The Accident Man

20

They’d danced, they’d drunk champagne, they’d even eaten Thai food from the club’s restaurant. Sealed off from the outside, in a world that stretched from their table to the bar to the dance floor, it was almost as if that mad hour of violence and death had never happened. As long as the music played and the drink flowed, they were just two regular people, civilians out for a Saturday night. Until Carver realized they’d been made.

“There’s a man over there who keeps looking at you,” he told Alix, trying to make himself heard over the thumping din of Eurodisco.

She rolled her eyes dismissively and shouted back, “Of course there is.”

“No. He’s really looking. The fat bloke, with the arm candy, by the far wall. I think he knows you.”

Carver followed her eyes as she glanced across the dance floor. A big, middle-aged guy with buzz-cut hair, a coarse, jowly face, piggy eyes, and a shiny golden brown suit was sitting behind a table. The combination of brutality, self-indulgence, and vulgarity was unmistakable. “Russian,” thought Carver. One of these days he’d meet a rich Muscovite who didn’t look like a gangster. But it hadn’t happened yet.

The Russian’s hands were all over two identical blond party girls. He was casually pawing their thighs and breasts while the girls giggled and wriggled, pretending to enjoy it. That was their job. But whatever the fat man was doing with his hands, his mind wasn’t on the bimbos at all. He was looking at the dance floor.

The Russian gave the girl on his left an elbow in the ribs. That got her full attention.

He barked a few words in her ear and nodded his head in Alix’s direction. The girl jabbered back at him and he threw up his hands as if to say, “Enough.” She nodded sulkily and shrugged her shoulders, all pretense of sexual attraction gone.

Alix watched the pantomime, then shook her head. “I don’t know him.”

Carver pulled Alix close to him, speaking right into her ear. “Don’t bullshit me. He’s Russian. I can tell just by looking at him. Why was he looking at you?”

“I don’t know, okay?”

Carver said nothing. Alix sighed heavily.

“Okay, the girls were in the ladies’ room when I was there. Maybe they’re telling him about the crazy chick who cut her hair. How should I know?”

Carver let her go. He glanced across at the Russian, who had a glass in one hand and a girl in the other. He seemed to have lost interest in Alix, but even so, Carver wanted to get out. The question was, how to do it without attracting the fat man’s attention?

He was just about to make his move when the lights came up and he finally understood why Max had wanted him dead, why the stakes were far, far higher than he had imagined.

It happened without warning. One moment the Eurodisco beats were crashing out, the next there was total silence, the houselights were on, and the deejay was delivering a message in French that was being spoken in countless different languages at that exact moment in every corner of the world.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know how to say this,” he began, his voice hesitant and strained. “I cannot believe it. But the Princess of Wales is dead. She was injured in a terrible car crash, right here in Paris, in the Alma Tunnel. They took her to the hospital of Salpêtrière, but the doctors could do nothing. She is dead.” The deejay said nothing for a second or two, then added, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can play right now.”

People were standing on the dance floor, looking around as if searching for some clue as to how they should react. Slowly the murmur of voices grew to a hubbub. There was a rush to the deejay’s booth and a desperate clamor for more information, mixed with pleas to come on, stop joking, tell us you’re just kidding around. And gradually, through it all, came the sound of sobbing as women clung to their partners, weeping, or simply fell to the floor in grief.

Amid the chaos, Carver stood motionless, as stunned as if he had been caught in his own dazzler beam, unable to grasp the magnitude of what had happened. He felt physically sick, clammy with sweat, his head heavy, blood pounding in his ears. His vision blurred, crackles of light flashing across his eyes, fragmenting the world around him. His mind seemed to be slipping out of his control. Then, at last, his survival instinct kicked in, and, as he got a grip on his consciousness, his pulse slowed and his breathing returned to normal.

He bent almost double, putting his hands on his knees and letting his head hang down. Then he let his breath out in a slow, steady stream and stood upright again, ready to face the truth. It really had happened, and he was the man who’d done it. The evidence was inescapable. The images on those TV screens, cutting from the devastation in the Alma Tunnel to the princess on her holidays, finally made perfect sense.

He thought back to the moment he’d found Alix’s bag in the apartment, his conversation with Max, his attempt to justify what he did by targeting those who deserved their fate and trying to spare civilians. Those principles had come to a cataclysmic, bloody end, hadn’t they?

In some distant corner of his consciousness, he was aware of Alix standing beside him. Her face was ashen, her eyes a million miles away. She was moaning, wordlessly, no more able than he was to articulate the conflict of thoughts and feelings tearing through her.

Carver felt as though every eye in the room was on him, that the mark of Cain was burning on his forehead. He told himself that was crazy: They were all too busy trying to cope with what they had heard to worry about anyone else. And then he realized that his instinct had been correct. He was being watched. So was Alix. And the madness was about to begin again.

In the flat, harsh glare of the houselights, Carver saw the Russian. He’d taken his hands off the girls and the drink. Now he was talking into a phone. Every so often he looked in their direction.

“Damn!” Carver spat under his breath. “We’re getting out of here. Now!”

He did not wait for Alix to reply, just grabbed her arm and pulled her from the dance floor. There was a waitress standing by one of the tables near where Carver and Alix had been sitting. He gave her five hundred bucks, pressing the notes into her hand. “Pour l’addition. Tenez la monnaie. Alors, où est la cuisine?”

The waitress did not reply, barely even noticing the money in her hand. There were tears streaming down her face. Carver shook her. He asked again where the kitchen was, his urgency forcing her to listen.

“Over there,” she murmured, limply waving an arm toward a double door set into the wall beyond the tables.

“Does it have a staff exit?”

“Yes, but…” She stood there motionless, muttering vague protests as Carver and Alix brushed past her.

Just as they reached the swing doors into the kitchen, Carver glanced back at the table where the fat guy was sitting. He was getting to his feet, gesticulating at two sidekicks who’d suddenly materialized on the floor in front of his table. Carver slipped through the doors and into the noise, the heat, and the smells of a working kitchen, a pungent blend of fish, meat, spice, and sweat.

He turned to look back through one of the porthole windows in the doors.

One of the fat man’s underlings was heading downstairs; the other was walking toward the restaurant area, a tall, solidly built guy with pockmarked skin and a ponytail. His suit was an oily blue. His shoes were pale gray. A gold medallion nestled in thick black chest hair, and there was more gold on his wrist and fingers.

Alix was already a few paces ahead of Carver, making her way through the sweaty, food-stained kitchen staff at their stations. A couple of them gave her a whistle and a filthy remark as she went by. Then they saw the look in Carver’s eye as he followed and decided that if she belonged to him, they’d be well advised to shut up.

Beyond the kitchen more swing doors opened into a narrow hallway. To the left, it led to a staircase that dropped away to ground level. There were a couple of doors on the far side of the corridor: a storeroom, an office. The lights were out. There was no one in either of them.

“Keep moving,” said Carver. “Go down the stairs. Make a lot of noise. Go!”

He listened to her running along the uncarpeted floorboards, then ducked into the office. The door opened inward. He stood behind it, holding it almost shut, without letting the catch close completely.

A few seconds later Carver heard the door to the kitchen burst open. He pictured the man with the ponytail standing in the corridor, gun held in front of him, surveying the emptiness in front of him, then hearing the sound of Alix’s feet on the stairs.

There were footsteps as the man went by. Carver eased the door open and stepped out into the corridor. He took three quick steps forward. The man heard him on the third step, but it was too late. He couldn’t stop, turn, and bring his gun around before Carver raised his left hand, brushed his right arm away and, in the same cobra-fast movement, jabbed two fingers into his eyes.

The Russian squealed in pain, dropped his gun, and held his hands up to his blinded eyes. Carver kept moving. He shifted his weight onto his right foot, rotated his shoulders, and slammed the heel of his right palm into the man’s chin. Another shoulder rotation and a shift of weight through the hips brought Carver’s left elbow up to crack into the man’s cheekbone. Now his right knee piled into the man’s defenseless groin. As he doubled over in pain, Carver karate-chopped the back of his neck. The Russian dropped unconscious to the floor. It was the basic five-second knockout – lesson one in the special forces’ fighting handbook. Worked every time. Unless the other guy had read the same book.

Carver thought about pulling the man back down the passage by his stupid ponytail, but decided against it and grabbed him under the armpits instead. He dragged the unconscious body into the empty office, then stepped back out into the passage. Now came the interesting bit. He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the stairwell. In the dim light from the passage, he could see a flight of steps, then a small landing, then another flight, which turned back the other way and disappeared beneath him.

“Alix?” he hissed.

He wondered if she’d be there. If she’d run he knew for certain he was on his own. If she’d stayed, it wasn’t so simple. She might be on his side. Or she could be sticking close so she could help someone else.

Alix appeared on the landing. She looked at Carver.

“So, what are we going to do now?”

“The only thing we can do for now. Disappear.”