Bad Luck in Berlin: An Exclusive Short Story

CHAPTER 9

‘How about another orange juice?’ Anika asked Victor.

He shook his head, said, ‘Not now,’ and stood.

She asked another question but he was already walking away. Letting Deák exit the bar without his knowledge was the kind of amateur level mistake Victor thought he’d left behind years before. Ascertaining the threat posed by the man he now believed to be Basayev had been a necessary precaution, but he shouldn’t have let Anika distract him. It hadn’t even been a purely physical distraction. He had been surprised by her reaction to the broken glass and felt bad for scaring her.

The whole sequence of events with the glass of orange juice had lasted no more than ninety seconds, beginning to end. Deák could have left at any point during that period. It would have taken five seconds for him and the hooker to slide off their seats and get out of the booth. Then four seconds to exit the bar. Up to eighty-one seconds left with which to disappear with.

Victor exited the bar in two seconds, reducing Deák’s head start to seventy-nine seconds. The Turk and his boss with the grey hair and beard were nowhere to be seen. Wherever Deák was, they would be just behind him.

The casino floor had five exits excluding the bar — a doorless entranceway that opened up to the restaurant, the corridor leading to the main exit, two unmarked doors for casino staff, and one for the restrooms. The two service doors were not options. That left three. Deák and the blonde wouldn’t be using the toilets, either out of necessity or squashed together in a cubicle. They could have more efficiently done either in the bar’s own. Two exits left.

He walked quickly, but not too quickly, towards the corridor leading to the main exit. He typed out a text message on his phone as he did — a man in a hurry replying to something important, searching for better reception. The restaurant was on the far side of the casino floor and a minute’s casual walk through the crowd and around the tables. Deák would have had plenty of time to reach the maître d’ stand and could be now waiting to be seated or on his way with the blonde to a table. It would take Victor forty seconds to get to the restaurant to confirm they were there. If they weren’t, Victor would have to recross the casino floor, losing another forty seconds and putting him 159 seconds behind Deák. Plenty of time to have reached outside and got into a cab and taken a turning off the street and be lost in the city by the time Victor got onto the sidewalk. And if Deák and the blonde were in the restaurant they would still be there after Victor had checked they hadn’t left the casino.

Deák was seventy-nine seconds ahead when Victor entered the casino floor. It took him nineteen seconds to reach the corridor leading to the main exit, and would take another eleven to get outside. Deák would have covered the distance no more than a third slower. Sixty-nine seconds ahead. If he was on foot he would still be visible. If not, it would take seven seconds to get into the first of the taxis lined up outside. Eight seconds to tell the driver where they were going. Two seconds for the driver to start the engine. Three to take off the handbrake and put the car in gear. One second to check his mirrors. Four seconds to pull out. Fifty-two seconds left. At only ten miles per hour that was 763 feet. Enough to reach an intersection and disappear around a turning or so that Victor would only see the tail lights glinting in the distance by the time he pushed through the revolving doors.

An amateur mistake.

But Deák wasn’t in a cab. He wasn’t on the street outside either. Victor checked with first taxi driver waiting outside the casino. He’d been there twenty minutes without a fare. Deák was in the casino restaurant, ordering a late supper for himself and the blonde. The grey-haired man with the meticulously trimmed beard was sitting at a nearby table. The Turk wasn’t in sight. There didn’t need to be both of them in the restaurant to confirm Deák was there and having been close to him in the bar, even a clueless crew didn’t want to risk avoidable exposure.

Victor saw the Turk when he returned to the bar. He was perched on a barstool waiting for another beer, looking somewhere between annoyed and exasperated. Too many false starts in one night. Victor sympathised.

Basayev was still at his little table. His neutral expression was just the same as when Victor had last seen it, except that now he nodded a single time at Victor. An almost friendly gesture.

Victor took a stool at the bar. When the Turk checked his phone and left, so would he. It wouldn’t be a long wait, maybe half an hour. Someone of Deák’s thin frame wouldn’t eat a huge meal at this time of night and the blonde would be keen to move things along as the sooner Deák was out of breath with a grin on his face, the sooner she could help someone else celebrate. It would have been more discreet for Victor to wait outside the casino, but he had returned to the bar to see whether Basayev was still present. While Anika fixed Victor another orange juice he considered that fact.

Basayev hadn’t moved when Victor had left to find Deák. If either Deák or his boss Farkas was Basayev’s target then losing a visual was a significant risk and one that seemed out of place with so careful a professional. So either Basayev knew exactly where Deák was going to be at some later point and there was no need to survey him so closely, or he knew Deák would now be in the restaurant. If the first option was true then Basayev had no need to be in the casino bar at all and was risking exposure for no benefit. That didn’t make sense. And if Basayev knew Deák was now in the restaurant with the blonde without having to check himself, then the blonde had to be under Basayev’s employ. But the blonde had shared a look of friendly rivalry with the other hooker. They knew each other. They both regularly worked the casino, competing for the same business but each getting enough clients not to have any genuine dislike for the other. A prostitute who relied on casino patrons to pay her rent wouldn’t betray one to someone she didn’t know or trust.

Therefore Basayev didn’t know Deák’s current location. He could have left the casino in a taxi to the airport for all Basayev knew. No killer, least of all one so careful and aware, would allow that to happen. Which meant one thing.

Neither Deák nor Farkas could be Basayev’s target.

Victor wasn’t either. There were too many reasons against it. He hadn’t been in Berlin long enough for one of his many enemies to track him down and put someone on the ground ahead of him. He’d never stolen from a Chechen warlord and people trafficker either. The only person who knew he was in Berlin was his employer, and he would know better than to send a lone man after him. Victor had met the man who hired him just once but from that short meeting knew he was too smart for such an error. If his paymaster was going to set him up the attempt would be much harder to identify and much harder to escape from. He knew Victor’s recent history. He wouldn’t make the same mistakes others had.

So if Basayev’s target wasn’t Victor or Deák or Farkas, then who was?

Anika wiped down the bar in front of Victor and said, ‘I hope you’re going to be more careful with that orange juice than the last.’

Victor gripped the glass. ‘I’ve got it glued to my hand.’

She smiled easily, relaxed, her face nothing like it had been in her reaction to the broken glass. Yet someone who worked behind a bar would hear glasses smashing on a regular basis. And even if she was new and still unused to such surprises, she would have only been startled, not scared. There was a reason why sudden noises frightened her.

Victor asked, ‘How long have you worked here?’

‘Almost a year.’

‘Like it?’

She did a little dance with her shoulders as she decided how to answer. ‘It’s a job. Like any other.’

She didn’t know Victor. She wasn’t going to tell a stranger she hated what she did for a living. He gave an understanding nod.

‘What about you,’ she began, ‘some kind of construction work?’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Your hand was rough. I don’t mean that as an insult,’ she was quick to add. ‘It just felt as though you don’t sit in an office all day.’

‘I do work in an office,’ he said, ‘but I do a lot of climbing. Where are you from?’

She gestured around. ‘Here. Berlin.’

‘Your parents aren’t German though, right?’

She looked uncomfortable and answered without looking at him. ‘That’s right.’

‘Where are they from?’

He smiled as though they were just making small talk, like he was a regular patron and not a professional assassin and she was a regular bartender, not someone who lived with the kind of fear that made her panic at the sound of breaking glass. He saw her debating with herself whether to say more, but in the end she trusted him enough to say, ‘They’re Moldovan. Me too, but I’ve lived in Germany for three years now.’

‘How do you like Berlin?’ he asked.

‘I love it. Germans are so friendly.’

Victor asked himself what Anika could have stolen from a Chechen warlord and people trafficker that would justify sending a man like Basayev after her. It had to be something of considerable value to the warlord to warrant the time and expense and risk of setting a killer on her trail. It had to be something personal because Victor doubted Anika had the know-how to have smuggled large amounts of cash or jewellery into the EU and if it was money or jewels then she wouldn’t need to work in a job she didn’t like. It had to be something precious to Anika to warrant living with the kind of fear that made her panic at the sound of breaking glass after three years.

There was only one thing she could have stolen.