Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (6 page)

“Fire!”

It did not register to Salvino—not until later—that the warning came in an unfamiliar voice, nor did he question why the fire alarm had not sounded. He only saw flames billowing from the kitchen entrance, and heard the hiss of a fire extinguisher discharging. He paused long enough to shout to his customers, “Everyone outside! And call the fire department!”

Diners began scrambling for the door, at least three with mobile phones to their ears. At the very moment Salvino reached the kitchen entrance, he was struck in the face by a burst of noxious vapor. He tripped over something and went down hard, his eyes stinging from the chemical bath. There was a crash, followed by shouting, and he called out to the cook. “Vincente! Where are you? Help me up!”

Vincente didn’t come.

Salvino rubbed his eyes, trying to regain his vision, and finally someone—he couldn’t say who—helped him stand and find his bearings. He staggered back toward the dining room, ricocheting between chairs and tables, and finally groped his way to the front door. Outside he was guided to safety by a circle of concerned relatives. In the next minutes his sight began to return, a haze-stricken world behind a sea of tears, and the first thing he recognized was an arriving fire truck.

The firemen were inside for ten minutes, after which Salvino was able to see well enough to notice the captain beckoning him with a wave. “Come, Mario, I must show you something.”

“Please—tell me it is not Vincente. Is he all right?”

The fire captain, a regular customer, grinned and said, “Vincente is Vincente—no worse than usual.”

The air inside the dining room was clearing rapidly, smoke venting through open windows, a light cloud of vapor clinging to the ceiling. The kitchen was equally improved, the back door open to dismiss smoke that had seemed liquid only minutes ago. Vincente was there, leaning against the walk-in freezer and looking stunned but otherwise unharmed.

“We found him in the cooler,” the captain said to Salvino. “The outer handle had been barred with a broom handle.”

“What? But … but the fire.”

“There wasn’t really a fire. Somebody threw a can of used fryer oil into the hot oven. It created a tremendous amount of smoke, but nothing was damaged. Whoever it was emptied both your fire extinguishers.”

“But…” stuttered Salvino, “who?”

The captain took the bewildered restaurateur by the elbow and led to the bar, stopping halfway down the mirrored wall. “Whoever did that,” he said.

Salvino looked down and his blood rose. The cash register was empty, a flat-bladed screwdriver jammed into the drawer.

“Bastardo!”
he bellowed at the top of his voice.

*   *   *

As Mario Salvino was calling the police, the man who’d cleansed his cash drawer was already four miles east in the Birkirkara district, stepping out of a cab near the municipal bus depot. In the back of the cab Slaton had discreetly counted his haul, the total falling in the middle of his estimate for what might be mined from a second-tier restaurant on an early Tuesday night: three hundred and two euros. He committed the number to memory, put in the same mental file as the address from the takeaway menu.

He reached the station just in time to catch the last mainline departure to Valletta. Slaton purchased a ticket from a vending machine, and eight minutes later stepped onto an aquamarine bus. There were perhaps a dozen riders already there, scattered antisocially, and Slaton took an empty seat directly behind the driver, which gave a buffer of three rows to the nearest passenger. He molded into the cloth seat, and for the first time took stock of his injuries.

His thigh remained the biggest problem. It throbbed in pain, and a stain on his newly acquired workpants made him glad he’d stolen something dark in color. The last passenger to board was an elderly woman, and when the gentlemanly driver stood to help her up the steps, Slaton seized an opportunity. Secured to the floor next to the driver’s seat was a first-aid kit, and while the man was distracted, he unlatched the metal box and quickly requisitioned a handful of gauze and antiseptic, and an assortment of bandages. He had the half-empty kit back in place seconds before the driver returned, and when he reached for the swing handle to close the door, Slaton engaged the kit’s anchoring latch with the toe of his left boot.

The bus came to life in a rumble of diesel and hissing brakes. Slaton eased back in his seat. By his best estimate, he would arrive in Valletta shortly after midnight.

SIX

Characterized by Disraeli as, “A city of palaces built by gentlemen for gentlemen,” Valletta, Malta, is perhaps more aptly described as a fortress built with style. In 1530, Charles V of Spain granted the long-drifting Knights of Saint John sovereign rule over the island, the annual fee being one Maltese falcon. Knowing a bargain when they saw one, the order of knights, who had a strong proclivity for mingling war with religion, rebranded themselves as the Knights of Malta. To make the place their own, the Knights set about fortifying the main harbor of Valletta. They built sentry stations and watchtowers, all looming high over the city’s elegant cathedrals. With their defenses in order, the Knights set a more leisurely pace to fashion the first planned city of Europe. They stayed for two hundred and sixty-eight years.

In the intervening centuries, the city has endured battles great and small. Valletta was where Suleiman the Magnificent was proved to be something less, his forty thousand troops sent packing by an entrenched force one quarter of its size. Even at the height of World War Two, enduring an enthusiastic bombing campaign by Axis air forces, Valletta remained largely intact thanks to the Knights’ robust design standards, not to mention brigades of sharp-eyed Allied antiaircraft gunners. By any measure, Valletta is a city built from the ground up with a defensive mind-set.

And defense was exactly what Slaton needed.

By cab he reached Senglea shortly after midnight, one of three harbor districts on the east side of the capital. In a country barely larger than Martha’s Vineyard there were few places to hide, so he’d opted for the densest population center, even if it was a predictable move. The neighborhood was an eclectic mix, a place where expatriate accountants lunched with tenth-generation cobblers, and sailmakers shared jugs of red wine with computer hackers. Yet there was no denying Senglea’s underlying soul—the massive Valletta shipyard was pervasive, infused into every brick, gutter, and shingle.

The temperature dropped markedly as morning took hold, and Slaton wished he’d stolen a jacket as well. His pants were bloodstained in spite of his efforts at a washbasin in the bus station restroom. His thigh throbbed in pain, and his hands still showed marks from a gravel rooftop in Mdina. A deep bruise on his elbow was a reminder of the Pole—the man he had killed in the stairwell. Slaton easily let that thought go. He hadn’t set out to kill anyone today. The other man had.

He selected a shabby boarding house near an empty dry-dock berth. The Inn, as proclaimed by a hand-drawn sign, was three stories of stone, mildew, and mortar that looked every bit as inspiring as its name. The night clerk was a man near sixty, and weathered was the word that came to Slaton’s mind—his channeled face and weary eyes spoke of a life less lived than endured. A lit cigarette was perched on a soda can, the ashes centered over the hole on top. The clerk barely registered Slaton’s approach.

“Do you have any rooms?” Slaton asked in English.

The man picked up his cigarette, the ashes missing the can completely and scattering over a scarred wooden counter. Once it was hanging from his slack lower lip, he said, “I have lots of rooms. Do you have any money?”

Slaton wondered if he looked that bad. He pulled out his wallet. “Two nights,” he said, knowing he would stay only one.

“Sixty euros … in advance.” As Slaton handled his wallet, the night clerk noticed the abrasion on his hands. “Been in a tussle, have you?” he asked, his tobacco-stained breath carrying across the counter.

“Accident at work. I’m a stonemason—I fell off a ladder. It was my hands or my face.”

The man curled fingers under his chin to think about it, a knurled thumb and forefinger that reminded Slaton of the branches of an old tree. He nodded as though it made perfect sense.

Slaton slid three twenties across the counter, and a key came in return, the old-school type with metal teeth and an engraved number 6.

Registration complete.

“Are you expecting company?” the desk man asked.

“Yes,” Slaton lied. “If a dark-haired woman comes looking for Max, please send her to my room.”

The Maltese nodded to say he would.

Slaton turned to go, but then he paused. He stepped back to the front desk and put his palm down on the moldering wood. When he pulled it away an additional twenty-euro bill appeared. “And if a man should come looking for me … or her … call my room and let the phone ring only twice.”

The man eyed him, and then the cash. “I don’t want trouble.”

“That’s my point.”

The twenty disappeared under the proprietor’s hand.

Another precaution was in place.

*   *   *

Slaton found room 6 on the second floor at the end of the corridor. The hallway by the door was nearly dark, the three-light fixture at that end of the hall having failed completely. He walked back to the staircase where a twin fixture was working perfectly, and in less than a minute he had switched out two of the three small bulbs. The hallway in front of room 6 was again bright. He did not reinsert the two dead bulbs into the staircase fixture. Instead, he studied the runner on the floor, a worn stretch of carpet ornamented with flowering vines and songbirds, all long ago trampled into submission. He raised the end of the runner nearest his door and placed the bulbs underneath, one at the end, the other a few feet farther on. When the carpet fell back in place the tiny rises were virtually indistinguishable.

Inside the room Slaton found what he expected, maybe a little more. The bed had been made and the floor seemed clean, although it was hard to say given the feeble light—every room at The Inn seemed a few bulbs short. There were dings and scrapes on the wall, but no damage that breached through to the next room. He rapped his knuckles on random sections and was rewarded with something old and solid, not the wood-framed drywall you got in newer buildings that was easily penetrated by small-caliber arms. The floor was old hardwood, worn and stained, and might have been recently swept. There was even a tiny bar of soap and a half-used bottle of shampoo in the bathroom.

Slaton swept the place for electronic devices, less because he expected to find anything than as an exercise to establish the right mind-set. Finding the phone unplugged, he reconnected the cable in case the night clerk had to make good on their arrangement. He checked the peephole at the door and saw an empty hallway, and through the room’s lone window, partly covered by plastic drapes that hung like lead, he saw the gray-brick siding of the adjacent building.

Slaton laid on the bed and closed his eyes, hoping for sleep. What came instead was the question he’d been evading for hours.
Who would want me dead?

Regrettably, it was a long list. Family members of those he’d dispatched. Their tribal brethren. Even entire countries. Slaton had served for years as a
kidon,
a Mossad assassin, doing Israel’s dirtiest work. A thing like that followed a man, no matter how well he concealed himself. The accomplishments of his career, if they could be called that, were branded for eternity in minds and souls across the world. Including his own.

Yes, he decided, that had to be it. His past was responsible for what had happened tonight in Mdina. But what part?

One detail narrowed the field considerably. The man he’d dispatched in the stairwell, he was quite sure, was former GROM—Polish Special Forces. Yet the others were different. He knew because the Pole had used heavily accented English on their tactical frequency—likely the attackers’ only common tongue. Everything about the group screamed high-end mercenary. Which led to more troubling questions.

Who had hired them? What did it relate to?

Finally, the most vexing question of all. Given such a team—experienced and heavily armed, with a well-designed plan, and facing an unarmed and surprised target—how on earth was he still alive?

SEVEN

Slaton slept as well as a hunted man could. Which was to say, not well at all.

To walk through life with a target on one’s back instills a measurable degree of fear—indeed, a lack thereof would border on psychosis. It was something Slaton had long ago come to terms with. More intolerable was the unpredictability. During his years in the field with Mossad he had rarely lived by routine, habitually leaving open where he would eat, travel, and sleep the next day. One could set a general course, but in the end life became no more than a series of reactions. No flights scheduled in advance, no meetings on a calendar, no lunch dates with friends. Unpredictability was the key. It was what kept you alive.

Late-morning sun coursed through the dirty window of room 6—the tilt mechanism on the slatted blind was broken, stuck in the open position. He went to the window, and the blunt wall of the other building was still there, only with color now, a dreary oyster-gray that would have looked right at home on any battleship. The inside of the room appeared worse in the truth of day. Wallpaper peeled from every corner, and what had appeared to be crown molding at midnight was actually a band of mildew riding the ceiling’s perimeter. The design he’d seen on the rug at the foot of the bed was in fact a terrible stain, the source of which Slaton had no desire to speculate upon.

He went straight to the bathroom and checked the mirror. A coarse man stared back, but a marked improvement over last night. The abrasions on his face had lessened, one scrape on his left cheek remaining. His thigh still hurt like hell, and Slaton stripped down and pulled the bandage back to inspect the wound. It appeared no worse, no obvious infection. After a lukewarm shower he tamed his hair with a quick finger-comb, then did his best with the antiseptic ointment and a fresh bandage. He dressed in the same dirty clothes he’d arrived in.