The fight, if it could have been called such, had lasted just seconds. Ben could still hear the muffled voices coming from inside Pierrot’s apartment. Someone laughed. However many people were in there, they obviously hadn’t realised what was happening outside.
The bodybuilder was curled up on the floor holding onto his broken arm and moaning in agony. Ben flipped him over, frisked him and found an identical Glock in a concealed shoulder rig under his coat. Fully loaded, fifteen rounds in the mag plus one up the spout. Ben took that one for himself, too, but didn’t stick it through his belt. He was going to need it, because he was about to make his entrance.
Ben grabbed the bodybuilder by his broken arm, levered him savagely up to his feet, propelled him forward and used his head to ram open the apartment door.
The door burst inwards with a juddering, splintering crash. Ben stepped through the open doorway, still holding onto the muscleman, who was half unconscious and bloody from the impact.
And now Ben could see the five other men inside the apartment. First and foremost was Thierry Chevrolet, the man Ben hadn’t been alone in hoping to find here. The second was the apartment’s tenant, Pierrot, looking as if he strongly regretted having let his buddy crash at his place. The two chums were sitting side by side on a pair of mismatched chairs, with their wrists tied behind them, their ankles bound to the chair legs, and gags tightly stretched across their mouths. Their faces were pallid with terror, their eyes wide and staring at Ben as he appeared in the doorway. Until just a second ago they’d been looking up at the third, fourth and fifth men in the room, who were standing in a loose semicircle in front of their victims.
The three gangsters simultaneously turned to face the door as Ben appeared. The ones on the left and right were just as large as the pair who’d been posted outside on guard duty, and pretty much carbon copies. Dark hair buzzed close to the scalp, dark trench coats, shiny shoes. The one in the middle was very different, and not because he was the only one not wearing the standard-issue gangster trench coat.
He stood less than five feet in height, but his eyes blazed with a fierce intelligence lacking in any of his much larger accomplices. Ben instantly took him to be the boss man of the operation, about twice as hard-boiled and three times as psychopathic as his underlings, as though all that aggression and violence had been concentrated into a smaller, meaner, undiluted package. If he’d been a dog he’d have been a wiry terrier-cross mongrel ready without hesitation to rip into Rottweilers six times his size. He was wearing a double-breasted suit that would have fitted a twelve-year-old, expensively tailor made. He had no hair at all, and like a lot of bald guys it was hard to pin an age on him. He could have been thirty, or fifty. A sickle-shaped scar distorted his left cheek, from the corner of his mouth to his earlobe, and accentuated the sneer of hatred that he was turning on Ben at this moment.
Ben was more concerned about the curved sabre clenched in the little hard guy’s fist. So, judging by the looks of utter terror on their faces, were Thierry and Pierrot. It seemed that he’d been about to take a swing at one of them when the door had burst open and interrupted him. Presumably, first to get the chop would have been Pierrot, before the little guy decided what to do about Thierry. Which probably depended on Thierry’s ability or otherwise to pay his debts, and whether the little guy considered it worth trying to get him to cough up the money or just make an example of him by slicing and dicing him into small, bloody pieces.
But all that was a secondary consideration now, as the stranger joined the party. The little guy’s scarred face hardened like iron. It took him only a fraction of a second to get over his surprise at Ben’s entrance, and fly into the attack. Being small and light on his feet, he was also exceptionally fast. He came at Ben whirling the sabre, the curved blade whistling as it sliced the air in a downward diagonal, right to left.
Ben propelled the stunned guard forwards to meet the savage strike, like a human shield. The little guy could do little to halt the momentum of the swinging blade, and it chopped into his own man’s left shoulder, sinking deep. Trapezius muscle severed, collar bone cleaved in half, probably a lot of other irreversible damage as well. Blood sprayed from the wound. The guard sprawled to the floor, twitched and lay still. The little guy stared down at him, then back up at Ben, eyes burning with fury.
Meanwhile the two big men either side of him reached into their trench coats and pulled out their guns. Two more identical Glocks, each fitted with the same kind of long silencer. They could have unloaded all thirty-two rounds into Ben and none of the neighbours would have heard a thing.
Ben wasn’t going to let that happen. But he wasn’t going to kill anyone, either. He’d seen enough death today already.
So instead he shot each of them through the foot, in such quick succession that the muted coughs of the silenced 9mm in his hand sounded like one ragged, elongated report. The big guy on his left got it in the left foot, and the one on his right got it in the right foot, the copper-jacketed bullets punching straight through the shiny leather of their shoes, and straight through the flesh and muscle inside. Before pulling the trigger Ben had already decided that the floorboards were likely thick enough to stop the bullets, to prevent anyone downstairs from getting hurt. Health and safety were important considerations at such times.
The two big guys simultaneously dropped their guns and collapsed like sacks of washing, howling in pain as they clutched their perforated feet. Before they’d even hit the floor, Ben had the Glock pointed towards the short guy’s face.
Ben said, ‘Do yourself a favour, little man.’
The sabre remained suspended in the air for a few instants, during which the psychopathic dwarf looked as though he was seriously considering taking another swing. Ben lowered his aim to point the pistol at his groin. His finger tightened on the trigger. He said, ‘Really?’
The little boss man relented, lowered the sabre and let it drop with a clatter to the floor, though the snarl of ferocious hatred never left his face. He spat.
Ben said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Paulo Fraticelli,’ the little guy growled.
‘Never heard of you.’
Fraticelli’s eyes gleamed. ‘You will. Make no mistake about that.’
Ben shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. You’re in the wrong job, Paulo. Go back to picking pockets or smuggling cigarettes, or whatever pissy little racket you came from. Messing with my friends is bad for your health.’
‘You’re a fucking dead man walking.’
‘At least I can walk,’ Ben said, pointing at Fraticelli’s associates on the floor. The little guy glanced down at them too. Only for a second, but a second was long enough a distraction. Ben stepped towards him and kicked him savagely in the balls, plenty hard enough to squash them flat. Fraticelli let out a screech and doubled over forwards, with perfect timing for Ben’s knee to ram him brutally in the face and knock him out cold. He hit the floor with much less of a crash than his henchmen.
The muscleman still wasn’t moving. Ben didn’t think he was dead, but he was certainly losing a lot of blood from the gaping slash in his shoulder. Before long it was going to start dripping through the ceiling of the apartment below. Meanwhile his two colleagues with the perforated feet were making an awful lot of noise. Ben said, ‘Enough of the racket, guys. People live here.’ He stepped over to one of them and kicked him in the head, and the noise level in the room dropped by half. Then he stepped over to the other. Same job. The apartment was suddenly much quieter.
‘Peace at last,’