The Accident Man:A Novel

18

The manhole cover budged an inch, just enough to shift it out of its housing. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then it moved again, right out of the hole, and came clattering to a rest on the sidewalk.
Grigori Kursk winced as the pain shot through his cracked ribs. He breathed heavily. That hurt too. Then he hauled himself out of the manhole and back onto the streets of Paris.
He spat on the sidewalk, trying to get the taste of muck out of his mouth. He’d swallowed half the Paris sewer system. He’d need shots for cholera, dysentery, tetanus—anything the doc could find.
What else? His hearing was gone: The explosion had temporarily deafened him and left his eardrums ringing in angry, shrieking protest. He’d been wearing lightweight body armor, but the blast had still hammered his rib cage and battered his skull. He hadn’t had a headache like this since the last days in Kabul, drinking away the shame of defeat with homemade potato vodka. He felt nauseous, dizzy, spacedout, concussed. Well, screw that. Kursk had been hurt a lot worse than this and kept fighting. He’d probably smelled as bad too. But it was one thing stinking when you were sitting in a foxhole at the ass end of Afghanistan and everyone else stank just as bad. In the middle of Paris, it wasn’t so smart.
Kursk looked around. He was standing on a wide avenue. Up ahead he could see ramps leading up onto a freeway, but there was barely any traffic. Behind him there were some rail yards, half lit in orange and gray. A few railway workers were wandering between the freight trucks. No one seemed to be doing too much work.
Kursk knew what he had to do. He slumped to the ground, leaning back against a lamppost by a bus shelter. Then he waited.
People came by. Three railway workers at the end of their shift, glad to be on their way home, shouted at him, told him to get a job and have a bath. One of them was about to aim a kick in his direction when his pal held him back. “Hey, Paco, you crazy? You’ll never get the smell off your boot!” The men walked off laughing.
Kursk waited.
It took about twenty minutes before he got what he wanted, one guy by himself, about Kursk’s size but flabby. He wouldn’t know how to defend himself. Kursk could tell just by looking at him.
As the man walked by, Kursk got up and walked toward him, just another drunken bum begging for a few coins. The man’s eyes widened in alarm. He tried to act tough. “Piss off, tramp!” Kursk grinned and came a few steps closer. The man turned and walked away fast, trying to maintain his dignity, not wanting to run. Kursk caught him in a few steps, grabbed the man’s head, and twisted it, snapping his neck, then caught him as he fell.
Kursk felt another stab of pain slice through his upper body. It settled into a relentless, grinding ache as he dragged the man’s body to the side of the road and dumped it by the rail yard fence.
It hurt Kursk when he pulled off the man’s jacket, pants, and shirt. It hurt when he got out of his own sodden, stinking, shredded clothes. It hurt when he got dressed again. Everything he did hurt.
He went through the man’s wallet and pockets: thirty- five francs in notes and another nine or ten in small change. That was plenty.
Kursk left the man slumped against the fence in his old, sewer-drenched clothes. It would be a while before anyone realized he was dead. No one was going to go too close to a guy like that.
He set off down the avenue, walking under the freeway. Beyond it the streets narrowed. They all looked the same: endless apartment blocks, four or five stories high, occasional bistros, bars, and shops. There was a public toilet on one corner. Kursk put a couple of francs into the slot, let the metal door slide open, and went in. He washed himself as best he could in the basin, soaping his face and scalp, and rinsing the filth out of the cuts that crisscrossed his shaved head, enjoying the sandpapery abrasion of the stubble against his palm.
When he’d finished, he looked in the mirror. It wasn’t too bad. He looked like a tough bastard who’d been in a fight and couldn’t give a damn. Kursk grinned at the thought of all the bourgeois Parisians who might see him and feel a prickle of fear. He took his capacity to intimidate for granted, the same way a beautiful woman assumes she will turn men’s heads. A walk down the street was a parade of his powers.
Kursk left the toilet and looked around for a phone booth. He shoved every coin he had into the box and dialed an overseas number. It was a while before anyone answered.
He spoke in Russian: “This is Kursk. Get me Yuri. Yeah, I do know what time it is. Just shut up and get me Yuri.”



19

Can I have one of your filthy cigarettes?”
Papin grinned. “I thought you did not smoke.”
The operations director grimaced. “I don’t usually. But tonight I think I’ll make an exception.”
Papin reached for his Gitanes, then held up his hand for a second before placing it to his own telephone earpiece. He frowned with concentration as he listened, then spoke briefly into the mic that dangled by his throat. Another nod, a quick good-bye, then he turned off his phone.
“I am afraid I have more bad news,” Papin said, handing over a cigarette, then flicking on his lighter. “There has been a killing in the Marais. One of the finest mansions in Paris has been turned into a slaughterhouse. An exploded car. A body in the gateway. Two more bodies in the hall. Two more again upstairs. And human remains from the explosion scattered like confetti across the courtyard. The dead men were armed with submachine guns. These men were professional killers, who were themselves killed. So I ask myself, why would killers be in Paris tonight?”
“All right, you’ve made your point.”
“Then follow me.”
They drove to the mansion in the first gray light of the false dawn. Papin flashed a badge at the police officers guarding the gate and keeping back the increasing crowd of rubberneckers attracted by the flashing lights of the vans and squad cars massed in the road outside the gates. Inside, Papin had a brief, angry conversation with a bull-necked man in an ill-fitting suit with sweat patches under the arms.
“That was the detective in charge of the case,” Papin told the operations director, by way of explanation.
“I gathered. What was his problem?”
“He wants to remove the bodies so that they can be examined as soon as possible. I told him he can have them in five minutes. So let’s not waste time. Tell me everything.”
They walked up to the first body.
“You know him?” asked Papin.
“Yeah. His name was Whelan, ex-Para. Seems fairly obvious what happened. Someone arrives at the front gate, Whelan goes to take a look, gets shot.”
They walked farther in, saw the burned-out shell of the bombed car. The detective was standing by the shattered remnants of the driver’s side door. “Regardez,” he said, and pointed inside. The two men looked in and saw the charred steering wheel. There was a plastic restraint clipped to the wheel. A fragment of a severed hand was still inside it. The rest of the body was in pieces all around the courtyard. A crime-scene investigator was photographing each piece.
Papin reached for his cigarettes. He offered the pack to the Englishman. “Another?”
“No, I’m all right, thanks, seen worse.”
They walked into the building and saw the two men sprawled on the floor of the hall, their blood a vivid crimson splash against the black-and-white tiles.
“Nichol, Jarrett, also Paras,” said the operations director. “They came as a crew with Whelan and two others.”
“Maybe you should think again about your hiring policy,” said Papin.
“Don’t worry. We hire the best. That’s why these two are dead.”
“You know who did this?”
“I’m pretty certain. I’ll know for sure when I see who’s upstairs.”
The men went into the dining room. The operations director winced when he saw Max.
“The one in the jeans is the fourth member of the crew, McCall. I imagine you’ll find what’s left of the fifth man, Harrison, down in the yard.”
“And the other man, the one I suspect you know well?”
“His name is Max. That’s what I called him, anyway. I couldn’t tell you what his birth certificate says. We weren’t on real-name terms.”
“Alors, who is? Have you noticed the interesting variation between the deaths in this room and those downstairs?”
“Of course. Max and McCall were hit by a three-shot burst of automatic fire; the others were killed by separate shots. My guess is your firearms people will find that those came from a SIG-Sauer P226. If they did, the shooter is known to me as Carver. He’s the only person that could have done this, except for one minor detail. He’s supposed to be dead.”
“Assume he is not. Can you describe him, please?”
“He was wearing a bomber jacket, T-shirt and jeans, all black, and he was riding a Honda XR400 dirt bike, also black.”
“You know this because?”
“I paid for them.”
“I see. Did you pay for his accomplice also?”
“No. Carver always works alone.”
“So why are there two weapons?”
“No idea.”
“Please, do not waste my time, huh? Either this man Carver came in with his favorite gun—a gun, you know, with twelve rounds in the magazine—fired four shots, then for some reason decided to pick up a completely different weapon; or there were two different people, firing two different guns. Alors, Charlie, what do you think?
He looked back at the Frenchman. “I don’t know what happened here. I’m not even sure it was Carver. He was meant to have been disposed of immediately after the operation was over. As far as I was concerned, he had been.”
“But if he survived this disposal . . .”
“Then he would be a very angry man.”
“And he would seek revenge?”
“That would be my assumption, yes.”
“Had he been here before?”
“No.”
“Did he even know of the existence of this place?”
“No.”
“And yet your Mr. Carver apparently manages to find this house, out of all the houses in Paris, and kill all the people inside, using two different guns. Then he disappears without a trace. You are right, Charlie. You do hire the best. Maybe that is why you could not dispose of him as easily as . . .”
“Damn! The computer!”
“Pardon?”
“Max had a computer, a laptop.”
“And . . . ?”
“And look at the table. It’s not there. That bastard Carver has got our computer!”
Papin paused to gather his thoughts. Then he spoke with the forced, patronizing calm of a man trying to take the heat out of a situation. “Perhaps we are rushing to an assumption too easily, huh? Tell me, how did you intend to kill this man, Carver?”
When the operations director replied, his emotions were back under control. “Two Russians, a man and a woman, names of Kursk and Petrova. They work out of Moscow. But they’re dead too. We blew their apartment to smithereens.”
“Was this apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it certainly exploded. But there was no one inside. No dead, no wounded. So far as the public and the media are concerned, it was just an unfortunate accident, a leaking gas pipe, nothing to worry about.”
“That can’t be right. We had someone watching the apartment. He reported that a man and a woman went into the apartment. Then there was an explosion. Are you sure the people inside weren’t just vaporized?”
“No. There was no one inside that apartment when the explosion occurred. So, who were the man and the woman? How did they get out? And where are they now?”




20

They’d danced, they’d drunk champagne, they’d even eaten Thai food from the club’s restaurant. Sealed off from the outside, in a world that stretched from their table to the bar to the dance floor, it was almost as if that mad hour of violence and death had never happened. As long as the music played and the drink flowed, they were just two regular people, civilians out for a Saturday night. Until Carver realized they’d been made.
“There’s a man over there who keeps looking at you,” he told Alix, trying to make himself heard over the thumping din of Eurodisco.
She rolled her eyes dismissively and shouted back, “Of course there is.”
“No. He’s really looking. The fat bloke, with the arm candy, by the far wall. I think he knows you.”
Carver followed her eyes as she glanced across the dance floor. A big, middle-aged guy with buzz-cut hair, a coarse, jowly face, piggy eyes, and a shiny golden brown suit was sitting behind a table. The combination of brutality, self-indulgence, and vulgarity was unmistakable. “Russian,” thought Carver. One of these days he’d meet a rich Muscovite who didn’t look like a gangster. But it hadn’t happened yet.
The Russian’s hands were all over two identical blond party girls. He was casually pawing their thighs and breasts while the girls giggled and wriggled, pretending to enjoy it. That was their job. But whatever the fat man was doing with his hands, his mind wasn’t on the bimbos at all. He was looking at the dance floor.
The Russian gave the girl on his left an elbow in the ribs. That got her full attention.
He barked a few words in her ear and nodded his head in Alix’s direction. The girl jabbered back at him and he threw up his hands as if to say, “Enough.” She nodded sulkily and shrugged her shoulders, all pretense of sexual attraction gone.
Alix watched the pantomime, then shook her head. “I don’t know him.”
Carver pulled Alix close to him, speaking right into her ear. “Don’t bullshit me. He’s Russian. I can tell just by looking at him. Why was he looking at you?”
“I don’t know, okay?”
Carver said nothing. Alix sighed heavily.
“Okay, the girls were in the ladies’ room when I was there. Maybe they’re telling him about the crazy chick who cut her hair. How should I know?”
Carver let her go. He glanced across at the Russian, who had a glass in one hand and a girl in the other. He seemed to have lost interest in Alix, but even so, Carver wanted to get out. The question was, how to do it without attracting the fat man’s attention?
He was just about to make his move when the lights came up and he finally understood why Max had wanted him dead, why the stakes were far, far higher than he had imagined.
It happened without warning. One moment the Eurodisco beats were crashing out, the next there was total silence, the houselights were on, and the deejay was delivering a message in French that was being spoken in countless different languages at that exact moment in every corner of the world.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know how to say this,” he began, his voice hesitant and strained. “I cannot believe it. But the Princess of Wales is dead. She was injured in a terrible car crash, right here in Paris, in the Alma Tunnel. They took her to the hospital of Salpêtrière, but the doctors could do nothing. She is dead.” The deejay said nothing for a second or two, then added, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can play right now.”
People were standing on the dance floor, looking around as if searching for some clue as to how they should react. Slowly the murmur of voices grew to a hubbub. There was a rush to the deejay’s booth and a desperate clamor for more information, mixed with pleas to come on, stop joking, tell us you’re just kidding around. And gradually, through it all, came the sound of sobbing as women clung to their partners, weeping, or simply fell to the floor in grief.
Amid the chaos, Carver stood motionless, as stunned as if he had been caught in his own dazzler beam, unable to grasp the magnitude of what had happened. He felt physically sick, clammy with sweat, his head heavy, blood pounding in his ears. His vision blurred, crackles of light flashing across his eyes, fragmenting the world around him. His mind seemed to be slipping out of his control. Then, at last, his survival instinct kicked in, and, as he got a grip on his consciousness, his pulse slowed and his breathing returned to normal.
He bent almost double, putting his hands on his knees and letting his head hang down. Then he let his breath out in a slow, steady stream and stood upright again, ready to face the truth. It really had happened, and he was the man who’d done it. The evidence was inescapable. The images on those TV screens, cutting from the devastation in the Alma Tunnel to the princess on her holidays, finally made perfect sense.
He thought back to the moment he’d found Alix’s bag in the apartment, his conversation with Max, his attempt to justify what he did by targeting those who deserved their fate and trying to spare civilians. Those principles had come to a cataclysmic, bloody end, hadn’t they?
In some distant corner of his consciousness, he was aware of Alix standing beside him. Her face was ashen, her eyes a million miles away. She was moaning, wordlessly, no more able than he was to articulate the conflict of thoughts and feelings tearing through her.
Carver felt as though every eye in the room was on him, that the mark of Cain was burning on his forehead. He told himself that was crazy: They were all too busy trying to cope with what they had heard to worry about anyone else. And then he realized that his instinct had been correct. He was being watched. So was Alix. And the madness was about to begin again.
In the flat, harsh glare of the houselights, Carver saw the Russian. He’d taken his hands off the girls and the drink. Now he was talking into a phone. Every so often he looked in their direction.
“Damn!” Carver spat under his breath. “We’re getting out of here. Now!”
He did not wait for Alix to reply, just grabbed her arm and pulled her from the dance floor. There was a waitress standing by one of the tables near where Carver and Alix had been sitting. He gave her five hundred bucks, pressing the notes into her hand. “Pour l’addition. Tenez la monnaie. Alors, où est la cuisine?”
The waitress did not reply, barely even noticing the money in her hand. There were tears streaming down her face. Carver shook her. He asked again where the kitchen was, his urgency forcing her to listen.
“Over there,” she murmured, limply waving an arm toward a double door set into the wall beyond the tables.
“Does it have a staff exit?”
“Yes, but . . .” She stood there motionless, muttering vague protests as Carver and Alix brushed past her.
Just as they reached the swing doors into the kitchen, Carver glanced back at the table where the fat guy was sitting. He was getting to his feet, gesticulating at two sidekicks who’d suddenly materialized on the floor in front of his table. Carver slipped through the doors and into the noise, the heat, and the smells of a working kitchen, a pungent blend of fish, meat, spice, and sweat.
He turned to look back through one of the porthole windows in the doors.
One of the fat man’s underlings was heading downstairs; the other was walking toward the restaurant area, a tall, solidly built guy with pockmarked skin and a ponytail. His suit was an oily blue. His shoes were pale gray. A gold medallion nestled in thick black chest hair, and there was more gold on his wrist and fingers.
Alix was already a few paces ahead of Carver, making her way through the sweaty, food-stained kitchen staff at their stations. A couple of them gave her a whistle and a filthy remark as she went by. Then they saw the look in Carver’s eye as he followed and decided that if she belonged to him, they’d be well advised to shut up.
Beyond the kitchen more swing doors opened into a narrow hallway. To the left, it led to a staircase that dropped away to ground level. There were a couple of doors on the far side of the corridor: a storeroom, an office. The lights were out. There was no one in either of them.
“Keep moving,” said Carver. “Go down the stairs. Make a lot of noise. Go!”
He listened to her running along the uncarpeted floorboards, then ducked into the office. The door opened inward. He stood behind it, holding it almost shut, without letting the catch close completely.
A few seconds later Carver heard the door to the kitchen burst open. He pictured the man with the ponytail standing in the corridor, gun held in front of him, surveying the emptiness in front of him, then hearing the sound of Alix’s feet on the stairs.
There were footsteps as the man went by. Carver eased the door open and stepped out into the corridor. He took three quick steps forward. The man heard him on the third step, but it was too late. He couldn’t stop, turn, and bring his gun around before Carver raised his left hand, brushed his right arm away and, in the same cobra-fast movement, jabbed two fingers into his eyes.
The Russian squealed in pain, dropped his gun, and held his hands up to his blinded eyes. Carver kept moving. He shifted his weight onto his right foot, rotated his shoulders, and slammed the heel of his right palm into the man’s chin. Another shoulder rotation and a shift of weight through the hips brought Carver’s left elbow up to crack into the man’s cheekbone. Now his right knee piled into the man’s defenseless groin. As he doubled over in pain, Carver karate-chopped the back of his neck. The Russian dropped unconscious to the floor. It was the basic five- second knockout—lesson one in the special forces’ fighting handbook. Worked every time. Unless the other guy had read the same book.
Carver thought about pulling the man back down the passage by his stupid ponytail, but decided against it and grabbed him under the armpits instead. He dragged the unconscious body into the empty office, then stepped back out into the passage. Now came the interesting bit. He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the stairwell. In the dim light from the passage, he could see a flight of steps, then a small landing, then another flight, which turned back the other way and disappeared beneath him.
“Alix?” he hissed.
He wondered if she’d be there. If she’d run he knew for certain he was on his own. If she’d stayed, it wasn’t so simple. She might be on his side. Or she could be sticking close so she could help someone else.
Alix appeared on the landing. She looked at Carver.
“So, what are we going to do now?”
“The only thing we can do for now. Disappear.”



21

The operations director tried to rub the exhaustion from his bloodshot eyes. The job was falling apart around him. He was standing with Papin in the street outside the mansion. The city would soon be waking up to discover the horrors that had taken place while it was asleep.
“Okay,” said Papin. “Let’s go through it from the beginning. Forget for the moment whatever happened in the Alma, concentrate on what happened here. No French citizens have been harmed. We will do our best to make it all disappear. But if I am to help you, I must know what happened. And you must deal with any—what do you say?—loose ends. So, to begin. Who owns the house?”
“I don’t know. I imagine that when your people start trying to trace the ownership, they will find a mass of shell companies in different tax havens. But I don’t know who owns them. And even if I did, I couldn’t tell you.” “How can I help if you play games with me?” “I’m not playing games. I honestly do not know. And I guarantee that any names I gave you would not appear on any ownership documents anywhere.”
“Okay, I understand. Next problem: Who did this?”
The operations director thought for a moment. Then he breathed a plume of smoke into the early-morning air and said, “Carver. It has to be. He knew about the explosives in that flat because he put them there. Kursk had no idea. If he’d gone in, he’d have been killed, and the woman with him.”
Papin nodded. “Okay, so we know a man and a woman went into that apartment. We agree the man must have been Carver. So could the woman be Petrova? Are they working together now? If so, they must have come out together too, because no one died in the explosion. Next question: Did they come here? Well, we have evidence of two weapons. The simplest explanation for that is two shooters. Do we have any other suspects? No. Did Carver have any other female accomplice?”
“No.”
“Eh bien, let’s assume that Carver and Petrova were responsible for the killings here. Clearly, they must be eliminated before they cause any more trouble. We need descriptions. So tell me, Charlie, are you sure you do not know what Carver looks like?”
The operations director ground his cigarette stub under his heel. “We had him watched on a couple of his early jobs. It was an obvious precaution. He’s a shade under six feet tall. Call it a meter eighty; maybe seventy-five kilos in weight; dark hair; thin face, intense looking. Other than that, no distinguishing features that I know of. Actually, there is something else. . . .”
“What?”
“Max wasn’t wearing his jacket when he died. And it wasn’t where he’d left it, the last time I saw him, hanging on the back of his chair. Carver could have dumped the black jacket and taken Max’s. It’s a gray one, same fabric as the trousers.”
“Okay. And the woman?”
“All I know is her reputation. She’s meant to be a blond model type.”
Papin raised his eyebrows knowingly. “Now we have a reason why Carver might want to be with Petrova. But if she was Kursk’s partner, what is she doing on the back of a motorcycle with the man who killed him? Why is she running in and out of apartments with Carver? Why is she joining him in a gunfight?”
“How the hell would I know? She’s a bloody woman. Maybe she fancies him. Maybe she changed her mind.”
“Or maybe she hasn’t.” Papin smiled. “What is it you English say about the female of the species?”
“It was Kipling. He said the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
“Alors, an Englishman who understands women. Incroyable!”