Potboiler

“Tapeworms,” Pfefferkorn repeated, for emphasis. Then he yelled that he had been waiting for an oscillating fan for more than a week. He slammed his fist on the desk as he said this. The clerk jumped. Then, with enormous contempt, as if he couldn’t stand to deal with such an imbecile any longer, Pfefferkorn reached into his left sock and whipped out the roll of cash. He peeled off a fifty-ruzha note and dangled it in front of the clerk’s face, as if to say, I can bribe you right out here in the open and no one can do anything about it. So how important must I be? Very important, that’s right. So don’t mess with me. That was his intention. It was equally possible that the message was Take this money and shut up. In any event, the clerk plucked the bill and gave him a timid smile. “Monsieur,” he said.

104.

Pfefferkorn’s finger hovered over the button for the penthouse. He told himself that he had more than enough on his plate as it was. He chafed, knowing he would have to let Dragomir Zhulk live to plot another day. He punched the button for the fourth floor.

As the car labored upward, he visualized what he was about to do. The Metropole was old and quirky enough for every room to be done up differently. Certain constants would hold, though. There would be an entry hall with a closet on one side and a bathroom door on the other. There would be a bed. There would be a dresser. There would be a television on top of the dresser. There would be a nightstand, a telephone, a clock, a radiator, and a lamp. There would be an oscillating fan, although the likelihood of its functioning would be low.

The elevator ground to a halt. The doors parted. He crept down the hall.

There would be Carlotta. That was important to keep in mind. He couldn’t come storming in like a maniac, striking at everything that moved. He had to be deadly but precise. If the room was anything like the one he’d stayed in, it could fit four comfortably. This being West Zlabia, he had to count on things being less than optimally comfortable. He steeled himself to fight ten men. They would be armed. They would have shoot-to-kill orders. His motions would have to be unified and fluid. He would go for the solar plexus.

He passed his old room. He passed 46, home of the noisy honeymooners. He came to number 48 and stopped. She had been no more than forty feet away the entire time.

He checked that he was alone.

He was alone.

He uncapped the deodorant stun gun and held it in his left hand. Not too tight, not too loose. He snicked open the toothbrush switchblade and held it in his right hand. Not too tight, not too loose. He reviewed Sockdolager’s advice. Let the weapons become an extension of your own body. Don’t pull punches. Commit. He held up the butt end of the toothbrush and tapped the door three times. There was silence, then footsteps, and then the door opened.

105.

The door opened.

“What the fuck?” Lucian Savory asked, or started to ask. He hadn’t gotten any further than “What the f—” when Pfefferkorn jammed the stun gun into his withered gut and fired. Savory’s knees folded and he went down like a sack of root vegetables, his bulbous head hitting the carpet. In one fluid motion Pfefferkorn sprang over him and rolled into the room, coming to his feet in a defensive crouch, whirling and ducking and weaving and jabbing with the knife and snapping off nasty eighty-thousand-volt crackles. “Hah!” he said. “Heh!” He dashed from end to end, a cyclone of lethality destroying everything in its path, meeting no opposition. He paused to assess the damage. Aside from Savory, who was an inert heap, the room was empty. He had completely subdued the finishings, though. He had mauled the curtains, lamed the lamp, annihilated the radiator, obliterated the fan, and electrocuted the duvet.

Carlotta was nowhere to be seen.

But then he saw that he had missed something. The room was mostly the same as his, but there was one key difference. There was an extra door, the kind that connects two adjacent rooms. It connected room 48 to room 46, home of the honeymooners.

He opened the door. The corresponding handleless door was ajar. He pushed it all the way open with his foot and stepped through the doorway and there she was, tied down to the bed, a moon-shaped scar in the wallpaper corresponding to the top of the headboard that she had been rocking back and forth for weeks, slamming the wood into the wall and producing a rhythmic banging that was not hot water pipes or overzealous lovers but a frightened woman’s desperate bid to attract the attention of whoever it was in room 44, not forty feet away but less than the same number of inches.