People Die (2 page)
Authors: Kevin Wignall
2
Paris, September, two years later
Naked, he’d been gagged, had his feet bound and hands tied behind his back; that much he’d undoubtedly paid for. He’d probably paid for the knife too, something heavy-duty and symbolic, and they’d have been a good way into it before he’d realized he was getting more than he’d asked for, the subtle transition from client to victim.
At some point, as the bruising had bitten deeper and the blade had begun easing into flesh, he’d have known, and then some point later he’d have stopped whining and crying, begging through his gag, and then one or more times he’d have passed out, from the pain and eventually from the loss of blood. He’d been dead, or as good as, long before the final burst of violence had hacked through his neck.
So that was it for Viner. The collection of eighteenth-century furniture would be auctioned off, some of it after restoration, and likewise his library. His other library would be confiscated by the authorities, destroyed or mislaid. The apartment would go on the market, but people would know what had happened there so it would probably be another foreigner who bought it. And at some stage in the cleaning process someone else would come too and sweep the place, mopping up any last fragments of his professional life. After that, there’d be nothing.
The phone was by the windows which were open, so when JJ sat down the pervasive smell in the room was held back a little by the street air. The body too was obscured by the furniture, but from where he sat he could see the raggedly separated head lying on its side under a chair, eyes open, staring, carpet-level toward the door where he’d come in.
It didn’t look like a hit. Viner had gone in for rough with street kids—a cheap explanation but probably close. It definitely didn’t look like a hit; that was the only thing that mattered. He’d call London, sort out a new handler, and then he’d be back to business as usual. It was a shame though, Viner had been okay.
As okay as people got, anyway. His material could be as off-target as anyone else’s, and when it came down to the wire he’d have sold people. But it had never come down to the wire and for the most part he’d been sound, sick in the sexual department but one of the few when it came to business.
A scooter tore up the street below; early evening, the city quiet, a time for teenagers to tear up streets on scooters, the whole night ahead, possibilities. It was a great time of day out there in the city, disjointed sounds playing out the bottom of the lull. He found himself distracted by it, drawn way into some indistinct memory, then pulled back again by the smell lapping toward him at the faltering of the breeze.
It made some people sick, the different ways death smelled, but it was a skill worth having, to be able to smell a corpse and know it. And the smell here wasn’t the worst; Viner had soiled himself but he was still fresh, had probably been there only a few hours, an early-afternoon rendezvous turned sour.
JJ tapped out the numbers on the phone and waited, then let the alarm tone sink in and the automated telecom voice repeating itself. Please try again. He tapped them out again and listened, put the handset down and stared at it, puzzled. Numbers like that didn’t change, didn’t stop being available; it didn’t make sense. He tapped it out a third time, carefully, more deliberately, got the same result, and put the phone down.
Another number reeled itself off in his head, but he held off using it. Something was badly wrong; for the contact number not to be working, there had to be a mess somewhere. He still couldn’t quite believe the scene in front of him was wrapped up with it, but suddenly he was uncomfortable, no longer certain it was a good idea to get in touch.
It hardly seemed necessary, but he tapped out a random number to cover his tracks, putting the phone down as soon as it rang. It was reassuring somehow to imagine some early-evening apartment, thrown into a moment’s suspended animation by that single ring of the phone, its occupants yanked by the leash and then released again to speculate on who might have called.
And the thought of another apartment made him look once more at Viner’s. It was too tidy, a couple of things knocked around near the body but the rest of the place untouched, or else turned over by someone who knew what he was doing. If a rent boy had done it he’d have ransacked the place. The way it looked just didn’t square with the way the man had been killed.
JJ glanced back at the phone and then stared at the door, listening; quiet footsteps outside. He moved his hand inside his jacket but let it fall away again as whoever it was knocked tentatively. It was instinct, a sense that the person on the other side of that knock wouldn’t know where to begin being a threat to him.
Things were getting interesting though. And it was like it was nothing to do with him, like he was just a spectator, cut off from the whole little drama by the stench rising off Viner’s body. He was on the edge of it, more a part of evening in the city than a part of what was happening in front of him. Because of the telephone. The telephone had cut him loose, and as long as he spoke to no one he’d stay that way.
There was another knock, and a few seconds later the door opened, hesitantly, almost apologetically. Battered red Converse, that’s what Viner would have seen from down there under his chair, and maybe that would have been enough to recognize him. He certainly had the look of one of Viner’s boys—jeans, T-shirt, scruffy black hair, young face, lean.
The only thing that didn’t fit was his nationality. He looked like a French kid, but as he bridled against the smell in the room he muttered some curse or other. An American. That was wrong. French and Arab boys JJ had seen there plenty of times but never American, and not just because of supply. It was a language thing; Viner had never liked sex with boys who spoke his own language.
The kid was carrying a sports bag and reached into it now, holding his breath, and pulled out what was inside. Then for the first time he saw JJ sitting there and stood frozen for a second, not breathing, his face straining at the building up of pressure.
A police siren sifted toward them, a few blocks away or even farther on calm streets, homing in on some accident or domestic somewhere. And the two of them stared at each other and then the American looked at the machete in his own hand and laughed, the breath bursting out of him. “Jesus, this must look weird, but then you must know about it, right? I was told to leave it here, or give it to you I guess.”
“Not me. Him maybe.”
The kid looked confused, then stared at the mess of furniture for a while before making out the body. The machete fell to the floor with a muffled clunk. The police siren hovered in the middle distance, apparently going nowhere. The kid had doubled over and looked set to empty his stomach.
JJ lumped out of the chair toward him. “Don’t be sick. Stand up.” He lifted the kid by the shoulders so they were face-to-face, the kid’s suddenly like a drunk’s, pasty and unfocused. “Don’t be sick, okay? Control it, just control it. Breathe.” He nodded like he understood, made a conscious effort to get his lungs working. “Did you know Viner?” He shook his head, still fighting the need to vomit. Now that JJ looked at him, he could see the kid was older, nineteen or twenty, much too old to have been one of Viner’s boys. “Have you been here before?”
Again, no, and this time he spoke, his voice high and shaky. “Two guys paid me a thousand francs to deliver the blade, no questions asked. They gave me the address, told me what to do.”
“What were they like? The two guys, what were they like?” He was shaking his head as if to everything. “I don’t know. They were just ... they were your guys, you know.”
“What do you mean, mine?”
“They were British. You’re English, right?”
Like his ears were stacking it up for him, JJ became aware of the siren again. It had jumped closer, much closer, turning the corner maybe, the end of the street. “You’ve been set up! Get the machete and the bag—follow me.”
“What? What’s happening?” The kid was still dazed, but he too could hear the siren now, his eyes darting to the windows and back.
“Do you want to end up like him?” JJ pointed at the naked body, lacerated and stained. “Then get the machete and the bag and follow me.” This time the American moved, urgency taking him over, and with the siren’s wail increasingly smothered, JJ was leading him out the back way and through the broken pathways he’d mapped a few years before, an escape route, one which would give him some distance in the event of something like this happening.
Not that he knew what had happened. The kid quickly getting out of breath behind him, his lungs beginning to rasp like they were bleeding, he was the one who’d been set up. JJ had just stumbled in there by mistake. But he’d stumbled in on something; it was just a question of finding out how big and how he stood in the middle of it.
For one thing, Viner had clearly been hit after all, and dressed up like voodoo for whatever reason. They’d set the kid up, British guys, probably arranged it with the police. And then there was that failed number. If the two were connected it was about as big as things could get. If they were connected then perhaps JJ really was cut loose.
They were descending flights of stairs, their steps producing no noise, the American’s painful breathing grating through the quiet though, and the sports bag finding obstacles in the walls and banisters. The police siren was gone, silence in the building around them, no televisions, no arguments, nothing to suggest they were passing through people’s lives.
And a few minutes later they were in a back courtyard, darkness already falling among the surrounding walls, the visible street empty. JJ stood looking at the kid, bent double again, coughing up heavy phlegm, drooling. They hadn’t run hard or far, so either he was ill or it was nerves.
Then perhaps he had a right to be nervous. Fifteen minutes before he’d probably felt like the luckiest loser in town, money in his pocket for running some mindless errand, and now he was just scared of dying too soon or being locked up or even hurt. JJ would have been scared too at that age. Not anymore though; at some point in the years between he’d had most of his nerves nickel-plated.
They were tingling now but for all the wrong reasons. It was the thought of what must have happened. If London had shut down the channels there must have been a mother security breach, and if Viner being killed was part of it then there was some sort of purge or turf war going on. It was that possibility that excited him. He wasn’t sure why but the idea of the system suddenly spinning out of control appealed to him.
The American had recovered enough to stop coughing, but he was still leaning over, hands on knees, muttering curses. JJ wasn’t certain why he’d brought him. He’d been caught in the middle of some other train of thought and had wanted to help the kid out of a fix. Possibly, given longer to think, he’d have left him there.
As it was, he supposed he could give him a few thousand francs, tell him to lose the weapon, get out of Paris. He had the look about him anyway of someone who just wanted to get out of Paris, out of Europe, back home to wherever it was he’d wanted to escape from in the first place. There was no real risk of him talking.
It crossed JJ’s mind to ask again about the men who’d paid him, but even if the kid knew anything, it was hardly information JJ could use. And if things had shut down it would be only temporary; it wasn’t like he’d be out of business for good. For all his flights of fancy, the chances were within a few days everything would be back to normal. The only thing he needed to know for sure was that it was actually happening. After that it was just a question of keeping out of the way till things had calmed down.
Collecting his thoughts, JJ pulled his gun and shot the kid twice, first through the side of the ribs, then in the head just above the ear, the second shot after he’d slumped to the ground. He went quietly, still drooling, and thinking about it JJ didn’t know why he’d ever considered any other option. After all, what kind of person took money from strangers? A desperate person maybe, a kid, still not somebody he wanted walking the streets with an imprint of his face.
The kid looked quite graceful now on the hard stone floor, like the kill in a hunt, like a leopard or cheetah. It didn’t matter how pathetic or otherwise his life had been, he was beautiful now, composed. And within a few days he’d probably make the papers and move people here and there in the suburbs of America, and it would seem quite exotic, that he had gone to Paris and been killed there.
3
JJ walked back to the hotel, the city’s metabolism building and night creeping up from the pavements, darkness wrapping itself around the people and cars on the streets, shards of noise and light, expectation mounting.
They were tourists mainly, entwined couples separating for no one, middle-aged ones clutching their bags and camcorders, all of them locked into their own personal highs. The Parisians were easy to identify; they were the ones who saw him, who made fleeting eye contact in the seconds they took to pass.
And none of them would remember his face. That was what he liked about city streets; there was no remembering the faces. He could walk like a wraith between worlds and be untouched by both of them. It was good too that those worlds rarely crossed into each other, that the pedestrians flowing around him would never know and never need to know why someone called Viner was dead.
That was only on the streets though. In the hotel he could feel himself slipping back into it, the corridors desolate except for a baby crying somewhere in one of the rooms, a stealthy silence draped over the functional sounds of the building. It was places and times like this that Viner was dead, out on the blank edges of other people’s daily existence.
The room said it too, oppressively calm, desperate, suffocating, like it was wrong to be there at that time of the evening. He sat on the bed, phoned room service to order something to eat, but changed his mind, the woman at the other end barely masking her irritation. He checked his watch, thinking it better to get the lowdown from Danny and then move on straight away.
He dialed and as soon as the answering machine clicked in said, “It’s JJ, pick up.” For a few seconds the message continued before Danny lifted the phone, at first competing with his own recorded voice. “Hey, JJ, it’s good to hear from you. I suppose you wanna know what’s happening?”
“Something like that. I’m in Paris.”
That threw him for a second, his reply cautious. “On business?”
“No, a private matter, but I took the opportunity of visiting an old friend, and I have to say, he wasn’t looking too good.”
Danny sighed and said, “Yeah. I had some traffic that Viner was down. You have to admit though, he would have been whacked anyway sooner or later.”
JJ smiled at the terminology, Danny’s fixation on the Mob.
“It’s not just Viner though, is it?” He was guessing, but Danny always gave more to people who sounded informed in the first place. He still responded as if to a massive understatement.
“No, no, no.” There was a pause. He was eating, his voice like cotton wool when he spoke again. “You’re just about the only one of Viner’s people left. I’m hearing Townsend’s down, so is Hooper. Berg’s down, of all people. Only person ahead of the game looks like Lo Bello. Him and his people have been bermuda since last Friday—not a trace.”
“That doesn’t surprise me—Lo Bello’s a shrewd operator.” But so were some of the other names he’d reeled off. “What about Berg’s people?”
Danny laughed, saying, “The beautiful Esther’s gone to ground if that’s what you’re wondering, but of the immediate crew the only other one still unaccounted for is David Philips. Exciting stuff, isn’t it?”
JJ didn’t acknowledge the question, but he could feel small surges of adrenaline firing off in his bloodstream. “Who is it?”
“Well as to who’s doing all the killing, your guess is as good as mine. London’s just found out it’s been in bed with the Russian Mafia for the last four or five years—something I think
we
could have guessed four or five years ago. So I’d say London’s overreacting, the Russians have panicked and started closing people down themselves, and our friends in Arlington have probably joined in because they’ve got nothing better to do. There’s just a real meltdown going on out there. It’s crazy; they’re gonna regret some of the people they’ve hit in the last couple of days.”
we
could have guessed four or five years ago. So I’d say London’s overreacting, the Russians have panicked and started closing people down themselves, and our friends in Arlington have probably joined in because they’ve got nothing better to do. There’s just a real meltdown going on out there. It’s crazy; they’re gonna regret some of the people they’ve hit in the last couple of days.”
“Not half as much as the people they’ve hit.”
“Yeah, but stiffs don’t vote.”
“Not as a rule. What about me, Danny?” Another mouthful of food. “Obviously, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to take you out, but that doesn’t mean you’re not on a list. I’d say the big thing in your favor is your, er, contractual status—you’re not as easy to track. If you were an employee and they wanted you dead, you’d be dead by now.”
“So it seems.”
“Too true. So play your advantage, disappear for a week or so till it’s blown over. Once they’re all thinking straight you’ll be okay. I mean, you whack the pimps, not the hookers.”
JJ smiled and said, “You seem pretty relaxed.”
“Please,JJ, a retired pimp isn’t worth the price of a bullet.”
“Nor the airfare to Sweden.”
Danny laughed, saying, “Exactly. So anyway, go on holiday, relax, call me in a week, ten days, and I’ll let you know the score.”
“Sure.”
“Oh, and it should go without saying, but don’t go back to Geneva.”
“So I’m gonna have to buy new beach clothes?”
Danny came back at him confidently. “You can afford it. And in a few weeks I’d say you’ll be able to renegotiate your fee.”
“An interesting thought. Speak to you soon, Danny.”
“Hey, I’ll be here.”
JJ put the phone down and checked his watch. Then he thought of Aurianne and immediately felt his stomach turn as what Danny had said hit home: don’t go back to Geneva. They’d know about her, had to know about her by now.
He picked the phone up again and dialed, smiling at first when the machine clicked in at the other end. She was ill at ease with her answering machine, one of those people who tried too hard to make her voice sound relaxed, the result, if anything, ending up strangely stilted. Slowly though he found the smile straightening out, the awkwardly voiced message he’d heard so many times before suddenly troubling him. He didn’t want to speak but did anyway. “It’s me. I have to go away for a couple of weeks. Don’t call. Don’t come round to my place. Don’t even leave a message. I’ll call you as soon as I get back.”
It was wasted. He could feel it in his gut, a creeping nausea; she was already dead. He kept trying to dismiss it, but it was there like a certainty. Like Danny had said, there was a meltdown in progress and it had taken Aurianne with it, just like it had taken Viner, like it had taken the kid in the alley. It didn’t make sense that anyone would choose to kill her. But that was exactly what happened at times like this, innocent people got killed.
He looked at the room, too small, a hotel he wouldn’t use again. And he tried to piece together what he was thinking because a part of him was still clinging stubbornly to the idea that she was alive, that she was simply out or sleeping. He phoned again from the station for the same reason, let the message run its course, ignoring the cold logic of it with the thought that if he wasn’t a target she wouldn’t be one by association.
But he was a target. Someone had been sent to Geneva just as surely as someone had been sent to Paris for Viner. They’d failed to find him though, so they’d gone to Aurianne’s, had no doubt tried to get something out of her before killing her. They’d still be there somewhere, in her apartment or his, waiting on station but no longer believing he’d show, particularly now, the contents of his call to Danny already distilled and drip-fed back to them.
Once he was on the train he thought again about what Danny had said, but there was no choice, he had to know for sure. And he’d have the element of surprise on his side. The train would get him there first thing, and he’d be out on an early flight before they even realized he’d been there. He’d take her with him if she was okay, but with the night drawing on that thought was already failing in his mind, becoming just a token response to an unpalatable truth.
He stared at the window, a softly lit version of the car reflected against the night, his own face visible from the corner of his eye. There were only a handful of other people reflected there: an elderly woman reading, the rest traveling students: two girls sleeping, a small group talking at the far end, a guy on his own looking bored.
JJ wished he could be like them, wished he could just be a person traveling, no mental baggage, of no interest to anyone else. Some of them probably felt the same way, he was aware of that. He resented it though, resented that he was in so deep and that, despite what Danny had said, it was never just a question of disappearing for a while. He was tied in too tight.
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