SEVERANCE KILL (11 page)

He didn’t wait for a response from any of them, just walked over to the far end of the office and began studying the pictures and clippings on the wall. Behind him he heard them conferring, in Czech and in low voices. He thought he heard hissed anger in Jakub’s.

‘Mr Calvary.’ Nikola. He turned. It hadn’t taken long.

‘We are involved with you, and you with us, now. Whether we like it or not.’ She paused. ‘And we need to find out what happened to our colleague, Kaspar.’

‘Okay.’

‘We will take you to the restaurant,
Nebe
, and go in with you.’

‘No. I mean, you can take me there. I’d be grateful for the lift. But it’ll be too dangerous inside. You can wait for me in the street. I might need to make a quick getaway.’

‘Mr Calvary –’

‘And it’s Martin.’

*

They took Nikola’s car, a dark blue Fiat parked round the corner. Max sat up front beside her, hoisting a backpack. He saw Calvary looking.

‘Camera. In case there’s any action.’

Jakub stayed behind.

They took the Browning. It was in the glove compartment with a spare magazine. Calvary wasn’t even going to try bringing it into the club with him.

As Nikola pulled away, Max shook his head.

‘Still can’t believe you killed my van, man.’

There was little traffic on the street at this hour. As they turned at the end, Calvary glanced at an idling Audi. Saw a man and an elderly woman inside.

For an instant there was almost eye contact.

Then they were away and heading towards the lights.

TWELVE

They’d sat in the car for ten minutes, watching the entrance of the restaurant
Nebe
from across the street. A steady stream of people passed in and out, more leaving than arriving at this hour.

Nikola and Max both had prepaid phones. They took Calvary’s number, and he theirs.

To pass the time Calvary said, ‘Are the two of you related?’

Nikola gave a faint smile. ‘We are cousins.’

To Max he said, ‘But you grew up in Minnesota.’

Max turned to stare at him. ‘St Paul. How the hell’d you know?’

The rounded vowels, the singsong delivery. ‘Lucky guess.’

‘Yeah. Whatever.’ He gave Calvary a curious look. ‘My parents took me there when I was a baby. Three years old. The borders had just opened up and they got the hell out of Czechoslovakia. But I kept in touch with my big cousin here, always wanted to come back. Arrived here two years ago.’

‘To fight the good fight.’

‘Hey, you don’t need to make fun of us, man.’ The kid’s anger was genuine. ‘You’ve got your priorities, we’ve got ours. This asshole Blažek has screwed up more people’s lives than you could imagine. He needs to be taken down.’

‘I wasn’t making fun,’ said Calvary, quietly. He thought:
nice one. You’re alienating the only people in this city who might be able to help you.

*

Calvary walked through the doors into the clatter of cutlery and crockery, the din of conversation. The place was dimly lit in red, the tables crowded.

Somebody touched his arm and he turned. A man sharply uniformed in a tuxedo had stepped up and was appraising Calvary, his expression chilly.

Calvary slipped a banknote out of his wallet and held it folded between two fingers. ‘Speak Russian?’

The man shrugged, looking as if he wanted to spit.

‘I’m looking for Bartos Blažek. Is he here?’

The man shook his head. Too quickly. Stepped back. Calvary brandished the note.

‘I’m not asking for an introduction. I just want to know if he’s here. A nod will do fine.’

A faint lifting of the eyes, past Calvary’s shoulder. Calvary looked round. Over the diners’ heads, through the hovering layer of smoke, he saw some sort of balcony. A mezzanine level.

He turned back to the maitre d’. ‘He up there himself?’

The man took the money, not quite snatching it. He leaned in again.

‘His son. Janos,’ he said in Russian.

Calvary fished out his phone, texted Nikola and Max.
Janos Blažek is here.

He was making his way between the tables when a reply came from Max:
Watch yourself. He’s dumb but mean.

Calvary thought about texting back
I know
, but didn’t.

A central flight of steps led up to the balcony that projected from the mezzanine. The bottom of the steps was crowded with people queueing to go up or come down. Waiters squirmed through, holding loaded trays precariously above their heads. Calvary headed for the steps.

An arm gripped his wrist.

As he began the instinctive manoeuvre to break free and counterattack, the other man pulled him close and pressed into the small of his back a hard steel object which he didn’t need to see to be able to identify. Another man appeared at his side, a third loomed ahead, at the foot of the steps leading up to the mezzanine. He jerked his head indicating up the stairs.

The maitre d’ must have tipped them off.

Calvary began to climb the steps, the gun pushed into his back. The two men took up positions on either side of him, the gunman bringing up the rear. They led him into the depths of the mezzanine. Ten or twelve booths lined the walls at the back on all three sides, the booths themselves insulated by partitions as high as a man’s shoulder. Access to them was through an opening about two people’s width across. All the booths were full and gold flashed from within some of them, rich laughter swirling like cigar smoke. The booth they were heading for was directly in the centre at the back.

They stopped at the entrance to the booth. Inside, still seated, were four men and three young women, pneumatic and feline, bleached blonde. Directly opposite Calvary was a lean man in his twenties in expensive but nasty clothes: light grey shiny three-piece suit, pink and white striped shirt with gold cufflinks, no tie. Calvary recognised the face from the encounter outside the hospital and in the bookshop. From the photos on the wall of the office. Janos Blažek.

Janos’s eyes were chips of blue, and slightly bloodshot as though he’d been drinking. They came into focus.

He stood up, staring at Calvary. Triumph chased fury across his face.

He said something in Czech, raising his voice to be heard over the din. Calvary shook his head. ‘Russian or English.’

‘Who are you?’ Janos spoke English. His accent was thick and guttural.

Calvary said, ‘I’m the guy who skewered your friend through the throat on the tram. And wrecked your daddy’s BMW.’

The barrel of the gun drilled deeper into the area over Calvary’s left kidney. He realised, suddenly, that Janos had been one of the masked men on the tram. Realised it from the way Janos’s teeth clenched when he mentioned the man he’d killed.

‘I’m looking for the man you kidnapped,’ Calvary said. ‘Give him to me and I’ll leave you alone.’

Janos didn’t like Calvary’s reply because his face darkened and his fist slammed the table top, dislodging a glass. ‘You do not speak until I tell you. This man. Why he is important to you?’

So they didn’t know. It was a bargaining chip. Calvary felt a flash of optimism.

‘Tell me where I can find him, if you still have him, and I’ll tell you why he’s important.’

His face showed he was struggling with his anger. Then he said, ‘We have him.’

Janos wasn’t going to reveal any more, and it wasn’t worth trying to get him to. Calvary knew he had to get away, as far away as he could, and quickly. The advantage he had was that four of them were inside the booth and only three outside, so the odds were better than they appeared, but they weren’t going to stay that way for long.

Calvary glanced at the man on his right, one of his escorts up the steps. Beyond him he saw that a waitress had negotiated the traffic on the steps adroitly and was speeding over, trays in both hands carried at waist height and laden with tiny shot glasses, each crowned with flame. She was heading for the booth immediately to the right of Janos’s.

Calvary made his move.

*

Darya flicked the spent butt end into the street and sat bolt upright.

Men were swarming from cars towards the entrance of the restaurant like bees funnelling into a hive at the command of their queen. The cars were high-end ones. The men looked like athletic thugs. The drivers moved the cars – four of them – into a tight barrier along the pavement outside the entrance.

‘You see that?’ she almost shouted.

In her ear Tamarkin’s voice was shockingly close. ‘Yeah.’

‘Who are they?’

‘I’m not sure, but they look like gangbangers. The Blažek crew.’

She knew of Blažek. Everybody who spent time in the city did.

‘They must have something to do with our man. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise.’

Tamarkin said, ‘I agree.’

They had followed the Fiat expertly after the first visual contact had been made, checking occasionally with Yevgenia that they were in fact following the signal she was monitoring. They’d taken up position at either end of the street, watching the Fiat until Calvary emerged, alone, and entered.

She couldn’t go in after him herself. She would stick out as though she were radioactive. And she wanted Tamarkin out here as well, in the other car, in case either the Fiat departed and needed following, or Calvary left the restaurant on the run. Not that she had any idea what he was doing there in the first place.

So she had sent Arkady in. He was young and trendy enough to be inconspicuous in a setting like this restaurant.

Arkady was trying to update them, but the overwhelming noise coming through his feed made his words unintelligible. In a moment a text message came through from him.
Can’t see the target, but there’s some sort of scuffle going on upstairs.

She texted back, her fingers labouring over the tiny keys.
Men pouring in. Keep out of the way. Safety first.

Part of her hoped he’d ignore her.

*

In the booth, Janos started to speak. Calvary cut across him loudly.

‘Hand over your prisoner and we’ll forget about –’

He didn’t finish the thought because it was always a surprise to the opponent when you attacked while you yourself were in mid-sentence, just as it was when you hung up a phone and cut your own voice off. Calvary shot out his arm and grabbed one of the trays from the waitress, hoping like hell it didn’t spill on to her. She was grasping it loosely and he managed to snatch it away, brought it whipping across and tilted it at the same time so that the glasses of burning sambucca sprayed into the booth like tiny splintering fireworks. He continued the movement of his arm and the edge of the tray cracked into the face of the man at his side with the gun. The burning spirits wouldn’t cause any real damage but they had shock value and would impart pain. It bought Calvary enough time to use his legs to piston himself off the outer wall of the booth and crash blindly backwards into the man behind him, who went down, shouting. Calvary twisted round and gripped the gun-arm by the wrist and gave it a quick rotational jerk. The man screamed. Calvary caught the gun with his other hand and hauled himself up, dragged the gunman across in front of him.

The momentum of his pistoning action had driven Calvary back towards the steps and the two men outside the booth had been slow to react, so they were only now coming forward. Calvary yelled at them to stay back as he got a forearm across the gunman’s throat and jammed the barrel of the pistol in his ear.

Pandemonium now as the patrons started to see the gun and began funnelling towards the steps. Calvary moved aside to let them pass. On the floor below, people were starting to notice and point up at them.

Calvary stood, his back to the stairs, hoping to Christ there weren’t any more of them down there, his arm exerting pressure on the gunman’s trachea so that he hissed and gasped. The shark’s fin of the pistol sight cut into the external canal of his ear. Five or six feet away ahead and to the right and left were Janos’s cronies, the women screaming and cowering behind them. All three of the cronies had drawn handguns, all attempts at discretion discarded. In the booth Janos had risen and was roaring, wiping at his neck and face with a handkerchief. Another man was leaning on the table in the booth, clutching his face and moaning.

On the floor below, the diners were on their feet, women screaming, a wedge of panicking bodies driving towards the doors.

Calvary moved quickly, shuffling back and dragging the gunman with him, slipping his fingers inside his suit jacket and coming out with a wallet and putting it in his own pocket before getting his arm around his neck once more. The gunman was trying to nurse his injured wrist with his other hand, a pathetic keening issuing from between his clenched teeth. Calvary assumed they would be more circumspect about shooting at him once he was down among the crowd. Not that he thought they’d give a damn about civilian casualties as such, but it would be bad public relations.

In two movements Calvary put his foot in the small of the gunman’s back and kicked him forward before using both legs to launch himself in a backward flip over the banister of the balcony. Deliberately falling backwards was a highly unnatural manoeuvre for a human being to carry out and he’d never been especially good at this type of acrobatics, but he didn’t exactly have a lot of options available.

Someone fired, and they were close because he felt the whine of the bullet past his face as he dropped into space. He got the move almost right and landed on his feet, but with the centre of gravity off so that he was leaning backwards, arms wheeling. He tumbled back, landed on his backside on one of the abandoned tables, found his balance once more and plunged low into the crowd struggling for the exit, keeping himself at the height of their waists. It might have been putting them at a terrible risk, but Calvary had calculated that the men up on the mezzanine wouldn’t start firing indiscriminately into the crowd as long as he was completely hidden in its midst. As he moved he thumbed the safety on the pistol and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket.

Someone in the throng had seen him land with the gun, and there was yet another renewed wave of screaming as the crowd started parting for him. It was making him more visible. Calvary saw them, then, at least four men, possibly six, forcing their way in against the outflow of the crowd. Clearly Janos’s crew, though God knew how they’d managed to arrive at the club so quickly.

Calvary got rough then, shoving his way through the crowd at a stumble, angling away from the direction of the exit and towards the row of low windows set in the wall facing the street. He could feel the presence of Janos’s men behind him on the floor as he broke free on the perimeter of the crowd and tucked his head down to turn himself into as much of a ball as he could.