Chapter 36
Dusk comes,Tristan is still asleep, and I am making my way to the club in the dark.
I don’t like wigs or hats or scarves while I work, and yet my hair is too distinctive not to hide, so I’ve dyed it dark with a temporary dye that will wash out with a few rinses. I’m in black pants, black boots, and a long-sleeved black shirt, my knife strapped to my thigh and hidden by the black trench coat I wear. I stay in the shadows when I can, but I make sure to keep my demeanor light and casual when I cross streets and squares. Belgrade is a night city, crowded and thrumming with people craving music, drugs, sex, and it’s best to blend in rather than to skulk. Here, my saint’s clothes just look like edgy club-wear, like I’m going to twist my body to EDM and drink black-light-reactive drinks until I’m dizzy.
I don’t go in through the front of the club this time. I approach from the back and stop in the shadows across from the same door Andrea was standing outside when I overheard her phone call. It doesn’t take long for the door to swing open—a lanky employee taking a bag of trash to a dumpster—and as he disappears back inside, I move forward silently, quickly, and catch the closing door with my boot. And then I slip into the club and pull on a pair of latex gloves.
There is no security back here in the staff hallway, and the VIP area itself is not surveilled by camera—I assume because the clientele would prefer not to have what they do committed to video. No, the bulk of the security comes from muscle, from hired guns.
In some ways easier to deal with than electronic surveillance, and in other ways much, much worse.
I drop my hand to my knife and breathe my usual prayer to St. Michael. I spent the afternoon stretching and praying and mentally rehearsing this. It will be fast and direct. No one bats an eye when a violent person meets a violent end, and so it’s a relief not to have to stage anything elaborate, to do this in the simplest way.
Blade, blood, done.
I duck my head as I take the stairs two at a time, emerging through the door to the VIP balcony and into a world of lights and music. It’s disorienting after the brightly lit staff staircase, but I’m ready for that too, waiting patiently for my eyes to adjust so I can see the way to the booth Kulov occupied last time. Predictably, there are three men in suits in front of it.
The men are giants; the suits are cheap.
All the other booths are unguarded.
I wish this were the movies. I wish I had some special gadget—a dart gun, a tiny gas cannister—that would take out the guards without killing them. I doubt they are good people, but there’s a cheapness to their deaths that depresses me.
I cannot keep myself hidden for long up here, so I don’t try. I approach the booth at a stride, confirming for myself as I draw my knife that I see Kulov and another man’s shoulder.
Drobny. Perfect.
One of the security guards steps in front of me, not seeing the knife until it’s too late. By the time he falls, clutching uselessly at his bleeding throat, I’ve done the same to the man behind him. The third has managed to pull out his gun, but I’m too close for it to do him any good. I slice up at his wrist, sweeping the blade all the way through the motion, and then I bring the point of my knife back down into the place where his neck joins his shoulder. It sinks into him until I hit bone. I jerk the knife free.
He drops and I step forward to the table, disappointment like an arrow to the gut when I see that the second man in the booth isn’t Drobny.
Fuck.
He must be at his safe house after all.
The strange man and Kulov are both fumbling for their own guns now, their clumsiness explained by the cocaine dust and empty vodka bottles on the table. I’m irritated, upset, and regretful as I slit the throat of the man I don’t recognize and then stab my knife through Kulov’s hand and pin it to the table.
He screams, but it doesn’t matter. The club is too loud for screams. And the lights are too erratic, too blinding, for anyone to make sense of what’s happened up here. Four slowly cooling bodies right above them and the half a thousand people just below are none the wiser.
“Where’s the safe house?” I demand in English. “Where’s Drobny?”
Kulov is trying to get his gun with his other hand now, and I can’t have that. I yank my knife free and drive it into his stomach.
His eyes go round, his shoulders jerk forward. The fear in his face is childish and pathetically confused. It’s the same for so many like him. You maim and murder for long enough, and it gets easy to mistake your cruelty for invulnerability. For immortality. You forget that even the apex predators become carrion after long enough.
“Where is Drobny?” I ask again. I don’t have to twist the knife much to make him scream. “Tell me!”
He’s babbling in Slovak now, trying to paw at me with his punctured hand. Blood is everywhere—the real reason why black clothes are so useful, aside from blending into the shadows.
“English,” I say. “Or I won’t call an ambulance when I’m done with you.”
Hope is sometimes a better weapon than a knife. Even when it’s entirely a lie.
Three minutes later, I’m flicking the worst of the blood off my knife and murmuring the prayer for forgotten souls over their corpses.
O merciful God, take pity on those souls who have no particular friends and intercessors to recommend them to Thee…
And then I’m walking away, down the stairs with my head ducked and then out the alley door, long gone before the poor cocktail waitress finds the bloodbath I left behind.
* * *
Drobny’ssafe house is in a partially burned block of apartments, the concrete scorched on one side with scattered windows lit up on the other. Even though my hands shake a little as I approach the building and step into the broken shell of the ground floor, I am eager to kill this man, perhaps more eager than I’ve been to kill anyone in the last year. Not only because I know him to be evil, but also because he tried to kill Mark, my husband. My jailer.
The very thought of Mark dying terrifies me. It is pernicious how much I’ve grown to care for him.
I take as much care as I can going up the stairwell, but the ash and glass and debris from the fire still litter the treads, and my steps crunch more than I’d like as I climb up to the tenth floor. Agony stabs through my right ankle every time I put weight on it, and there’s a nasty ache from hip to thigh that tells me I’m going to have a fairly dramatic bruise there. I didn’t quite make it out of the club undetected and was chased nearly to the blokovi before I killed one of my pursuers and lost the other with a hasty lunge from the bridge to the train tracks several feet below. I got away, but my ankle and hip paid the price.
But the adrenaline is fizzing in my blood; I’m sharp, alert, ready. When I get to the right floor, I slide my knife free and steady myself. Pull my breath and balance into my center. I don’t know whether to expect one person in the safe house or ten, and I don’t know if I’m about to kill an unsuspecting man or a man who’s been alerted that his people are being hunted all over town.
The hall is dark, a husk of a hallway, with half-charred apartment doors yawning open and the moldering remains of sofas and tables and pictures inside, all of them water-stained and streaked with soot.
There’s a faint light from the end, a place where the debris slowly stops and the walls are clean—the fire spared this section. I adjust my grip on the knife, my fresh pair of latex gloves cool and dry, and get ready to peer into the open doorway.
I hear a scream.
It’s a scream like the others I’ve heard tonight, a grown man in unbelievable pain. The scream of someone who never thought pain would happen to them.
Is Drobny torturing someone in there? That is a complication I didn’t plan for and one that I’m not sure how to work around. I wouldn’t kill an innocent person—but how to know if they’re innocent? And witnesses are never a good idea…
But when I stop at the edge of the door and carefully angle myself to see inside, a jolt of pure, unblemished panic rips through me.
Drobny isn’t torturing someone. And this isn’t a complication.
This is my husband.
My husband is standing inside Drobny’s safe house, a tarp spread beneath his feet, a bare light bulb from the kitchen casting him in dramatic shadows. He’s wearing black-latex gloves, just like me, and a black knit hat pulled snugly over his hair. He’s not wearing the suit he left the penthouse in but tactical clothes very similar to mine, with a leather jacket instead of a trench coat.
Drobny is zip-tied to a chair in front of him, shirtless and black-eyed. The tarp is underneath him too, although it’s hardly necessary. It’s currently spotless, save for the two bags of blood tossed carelessly to one corner and a few shiny spots below Drobny, which I think are spatters of sweat. I angle myself a bit more and see the IV catheter taped neatly on the inside of one of Drobny’s elbows—Mark’s been slowly depleting him of blood. Maybe injecting him with something too. An expedient way to weaken someone, to kill them, without all the mess of stabbing and slicing, without the effort of strangling.
The efficiency of it is chilling, even to me. Me who is holding the hilt of a knife that’s still speckled with gummy flecks of drying blood.
I blink a few times and try to make sense of what the fuck is happening, what this means. Mark is not collecting information from a member, and Andrea is nowhere in sight. Mark is at a safe house that was extremely difficult to locate, and Mark is torturing and about to kill the same person I’ve been tasked to kill.
Mark who is supposed to be retired from that life. Mark who drinks gin all day and fucks like it’s preferable to breathing. Mark who occupies himself with manipulating stocks and legislation when it amuses him.
This is not that Mark.