Frederick Forsyth - The Fourth Protocol

Two were brutes, simple steak-faced thugs who would do anything they were told and would obey the orders of the third; he was slight, pocked, mean, with dirty-blond hair.

Zablonsky did not know them personally; he just “knew” them; he had seen them in the camps, in uniform. Recognition sapped his will to resist. He understood there was no point. Men like these always did what they wanted to people like him. There was no point in resisting or appealing.

They pushed him back into the sitting room and threw him into his own armchair. One of the big men stood behind the chair, leaned forward, and pinned Zablonsky into it. The other stood by, caressing one fist with the palm of the other hand. The blond man drew up a stool in front of the chair, squatted on it, and stared at the jeweler’s face. “ ’It ’im,” he said.

The slag to Zablonsky’s right swung a heavy fist straight into his mouth. The man was wearing brass knuckles. The jeweler’s mouth dissolved in a welter of teeth, lips, blood, and gum.

Blondie smiled. “Not there,” he chided gently. “ ’E’s supposed to talk, ain’t ’e? Lower down.”

The thug slammed two more haymakers into Zablonsky’s chest. Several ribs cracked.

From Zablonsky’s mouth came a high-pitched keening. Blondie smiled. He liked it when they made noise.

Zablonsky struggled feebly but he might as well not have bothered. The muscled arms from behind the chair held him fast, as the other arms had held him down on that stone table so long ago in southern Poland while the blond doctor smiled down at him.

“You been bad, Louis,” crooned Blondie. “You upset a friend of mine. ’E reckons you’ve got something of his and ’e wants it back.” He told the jeweler what it was.

Zablonsky choked back some of the blood that filled his mouth. “Not here,” he croaked.

Blondie considered. “Search the place,” he told his companions. “ ’E won’t give no trouble. Take it apart.”

The two slags searched the house, leaving Blondie with the jeweler in the sitting room.

They were thorough and it took an hour. When they had finished, every closet, drawer, nook, and cranny had been turned out. Blondie contented himself with poking the old man in his broken ribs. Just after midnight the slags returned from the attic.

“Nuffink,” said one.

“So who’s got it, Louis?” asked Blondie. Zablonsky tried not to tell him, so they hit him again and again until he did. When the one behind the chair released him, he fell forward onto the carpet and rolled onto one side. He was going blue around the lips, his eyes starting and his breath coming in short, labored gasps. The three men looked down at him.

“ ’E’s ’aving a ’eart attack,” said one curiously. “ ’E’s croaking.”

“ ’It ’im too ’ard, then, dint ya?” said Blondie sarcastically. “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got the name.”

“You reckon ’e was telling us straight?” asked one of the slags.

“Yeah, ’e was telling us straight an hour ago,” said Blondie.

The three left the house, clambered into their van, and drove off. On the road south from Golders Green, one of the slags asked Blondie, “So what we going to do now, then?”

“Shut up, I’m thinking,” said Blondie. The little sadist liked to think of himself as a commander of criminals. In fact, he was of limited intelligence and now he was in a quandary. On the other hand, the contract had been to visit just one man and recover some stolen property. On the other, they had not recovered it. Near Regent’s Park he saw a telephone booth. “Pull over,” he said. “I got to make a phone call.”

The man who had hired him had given him a telephone number, the location of a phone booth, and three specific hours at which to call. The first of them was only a few minutes ahead.

Beryl Zablonsky returned from her Saturday-evening treat just before two in the morning.

She parked her Metro across the street and, surprised to see the lights still on, let herself in.

Louis Zablonsky’s wife was a nice Jewish girl of working-class origins who had early learned that to expect everything in life is stupid and selfish. Ten years earlier, when she was twenty-five, Zablonsky had plucked her from the second-row chorus line of a no-hope musical and asked her to marry him. He had told her about his disability but she had accepted him nevertheless.

Strangely, it had been a good marriage. Louis had been immeasurably kind and treated her as if he were a too-indulgent father. She doted on him, almost as if she had been his daughter. He had given her everything he could—a fine house, clothes, trinkets, pocket money, security—and she was grateful.

There was one thing he could not give her, of course, but he was understanding and tolerant. All he asked was that he never know who, or be asked to meet any of them. At thirty-five, Beryl was a trifle overripe, a little obvious, earthy and attractive in that kind of way that appeals to younger men, a sentiment she heartily reciprocated. She maintained a small studio flat in the West End for her trysts and unashamedly enjoyed her Saturday-night treats.

Two minutes after entering the house, Beryl Zablonsky was crying and giving her address on the telephone to the ambulance service. They were there six minutes later, put the dying man on a stretcher, and tried to hold him in this life all the way to the Hampstead Free Hospital. Beryl went with him in the ambulance.

On the way he had one brief period of lucidity and beckoned her close to his bleeding mouth. Craning an ear, she caught his few words, and her brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

It was all he was able to say. By the time they got to Hampstead, Louis Zablonsky was another of the night’s dead-on-arrival cases.

Beryl Zablonsky still retained a soft spot for Jim Rawlings. She had had a brief affair with him seven years earlier, before his marriage. She knew his marriage had now broken up and that he was again living alone in the top-floor apartment in Wandsworth whose telephone number she had called often enough to have memorized it.

When she came on the line she was still crying, and at first Rawlings had some trouble, dazed with sleep as he was, in making out who was calling. She was ringing from a public booth in emergency admissions and the pips kept going as she put in fresh coins.

When he understood who it was, Rawlings listened to the message with increasing puzzlement.

“That’s all he said? Just that? All right, love. Look, I’m sorry, really very sorry. I’ll come up when the fuzz have cleared out. See if there’s anything I can do. Oh, and Beryl

... thanks.”

Rawlings replaced the receiver, thought for a moment, and placed two calls, one after the other. Ronnie, from the scrapyard, reached him first, and Syd was there ten minutes later. Both, as instructed, were tooled up, and they were just in time. The visiting party tramped up the eight flights of stairs fifteen minutes later.

Blondie had not wanted to take the second contract, but the extra money the voice on the phone had guaranteed was too much to turn down. He and his mates were East Enders and hated to go south of the river. The animus between the gangs of the East End and the mobs of South London is legendary in the capital’s underworld, and for a southerner to go “up East” uninvited, or the reverse, can be a ticket to a lot of trouble. Still, Blondie reckoned that at three-thirty in the morning things should be quiet enough and he could be back in his own manor with the job done before he was spotted.

When Jim Rawlings opened his door, a heavy hand shoved him straight back down the hallway leading to his sitting room. The two slags came in first, with Blondie bringing up the rear. Rawlings backed fast down the hallway to let them all in. When Blondie slammed the door behind him, Ronnie came out of the kitchen and leveled the first slag with a pickax handle. Syd came out of the coat closet in a rush and used a nailbar on the cranium of the second man. Both went down like felled oxen.