He raised his glass in Bartos’s direction and bared his teeth in what Bartos had heard the Americans call a shit-eating grin.
Bartos watched him. Didn’t smile.
Someone was tapping at his shoulder and he brushed at it. Magda’s voice roused him and he turned his head. She handed him the phone.
He listened.
‘On my way,’ he said.
Bartos clasped his twins close, stood and murmured in his wife’s ear, felt her nod as he pulled her to him and kissed her hair. Then he left, not looking back. He felt Janos’s terror cast after him like a fishing net.
*
The young man – boy, really – was trussed to a flimsy wooden chair at the back of the warehouse, between the standing shapes of two of Bartos’s men. The falling evening light through the window picked out his juddering silhouette. Bartos could smell the boy’s shit from the door.
As Bartos stepped forward a high jabbering started up. One of his men put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, not roughly. Close up, Bartos could see he’d been slapped around a little: lip scabbed, one eye swollen closed.
Bartos dropped to his haunches, one knee cracking, in front of the boy. The jabbering had segued into a low keening.
‘What’s your name, son?’
The boy began to blubber and one of the men backhanded him across the temple, the other grabbing the chair before it could tip over. Bartos frowned and shook his head at the man.
‘What’s your name?’
‘K-k-k-k –’
‘A little louder?’
‘K-Kaspar. Sir.’
‘I’m Bartos, Kaspar. You seem a nice enough guy. Sorry to meet you in these circumstances.’
Bartos frowned at the ground for a moment, then looked up at the boy. ‘You know why you’re here, of course.’
The nods came rapidly, guilt eager to confess itself.
‘You tried to take something that didn’t belong to you.’
‘Yes.’
‘A pickpocket. Do you do this for a living?’
The boy, Kaspar, tried to find saliva, his throat clicking.
‘I assume you don’t, because you were quite poor at it. Unlucky for you that you chose one of my people.’
Pavel had phoned him just after breakfast. Somebody had tried to lift his wallet and he’d noticed. The would-be thief had raced off. Pavel had sent two men in pursuit.
‘Call me when,’ Bartos had said before ringing off. An attempted crime against one of his middle-echelon men was something he needed to respond to himself. It implied an attack on him personally.
Bartos duckwalked forwards until his nose was under the boy’s.
‘So, if you’re not a professional pickpocket... why did you do it? Who hired you?’
He flinched from the bubble that swelled at one nostril. The boy was panting.
‘Nobody. I’m out of work, needed money. I tried my hand. I was no good.’
‘Nobody put you up to it.’
‘No.’
The boy was in confessional mode, would shop anybody. Bartos was sure of it. Was sure he was telling the truth.
He sat back on his heels. ‘In that case, I’m left with a problem. What do I do with you?’
Kaspar began to rock in the chair, chattering again. Bartos held up a hand. To his credit, the boy shut up at once.
Bartos stood.
‘I’m hated by many people. But even my worst enemies will concede that I’m nothing if not fair.’
He fished in the hip pocket of his trousers and came up with a koruna piece which he balanced on his thumb tip, letting the light play off the edge.
‘Fairness requires an even chance. So. I spin this coin. You call it. If you win, you walk. No conditions, no harm done, other than a pair of shitty pants. If you lose, I do what I have to.’
The nodding was hectic now, almost mechanical. Bartos wondered whether he himself would view fifty-fifty odds with such enthusiasm.
He flipped the coin high and clapped his hand over his wrist.
The boy stopped shaking. Beside him both men were stone.
‘Call, it, Kaspar.’
‘Tails,’ he blurted.
With a conjuror’s flourish Bartos removed his covering hand, angling his wrist so his two men could peer at the coin. Kaspar let out a whimper. His feet began to jitter and bounce.
‘Well, well.’ Bartos slipped the coin back in his pocket. ‘You’re in luck.’
Behind him the boy’s sobs were indistinguishable from his laughter. Bartos headed for the door, listening to the mutters of his men as they began to unleash their prisoner.
Bartos stopped.
The image of Janos, his firstborn son, flashed back. Staring. Staring at his stepmother, Magda. The drool virtually spooling from his slack lower lip.
Bartos squeezed his eyes tight.
In four steps he was back at the boy, hands hanging open at his side, looking down. The face was weeping and grinning up at him in fawning thanks. After a moment, the first flicker of doubt passed across the eyes. Lodged there.
‘Sorry, Kaspar.’ Bartos moved in, stepping to the side of the boy as his man moved back, shoving one bear paw under the boy’s chin and reaching with the other one across the face from the top so that his fingertips thrust into the boy’s mouth, gripping the upper and lower lips. He kept his nails long, and he felt them bite through the flesh as the boy’s scream echoed through the rafters.
‘It’s been one of those days.’
Bracing himself, feet and shoulders, he pulled his hands apart and peeled the boy’s lips away from his jaws, not stopping when the natural anatomical resistance was met. The upper lip tore off, the lower extending itself down the chin.
The screams went on until Bartos altered his grip to hook his fingers behind the teeth, and prised the lower jaw off the boy’s face.
FOUR
Calvary had chosen a hotel two blocks away from Gaines’s flat. He checked just after eleven in the morning, having taken a tram from the airport and then a Metro train to the northeastern suburbs. The Prague Metro system was a relatively straightforward one and he navigated it with ease. Prague was chilly, the April wind rawer than it had been in London. Calvary was wearing a pullover and jacket which threatened not to be enough.
The hotel was a three-star affair, part of a chain and somewhere he was less likely to be remembered than a family-run bed and breakfast. Calvary slung the holdall in a cupboard, splashed water on his face, and went for a walk.
In other circumstances he would have cased Gaines’s street, looking for potential approach and escape routes, access points. But he wasn’t intending to break in and carry out the hit in the man’s flat. He knew somebody, either SIS or Llewellyn’s minions, had had Gaines under surveillance, and more than likely still did so. Calvary didn’t intend to get caught on camera again, leaving the scene of the killing. Instead he turned and strode in the direction of the city centre, armed with his map.
Calvary wandered for an hour, absorbing the atmosphere of the city, the rhythm of its streets. He didn’t consider himself to be much of a romantic but the city had a distinct, heady aroma that made him think of dense forests. He bought two sausages – jiternice, a local specialty – and a bottle of water from a street kiosk, and ate them on the way back to the hotel.
*
Back at the room he kicked off his boots and lay supine on the bed, hands behind his head. He’d rested well the night before, was killing time more than anything else.
Llewellyn. The man’s face was imprinted in the floral pattern of the dark ceiling, in the skin at the back of Calvary’s eyelids when he closed them. He’d never been a mentor to Calvary, quite. Calvary had been too old for that sort of thing by the time he’d met him. But Llewellyn had offered him salvation of a sort, a chance to earn back his self-respect. No, not quite that. To achieve redemption. Absolution.