Written in the Blood (26 page)

‘
No
.’ The man stared. A pulse began to beat in his neck. Violently, he shook his head. ‘I didn’t mean . . . I mean
yes
. I do. I do.’

‘He’s a long way from you right now. About as far away as He can get.’

Sorrentino’s protuberant eyes moistened and then filled with tears. ‘Are you . . . Do you mean you’re . . . ?’

‘That’s right.’

‘
Satana
.’

‘In the flesh.’ He held up his hands, noticing with some satisfaction how the other man cringed away. ‘Well, in
your
flesh, I should say. What do you think? I’d say you’re ugliness personified, wouldn’t you? I’ll bet you’ve never even considered just how far apart your eyes are set. It actually stings to wear your face for too long. Did you know that? That’s how ugly you are, Mario. So ugly it hurts.’

‘I . . . I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. I’m not here because of your face.’

Izsák reached into the paper bag and removed one of the diner’s filleting knives. Seizing the man’s wrist, he drove the blade between the bones of his hand, pinning him to the table.

Sorrentino screamed.

‘If you get a single spot of blood on those clothes, I’ll cut off your face and feed it to you. Do you understand?’

The man nodded, eyes as round as moons.

Leaning over the table, Izsák patted Sorrentino down. ‘Where is it?’

‘Right pocket. I think . . . I think I’m going to be sick.’

Izsák pulled a Colt pistol from the man’s jacket. He swung himself out of the booth, fetched a bowl from behind the Ready Eat’s counter and set it down on the table. ‘If you’re going to be sick, be sick into that. Remember what I said: if you get blood on your cuff, on any part of your clothing, I’ll make you eat your face. And if you’re sick on yourself instead of in the bowl, I’ll cut out your eyeballs and make you chew on them like gum. Do you understand me?’

Sorrentino was crying now. ‘Yeah,’ he whispered. ‘I understand you. What you gonna do? What’s gonna happen to me?’

‘You’re going to die, Mario. After that . . .’ He shrugged. ‘You’ll see soon enough. But first I’m going to ask you some questions. The better the answers you give . . . well, I don’t need to spell it out, I’m sure. Frank Fischetti. Where does he live?’

‘What?’

Izsák clubbed the man’s face with the gun, hard enough to split his cheek. ‘Where does he live?’

‘He . . . he’s up in Riverdale.’

‘Give me the address.’

Sorrentino told him.

‘Describe him.’

‘B . . . big guy, kind of obese. Early fifties. Double chin. Black hair, grey in places. Wears a lot of gold.’

‘What’s your connection?’

‘I’m his nephew. Well, sort of nephew. Not directly, you know? I don’t know what the word is. Hang on.’ Noisily, he vomited into the bowl. He glanced down at himself, saw that he’d spilled nothing over his clothes. Sagged.

‘Are you close? To Fischetti?’

‘Yeah. We’re close.’

‘Who does he keep around him?’

‘Why are you asking? Surely you—’

‘You want to question me?’

‘No, I—’

‘Was that a question for me?’

‘No.’

‘Who does he keep around him?’

‘Leo and Fabian. They’re his sons. Then there’s Bruno. Bruno’s not related, but he’s usually there. And sometimes Seve, too’

‘Who’s waiting for you in the car outside?’

‘George.’

‘Is that what you call him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who’s in charge?’

‘Huh?’

‘Out of the two of you. Who’s the boss?’

‘Uh . . . I guess me.’

‘Walk me through the house. Fischetti’s house.’

‘I . . .’ Sorrentino stared at him, terrified and confused. He tried to stand.

‘Not literally, you idiot. Your hand is attached to the table. Sit down. Now, walk me through it. Tell me where Fischetti will be.’

‘It’s a big place. Kind of . . . like a palace. Pillars out in front. This huge lobby. Frank’s study is on the ground floor. You take the first left off the lobby, keep going. It’s the big door at the end. What’s this got to do with Frank?’

Izsák took a wad of napkins from the bag. He leaned forward and eased the knife out of Sorrentino’s hand. Handed him the napkins. ‘Stand up. Take off your clothes. Don’t get blood on them.’

Eyelids flickering, looking as if he might pass out, the man shuffled from the booth, clutching the wad of napkins to his hand. Awkwardly, he shrugged out of his jacket. Then he removed the rest of his clothes, folding them neatly.

‘Now back up. Over there in the corner.’

Quickly Izsák undressed. He threw on Sorrentino’s trousers, shirt and jacket. Stepped into his shoes. Picked up the pistol from the table.

‘I still don’t get why you’re asking me all—’

Izsák raised the gun and shot Sorrentino between the eyes. Then he walked to the door of the Ready Eat. On his way past the counter, he grabbed a leather satchel and a bag of pastries.

Outside, an Oldsmobile was parked against the kerb. Izsák opened the passenger door and slid onto the seat.

The man behind the wheel stared. ‘You shot Otto?’

Opening the bag, Izsák took out a strudel and stuffed it into his mouth. ‘Yeah. Take me to Frank’s.’

The car pulled out into traffic. Izsák swallowed the pastry and took out another.

‘You hungry or something?’

‘Shut up and take me to Frank’s.’

The Fischetti place was a Georgian-style mansion set back from the road on an impeccably manicured square of land. Izsák told George to stay in the car, and walked up the drive. A rake-thin man in a wide suit opened the front door, nodding when he recognised who was calling.

‘Frank here?’

‘Yep.’

‘Anyone with him?’

‘Nope. He’s on the telephone. Guys are out back.’

Izsák strode across the parquet floor, took a left and kept going. At the end of the hall, between two ugly bronze statues, he saw a thickset oak door, just where Sorrentino had described. Without hesitating, he pushed it open and walked inside.

Frank Fischetti wasn’t on the telephone. He was sitting at his desk, using a ramrod to insert a ball and patch down the barrel of what looked like an antique duelling pistol. Behind him, drapes were pulled across a pair of French windows. On the left, the door to a wall safe hung ajar.

Sorrentino had described Fischetti reasonably well, but he’d failed to explain the lizard-like quality of the man’s eyes. Fischetti’s face was pock-marked too, as if, in his past, he’d caught either a bad dose of acne or a round of birdshot. He glanced up as Izsák came in, and for the briefest of moments his eyes narrowed. Then he smiled. ‘A pair of Mantons,’ he said. ‘You ever heard of Joseph Manton?’

‘No.’

‘One of the finest gunsmiths that ever lived. These were made in 1797. Just look at the engraving on the trigger guards.’

Izsák approached the desk, dropping his satchel onto the floor. A mahogany case in front of Fischetti contained the second pistol. It had already been primed. ‘They sure are nice,’ he said.

Fischetti nodded. Working with methodical slowness, he took a metal tube from his desk and tapped primer into the pistol’s flash pan. Once he’d closed the frizzon, he lowered the weapon until the barrel pointed straight at Izsák’s chest. ‘Since when did you walk in here without knocking?’

Moving with the speed of a striking snake, Izsák snatched the Manton off him with one hand and punched him in the throat with the other.

Fischetti toppled back into his chair, hands darting to his neck. He gasped, choked. When he still couldn’t get enough air, he panicked, tried to stand, and crashed instead to his knees.

‘You’re a scourge, Mr Fischetti. A parasite. Or you were,’ Izsák told him. ‘Not after today.’ He opened his satchel, removing a bed sheet and several pieces of rope.

Working fast, he laid out the sheet on the floor. Then he picked up Fischetti’s ankles and dragged him on to it. While the man clawed at his throat, Izsák stripped him of his clothes. He bound Fischetti’s hands and feet, then dressed himself in the discarded garments.

Walking up to the safe, he peered inside. ‘Are those what I think they are?’

Wheezing now, desperately trying to inhale through his crushed windpipe, Fischetti nodded.

The discovery of the safe’s contents justified a revision to his plans. Five minutes later, after receiving a whispered explanation from Fischetti, Izsák knelt down and gagged him. He put his face mere inches from the man’s own, studied the contours of his skull, his pocked skin, his eyes, his hair, took a deep breath, and
changed
.

Fischetti tried to scream, nearly suffocating himself on the gag. Grabbing him by the shoulders, Izsák rolled him up inside the sheet and secured him with the ropes. Then he opened the drapes covering the French windows.

Outside, four men were standing around a peppermint-green Lincoln, smoking. Two of them shared the same lizard-eyed stare as Fischetti.

Izsák opened the doors and shouted out to them. ‘Get in here, all of you.’ Once they’d assembled inside the room, and Izsák had locked the doors, he pointed at the body, wrapped in a bed sheet, writhing on the floor. ‘This man,’ he said, ‘is a thief. He’s stolen something from me no one can replace.’

One of the Fischetti brothers hawked and spat on the fabric. ‘Well that was a fuckin’ mistake. What did he do, Pa? What did he take?’

‘I’ll tell you once you’ve killed him.’

At that, Fischetti began to struggle more violently, like a newly formed moth trying to escape a chrysalis. The men raised their eyes to Izsák.

‘Now? In here?’ one of them asked.

‘Yes, now. Yes, in here. But no guns. And keep him inside that sheet. I don’t want him messing up the place.’

Grinning, the men removed their jackets.

As the blows began to fall, as the room filled with cries of animal excitement and hoots of laughter, as the white linen grew dark with blood, none of the four noticed the man who looked like Frank Fischetti pick up the two flintlock pistols from the desk and walk out of the room.

They continued to kick and howl and stamp, until finally the exertion got the better of them. Leo Fischetti was the first to stop. He rested his hands on his knees and bent over, panting, grimacing at the blood on his shoes. ‘Boys, I’d say that’s enough. Someone’s gonna have to bury this shit sack. Any longer and it’ll be like shovelling mincemeat.’

‘Where’s Pa?’

‘Must have stepped out. Say, I want to see who this guy was. Don’t you?’

A chorus of agreement.

Leo pulled out a switchblade and cut away the sheet from around the dead man’s head. For a moment, everyone was still.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Leo said. ‘Oh Jesus, oh
JESUS.
’

Balázs Izsák walked along the hall to the foyer and out of the front door, closing it behind him. He was halfway down the drive when the dynamite he’d found in Fischetti’s safe detonated, vaporising the man’s sons, blowing out every window on the ground floor and lighting up the building with flame. The air rained brick dust and plaster and glass.

George was waiting in the car parked at the kerb. When the house exploded he dived out, running up the drive towards Izsák.

Izsák lifted one of the duelling pistols and pulled the trigger. The flint struck the flash pan and the primer flared with a hiss. But the spark did not carry to the breach.

It sometimes happened with flintlocks.

George skidded to a halt, his mouth gaping. Izsák lifted the second pistol and fired. This gun worked perfectly, and the ejected lead ball took off a sizeable part of George’s skull. The man collapsed to one side of the path.

Izsák climbed into the Oldsmobile, threw the pistols onto the seat and accelerated away from what remained of the Fischetti residence.

His ears were ringing from the explosion. But when, at last, the sound faded, all he heard was the Oldsmobile’s engine and the hiss of its tyres on the road. For the first time in his life, the mocking voice inside his head spoke not a word of complaint.

C
HAPTER
25

Snowdonia, Wales

I
n the dying light, the mountains were black humps against a bruised sky. Leah stood beside her father’s grave, between the stag poised at the edge of the lake and the man called Tuomas on the gravel track.

Even the wind had faded. The only sound she heard in the valley stillness was the rasping breath of the animal behind her, so close it felt as if the stag blew gouts of steam against her neck.

She wanted to run, but where to? Not towards Tuomas, that was for sure. She could possibly make it into the trees before the stag reached her, but what then? The forest floor was choked with trailing vines and bracken. Further in, it was night-dark. Within seconds she would be disoriented, unable to see, even more vulnerable than she was in the open.

Leah could feel her legs trembling beneath her, a horrifying lightness to them, as if they’d been stripped of muscle and bone. And here was that feeling again, a spider-like prickling on her skin. Not simply another symptom of her fear, but the same strange sensation she had felt when she arrived outside Etienne’s residence during her second visit.

Tuomas took a step towards her. He held something in his hands. It was too dark to see his eyes, or the expression on his face, but there was something grim and inevitable about his silhouette.

Behind her, the stag blew air from its snout. She heard it lift its hooves, the mud sucking at them.

A rifle. That was what Tuomas held. He raised it in a single fluid movement, until the barrel pointed at her face. He leaned his head into the scope.

Leah closed her eyes. Perhaps this was a fitting resting place, she thought. Her father lay here. Her grandfather too. She could think of worse places to die.

You’re a Wilde. You don’t close your eyes and wait for death. You fight. Until you have nothing left.

Taking a breath, she opened her eyes.

Tuomas said something to her, and it took a moment for her brain to process his words:
Get down.

An explosion of movement behind her.

Hooves. First churning mud, then thumping across hard-packed ground.

She did not have time to run. Did not have time even to turn and confront the creature that charged her. Instead, she dived.

Tuomas chambered a round; the rifle’s bolt snapped back, forward and down.

Leah hit the ground hands first, gravel chips slicing her hands like shards of glass. Beneath her she felt the vibrations of the charging stag.

The rifle blast, when it came, ruptured the air like two motor vehicles colliding. Still the animal came, hooves drumming against the earth.

Leah rolled onto her back. Saw it bearing down on her, a mountain of antlers and muscle. The front of its head was a mess of pulverised bone and flesh. Even as its forelegs dipped and its chest hit the ground, its momentum carried it onwards, antlers scouring the earth as it slid towards her. It came to a rest a yard from her feet.

Leah gasped, feeling the cold press of soil against her spine. Raising herself to her elbows, she stared at the animal’s ruined skull.

She climbed to her feet and faced Tuomas. When he chambered another round, she raised her hands, backing away.

‘Stop,’ he said.

The smell of blood was rich on the air, mingling with the stag’s musk. For some reason, her legs wouldn’t obey her. She took another step backwards.

‘Leah, I said stop.
Now
.’

She froze, registering the urgency in his voice. Her boots were a few inches from the tips of the stag’s antlers.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch it. Careful as you can, come towards me. Just a few feet. Until you’re away from it.’

‘You followed me here,’ she said, and heard the fear in her voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘You need to come away from there. It’s not safe.’

‘I asked you a question.’

Tuomas lifted his cheek from the rifle scope. Scanned the valley. ‘You’re being hunted.’

Leah swallowed. Looked back down at the carcass by her feet. Finally she complied, taking a step away, not towards Tuomas but to her right, towards the trees. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘How much detail do you need? You’re being hunted, Leah.’

She felt her blood beginning to chill. ‘By a stag?’

‘By
lélek tolvajok
. Trust me. You really don’t want to touch it.’ Tuomas tilted his head towards the forest and paused, listening. ‘There may be more of them. We need to go. Now.’

‘Wait a minute. You’re telling me that was one of them?’

‘Yes, and I can’t protect you in the dark. We’ve only a few minutes of light left.’

‘If you think I’m going with you—’

‘Is that your Mercedes by the gate?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you don’t need to go with me. But if you stay here and argue, you’re going to be in serious trouble.’

She stared at him, wishing she could see his eyes in the failing light. But even though his sudden appearance had frightened her, he sounded sincere.

And how much value do you place on that? He’s
hosszú élet
. Of course he’ll sound sincere. Look sincere. You know nothing about him. Who he is. Why he followed you.

From somewhere beyond the ridge, she heard an animal wail, almost like a fox’s scream. A moment later an answering cry rolled towards them from the other side of the lake.

Tuomas stiffened. ‘They’re coming. It’s up to you, but we don’t have time for debate.’ He began to walk back up the track.

‘Wait.’ Leah broke into a run, reaching his side in moments. ‘OK, so I don’t know who you are. That’s freaking me out. Or why you followed me. You just killed that thing, and I’ve no way of telling whether what you say is true.’

Another cry drifted across the water. Closer now.

‘But you’re right,’ she continued. ‘That’s not a sound I’ve heard before. Something’s out there.’

‘Stay close,’ he replied. ‘In the dark, their vision will be better than ours. If we—’ He raised a hand, and she stopped dead. Tuomas swept the night with his scope. Nodding, he said, ‘Let’s go.’

Her Mercedes came into sight a minute later, a black outline in the gloom. ‘Don’t unlock it,’ he told her. ‘Not until you’re beside the door. The indicator lights will alert them.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m parked at the top of the hill.’

‘Then let me drive you there. If it’s dangerous out here for me, that goes for you, too.’

He scanned the track in both directions. ‘You’re sure?’

Oddly, she found she was. As she unlocked the Mercedes its lights flashed orange.

Leah slid behind the wheel. Tuomas jumped into the passenger seat, clamping the rifle between his knees. He locked his door and she did the same.

‘Drive,’ he told her.

She didn’t need any encouragement. Revving the engine, she threw the car into reverse and backed up, sliding it around as soon as she had the space.

She found first gear, floored the accelerator. The wheels spun, digging for traction before they bit on hard ground and the vehicle rocketed forward.

Leah switched on the headlights just as something crashed out of the bushes up ahead. She cried out. Instead of swerving to avoid it, she punched the car into second gear and accelerated. Tuomas braced his hand against the dash.

The impact bounced them out of their seats. The Mercedes’ left headlight shattered and the vehicle sloughed around. Leah fought against the wheel, and for a moment she thought the car was going to spin. By sheer luck she managed to regain control, and then they were flying up the track, shredding vines and snapping tree branches.

‘Did I kill it?’ she shouted, throwing a glance at her mirror. Nothing was visible back there except darkness. Ahead, the track was lit only by her right headlight. She could see virtually nothing on her left but she couldn’t afford to slow down.

Tuomas twisted in his seat. ‘It’s following.’ He sucked in a breath. ‘Two of them.’

Leah cursed, and then the car was barrelling over the lip of the track. Ripping the wheel to the right, she slid the Mercedes onto the main road and controlled the skid, tyres shrieking. With tarmac beneath her, she floored the accelerator once more. ‘Where’s your car?’

‘Forget it,’ Tuomas said, drawing the seatbelt across him. ‘Drive.’