from the start. And that first time I mentioned drugs, you were so shocked that somebody could actually get addicted to them.'
'I was only acting,' I said.
'No, you weren't, love. You forget, I know acting. Aren't I married to the best actor in the world?'
'You obviously haven't seen Light Years from Home.'
It was done with a ballet deftness, a crack of the hand against my ear, but the hand with the gun so that it was a sharp metallic crack. I reeled across the room. I hugged my hand to my ear. 'I came here to save you,' I said.
'That's really nice of you, Dan, but we really do have to kill you now.'
'That hardly seems fair.'
She smiled. 'I know, but you keep getting in the way, and we can't have that. You've done more than enough damage already. What's that saying? Life's a bitch and then you die?'
'No, I think it's: you're a bitch, and then you die.'
When taken in tandem with the switchblade I suddenly produced, then threw in one fluid motion, pinning her gun hand to the bare wall, my response was not only suitably dramatic but it also had a certain style. A je ne sais quoi.
If only it had worked like that.
The knife snagged on the hole in my pocket. By the time I'd managed to coax it out of my jacket and flick open the blade, there were three guns pointed at me.
Alice shook her head. I dropped the knife to the floor. 'Poor Dan,' she said, 'all talk, no action.'
'That's not what you said in bed,' I replied.
'But it's what I thought.'
'So that third orgasm . . .?'
'Like the first. Non-existent.'
'So why bother at all?'
'Because I thought you might be worth a ride. Bit of a disappointment, really.'
'But . . .'
She pulled the trigger. There was a bang and something bit into my arm. Putting two and two together is my business. I thought it reasonable to assume that I'd just been shot. I thought about it while I was spun round. I settled on my conclusion as I dropped to my knees.
There was no need to fall, actually. It didn't hurt particularly. But it was one of the rules. When shot, fall, instead of standing there like an eejit. When we were kids we used to play games of commandos and have competitions for who could fall best when shot. I used to win all the time, but this one wouldn't have got more than one out of ten for artistic impression; there was just a dumb slump and a look of surprise.
'Thanks,' I said.
'I didn't mean to shoot you in the arm,' Alice said. She wasn't apologising. She had meant to shoot me in the chest, or in the head. She was a crap shot. But practice makes perfect. She raised the gun again. The two hoods, evidently taken by surprise as much by the sudden gunfire as by her inability to satisfactorily despatch an inanimate object at such close range, stepped wide to either side of me.
'Why are you shooting me at all?' I asked.
'Because you complicate things,' she said. Her finger squeezed the trigger. But not all the way. She was distracted. I followed her eyes to the window. Staring in, drunkenly mesmerised, like he was watching bad TV, was the rancid Scot.
Alice lowered her gun. 'Get rid of him,' she snapped.
The Scot probably didn't hear it, but he lost his grip anyway and dropped back out of sight to the street below. The hood in the black suit turned and hurried down the few steps to the door. He hadn't bothered to relock it, so it was only a few moments before he had it open and was shouting at the beggar.
And then there was a gunshot, and I thought, that's a bit rough on the poor fella.
Except it was the hood who came staggering back into the apartment clutching his belly, and the Scot who came in behind, gun drawn. Behind him came the black hooker in her bikini. In her hand a gun.
Holy fuck, I thought.
'Police! Don't move a fucking muscle!' the Scot screamed.
They didn't.
They moved several.
Alice dived to one side, shooting as she went. The other hood dropped to one knee and fired off several rounds in response to the furious gunfire already being returned from the doorway. I saw blood spurt from the side of his face without any apparent reaction, he just kept shooting. I flattened out. The lack of furniture gave everything an echo, made it twice as loud. I closed my eyes and pressed my face to the wood.
It seemed to last for ten minutes, but it could only have been that many seconds.
When it was over there were low moans and heavy breathing.
I opened my eyes. There was blood on the wood where it had seeped out of my shot arm. There was more blood, a stream of it, on my other side; I followed it back to its source and saw Alice, slumped against the back wall, eyes glazed, breath shallow. Across the room lay the hood who didn't have a black suit; he was face down and there was a pool of blood beneath him; the hood who did have a black suit remained in the doorway, clutching his stomach.
The hooker, who evidently wasn't, stood with her gun stretched out in front of her, shifting its focus from one motionless figure to the other. The Scot had already dropped his weapon back into his disgusting trench-coat pocket. He knelt down beside me. 'You okay, lad?' he said. He was Scottish, but he'd spent at least a week at public school.
I nodded. Now my arm was sore. 'You must be bloody desperate for that cup of tea,' I said.
35
There were dozens of police, both in plain clothes and in uniform. There was a fleet of ambulances. There was the Fire Brigade, just in case. There was TV. There were reporters and bystanders and hookers raising their prices in case anyone got really excited at the sight of dead bodies being removed on wheeled stretchers. There was me, leaning against a car, having my arm examined by a medic and my head examined by an amateur psychiatrist.
'Dan,' said Maurice, 'you have to give this up.'
'How can I?' I looked at him. My head was throbbing. Once again I'd been dancing with death and I was no closer to learning the steps. Maurice's eyes were sympathetic.
'You don't really have any children, do you?' I asked.
He shook his head.
'Ouch!' I said as the medic probed. 'Then you don't understand.'
'Just get in the ambulance.'
> I nodded. They'd given me a shot of something and the throb in my head was trying to fight it out with the fuzz of something easing up from the base of my skull. Maurice helped me up, then climbed in behind me. The medic, apparently satisfied that I wasn't going to die on the spot, climbed in beside us but otherwise left us alone. There was a pressure bandage on my arm and a very large hole in my heart.
'She's dead, isn't she?' I said.
Maurice, staring at the floor, nodded for a moment, then glanced up at me. 'Who? Your wife?'
'No, Alice.'
'Not yet, but she will be.' He turned to the medic and said something in Dutch. The medic replied, then gave a little shrug. 'Might last the night, but shouldn't make breakfast,' Maurice said.
I shook my head. There were little stars appearing before my eyes, none of them from familiar constellations. Alice, blood soaked, head against the wall, fighting for breath. 'Seems a little harsh, if she was just looking for a fix.'
'She was going to kill you.'
'You didn't mobilise the 7th Cavalry just to save me.'
'We did, actually.'
I fixed my eyes on him. Maurice. The Scots tramp. The black hooker.
'We've been watching them for days. The place was bugged, we had pretty much what we needed, it wasn't too much of a sacrifice to go in and save you.'
'I kind of wish you hadn't bothered.'
'You should not give up hope, Dan. Do you not believe in God?'
I stared at the floor. God? If there was a God, he was an Old Testament God, into smiting things and plucking out eyes. But there wasn't. 'I believe we were colonised by visitors from outer space, way back in Stone Age times. I believe that left to our own devices we would have stayed in the caves. That it might have been better fun. Though I suspect that the women would probably have looked more like Mother Teresa than Raquel Welch.' He was staring at me. 'I'm sorry. I should thank you for saving my life. Thank you.'
'It's okay'
The medic reached across and lifted my hand. He turned it palm up and started to check my pulse.
'Tell me about Alice,' I said. 'Tell me what happened. This isn't all about you trailing me for having horse in my Johnson's Baby Powder, is it?'
Maurice shook his head. 'We've been watching right from the start, Dan. This is an Interpol operation. We had agents on set at The Brigadier, we had agents at the party, we had agents at your hotel.'
'Seriously?'
He smiled. He delved into his inside jacket pocket. I could see the handle of his gun in its shoulder holster. He got hold of something, then showed me his closed fist. Slowly he unfurled the fingers. I gulped. It was my wedding ring. 'We were close all the time, Dan.'
'Not close enough to stop me drowning.'
'We would have found a way. It wasn't you. It wasn't even Sean, though he's an unscrupulous scumbag with a bad drugs problem. It was Alice.'
I sighed. Alice. I had already guessed there was more to her than met the eye, though what had met the eye was more than pleasing. The medic let go of my hand, apparently satisfied. He went to make a note on a chart, but Maurice stopped him with a quick wave of his hand.
'Alice used to be an air hostess. You knew that?'
I nodded.
'That's how she started, as a courier, all of the risk and none of the profits, so naturally she wanted to move on. And she did, she did very well. She had a mentor, of course.'
'Michael O'Ryan.'
'Michael O'Ryan. Mentor. Lover. They were an item for several years. She learned the ropes, she learned them well. Then Sean arrived to research his film and she fell for his movie-star charms and ran away with him, taking several million pounds and copious amounts of drugs with her in the process.'
'So O'Ryan wasn't happy.'
'He was furious, and not just because he lost her. Alice, as you know, has a certain way with men. When she left she tried to take his whole operation with her, and nearly succeeded.'
'Those guys that were killed in the house, they were changing sides, right?'
'Thinking about it. They couldn't work out the details, so she pulled a gun on them. That's where you crashed in.'
'I thought she was . . .'
'Like I said, she has a way with men. O'Ryan tried to drown her, remember? He couldn't make his mind up whether he wanted her dead or alive, and now we've made it up for him. What he really wanted to do was teach her a lesson, hurt her, force her back to him. So he decided to kill Sean. There's a certain kind of logic to it, if you accept that he's mad to start with.'
'But demented or not, he must have known there were better ways of killing Sean than me? I mean, I'm crap.'
'Sometimes an amateur is better than a professional. Did you ever see The Day of the Jackal?'
'I saw the remake. Bruce Willis.'
'Doesn't matter. For all that sophistication, the professional assassin nearly always gets shot in the end.'
'I got shot.'
'Whereas an amateur, say Mark Chapman' who shot Lennon, or Hinckley who got Reagan . . . you can't protect against that. You can't predict unpredictability. Even Lee Harvey Oswald got his man and he was . . . stupid.'
'Lee Harvey Oswald was a soldier. He wasn't an amateur. And besides, he didn't shoot Kennedy. At least, not according to Oliver Stone.'
'He was a poor soldier. You ever see pictures of him, Dan? He looks like a victim of perpetual incest. He was stupid, but he did the job. And he did do the job, and he did it alone. You shouldn't believe people like Oliver Stone. He sees a conspiracy beneath every . . . stone.'
'Nevertheless.'
'Nevertheless. I know. Sean is alive.'
'But he'll call it off now Alice is dying. What's the point?'
Maurice shook his head. 'Michael O'Ryan was arrested in Dublin this morning. He's being held in Mountjoy Prison. He has been asked to reveal where your wife and child are being held. But I'm sorry, he has refused. He will not say until Sean O'Toole is dead.'
'But what difference does it make if Alice is dying?'
'Because he doesn't know she's dying, and we can't tell him. We want to get as much information from him about his activities as we can. He's a world player, Dan, not just some provincial hood. Interpol doesn't bother with the little fish, it's the big whales we go after.' He paused, he nodded. 'Okay, so whales aren't fish, Dan. You know what I mean. We know plenty about what he's been up to, but there's plenty more, and if we press hard enough he might give it up. But not if he finds out we killed his girl. See, he still loves her, and telling him that will shut him up for sure.'
'So my family will die so that you can get information about drug trafficking.'
Maurice took a deep breath. 'It's not my decision.'
'So who do I speak to?'
'Dan, there's no point. That's how it works.'
The ambulance came to a halt. There was no move on the medic's part to rush me into ER. He sat and waited.
'So what now?' I asked.
Maurice put a hand back into his jacket. From an inside pocket he produced something wrapped in a handkerchief. Not many men used handkerchiefs any more, but it seemed an inappropriate time to open a discussion on the subject. He placed the object in his lap and carefully unwrapped it.
It was a gun. I pointed this out to him.
'I know,' he said.
'What's it for?'
'Shooting people.'
'I think we should take this conversation to a higher level, Maurice.'
He nodded. 'Okay. It's for you.'
'And why would I want it?'
'Well, you can take it and blow your brains out, because I'm sure you're feeling suicidal. Or you can take it and blow my brains out, because I'm part of the reason you're feeling suicidal. Or third, and this is the option I recommend, you can take it and kill Sean O'Toole.'
'What?'
He nodded at the medic, who gave a slight smile and leant forward; he pushed open the back doors of the ambulance and stepped out. He disappeared around the front of
the vehicle. Sunlight flooded in. There was no hospital. There was Amsterdam Centraal. The train station. 'Get on the train. Go to Paris, then Nice, you'll catch up with him in Cannes. Blow his head off.'
'But . . . why?'
'Because a plane would be quicker, but you won't get a gun onboard. You don't get searched on a train.'
'No, I don't understand. Why are you doing this?'
'Because I can.' It wasn't enough. I stared at him until he came up with more. 'Dan, Sean O'Toole is a junkie. He never was the brains behind any of this, in fact I'd be surprised if he even knows about it all. He thinks his films are so important that somebody like the Colonel would go to extreme lengths just to have him killed. Well, he's wrong. He's a bad actor and he's addicted to heroin and about a dozen other drugs. Sooner or later he's going to end up killing himself, so you might as well do it for him and save your wife and child in the process.'
'Jesus. I can't believe I'm hearing this.'
He shrugged. 'Don't get me wrong. As far as we're concerned you lifted the gun off one of O'Ryan's men back in the house. Dan, you don't have to go after him again. It's just an option.'
My head was whirring, and it wasn't just the drugs. I was working out dates and times and whether my wife and child could just conceivably still be alive. I couldn't work it out. Cannot compute, Will Robinson. Everything was vague and fugged and all I knew was that a policeman was giving me a gun and telling me to go and kill somebody famous in another country. He was trying to be nice, and that didn't compute either. I gripped the side of the stretcher; pain flexed up my arm. I nodded down at it. 'What about this?' I asked.
'It's just a flesh wound. You've lost some blood. You can go to hospital if you want.'
I shook my head slowly. 'This is very good of you,' I said.
He shrugged again. People heading into the station were peering into the back of the ambulance, trying to see what was wrong. I pushed the gun into my jacket pocket. 'Do you think they're alive, my wife and son?' I asked.
'I don't know. But if they are, I think this is the only chance you have of getting them back. I don't think you can depend on Michael O'Ryan feeling sorry for you.'
He was right, of course.
I had to go back on the chase.
Shooting Sean Page 18
