Paul Johnson - The Death List

Fels went to the dresser and poured himself a cup of Darjeeling. He stared at his reflection in the rococo mirror and checked that the long strands of hair were still plastered over his bald skull. There had been a footballer famous for such a hairstyle, but he couldn’t remember his name. One of the other top agents had sold his memoirs. He patted his cheeks to bring the color up in them. He was doing well for sixty-four. People often complimented him on his appearance, though he knew that most of them only did it because they wanted something out of him. He tightened the knot of his silk tie. It had cost him more than five hundred pounds. He treated himself to a tie like that every time he completed a deal. It wouldn’t be long before he bought another.

He went back to his desk. Another hour and he would have finished vetting the complex American contract for one of his children’s authors-hardcover and mass-market editions, audio and film rights, product endorsements. The deal would add a wing to his third villa, the one on the Cote D’Azur. He wasn’t sure if he would be taking Vlado there with him when summer came. There were plenty more like him in the South of France, those ones tanned and lean from water sports. Variety was the spice of life.

The doorbell rang when he’d only got through another three clauses.

“Bloody hell!” Fels muttered, throwing down his Mont Blanc fountain pen. It was probably one of the juniors from the agency. He’d told his colleagues often enough to leave him alone in the mornings, but the idiots always found something they couldn’t handle without his expert input.

He went downstairs, wishing not for the first time that he’d installed one of the agency secretaries in his house. But no, that would have made grabbing Vlado less straightforward.

Looking at the security screen, he made out a shortish man wearing a cap. He had turned away from the door. Some kind of courier, he presumed-he was carrying a box. Perhaps it contained the long-overdue script from the most tiresome of his female authors; tiresome, but extremely high-earning. He pressed the button and watched the door swing open.

“Mr. Fels?” the man said in a curiously accentless voice. He sounded like a BBC newsreader from the 1950s.

“The same. Is that for me?”

“Yes,” the man said. “And so is this.”

Christian Fels only saw the short black truncheon the instant before it crashed onto his left temple. He toppled backward onto the carpeted hall and lay motionless, his eyes misting over. He was aware of the front door closing, then of his body being dragged into the dining room. It was when he was being lifted onto the table that he realized he had more than one assailant.

“Wha-” His voice sounded far away, as if it were coming from a megaphone on the other side of the city. “What…what d’you want?”

The man who had hit him leaned over. Fels realized that he had put on a mask, one that hugged the contours of his face. It made him look like a ghost, but it had the desired effect-he couldn’t remember anything about his face.

“Christian William Niall Leconbury Fels,” the man said, giving a dry laugh. “A handy moniker, I’ll say!” He looked across to his companion, who was wearing a similar mask and did not speak. “Known in the literary world as ‘the Barracuda.’” He laughed again. “Not very flattering, is it?”

Fels came back to a higher level of consciousness. “Get…get out of my house, you…you criminals. My gardener’s out the back. All I have to do is-”

“Shout and your balls will be cut off,” his attacker said, jabbing something sharp into the flesh of Fels’s thigh. “Message received?”

“Ye…yes.”

“Good. Now, I imagine you want to know what’s in the box.” The man lifted up the brown cardboard package. It was about a foot across.

Fels tried to raise his hands and realized that they were bound.

“I tell you what, I’ll open it for you.” The man ran the knife along the seal and put his latex-covered hands inside. “Do you know what these are?” he asked, lifting a pile of books out.

Christian Fels blinked away the blood from his left eye. He saw books, books with jackets that were vaguely familiar to him. He tried to make out the titles and the author’s name. The Revenger’s Comedy. Matt Stone. Tirana Blues. He knew these books and the man who wrote them.

“Yes, that’s right,” the man said, bending low over his face so that the smell of mint was pungent in Fels’s nostrils. “They’re by one of your authors, or should I say ex-authors?”

“Matt…Matt Stone,” he stammered. He remembered the fellow, of course. Average talent, if truth were told, but an unusually vivid imagination. He’d done a couple of crime novels set in Albania, hadn’t he? There was no way they were ever going to sell well, even though he himself had screwed a more than generous advance out of the publishers.

“Matt Stone,” the man in the mask confirmed. “Also known as Wells. Do you know what you’re going to do with these books, Christian? You don’t mind if I call you Christian, do you? Though behaving like a barracuda is hardly very Christian, is it?” The man let out a laugh that suggested unfathomable depths of depravity. “I’ll tell you.” He paused to ratchet up the tension. “You’re going to eat them. Every last page of them. Not forgetting the jackets.”

Fels choked before anything had been stuffed into his mouth. “What?” he gasped. “Why?”

The man looked at him with cold, dark eyes. “Because you consumed Matt Wells’s career. Now you can consume his books.” He tore out some pages and rammed them into the agent’s mouth.

“Aaaach!” Fels groaned, unable to scream, and unable to chew or swallow. “Nnnnggmmm!”

Then something very strange happened. The man and his accomplice suddenly moved away from him. He twisted his head round, frantically trying to spit out the semisodden paper. A tall, fair-haired man in a tracksuit top was standing at the door, a spade in his hand. He wasn’t Vlado.

“Well, now, what have we here?” the man asked in a strong American accent. “I think I can hear Klaxons,” he said, cupping his hand to his ear. “I can definitely hear Klaxons.”

Fels could hear them, too. Oh, blessed relief! He would reward his good-looking savior handsomely.

“No, no, you’re not going anywhere, shitheads,” the American said, moving to block the two intruders’ passage to the door.

“You’re making a mistake,” the man in the mask said, his voice icy. “Let us past.”

“Screw you, pal,” the big man said, brandishing the spade.

“Dolt,” the attacker said. There was a flash of highly polished metal and the sickening sound of flesh being punctured.

Christian Fels managed to spit the mass of pulp from his mouth. He twisted his head round as far as it would go, strands of his hair dangling over his face like jellyfish tentacles. He was in time to see the two men in caps turning toward the rear of the house.

“Vlado!” he said with a gasp.

“Never mind bloody Vlado,” said the American. He’d collapsed against the wall, his eyes fixed on the haft of the knife that was protruding from his upper chest. “What about Andrew Jackson?”

As his rescuer’s golden locks fell forward, Fels swooned clean away.

I called Andy’s mobile from a public phone on Oxford Street and let it ring four times. Then I hung up and pressed Redial.

“Hello?”

The male voice was familiar, but there was something wrong about it.

“Andy?” I said in a low voice.

“Who is this, please?”

I clocked the Welsh tones. They belonged to D.I. Turner. I cut the connection quickly. What the hell was going on? Before I could think further, my mobile rang. I wondered if it was the detective, having recognized my voice. I’d given his superior my number.