He waited for her to leave, called Bruno again, ordered some food. Then he set to work making calls, eager to find out what he could about Larsen Grohl, his sense of urgency renewed because he wanted to be done with this before she started drawing attention to him by association.
She was becoming her own creature, and when his old world started to notice her, he didn’t want to be there. He’d worked hard at disappearing, too hard for him to throw it all away now by walking into the spotlight with Ella Hatto.
Chapter Fifteen
She felt sick as she got into the taxi, and guilty too, as if everyone who saw her knew exactly what she was planning to do, that she had a gun in her bag. The doorman gave the destination to the driver and he turned and smiled, repeating the words ‘Alkotmany utca’ as if even he knew what she had in mind.
She was scared, but she had to go through with it. Lucas was like a bureaucrat, so wrapped up in the world he inhabited that he couldn’t see beyond procedure to the truth. It was the done thing not to touch people like Brodsky because they were facilitators. But without men like Brodsky, maybe people wouldn’t find it so easy to buy a death. She didn’t know that her family would still be alive if Brodsky hadn’t existed, but she knew they were dead because he did.
He’d been told who the targets were—a man, his wife, his daughter, his seventeen-year-old son—and rather than recoiling in horror, he’d talked prices. He’d murdered them, his hands no less bloody than those of Novakovic and whoever it was who’d hated her father enough to take out the contract.
As the driver turned into the tree-lined street, he said, ‘Number?’
‘This is fine.’ She didn’t know the number and anyway, she didn’t want the driver to see where she was going. She waited for him to pull away before walking up the street, trying to remember in darkness how it had looked during the day.
The first building she stopped at looked familiar but she couldn’t find his name on the panel of buzzers. She moved on a couple of buildings until she saw another that looked familiar and this time found what she was looking for.
She opened her bag, double-checking what she knew, that she had the gun, her stomach knotting up on itself at the sight of it. She raised a worryingly shaky hand then and pressed the buzzer. She wasn’t sure what she was scared of: killing him or not being able to.
‘Hello?’
She stepped closer to the intercom. ‘Mr. Brodsky, it’s Ella Hatto.’
‘Top floor,’ he said and buzzed her in. She climbed the first flight of steps, then found the old elevator and took it the rest of the way. He’d left the door ajar for her. She knocked and walked into a small cluttered hallway. ‘I’m in here, Ella.’
She walked through the kitchen and into the living room, taking in the high ceilings with their yellow and cream stucco, evidence that this had once been a grand property. On the far side of the room the large windows were open, a breeze blowing through them.
There was a small lamp on in the room and a few large candles burning, the flames being danced close to death by the breeze. Brodsky was sitting to the left of the doorway on one of two modern sofas that filled that corner of the room. A bottle of wine and glasses sat on the coffee table in front of him, a couple of armchairs completing the circle.
She stood behind one of the armchairs and looked at the wine, the two glasses, realizing that he was expecting company. She looked him in the face then. He seemed disappointed. ‘So soon? No time for reason?’
At first she didn’t understand what he meant, her brain taking a couple of seconds to catch up with itself. She’d taken the gun out as she’d walked through the kitchen and was pointing it at him now. He smiled and looked set to say something else, and she didn’t want him to say anything, didn’t want to hear reason or have to think of him as a human being.
She lifted the gun and aimed it at the middle of his chest. Conscious that her hands were trembling, she braced herself for the kick and pulled the trigger. Nothing. She pulled it again, getting panicky, all the time staring at his chest, not his face.
‘Ella, it isn’t loaded.’ She heard his words but pulled the trigger again. ‘Lucas called me. He told me you’d be coming, that the gun would not be loaded.’ She looked at the gun. She couldn’t understand. Why would Lucas have betrayed her like that? She backed away, looking around the room for something to defend herself with. Brodsky didn’t move, though, and still smiling benevolently, he said, ‘Please, come and sit down. I’ve opened a very nice bottle of red wine. Take a glass with me and tell me why you so want me to die.’
He poured the two glasses of wine. Lucas hadn’t betrayed her, just seen through her own betrayal of trust and intervened. He was probably hoping that if she talked to Brodsky, shared a glass of wine with him, she’d begin to see things their way.