All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  “Probably. Let’s see . . .” He bit a mouthful out of the burger and started typing.

  “Anonymously.”

  “Thank goodness you reminded me. I was totally going to post this on Facebook,” Baaz sighed. I ignored that, and he tapped away. “OK, Citizens information . . .” He paused and clicked his tongue. “Property deeds . . .” Another pause. “Land registry. OK. Here we go. What’s the address?”

  “It doesn’t have one—not an official one, anyway.” I leaned in next to him and looked at the map he’d loaded. “Zoom in here, to Gortnalughoge. That’s where I did the recce from, the holiday park. Go east across the bay. Stop. There.” I pointed at the screen. “That’s it.”

  Baaz clicked on the oblong outline of the old cottage.

  “The property isn’t registered,” he said. He chomped on the burger again and mumbled, “What next?” But before I could answer, he’d loaded a new page. “Hang on.” He typed and then swallowed. “This is going to cost five euros.”

  “Anonymous, remember?”

  He gave me a sideways glance.

  “Right. No, nothing on the house. It’s going to be tricky to determine ownership.”

  “Great.” I sat back and chewed a mouthful of steak. “It’s never bloody easy, is it?”

  “But the land it’s on,” he continued, a grin spreading across his face, “is registered.” He paused dramatically. “Drumroll, please.”

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  “OK! Registered . . . in the name of one Jacob Benjamin Israel Levy.”

  “Fuck.”

  “But you knew!” For once he looked genuinely impressed. “How?”

  “The horses. Moshe said he met Rachel because she bought paintings from him, paintings of horses that reminded her of home. There was one on Moshe’s wall, in the storeroom. There’s one on her office wall, too. And another in Doc’s house, in the room where he stitched me up.”

  “And there was one in the cottage, too?”

  “Yeah, there was. And that’s not all. The painting, there”—I pointed at his laptop, as if it were a magic portal back home—“the fourth horse. It was of a pale mare.”

  “So?”

  “So look it up, clever clogs.” He did, and his face dropped. “Let me see.”

  He turned the laptop toward me. The screen was filled with the image of a painting by Viktor Vasnetsov, a Russian artist, reproductions of whose pictures my mother had adorned our house in Ireland with. In it the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ran amok. They were led by a white horse and its mounted archer. A swordsman followed on a brown steed. And in the hands of a third horseman, astride a black stallion, a set of scales dipped menacingly. But at the back, slightly distant from the others and carrying a scythe, a fourth figure rode a sickly, pale mare. Staring down over the land he’d laid waste to sat the shroud-wrapped skeleton of Death himself.

  Baaz closed the screen.

  “Man,” he said, and blew out hard with puffed cheeks, “you Christians are, like, totally nuts.”

  27

  More coffee, please.”

  It was a bright, breezy morning—already nearly seventy degrees. There was a stiff wind from the south that cut across the hotel terrace, carrying with it the harsh, flinty taste of the city. In Jerusalem it always felt as if I were on the edge, caught between the ideal of the city and the reality of the desert that surrounded it. I preferred Tel Aviv. The sea was constant, the horizon fixed. Just like home, I thought to myself. But the truth was that home, like the Holy City, was just an idea. It could mean anything you wanted it to. The waitress cleared away the remains of breakfast.

  “And for your friend?”

  I shrugged. There was no sign of Baaz. She smiled and headed back inside. There was no sign, either, that shaking down Moshe had stirred up trouble. I looked at the date on the copy of Haaretz I’d brought with me from my room. Thursday, January 18.

  Shit.

  Ten days ago I’d blown the top of Amos Stein’s head off. He might have lived as a mathematician, but he’d died as a courier. I worked backward and pieced the dates together. His run from Tel Aviv to Donegal had taken him two days, via Moscow. Ellard was right: A rabbit never bolts straight for the burrow—Stein included. If Avilov was onto him, then Stein’s forged passport slowed his pursuit. If Baaz and I could work out that Doc Levy owned the cottage, so could Avilov—too late to intercept Stein at the cottage, but in time to intercept me by the shore of Lough Conn. Talia said Stein had arrived in the UK on the thirtieth, so he must have left Israel on the twenty-eighth. That put him in the cottage two days before I showed up to do the recce—which tallied with the date Frank had given me.

  Stein had also left Israel a full twenty-four hours before Rachel had gone missing. It was possible that his departure had triggered her disappearance, and possible, given how terrified Moshe said she’d been, that she’d known something was going to happen to her. Perhaps she’d sent Stein and his message back home while she still could—as a fail-safe, an insurance policy, in Moshe’s words. But against what?

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  Baaz sat down in the chair next to me and set his laptop on the table. It was as if he was connected to its shiny silver case by an umbilical cord—a digital witch’s familiar for the twenty-first century. He’d switched his simple black turban for a crimson one and marshaled what passed for his beard into a neat series of wisps. I ran the back of my hand over my chin and made a mental note to ask housekeeping for a razor.

  “I’ve been thinking about the dates,” he said, “and about that Russian joker, too, who you said turned up in Paris, in the catacombs.” Baaz sipped from my untouched glass of orange juice. “The boss man.”

  “Who, Avilov?”

  “Yeah. By my calculation, he arrived here in Israel a couple of days before you started the stakeout, at the cottage.”

  “Reconnaissance. We do reconnaissance, not stakeouts. But yeah, that’s correct—assuming Talia isn’t spinning us a line.”

  Which was always possible, of course. Ezra had said that she was on the side of the angels—though from where I was standing that was no longer necessarily a good thing. The fact she had that book of matches meant she’d definitely known more than she was letting on. It seemed unlikely that she’d given them to me in Rachel’s office by accident.

  “OK, whatever. But then he pops up again on that ship in the English Channel, where he’s trying to keep you alive—sort of. That’s when you first meet him, right?” Baaz was speaking fast now. I got the feeling sometimes that if he could entirely dispense with words and use just numbers, he would.

  I nodded. “So?”

  “So that means he’s behind the curve. Don’t you see? He’s trying to solve a problem, too. He’s got his own equation, and the reason he, or whatever boss Russian he works for, wants you alive is because they think you can solve it for them—just like the Israelis, probably.”

  “OK. But why not just take the banknote? He had me strung up by my ankles—and what, his goons didn’t even think to search my pockets? Any amateur would have done that. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Variables. Your equation has variables. His equation has variables. Unknown variables. Same-same. You’re both in the dark. And then, boom!”

  “There have been a lot of booms so far, Baaz. Which one is going off now?”

  “Bloody Paris, Max! Before you meet this—what did you call him, ‘bad Bulgarian’?—no one knows you’ve even got the banknote. And then you tell . . . Ah, what is his name?”

  “Lukov, Sergei Lukov.”

  “Right. You tell Lukov, and he tells bloody everyone, and the next thing you know, Bob’s your bloody uncle: the whole city’s a war zone, and some Russian bastard is trying to drown me in the catacombs.”

  He had a point. Until Lukov started the auction, the only people who’
d known I’d laid hands on the hundred-dollar bill were Frank and the shooter in the cottage. I’d told Frank I’d lost it, and the shooter had no way of knowing whether I’d managed to hang on to it in the surf. Prior to Lukov going public, my connection with the note rested on whether Frank bought my lies—or, maybe, whether the shooter had survived.

  The waitress arrived with more drinks. We both fell silent and looked awkwardly out to sea while she refilled my coffee cup and poured tea for Baaz.

  “So,” I said quietly, “Rachel uses her colleague Amos Stein to send a message to her father. But nobody, not even Moshe, knew she had. Maybe not even Doc knew it. To everyone else it would just look like she was sending him cash. Like you do, to your auntie.”

  “Will do,” he corrected me, blushing. “Totally unremarkable.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “The gunman in the cottage was waiting for someone, not something. Otherwise why stick around?”

  “Well done, Maximilian. Professor Bhavneet Singh awards you an A-minus for effort.”

  “Yeah, but who the hell was he?”

  “That,” replied Baaz, “is one hundred percent your department. But from what you’re saying, he can’t have been a Russian. The dates don’t work, do they?” He looked around for the waitress again. “I wonder if they have bagels? I mean, it’s Israel. They’ve got to have bagels, right?”

  He was right. The shooter in the cottage couldn’t have been one of Avilov’s men. The dates didn’t tally. Until my name and face had popped up in the Times, Avilov hadn’t even known what to call me—at least, he hadn’t spoken my name in the ship’s hold.

  The same couldn’t be said of Doc. He could have been killed on Avilov’s orders—though my money was on one gunman, with that signature shot to the heart. Most terribly of all, if the shooter in the cottage had survived and then killed Doc, I’d led him straight to my oldest friend’s door, after all.

  It was heartbreaking and infuriating in equal measure. As soon as one question was answered, another presented itself. But we were getting somewhere. While Doc had worked on my wounds, he’d told me that I’d been lucky to find him, that he’d had a shooting trip planned. And there’s good shooting in Donegal in January—snipe and woodcock, particularly. The more I looked at everything, the more it seemed Doc must have been the intended recipient—even if he might not have known he was, or what the banknote signified. But as soon as he’d spotted the name of my mother’s birthplace, he—like me—would have understood it meant something important. But if Doc had known what was going on, or if he’d had the means to work it out, then that knowledge was gone, too—incinerated in the remains of his eccentric mansion.

  Trying to work out what it all added up to didn’t make me feel like an A-grade student. It made me feel sick to my stomach. No matter how hard I tried to wash it off, Dr. Jacob Levy’s blood still clung to my hands. I went back over every detail of the firefight in the cottage, sieving my memory for anything that might help point to the path ahead.

  Discovering the banknote and then deciphering its significance had been woven inextricably into my own personal quest to find Rachel. Seeing my photograph in the paper had forced me to run. Sure, it had shrunk the world around me. But as much as it had made life more complicated, it had also released me. The press reports were like a knife, cutting the bonds that tied me to process and procedure. However difficult it was operating beyond orders, I was free to do what I liked, how I liked. There were no rules, and no one to answer to except myself.

  I didn’t know if Rachel had made a run for it or had been abducted. I didn’t even know if she was still alive. But if Avilov was as much in the dark about her whereabouts as I was, I might still get to her first.

  “Well,” I said, “we’ve only got one lead left, so we may as well use it.”

  “What’s that?” Baaz asked.

  I put Moshe’s book of matches faceup on the table. The black 7 logo danced on its yellow flame. Then I opened the book and pulled the match heads forward to reveal the hidden cell phone number scrawled on the cardboard backing. Baaz half rose out of his seat in excitement.

  “You’re going to call it?”

  “Not yet.” He sat down again, disappointed. “Let’s scope out this Gallery 7 online first. Look nationwide, not just in Tel Aviv.”

  Baaz opened the case of his digital demon and clicked away at the keys.

  “It’s definitely a gallery.” He typed some more. “A gallery bar. Art and cocktails. ‘The most relaxed VIP vibe in Tel Aviv.’” He looked over the screen at me. “It’s a few blocks south of here, in the center of town.”

  “I wonder,” I said, and finished my coffee, “if the punters know they’re buying Moshe’s interpretations?”

  28

  Baaz and i got out of the taxi simultaneously and cut north, across Rothschild Boulevard, up Allenby Street. I’d assumed we’d be followed. So, as a precaution, we’d changed cars three times, splitting up for an hour and then rejoining for the final, short drive. I couldn’t discount the possibility that Talia had given me her book of matches by accident—but equally I’d never seen or heard the Israelis do anything that wasn’t deliberate. Whatever the case, even the slimmest edge of surprise counted for something.

  There were any number of ways the visit to Gallery 7 could play out. In anticipation of its going wildly wrong—which wasn’t unlikely—I’d spent the rest of the morning familiarizing Baaz with the SIG semiauto. By the time we left the hotel he could strip, reassemble and load it, make ready and make safe. He said he’d never even picked up a gun before, but after an initial bout of unease his fingers moved confidently around the steel frame. The point at which Baaz needed to use my pistol was the point at which it probably didn’t matter whether he managed to successfully or not. But instructing him gave us something to talk about other than endless unanswerable questions and intractable equations.

  We went through the basics of what to do if the shit hit the fan (if he forgot everything else, just get small, fast), and then I’d broached the delicate issue of concealment: there was no way I was walking into the bar unarmed, and no way I could risk trying to conceal a weapon from the inevitable security search at the entrance.

  “No!” he’d said at first, so vehemently that I was physically taken aback. “Impossible. I’m not a bloody Nihang warrior. It’s manha. Forbidden. Totally out of the question.”

  It had taken an afternoon of persuasion and perseverance, but eventually he agreed—on the condition that he did it himself, entirely alone and without me looking, never mind helping. I consented. And forty-five minutes later Baaz had emerged from the bathroom resplendent in his now oversized, tightly wrapped crimson turban—now concealing not just his hair but also the compact frame of the SIG 9mm.

  “OK,” I’d said, “now you have to practice walking and talking. Back straight, no nodding. Think of it like spy finishing school.” He didn’t laugh.

  By the time we’d climbed—carefully—into the taxi at the Lemon Tree he was so slick that, if I hadn’t known, I’d never have guessed he was carrying. In the security line outside the bar he was quiet and concentrated—a dignified ramrod trying and failing to make small talk.

  “This,” he said, still unsmiling, “is absurd.” His voice wavered with nerves. His fingers drummed the air by his sides.

  “It’s OK,” I tried to reassure him.

  “I can’t do it,” he blurted out. “Max, really . . .”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and gripped him tight. The couple in front of us turned to stare at him. I smiled and they looked the other way.

  “Five minutes,” I hissed in his ear, “and we’re in. And then it’s off. It’s done.”

  “But . . .”

  “Baaz?” I stepped back a fraction and looked him straight in the eye. He stared at the pavement. “Be cool, OK? You can do it. It’s all good. Everything’s going
to be fine.”

  He breathed out slowly. When his fingers stopped drumming, I saw that his hands were shaking.

  “OK,” he said. “It’s OK. I’m OK.” Then he turned around and his fingers resumed their silent dance.

  The entrance was on the ground floor of an uninspiring modern block, fringed by a line of evergreens. The faint thumping of electronic bass trickled out into the street. Above the door a black 7 was embossed on a bright yellow flame; in front of the door a thickset bouncer with an earpiece and a bulging suit waved down would-be punters with a handheld metal detector. The crowd was well-heeled and had a few years on the bright young party things we’d seen queuing up elsewhere from the taxi windows. The security check was so second nature it didn’t even interrupt conversation.

  Baaz went first.

  “Ma kore,” he greeted the doorman in Hebrew. Good evening. His nervousness manifested as arrogance. He fit right in.

  The bouncer’s reply was inaudible, but within another couple of minutes we were both inside the building.

  “Since when can you speak Hebrew?”

  “The waitress at the hotel. She’s been teaching me. Easier than French.” He winked. “Good accent, eh?”

  I stepped in front of him, parted a velvet curtain on the far side of the coat check and walked into the bar first. The electronic beats that had seeped outside deepened and expanded, filling the cavernous, low-lit joint with a disconcerting, undulating rhythm. Center stage was an island bar, orbited by beautiful women and older, manicured men. The walls were lined with paintings—all the same size, all reworkings of the same drowning-man motif in different shades of red and blue, pink and white. Limbs twisted. Mouths gulped. Silent screams engulfed in a horror-kitsch art aquarium. Above them, at the far end of the room, a glass staircase led to a mezzanine. Short skirts flashed above the parapet. A DJ kept the beats going on a set of turntables behind them. It was busy, but not crowded—the atmosphere fine-tuned to make men in their forties feel as young as their girlfriends. There’s nothing quite so effective as the promise of eternal youth to part men from their money.