“I ran into Nora there,” Lespasse said.
“… and nearly blew my head off.”
“We saw the blood and thought the worst,” Lespasse added. “We started checking hospitals, closest ones first, and there you were.”
Perez turned back to his father-in-law. “Not too difficult. And the guys who are after you, whoever they are, seem fuckin’ relentless. How much longer before they turn up here too?”
Any answer Middleton might have given was interrupted by the night duty nurse. “You and your father-in-law will have to quiet down, Mr. Perez, and your friends will have to come back during regular visiting hours.”
Middleton seized the opportunity. “Yes, ma’am, and we’re very sorry. I’ll just see these folks out so Jack can sit with Charley.”
He took Tesla’s arm and led her and Jean-Marc toward the elevator, leaving Jack Perez grinding his teeth in the darkened hallway.
Outside, the air was warm and close. The hospital parking lot was nearly empty. Jean-Marc Lespasse lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew a column of smoke into the night sky.
Harry Middleton recalled the last time he’d seen Lespasse and Val Brocco. A blisteringly hot day at chaotic Kenyatta Airport. He remembered too his farewell to Nora Tesla. It had been somewhat after his final meeting with the two men and the location was much nicer-an Algerian-influenced inn on the Cote D’Azure-but the moment was no less difficult.
Events intervened…
She glanced at him once and then her eyes fled. Words seemed easier.
“Your family has no idea?” Leonora Tesla asked Middleton.
“No. I never told them-never thought I’d have to. I thought I could protect them from… all this.”
She clutched his hand, an instinctive gesture, and released it fast. “This isn’t your fault, Harry, but your son-in-law is right. It wasn’t difficult for us to find you, and it won’t be difficult for anyone else who’s looking. It’s not safe.”
“It’s safe enough for a little while-long enough for me to think things through. The Soberski woman asked about Faust. She thought I was into something with him.”
“So you said, Harry, and I told you, Eleana Soberski was a sociopath and a congenital liar,” Tesla said. “You have to assume that anything she said was meant to mislead and to manipulate. Faust was our boogeyman-our white whale-and she knew that. What better way to get your attention than dangle his name?”
“She didn’t have to dangle anything, Nora. She had a gun in my ribs.”
Blowing out more smoke, Lespasse said, “She thought she was going to be interrogating you, Harry. She was laying groundwork, putting you off balance. She-”
Before Lespasse could finish, Middleton’s cell phone burred. He found it in a pocket, flipped it open and heard only static. And then a faraway voice, old and struggling in English.
“Colonel Middleton? My name is Abraham Nowakowski. I’m calling from Rome and I have a message from Felicia Kaminski-Henryk Jedynak’s niece. An urgent message.”
Harold Middleton listened intently for several minutes. Then he said, “Ciao, Signor Abe, mille grazie.” Closing his phone, he let out a massive breath. Tesla and Lespasse looked at him expectantly.
“Speak of the devil, and the devil appears,” Middleton said. “Faust. He’s in the country, and close-up in Baltimore. He’s got something Henryk Jedynak was holding for me, and he’s got Jedynak’s niece too.”
“Baltimore? What the hell is he doing in Baltimore?” Lespasse asked.
“I don’t know. Jedynak’s niece managed to get a call out to a family friend in Rome-that’s who was on the line. From what he said, it sounds like Faust has some sort of operation going on there, but the girl was cut off after a minute.”
“Did she say where in Baltimore Faust is?” Tesla asked.
“No, but she did tell her friend where she and Faust would be tomorrow-check that-tonight. A place called Kali’s Court, on Thames Street. Apparently the two of them are going there for dinner. Just the two of them. I’m thinking that maybe we should join them.”
Tesla and Lespasse looked at Middleton. Tesla shook her head. “Join them? You can’t be serious, Harry-with only three of us.”
“We need backup for something like that, Colonel,” Lespasse said. “Unless what you want is in and out, bang, bang, bang.”
Middleton shook his head. “That’s appealing, but not smart. No, we need to talk to this guy, and at length. So backup it is.” Harry opened his phone again and clicked through his list of contacts. He stopped on an entry marked E.K. and hit dial.
The phone rang once.
The voice in Middleton’s ear said, “It’s about time you called, Harry. But then I guess you’ve had your hands full lately.”
“I need a team, Emmett,” Middleton said. “In Baltimore.”
“Sure you do, Harry. And what about what I need?”
“We can talk about that too, after we settle Baltimore.”
“We can fuckin’ talk about it now.”
“It’s been real bad luck for people to run into you lately, Harry. We’ve got bodies at Dulles, downtown on Sixteenth Street and two assholes with fake Bureau IDs in a bar nearby. Okay, sure, self-defense. But you still have to answer questions. And we can’t stop the local boys from bringing you in if they find out. Jesus, you should’ve told us from the beginning what was going on.
“Guess what, Emmett. Somebody forgot to send me an agenda. I didn’t know what was going on. And I still don’t.”
“Be that as it may, we need to talk.”
“No time, Emmett. My battery’s running low.”
“Not to worry, Harry, we can talk about it over coffee. Say in five minutes, in the hospital cafeteria.” Middleton looked left, right, overhead. On the phone Kalmbach laughed nastily. “On your left,” he said. “Across the street.”
Middleton peered into the darkness and a pair of headlights of a Bureau-issued car winked once, twice at him. Emmett Kalmbach was still laughing. “Cream and two sugars for me, Harry.”
In his suite at the Harbor Court Hotel, the man known as Faust answered the muted beep of a cell phone. The voice on the other end was faraway and old. Faust listened intently, and a small, satisfied smile played on his lips. “Well done, Signor Abe,” he said.
Faust put his phone down and looked across the sitting room, into the smaller of the suite’s two bedrooms. A splash of light fell across the king-sized bed, and in it he could see Kaminski’s pale face on the pillow, and a spray of blond hair.
“Charming,” he said again, to no one in particular.
12
There was something about Fells Point that put Harold Middleton in a foul mood. Maybe it had to do with the fight at The Horse You Came In Saloon that got him booted out of West Point. Maybe it related to the scar on his left temple left by a bar stool-the one that still throbbed whenever the thermometer dipped below 40.
This dank place changed my life, he thought, entering the fog that clung like bad luck to Baltimore’s Thames Street.
Charley’s miscarriage; his ex-wife Sylvia’s violent death; the mayhem and destruction that trailed him since the meeting in Krakow: Now he was determined to right all that, coming on like St. George to slay the dragon as in the richly colored depiction by Raphael Sanzio he admired, even if Faust had chosen Kali’s Court in some sort of a sick cosmic joke. He smiled to himself. Wasn’t Kali the Hindu goddess of annihilation?
As he peered through the fog, Middleton reminded himself to focus. The forces aligned against him were vile and dark. The equation he followed was simple. He had come to slay evil, which had manifested in numbing complexity.
Nora Tesla’s voice squawked in his earpiece. “Target’s in. Alone.”