Calvary was disorientated, thought they were somewhere south of the hospital where it had all kicked off. It was a slightly grubby commercial district, fleets of lorries rolling down the roads in boiling clouds of dust.
‘Who are you?’
She said, ‘I’m Nikola. This is Max.’
‘No, I mean who are you?’
‘Your enemy’s enemies,’ said the boy. ‘So, your friends.’
Calvary thought, Spare me. He didn’t push it, concentrated on an inventory of his injuries. Nothing disabling, but there’d be aches later that might restrict mobility. He’d have to watch for that, keep his joints in motion.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Calvary.’
‘Like where Jesus got crucified.’ The boy was grinning again.
The woman, Nikola, had been murmuring into a phone. She put it away.
‘We are activists,’ she said. ‘We publish an independent newsletter. Reflektor. You are from England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you will not have heard of us. Even most Prague residents haven’t.’
Max said, ‘We’re kind of a single-issue group.’ When Calvary didn’t ask, he went on: ‘Committed to bringing down Bartos Blažek and his empire.’
Calvary was silent. Max stared at him. ‘You – don’t know?’
‘Who that is? No.’
‘Shit, you really are from out of town, dude.’ He glanced at Nikola. ‘He’s the head of the biggest organised crime syndicate in the city. The country, even.’
Nikola finished: ‘And that was him. In the car behind us.’
*
A bulb blew with an audible pop as she flicked on the lights. The office was low-ceilinged, crowded but neat. Four workstations were positioned to make maximum use of the space available. The IT equipment looked up to date or close to it. A couple of older televisions hung on brackets. Even with the illumination from the fluorescent lights the room had the feel of a basement, which it was.
The walls were corkboarded almost from floor to ceiling, and virtually every inch of board was in turn covered with a cutting or photograph of some sort: newspaper and magazine articles, posed portraits, paparazzi shots. The faces were unfamiliar apart from two that kept cropping up: the scarred potato features of the huge man he’d fought in the bookshop, and the feral-looking smaller man whom he’d slammed in the car door and who had followed him into the shop with his crony.
And, most frequently of all, he noticed another large man, mid-forties, running to fat, dressed sometimes in shiny suits, sometimes polo shirts. He hadn’t had a clear look at the passenger in the BMW but he knew this was him.
‘Blažek. The Kodiak,’ said Max. He shoved a swivel chair across. Put your feet up, man. You look beat.’
‘No time.’ Calvary began to prowl about the office, taking in the pictures. The articles were all, or nearly all, in Czech so they meant little to him. ‘How did you happen to be there just at the right time?’
‘Back there?’ Max looked at Nikola, who’d hung up her jacket and was over at a tiny kitchenette, putting the kettle on. ‘Do you think we should –’
‘We have been following this man.’ She tapped a shot of the scarred giant. ‘Pavel Kral. One of Blažek’s thugs. He is medium level, not among the lieutenants but more than just a footsoldier. We’ve been tailing him all morning. This afternoon he took a phone call and set off for the hospital. We saw him enter the bookshop. Then you came out with the other two following, and Blažek himself appeared and tried to grab you. Whoever you were, we could not let them take you.’
‘What she means,’ said the kid, ‘is that it gave us great satisfaction to stick it up Blažek’s ass.’
Nikola: ‘What happened to this man? Pavel?’
‘I put him down,’ said Calvary.
Both of them were looking at him with new expressions.
‘For good?’ said Max.
‘No.’ He accepted the hot mug Nikola passed him. Black coffee, and sugared. He grimaced but sipped anyway. ‘Why were you following him?’
Nikola leant back against the kitchenette counter, bounced lightly on her heels. ‘We are four, in this office. Jakub you will meet shortly. The other man, Kaspar, has disappeared. He was investigating Pavel Kral’s involvement in an armed robbery. An involvement that is suspected but unproven.’
‘Dumb asshole thought he was some kind of master pickpocket.’ Max shook his head. ‘He was going to steal Kral’s bank cards, hack his accounts, link him to the purchase of a getaway car. Crazy stuff. We told him it’d never work.’
‘He disappeared this morning. Left the office and did not return. Does not answer his phone,’ she said. ‘We believe Kral has taken him.’
*
‘How long have you been doing this work?’
Calvary had accepted the offer of a chair in the end.
‘The newsletter has been running for three years, now,’ she said. ‘Jakub and I started it, then Max and Kaspar came on board. We publish irregularly. Sometimes monthly, sometimes every three months. It depends on the activity of Blažek’s organisation.’
‘It’s guerrilla activism,’ Max piped up. ‘We print an edition, distribute it ourselves to stations, street corners. Quick and dirty. Then we go to ground again. Every scrap of a link between Blažek and some new or old crime gets reported.’
‘Has it made any difference?’
‘No,’ said Nikola, quickly, staring at him. Daring him to laugh. ‘Not yet. We do not even know if Blažek is aware of our existence.’
‘He is now.’
She nodded.
‘You said you had weapons.’
She glanced at Max. ‘We have a gun.’
‘A gun. Singular.’
‘Yes.’
He raised his eyebrows. Max went over to a drawer, unlocked it.
By the way he carried the piece Calvary could see he wasn’t used to handling it. He took it. A Browning Hi-Power. Chambered for nine millimetre parabellum rounds. He jacked the magazine. It was full.
A good piece. But there was no smell of oil, and the mechanism didn’t feel slick.
He began stripping it. ‘Needs a clean.’
Nikola and Max hovered, unsure. Calvary said, ‘Have either of you ever fired this?’
Glances. If they’d been standing they would have shuffled their feet. ‘No. But Jakub has had some practice.’
‘Shooting tin cans?’ He reassembled it, sighted down it, straight armed. It would have to do.
‘So. Mr Calvary.’ Max tried to lighten the mood. ‘Can I call you Cal?’
‘No.’
‘Right. So, like… What’re you doing here?’
He’d been waiting for the question, had had time to work out the best response. He said, ‘Turn on the TV. To the news.’
Nikola shrugged, did so. Found one of the American 24-hour channels. They waited a couple of minutes until the economic news was over. Then the background switched to a jarringly familiar scene. The site of the tram hijacking just outside the Old Town.
A breathless local reporter summarised the known facts. Three, perhaps four masked and armed men had boarded the tram shortly after noon and had shot dead a Russian national, seemingly randomly. They had taken captive an unidentified man but had come under attack from another passenger armed with what appeared to be an umbrella. The other passenger had disappeared. Police were appealing for the mysterious hero to come forward and give his version of events, as he might be able to shed light on the attackers’ identities. Police had also released an identikit picture of the kidnapped man, based on eyewitness testimony, and were appealing for help from anybody who could identify him.
The identikit resembled Gaines in the same way a second-rate political caricature resembles its target. They’d made him heavier, given him jowls, which had the effect of taking twenty years off his age. He looked almost jolly, not furtive and crepuscular as he really was.