The Accident Man

by Tom Cain

  “That can’t be right. We had someone watching the apartment. He reported that a man and a woman went into the apartment. Then there was an explosion. Are you sure the people inside weren’t just vaporized?”

  “No. There was no one inside that apartment when the explosion occurred. So, who were the man and the woman? How did they get out? And where are they now?”

  20

  They’d danced, they’d drunk champagne, they’d even eaten Thai food from the club’s restaurant. Sealed off from the outside, in a world that stretched from their table to the bar to the dance floor, it was almost as if that mad hour of violence and death had never happened. As long as the music played and the drink flowed, they were just two regular people, civilians out for a Saturday night. Until Carver realized they’d been made.

  “There’s a man over there who keeps looking at you,” he told Alix, trying to make himself heard over the thumping din of Eurodisco.

  She rolled her eyes dismissively and shouted back, “Of course there is.”

  “No. He’s really looking. The fat bloke, with the arm candy, by the far wall. I think he knows you.”

  Carver followed her eyes as she glanced across the dance floor. A big, middle-aged guy with buzz-cut hair, a coarse, jowly face, piggy eyes, and a shiny golden brown suit was sitting behind a table. The combination of brutality, self-indulgence, and vulgarity was unmistakable. “Russian,” thought Carver. One of these days he’d meet a rich Muscovite who didn’t look like a gangster. But it hadn’t happened yet.

  The Russian’s hands were all over two identical blond party girls. He was casually pawing their thighs and breasts while the girls giggled and wriggled, pretending to enjoy it. That was their job. But whatever the fat man was doing with his hands, his mind wasn’t on the bimbos at all. He was looking at the dance floor.

  The Russian gave the girl on his left an elbow in the ribs. That got her full attention.

  He barked a few words in her ear and nodded his head in Alix’s direction. The girl jabbered back at him and he threw up his hands as if to say, “Enough.” She nodded sulkily and shrugged her shoulders, all pretense of sexual attraction gone.

  Alix watched the pantomime, then shook her head. “I don’t know him.”

  Carver pulled Alix close to him, speaking right into her ear. “Don’t bullshit me. He’s Russian. I can tell just by looking at him. Why was he looking at you?”

  “I don’t know, okay?”

  Carver said nothing. Alix sighed heavily.

  “Okay, the girls were in the ladies’ room when I was there. Maybe they’re telling him about the crazy chick who cut her hair. How should I know?”

  Carver let her go. He glanced across at the Russian, who had a glass in one hand and a girl in the other. He seemed to have lost interest in Alix, but even so, Carver wanted to get out. The question was, how to do it without attracting the fat man’s attention?

  He was just about to make his move when the lights came up and he finally understood why Max had wanted him dead, why the stakes were far, far higher than he had imagined.

  It happened without warning. One moment the Eurodisco beats were crashing out, the next there was total silence, the houselights were on, and the deejay was delivering a message in French that was being spoken in countless different languages at that exact moment in every corner of the world.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know how to say this,” he began, his voice hesitant and strained. “I cannot believe it. But the Princess of Wales is dead. She was injured in a terrible car crash, right here in Paris, in the Alma Tunnel. They took her to the hospital of Salpêtrière, but the doctors could do nothing. She is dead.” The deejay said nothing for a second or two, then added, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can play right now.”

  People were standing on the dance floor, looking around as if searching for some clue as to how they should react. Slowly the murmur of voices grew to a hubbub. There was a rush to the deejay’s booth and a desperate clamor for more information, mixed with pleas to come on, stop joking, tell us you’re just kidding around. And gradually, through it all, came the sound of sobbing as women clung to their partners, weeping, or simply fell to the floor in grief.

  Amid the chaos, Carver stood motionless, as stunned as if he had been caught in his own dazzler beam, unable to grasp the magnitude of what had happened. He felt physically sick, clammy with sweat, his head heavy, blood pounding in his ears. His vision blurred, crackles of light flashing across his eyes, fragmenting the world around him. His mind seemed to be slipping out of his control. Then, at last, his survival instinct kicked in, and, as he got a grip on his consciousness, his pulse slowed and his breathing returned to normal.

  He bent almost double, putting his hands on his knees and letting his head hang down. Then he let his breath out in a slow, steady stream and stood upright again, ready to face the truth. It really had happened, and he was the man who’d done it. The evidence was inescapable. The images on those TV screens, cutting from the devastation in the Alma Tunnel to the princess on her holidays, finally made perfect sense.

  He thought back to the moment he’d found Alix’s bag in the apartment, his conversation with Max, his attempt to justify what he did by targeting those who deserved their fate and trying to spare civilians. Those principles had come to a cataclysmic, bloody end, hadn’t they?

  In some distant corner of his consciousness, he was aware of Alix standing beside him. Her face was ashen, her eyes a million miles away. She was moaning, wordlessly, no more able than he was to articulate the conflict of thoughts and feelings tearing through her.

  Carver felt as though every eye in the room was on him, that the mark of Cain was burning on his forehead. He told himself that was crazy: They were all too busy trying to cope with what they had heard to worry about anyone else. And then he realized that his instinct had been correct. He was being watched. So was Alix. And the madness was about to begin again.

  In the flat, harsh glare of the houselights, Carver saw the Russian. He’d taken his hands off the girls and the drink. Now he was talking into a phone. Every so often he looked in their direction.

  “Damn!” Carver spat under his breath. “We’re getting out of here. Now!”

  He did not wait for Alix to reply, just grabbed her arm and pulled her from the dance floor. There was a waitress standing by one of the tables near where Carver and Alix had been sitting. He gave her five hundred bucks, pressing the notes into her hand. “Pour l’addition. Tenez la monnaie. Alors, où est la cuisine?”

  The waitress did not reply, barely even noticing the money in her hand. There were tears streaming down her face. Carver shook her. He asked again where the kitchen was, his urgency forcing her to listen.

  “Over there,” she murmured, limply waving an arm toward a double door set into the wall beyond the tables.

  “Does it have a staff exit?”

  “Yes, but . . .” She stood there motionless, muttering vague protests as Carver and Alix brushed past her.

  Just as they reached the swing doors into the kitchen, Carver glanced back at the table where the fat guy was sitting. He was getting to his feet, gesticulating at two sidekicks who’d suddenly materialized on the floor in front of his table. Carver slipped through the doors and into the noise, the heat, and the smells of a working kitchen, a pungent blend of fish, meat, spice, and sweat.

  He turned to look back through one of the porthole windows in the doors.

  One of the fat man’s underlings was heading downstairs; the other was walking toward the restaurant area, a tall, solidly built guy with pockmarked skin and a ponytail. His suit was an oily blue. His shoes were pale gray. A gold medallion nestled in thick black chest hair, and there was more gold on his wrist and fingers.

  Alix was already a few paces ahead of Carver, making her way through the sweaty, food-stained kitchen staff at their stations. A couple of them gave her a whistle and a filthy remark as she went by. Then they saw the look in
Carver’s eye as he followed and decided that if she belonged to him, they’d be well advised to shut up.

  Beyond the kitchen more swing doors opened into a narrow hallway. To the left, it led to a staircase that dropped away to ground level. There were a couple of doors on the far side of the corridor: a storeroom, an office. The lights were out. There was no one in either of them.

  “Keep moving,” said Carver. “Go down the stairs. Make a lot of noise. Go!”

  He listened to her running along the uncarpeted floorboards, then ducked into the office. The door opened inward. He stood behind it, holding it almost shut, without letting the catch close completely.

  A few seconds later Carver heard the door to the kitchen burst open. He pictured the man with the ponytail standing in the corridor, gun held in front of him, surveying the emptiness in front of him, then hearing the sound of Alix’s feet on the stairs.

  There were footsteps as the man went by. Carver eased the door open and stepped out into the corridor. He took three quick steps forward. The man heard him on the third step, but it was too late. He couldn’t stop, turn, and bring his gun around before Carver raised his left hand, brushed his right arm away and, in the same cobra-fast movement, jabbed two fingers into his eyes.

  The Russian squealed in pain, dropped his gun, and held his hands up to his blinded eyes. Carver kept moving. He shifted his weight onto his right foot, rotated his shoulders, and slammed the heel of his right palm into the man’s chin. Another shoulder rotation and a shift of weight through the hips brought Carver’s left elbow up to crack into the man’s cheekbone. Now his right knee piled into the man’s defenseless groin. As he doubled over in pain, Carver karate-chopped the back of his neck. The Russian dropped unconscious to the floor. It was the basic five- second knockout—lesson one in the special forces’ fighting handbook. Worked every time. Unless the other guy had read the same book.

  Carver thought about pulling the man back down the passage by his stupid ponytail, but decided against it and grabbed him under the armpits instead. He dragged the unconscious body into the empty office, then stepped back out into the passage. Now came the interesting bit. He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the stairwell. In the dim light from the passage, he could see a flight of steps, then a small landing, then another flight, which turned back the other way and disappeared beneath him.

  “Alix?” he hissed.

  He wondered if she’d be there. If she’d run he knew for certain he was on his own. If she’d stayed, it wasn’t so simple. She might be on his side. Or she could be sticking close so she could help someone else.

  Alix appeared on the landing. She looked at Carver.

  “So, what are we going to do now?”

  “The only thing we can do for now. Disappear.”

  21

  The operations director tried to rub the exhaustion from his bloodshot eyes. The job was falling apart around him. He was standing with Papin in the street outside the mansion. The city would soon be waking up to discover the horrors that had taken place while it was asleep.

  “Okay,” said Papin. “Let’s go through it from the beginning. Forget for the moment whatever happened in the Alma, concentrate on what happened here. No French citizens have been harmed. We will do our best to make it all disappear. But if I am to help you, I must know what happened. And you must deal with any—what do you say?—loose ends. So, to begin. Who owns the house?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine that when your people start trying to trace the ownership, they will find a mass of shell companies in different tax havens. But I don’t know who owns them. And even if I did, I couldn’t tell you.” “How can I help if you play games with me?” “I’m not playing games. I honestly do not know. And I guarantee that any names I gave you would not appear on any ownership documents anywhere.”

  “Okay, I understand. Next problem: Who did this?”

  The operations director thought for a moment. Then he breathed a plume of smoke into the early-morning air and said, “Carver. It has to be. He knew about the explosives in that flat because he put them there. Kursk had no idea. If he’d gone in, he’d have been killed, and the woman with him.”

  Papin nodded. “Okay, so we know a man and a woman went into that apartment. We agree the man must have been Carver. So could the woman be Petrova? Are they working together now? If so, they must have come out together too, because no one died in the explosion. Next question: Did they come here? Well, we have evidence of two weapons. The simplest explanation for that is two shooters. Do we have any other suspects? No. Did Carver have any other female accomplice?”

  “No.”

  “Eh bien, let’s assume that Carver and Petrova were responsible for the killings here. Clearly, they must be eliminated before they cause any more trouble. We need descriptions. So tell me, Charlie, are you sure you do not know what Carver looks like?”

  The operations director ground his cigarette stub under his heel. “We had him watched on a couple of his early jobs. It was an obvious precaution. He’s a shade under six feet tall. Call it a meter eighty; maybe seventy-five kilos in weight; dark hair; thin face, intense looking. Other than that, no distinguishing features that I know of. Actually, there is something else. . . .”

  “What?”

  “Max wasn’t wearing his jacket when he died. And it wasn’t where he’d left it, the last time I saw him, hanging on the back of his chair. Carver could have dumped the black jacket and taken Max’s. It’s a gray one, same fabric as the trousers.”

  “Okay. And the woman?”

  “All I know is her reputation. She’s meant to be a blond model type.”

  Papin raised his eyebrows knowingly. “Now we have a reason why Carver might want to be with Petrova. But if she was Kursk’s partner, what is she doing on the back of a motorcycle with the man who killed him? Why is she running in and out of apartments with Carver? Why is she joining him in a gunfight?”

  “How the hell would I know? She’s a bloody woman. Maybe she fancies him. Maybe she changed her mind.”

  “Or maybe she hasn’t.” Papin smiled. “What is it you English say about the female of the species?”

  “It was Kipling. He said the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

  “Alors, an Englishman who understands women. Incroyable!”

  22

  They were sitting in an all-night bistro, tucked between the sex shops and tourist traps of Châtelet-les-Halles. It was a quarter past five. Even the local hookers had given up for the night and come inside for a nightcap.

  Alix looked exhausted, her adrenalin rush long gone. Carver got her a cappuccino with a double espresso and a pain au chocolat to dip into it. It wasn’t exactly a healthy diet, but she needed the energy the fat and sugar would provide. Alix ignored the pastry, took a sip of the coffee, then lit a cigarette.

  Carver leaned across the table like a lover. “Who was he, that man in the club, the one who sent his goons after us? What’s his name? What’s his interest in you?”

  She took another drag on her Marlboro, made a show of blowing a stream of smoke up toward the ceiling, but said nothing.

  “Come on, Alix, don’t jerk me around. You knew him. He certainly knew you. Why? And why did he send his men after us?”

  She shrugged. “His name is Ivan Sergeyevich Platonov. Everyone calls him Platon. He belongs to what you would call the Russian mafia. But the gangs—we say ‘clans’—are not just Russian. They come from every race—Chechen, Azeri, Kazakh, Ukrainian. They have names, like rock groups or football teams. The Chechens are Tsentralnaya, Ostankinskaya, Avtomobil’naya. The Russians are Solnt sevskaya, Pushinskaya, Podolskaya—that is Platon’s gang. Every gang hates all the others, but when you are a woman, they are all the same. They all want to fuck you, or beat you, or both. They are all pigs.”

  “So how do you know so much about this Platon, then?”

  “Everybody knows about him. He is a gangster, but the newspape
rs talk of him like some kind of superstar: how many houses he has, what new car he has bought, who his mistress is this week. And you must understand, he is not the boss of Podolskaya. There are others, much higher up than him. And they have bosses too, men who belong to no gangs, but who control them like, like . . . puppets.”

  “Okay, so what’s Platon doing in Paris?”

  “It could be anything. He could be doing a deal for Podolskaya. He could be paying off a French government minister. He could be taking his girlfriends shopping in Paris. You know, I was looking at them in the ladies’ room. I couldn’t decide: Are they twins, or did they just have the same surgery? Platon would like that. Take two girls and turn them into Barbie dolls. He would think it was funny.”

  Carver heard the bitterness in her voice. It sounded personal.

  “One more time: How do you know him?”

  “How do you think? How does any woman ever know a man like Platon?”

  Carver thought of the fat man in the nightclub, his body pressing down on Alix. It wasn’t a nice image. “Who was he calling?”

  “The man who sent me here.”

  “Who is?”

  “I don’t know. Why should I know? You don’t know who sent you. My connection is Kursk.”

  “Was. He’s dead.”

  Alix shook her head, a mirthless smile playing at the corner of her mouth. “You think? Did you see the body?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know Kursk. Many people have tried to finish him before now. Some even thought they had succeeded. But he is like Rasputin. You have to kill him again and again before he will die.”

  “If you say so. But in my experience, people only die once. You work together all the time?”

  “No. Not before tonight—not as partners.”

  “What changed?”

  She gave another exhausted, heavy-eyed smile. “It was like The Godfather. He made me an offer I could not refuse.”