Columbus (2 page)

“And rivals?”

“Yes . . . it can be competitive. But it is as you say, I like to catch things.”

Her whole face lights up when she says this, and there is something familiar about the expression. I think I’ve worn it myself a few times.

“How long would it take you to locate one for me?”

“First edition?”

“Yes.”

“I will have to call a few people, but I do not think long. As old as the book is, it was very popular in its time. There are quite a few on the market. I should be able to find it for a fair price. How may I contact you?”

I write down an e-mail address for her, and she hands me her card. “You can reach me any time . . . that is my personal mobile number.”

“I look forward to hearing from you.”

“I’ll start fishing,” she says with a laugh as I head for the door.

It will be a while before the image of her face leaves my head. And that undercurrent, that emotion she tries to bite down but can’t quite pull off, is as intriguing to me as a wrapped box. I need to know more about Risina Lorenzana; I have to know more.

These are thoughts I should not be having.

Darkness descends on Prague quickly, like someone tossed a blanket over the sun. The city at night is quiet and expectant, the cold of winter chasing most tourists to warmer hemispheres. It is foot-stamping weather, and icicles hang like incisors from the buildings of Old Town. The moon hides, as though afraid of what’s coming.

I am in my third week of tracking Jiri Dolezal, making the connection so I can sever the connection. It is easy to blend in here . . . thick, bulky coats, dark toboggans for the head, and full beards conspire to make all men look uniform. In the winter, it is simply too cold to pick out a stranger on the street, or to notice a professional killer as he stalks his prey.

I am in a basement restaurant near the St. Charles Bridge, an authentic Czech establishment serving duck, rabbit, lamb, and potatoes in a large pot brought right to the table. As beautiful as the city is—the bridge itself is a marvel of medieval craftsmanship—the insides of the traditional restaurants are mausoleums: dark, cramped, and smoky. I have my head buried in a book while my fork moves regularly from dish to mouth. I don’t say much, don’t move much, just blend into the wall like a piece of old furniture.

Two men sit in a dark corner, smoking Petras and drinking vodka. They run a nightclub for Dolezal, an ostentatious techno-dance hall that specializes in transporting women from the brothels outside of town to a less threatening location for tourists.

Ryan’s file indicates that these men, Bedrich Novotny and Dusan Chalupnik, have been skimming money from the boss, bumping liquor prices on cash sales and ringing up only half the purchases while pocketing the rest. They also have deals with the working girls to pad their prices and split the profits, unbeknownst to their employer. It is a tightrope walk, this scamming of a scammer, and these men are either too reckless or too stupid to pull it off successfully.

They have been summoned to meet Dolezal tonight, and it is obvious from the way they pick at their food and tap their legs up and down continuously, they suspect the old man might have caught wind of their play. Though I can’t speak their language, I gather they are comparing notes tonight, getting their stories straight before meeting the man they are defrauding.

It is one thing to read about a mark’s misdeeds in a dossier, although Ryan does an amazing job of chronicling them explicitly. It is quite another to experience them first hand, to witness evil in a man up close, to see his face as he metes out punishment. I have learned over the years that perhaps the best way to get to know a mark is to watch his employees, to see how they carry themselves, witness for myself how they are treated. When looking for evil to exploit, watch the men right below the man. They are his representatives, a part of the mark himself.

After an hour, Novotny and Chalupnik don their coats and shuffle out into the night. I settle my bill and follow discreetly. Prague is a walking city for many of the residents, and these men are no exception. They certainly aren’t worried about being tracked; they’re both wearing bright red parkas and smoking cigarettes like they’re determined to reach the bottom of the pack. They mumble to each other as they go, and though I don’t understand the words, I can pick up the tightness of their speech, like their windpipes are constricting as they get closer to the meeting point.

They arrive at a corner where Partyzanska Street meets a set of railroad tracks and stand under a lamppost, their backs to me, waiting. My eyes have long since adjusted to the darkness, and it is easy for me to watch those red parkas from a stoop a block away. I am invisible here; even my frozen breath I’ve learned to trap in my black scarf by breathing slowly out of the side of my mouth.

Fifteen minutes pass and they check their watches. Their voices reach me over the wind, irritated, frustrated. If they were planning on coming here to make an angry stand, the delay has taken the wind from their sails. Just as a freight train approaches, rounding the corner, I see a large man approaching them from behind rapidly, pulling a handgun from the small of his back.

Gunfire erupts, two shots, the report of a low-caliber pistol, pop, pop, barely audible over the thunder of the train. The two men pitch forward, their foreheads opening, and crash to the sooty pavement, side by side, their limbs splayed out at absurd angles. The train passes and the shooter retreats down the adjacent alley to my right until I can no longer see him or hear his footsteps.

I wait twenty minutes, though I’m sure the killer is long gone, and then head back the way I came. I’ve seen all I need to see.

At Waxham Juvenile Hall, boys learned all the ways of dirty fighting, but nothing was held in more contempt and less respect than the sucker punch. Decking someone from behind with a fist to the temple, or shoving a pencil into someone’s back was considered the lowest of the low, and any kid who pulled that shit soon found himself friendless, alone, vulnerable.

Jiri Dolezal took care of business by sucker-punching his men, gunning them down when they couldn’t see it or hear it coming. I’m not sure if he pulled the trigger, or simply ordered it done, but I had little doubt it was his decision, his play, and it gave me all I needed to plan his death.

I return to Rome for one purpose, to pick up a first-edition copy of Izaak Walton’s
The Compleat Angler
. There are a hundred ways I could have paid for the book and had it delivered to me without setting foot inside Zodelli’s, but I find my feet moving through the door like they are operating on their own, no mind to guide them, enchanted.

“Mr. Walker!” Risina greets me warmly, and now it is my throat constricting.

“Good afternoon,” I manage.

“Just give me one moment. I have your book in the back.”

She heads through a swinging wooden door, leaving me alone in the shop. The truth is, I don’t need to be here. I’ve done what I set out to do, to get inside the mind of my target, and the rare-book world is a dead end, a pointless triviality, with no evil to exploit. So why am I here? Why did I travel all the way back to Rome? Why am I waiting to look into a face flawlessly exhibiting both kinds of beauty? Because there’s an undercurrent in her face I need to explore.

“Ahh, here it is. Have a look?”

I take the volume in my hand, and study the front . . . the author’s name in white text above the black title of the book, and then an illustration of a pair of men nestled under a tree, casting lines into a river.

“Remarkable condition for a seventeenth-century novel, yes?”

I nod. “It’s amazing.”

“I will admit I read through it while I was waiting for you to pick it up. I studied literature in school, yes, but my seventeenth-century experience is limited. Milton, yes, some of the poets like Herbert, Donne . . . but Walton passed me by. You have inspired me.”

“I’ll confess I know nothing about him. I told a friend I might start collecting books, and he suggested this one. But now I feel like I shouldn’t touch it, just put it on a shelf. . . . ”

She makes a clucking sound with her mouth, like a schoolteacher correcting a student. “No, no, no, Mr. Walker. Hang paintings on a wall, put photographs on a shelf, but books . . . no, they are alive. They are meant to be handled. Open the pages and read them. Only then are they worth collecting, once you know what’s inside.”

I smile at her and Risina returns it, and there’s that underlying hint of sadness there, like the bass note of a perfume. The corners of her mouth turn up, but only slightly. I feel a spot opening up in my stomach, like someone has hooked a line there and is towing me toward her. Goddamn, do I need to know more about her. But to what end? What can it possibly gain me but complications in a life where it remains essential I be alone?

After I pay for the book, she offers her hand. “Please come back to see me, Mr. Walker. We can start to grow your collection.”

“I would like that,” I say, and since there is no other practical reason for me to remain, I head for the door. This will be the last time I see her, I lie to myself, and take one last look at her behind the desk as I head out into the street.

Jiri Dolezal will die tonight. He is in his office, working late, surrounded by a skeletal staff: an assistant, a bodyguard, and his cousin, who oversees his ledgers. Dolezal didn’t luck into his fortune; he worked extremely hard at the business of evil. His work ethic would almost be admirable if he applied it toward say, fighting world poverty instead of exploiting teenage girls in the Eastern European sex trade.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I do not know who hires me. Our fences are designed as a barrier between assassin and client, to protect us from each other. It is better this way. I don’t need to know the motivation for why someone placed a hit on my mark. I only need to validate the inherent evil in my target so I can make my kill and walk away.

Occasionally, though, I discover the client in the course of the hunt. The file will hint at a possibility, and if beneficial, I can use that information to assist me. I just have to be right.

I break into the building using the oldest of techniques: a tension wrench and a steel lockpick. While Prague has made great strides toward joining the new century, security is surprisingly Old World. It is as though the new crop of organized criminals believes the fear and intimidation popularized by the old government regime is enough to keep danger at bay.

I march to the second-floor office and knock on the door, brazenly. I can hear everything go quiet in the room, like I’ve caught its occupants in some nefarious act, and then a man with a baritone voice barks an order to someone nearer to my position.

The door swings open and the secretary fills the space. She measures me with a dour expression. She says something in Czech, and I respond by holding up the book Risina tracked down for me. With my best British accent, I say, “I understand Mr. Dolezal collects Izaak Walton.”

She frowns and clucks over her shoulder. After a brief argument from which I can guess the gist, the door opens further, and I step into the room.

Dolezal is behind his desk, ten feet away. He has a fat face and a nose that lists to the left, like it was broken and never reset. To my right is the cousin, who barely looks up from his laptop. The bodyguard, who is easily a head taller than me, stands next to him. I am confident he is the man who pulled the trigger on Novotny and Chalupnik, the one who shot them at close range from behind.

In my left hand, I hold the first edition
Compleat Angler
. It is like a magician’s feint . . . it draws the eye to it and away from my free hand. The bodyguard steps in to frisk me, which is always a good time to strike. When the big man is stooped over, his hands on my waist instead of his weapon, he is vulnerable.

He starts to pat me down and my right hand finds that pistol he keeps in the small of his back. I have it out of his waistband and up in the blink of an eye. It’s a double-action, nine millimeter Czech CZ-TT, a little small for me but it will do just fine in close quarters. Dolezal is still staring at the book in my left hand when the bullet shatters that misshapen nose of his for good. I hit him square, a sucker punch he never saw coming.

The loud report of the gun is like an electric shock to the bodyguard. He leaps backward, takes one look at his boss, and his face falls. I can see the calculations working out in his mind, can see his brain forming the wrong decision. The secretary starts to bellow like a siren but I’m not worried about her. The bodyguard sets his legs to pounce, lowers his head to charge me—if he’s going down, he’s going down a fighter even though the battle is already decided.

Just as I swing the gun around, the cousin rises up behind him, wielding that laptop like a mallet. He brings it down with everything he has on top of the bodyguard’s head. The big man drops like someone kicked his legs out from under him as the laptop cracks across the back of his head, shattering into a hundred pieces.

The cousin gives me a satisfied look but I keep my face neutral, drop the pistol next to the capsized guard, and hurry toward the stairwell. I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to kill the bodyguard. In my experience, killing anyone other than the target creates a mess. So I let the forgotten man in the room take care of him, the cousin, the one who hired me. Since I don’t know where the secretary’s loyalties lie, I am gone before she can make a decision. If she had planned it with the cousin, had been a part of hiring me, I’ll never know.

I know exactly what I’m doing, goddammit. I’m clearing my mind, recharging my batteries, wiping my slate clean so I will be fresh for a new assignment. I am getting my mind right.

So why am I once again in Rome, sitting in a small
trattoria
near the Trevi fountain?

“I hate it, actually,” Risina is saying. “My sister was six or seven when my mother was pregnant, carrying me. For some inexplicable reason, my mother asked her to name me. She was so young, and I suppose was playing off of the common name Rosina, which means ‘rose,’ and instead came up with Risina, which means nothing except that I have had to correct people all my life.”