Beloved enemy, p.32
Beloved Enemy, page 32
He’d seen Namazi’s helo landing on the roof and knew that’s where he wanted to be. That’s where Namazi would be making his escape.
He pressed the button to summon the small elevator. He watched as it rose from the lowest level, the subbasement, then opened the narrow door and stepped into what looked like a vertical coffin, lined with plush red velvet, a little circular light in the center of the ceiling. He pushed the button for the roof. Before stepping out, he sent it back down so his use of it would remain unnoticed.
* * *
As Jack stood up, letting go of the curtain cord, he heard sounds coming from just outside the door. Then there was a sharp knock and a voice raised in concern.
“Ms. Yemchevya! Are you in there? Are you all right?”
Stepping over the corpse, Jack flattened himself behind the door an instant before it swung open. A guard, holding a Glock 9mm at the ready, entered the room, saw Galina lying on the floor. As he swung around, Jack landed a blow with the butt of the Airweight to the base of his skull. The guard went down and stayed down.
Jack stepped over him, peered cautiously into the corridor. It was deserted, at least for the moment. He stood in the doorway, the window through which he had climbed at his back. Closing his eyes, he oriented himself, as if he were looking at the chalet from his vantage point outside. He had noticed the solid walls where, in other chalets, there would have been windows. That area was to his right.
Moving out into the hallway, he made his way toward the windowless area, but before he could get there, he was stopped by a blank wall that, unlike the sidewalls, was papered in a busy cabbage rose, trellis, and vine pattern. He had reached the end of the hallway, but from his recon he knew more of the chalet existed on the other side.
Pressing his ear to the wall, he rapped with his knuckles, but could discern no hollow sound. Returning to the room, he rummaged through Galina’s pockets, found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He had smelled the smoke coming off her hair and clothes.
Returning to the end of the hallway, he lit a cigarette and took several puffs, letting the smoke out slowly. It drifted up to the ceiling. He stepped along the wall. Suddenly, the smoke he released swirled toward the wall instead of the ceiling.
By viewing that section of the wall from different angles, lit by the flame from the lighter, he could discern a seam, cleverly hidden along the line of a trellis. Using his fingernails, he traced the seam into which the smoke was vanishing. He moved closer, felt the draft of air being sucked into the space on the other side of the wall.
He pushed on areas around the seam until a section of the wall, wide as a door, swung open, and he stepped into the hidden area beyond.
* * *
“I should kill you.” Namazi shot Annika a menacing look.
“What a disappointing response.” She shrugged. “But it’s only what I expected.”
Giles stepped between them. “We need to keep our personal animosities on hold or we’ll never get this done.” He looked from one to the other.
“This way,” he said, after a moment’s silence.
He led them to the room with Jean Dufy’s prancing horses amid the leafy greenery of the park. Giles unlocked the door and flipped a switch. A spotlight illuminated the Dufy. Stepping over to it, he swung it aside, revealing a formidable-looking wall safe.
Iraj stood very near her. “This isn’t over,” he said under his breath.
“You’re terrifying me,” Annika said. “Input your fucking numbers.”
“If you recall,” Giles interjected, clearly uneasy with their display of hostility, “we were informed there was a certain order. I was to go first, then Namazi, and Annika last.”
“Do it then,” Namazi said without taking his eyes off Annika.
Stepping up to the vault, Giles typed in a set of numbers, then moved back so Namazi could input his. After he was done, Annika typed in hers.
The click of the tumblers opening sounded as loud as a rifle shot.
Iraj’s eyes glittered.
Giles licked his lips.
Annika turned the lever and opened the safe’s door.
Leaning forward, they all peered inside. At nothing.
The vault was empty.
TWENTY-FIVE
“WHAT THE fuck?!” Iraj said.
Giles scrabbled in the depths of the safe, unable to believe the evidence of his eyes.
Annika began to laugh. She laughed so hard tears sprang into her eyes and she began to wheeze. When she had regained her breath, she said with a biting savagery, “You fools! You’re both fools to take my grandfather at his word. He despised both of you.”
“You bitch,” Namazi said, baring his teeth. “Don’t you understand, he’s made a fool of you, as well.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want any part of his legacy.”
The Syrian frowned. “Another of your lies. You’ve been bent on doing what Gourdjiev told you just so you could come to this moment.”
“That was then,” Annika said with an equanimity that clearly disturbed him.
“God in heaven, Galina was right.” Giles began to pull at his hair. “I allowed Gourdjiev to lead me around by the nose. I did his bidding without question, no matter how abhorrent his orders seemed—beginning with you, Namazi. I curse the day Gourdjiev introduced us.”
The Syrian turned to him. “Shut up, Giles!”
Giles shook his head, lost in his own thoughts. “All these years, I chased after a phantom—a dream he created for me.”
“I said shut the fuck up!” Namazi drew a gun from beneath his jacket.
“No!” Annika screamed.
But it was too late. The bullet plowed into Giles Legere’s chest, slamming him against the wall, like a pitched ball. He gave out a little sound as he slid down the wall to sit, splay-legged like a child.
“It’s beyond me why you’d want to save that sorry sack of shit.” Namazi grabbed Annika’s hand, dragged her out of the room and into the vertical coffin. They rose up toward the roof and their waiting helo.
* * *
Jack flicked the lighter and the flame rose up, sending his shadow streaming across the wall. The odors of must and decay, mold and an unending damp that even the freezing temperature couldn’t allay burned his eyes and the inside of his nose.
A light switch brought several bare bulbs to life. Jack found himself in a warren of rooms—no more than cubicles. What windows had once been there had long ago been removed, the rectangles walled up and papered over.
Cobwebs and dust balls were the only furniture. That was not to say they were empty. In one, he found a metal box filled with vintage diamond jewelry, in the second, another box, this one covered in velvet the color of oxblood. Inside were piled handfuls of gold fillings, some still embedded in human teeth.
Farther back, he approached an object covered in a canvas drop cloth. Peeling it away, he discovered a painting of heart-stopping beauty. His dyslexic mind sorted through images he had seen at lightning speed. He looked closer and then was certain. He was looking at the Portrait of a Lady, by Caravaggio, believed to have been destroyed in Berlin’s Friedrichshain Flakturm, in 1945.
Continuing on, he found statuary by Donatello, a painting by Raphael, one of the Virgin by Giotto. All thought lost or destroyed, each one in a small, square, windowless room, as if on display in an eerie, forgotten museum.
He stood back, heart pounding. Giles Legere’s chalet was a storehouse of treasure looted by the Nazis during the war.
* * *
Giles was colder than he had ever been in his life. But, somehow, he didn’t mind. He thought he’d sit here a while and enjoy Dufy’s prancing horses, so noble and proud. He imagined them in another season, pulling a sleigh of laughing, red-cheeked people, warmed by drafts of hot buttered rum and red-and-white-striped candies.
With perfect clarity, he recalled a day snuggled between Christmas and New Year’s. The Swiss Alps wrapped their mighty arms around him. He was bundled beneath a quilted blanket, sitting between his parents in an old-fashioned, horse-pulled sleigh. His mother was a month away from death. He was eight years old.
“Sugar,” his mother had said, “are you happy?”
He remembered the Alps, the snow, the red noses, the high curved back of the sleigh, the horses, snorting and prancing through the drifts.
“Yes, Mama, I’m happy.”
It was the last time he had been happy.
Until this moment of utter peace, watching Jean Dufy’s horses, the riders, the park, remembering the snow falling, his breath steaming, his mother close beside him, asking the crucial question amid the utter, silent grandeur of the Alps. His mind traveling back in time, that winter moment and this one, conflated forever in a perfect fusing of future, present, and past.
* * *
The chalet seemed eerily quiet. It was time. Jack needed to find a way to reach the roof. Soon enough, he found it. This secret section of the chalet had its own staircase—a narrow spiral with worn stone treads rising up through a cramped, conical space.
The window he had entered was on the second story, so he had only two flights to reach the roof. He launched himself up the stairs. It seemed criminal to leave the hoard behind—both historians and art critics should have access to it—but that was hardly his concern now. Annika and the Syrian were uppermost in his mind.
He passed a door to what must be the third floor and hurried on, mindful that the stone walls surrounding him were starting to converge. Some way up above his head, the space was reduced so drastically it appeared a preteen would be hard-pressed to squeeze through it. From the picture in his mind’s eye, he guessed the top of the conical space turned into one of the chalet’s great curving iron talons he’d observed from the road far below.
The spiral stairs gave out just below the severely narrowed space, though the central column continued to climb all the way to the top. Jack stopped, stymied. There was no egress to the roof from where he was perched. He could go back down to the third floor and, perhaps, find another way up. But he could just as well find himself trapped in this secret, windowless section of the chalet.
The only way was to continue up.
Grasping the metal pole, he wrapped his legs around it and began to shimmy his way upward. The conical space continued to press in around him, until he could feel the freezing stone against both shoulders. He drew them in, compressing the width of his body as escape artists do when wriggling out of a straitjacket.
He continued upward until the space was simply too narrow for him to continue. But now he felt gusts of icy air flow over him and, like the cigarette smoke that had led him here, he followed it until he saw light ahead of him and knew that he was crawling through one of the massive talons at the corners of the chalet.
The brightness of the sky crept toward him, then, all at once, he was at the outlet, emerging into dazzling light after his long dark climb, all of Switzerland’s Alps, it seemed, ringing the clear, cerulean sky.
* * *
Radomil had been on the roof for some minutes, hiding behind one of the mounds of snow that had been shoveled off to the edges. He had seen the sprawled bodies of the guards. They were all unmoving, undoubtedly dead. It was curious, though, that there was no sign of weapons. He saw the helo, crouched and waiting, its rotors revolving, ready for liftoff at a moment’s notice.
There was no sign, however, of either Namazi or Annika, which meant they were still in the chalet. Then he saw a door slam open and his half-sister being dragged by the Syrian across the roof toward the helo.
At that moment, another man—big, eyes wild and staring—appeared, taking aim at the running figures. Radomil launched himself at the big man, knocking him sideways as he squeezed off a shot. Namazi and Annika ducked but kept running, reaching the open door to the helo and climbing in. He heard Namazi shout an order and the rotors began to revolve more quickly. The helo was ramping up to lift off.
The big man struck Radomil on the jaw, and he saw stars. He rose, kicked Radomil in the ribs, then aimed at the helo. Rolling over, Radomil kicked the back of the big man’s right leg. Again, the shot went wide.
Then the big man turned, aimed his handgun at Radomil and shot him between the eyes.
A split instant later, he himself was rocked back by a bullet that struck him in the chest. He whirled. Jack sped over the roof toward him. He raised his Mauser, but Jack fired again, and he was taken off his feet. Jack fired a third time, leapt over the body, and sprinted toward the helo, which was now rising off the rooftop.
For an instant, he doubted he was going to make it, but at the last moment he put on a burst of speed, then leapt, grabbing onto one of the landing runners just before the helo took to the air. Immediately, it began to bank to the right.
Jack scrambled up onto the strut. From there, he could lever himself into the interior of the aircraft. As he began this maneuver, Namazi stuck a gun out through the doorway and fired. Jack spun away beneath the fuselage just in time, but the Syrian extended himself to fire again.
“McClure!” he shouted over the helo’s noise and the rushing of the wind. “You’re well and truly fucked now. You poor bastard, you shot Rolan! You killed her husband!”
Jack worked his way around the strut, but at that moment the pilot banked and dipped the helo. Jack’s foot slipped and he began to fall backward. Lunging out, he caught the door handle just as he lost his footing altogether.
For a long, heart-thumping moment, he swung in the air, then, as the helo shuddered upward, he used the momentum to swing himself around to the fuselage. He was just scrabbling for a handhold on the rim of the opening when the door began to slide shut.
The helo banked the other way, shuddering in the wind currents as the pilot continued to try to shake him loose, but this last maneuver worked in Jack’s favor, as the door slid back open.
Seizing the opportunity, Jack swung his lower body up and into the interior of the helo. Namazi was still hanging on to the door, in a vain attempt to close it. Jack struck him on the point of the chin and he staggered backward, landing on his shoulder.
“Didn’t I warn you to stay away, Jack?” Annika, weeping uncontrollably, held her Bersa aimed at his head. “Why didn’t you listen to me?”
“I couldn’t stay away.” He took a step forward. “You knew that.”
“Sadly, I did. And now both Rolan and Radomil are dead.”
“Ah, the lovebirds,” Namazi chuckled as he rose to his feet. “United, only to be forever torn apart.”
“God, I hate you, Jack!” Annika waggled the Bersa. “Stay back.”
“You’d better do as she says, McClure,” Namazi said. “Or maybe it doesn’t matter. She’s going to put a hole through you no matter what.”
Jack took another step toward Namazi. “You won’t shoot me, Annika.”
“Oh, but she will. Bank on it.”
The helo skimmed over the tiled rooftops of other chalets.
Jack moved a step closer to both of them. Annika was staring fixedly at Jack, or maybe through him. Jack saw his opportunity, saw what he had to do in a lightning flash. He faked to the left and knocked the Bersa away from her.
“Annika, Annika, listen to me!”
But she was past listening to anything he had to say. Witnessing Rolan’s death had clearly unhinged her. There was only one other choice. Fighting her every step of the way, ignoring the strikes of her fists and feet, elbows and knees, he doggedly hauled her over to the door. He kicked it open and, as the helo passed over the roof of another chalet, he moved to shove her out. As she was toppling out, she lunged back and snatched the Airweight from Jack’s hand, and it went tumbling down. She fell only six or so feet before she hit the snow piled on the canted roof tiles. She slid a bit, then grabbed on, pulling herself horizontally to the roof’s edge, where she lay, staring after the receding helo. Jack bit back every emotion that threatened to rise up and overwhelm him.
“Now it’s just you and me, Namazi.”
As he turned, Namazi fired at him. The bullet put a hole in the fuselage and, for an instant, the helo wavered. Jack sprang at him, slammed his fist into the side of Namazi’s head. Namazi turned in his seat. A thick-bladed hunting knife came whistling down, slicing through Jack’s coat and shirt, drawing a line of blood across his chest.
The Syrian tried to turn the strike into a thrust, but Jack smashed his right shoulder with such force, it dislocated. Namazi gasped but still managed to transfer the knife to his left hand. Jack grabbed it and repeatedly slammed it down onto the instrument panel.
The helo went immediately out of control, veering downward at a terrifyingly steep angle. It plowed into a deep snowdrift, slowing its momentum somewhat before striking the rocky ground beneath. The two men slammed into the helo’s windshield.
* * *
Jack must have passed out. He blinked, his lungs working like bellows. He looked around the shattered interior, saw the pilot crushed in his seat. Then Namazi was coming at him, both hands extended. Jack, cocking his right leg, buried his foot into Namazi’s sternum. He felt the percussion all the way to his coccyx.
The Syrian was thrust backward against the helo’s shattered fuselage. He stared at Jack, his lips drawn back from his hungry teeth. He looked like he wanted to eat Jack alive. A moment later, blood gushed from his mouth. Jack saw that he was impaled on a length of twisted metal.
“Fuck you,” Namazi said. “Fuck you.”
Jack pulled himself to his feet, every muscle in his body screaming in pain, and picked his way to where the Syrian hung. He smiled as he saw the light fading from the Syrian’s eyes. It was a terrible thing, perhaps, but he couldn’t find it in himself to feel remorse.
