Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

The last thing she wanted was a rabbit. Ana knew if it turned to a footrace she would never be able to catch him. He was young, lean, built like a runner. She was winded, still recovering from her sprint around the building.

She tried talking to him in French. When that didn’t work, she tried English, then Spanish.

Whether he didn’t understand her or chose not to, she couldn’t be sure. But it seemed to relax him. Slowly he came out of his crouch, relaxed his arms as he studied her from a distance. He put his hands on his hips, struck a bold pose, murderous male model strutting the latest in soiled T-shirts and shredded jeans.

She motioned for him to put his hands up.

He didn’t do it. Instead he just stood there looking at her. The message? She had only one arrow. Did she really want to burn it over something like this?

Ana kept the crossbow trained on him as she backed off a couple of steps. It was a mistake.

The kid suddenly smiled. He mistook her movement for fear. It told him all he thought he needed to know. If she wanted to kill him she would have already done it. She was probably just some pain-in-the-ass citizen trying to be a hero. He had already made enough miscalculations to fill a book.

She motioned with the crossbow for him to get down on the ground.

This time he shook his head and the smile broadened. He motioned with his hands toward one thigh, challenging her to shoot him in the leg. He’d be on her with the knife in an instant, cutting her throat. Besides, she’d probably flinch at the last second and miss. This time he winked at her and said something in a language she didn’t understand, at least not the words.

Ana got the message. The eruption of manliness, the seeping arrogance. Not only was there a single arrow, but the person behind the trigger was a woman. She could read it in his eyes. Ana had known that look since she was a young girl. If he wasn’t careful this machismo was going to get him killed.

When his feet suddenly started to move and he backed up just a short step she said, “No!” He was getting ready for something. She could tell.

He stopped momentarily as his right hand slowly went toward the back pocket of his jeans. The smile never left his face.

Ana knew he was reaching for the knife.

“Stop!” She shook her head, looked at him with a stern expression, tightened her grip on the crossbow, and leaned into it as if she was about to pull the trigger.

His hand slowed but only for an instant before it disappeared behind his hip. The sound of the water covered the snap of the blade as it opened.

He may have concealed the knife, but his faltering smile and the fixed concentration in his eyes told Ana all she needed to know.

The spring in his legs launched him toward her. Two strides like a long jumper and he closed the distance. She pulled the trigger.

The needlelike point of the knife lashed out toward her throat as the momentum of his body quickly carried him forward.

The bolt met him in midair. It entered his chest and disappeared for a fleeting instant before Ana glimpsed it again in the distance as it skipped like a stone across the surface of the river.

His outstretched arm holding the blade reached her just as she turned her body and stepped to one side. His lifeless form flew past and collapsed in a heap on the cement a few feet beyond where she stood.

A fraction of a second sooner and even as deadweight his body would have planted the knife in her chest.

Harry and I hoof it toward the traffic bridge where the lake pours into the river. On the other side of the bridge is the main Lucerne train station, a modern glass and steel structure.

In front of it in the distance I can see the freestanding remnant, the high arching stone façade of the entrance to the nineteenth-century station. That building was lost to a fire in the early 1970s.

In the dead of night there is almost no traffic at all on the bridge. It is nearing two in the morning. Harry and I walk briskly without saying a word, dragging our luggage over the rough cobblestones as we go. The two bags bounce all over the place. Off to the right I see banks of flashing lights just across the river near the entrance to the old wooden footbridge a few hundred yards away, downriver.

“They must be doing some work,” says Harry.

Four minutes later as we approach the other side of the bridge we see that a small crowd has formed near the stone walkway leading along the river. There are a dozen people or more, all looking down the river toward the flashing lights.

By the time we get there, the contagion of curiosity has infected us. We stop for a moment and look down the river along the quay on this side. It is not construction. I can see police vehicles, several of them, and a larger crowd near the end of the wooden bridge. “I wonder what happened,” says Harry.

A fellow standing in front of us hears him. He turns, looks at us, and says, “Someone murdered an old man coming off the bridge.”

As shocking as it is, ordinarily we might not have thought anything more about it, except that Harry and I were instantly troubled by the same question. We look at each other.

“No,” says Harry. “Couldn’t be. He left almost an hour ago. You heard him. He was gonna take a taxi back to his son’s apartment. We gave him the money.” Still, the rash of accidents leaves us both wondering.

We are going to miss the 2 A.M. train. By the time we drag the rolling cases the hundred and eighty yards or so down along the river, Harry and I convince ourselves that it can’t be Korff. It isn’t possible. Some other poor soul.

Harry had given him the money and extracted the promise that he would take a cab home. I was standing right there. I saw the whole thing. This image of the three of us in the hotel lobby makes it even more surreal when I see the back of Korff’s jacket. The collar is still wet with his blood as he lies facedown on the concrete, a few feet beyond the steps leading up to the bridge.

Standing in the crowd holding our suitcases and looking at his dead body on the ground, Harry and I feel as if we’ve been sucker-punched.

Police officers are standing around, a couple of them in plain clothes-detectives, I am assuming. One of them is taking pictures with a large SLR camera, moving in for different angles around the corpse. The flashes of the strobe light up the cold night air each time he snaps the shutter and fires. The uniforms are telling the crowd every few seconds to step back.

“Why didn’t he take the cab?” says Harry. “He said he would.”

“Maybe he needed the money,” I tell him.

“The cost of a taxi wasn’t worth his life.”

“I’m sure he knows that now.” What is troubling to me is not just the violence of the act, but its utter futility. “Why? Why do it at all?”

“What do you mean?” says Harry.

“Why bother to kill him?”

“Obviously because he knew too much,” says Harry.

“Yes. But he’d already told us everything he knew. Whoever killed him had to know that. They were either tailing him or. .”

“Or what?” says Harry.

“Or they were tailing us. Either way they had to know he already met and talked with us. If the purpose was to silence him, why not kill him before he talked instead of after? It’s the pattern. The same thing happened with the girl, remember?”

“I wasn’t there,” says Harry.

“That’s right. It was Herman and me. They waited until after we talked to her in the motel room. And then they killed her. Killed both of them, Ben and her friend. And Graves. I met with him at his office. We talked. Next morning he’s dead in the underground. Each time they waited until after they talked to us, and then they killed them.”