The Darkest Day (3 page)

The woman advertised her age as twenty-five, but was at least ten years older. The soft glow provided by the low-wattage lighting helped the lie by smoothing out the fine lines in her face, and generous make-up covered the dark bags beneath her eyes. Victor went along with the deception. Neither did he comment on the fact the photographs on her website must have undergone extensive retouching. There was no need to be impolite.

Still, she was an attractive woman with long dark hair and blue eyes full of life and ambition. She opened the front door to her second-floor apartment on Pařížská Street, off Wenceslas Square, wearing a silk robe and an enormous smile. Her teeth were bleached white and too straight and perfect to be her own.

She advertised herself as an escort. It was a soft, almost harmless-sounding word. Victor understood the need for it in the same way he understood why people like him called themselves mercenaries or shooters or hitmen. He only thought of himself as a professional killer. He had no need to soften his means of employment any more than he had his use of prostitutes.

She took his hand and led him inside without a word, gesturing him to go on into the lounge area while she closed the door behind him. Victor didn’t like to give anyone his back, but he was playing the part of a typical client and did as she asked to preserve the illusion of normalcy. A significant part of his life was spent acting; even so, pretending he was just another regular guy while maintaining a permanent guard was a difficult balance to achieve. He never liked to increase his vulnerability if it could be avoided, but sometimes it was better to be a little more vulnerable in the moment to ensure continued survival outside of it. Now was one of those times.

He rubbed his hands together in a sign of nervousness and because they were cold from an afternoon spent following the prince’s accountant around the city.

The woman’s apartment was small but furnished with expensive pieces in a clean, modern style. It was so spartan he wondered if it served only as a place of business and she lived elsewhere, but bookshelves filled to capacity contradicted that assessment. Maybe she just liked the minimalist approach.

‘You know my rate for the hour, yes?’ the woman asked as she followed him into the lounge.

She spoke in English, but with a strong Czech accent. Her high heels clicked and clattered on the bare flooring. In them, she was as tall as he.

He had already turned to face her, positioning himself so he was near to the same wall as the west-facing windows, at an acute angle so as not to be in the line of fire for a marksman across the street.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Then I’d like to see my gift now,’ she said with a smile that made it seem as innocent a request as the way she phrased it.

‘Of course.’

He withdrew his wallet and counted out crisp banknotes.

She approached and took them from his hand, still smiling, but the smile slipped away as she turned to count the money and put it out of sight on a bookcase between two hardback novels. Historical fiction, he noted.

‘I take it you read all the rules,’ she said without turning around. ‘What’s allowed and what’s not.’

‘I did.’

‘That’s good to know. I don’t like having to repeat myself. It wastes our time.’

‘I’m not here to waste time,’ he said.

She turned around and regarded him in a different way, as if assessing his desires and perversions from the way he stood and the cut of his suit. Maybe it was a game she played with each client, having long grown used to what makes a man tick.

‘What shall I call you?’ she asked as she toyed with her hair.

Victor remained silent.

The woman said, ‘You can tell me your name, honey. I won’t tell anyone, I swear. Discretion is all part of the service, I assure you.’

Victor said, ‘Honey will be fine.’

She tilted her head to one side. ‘Is that what you want me to cry out in bed?’

‘There’s no need for you to pretend.’

She smiled. ‘I don’t think I’ll need to with you, will I?’

He’d heard it all before, of course. It wasn’t his first time paying for sex. It was sometimes necessary in a life where he could allow himself no real connection with anyone, but could not afford to be distracted by desire for too long. It was one impulse he could do little to control with will alone.

He smiled with her because that’s what she expected him to do and he was playing the part of a regular client – a businessman cheating on his wife, maybe, or a politician living out a sordid cliché of a personal life – not a professional killer who used hookers because he couldn’t risk a relationship, or even a friendship. Any personal connection created a gap in his defences and at the same time put that person at risk from those who meant Victor harm. The last time someone had wanted to get close to him he had convinced them the feeling was not mutual.

‘Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’

He gestured to a small table where a lead crystal decanter sat on a solid silver tray; Scotch, judging by the pale yellow colour of the liquid.

‘No,’ she said in return. ‘I’m afraid that whisky was a present from a dear client. It would be rude to share it with another. I’m sure you can understand that.’

He nodded.

‘What do you like?’ she asked, and he could feel the expectation of her words. She wanted to see if she was right in her previous assessment of him.

‘I prefer to show, rather than tell.’

This seemed to catch her by surprise. ‘That sounds… promising.’ She tapped her bottom lip with a long red nail. ‘And there was I thinking you were going to be boring.’

‘I can assure you I’m a painfully dull person.’

‘I think I’ll be the judge of that,’ she said.

They stood in silence for a moment.

She gestured with her eyebrows, which had been plucked and drawn back on. ‘Bathroom’s that way.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Victor said. ‘Clients need to shower first.’

‘That’s what my listing clearly states.’

‘What if I told you I don’t like showers?’

‘Then I’d politely bid you farewell.’

‘No refund?’

She smiled and said nothing.

‘Do any clients refuse?’ he asked.

‘It happens on rare occasions. Most men accept my rules. Most behave as a gentleman should.’

‘And what happens on these rare occasions?’

‘I show them the door.’

Victor said, ‘Even very dear clients?’

She carried on smiling, but did not answer. ‘Help yourself to a robe.’

He nodded and circled through the lounge so he did not have to pass in a straight line across the window. His route brought him close to the woman. She brushed his arm as he walked by.

The bathroom was off the hallway. He stepped inside and shut the door. He slid the little brass bar across to lock it. Not that such a mechanism had any strength to resist a forced entry, but he did not want the woman entering and interrupting what he had planned.

Victor pulled the hanging string by the door to turn on the light. An extractor fan whirred into life as the fans got to speed and emitted a quiet hum. He reached behind the shower curtain to turn on the shower. Then he lowered the toilet lid and stood on it so he could reach the extractor fan high on the same wall as the bathroom’s small window.

He took a cent coin from a trouser pocket and used it to unscrew the plastic protector from the face of the extractor fan. He felt the change in air pressure as the whirling blades sucked air from the bathroom and forced it outside. The blades were made of plastic and weak, but were spinning fast enough to split skin and maybe damage tendons. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a ballpoint pen. Its shell was made from aluminium.

He held it in a tight grip and pushed it between the blades. They came to an abrupt stop.

He heard clicks and creaks and a mechanical whine before the sound stopped and resistance died with it. He removed the pen and the blades sat unmoving while he replaced the fan’s face-plate and screws.

He gave it a couple of minutes for the room to steam up, then began undressing. He did so in a particular way, in a particular order to limit his vulnerability doing so. His balance and flexibility were both excellent, but bending or squatting and standing on one leg all put him at greater risk than sitting down. He first sat on the toilet lid to untie his shoes, perched on the edge, head over hips, ready to spring to his feet if necessary. He untied both shoes before removing them, to spend the least possible time wearing only one shoe. Running or fighting wearing one shoe would be a considerable hindrance, even without the fact Victor had no intention of dying in such an undignified manner. His socks followed because bare feet gripped surfaces far better than soft wool. The jacket and tie were next, which he stood up to remove, followed by his shirt, trousers and then underwear. He placed all the items in an easy-to-carry pile and left them on the toilet seat while he ran the taps to wash himself as requested.

When he had finished washing he turned off the shower and dried himself off on one of the several white towels hanging on a rail and wrapped it around his waist. He saw the rail could accommodate another two towels and tried not to imagine the previous two clients who had been here today before him. He slipped into a towelling robe but did not tie it.

The woman was waiting for Victor in the lounge when he stepped out of the bathroom.

‘You take your time, don’t you, honey?’

He shrugged and said, ‘I think your extractor fan is broken. The bathroom’s all steamed up.’

‘Oh, that’s annoying. Be a dear and open the window for me.’

He placed his folded clothes on an armchair in the hallway and returned to the bathroom and did as she asked.

He heard her say, ‘Would you please excuse me for a second?’

‘Of course,’ Victor said.

He used the time to approach the lounge window, standing side on to the wall next to it and peering outside and over the balcony. He saw that there were no conceivable sniping nests from which a marksman could take a shot, so he allowed himself a few extra seconds to gaze outside at the city.

The view from the window showed a sky blanketed by cloud. No sun was visible. He could see an uneven cityscape of sloping rooftops of red tiles and tall chimneys. A scattering of snow lay across them, thicker on the west-facing slopes and patchier on those facing east. The buildings beneath had an understated beauty with their pale pastel-coloured walls and arched windows. Clock towers and spires poked at the grey sky above. For a pleasant moment he watched the swirling gentle spirals of white chimney smoke rise and dissipate, seeming to join the clouds as though they linked Earth to the heavens. He heard the woman return and turned away from the soothing fantasy.

‘Do you like the city?’ the woman asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said, speaking the truth, then added, ‘It’s my first time here,’ which was a lie.

Of all his skills, lying was the one he employed with the most frequency; he spoke more often in lies than truth, existing in a constant state of pretending to be someone he was not – a businessman, a tourist, a nobody. Always unremarkable, always unworthy of attention. It had become second nature to do so because the part he played least of all was himself.

No one saw that side of him other than his victims and the reflection in the mirror of a face that was no longer his.

She stepped closer to him and untied her robe, slipping out of it in an effortless motion that would have been elegant if Victor could have ignored the fact she had performed the move countless times. She stood before him in a white bodice. He looked her over as she expected him to.

She parted his robe and eased it off his shoulders. She spent a long time looking at his body and the many scars and marks that covered his skin. He was used to the stares and the questions that followed. He had been cut and burned and shot and torn and bitten and more. He had whole tales memorised for every one of them, explaining away the more prominent scars as the result of a car crash and the lesser ones as sports injuries; if the person enquiring knew a scar caused by a bullet when they saw it, he had war stories from a military career that was different to his own.

But when the woman had finished examining him and her gaze returned to his, she did not ask a single question. Which was as rare as it was unexpected. Instead, she said to him:

‘I knew that you weren’t boring.’

The tailor had been cutting suits since the Second World War. He told Victor as much while he waited in the fitting room of the low-ceilinged atelier. The establishment was small but stylish, with a long waiting list of elite clientele. It was owned and run by a single tailor who was so short he had to stand on a rickety three-legged stool to measure Victor’s shoulders.

‘I was a boy cutting fabric for Nazi officers,’ the tailor explained, looking as though he might fall off the stool to his death at any moment. ‘Can you imagine?’

Victor said, ‘I’m not sure I can.’

The tailor snorted. Not quite a laugh, not quite a huff. It sounded to Victor that the man had a chest infection or some persistent pulmonary problem. The tailor did not seem to be any less energetic as a result.

‘I smoke sixty a day,’ he’d bragged. ‘And I’ve outlived all my boyhood friends who did not.’

Victor offered a hand to help the man off the stool, but he batted it away with palpable disdain and dropped down with a creak of floorboards, or maybe knees.

His fingers were stained by the lifetime of smoking he boasted of. Framed black-and-white photographs adorned the walls of the atelier. They showed the old tailor with clients, maybe even celebrities from yesteryear Victor didn’t recognise. In every one the tailor, like his clients, was smoking. One even showed him standing among tobacco plants in some tropical plantation.

The tailor wore a three-piece stone-brown suit complete with pocket square and pocket watch. His glasses were bifocals with thick lenses and the Cuban heels gave him enough height for the top of his shiny scalp to hit five feet if he stood straight-backed, which he did not.

He fetched the bespoke suit from a back room and hung it up on a wheeled rail for Victor to try on.

‘I don’t understand your reasoning, my boy. You already have a charcoal suit. Off the rack, obviously, but of decent enough quality to avoid outright humiliation. Why pay for another?’

‘Do you not want my business?’ Victor asked.

‘I want you to look your best,’ the tailor countered. ‘Is that so hard to comprehend? Is your brain not in proportion to your height?’

Victor couldn’t help but like the man.

‘Charcoal is so unadventurous,’ the tailor said with a tut. ‘It is but the sickly cousin of black. A pauper to be ignored, not a gentleman to be envied. Black is a colour. Charcoal is a shade.’

‘Black is the absence of colour.’

The tailor acted as though he hadn’t heard him. ‘What about it? Black would be more striking. You’ll look good in black.’

‘Everyone looks good in black,’ Victor said.

The tailor looked hopeful. ‘Is that a yes?’

Victor shook his head. ‘I only wear black to a funeral.’

The tailor did his best not to sigh. He looked pained. His face was a spiderweb of deep wrinkles. ‘But of course. Why would you wear black at any other time? Why would anyone want to look his best? What kind of world is it when someone elects to wear what suits him less? What about a nice navy? It’ll be more sophisticated, but still subtle.’

Victor unhooked the jacket and slipped his arms into the sleeves. He said nothing.

The tailor said, ‘I wish you had at least gone for a pinstripe or a colourful lining.’

Suits were important to Victor. He wore one more often than not. A suit gave him an air of authority and respect. In a suit he looked like a man of no small importance while blending in to the masses of office workers, lawyers and bankers found in almost every major city. A suit was ideal camouflage for the urban terrain where he both lived and worked.

Victor buttoned up the jacket and rolled his shoulders.

‘It’s perfect,’ he said, feeling the extra room he had asked for, which made it easier to hide a gun, to fight or climb or run for his life.

The old tailor’s eyebrows rose and arched and a curved fence of closely spaced grooves deepened across his forehead. He wrinkled his nose and blew air out of pursed lips. He did not approve.

‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘That won’t do at all. We need to fix this. It’s terrible. The fit is nothing short of an abomination. I’m ashamed of myself.’

‘I like it the way it is. This is exactly what I asked for.’

‘Then I need to saw open your skull and check you have a brain, my boy. Look here. You don’t need all this room across the chest. Are you planning on getting fat? Are you planning on growing breasts?’

Victor shook his head.

The tailor chewed his bottom lip. He looked stressed. Sweat beaded on his forehead. ‘Let me bring it in a smidgen. It’ll look all the sharper. Please? I can’t let you walk the streets like this.’

‘I prefer it the way it is,’ Victor replied. ‘You’ve done an excellent job.’

‘I’ve embarrassed my name and the name of my father. How about a tiny tuck?’ He held a finger and thumb a few millimetres apart. ‘Just a little? I promise it will still allow you room to breathe. For me. Please.’

‘This is comfortable.’

‘
Comfortable?
That’s a filthy word if ever I heard one. Barbaric even. If all we cared about was being comfortable then we would be a huge hideous mass of synthetic materials, shapeless and indistinguishable from one another. Sir, if you came in here for comfort then you must have misread the sign above my door. I do not sell comfort here. I sell suits. I sell style.’

Victor remained silent.

‘Fine,’ the tailor said with a heavy exhale. ‘I give up. We’ll do it your way and you can walk out of here knowing I shall live my last years in a state of unhappiness and shame.’

‘I’m glad we can agree.’

The tailor removed a solid silver cigarette case from his inside jacket pocket and thumbed it open. He held it towards Victor, who shook his head.

‘A gentleman should smoke,’ the tailor said as he took out a cigarette for himself. He didn’t light it. ‘And a man who appreciates a tailored suit
needs
to smoke. He must know his tobacco like he knows his fabrics.’ The tailor held the unlit cigarette beneath his nostrils and inhaled. ‘Suits are my love, but tobacco is my passion.’

‘I quit,’ Victor said.

‘Then start again,’ the tailor implored. ‘Before it’s too late. But only the best. Good cigarettes are like a good suit. Utterly distinct and separate from the mass-produced garbage so commonplace today. No two varieties of cigarette, if made correctly, are the same. They have a range of flavours and feels that titillate the palate. Like a fine wine, almost.’

‘Most wine tastes like vinegar to me.’

The tailor looked at him with disgust. ‘Your barbarism knows no bounds.’

Victor nodded. The tailor helped him out of the jacket. ‘I’m just going to tidy up these threads and the suit will be ready to collect this afternoon. Or you can wait here and I’ll do it now. Your choice.’

‘I’ll wait, if it’s all the same to you.’

The tailor shrugged. ‘Child, it makes no difference to me what you do. Would you like a drink? Or something to read? I’ll be about twenty minutes. I’m assuming a barbarian such as yourself can actually read? I’m probably giving you too much credit, aren’t I?’

He asked as though he expected an answer.

‘I’ll entertain myself,’ Victor said. ‘Take your time, please.’

The old man nodded and went to leave. He stopped and turned around. ‘And a haircut and shave wouldn’t kill you…’

He trailed off, muttering under his breath as he closed the door behind him.

Alone in the measuring room, surrounded by mannequins, hangers and fabrics, Victor stood still, listening to the quieting footsteps of the old tailor as he shuffled away. A moment later, another door clicked open and then closed again. Victor pictured the tailor settling into a comfortable chair to make the final adjustments to the charcoal suit.

He had twenty minutes.

Victor reached into a trouser pocket and withdrew a mini plastic bottle labelled as containing antibacterial hand gel. There was a small amount of ethanol inside, for the appropriate smell, but the bottle contained clear silicone gel. The consistency wasn’t quite the same as alcohol gel, but it was similar enough to pass a cursory examination. Not even an airport security guard had ever done more than sniff the bottle, let alone apply some and compare it to a genuine product.

He squeezed a blob of silicone gel into his palm and spent two minutes rubbing it over his hands, paying particular attention to his fingertips and palms. The gel was cool and oily. It took a further minute to dry. His hands were now coated in a waterproof barrier, invisible to the naked eye, which would prevent the oil from his skin being left behind on any surfaces he came into contact with. No oil meant no fingerprints.

Three minutes to apply the gel meant seventeen remaining.

He replaced the bottle in his pocket and approached the room’s only window. The sash window was open a crack and the semi-transparent white drapes rippled in the breeze. Victor pushed them to one side and heaved open the window until it was high enough for him to bend over and step through on to the balcony outside.