The bookshop was dark, cosy, populated by a handful of browsers and silent staff. Calvary moved across to the far end, near the cash registers, picked a book off a shelf and began paging. He watched the door.
Something changed in the atmosphere, a subtle shifting like the first hint of a storm. Keeping his gaze on the doors, Calvary groped for it with his other senses, trying to pin it down.
Damn it. A side entrance.
Over to his right, a man stood inside the door. Head shaven, torso wrapped in black leather like a hide. Without looking directly at him Calvary nonetheless sensed there was something wrong with his face. The man wasn’t moving, was just standing there, his stare boring into Calvary.
A minute later the doors at the front swung open and two men slipped in. One was hobbling a little. The passenger from the Lexus. The other was the driver.
They too made no pretence at subtlety, their eyes fixed on Calvary.
All right, if that’s the way it’s going to be.
He lifted his head, looked straight at each of the three men in turn. His eyes met theirs almost audibly, like swords joining battle.
NINE
The big one first. It was an axiom. Putting down the bruiser, the tough guy, gave your own morale a boost as well as denting that of whichever opponents were left.
Calvary walked between the rows of shelves towards the shaven-headed man, who didn’t move from his place at the door. Up close, he could see he’d been right about the man’s face. Scars crossed the mouth like stitching performed by a drunken surgeon. His left cheek was bone white, a continent of scar tissue. The eyes were black, small.
Another thing Calvary noticed up close was the man’s size. He was six feet four or five. Shoulders almost too wide to have fit through the door.
Calvary stopped three feet from the man. In a low murmur, in Russian, he said, ‘Over there’. He tipped his head to the right, where taller aisles curved away, floor to ceiling. It would afford more privacy.
The man glanced in that direction, nodded once. He looked past Calvary, over his head, and nodded again to the other two.
Calvary turned his back, brazenly, and walked over to the tall aisles. A scan of the shop suggested that nobody had noticed anything untoward, neither shoppers nor staff.
There was nobody browsing in the first aisle Calvary came to. It curved towards the wall and ended there, a cul de sac. There was room for perhaps two medium-sized people standing abreast.
The move relied entirely on position-sense, the instinct a fighter develops after years in the field for an opponent’s location in space. There was no time to confirm visually. Even a fraction of a second’s hesitation would blow it, would lose him the advantage of shock and surprise.
Calvary pivoted on the ball of his foot and kicked up into the place his position-sense told him the bald man’s crotch would be.
It was a kick with a leg that was almost straight, with the full power of his right hip behind it, with the blade of his shin bone rather than the ankle as the offensive edge. And his judgement, his sense of the man’s location, was pitch perfect. His leg slammed against soft tissue and bone, the impact jarring him almost off his left foot.
The man’s arms had been outstretched, ready to move in with a stranglehold, and they flapped against the twin towers of the shelves like broken wings. His breath came in a drawn-out huff, his eyes straining from their sockets. He staggered, doubling, and Calvary brought a half fist up at his throat.
The man turned his head at the last second and Calvary’s blow rocked off his jaw, snapping his head round further. Incredibly the man kept his feet, bracing his hands against the shelves on either side. Calvary took a step back, deeper into the aisle, and kicked again, a roundhouse, this time catching the man in the chest, not in the face where he wanted it. It sent the man barging against one of the shelves.
Behind him the other two were loitering, unable to pile in because of the lack of space and because a commotion would be inevitable. They seemed resigned to keeping watch.
The giant’s face was waxen, the rest of his skin now matching the tone of his scars, a damp sheen across his forehead like a caul. His breath hissed wetly between his clenched teeth. His tiny eyes glittered with pain and hate. With a grunt he pushed himself away from the shelf and bore down on Calvary.
Calvary grabbed a hardcover book without looking, some kind of academic tome that weighed a couple of kilogrammes at least. He lashed out at the man’s kneecap with his boot and as the man sidestepped it, shoved the book into his face like a shotputter. He felt the crack as well as heard it, saw the gout of red spray sideways and spatter the spines on the shelves.
Still the man kept coming on, driving Calvary back until he felt the wall press against him. He put up his hands to protect his face, used his feet on shins and knees, tried another kick at the groin. Then the man’s forearm slammed past his hands and across his throat.
The blow knocked the breath from him, but this was followed by panic because he couldn’t regain the breath, couldn’t get air through his compressed trachea. He brought both hands up to curl his fingers around the forearm, trying to pull it free. It was a mistake. The man punched a meaty fist into his exposed torso.
Calvary tensed his abdominal muscles in time but even so, the pain was colossal, like an extension of the man himself. Blurred waves eddied before his eyes, the man’s face rippling grotesquely. And all the time, the pressure built against his throat, threatening to cut off air and blood flow.
One chance. He raised his hands on either side, open-palmed, and slapped them together with all the force he could muster, against the man’s ears.
The move wasn’t so much painful as disorientating, the sudden overwhelming clap of noise directly against the eardrums producing a similar effect to a tiger’s roar, the pitch of which stuns its prey momentarily. The man recoiled, forearm easing back from Calvary’s throat. He brought a knee up this time, into the groin, and there was no way any man could cope with two strikes there in succession. Calvary turned his head aside barely in time to avoid the full force of the man’s vomitus. Some of it caught him on the shoulder; most painted the books and the shelves. The giant sagged against Calvary, who gripped him under the arms and lowered him to his knees.
Past him, beyond the entrance to the aisle, he could see the other two men half remonstrating, half apologising. Evidently a staff member had been alerted by the commotion, and the men were pretending they’d knocked a stack of books over.
Using the collapsed man as a step, Calvary vaulted upwards, clambering up the wall of shelves and dropping down the other side, scattering volumes in a series of thunks and crashes. The sales assistant shrieked but he didn’t pay any attention, didn’t even look at her or either of the two men as he sprinted towards the side entrance where the big man had come in. He heard a yell behind him but didn’t pause, letting the door swing shut behind him.
Once more the cold blasted him after the warmth of the shop. The side street tapered to an end to his right, a wall with a locked-looking steel door blocking the way. He headed left, back towards the main street, put his head round, then took off to the right, back in the direction he’d originally been heading, towards the Old Town.
The car roared at him immediately from across the road, cutting diagonally across two lanes and causing other vehicles to brake and slew. Once again they were trying to block his passage along the pavement. At his back he could hear the shouts of the two men as they emerged from the front entrance of the bookshop.
Calvary stumbled, the blow to his gut and the precious seconds of compression of his windpipe taking their relentless toll. For a moment the pavement reeled towards him but he kept his footing, bit down hard on his lower lip, the pain like a slap across the face. The car, a high-end BMW, had mounted the kerb and he was perhaps ten yards from it. He couldn’t dodge it, nor could he turn back because the two men were close behind; he could feel them.