I KILL

by Lex Lander

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, he would,’ Emilia whispered. ‘Look at his face.’ She was a better judge of character than him.

  ‘You can hardly complain to the police,’ I pointed out mildly. ‘Unless you want your slimy little racket blown, that is.’

  Still he wasn’t convinced. I took a pace towards him, aimed the gun barrel at a Gucci-shod foot. He flinched. He wasn’t without guts. What a pity his cause wasn’t worthy of the sacrifice. I had no sympathy for him. I had no feelings for him at all. This was strictly business. Personal business.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said, his lip curling. Maybe he thought this was a Dirty Harry movie, and my gun and I were full of blanks.

  Pulling triggers was second nature to me, and never was the cause so just. Trouble was, a mews cottage like this was no place to be letting off guns. So, before he had chance to react, I reversed the Korth and brought it down on his kneecap with all the force of my loathing behind it. The crack and his shriek blended. He rolled off the chair, clutching his shattered knee, still squealing. As Emilia rushed forward to succour him, I sat down in an armchair with flowered upholstery, a dispassionate spectator. It would be a while before he got the screaming out of his system and was ready to talk.

  And if he still proved reluctant, it would cost him his remaining kneecap. It was all the same to me. If I hadn’t needed him, I would have killed him already.

  III

  Annika

  Twenty-Eight

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon and dark as night. I drove in a state of dangerous abstraction, in the outer lane of the M25, other vehicles in front and behind and beside. The snow had turned to rain and trucks lashed my windscreen with slush as I overtook them. On the opposite side of the barrier headlights flared past in a dazzling, unbroken daisy chain.

  The DVD reposed in the Merc’s glove locker. Though it would be no more than a gesture, a ritual Viking funeral, it was destined for cremation. For sure I had no wish to view it, to remind myself anew of Lizzy’s degradation. Those images were branded on my brain for eternity. Though they might soften with age, they would never be banished. But, thanks to Stephen Bloore, I was a step closer to paying back the instigator. I now had a name – Bernard Petit, a Frenchman. And an address in Paris.

  I glanced at the girl, curled up on the front passenger seat, her head resting against the window, her eyes vacant. My hostage Emilia. My guarantee that Stephen was telling the truth. His only hope of staying alive and getting his knee fixed.

  ‘Do you love him?’ I had asked her, before deciding on the next step.

  She had nodded, her mouth turned down. ‘Stephen? Yeh, I love the shit.’

  It had the ring of sincerity. With both of them taped hand, foot, mouth and eyes, I had driven out into the Kent countryside and deposited him, still taped, still whimpering, still bleeding, in a place where no one would find him unless they knew where to look. In near-zero night-time temperatures I reckoned he was good for a couple of days. By then Emilia should be back in the UK, armed with directions how to find his temporary prison. Unless I had been given a bum steer. In that case she wouldn’t be going back at all, and he would die of exposure or thirst or who cared what.

  Leaving him, we had detoured to Emilia’s flat in Greenwich to collect her passport, which necessitated removing her bonds. She made no attempt to slip away, made malleable by the knowledge that if she didn’t co-operate her lover was a dead man.

  Back in the car, she asked where we were going, sounding as though she didn’t care one way or the other.

  ‘It’s a mystery tour,’ I said.

  A bleary-eyed shrug was her only comment.

  Our next port of call was Nuper’s Hatch. En route, I pulled over into a lonely turn-out, and re-blindfolded, gagged, and bound her with some more of that versatile parcel tape. No resistance. Her skinny limbs were slack, flaccid. She was either spaced out or apathetic. Either suited me just fine.

  Tagd was openly surprised to hear me over the intercom.

  ‘I thought you were having me on, so I did, when you said you might be back today.’

  When I handed over the box his nostrils twitched like a rabbit’s. He didn’t need to open it to know the Korth had been fired.

  ‘Been hunting out of season, have we, Mr A?’

  ‘For some vermin there’s no such thing as out of season,’ I returned.

  He nodded musingly. ‘I’ve been in touch with Spijk …’

  ‘Hang fire on that, Tagd,’ I cut in. ‘I have to go to France first. Get it all parcelled up, and wait until I phone you.’

  Pointless, I reasoned, to ship my armoury off to Holland until I established that Lizzy was there. If I needed a shotgun in France I had a local source.

  ‘Is the fire going upstairs?’ I asked, referring to the antiquated coke-fired stove in the farmhouse.

  ‘Feeling the cold, is it?’

  I partially withdrew the DVD in its plastic box from inside my coat. ‘Some garbage to dispose of.’

  Burning a single DVD would be at best no more than a symbol of my desire to immolate the whole lousy, filthy, stinking industry that produced it. Until I achieved that goal it would have to suffice.

  We ascended by a second secret staircase, and I lobbed that innocuous-looking plastic disc into the mouth of the stove. It threw up a tongue of purple-laced flame and a stench of burning chemicals that caught in my lungs. I turned away, coughing.

  ‘What the feck was on it?’ Tagd asked, flapping frantically.

  ‘Nothing much. Just a kid’s life ruined.’

  A little after midnight we were at Terminal 4, Heathrow Airport. No chance of a seat on a flight to Paris until 9.45am. We passed the night at the terminal. Emilia soon fell asleep, sprawled across three seats. Weary as I was, I stayed awake.

  The hours crawled. Emilia slept like Rip Van Winkle. Reckoning she was safe to be left awhile, I browsed the book and gift stalls. In between I drank coffee until I was sick of the stuff.

  When the time came to board, Emilia had to be woken up. Passing through passport control, she behaved impeccably, yawning and saying little, cooperating with the horrendous security procedures.

  ‘Aren’t you the smallest bit curious about all this?’ I asked her, as we settled in our business-class seats.

  ‘If you want to take me to gay Paree at your expense,’ she mumbled, showing a tiny spark of animation, ‘who am I to quibble?’

  That was the extent of our conversation. She slept the short flight away, while I spent it ruminating over the Petit connection. It was a bit of a mystery, as I had assumed all along that Rik de Bruin was holding Lizzy. Furthermore, unless I was not as well-informed about Dutch topography and architecture as I thought, the movie had been shot in Holland, or at least in Belgium. So where did a Paris-based Frenchman fit in?

  We hit central Paris at eleven. Finding rooms took several phone calls. I finally tracked down two doubles at the Mercure, in the Montmartre. I parked Emilia in her room untrussed and still in a zombie-like state, and relieved her of cash and credit cards. If she decided to run for it, she would have to use her thumb.

  The address Stephen had given me was the Club Concorde. The guy on the hotel front desk was sniffy when I enquired about it. It was patently not a place for decent people. Nevertheless, I donned the only suit I had brought with me, a dark grey worsted with a vertical silver thread running through it, and a plain maroon silk tie with a matching maroon shirt, to complement it. That way at least they wouldn’t have an excuse to throw me out for being improperly dressed.

  The capital city of France is renowned above all for its culture and elegance, and the delights of being there in April as once extolled on disc by the late Maurice Chevalier. Among its less appealing features is the great concentration of low life it gives asylum to. Like vampires, these denizens of the back streets hibernate by day, emerging only with the fall of darkness to infest the sidewalks and gutters, and beg or steal or extort their d
aily crusts. Nowhere in Paris are they more prolific, more pestilent than in the 9e arrondissement. If a city can be said to possess an asshole, this is it.

  My taxi got stuck in a traffic snarl-up at the Place Pigalle, and looked like taking root for the night, so I paid off the driver and set off on foot. It was raining, a fine freezing rain, and the temperature was noticeably lower than in London.

  The Boulevard du Clichy is the 9e arondissement’s main artery, a stretch of concrete teeming with vice and lice, relieved by a double line of plane trees down the middle. I was no stranger to its offerings. Segments of my early twenties had been mis-spent in the more celebrated but less ostentatious Rue Pigalle, which abuts onto it.

  The boulevard and its adjoining streets are truly the Mecca of the legions of the lost. Represented, perhaps most of all, by the sad, ageing prostitutes who ply for custom from passing cars and tourist buses.

  Yet who was I to condemn? I, with my ill-gotten millions, my villa and my yacht, my expensive cars and my decadent taste in women.

  Multi-coloured, flashing neon signs lined the street. Their message was consistent and always in English: BEAUTIFUL GIRLS beckoned one throbbing script, SUNNY GIRLS another. GIRLS-GIRLS-GIRLS a third. Girls were what the Boulevard du Clichy was all about. Other messages were blunter: SUPER-SEX – EROTIC – PORN – SEXY – EXTREME. Endless permutations of a common theme.

  ‘Venez chez moi, chérie,’ a tart murmured in my passing ear. Her face, grotesquely over-painted, lips purple and exaggerated to twice their natural outline, registered like a slide flashed on a screen – there one minute, gone the next. A sex show tout caught at my arm, thrust a ticket at me.

  ‘Pas cher,’ he mouthed. ‘Pas cher.’

  Scarcely breaking my stride, I flung him aside with force enough to send him reeling against a wall-mounted collage of soft-porn photographs. I would have liked to kill him. To make an example of him as representative of the whole festering sump to which Lizzy was now an unwilling contributor. To think that I had once paid money to enjoy and therefore perpetuate this rottenness. How these anachronistic sleaze shows survived in this age of the Internet was beyond my ken.

  Then I was there. A sign – LINGERIE CUIR (it sounds so much more exotic than “Leather Underwear”) and above it CLUB CONCORDE, in tricolore. How patriotic. I entered a dingy passageway lit by a single glow-worm of a bulb. If the boulevard represented the sight and sound of squalor, here behind the neon façade was to be found its odour. Bad drains, stale cooking, staler perfume, piss and vomit. Even a rat would think twice before foraging in these sewers.

  A tuxedoed sentry held the door open for me, expecting and receiving a generous pourboire for his troubles. I aimed to rock no boats, upset no protocols tonight. I was entering the kingdom of the profane, where nothing is sacred except money, and where outsiders are tolerated so long as they spend freely and keep their profiles invisible.

  Inside, a second sentry, bigger, burlier, and with eyes like holes in a Halloween pumpkin, awaited me. Not exactly barring my path, merely causing me to divert around him. The pumpkin eyes stripped me every step of the way, but not because he had designs on me. I was glad now I hadn’t come heeled. Bringing a gun into the likes of the Concorde Club would rate as a declaration of war.

  The lighting in the main bar was subdued red, apart from the spotlight over a circular stage where a topless bottomless girl pirouetted around a pole. I watched idly for a minute. It was tame stuff by French nightlife standards, mere hors d’oeuvres on the menu of erotica that would cater for every last perverted taste. Public buggery not excluded.

  Trade was still slack. In a place like this it wouldn’t take off until well past the midnight hour. The underemployed trio of bartenders in their wine-coloured waistcoats and bow-ties fairly rushed to serve me. The honour fell to the most nimble-footed, a runt of an Arab sporting a lonely earring and a phoney grin.

  ‘Un Tchaikovsky,’ I ordered. Vodka with Calvados, a mix that Willie had introduced me to over the festive season. It made a change from Vodka without Calvados.

  ‘Volontiers, m’sieu.’

  The drink came in a fancy square glass, together with a bill. The size of it explained why the club had no need to charge an entrance fee. It was built in.

  ‘I want to see the boss,’ I said to the Arab as he was about to rejoin his chums.

  ‘Ah, bon? Vous voulez parler à Monsieur Gabrio?’

  ‘No, whoever he might be. It’s Petit I want.’

  He hunched his shoulders, what little there was to hunch. ‘Il n’est pas ici, m’sieu.’

  I slid a 50-euro note across the counter. ‘Keep the change and get him ici.’

  Before reaching for the note he did a fast east-west recce. Apart from the other barman the only living beings within observing range were an ill-matched couple (male, sixty; female, Lizzy’s age, give-or-take) a couple of stools along. The man was engrossed in his pert companion, she in her fingernails: a fishnet clad leg swung like a metronome to the music’s trudging beat. It was a long, shapely leg. For all the impact it had on my libido it might as well have been a leg of mutton.

  The banknote meanwhile did a vanishing trick.

  ‘Who shall I say wants him?’

  ‘Warner,’ I pronounced it the French way, “Varnair”.

  ‘Varnair,’ he repeated. A grunt. Not impressed then. ‘D’accord.’

  A whisper to his workmates, who flashed identical startled looks at me, and he was off. I tasted my Tchaikovsky, letting it trickle unhurriedly down my throat, savouring the fiery edge the Calvados lent to the vodka. The pole dancer, still pounding away on the circular stage, began to rotate her siliconed boobs in opposite directions, flouting the laws of physics and drawing applause from the thinly-spread audience.

  ‘Quels tétons, hein?’ a voice murmured close by my ear. Some tits.

  I didn’t turn. This would be the advance guard, checking me out. I made a suitably coarse remark about the girl’s “tétons”, provoking a snigger.

  ‘Are you armed?’

  Now I looked at him. I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes. He was the Incredible Hulk in a midnight blue tuxedo instead of green skin.

  ‘Want to frisk me?’

  A toothless grin split the battered face. It was the face of a man who had launched a thousand gatecrashers – head first, into the gutter.

  ‘Not here,’ he demurred. ‘Come.’

  Under the wide-eyed scrutiny of the other barmen we crossed the bar diagonally, me leading, the Hulk breathing down my neck, to a distant corner. PASSAGE INTERDIT warned the door ahead. We passaged anyway. On the other side was a corridor with real lights that you could see by, and a reception committee of three: the little Arab, quivering like a cornered mouse, and a pair of meatballs in lounge suits, either of whom would have made two of him.

  ‘This him?’ my escort barked at the Arab.

  His head bobbed like a puppet’s.

  ‘Okay. Get back to work.’

  The relieved Arab scuttled off to the sanctuary of the bar.

  ‘As for you, Monsieur Varnair,’ my escort grinned, ‘hands on the wall and legs apart. S’il vous plait.’

  A sidekick did the frisking. That he didn’t find anything wasn’t for lack of diligence.

  ‘Is Petit here?’ I asked, when it was all over. I made a performance of smoothing lapels and dusting off sleeves, affecting indifference.

  ‘Come,’ the Hulk said again, and beckoned. Now he led and I followed and the lesser goons brought up the rear. We tramped down a corridor to a T-junction, turned left into a dead end with three doors branching off. DIRECTION proclaimed the last door, and below, an uncompromising FRAPPEZ! In between, a peephole. The Hulk rat-a-tatted with a bent forefinger.

  ‘Oui?’ came faintly from within.

  ‘C’est Tom-Tom, patron. J’amene le type qui voulait vous voir.’ I’ve brought the guy who wanted to see you.

  ‘Fais-le entrer.’

  Tom-Tom the Hulk nudg
ed me in ahead of him into a spacious, well-lit office, soullessly and antiseptically furnished in metal and plastic with black and white carpet tiles underfoot, laid out like a chessboard.

  From the inevitable desk a man beheld me without expression. A second man, standing by the desk, did likewise.

  ‘Vous êtes Warner?’ the man behind the desk enquired civilly enough. ‘André Warner?

  ‘Lui-même.’

  He didn’t seem any more impressed than the barman.

  ‘Je m’appele Petit.’

  In keeping with his name, he was slight of build, with narrow sloping shoulders. The slicked down hair showed strata of grey, and the mouth was lipless; it might have been drawn with a scalpel. A dapper dresser. In an earlier era he would have worn spats and sported a cane.

  Tom-Tom had melted back into the corridor, which improved the odds in my favour. Petit wasn’t alone though, and was bound to have a gun within grabbing distance. The right hand out of sight behind the desk wasn’t there for the purpose of self-abuse.

  ‘Am I allowed to sit?’ I said.

  ‘Please do.’ From a semi-circle of three lounge chairs before the desk I chose the middle one.

  ‘You will not mind if my associate remains with us.’ Petit was telling, not asking. ‘Gilles Gabrio, je te présente Monsieur André Warner. Un anglais, bien entendu.’

  Nods passed between Gabrio and me.

  ‘Anglo-Canadian, actually.’ I said pedantically.

  Gabrio was a stereotype Frenchman. A near-black pelt of hair, sallow Mediterranean complexion. Tough looking. Good physique.

  ‘We have heard about you,’ Gabrio said. ‘A contract man, hein?’

  Petit stroked the tip of his nose with a forefinger. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Co-operation.’

  Gabrio paused in the process of lighting a cigarette, the lighter flame wavering an inch short of the tip, his dark eyes fathomless under projecting brows.

  ‘Vous avez du toupet,’ he remarked without heat.