Blood poured from her side where I plunged the knife between the ribs, and still she struck at me, her kick failing to connect, and I smashed her nose with the palm of my left hand, driving the broken bone deep, towards the brain.
The organism taking over when you’re attacked, feral instincts and the burning desire to kill, and to live, and I guess that’s why I do what I do and let other people do nine to five or fix the taps when they leak; you only really live when your life is threatened.
Her eyes rolled and she fell down on the floor with a soft whoop, blood smearing her naked skin. She wore a thong and not much else, but she must have had instructions, kill on sight or something similar, because she’d jumped me as soon as I was alone, trailing me to the ladies’ bathrooms and attempting a knife attack, and I hit her, kicking the knife from her hand and grabbing it before it fell, and driving it into her with one motion, and that’s the benefit of krav maga over the other martial art forms, Kung Fu and karate and Tai Kwan Do, that it doesn’t teach you philosophy, it teaches you to kill with whatever you have to hand and with everything else, too. The Israelis had developed it for their Mossad agents, and we’d borrowed it from them.
Someone tried the door and I blocked it.
“Cleaning!”
The whole thing only took a moment; I hadn’t been in Paris twenty-four hours and already there was a corpse and I had to do something about it.
There were two cubicles and I put her into the one furthest from the door, propping her on the seat, white girl, petite, dark hair that looked like it might have been professionally dyed. Her hand flopped down and exposed a tattoo on her wrist: an inverted swastika inked in red with a spread wing on each side. I hadn’t seen that before and it was making me worried, suggesting the opposition were new. Unknown meant unpredictable in this business, a different kind of dangerous.
I left the toilet cover up, positioning her so that the blood ebbed into the bowl below, turning the water red. I used toilet paper to wipe blood from the floor--I’d have to take the knife with me--and I closed the door on her and locked it from the outside, moving the screw with the knife until it clicked.
“Champagne?” He’d obviously thought I worked there and had been trying to impress me, the left hand in his pocket probably hiding the pale band where the wedding ring had been just before he’d come into the club.
Le Minou Rose. The Pink Pussycat. It was the fourth one I’d gone into and already I was getting sick of it, the smoke and the dim lighting and the men in cheap suits and the girls who served them. The wealth of the clientele diminished with each nightclub and this one was positively budget, and packed.
“No, thank you.”
It was easier to talk to the bartenders. To talk to a girl I’d have to hire her, and that would raise questions, and she might not want to talk however much I offered her. I slid the photo across the counter and he nodded, once, and took the note I gave him and turned away.
Then I’d gone to the loo and the girl had attacked me and suddenly everything had changed.
There were two options and I much preferred the first. That by asking the bartender about Eldershott, I had triggered an immediate response, and that was all there was to it. I didn’t like the other option: that they knew who I was, that somewhere there was a picture of me and that they circulated it with clear-cut instructions. They wouldn’t have my name but the fact is that someone, somewhere, could have managed to snap the right picture and that I was now a major target for the opposition, and I had to get out of there.
I left the bathrooms and closed the door behind me, jamming it. I needed time. I was going with the first option, for the moment.
I stood in the entrance to the club’s interior and examined the room, looking for potential assassins.
I had to get the information, had to track down Eldershott, and I knew this was the place, this was the focal point, and they were watching it, and if they didn’t know who I was they would soon, if I didn’t make it out of there--but I couldn’t run. I was the ferret dumped into the chicken coop to stir everything up.
I went back to the bar. The same bartender was still there.
Still going with option one.
“Thought we’d continue our chat.”
He shrugged, soundlessly.
“Can you tell me where I might find him?” I slipped a second note towards him, larger than the first. I was perched on the bar, scanning the crowd.
The bartender seemed to think it through.
I added two more notes and straightened them on the counter.
He jerked his head, once, and the notes disappeared.
I waited as he served a customer, rang it through, then left the bar (there was a whispered argument with a replacement, and I suspected money changed hands again). I got up and followed him through the corridors and out of the back, a fire escape and a freezing alley where the stench of fermented garbage permeated everything.
“Who are you?” he said, and he spoke English, not French, which should have warned me plenty. It was Northern Irish.
He had the voice of a smoker, but he didn’t make a move to take out a cigarette, just stood there calmly and watched me, waiting for me to give him a good enough reason to trust me. I wanted to know who he worked for.
The Anna Krojer identity wasn’t going to do me much good, not anymore, and not with this man. So I said, “I think Eldershott might be in trouble,” and watched his face as I said it, and he was good, not a muscle moved but his eyes shifted, only a fraction, but I knew he recognised the name and that this was more than a random bar the target had happened to wander into, this was a relationship, so I waited, baiting him with the name to get a response.
“Who are you?” he said again, but from the tone it was evident he wasn’t going to fight the point; he knew he wouldn’t get an answer he could do anything with. So instead of an answer, I took out three new notes, American, knowing the bloodsuckers in Accounts were going to raise hell about it, and after a moment’s pause he took them and made them disappear. “I’m retired,” he said. His sudden grin was warm, lighting up his face. I said, “IRA?” and he shrugged. “Once. You’re what, MI6?”
“No.”
He shrugged again, saying it didn’t matter to him. “I thought someone would show up sooner or later.”
I thought he could have been part of the opposition, but he was just a freelancer. “Tell me about Eldershott,” I said.
“There’s a girl,” he said. “Sophie.” Then, “Sophie Stockard. John took a real shine to her. The rule in the club is no touching, no soliciting. But what the girls do outside the club is their business.”
I registered the sudden nervousness, now that he was committed, now that he was telling me this. Subtle signs, a narrowing of the eyes, the left hand making a circling motion over the thumb. And the name, John, not Eldershott, and I thought, There are deeper connections here. A larger picture of which I was ignorant.
He gave me an address and the hair at the back of my neck rose because it was the Quartier Latin, almost in view of the cathedral, and I knew, then, that this was something to do with the angels, something to do with Metatron, specifically, and it was going to be a mess, no matter how you looked at it when you picked up the broken, bloodied pieces.
He was going to sing like a canary down the mine, I knew that; he was going to open up and let me have it, his life story if I wanted it; he seemed willing enough to talk when the price was right. I was reaching into a pocket for more contributions to his retirement fund and I should have been paying attention, but I wasn’t.
He must have known something was off, the way he twitched, suddenly, and looked to the side, but it was too late and the bullet penetrated his skull, just a normal run of the mill metal slug, nothing fancy like a blood bullet, and he went down like a car crash and stayed there, twitching a moment longer before dying.