After several transfers, I was a few blocks from the house. I walked towards it, conscious of the sounds created by the city and the night. In the glow of the streetlights I saw eyes watching me inches from the ground, but I saw no human eyes tracking my movements. I walked through the open gate in front of the house. Junk mail had been crammed into the mailbox by several companies that already thought I could be a winner. I unlocked the door, fighting the stiffness of the old mechanism. Its age made it turn with a groan, and I hoped, as usual, that the key would not break off. Inside the air was stale. The house had no real smell to speak of, probably because the house had no tenants to speak of.
I raided the kitchen looking for unspoiled food and found very little to choose from. I found crackers and an old jar of peanut butter that had given up its oil to the surface. I stirred the peanut butter with a knife and ate it with the crackers while I cleaned my Glock. When I finished with the Glock, I pulled my spare piece, a SIG Sauer 9 mm, from a compartment under the floorboards, and cleaned that as well. The amateurs I had met hadn’t seemed like the fighting type, but then again they didn’t seem like the type that would be able to find me, either. I decided I wouldn’t let them surprise me again.
The next morning I used two buses and a cab to get me back to the office by nine. The Glock was in a holster at the small of my back; I placed the SIG in a holster taped to the underside of the desktop. I made a cup of tea and rolled my chair to the window to read the paper. Between stories, I glanced at the street below, looking for things that stood out. After I had read a story about local rezoning, I looked down to see a car pull up in front of the building. Three men got out of the car; each was dressed in a trench coat and sunglasses. The car screeched away once the three were clear, its tires spinning until smoke poured out. The car disappeared around a corner amidst the screams of pedestrians and the horns of other motorists.
These guys were absolutely unbelievable. I pulled the gun from the holster at my back and racked a round into the chamber. I put the Glock, safety off, in my lap, and waited.
In two minutes, there was a knock at the office door. I didn’t move. Thirty seconds passed, and I saw a face pressed to the frosted glass. Another knock. I put my hand on the gun in my lap and yelled, “Just a minute, I’m in the john.”
Another ten seconds passed and then the door opened slowly. The first one through eyed my grin with amazement. He stood inside the doorway staring at me until I waved him in, saying, “Come on inside.” He was regular height with black hair that stood up in the front. The hair was sloppy over the ears, and I imagined it had been some months since he had a haircut. His nose was pointed like a beak, and his face was unshaven. A belly created a bulge under the buttoned trench coat he wore. The other two men tried to enter together, the larger finally managing to squeeze through first. He was bigger than chubby, but not yet obese. He had close-cropped red hair with a goatee to match, and on his left hand skin cream had dried crusty white. The third guy was tall, well over six feet, rail-thin, with a ponytail tied loose. He had circular John Lennon style glasses on a small pointed nose, and an Adam’s apple that protruded from his neck. I presumed that the one who entered first was the leader, because he was the one to speak first — unsurely, but first.
“Uh . . .” he said.
I cut him off. “There’s no name on the door, and no office number, so I know you don’t want anything honest. Just spit out what you really came here for.”
The three men shared a look, and then it started. The two at the back pulled at their coats and began to produce guns. The whole process took several seconds because of the time the stubborn snaps on their coats took to open. I could have shot all three using either gun, but I let it play out. Two guns, big ones, were aimed at my face. On the right side of two guns, the talker lost all of his nervousness and began to question me.
“Where the fuck is the bag, you motherfucker? I’ll kill your ass dead if you don’t talk, fucker!”
Amateurs always thought hard-asses spoke like that. I played along. “What bag?”
“You know exactly what bag. The one you took off Nicky at the airport.”
“I’m sorry,” I said calmly. “You must have me confused with someone else.”
The leader fumbled under his coat, brought out a piece of paper, and slammed it onto the desk. I stared at it while the sweat from his palm dried off the surface of the glossy paper. It was a picture of me leaving the airport with the bag. The image was grainy, but it was me. The photo had several numbers in each corner, as though the shot came from a security camera. This was the first time I was impressed. They had a watcher, someone I didn’t see, use the airport security cameras to get a shot of me coming from the bathroom.
“Well, it seems like I’ve been found, but you’re late — the bag’s gone.”
“We know that, fucker! We want it back.”
I filed the fact that they knew the bag was gone away in my brain, along with the name of the guy at the airport, which they had let slip. “Can’t help you. The bag’s been picked up,” I said.
“By who?”
I knew something they didn’t. It felt good to score a point against them after they had shown up knowing about me and the transfer of the bag. “You don’t want to know. They wanted the bag. They got it. You candy-asses couldn’t hang with them, so let it go. You lost the bag, but you’re alive.”
“Candy-asses, candy-asses, you fuck . . . fuck. I’ll show you.” The words sputtered out of his mouth as he twisted around to the fat one behind him. He wrestled the gun out of the fat man’s hand and aimed it at my head from three feet away. His hands were shaking with rage, but at that range it didn’t really matter; he could hit me no matter how much the barrel trembled. He held the gun with two hands and used both of his thumbs to pull back the hammer. I fought all the urges of fear and stared into his eyes. Time began to stretch; seconds felt like minutes, but everything snapped back when the skinny gunman with the Lennon glasses spoke up.
“Relax, Mike, we need this guy alive,” he said.
Mike took a few seconds, and then pulled the gun away and gave it back to the heavier of the two men.
“We found you, you fuck. We know who you are. We want the bag back and if we don’t get it, we’ll get you,” Mike said.
“I told you the deal is done. I’m a middleman, nothing more.”
“You have a day. Let’s go,” Mike said, and the three of them turned their backs and left. Mike went first, followed by skinny, then fat. They took turns this time so no one got stuck. I sat there thinking about how they had turned their backs on me. I could have pulled out a gun from anywhere and shot them dead, but the amateurs didn’t know that. One question rolled through my mind: how did these amateurs do such a pro job of finding me?
I sat in my chair and stared straight ahead. My whole lower body was damp with sweat. I spent twenty seconds like that, then I turned to the window. After a minute, I saw the three get into the black sedan they arrived in. As soon as they were in, the car peeled out from in front of the building. From the height and angle of my window, I only managed to make out an “H” on the far left of the plate, but I knew the vehicle: it was an Audi. The shape had been imperfectly copied by several American and Japanese automakers, but there was no mistaking the look of a real Audi sedan. I went to my desk and pulled a pad and pen from the second drawer on the left. I wrote down the information I had so far: the bagman named Nicky, descriptions of Mike and his two friends, the make of the car, and the “H” I saw on the licence plate. I tore the sheet from the pad, and stashed the information in a locked file cabinet with my paid bills.
I sat back in the chair and considered my options, which weren’t many. The bag wasn’t coming back willingly, so I could either try to find my new friends or wait for them to come to me again. I knew nothing about the bag or the people I took it from. I needed to know what I was up against before I made a move. In the end, I decided to make a call to the boss. Maybe he would give me an idea about who was on to me. I picked up the cell phone and dialled the same unlisted number I had called yesterday. It was the number for a restaurant, which it was, among other things. I waited, listening to the ringing tones. Promptly after the second chime, the phone was answered.
“Yeah?”
“I need an audience with the man,” I said.
“I think you have the wrong number. This is a restaurant.”
“Just tell him I delivered his bag and I just realized that there’s some other luggage that needs to be dealt with.” I didn’t wait for the guy on the other end to hang up first because I knew it was coming. The message would be automatically passed on and the right people would know what it meant. I figured I had some time before my question was answered, so I made a run to the deli at the corner. I picked up four large crusty rolls along with slices of pastrami, salami, corned beef, and turkey. I also got milk, a couple of deli pickles, and three pickled eggs. I took the food up to the office and set it in the small fridge I had in the corner. I pulled a book from a desk drawer and began to read with my feet on the windowsill.
I had finished two sandwiches and a pickle when I heard the steps. I dog-eared my page and gripped the SIG in the holster fastened under the desk. The room dimmed as a large shape blocked the light coming through the frosted glass of the door. I kept one hand on the gun and picked up an egg with the other hand as Julian walked into the room without knocking. He took a seat in the chair across from me and stared. I stared back at him and ate my egg.
“The job was done. You did what you were supposed to do. Everything was finished. Why the call?”
“This morning the bag owners were here looking for the bag,” I said, in between small bites of the egg.
Julian stared. If he cared he didn’t show it. “So? What’s your point? How is this our problem?”
Julian’s slow, repetitive style had a way of cutting through bullshit. “Point is, Julian, I need to know some things.”
“So? What’s your point? How is this our problem?” The mastodon in front of me altered. His tone changed; he was no longer polite, no longer a pleasant associate. He was considering what would have to be done about me.
I popped the last of the egg into my mouth and chewed. After I swallowed, I took a sip of milk, never moving my eyes away from Julian’s. “I want to know who the clients are, what they want back, and any other information I can get,” I said.
Without a word Julian rose from his chair and left. I wasn’t surprised he would go and consult with Paolo. Julian was important but he wasn’t management. I made a third sandwich and cursed under my breath; I had forgotten to get cheese. About ten minutes passed before the same shadow loomed in the doorway. Julian came in without knocking, again, and sat in the chair he had just left. I held the sandwich with my left hand, keeping my right below the desk on the gun. I took a bite and returned the look Julian was giving me.
“Well?”
“The boss says he’s disappointed. He’s angry about what you’ve done. He’s not happy. He says he used you because he didn’t want any complications. I told him we should just cut off the contact point — you. You know, kill you. But the boss said to give you some time to handle the problem.”
“How long?”
“Two days. Forty-eight hours.”
“Two days. Fine. What can you tell me?”
“The owners of the bag were computer nerds. They were moving something the boss wanted.”
Computer nerds. That explained the photo from an airport surveillance camera. One of them must of hacked into the security feed. “Why use me? Why not you?”
“There had to be deniability. No one could know who was interested. It was supposed to be anonymous. But you fucked that up, eh, tough guy?”
I let his challenge go unanswered and continued to probe. “What was in the bag?”
“None of your business. You don’t need to know. Next question.”
“How did you find out about these computer nerds?”
“None of your business. You don’t need to know. Next question.”
“What else can you tell me, Julian?”
“Two things. The first is an address, twenty-two Hess. The second is I’ll see you in two days.” With that, the dinosaur was up and on his way to the door.
“Julian,” I said. He turned to face me, his bulk erasing the door, and stared for a long minute. I put the last bite of sandwich in my mouth and raised my index finger and thumb. I felt a familiar grin pull at the side of my mouth and I dropped my thumb. It didn’t scare him; he didn’t even seem to notice. He stood in the doorway for ten long seconds, showing zero emotion; then he left. I went to the file cabinet and retrieved the notes I had taken earlier. “Computer nerd” and “22 Hess” were all I could add to the random details I had collected. I thought about the bag I had taken from Nicky. Paolo used me because he wanted to insulate himself. No one was to know about the contents of the bag or that he was interested in it. Since no one outside of Julian knew that I worked for Paolo, having me steal the bag was the best way to make it look like he wasn’t involved. The contents of the bag had something to do with computers, which meant it was probably still around in some form or another. Software is worth something, but it’s not like drugs or cash; it doesn’t vanish, and it isn’t consumed and can’t be laundered. The information that was on whatever was in the bag must have been of interest to Paolo. But what kind of information could a bunch of amateurs have that would interest a man like Paolo Donati?
I leaned back in my chair and stared at nothing in particular. Whatever the contents of the bag, I had two days and few options. I could steal the package back from Paolo and spend my life looking over my shoulder, or I could get the amateurs off my back. It took only seconds to weigh it out: I had to visit 22 Hess and the boys who paid me a visit earlier.
It was still early in the day, only ten past one. I pulled a short-sleeved oxford-cloth shirt from the small office closet and put it on. The blue shirt had a faded pattern and it blended into a crowd well. I left the shirt untucked over my jeans and left the office. I got in the car, tossed the Glock into the glove box, gunned the engine hard, and drove fast away from the office, keeping a close eye on the mirror for a tail. As I made the different lefts and rights, I noticed a black Audi cut in front of me from a side street. It stayed with me until I made another turn, and a minute later it was ahead of me again. These assholes were unbelievable. They were doing a tail in front of me — which only works on long roads with few turnoffs — and they were using the same car they had driven to the office earlier. I pulled a pen from the glove box and wrote down the rest of the plate, H21 2T5, on my forearm. When I saw an opening, I made a U-turn from the far right lane to the far left. As I pushed the car through traffic, weaving tightly around other motorists, I heard the sounds of horns. I watched the Audi in the rear-view attempt a similar U-turn only to get blocked in the middle of the street.
I made my way alone to 22 Hess with little trouble after that. The neighbourhood housed pubs and restaurants, a dentist, a tattoo parlour, and other businesses. The road on this portion of Hess Street was brick instead of pavement, and each of the buildings was set back from the street; they all had ample front gardens or patios. The building I wanted was a two-storey walk-up that had no use for its patio, so the space had been converted into a small garden with a black iron fence and several benches for smoking employees. The building looked as if it had begun life as a house, but it had been recently modernized for a different type of clientele. The large window that faced the street had been re-paned with reflective glass that deflected the sunlight onto the garden.
I parked across the street and watched the building. For twenty-five minutes nothing stirred; no one went in or came out. The pedestrian traffic was light. Most of the crowds were probably going back to work after their lunch. The occasional person walked by my car but none of them were police or security. The length of time in which nothing happened made me think I would be able to meet with these boys without being disturbed. I pulled the Glock from the glove box and made sure it was loaded and ready. I shifted in my seat and tucked the gun under my shirt into the holster at the small of my back. Once I was armed, I got out and fed the meter two quarters, earning me half an hour. I wasn’t going to be long, but parking tickets lead to paper trails, and people can follow those trails. I opened the Volvo’s trunk and pulled out a baseball cap, which I pulled low over my eyes while I waited for a break in the traffic. The second to last car before the light turned was a police car. I smiled at the cop in the passenger seat as he rolled by. He stared back uninterested. When the street was clear, I crossed and followed the path of the police car. The patrol car turned left at the next lights, and neither of the two men inside looked back at me. Seeing the police car didn’t bother me. I had been on Hess Street for half an hour and it was the first sign of the law I had come across. I figured I had at least a half of an hour before the police would be back; that was twenty minutes more than I needed.
I doubled back up the street and walked through the garden with my hat still pulled low. When I opened the front door, I was greeted with the smell of recycled office air. Fifteen feet in front of me was a receptionist speaking into a headset. The woman seated behind the desk was plump, almost round. Her nose was pointed up in a slightly piggish way, and her round face was accentuated by a curly mass of short hair. She occupied her free hands with a bottle of red nail polish. I angled my head low so that the visor of the hat hid my features from any cameras above me. I couldn’t be sure who knew me in the building, and I didn’t want any new friends. I waited politely in front of the receptionist, looking at the counter, the floor, and the two hallways leading away from the reception desk. The hallway ahead had only one door I could see; its wood was polished and expensive. The hallway to my left contained several doors, each with plastic name plates beside them.
The receptionist finally told someone to hold on and greeted me cheerfully: “How may I help you today, sir?” It was said without any hint of sarcasm or feeling. It was an automatic response to a visitor.
I smiled pleasantly. “Hey, is Mike around?” I said, using the name the amateur let slip in my office.
She spoke again with congenial efficiency. “Just a moment, sir, let me check to see if he is available.” She touched a button and spoke into the headset. “Mr. Naismith,” she chirped, “you have a visitor who would like to see you.” There was a pause and then the woman said, “No.” She looked at me again, and I smiled before turning my head to look at the art hanging on the walls. I heard her say, “Not by me, sir,” before ending the call with a “yes, sir.”
She looked at me and said Mr. Naismith would be out momentarily to see me. I decided to chance it and asked the receptionist, “Is Mikey’s office still around the corner there?”
The receptionist craned her neck, her eyes following my pointing finger down the left hall, and said, “Um, no. That is where our associates work. Mr. Naismith’s office is the door in other hallway.”
I thanked her and started down the hall. I heard a protest of, “Hey, you can’t do that!” But I kept on walking. As I neared the door, I could hear a buzz and the sound of the receptionist calling from her desk to inform Mr. Naismith about my behaviour. I opened the expensive door without slowing down.
Mike was bent over his desk, his back to me, speaking into the intercom. It must have buzzed as he walked to the door, and he had reached over his desk to answer the call. He had just enough time to look over his shoulder and see me before I pulled his hand off the buzzer and punched him in the kidney. My arm was around his neck before he had a chance to slump to the floor.
I spoke into his ear calmly and clearly. “Tell the girl at the desk that everything is cool. Tell her we went to school together and I was trying to surprise you.” When I said the last few words I squeezed his throat for emphasis. “Anything funny and you’ll be dead before you hit the floor. The receptionist will be next, way before she gets from nine to one one on the phone.”
I reached over and held down the speak button on the intercom. Mike laboured out, “It’s okay, Martha, my friend just wanted to surprise me . . . I . . . I haven’t seen this guy since high school. Please just hold my calls.” There was a small grunt of pain in between breaths, but he got out what I wanted him to say.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Naismith.” The receptionist sounded like she wasn’t convinced, but she was in no position to question. She clicked off the line and went back to work.
I kept the choke on and squeezed until the man I now knew as Mike Naismith brought his hands up to pull on my arm. I seized the opportunity and let the choke go in favour of a wrist hold. I pinned him to the desk with his head beside a paperweight and his arm ninety degrees in the air.
“Now,” I said, “it’s time we had a talk without guns being pointed at people.”
“How did you find me?” All the bravado and tough language from before had left when I hit him.
“Do you think it was that hard? You’re an amateur and I’m a pro. Finding you is a slow morning. I want to know how you found me.”
There was a long pause before Mike grunted. “We followed you.”
I twisted his arm, feeling bone scrape on bone. “All right, all right,” he said. “The bag had a GPS. We tracked it.”
There was a new world dawning while I slept. A GPS tracker let these amateurs follow me home, and I didn’t do a thing about it. I should have got rid of the bag right away, but I was told to deliver it. I assumed the bag was clean because, before now, every bag I delivered had been clean. I hated myself for five seconds, then I got back to work.
“Now, what did I take from you?” I figured identifying the package would give me some info on how bad the situation was. I had to find out how far these guys would go to get the bag back, and what it would take to persuade them to give up. Everything depended on the bag. Mike gave me no response, so I pushed the arm to ninety-five degrees and asked again. “What did I take?” I felt the last few degrees produce another grinding sensation deep in Mike’s shoulder. His arm was so far back he was unable to offer any fight against the hold. Any more pressure from me and his shoulder would start splintering apart like old wood under too much tension.
“It was disks, that’s all — disks. Goddamn it! You’re breaking my arm!”
“What was on the disks? And who were they going to?”
I heard Mike breathe heavily in and out, and I listened to him groan. He was trying to raise his chest off the desk to relieve the pressure on his shoulder, but the position he was in gave him no leverage or muscle power.
“Answer me before I make you, Mike. Either way I win. If we do this fast you might even get out of a trip to emergency.”
“It was the files we took; all of them. We don’t have anything else.”
Mike was starting to scream, and I was starting to realize that he had no idea who I was working for. I spun him around using the arm as a lever and laid my fist right into his stomach. Under his wrinkled untucked dress shirt was a soft belly, the kind you get from sitting a lot and eating at your desk every day. He wheezed like a balloon deflating, then slumped into a fetal position.
“I could do without the yelling. From this point on,” I told him, “I want you to act like I’m new to all of this. Explain it to me step by step, or this will take a lot longer than you could ever want it to.”
Mike lay like a fish pulled into a canoe; he gasped and struggled and before long he started to sob. I waited five seconds and then pulled him up to his seat by his greasy wax-styled hair. I showed a deliberate wind-up, and Mike gasped. I stopped the punch halfway to his face and asked again, “Will you tell me everything?”
“Yuh, yuh . . . yes.” He sobbed. Snot ran down his face.
“What was it I stole?”
It took several seconds for the question to register. I had to wait several more while Mike wondered how I couldn’t know what I took. I decided to make things easy on us both. “I’m only pick-up and delivery, like FedEx. I don’t know contents. I usually don’t ask questions, but now that there are complications I want to know everything, and you are the only source of information I have.”
Mike’s breath came back during my little speech. His voice was less shaky, and the tears on his face had absorbed into his collar. “It was accounting records, all right?”
“Were they yours?”
“No. They belonged to someone else. We were selling them back.”
I exhaled loudly and turned to the door. The turn masked my arm moving, and when I turned back I used my hips to power a left hook into the side of Mike’s neck. My fist hit the meat of his neck — right in between where his stubble stopped and the hair on the back of his neck began. I didn’t hit him too hard, just enough to shock and scare. The impact, and fright, drove him out of his chair.
As he sputtered on the floor, I crouched down beside him and said, “Listen, Mike, I don’t have all day and I don’t want you to keep holding out on me until I ask just the right questions. Tell me everything, and I mean everything.”
Mike got out a, “You asshole,” between sobs.
I put him back into his chair and asked once again, “Last time. Tell me everything about the disks.”
He gulped in air. Then he began spitting out information almost faster than I could listen. “We repair computers here. One day an accountant, at least we think he’s an accountant, came in with his laptop. He was totally freaking out. I mean really losing it. He said he had lost some files and he needed them back pronto. He said he would pay anything — it just had to be done immediately. We took his laptop and gave it a full diagnostic check. Its hard drive still had copies stored from before the system crash. While we were restoring the files, we took a peek to see what was so important. It was all accounting files, with client names, company names, and bank account numbers. Some of the banks were offshore banks. Jimmy, one of the boys on staff, he was able to understand the information. He was an accountant before he came here. He saw . . . mistakes; he realized a lot of the information wasn’t kosher. It took us a whole day to figure out what was hiding in the files. Once we had the scam figured, we made encrypted copies of the files, erased the originals, and then called the accountant to set up a trade. Heh, he said he’d give anything, right? We gave him a number, and he said he needed three days to pony up the dough. We said okay, and three days later we set up an exchange.”
“At the airport. That was what I took off Nicky.” I was beginning to see where this was going.
Mike seemed genuinely surprised that I knew Nicky’s name; he must have not realized that he let it slip when we first met. The only part I couldn’t figure out was how Paolo Donati fit in, and more important, why did he care about blackmailing an accountant?
“What’s Nicky’s last name?” I asked.
“Why?”
I pulled back my fist, and Mike barked a quick answer. “Didiodato,” he said.
“Whose idea was it for him to be the bagman?”
“Bagman?”
“The guy who took the disks to the airport.”
“Oh. He volunteered. No one here has ever done anything like this before, so no one argued with him.”
I wondered why a kid who worked with computers all day would want to be the face of a blackmailing scam. Why would anyone volunteer to put themselves out there like that? I didn’t allow myself to focus on any theories for too long; I had been in the office almost ten minutes. “Who did the accounting files belong to?” I asked.
Mike didn’t answer. He shook his head twice, gritting his teeth, showing the first sign of backbone, or of a fear of something worse than me. I hit him in the stomach, and sound echoed off the walls. The sound wasn’t my fist. The loud crack was something else, and it turned both our eyes to the door. Then the screaming started.