Columbus (7 page)

I waited there for over an hour, in an obscure corner with no traffic, freezing my ass off. I didn’t see him again.

In my hand, I’m holding a Nokia pre-paid cell phone I picked up at a mini-mart near the Holiday Inn in Decatur where I’m now staying. I employed every anti-surveillance technique I know in driving away from Buckhead, veering on and off the highway, racing red lights, making unexpected turns, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t been followed, but I’m not positive, goddammit, and this fucker has me doubting myself in ways I have not doubted in a long time.

And yet, if he wanted to kill me, if that was his end game, then he made a colossal mistake in not doing so when he had the chance. If he’s so fucking smug that he’s choosing to play games, choosing to reveal himself so that I know
he
knows where I am, then I’m going to pluck whatever weapon he comes at me with right out of his hands and ram it down his fucking throat. Toying with your target is a novice’s play, a cocksure move intended to intimidate your mark into making a mistake. But there are flaws to this play, and chief amongst them is that he has given away information about himself.

My pursuer carries a knife in his left sleeve, I’m sure of it. In the two instances where I spotted him, I took in the folds of his jacket, and both times, the left sleeve bunched up near the wrist opening, then smoothed out toward the elbow. It wasn’t much, and I’d only had a second to look, but it was there.

Maybe he has been paid not just to kill me, but to stick me up close, to disfigure me, a vendetta killing. I’ve heard of bagmen taking this kind of work, not just ending a mark’s life, but disgracing him in death, pissing on his grave. Come to think of it, it would require the killer to work in close, and maybe that’s why he’d been aiming low in the train station in Naples, when the bullet skipped off the pavement by my feet. Maybe he had been aiming for my knees, hoping to wing me so he could carve me up like beef at the slaughterhouse. Or maybe I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.

I dial a number from memory, look at the digital clock next to my bed, and wait for her to answer.

“
Ciao
?”

“Risina. It’s Jack Walker.”

Her voice warms immediately. I can feel the smile through the phone line.

“
Buongiorno
, Jack. I was just opening the store.”

“I thought you might be. Do you have a moment?”

“Yes. Yes. How are you?”

“I’m . . . fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I don’t? I’m tired, I guess.”

“Where are you?”

“The States. East Coast.”

“It is late there.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m very pleased you called. I was thinking about you.”

“I’m glad you were. I think about you too much.”

She laughs. It is a sound low in her throat, as soothing as a touch. “You can never think about me too much, Jack.”

I wait for a moment, and there is an odd comfort in the silence, like the distance between us has been erased. I don’t know why I feel the compulsion to say what I’m about to say, but the words come out of me before I can decide against them.

“I was just remembering a story I read once. Something from when I was a kid.”

“Yes?”

“Maybe you can figure out for me who wrote it.”

“I can try. It is a children’s story?”

“Well, I read it when I was a kid, but I’m not sure where or how I came across it. I’m not sure how old I was when I read it. A lot of those years are blurry for me.”

“It’s a famous story?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I haven’t come across it in a long time. But some things in my life made me think of this story, and I thought maybe I’d tell it to you and see if you’d heard of it. I’m not even sure if it’s very good or particularly profound.”

“Well, now I’m definitely intrigued. Let’s hear it.” I hear the sound of her leaning back in the desk chair, and I picture her with her knees pulled to her chest and one arm around them, holding them tight, those venerable leather-bound books surrounding her like a theater audience. “I haven’t unlocked the shop door yet and Alda is not coming in until after lunch. My ear is yours.”

“Okay. Well, here goes. I don’t remember the name of the story. And the main character doesn’t have a name. In fact, that’s the point of the story . . . I think . . . anyway. . . . ”

“I’m listening. . . . ”

“Well, this guy, just a normal guy, he kisses his wife good-bye, leaves his house, dressed like he’s going out for a jog, but he’s not, he’s actually got his kid in his arms, a little boy, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler who looks just like him.

“And every day they do this . . . he and his kid take a walk together, all over the city. Or rather, he walks, pulling a silver wagon with his kid buckled safely inside. And they walk everywhere, I mean everywhere, looking at the fire trucks and the police cars and the ambulances and the construction trucks; and all the time, the dad’s pointing out this thing and that thing and the kid’s taking it all in like a sponge.

“The dad’ll pull him for hours, for miles, end up in neighborhoods nowhere near his own, and everyone that passes them on the sidewalk or in the street looks at the two of them longingly and thinks that this father and this son who resemble each other are just a little part of the world that is right. That all the death and mayhem and war and assassinations and everything else wrong in this world is pulling them into the blackest of abysses, but this thing, these two walking by, father and son, these two are what’s honest and true and hopeful. And maybe they’re the
only
two, you know? Maybe everybody else has a little blackness in his life, but it all fades away to white, because when people spot this guy and his son walking down the street, they just can’t help but smile.”

I can hear her breathing, but she doesn’t cough or sigh or interrupt. I can’t remember the last time I’ve talked this much, but the words continue to tumble out of my mouth like an avalanche.

“And they’re on this block a good mile from their house and the dad is in the middle of telling his son about this big cedar tree on the end of the street he likes to visit, that the tree probably looks to the boy like it’s taller than a skyscraper, and right there, right in the middle of his sentence, the man’s left arm seizes up on him, his breath catches in his throat, and he falls down dead. Heart attack, no warning, right there on the sidewalk. He topples over like someone shot him and lies face down on the concrete.

“The kid doesn’t know what’s going on, he’s only two and a half. Is the father playing some sort of game with him? That’s all this kid knows. So he calls out to his dad, ‘Da-ad. Da-ad.’ You know, like it’s a song, like it’s a game. But his father doesn’t, his father
can’t
get up.

“‘Something is wrong’ registers in the kid’s brain . . . even caught in the middle between two and three, this message comes through loud and clear, but he can’t get out of the silver wagon, he’s stuck there, buckled in tight. He starts blinking tears, crying in that way toddlers cry, his lips curved in an ‘o,’ his wail silent then strong then silent again as he can’t catch his breath to pound it out.

“And then a man comes up, this homeless guy, this guy who reeks of alcohol and cigarettes and the kid thinks at first maybe this man will help him, help his dad, who is still lying face down on the sidewalk, but the raggedy man descends like a vulture, his eyes darting, he barks at the kid to ‘shut the hell up’ as he’s rifling through the father’s pockets and there’s not a damn thing the kid can do about it.

“The guy takes what he can and hurries away, leaving the kid, the boy who isn’t much more than a baby sitting there in the silver wagon, stuck there, a mile from home, where he can’t see anything but his father lying there dead on the sidewalk and still no one has noticed. No one has come for him. The mother is oblivious in a house a mile away and the father and son are gone for hours sometimes and she’s still forty-five minutes away from even thinking something’s wrong.

“The kid starts to cry again, because he’s scared now even if he doesn’t know why, but he’s scared in that part of him where deep, deep down through centuries and centuries of ingrained behavior we know we’re in danger even before we are.

“And right then, just as he’s getting worked up to really wail, a woman comes rushing out of her house. She’d just been looking out the window and saw that kid and that wagon stuck on the sidewalk and the man fallen over and he hasn’t gotten up and she rushes over to check on the man, and she feels for a pulse, but she knows he’s dead, and so quickly she has that seatbelt unbuckled and has the kid up and in her arms and she’s saying ‘it’s okay, it’s okay. What’s your name, child? What’s your name? Can you tell me your name?’

“And the kid knows his name, he does, it’s on the tip of his tongue, his parents have called him it a thousand times and he’s said it himself a few times too, but it won’t come out, he can’t make it come out and so he just shakes in her arms, sobbing.”

I sit there for a moment, listening for her on the other end of the phone.

“That’s it. That’s what I remember.”

Her breathing has stopped, like she’s afraid to exhale. After a long moment, she breaks the silence. “I wish I could tell you I knew this story. But I don’t.”

“Yeah. I haven’t been able to track it down.”

“Well I like it. I like it very much. I need to think about it some more. Consult some other sources.”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all.”

“Well, thank you. I really appreciate that, Risina.”

“Are you certain you’re okay?”

“Yes, I’m certain.”

“I’m very glad you called me, Jack. I’m still thinking of this story. I can see why it stuck with you.”

“Yes.”

We talk for another ten minutes about nothing before we say our goodbyes. I head into the bathroom, wrap the phone inside a towel, and then smash it with the heel of my shoe until it shatters into pieces. Slowly, methodically, I flush each piece down the toilet.

Thomas Saxon isn’t quite a billionaire, but he doesn’t mind when people make that mistake. He’s a vulture investor, a corporate raider, a man who never found a shortcut he wouldn’t take. He was a frequent attendee of the Predator’s Ball in Los Angeles in the eighties, when a few men created enormous wealth by building an entire financial market around junk bonds. Information was key—whether it could be gained legally or illegally didn’t matter. The SEC caught up with a few, others escaped scot-free, entire companies were carved up, chewed up, and spit out, but everyone involved made the kind of money that has strings of zeroes at the end of the number. The suckers were the ones who worked within the system, and the suckers never came out on top. Tommy Gun, as his friends called him, was nobody’s sucker.

He is living in an enormous house in East Atlanta, out past the airport. It was originally built for Evander Holyfield’s mother, but after she died, the champ didn’t want to set foot in it again. Saxon paid cash and moved in within a week of the funeral.

Like a lot of financial guys, Saxon thinks he is invincible, immune to the dangers that felled some of his friends and rivals. He narrowly dodged charges from the SEC in 1987 while he watched his associates drop like flies. He thought he was untouchable, special, lucky. This feeling of grandeur ultimately manifested in the hiring of dark men like me. How many men Tommy Gun has sentenced to death, I have no idea. Does he do it because of petty rivalries? Out of hubris? Or is it all just about money? I don’t have a fence to put files together for me, so the information I have is only what I can cobble together over the Internet or through an assortment of shadow guys I’ve come into contact with over the years. I am beginning to suspect Anton Noel meant nothing more to Saxon than numbers across a ticker, that his death was engineered to affect the price of Ventus-Safori’s stock. Yet, I feel a nagging at the back of my brain, like something doesn’t want to add up so easily, like the square peg is just a little too unwieldy to fit inside the round hole.

Often, an assassin will get to a mark through his vices. A guy might have a mistress, or visit a regular whore, and since he has to be sneaky about meeting the woman, he compromises himself, makes himself as easy to pick off as a duck at a broken-down shooting gallery. He might enjoy a specific type of cigar, or a certain bottle of wine, or participate in an illicit card game, and a contract killer can get to him by posing as a delivery guy or a rival gambler. Everyone has vulnerabilities; it is an assassin’s job to exploit them.

Saxon doesn’t keep a mistress, smoke cigars, or play poker. He doesn’t visit whores or collect French wines or smoke a little weed on the side. No, what Saxon likes to do is fish.

Every weekend, he drives an hour north of Atlanta, into the mountains, alone, and fly-fishes the Soque River. Fishing is a solitary endeavor, a chance for him to commune with nature. Maybe he does it because it brings back memories of him and his old man casting their lines. Maybe he does it to get out of the rat race and clear his mind. Or maybe he thinks stepping into the water will somehow wash his sins down the river.

I tail him for three straight weekends before determining the Soque River as the place our lives will intersect.

I am standing in the men’s room of a tiny store named Ramsey’s Bait and Tackle off of Highway 197 in the town of Jackson Bridge. A biting wind has kept most anglers near a warm fire this weekend, but not Saxon. Every Saturday, he makes the trek north, no matter the icy temperature or thick frost on the ground.

Saxon hasn’t yet come to the store, but he’ll be here soon. I take a quick look in the mirror and set my jaw, steeling myself, getting ready. The bell over the door in the front of the shop jingles.

I turn on the water of the sink and position myself behind the bathroom door so I’ll be hidden when he enters. I take one last breath as the handle starts to bend downward. If I were waiting for Saxon, this would be over in moments. But I’m not waiting for Saxon.

It is common to use a shiny lure to catch trout, letting the sun filter down through the murky water until the bait catches the fish’s eye and suckers him toward the hook.