Liberation Day

Chapter 20

He hadn’t lied: the door was still open. I touched him gently with the pistol on the side of his arm. “In you go, and leave this as it is.” He did as he was told, and even opened the door that led into the bathroom and the bedroom, to prove the place was deserted.

I stepped inside and it was immediately obvious that the magic cleaning fairy hadn’t paid any surprise visits since this morning. I turned the light off above me with the Browning’s muzzle, then pushed down the button that released the deadbolt so I could close the door with my heel. I raised the Browning, ready to go into the room.

The moment the door was shut, I reactivated the deadlock. I didn’t want anyone making entry with a key while I was clearing the apartment.

He was standing by the table. “I have the addresses….” He had to force his hand into his jeans, which were straining to hold in his gut.

“Turn the light out.”

He looked confused for a second, then understood. He reached for his Camels before moving to the switch; then we were plunged into darkness. A streetlight across the road glowed against the old man’s garden wall. Greaseball was nervous; the lighter wouldn’t keep still as he tried to direct the flame toward the tip of his cigarette. The shadows that flickered across his face made him look even more like something out of the Hammer House of Horror than he normally did.

I didn’t want the darkness for dramatic effect. I just didn’t want anyone to see a silhouette waving a pistol about through the net curtains.

“Now close the blinds on these balcony windows.”

I followed the red glow in his mouth as he pulled down on the canvas strap that controlled the wooden roller blinds, and began to lower them. “I really do have—”

“Wait, wait.”

Once the blinds were down I watched the glow of ash move back toward the couch, and listened to him wheezing as he tried to breathe through his nose with a mouth full of cigarette. He knocked into the table and I waited for the sound of him sitting down.

“You can turn the light back on now.”

He got up and walked past me to hit the switch.

I started to clear the apartment, with him in front of me as before. I glanced at the wall unit for another look at Curly. The Polaroids weren’t there. A dog barked its head off on the balcony above us as we entered the bedroom. It looked as if he had decided against tennis, after all. The bags, along with the syringes, had gone from under the bed. The apartment was clear: there was no one here but us.

As I moved toward the living room, I pushed the Browning back into my jeans and stood by the door. He collapsed back onto the couch, flicking his ash at an already full plate.

“You have the addresses?”

He nodded, pushing himself to the edge of his seat and reaching over the coffee table for his pen. “The boat, it will be at Pier Nine, berth forty-seven. I’ll write it all down for you. I was right. There are three collections, starting Friday in Monaco—”

I lifted my hand. “Stop. You’ve got the addresses in your pocket?”

“Yes, but — but…the ink’s bad. I’ll write them again for you.”

“No. Just show me what you’ve got in your pocket.” His excuse sounded too apologetic to be true.

He managed to squeeze his hand back into his jeans, and produced a sheet of lined paper that had been torn from a notebook and folded three or four times. “Here.” He leaned toward me with the sheet in his hand, but I pointed at the table. “Just open it up so I can read it.”

He laid it down on top of yesterday’s Nice Matin, and turned it around toward me. It wasn’t his writing, unless he’d been to neat lessons since this morning. This was very even and upright, the sort that girls in my grammar school used to practice for hours. And it belonged to a Brit or an American. The first address contained the number 617; the one didn’t look like a seven, and the seven didn’t have a stroke through it.

Monaco was marked “Fri.” Nice marked “Sat.” Here in Cannes was labeled “Sun.” “Who gave you these?”

He shrugged, visibly annoyed with himself, and probably shaken because he knew he’d messed up when he panicked at the beginning and got too eager to give me the addresses so I would go away. “No one, it’s my—”

“This isn’t your handwriting. Who gave it to you?”

“I cannot…I would be—”

“All right, all right, I don’t want to know. Who cares?” I did, really, but there were more important things to worry about right now and, besides, I thought I already knew. “Do you know the names of the collectors — or the hawallada?”

He shook his head and sounded breathless, probably because of the amount of nicotine he was inhaling. He couldn’t have been more than forty years old, but he’d be dead of lung cancer long before sixty.

“What about the collection times?”

“This is all I was able to find out.”

“How do I know these are correct?”

“I can guarantee it. This is very good information.”

I went over to crazy-threat mode. “It had better be, or you know what I will do to you, don’t you?”

He leaned back in the couch and studied my face. He wasn’t panicking now, which surprised me. He smiled. “But that’s not really going to happen, is it? I know things. How do you think I’ve survived so long?”

He was absolutely right. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it. These people can screw you around as much as they want. If they provide high-quality intelligence, nothing can happen to them unless people like George want it to. But what sources often fail to understand is that they’re only useful while they can provide information. After that, nobody cares. Apart from Hubba-Hubba and Lotfi, that is; I was sure they would continue to care a great deal.

He studied me for a long time and took another drag of his cigarette. The smoke leaked from his nostrils and mouth as he spoke. “Do you know what slim is?”

I nodded. I’d heard the word in Africa.

“That’s me — slim. HIV-positive. Not full-blown AIDS yet. I pump myself with antiretrovirals, trying to keep the inevitable from happening, but it will come, unless…. Well, what do I care what you do to me? But I used to wonder about Zeralda. I used to wonder if he had slim…” He was trying to hide a smile but couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from turning up. “Who knows? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he did, but didn’t know it. Slim has a way of doing that. It just creeps up on you.” He flicked some ash angrily onto the plate. “Maybe you should have a checkup yourself. There was a lot of blood, wasn’t there?”

Taking more nicotine into his lungs, he sat back and crossed his legs. He was enjoying this.

I didn’t let him know that I wasn’t that concerned by Zeralda’s splashed blood. I knew that I had about the same risk of contracting the disease from it as being struck by lightning on the same day I won the lottery.

I stared back at him. “If you don’t care about dying, why were you so scared in Algeria? And why were you scared earlier?”

He started to smoke like Oscar Wilde on a bad day. “When I go, my friend, I plan to go — how do you people say? — with a bang. Let me tell you something, my friend.” He leaned forward and stubbed out his second butt end. “I know there is no hope for me. But I do plan to end my life the way I wish to, and that certainly isn’t going to be at a time of your choosing. I still want to have a lot more living before slim really gets me — then bang!” He clapped his hands together. “One pill and I’m gone. I don’t want to lose my figure — as you can see I’m still the prettiest boy on the beach.”

I picked up the newspaper and folded it around the notebook page, making sure it was nice and secure, then rolled it up, as if I were on my way to the building site. “If you’re Iying about these addresses, I’ll get the green light to hurt you bad, believe me.”

He shook his head, and extracted another cigarette. “Never. I’m too valuable to your bosses. But you, you worry me, you have been out of your kennel too long.” He jabbed a nicotine-stained finger at me. “You would do it of your own accord. I felt that in Algeria.” There was the single click of his lighter and I heard the tobacco fizz. “I know you don’t like me, and I suppose I can understand that. But some of us have different desires and different pleasures, and we cannot deny ourselves our pleasures, can we?”

I ignored the question. I opened the door and he got to his feet. I left with the newspaper in my hand, wanting to get out of there quickly so I could resist the overwhelming urge to splatter him against the wall.