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  “Mr. Michael Ryan to see Mr. Vatroslav Mesic,” I said to the front desk staff member.

  “He’s expecting you,” said the front desk staff member.

  That’s how it was going down. Seconds later I was alone in the elevator, watching the numerals climb to “PH.” I should’ve had my gun drawn, ready to fire away at whatever might appear beyond the sliding doors.

  I didn’t.

  I had a bottle of Kamešnica plum brandy. The one errand I had run along the way.

  The elevator nestled to a stop and I walked into what felt like a carpeted air lock. Thought I killed you at Harvard, I said to myself upon seeing him. No, but all these bodyguards looked alike.

  Vatroslav gestured for me to hold still, then had me slowly pirouette for him while his massive hands groped. He discovered my Smith & Wesson revolver—they always do—and took it.

  What a joke of an apartment.

  Picture three point eight million dollars spent as idiotically as possible on decadent all-white postmodern lowest-bidder neo-conformist decor. Wherever you looked you saw a bad decision. The odd walls. The couch from outer space. The rug with a Nike logo on it.

  Then there was Vatroslav, standing by the distant window. I almost expected him to be in a velvet robe and monogrammed slippers, casting his gaze toward the bay while quoting Sun Tzu before snapping his fingers to have my throat slit from behind.

  He was in jeans and a track jacket. Didn’t even dress for the part.

  “You actually showed up,” he said.

  “Figured you had questions that only work on a second date,” I replied.

  “Yeah. How did you know I had a pair of eights?”

  He was as boring as I’d hoped.

  “Seriously,” he repeated. “How?”

  Off to the side was a barefoot supermodel at a glass dining table busying herself with her phone. Part of me felt relieved to see her there. Her presence meant I might not be shot at. But after some good ole-fashioned pessimistic thinking, I remembered that imported sex trade girls are shown as much violence as possible as often as possible, so that they have motivation to cooperate. The guy behind me was armed with a delayed-blowback Croatian VHS-2 assault rifle. I made no eye contact with him. I crossed the room and sat in an armchair and started to undo the cork on the bottle I was still carrying.

  This was way ahead of schedule. I’d meant to uncork it at the most strategic point in the upcoming banter. I stopped.

  “Really?” said young Vatroslav. I couldn’t tell whether he was impressed or insulted. “You sit down in my chair, you give up your gun, you keep your back to the man with the VHS-2, you ignore my question.”

  He said all this after observing me just doing nothing for a full minute. He was oddly patient despite his youth.

  “This is not the skillful Michael Ryan I know of.”

  “He’s retired.” I finished opening my bottle, then took a Balkan-sized swig. When in doubt, talk about yourself in the third person.

  Vatroslav came over and sat in the armchair opposite mine. I was in doubt. Terrified. He was somewhat bewildered by my actions. So was I.

  “You’re not on suicide watch, are you?” he asked.

  I took another swig. The alcohol content of this swill was gut-wrenching. Kruskovac brandy, they called it. I set it down on the ottoman between us. I felt ill. Vatroslav snatched the bottle and sat back with it, then looked at me, then patiently rotated the label in his hand to read the good news.

  “Jesus,” he said. “This is a three-thousand-dollar Kamešnica.”

  “Tastes like congealed urine.”

  “Urine? I should kill you for saying that.” He drank some. “But I’m going to kill you anyway.” Then he drank more.

  We didn’t talk for another painful minute, after which I cleared my throat and began. “Do you know the ending of Patrick Süskind’s Le Parfum?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a book. There’s a passage in the middle. ‘Se rendre parfaitement inintéressant. Et c’est tout ce qu’il voulait.’”

  “Why is this warm?” Vatroslav said. “Brandy is supposed to be the temperature of dawn.”

  “‘He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. And that was all he wanted.’”

  Vatroslav stared at me, embarrassed for me. “Do you have any women in your life who don’t find you dull?”

  “Do you have any women in your life who don’t come by shipping container?”

  I was fully invested.

  He stood up and nodded to his thug. His thug stepped forward, machine-gun in hand. I should’ve left a handwritten note on my dashboard for whoever might find my dog in my car. I should’ve parked in a more visible spot. I should’ve found religion. I should’ve gone to couples therapy. I “should’ve” a lot of things. I should’ve been a more interesting husband.

  Chapter 39

  “Listen to me, Michael Ryan,” said Vatroslav. “I built Boston. My family put serious money in this town.” I didn’t interrupt him. “We provide the most important product anyone here could want.” I didn’t remind him that a family donating ten million bucks to a city that does three hundred fifty billion dollars in business does not an empire make. “My brother…My brother got in the way of that.”

  Ah, yes, one son to nail women, one son to sell them.

  “My brother,” he continued, “was interfering with the natural evolution of this city’s commerce.”

  “Your brother was in school. To avoid being as dumb as you.”

  My gun lurked well behind me, somewhere, maybe on a shelf in the foyer. Vatroslav was getting angrier. He began to pace back and forth, still drinking from my bottle.

  “Why are you calm?” he said. “I can kill you. I will kill you.” He looked at me. I looked at him. The girl was now looking, too. At us. Vatroslav’s question was not rhetorical. Everyone in the room felt the shift.

  So I answered him by pointing my index finger at the liquor in his hands. “That,” I said.

  He didn’t get it at first.

  I told him. “It’s poison.”

  He laughed.

  “It’s tetrodotoxin,” I said. He stopped laughing. “Fast-acting. I added it before I got here. Tetrodotoxin numbs the spinal cord, then the heart.”

  He was listening now.

  “Impossible,” he concluded. He was putting two and two together. He was doubting the math. He looked at the brandy, then looked at me. “You drank it yourself.”

  I nodded to the bottle again.

  “You drank it yourself!” he repeated.

  “Thought you said I was on suicide watch.”

  He contemplated me for a long time. There was no twitch in my iris at this point. Full commitment.

  And it painfully started to make sense, the possibility of a hit man who’d ensured mutual revenge.

  “Guard!” he suddenly yelled. He grabbed his phone. Tetrodotoxin takes merely minutes to act. He dialed 911. A second guard ran in, ready to shoot me, but the prodigal son had a more urgent directive for him. “Get me the family doctor!”

  “B-boss,” said the guard. “What happened?”

  “Get me the fucking doctor!”

  We then heard the 911 operator answer through his phone.

  “I’ve been poisoned!” he yelled into it. Then he ran to the bathroom.

  I remained in the armchair the whole time. The guard had no idea what to do with me. He wanted to shoot me, he wanted to ask me questions, but most of all he wanted to not have the last remaining son of a two-son emperor die on his watch.

  From a distance I could see Vatroslav through the open bathroom door. He was bent over the sink. He began dry-heaving as hard as he could, having grabbed a toothbrush to gag his tongue. Not much welled forth.

  “Where’s the medic?!” he screamed. Then he burst out of the bathroom and scurried down the emergency stairwell. Twelve flights of stairs to the ground floor. Followed by his second guard.

  Gone.

 
Exited.

  Both of them.

  Alone with me now, the other guard had a serious dilemma. He could a) chase his boss, b) shoot me, then chase his boss, c) preserve me as the only source of valuable information on how to save his boss and then chase his boss, or d) yell.

  “Glupi majmune!” he yelled, then punched a wall. He was malfunctioning. “Idi u pičku materinu lit! Što si učinio?!”

  “Okay.” I didn’t know what all his words meant, but it couldn’t have been a recipe for baklava.

  “Što si učinio?” he screamed at me. “Što si učinio?”

  He threw a lamp, then kicked over a desk, took a breath to gain some practical control of himself, then marched over to me.

  “You poison him?!” he asked.

  “Us,” I corrected him.

  He looked at me like I’d fallen from a passing asteroid.

  I pointed to my mouth. Us. I opened my mouth. I showed him. Then he leaned over me to inspect this nonsense. What you are talking about?” he asked.

  “I’m talking about…this.” And that’s when I grabbed his gun. He had leaned in just close enough, just carelessly enough, to allow me access to his muzzle.

  My left hand took the stock, my right took the barrel.

  “Odjebi!” he roared.

  He outweighed me by fifty pounds, yet from my seated position, gravity favored my effort. His weapon wound up pointing back toward him. His instinctual effort to reclaim it led him to slip his finger off the trigger, so that bratatatat.

  Should have chased his boss.

  Chapter 40

  Clock ticking, the next step was to fetch my target. I had to assume the neighbors were now a logistical factor. Few things earn as much attention as an assault rifle going off behind cheaply built walls.

  I stood up and saw the supermodel standing within striking distance of me. She looked like she was experiencing every emotion imaginable.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” I said to her. “I just need th—”

  Wham! She kicked the dead guard in his bullet wound. Wham! She kicked him again. Kick after kick. When she had finished, she looked up at me, panting.

  “Hospeetal is there,” she said, pointing across the city block in front of us.

  She was looking out the window. There was a giant street and then a hospital visible in the distance.

  “I tell you fastest way,” she said. “First you go courtyard. Then—”

  “I know,” I said. “He’ll try to cut through the library.”

  I’d mapped the route several hours earlier. Poison was the only way to get him out of his eagle’s nest. I knew I had a very low probability of killing him inside this palace, but I figured if I could lure him to the streets, the playing field would level itself out. My Smith & Wesson was on the kitchen counter. I grabbed it and handed the VHS-2 rifle to our newly liberated female army of one.

  I swear this woman was ready to adopt me.

  I started to show her how to use it. “You just need to pull the knob t—”

  Chkkkchk. She yanked back the charging handle.

  “I know,” she said. She pointed me toward the elevator.

  Seconds later, I was heading down. My bet was there’d be someone waiting for me when the doors opened, but nope, the lobby was empty. I was sure our fireworks had been heard, but somehow this entire operation had aroused exactly no one.

  I stepped out of the elevator just in time to see Vatroslav down the block, disappearing into the hedges toward the library.

  “On schedule,” I said to myself somewhat smugly.

  Bratatatatat!

  A hurricane of bullets shattered all the glass in the lobby. I was being shot at from the other elevator, two bodies visible.

  I ducked behind the front desk while firing two quick shots toward my rear. I don’t think I hit anything useful but I certainly made my point. They crouched low. I crouched low. Mutual suppression. They didn’t do me the favor of collaborating with each other in English.

  What if I crawled toward them?

  There was a row of tall indoor planters and a door to the parking garage.

  One warning shot from my revolver—blam—which elicited a barrage of wrongly aimed retaliatory fire, and off I went. Once I was close enough to the door, I lunged for the knob, twisted it open, and burst through. I then pulled it closed behind me, just as incoming bullets lit up the frame. The finishing touch was to jam the hydraulic arm up top—the skinny metal thing that slows down big doors. By grabbing it and doing a mock pull-up, I managed to bend its elbow downward, which bought me an extra ten seconds of exodus. A lifetime in this business.

  I sprinted out and took a shortcut across the lawn to see the tail end of Vatroslav’s flight. He’d sprinted across the sloping lawn and opted for a path that led to a locked gate, leaving him no recourse but to come back the same way, back up toward the main steps, and up to the front entrance of the public library. Enough time for me to catch up.

  “You got a back door?!” he roared at the librarian he encountered.

  I managed to catch sight of his frantic path toward a utility door.

  Mmmmmmm. I knew where that led. The subterranean level, full of old, archived, out-of-date, ugly, gorgeous editions of every book imaginable.

  Thank you, city of Boston, for conserving these valuable books. Vatroslav had cornered himself in a labyrinth of good ideas.

  Chapter 41

  His panic was increasing. I could hear it.

  “Titles are listed by author,” I bellowed out. “Not subject.”

  I was starting to relish the news I had for him. He couldn’t see me but he could feel my voice come from every direction at once. The muted reverb was unworldly. Perfect for stifling the sound of a .38 Special.

  “Get me out of here!” he yelled.

  He rounded his final corner and arrived squarely in front of me, face-to-face, out of breath.

  “The poison!” he said. “The poison is taking effect.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I replied.

  “Christ, you don’t feel the numbing?”

  “I don’t. And would you like to know why?”

  “Move!”

  He tried to get by me but he was so out of breath he didn’t have the agility needed.

  “Because there’s nothing to feel,” I said.

  He stopped struggling.

  “The bottle of brandy contained pure brandy.” I had his full attention now. “I never added a drop of poison.”

  “What?”

  “The mind is a powerful drug, my friend. Today you’re learning it. I spent eleven years and one terrible marriage learning it. Pretending she wasn’t trying to kill me.”

  “Wait. What?!”

  “And now I’m here to kill you.”

  He looked at the gun in my hand, aimed his way. He wondered if I really wanted to fire it in a library. That was the beauty of the stacks—a fact I decided to elucidate for him.

  “Worth mentioning,” I began. “I have a noisy weapon in my hand but we’re surrounded by thousands of sound-absorbent pages.”

  “My father will gut you.” He spoke with as much venom as humanly possible.

  I took out my phone. If he wanted to go there, sure. “I’ll let you personally help him find out.”

  “Father!” he cried.

  “Hang on, I haven’t dialed yet.”

  I dialed.

  “You’ll never get away with this,” he said.

  “I’m gonna wheel your corpse out on a book cart. In broad daylight.”

  It was true. I’d probably shroud his dead body under a large floor mat and roll the whole mess out the back gate, right to the trunk of my car. I’d then drive the corpse to my house, where I’d lay it inside the Kolpak 1010 freezer system. I’d go to Ivan and give Ivan the house keys. Maybe Ivan would be kind enough to dispatch a team of people who’d make disturbing situations disappear.

  “Yes?” said Ivan’s voice on my phone.

  The trail of
evidence along this ten-person graveyard was way too damning for anyone to tolerate. A man like Ivan would be only too willing to dispose of the aftermath.

  “Ivan,” I said into my phone. “I’m here with the man who ordered the death of your beloved son.”

  “Father,” cried Vatroslav toward my phone. “It’s lies. He’s lying.”

  There was a pause.

  The kid repeated his plea. “Father, please. It’s all a lie.”

  It was enough to paint the entire picture for Ivan. The feud. The handsome, Harvard DNA versus the jealous DNA. I could hear him at the other end of the phone, weighing the implications. Michael Ryan has never once missed—or misjudged—his mark.

  “Father, get me out of here!” cried the son. “Father!”

  This ushered in an epoch of a pause.

  Until Ivan quietly spoke. “You know what the job is,” he said. Then hung up.

  “Father—!”

  Blam.

  Eight. Eight victims in three days.

  The gunshot was a lot louder than my previous essay on acoustics would’ve had him believe. I didn’t care. Vatroslav Mesic was gasping quietly for his last breath. I stepped forward and half knelt to him. I estimated I had twenty-five seconds before the closest librarian would hustle over to look into whatever lofty book had dropped.

  He tried to grab my gun. Futilely. He had no strength. Fifteen seconds.

  “I don’t want to spoil it, but at the end of Le Parfum…the villagers get their vengeance on the villain.”

  Eight seconds. I took hold of each of his limp forearms.

  “The line is, ‘For the first time, they had done something out of love.’ Which is saying that they did what they did out of compassion…which is saying that brutality can come from love…which, let’s be honest, is not possible for any of us.”

  I started to drag his corpse toward the nearest book cart.

  “But I’ve enjoyed pretending otherwise.”

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