Espresso

I'VE POSTED A NEW VERSION. READ THAT INSTEAD.

A strikingly ginger haired fellow stretches out on the large leather sofa like a giant invalid cat, one leg jutting well beyond its well padded arm, the other cocked at the knee. He frowns out of the bay window into the smoky winter evening. Beside him a book has recently been splayed face down, its spine cracked, abandoned during a long descriptive passage. Books, he thinks, exhaling loudly through his nostrils, are never as good as their covers.

The large room, decorated modestly but for a large and bright chandelier, looks out through a large window onto treetops and beyond this onto even more trees that fill the city park. A few stories up from the pavement, the sounds of the metropolis are barely perceptible, muffled by the triple-glazed panes. Nevertheless, as the holidays approach, Maxim has perceived an ever increasing hubbub floating up to his room. But he has no reason to join the throng. Even if he could. Imagining the painfully crowded pavements, he shifts his weight from his left to his right buttock and scratches his arm.

Although he is alone and barely sees a soul, Maxim has a lingering concern that he is dressed rather absurdly. Over his torso he wears a tight black sweater. Below, nothing but a single sock on his bad foot. Through the jet wool, the skin feels loose over his ribs. He always bulked up between jobs when he was younger, gorging on takeaway food and Czech beer, but he has been so inactive for so long now that his capacious appetite has all but gone. All he consumes is coffee, pumped from the expensive machine that is sitting, squat and shining, like a new sports car on the low table.

In spite of his diminishing waistline, he remains truly big boned – built like a tank, his grandmother proudly used to say. He will always be tall and broad of beam, with a skull the size and almost the shape of a football – but now the muscle and fat that had once sat so well on that colossal skeleton had gone. And while he remains two decades from his planned retirement his skin feels like it is beginning to sag. Earlier that day he had failed to even squeeze out a crisp round of stomach crunches. His bottom lip bares a sultana-sized scab, proof of his efforts to fight through a pain that rose and rose up his body as he struggled to even reach a pathetic dozen.

His eye now roves along the rods pinned along his leg and thinks about what Dr Da Costa said. He frowns – frowns so profoundly in fact that his brow seems to envelop his eyes. He cannot change anything now. But at his age he cannot just sit and wait and wait and wait.

Wincing and almost growling through pursed lips, he swings his legs slowly down to the floor. He twists and grasps his crutches, puffing his cheeks as he prepares his limbs. But from the low sofa it is impossible though to get any purchase on the sticks. 'How!? Jesus!'

He slowly leans back and then quickly jerks forward, trying to propel himself upwards. Even his eyebrows seem to try to lift him from his seat. Even they, despite being shaped and coloured like a golden eagle's wing, are powerless.

'Fu-uck!'

How could he not have the strength to do even this? A man who with one hand used to regularly lift his targets up by their necks, who once broke all five of his opponent's fingers during an arm-wrestle. How could that man become this man. It hasn't even been a year.

He swings the crutches violently towards the far wall like a drunken Olympian and yells up at the ceiling, long and hard. He listens, primed to shout back if anyone calls an objection. Only the increasing, low bustle from the streets below supplies any sounds of response. Breathing deeply in and out, he looks down and sees one of the crutches has barely made it a quarter of the way across the room. Scowling beneath his massive brow at this aluminium foe, he drags it back towards him with his foot, hissing with pain as he picks it up before swinging it down on the table with a whooshing smack.

His half empty cup flies off across the room, spinning and sliding along on its side like a crashed motorcyclist. Cracking into the wall, with its dark contents leaving a sticky trail behind, it sits in the corner, rocking slowly for a few seconds from the momentum.

There is a knock on the door.

Maxim remembers Da Costa's departing words. 'It's not good. I'm sorry.' He smiles. He likes the doctor. 'Come in,' he booms. And the door handle twists one way and then the other but there is no response.

'Not got the key?' he booms louder.

His question is answered by a disappointed groan. Seconds pass, the sounds of the city grow distant. Maxim stares at the door. Suddenly its handle explodes across the room, accompanied by the hollow hoot of a silenced pistol. Maxim smiles.

A short dark man, dressed all in slate grey, marches into the room. He stands two metres from Maxim, pointing his black gun at the seated man's head. 'Gun,' the newcomer says.

Maxim rolls his eyes and smiles. 'So, you've not been given the key?'

'Gun,' insists the new man, with what sounds to Maxim like an Italian accent. His voice is confident and calm, despite his conceding many years to his mostly-naked opponent, which impresses Maxim and he beams up at the young interloper.

'I've been to Roma a few times, Livorno one time. Always for work, always at night. But still nice people, eh?'

The newcomer sighs and flicks his eyes quickly onto the table and back to Maxim, then to different sides of the sofa and back to Maxim, who has not moved a muscle. 'Do you have a gun?'

'Of course. Under the table here.'

'Please. Pass it to me.'

The ginger giant curls his hairy foot round his own pistol and flicks it adeptly with his toes over to the new man, who crouches down to pick up the weapon with his spare hand, keeping his eyes fixed all the while on Maxim's. 'Da Costa says you will be lame,' he tells Maxim, flatly, with no trace of any Italian vowels. 'You are no good. They say this.'

Maxim barely shows any concern, he is not concentrating on what the man is saying. 'You are not Italian then. That is unusual.' He gestures at the marvel of beverage engineering on the table. 'Coffee maybe instead?' he asks, implying this will make up for it.

The new man shakes his head slowly but cannot resist looking down at the machine. He is tempted. He has not slept since leaving home the day before.

'I'll make us coffee. OK? I have two cups.' Maxim winces as he leans forward and makes the arrangements.

The newcomer murmurs a grudging permission, trying to keep his upper hand. He knows the older man and he respects him. He has heard much about the red haired giant and although he is disappointed to see him reduced to sitting in his underpants in this bland foreign room, he enjoys the fact he has not been made to work too hard. The ginger man has pressed the button and the black liquid is steaming into a tall espresso cup.

'The other one for me is there,' says Maxim, gesturing with his long nose towards the broken cup in the corner.

The newcomer doesn't move at first. He has remained standing in the same spot, two metres from the seated Maxim, with his pistol still pointed. The first scent of coffee – it is Egyptian, like his father – has made his stomach ache for the drink now though. He turns and looks down at the corner of the room, where the twin cup lies. He wonders for a few seconds whether he shouldn’t just finish the job now and then drink the coffee. But some deep-held ancestral notion from within him banishes these cold, efficient thoughts with the desire to share a drink with the doomed man. Still facing Maxim, he walks slowly backward, stopping before his shoes touch the spilt liquid there. Pointing his gun up at the ginger man, he crouches down and rescues the vessel. His gaze flicks quickly to the object in his hand, it is badly cracked but will still hold the hot liquid.

He looks back, smiling, to Maxim. Maxim looks back, smiling also. The ginger man now has a new gun in his hand, which he quickly fires towards the head of the short dark interloper, whose toothy expectant grin is literally shattered against the far wall.