Gunfight at the okay mall

The sound had come from a table no more than three metres away from ours. It sounded more like a plastic tray striking a table than the deafening thunderclap of Hollywood gunfire. My friend Robert dived under the table, his chair crashing to the floor beside him.
I think it was the unexpected sound of the gun that meant that, for a split second, I was convinced there was no danger, that this was still a typical hurried lunch at the bustling Viking Bar in the Klif shopping centre. Something about my friend's glance told me that this was no prank, and I dropped to the floor.
A lone assassin approached four men who had been sitting only two tables away from us. Using the element of surprise, he shot one of the men through the head and the other in the chest at point-blank range and simply walked away.
Two rival factions of Warsaw's Wołomin gang, smashed by the police a year earlier, had decided to settle their scores in broad daylight in a mall crowded with unsuspecting shoppers, women, children and the elderly.
The police are swooping down on the leaders of the largest criminal gangs, most recently the "Pruszków gang", who are currently on trial in Warsaw. But as the gangland generals stand defiantly in the dock pleading their innocence, the lower orders roam free, battling to claw back their territory from the fragments of other gangs for the all-important extortion revenues. The violence continues.

Amidst the momentary pandemonium, George scrambled along the floor to hide behind a pillar, frantically signalling for us to keep low. Robert lay out of my reach. I couldn't see his face, and it worried me. A woman was lying motionless to my left with her eyes closed, hair strewn all over her face. Was she the victim of a stray bullet or merely shrouding behind her eyelids in the absence of a real hiding place?
After a short burst of shouting and the clatter of falling chairs and tables came a terrifying silence. We waited with baited breath for the slightest sound or movement. To my relief, the woman to my left slowly opened her eyes.
After what seemed like a dangerously short time, the first heads began to slowly rise above the floor. We all turned towards the table from which the shots had come to see the back of a man, coiled foetus-like on the tiles. Blood seeped slowly from beneath. No visible entry wound. I looked away.

Soon a throng of people crowded around an animated sprinkling of security guards as the three of us struggled to put what we had seen into words. How many shots were fired? Five? Six? Where were the other three men? Could the killer still be in the building?
We were struck by the futility of our actions. The lethal rounds had been fired long before any of us hit the floor, giving us no chance against stray bullets. It is tough to admit that we, and everyone else who worked and dined in the restaurant that afternoon, remained alive through nothing else than pure luck. It is amazing that no one apart from the criminals was harmed.
I recalled how in 1999 a stagehand from the National Theatre had been caught in a gang shoot-out on his way home outside the T.G.I. Friday's restaurant on Aleja Jana Pawła II. Why doesn't the public exist for a mob assassin with his finger on the trigger? His intended victim died instantly. The innocent bystander bled to death in the restaurant's foyer.
Robert asked us if we had seen anything. George and I had both had our backs to the unfortunate table. I had seen four heavily built men hovering around the buffet at the same time as us, but remembered nothing apart from their crew cuts and shorts.
We drifted silently across the deserted mezzanine, past a row of abandoned boutiques to the escalators. I saw the fingers first: rigid hooks raised in the air, as if the victim had meant to claw an unseen assailant in the final moment of his life to avenge his own death. Shot through the chest, his desire to escape carried him across half of the centre before he expired.

Downstairs, the mall seemed undisturbed. Minutes after a multiple killing, people were still milling around and window-shopping to the drone of elevator music as if nothing had occurred. Meanwhile, the assassin fled, as did one of his victims, only to fall into the hands of the police the following week. The last of the four, heavily wounded, was taken to hospital.
Outside was a beautiful, still, sunny Friday, and we stood on a street corner furiously smoking while the police blocked the entrance to Klif, and detectives in unmarked vehicles screeched into the car park. Despite the roadblock, cars poured out onto the street by heading upstream through the parking lot's entrance.
None of us felt particularly shaken, just a little displaced. Perhaps when death leaves the battlefield and strikes in a familiar place, in a setting as improbable as a shopping centre crowded with hundreds of people, it takes horror by surprise.
Shopping centres are spaces that refuse to remember tragedy. Three months later, curiosity drew me back inside. No signs of the killing remained; there were no flowers or candles. The tables in the restaurant had been rearranged so that I could no longer remember where we had been sitting. But while the place hummed with the noises of the lunchtime crowd, one table always remained empty. Perhaps a fitting memorial to the casualties of civil war.