The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) (5 page)

Read The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) Online

Authors: John R. Maxim

On the autobahn, the van had dropped farther back, the driver biding time. Now, gradually, it closed the distance, ready to ease off if the Mercedes, which could easily outrun the van, accelerated. If it did, they would wait. It did not.
They were near the town of Sargans, where the autobahn would soon branch off toward Austria, and where the morning fog had begun to thicken, when the killers made their move. The Mercedes had remained in the right-hand lane, the van in the center. Now it moved up, slowly, until it had drawn abreast.
Elena Bragg saw the shape. She raised her eyes. The van's driver, a young man, no, a woman, thin, bad skin, was looking back at her. Shouting something. Not watching the road. What is it, she wondered. A low tire?
But then she knew. Even before the side door of the van swung open, she knew. She called a warning to Josef. But the door sprang back. Two men. One was tall, fair skinned. The other was short, dark, with a cigar between bared teeth. That was all she had time to see. Except for the weapons now appearing from behind their backs. The dark one fired first, at Josef.
One short burst, then a longer one. She saw his body shudder under the impact but still he tried to fight. She could see him groping for his weapon as he steered the big Mercedes into the open side of the van in an effort to block its line of fire. But the van swung wide and accelerated. She could see the two gunmen again.
They seemed to hesitate. They had clear shots at Russo and yet they were looking beyond him. They shifted their sights. It was then that Elena knew that she, not Dr. Russo, was their target. As Josef slumped forward, and as the slowing Mercedes drifted onto the soft shoulder of the road, they emptied their clips at her.
Flying glass ripped her scalp. One bullet shattered the forearm that held Russo. Another found her right shoulder, slamming her backward onto the seat. Russo, his last breath a scream of rage, his body jerking wildly under the impact of two dozen slugs, seemed to turn, deliberately, and hurl himself across her body.
She could see nothing. But she felt the bouncing of the Mercedes as it crossed the shoulder and tore through a signpost. It was in a field now, a plowed field, pitching over furrows, turning, tilting, then rolling, so slowly, onto its side. The Mercedes’ engine coughed and quit. Now she could hear the screech of brakes, and then running feet as the two from the van rushed to finish their work.
But suddenly, new gunfire. This from a distance. She felt a thrill of hope as, in her mind, she saw her cousin Willem racing up the road from Landquart, his own machine pistol spewing bursts of fire out the window of his car. The running feet stopped, then turned away. Doors slammed. Tires squealed.

Soon there was only Willem. His manner anguished but efficient, feeling the throats of first Russo, then Josef, nodding to her as if to say they were alive although the pain in his eyes told her that his brother, at least, was dead. Then there were sirens. Policemen. Paramedics dressed in orange jumpsuits. Men tugging at her, their voices distant. Then only dreams.

 

 

 

 

-4-

The nuns had told her, when she was a girl, that one's life passed in review at the moment of death. This was God's mercy, they said. He permitted his children that brief instant in which to remember all their sins, the better to make a good act of contrition.
That had not happened. It was probably for the best. Her thoughts at that time might not have been pleasing to God. The first was of revenge.

Even as the bullets screamed through glass and flesh, she knew who had sent these men. It seemed to her that she had prayed. That she had asked God to spare her long enough to send them to hell.

There were other thoughts, astonishing in their variety and clarity for so short a time. Two seconds. Three at the most. Perhaps the nuns were correct after all.
There were regrets. But more a sense of resignation. She could hardly complain. For much of her life she had played a dangerous game. She knew the risks. She, too, had sent out killers in her time. Still, it seemed less than fair. That life was behind her now. She had been to confession. She had given away millions. She had walked away from millions more.

Nor might God have been pleased that, at the moment of imminent death, she committed the sin of vanity. It was true. She would never tell her priest about it because, even as he gave her absolution he would bring a hand to his face so that she could not see him laugh. For at one point, for one of those seconds, what had seemed foremost in her mind was a concern for the appearance of her corpse. She saw a vision of herself as the police would find her: face bloodied, eyes staring at nothing, mouth gaping, hair dripping and matted, her body in an indecorous sprawl, legs apart, across the backseat of the Mercedes. They would take photographs. And so, even as Russo threw her backward and the car began to roll, she had curled up like a fetus and was struggling to hold her long leather skirt against her calves.

But most of all, she'd thought of Lesko. And whether he would come to see her body. And if he did, would he be sorry that he had hurt her.
And that, Elena knew full well, was the greatest absurdity of all. It was ludicrous. About to meet her maker and yet mooning like a schoolgirl over this great beast of a man who, two years earlier, would happily have seen her in prison and had himself come within a whisper of killing her.
It had happened in New York. Brooklyn. The back room of an abandoned barbershop on a street of gutted tenements. He was still a policeman then. He'd come with a shotgun in one hand, a pistol in the other and vengeance in his heart. He left death all around her. Yet, in the end, he could not pull his trigger that one last time. He'd left her standing there.
Josef had once remarked that she was born again that day. But she knew it was nothing of the sort. A time simply comes when enough is enough. She'd stood there, trembling, long after Lesko had turned away from her and had gone. Then, composing herself, she'd stepped over the bodies of the men he slaughtered, walked out onto the dead street of a dying city, and never again looked back. She would not retum to Bolivia. There was no reason. The last of her relatives, on her mother's side, were dead. Her house had been bombed in the drug wars, the servants frightened away. Her only home was a hotel suite in La Paz.
Nor could she have remained in the United States. There were two warrants for her arrest, one from the federal government, the other from the state of New York as a material witness to that so-called barbershop massacre that had filled the front pages of the city's newspapers.
But there was still Switzerland. Where her money was. Where her second family was—that of the Swiss father she had never been permitted to meet until, at age twenty, she telephoned him herself, then met him in Zurich soon after. He, too, was dead now. He had died in the same climbing accident that had crippled Uncle Urs. But Uncle Urs, no less formidable for being confined to a wheelchair, no less the head of the family, had now become her protector. And there were aunts, nephews, and many cousins. All of them welcomed her. Loved her. She felt alive again. Her past, her mistakes, were behind her. All of it. Except for Lesko.
In the two years since the barbershop he was never far from her thoughts. Not for a day. The priest had tried to explain it. This man, the priest said, this policeman, was the instrument of your salvation. Granted, this was not his intention. But your life did tum on your encounter with him. It is perfectly natural to feel certain emotions toward those who have importantly touched our lives.
“Certain emotions?” she asked softly. “The man despises me.”
“And you wish he did not?”
“Yes.”
“This too seems natural. If he was the instrument of your salvation, perhaps you would like him to know it. Perhaps you wish his forgiveness.”
“Father,” she closed her eyes, ” I ordered the death of his partner.”
‘The corrupt detective? The one who was stealing from you?”
“Yes.”
“And yet, in avenging the partner, Lesko spared you. He must have seen something in you, Elena.”
“He saw a small frightened woman who traffics in cocaine. If I were a man I would have been dead.”
“And what did you see?”
“In Lesko?”
“Yes.”
“An honorable man.”
“To whom you told the truth. Even if you would die for it”
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps he saw honor in you as well.”
“Perhaps,” she said quietly. “Father?”
“Yes?”
“If I ask this, you will not laugh?”
”I will not laugh, Elena.”
“Is it possible to love such a man?”
“It is clearly possible to become obsessed with such a man. Elena.” The priest took her hand in his. “By your own account you saw this Lesko once in your life for no more than five minutes. And afterward, you sent out word among your former associates that, on the lives of their own women and children, neither Lesko nor any member of his family was to be harmed. For that reason alone you might feel a certain bonding with him. But love? I do not think so.”
”I suppose not,” she said. Her cheeks were buming.
“May I now ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“If he, or a member of his family had been harmed, would you have made good your threat?”
“Immediately.”
“But not now. You have renounced all violence just as you have renounced your past.”
“It has been two years, Father. The question no longer arises.”
“But if it did,” he pressed.
”I have not attained sainthood, Father. I owe the man a debt. I will pay it if I can.”
Then, perhaps, he could forgive. Even if God and her priest would not. At least, then, she could be free of him.
The two years in Zurich were a cleansing time in a place of peace and beauty. It was one of the few cities in the world that had no slums, no stink of poverty. She made new friends, first those of her cousins and then her own. She began to entertain, as often as before, but now it was for the pleasure of good company. No more strutting Bolivian generals and fawning politicians. No more swinish Colombians with gold crosses on their chests and knives in their pockets who came for the coca leaf with trunks full of American dollars. No more Americans in their suits and ties with the struggle against Marxism on their lips and the rape of her country in their hearts.
In all the ways that she could think of, she remade herself. She allowed herself to gain two kilos of weight. Her cousins said that it became her. She had long been too thin. But she kept her body firm through long solitary hikes in summer and ski lessons in winter. She lightened her hair, to look all the more European, and she cut it short. She wondered if Lesko would like it. She knew that was foolish, the conceit that he would care enough to comment, that he would even remember her face. But she wondered nonetheless.
She remembered him. She'd even painted him. Or tried. It was near the end of the first year. The horror of that day in Brooklyn had begun to fade. Even the lines of Lesko's face, which she saw now and again in dreams, began to soften. It was a massive face, more square than oval. Hair combed straight back, thinning just a bit on top, the color of steel at the sides. It was also a hard face. The eyes were menacing, the mouth was cruel. And yet, she felt, it was not life that made them so, because Lesko's face could be frightening even in repose. His teeth were white, even, and cosmetically perfect and yet, when she tried painting a smile, the result was as intimidating as a Lesko scowl. Unfortunate. An accident of physiognomy. And the eyes, quick, intelligent, cunning, must certainly have been capable of expressing tenderness at some time in Lesko's life—he had, after all, been married once, and had held a child—but her brushes could not find it.

She put the painting away. But she felt good that it was near. She felt safe. Her new life went forward, a season at a time.

And then, one day in January, the phone rang,
and the
flesh-and-blood Lesko was back in her life. A part of her had never expected otherwise.
It was Josef who called.
“Elena,” he asked, “do you know a man named Raymond Lesko?”
Her throat became full.
“This man, Lesko,
5
’ Josef told her, “has been calling from America. He calls every Brugg in the Zurich directory. He is quite insistent. He says he knows that you are here and you must call him back. He says it concerns not himself but his daughter.”
His daughter. Elena bit her lip. Could they have harmed her after all? Fearfully, she placed the call to the number Lesko had left.
She had prepared herself for ... she did not know what. The worst of news. Threats. Contempt. The hard voice of a hard man who loathed everything she had been. But his voice, when he answered the phone and she said her name, became quiet, gentle, sometimes halting and shy in the manner of a bashful boy. He must have realized how he sounded because he abruptly cleared his throat.

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