The Hunter's Prayer (15 page)

He smiled, knowing that it was too insignificant to speak of. He’d been in a department store in Zurich, crowded in the approach to Christmas, and suddenly he’d found a small hand in his. A little girl had reached up to take what she’d thought was her father’s hand. The father had seen it happen and had exchanged a little joke in German which Lucas hadn’t understood.

That’s all it had been, a stupid little incident, the kind of thing that people experienced every day without giving it a thought. But its effect on Lucas had been profound, for reasons transparent enough to be embarrassing. It didn’t matter, though, how weakly sentimental the catalyst had been, only that he’d been receptive to it.

‘Nothing happened. I just decided to change.’ He said no more, and yet he wanted to warn her that it wasn’t that easy—something he and Bruno Brodsky and her own father all would have testified to. Once in, there was always a route out; staying out was where the difficulty lay.

But he sensed that she was already too far gone. So instead of giving her advice when they got back to the hotel, he gave her a gun, and a little later still, he called Bruno to get the information he needed and to warn him that Ella was coming.

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

S
he 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.

‘You killed my family.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘I can play with words, but it is possible they would be still alive without me. You’re right to be angry. Please.’ He gestured to the armchairs and reluctantly she sat down, placing the gun back in her bag, taking the wine glass he offered her.

‘So why shouldn’t I kill you?’

‘Because it would be without purpose.’ He sipped at his wine. ‘I can understand why you wanted Novakovic dead—yes, Lucas told me about that, too: because he pulled the trigger. You wanted him dead because he was too professional; he didn’t change his mind when he saw your family. I can understand also why you must kill the person who ordered the contract; it’s only just. Me, I’m a middleman. My crime was to place together people who wanted to kill with people who could do it for them. I didn’t think badly of your family; I just didn’t think of them at all.’

‘I’m not sure how that’s meant to convince me.’

He smiled and said, ‘I make a better argument in German.’

‘You’re German? I thought you were Hungarian.’ She was annoyed with herself for asking; she didn’t want detail, but she was curious all the same.

‘No. I come from just outside Dresden, in the East. My wife was Hungarian.’

‘Lucas said she died when she was young.’

‘She didn’t die: she was killed. Summer 1977. In one summer three women were raped and strangled. She was the second. They never found the killer, but after the summer, no more attacks.’ He took a larger mouthful of wine. ‘And yes, I’m seeing why you want me dead because that summer I wanted everyone dead. I wanted to kill policemen for doing nothing. I wanted to kill people for being happy. And all because I could not have what I most wanted: the killer killed.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She sipped at her wine too. This was what she’d least wanted—to see him as human, carrying his own sadness.

‘But you still don’t see why you’re lucky. You
will
find your killer. You can make things right because you have Lucas and he will find them for you.’

She felt awkward hearing Lucas mentioned like that. He was the only person she could rely on and he’d helped her twice. But she was worried that he’d look upon her differently now that she’d lied to him and come here with a gun. For all she knew, though, this would lift her in his estimation, his skewed view of the world probably treating deceit as a virtue.

‘You’ve known Lucas a long time?’

He shrugged but said, ‘I guess as long as anybody. Almost long enough to be his friend.’

‘Tell me about him.’

He finished the wine in his glass and poured himself another. ‘What can I tell you about Lucas? First, don’t be tricked by his accent. He’s no Englishman. He’s a Rhodesian.’

‘A what?’

‘Rhodesian,’ he said, as if surprised by her ignorance. ‘Rhodesia. You know, today’s Zimbabwe. Before 1980 it was Rhodesia. That’s where he comes from. All I know about his time there is he doesn’t talk about it. Another thing: he says he doesn’t speak any other language—it’s a lie. He speaks a native African language, lots of . . .’ He made a clicking noise with his tongue. ‘You know? Sometimes when he was drunk he would speak like that for fun. A little Afrikaans too. That’s where he went—South Africa, Namibia, Angola. He was very young when he left Rhodesia, before independence. I think he was only twenty-three when he came to Europe but he had a reputation already. I liked to work with him. He was good. Kill anyone.
He
would have killed your brother. He would have killed you.’

She couldn’t process all the information that was coming at her. Lucas had been a rough sketch to her, a caricature at most, a man defined by his social awkwardness, his tics, and now Brodsky was suggesting a real and complex life. Lucas had come from somewhere, had grown up, possessed memories.

For the first time since meeting him, she felt like she wanted to get to know him, to see him open up about that past. And that desire made her sad too, because she was locked on a course that would put distance between them, almost certainly sending Lucas back into the shadows.

Because in the past, Lucas might have been willing to kill anyone, but he’d changed. He hadn’t wanted to kill Novakovic; he didn’t want to kill Brodsky. She could see now how he was fighting clear of that past and how she could only pull him back into it. It was beyond her control, though: the choice had been made for her by others, including the man sitting opposite, and she wouldn’t rest until they’d all paid.

She had no doubt that Brodsky was good company, that he could tell her stories about Lucas. And he’d helped her with information. Perhaps he was a good person but so too had been the people whose deaths he’d arranged. She’d come here to kill him and she’d be guilty of betraying them if she didn’t go through with it.

‘So you lived here during the Communist era?’

‘I lived my whole life in Communism. I was a Communist.’

‘Tell me what it was like.’

‘What do you want to know?’

She asked the right questions, kept him talking. She watched him drink while she tried desperately to think of a way to do this. A gun would have been easy but Lucas had denied her that. She didn’t think she could stab him. Perhaps she could hit him with something.

All she had to do was wait until he’d drunk enough that his reactions would be slowed. She sipped at her own drink and allowed him to top it up, but Brodsky was drinking quickly and already seemed groggy when he got up for a second bottle.

‘You didn’t tell me how you came to Budapest,’ she called out as he got the wine from the kitchen. She wasn’t listening to his responses, her brain racing through its own internal dialogue, trying to think of a way to kill him but finding it hard to fix on that target. She was thinking about killing someone, ending a life.

He began to slow down and fell asleep before he’d finished the second bottle of wine. And there it was, offered up to her, but she still didn’t know if she could do it. She walked over to the window, escaping the nausea and the confusion and the responsibility of who she was by looking down onto the empty street.

She’d been there for a few minutes when she heard someone call out, a monosyllable, nothing more, almost lost in the rustling of the trees. She struggled at first to see where it had come from and then noticed the boy standing down below on the opposite side of the street.

She felt an instant happy surge of recognition, only to have it sink away. It couldn’t be Ben—of course it couldn’t. He looked like him, though, even the way he was dressed, the apparition distant enough to cover up the flaws. Slowly, he lifted his arm in a wave. Her spine ran cold, a mixture of having been spotted and the boy’s phantom resemblance to Ben. She lifted her own arm in response but then she heard another voice and dropped it.

She was embarrassed as she saw that someone was leaning out of a window in one of the neighboring apartments. Another teenager. He called a few more words to his friend before disappearing. The boy in the street hadn’t seen her there. Nobody had seen her. Ben was dead. Brodsky had to die.

She closed the windows, the breeze putting up a half-hearted resistance. She walked into the kitchen without looking at him. There was no time for squeamishness; it would have to be a knife. She’d close her eyes, think about what he’d done, drive it into him. She could do it, and had to.

She opened a couple of drawers, the cutlery drawer rattling so noisily that she glanced into the living room to check that it hadn’t disturbed him. As she turned again, her eyes were snagged by the cooker and she stared at it as she gently closed the drawer.

Gas. She could turn on the gas. She remembered someone telling her once that domestic gas wasn’t poisonous. It was combustible, though, and that was a way of doing this without having to fall back on violence. And the death wouldn’t look suspicious either. An accident, an act of God.

She walked back into the living room and carefully picked up one of the large lit candles, carried it into the kitchen and placed it on the work surface. She picked up her wine glass and washed it, then got her bag and took one last look at Brodsky, looking older now that he was asleep, and harmless.

She couldn’t even know for certain that it would work but that made it better somehow, easier. Brodsky was guilty of killing her family, she believed that in her bones, but if this didn’t kill him it would be like someone surviving the gallows or electric chair, an intervention by fate.

She turned on all the burners, a chorus of hissing, and left. She took the stairs, descending quickly, not knowing how long she had. She emerged from the building and slowed instinctively as she spotted the two boys chatting and smoking a short distance away. He didn’t look as much like Ben from down there, his face harder and gaunt. He looked over and she turned her face from him.

She walked in the opposite direction, toward the illuminated backdrop of the parliament building, and at the end of the street she turned left, guessing that she was heading towards the river.

She was waiting, a timer ticking towards detonation in her head. It faltered, though, and she began to have her doubts, knowing all the while that it was too late to do anything about it.

If he’d woken up or if the candle had blown out, or if this was something that simply didn’t work outside the world of the cinema, then she’d really made a mess of things, because Brodsky would know that she’d tried to kill him again and this time he might not be forgiving.

Then the noise came, hard to distinguish at first, like a fighter plane somewhere in the dark sky. It took shape, declaring itself unmistakably across the city: an explosion, some kind of alarm bell filling the void as it died down. Soon there’d be sirens and she was full of nervous excitement, her heart tripping like she was on speed.