Page 78 of The Nameless Ones
‘And if these Vuksans, whoever they are, pay you, then all will be forgiven?’
‘What do you think?’ said Mr Rafi. His pupils had grown larger, turning his brown eyes almost black, as though in anticipation of the suffering they might soon witness.
‘I think,’ said Louis, ‘that I may have to find somewhere else to drink my morning coffee in future, at least until something happens to you.’
Mr Rafi produced a card. It was blank, apart from a telephone number written by hand in blue ink. He slid the card toward Louis, who ignored it.
‘I’d advise you to take it,’ said Mr Rafi. ‘What harm can it do to leave open a channel of communication?’
Louis hesitated before, with studied indifference, taking the card and vanishing it into a pocket.
‘You have a good day,’ he said.
‘Ma salama,’ said Mr Rafi.
The smile was back with a vengeance. Louis decided that it would be an act of public service to wipe it permanently from Mr Rafi’s face, and erase Mr Rafi from the face of the earth immediately after.
Louis headed for the door, passing Mr Rafi’s companion. He bore a jagged scar that ran from above his right eye, and across his forehead, to behind his left ear. It looked as though someone had tried to unfasten his skull with a can opener.
Louis paused in front of him.
‘Yo,’ said Louis, ‘Harry Potter.’
The man glanced up.
‘Made you look,’ said Louis, and continued out the door. He patted the pocket containing Mr Rafi’s card. He now had a bargaining chip.
Perhaps Harris and Ross might be disposed to do him a favor after all.
Chapter LXIV
Frend summoned a taxi to pick him up from the shadow of the silos. The app suggested it would be a twenty-minute wait, and he suddenly felt very exposed. Damn Kauffmann and her cemetery theatrics, and damn her, too, for making him doubt the wisdom of staying in Vienna once the Vuksans were gone. A bus was idling at the stop, and the driver was putting his phone away in preparation for departure. Frend decided to cancel the taxi. He did not wish to be out here with only birds and the dead for company. He took a seat behind the driver and was the sole passenger for the journey back to the tram terminus at Kaiser-Ebersdorfer Strasse, the trip offering him only a glum vista of warehouses, fields, and farm equipment. This was not Frend’s Austria. It was the preserve of those who ate lunch standing up.
He distracted himself from the landscape with his phone, where he learned of Hendricksen’s murder. So absorbed had he been by the presumed surveillance of the previous evening, and the impending meeting with Kauffmann, that he had failed to keep up with the news, which was unlike him. He could have lied to himself and pretended that he had not known how the Vuksans would react to Hendricksen’s involvement, but such dissembling was beneath him. He would have preferred them to have gone about their business in a less gruesome and more private manner, though. The Vuksans appeared intent on making an already precarious position more unstable still.
The burner phone he used to remain in contact with the Vuksans beeped as he stepped from the bus and waved down a passing taxi. The message was a short, simple text: We need to talk. It was, Frend considered, a little late for that. The time to talk would have been before Ilic and the girl – because it was surely their handiwork – had set about torturing Hendricksen in the bathroom of a city hotel before leaving the dying man to be discovered by some unfortunate chambermaid or duty manager.
It was as Frend climbed into the taxi that he realized the implication of one element of the story: the dying man. Did Hendricksen remain conscious for long enough to supply information to whomever had found him? More to the point, how much had he shared about Frend with whomever had engaged him to make the trip to Belgrade to begin with?
Which was when Frend noticed a new email in his in-box, containing a video attachment. When he opened the message, three lines of text greeted him.
We have your daughter.
Wait for a call.
Breathe a word, and she dies.
Angel was waiting for Louis in the doorway of the Oswald & Kalb restaurant when the latter emerged from Kaffee Alt Wein.
‘Are we making friends?’ he asked, when Louis joined him. Angel had been watching the interaction between Louis and Mr Rafi from the street, but had seen no reason to make his presence known. He had faith in his partner’s ability to handle most problems, as long as they did not require excessive diplomacy.
‘Not unless you’re planning to convert,’ said Louis as they walked down Bäckerstrasse, ‘and I don’t think they’re looking for our business anyway. I take it you got pictures of them?’
‘From a distance, but the images will clean up nicely. What do they want?’
‘The Vuksans. Alive.’
‘Why?’