Read The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) Online
Authors: John R. Maxim
On the autobahn, the van had dropped farther back, the driver biding time. Now, gradually, it closed the distance, ready to ease off if the Mercedes, which could easily outrun the van, accelerated. If it did, they would wait. It did not.
They were near the town of Sargans, where the autobahn would soon branch off toward Austria, and where the morning fog had begun to thicken, when the killers made their move. The Mercedes had remained in the right-hand lane, the van in the center. Now it moved up, slowly, until it had drawn abreast.
One short burst, then a longer one. She saw his body shudder under the impact but still he tried to fight. She could see him groping for his weapon as he steered the big Mercedes into the open side of the van in an effort to block its line of fire. But the van swung wide and accelerated. She could see the two gunmen again.
They seemed to hesitate. They had clear shots at Russo and yet they were looking beyond him. They shifted their sights. It was then that Elena knew that she, not Dr. Russo, was their target. As Josef slumped forward, and as the slowing Mercedes drifted onto the soft shoulder of the road, they emptied their clips at her.
Flying glass ripped her scalp. One bullet shattered the forearm that held Russo. Another found her right shoulder, slamming her backward onto the seat. Russo, his last breath a scream of rage, his body jerking wildly under the impact of two dozen slugs, seemed to turn, deliberately, and hurl himself across her body.
Soon there was only Willem. His manner anguished but efficient, feeling the throats of first Russo, then Josef, nodding to her as if to say they were alive although the pain in his eyes told her that his brother, at least, was dead. Then there were sirens. Policemen. Paramedics dressed in orange jumpsuits. Men tugging at her, their voices distant. Then only dreams.
-4-
Even as the bullets screamed through glass and flesh, she knew who had sent these men. It seemed to her that she had prayed. That she had asked God to spare her long enough to send them to hell.
Nor might God have been pleased that, at the moment of imminent death, she committed the sin of vanity. It was true. She would never tell her priest about it because, even as he gave her absolution he would bring a hand to his face so that she could not see him laugh. For at one point, for one of those seconds, what had seemed foremost in her mind was a concern for the appearance of her corpse. She saw a vision of herself as the police would find her: face bloodied, eyes staring at nothing, mouth gaping, hair dripping and matted, her body in an indecorous sprawl, legs apart, across the backseat of the Mercedes. They would take photographs. And so, even as Russo threw her backward and the car began to roll, she had curled up like a fetus and was struggling to hold her long leather skirt against her calves.
But most of all, she'd thought of Lesko. And whether he would come to see her body. And if he did, would he be sorry that he had hurt her.
And that, Elena knew full well, was the greatest absurdity of all. It was ludicrous. About to meet her maker and yet mooning like a schoolgirl over this great beast of a man who, two years earlier, would happily have seen her in prison and had himself come within a whisper of killing her.
It had happened in New York. Brooklyn. The back room of an abandoned barbershop on a street of gutted tenements. He was still a policeman then. He'd come with a shotgun in one hand, a pistol in the other and vengeance in his heart. He left death all around her. Yet, in the end, he could not pull his trigger that one last time. He'd left her standing there.
Josef had once remarked that she was born again that day. But she knew it was nothing of the sort. A time simply comes when enough is enough. She'd stood there, trembling, long after Lesko had turned away from her and had gone. Then, composing herself, she'd stepped over the bodies of the men he slaughtered, walked out onto the dead street of a dying city, and never again looked back. She would not retum to Bolivia. There was no reason. The last of her relatives, on her mother's side, were dead. Her house had been bombed in the drug wars, the servants frightened away. Her only home was a hotel suite in La Paz.
Nor could she have remained in the United States. There were two warrants for her arrest, one from the federal government, the other from the state of New York as a material witness to that so-called barbershop massacre that had filled the front pages of the city's newspapers.
“Certain emotions?” she asked softly. “The man despises me.”
“And you wish he did not?”
“Yes.”
“Father,” she closed her eyes, ” I ordered the death of his partner.”
‘The corrupt detective? The one who was stealing from you?”
“Yes.”
“And yet, in avenging the partner, Lesko spared you. He must have seen something in you, Elena.”
“He saw a small frightened woman who traffics in cocaine. If I were a man I would have been dead.”
“And what did you see?”
“In Lesko?”
“Yes.”
“An honorable man.”
“To whom you told the truth. Even if you would die for it”
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps he saw honor in you as well.”
“Perhaps,” she said quietly. “Father?”
“Yes?”
“If I ask this, you will not laugh?”
”I will not laugh, Elena.”
“Is it possible to love such a man?”
”I suppose not,” she said. Her cheeks were buming.
“May I now ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“If he, or a member of his family had been harmed, would you have made good your threat?”
“Immediately.”
“But not now. You have renounced all violence just as you have renounced your past.”
“It has been two years, Father. The question no longer arises.”
“But if it did,” he pressed.
”I have not attained sainthood, Father. I owe the man a debt. I will pay it if I can.”
Then, perhaps, he could forgive. Even if God and her priest would not. At least, then, she could be free of him.
In all the ways that she could think of, she remade herself. She allowed herself to gain two kilos of weight. Her cousins said that it became her. She had long been too thin. But she kept her body firm through long solitary hikes in summer and ski lessons in winter. She lightened her hair, to look all the more European, and she cut it short. She wondered if Lesko would like it. She knew that was foolish, the conceit that he would care enough to comment, that he would even remember her face. But she wondered nonetheless.
She put the painting away. But she felt good that it was near. She felt safe. Her new life went forward, a season at a time.
It was Josef who called.
“Elena,” he asked, “do you know a man named Raymond Lesko?”
Her throat became full.