Chapter 14
“I’m going to move my hand to the right,” he said, “away from my gun.”
His voice shook. He received the barest of nods in response.
In the mirror, he saw two guns pointing at Ulyan by the door, who hadn’t even had time to put down his New York Post before he was disarmed.
Amir had never regarded Ulyan highly, and now had confirmation; but then, Ulyan hadn’t respected Amir either, so they were both right.
Farther along the bar, Kade was motionless, as was Louis, but Louis was more relaxed than Kade because two Japanese men were not leveling pistols at him.
This disappointed Amir almost as much as the attitude of the bartender, since he had always associated the Japanese with politeness.
He had never seen a Japanese person holding a gun outside of a war movie.
Behind Amir, another of what he had mistaken for the bar’s regular clients locked the door and extinguished the neon sign in the window.
Finally, the music was turned off, leaving them all briefly in silence, broken by the ringing of a cell phone.
The man who had locked the door answered the call, acknowledged whatever was said, then hung up and signaled to Louis.
In the mirror, Amir could see the rest of the bar’s clientele were also holding pistols of varying makes and calibers.
Either the tech industry was even more cutthroat than rumor suggested, or Kade had walked them into a trap.
The older bartender came from behind the bar to relieve Amir of his gun. She approached him from the left side, keeping clear of the sawed-off barrels, in case Amir decided to do something stupid that necessitated his decapitation.
“Are you left-handed?” the younger bartender asked him, though Amir supposed it should have been her dark-haired colleague who asked, since the latter was the one doing the disarming.
“No, right,” said Amir.
“Then why wear your gun on the left side?”
Amir blushed.
“I don’t know.”
But he did: because he thought it was cool, despite Kade having stressed, on more than one occasion, that it wasn’t.
“Dumb,” said the woman.
“I did warn him,” said Kade. He continued looking at Louis, one hand resting by his Scotch, the other held away from his body. “But these young people, they just don’t listen.”
“They may not listen any closer after today,” said Louis. “You haven’t covered yourself in glory here.”
“I didn’t expect you to take over the whole bar. I didn’t even think it was your kind of place, though I should have guessed from the shitkicker music.”
“Black shitkicker music.”
“Whatever.”
“Your loss. By the way, we took your boy outside too.”
Kade frowned.
“Pity. I had higher hopes for him.”
“At least he’s still alive to learn from the experience,” said Louis. “In lower company, he might not have been so lucky. Same goes for the two here. As for you, I can’t say. You always were hard to call.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Take it how you like, I don’t care.”
Louis got up from his stool and took three steps back. “You can stand now. One of my friends will frisk you, though it would help everyone breathe easier if you were to point him in the right direction. It’s polite to show willing.”
Kade stood.
“Belt, right side,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Seriously?”
One of the Japanese chess players removed the 9mm Mossberg from Kade’s gun belt and ejected the magazine and the round in the chamber.
He then proceeded to search Kade thoroughly, all while his opponent continued to target Kade’s head.
But Kade was telling the truth and no other weapon was discovered.
Louis resumed his seat and indicated that Kade should do the same.
“I didn’t come here to kill you,” said Kade, “despite what you might be thinking. Even if I had, one gun would have been enough for the job.”
“Yet you came in here with backup, and more on the street.”
“Consider it an understandable excess of caution, given what’s just gone down.”
“An excess, after picking up a paper with my name on it? There isn’t enough caution in the world for that. Did you really think you were going to make bank on the deal?”
“No,” said Kade. “I figured you’d hear.”
“And still you picked it up.”
“You haven’t asked why.”
“There can only be two reasons,” said Louis. “One is poverty, and you don’t dress poor.”
“I’m not.”
“Then give me reason number two.”
“I picked it up so that no one else would.”
Louis regarded him thoughtfully.
“You know it’s true,” said Kade.
“Do I?”
“If I was going to follow through on the contract, I’d have shot you in the head from behind, up close and intimate. You wouldn’t have known a thing about it.”
“Assuming you could get up close and intimate with me.”
“I’d rate my chances.”
And Louis thought Kade might have been right, but whether he could have followed through was debatable.
“It didn’t sound like your scene,” said Louis. “Last I heard, you were a contractor of a different stripe.”
“I still am. I like government work. It pays surprisingly well.”
“Depends on the government. The worse they are, the better they pay.”
“I’m not greedy,” said Kade. “And I have a conscience.”
This had always differentiated Kade from Louis. The former’s morality had barely flickered from the start, while the latter’s only slowly incandesced.
“It’s what confused me when your name came up,” said Louis. “Worried me, too.”
“Because you wondered what might have been bad enough to cause me to pick up the paper,” said Kade.
“If I had to guess, I’d say it was from way back.”
Louis had left wreckage in his wake—it came with the territory, and with Parker—but anyone clinging to that flotsam wouldn’t have attracted Kade’s interest, not for any sum.
He’d have been more likely to stamp on their fingers and watch them sink.
In the right hands, morality was a double-edged sword.
“Because now you have a conscience as well,” said Kade.
“Don’t believe everything you hear. I’m a work in progress.”
Louis picked up his glass, tapped it to Kade’s, and both men drank, Kade more deeply than Louis because his nerves required more steadying.
“Did you really believe I’d accept money to kill you?”
“I wasn’t sure,” said Louis.
In truth, he trusted only three men in the world.
Two of those were in Maine, and the third was himself.
As for Kade, Louis had been only a fleeting figure in his life, and while they had parted on good terms, people changed, particularly when money was involved, with the degree of change being proportionate to the amount of money on offer.
“I owe you a lot,” said Kade.
“You don’t,” said Louis. “And even if that was true, not everyone pays their debts.”
“After all this time, I still don’t fully understand why you took me in—and the rest that you and Angel did, all that came after.”
Funds: sufficient for Kade to hold his head up in company, but not enough to cloud it; a private education; guidance, when asked for or required; and discipline, when necessary.
But Kade saw Louis just once or twice a year, if that, and Angel more seldom still.
After a while, Kade did not see them at all, but it did not mean that he forgot.
Meanwhile, Louis might have dismissed the intervention as a whim, or if this were a Hollywood movie, he could have said that in Kade he saw a reflection of himself as a boy, for they had orphandom in common.
But while there was truth to both statements, neither would have been sufficient to explain Louis’s motivation.
It was Parker. He crossed my path and I was altered—or awakened. Had he not, I would, without hesitation or regret, have left Kade to the dubious care of the state or the brutality of the streets. And I would have been less than I am now.
Kade adjusted his tie and said: “This place is very subdued without music.”
“What was playing wasn’t to your liking.”
“It didn’t mean I wanted to join a silent order.”
Louis gestured to the bartender. Curiously, she had continued to keep Amir under her gun.
Amir concluded that she might like making people nervous and unhappy, especially him.
But at Louis’s signal she lowered the sawed-off and stored it under the bar.
The older, dark-haired woman joined her, Amir’s pistol tucked in her belt.
Louis touched his right ear, followed by a circular movement with his right index finger, directed roughly at the speakers on the wall.
The older bartender’s fingers moved rapidly in response.
“Do you want the same?” said the blonde, translating the sign language.
“Softer, please,” Louis replied. He faced the bartender as he spoke, so she could read his lips, and seconds later classical music began to play: Bach, one of the Cello Suites.
“How can she hear music if she’s deaf?” Kade inquired.
“She can’t, not unless it’s got a lot of bass. But she can read a Spotify playlist.”
“Who are those women? Because if they’re really bartenders, I’ve misjudged the challenges of the trade.”
“Friends,” said Louis. “More or less.”
He swirled his wine, drained the glass, and raised it for a refill.
“Was there a plan B?” Kade asked.
“You’re looking at it. Plan A was to kill you before you even got here, all ‘up close and personal,’ as you put it, but I was minded to give you the benefit of the doubt. I’m glad you didn’t disappoint me, beyond the ease of rendering you harmless.”
“How long have you known?”
“About the paper? A week.”
“And how long have you had me under surveillance?”
“A week.”
“I didn’t spot it.”
“That’s the point.”
“Damn,” said Kade. “I got to ask you for some phone numbers when we’re done, because you got more contacts than Bausch and Lomb. I may need to start a new address book.”
“You’ve been playing a different game for a while,” said Louis. “Speaking of which, how was Ukraine?”
Louis’s research had traced Kade most recently to the war in Europe.
“Dangerous, even as an advisor.” Kade touched a finger to his cheek. “Skin like ours makes a man a prime target for drone operators.”
Some soldiers from African nations were serving on the front lines of the conflict, but most were fighting for the Russians, either as mercenaries or trafficked conscripts.
Americans—whether Black, like Kade, or otherwise—were drawn to the Ukrainians, as was anyone else with a shred of decency.
As far as Louis was concerned, those who didn’t side with the Ukrainians deserved to be introduced to the Russians in person.
“And I’ve crossed paths with racists in my time,” added Kade, “but you haven’t met a true racist until you’ve met a Russian one.”
Louis, too, had crossed paths with racists, but didn’t regard the Russians as worse than the rest. Ignorance transcended racial boundaries; ironically, to have believed otherwise might have made him a racist.
“Tell me about the contract,” he said.
“What do you know?”
“Only that someone put my name to a paper and you picked it up.”
“There wasn’t a lot of competition, but it was better not to take any chances.”
“Price too high?”
“Too low: fear of blowback.” Kade extended his arms to take in the bar and its occupants. “You were known to be protected, but that wasn’t the only reason.”
“Go on.”
“I read the small print. I dug deep.”
Opinions differed on the wisdom of investigating a contract.
Some considered it unwise, others irrelevant.
But early on, Louis had learned the value of establishing the identity of one’s ultimate employer and the reason they wanted a life to be ended.
When things went wrong—and in Louis’s experience, they went wrong more often than they went right—it was crucial to have an inkling of where the danger might lie.
“And?”
“I put together a file,” said Kade. “It’s on Amir’s iPad, but it doesn’t amount to much.
The point of origin is a Boston businessman named D.
Francis Sturgis, the D standing for Dawson.
He’s fifty-eight, and distantly related to a Boston Brahmin family of the same name.
He has property wealth, all inherited, and a reputation as a philanthropist: children’s charities, pediatric hospitals.
According to the broker, he was also open about why he wanted you killed, which might be another reason the paper was treated like it might ignite if touched. ”
“So why did D. Francis Sturgis put a price on my head?” asked Louis.
“Because,” said Kade, “an angel told him to.”