Katja from the Punk Band (14 page)

Today she studies them from around the corner but there have been times when she has sat amongst them, as out of place as a bright red poppy amongst a collection of weeds. She has even held one of the slips of paper, reading the instructions as if she truly believed she would be party to them, closing her eyes and imagining herself being led into one of the rooms and being fed or injected or sprayed and perhaps dying there on the cold, tiled floors.

Her reverie is interrupted when she feels a vibration next to her thigh and her breath catches with surprise. Some of those in the chairs look up at her, a few recognizing her, and she ducks back around the corner, slaps a hand to her thigh.

Her heart is racing now and she checks the corridor both ways. There is a handful of technicians at the far end in deep conversation with one another, so she opens the door of a storage cupboard and ducks inside.

She reaches into her dress and pulls a cell phone from her garter belt.

She presses the answer key.

“It’s me,” a voice says.

She whispers emphatically, “I told you not to call me like this. What’s happened? Is something the matter?”

And she’s watching the edge of the door jamb for the splinter of light that would appear should someone find her here.

“It’s too dangerous,” she says. “What if he catches us? Okay. I’m just scared that . . . I miss you. I have to go . . .”

And she ends the call, finds herself out of breath from trying to remain quiet as her heart rate continued to increase. She switches the phone off completely and slides it back into place next to her thigh, pulls the dress over it. She licks her lips, her mouth suddenly bereft of moisture, takes a deep breath.

She opens the door just a crack, listens for the sound of approaching footsteps, then opens it farther so she can see into the corridor beyond. The technicians are still at the far end, arguing now over something attached to a clipboard one of them holds.

She slips back out of the cupboard and quietly closes it behind her.

“Ylena.”

She just about shrieks with fright at the word spoken so close to her that she can feel breath on the back of her neck, and she snaps around to see Dracyev standing before her. His black-gloved hands are by his side, fingers poised like that of a gunslinger. His lab coat is black too, and made from a thin plastic or rubber rather than the standard white fabric his technicians wear. His hair is gelled back from his face so the reflection of the strip lighting overhead looks like blue waves upon it. His beard is pencil thin and razor sharp, framing his angular face and wide jaw.

“Here you are,” he says.

And her heart is racing again; it feels like the time he injected her with an amphetamine he’d developed called ZR-69. He’d taken a dose himself and they had fucked for most of the night while riding its chemical tide.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

“I needed to stretch my legs,” she says. “I was getting claustrophobic locked up in that room.”

His eyes go to the half-closed door behind her.

“I felt sick,” she tells him. “I thought it was a bathroom.”

“You were sick?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you’ve caught a bug or something. An infection.”

“Perhaps.”

He places a hand on her shoulder, runs it along until he reaches her neck, slides his gloved fingers around her.

“You should go back to your room. Rest. Then you’ll feel better.”

“Yes,” she says. She feels the tension in her muscles and tries to force them to relax, willing them to soften.

“Besides, I have a surprise for you — later tonight. I want you to be ready for it.”

“A surprise?”

He smiles and his fingers leave her shoulder and slide down her chest. “Go rest for now. I’ll send someone for you later.”

Ylena nods, lets him lean in to kiss her and she tastes the chemicals in his mouth. His tongue is dusted with them and now so is hers.

He knows something has happened before the arcade’s shutters have finished their crunching descent, before he reaches the car and sees that one of the rear doors is open. Before he sees that Katja is gone.

His jaw flexes in anger and he drops onto the vehicle’s hood the bag Szerynski has given him, hears a noise coming from one of the nearby alleys.

“Katja!” he shouts, striding toward the dark passageway. The sound of footsteps echoes toward him and he instinctively reaches for his gun. He is not in the habit of drawing it and certainly not for someone such as Katja, but he knows how desperate people can become and he knows what people are capable of when they are desperate.

He knows this intimately.

He shouts again, sees a flash of movement and again, entirely on instinct, shoots. The shot hits something solid and metal and ricochets once, twice. He takes another step into the alley, prepares to fire again . . . then lets the weapon drop.

Fuck it.

What did it matter anymore? Let her run. Let her be free. He is tired of locking people away.

He takes the bag from the hood and shoves it into the passenger seat, climbs into the car. He kicks it into reverse, stops as he comes level with the alley and has one last look, and is relieved when there is no sign of her. He briefly wonders how the hell she managed to get out but kills the thought. No longer matters.

The vehicle’s tires screech wildly as he drives back out onto the wet streets and he can’t help constantly looking down at the bag on the seat beside him.

He pulls up outside his apartment a short time later, kills the engine and sits there for a few moments. His breath steams on the cold glass of the windscreen, distorting his view of the apartment beyond. His fingers are clamped around the steering wheel.

Now the bag beside him is a lump of guilt. He picks it up, takes it into the apartment with him.

It is cold and dark inside, smells of damp.

He switches on lights as he goes.

Climbs the stairs and the damp scents are replaced by sharp, aggressively medicinal ones. He moves gently across the landing, stops before the bedroom door.

Listens.

Then opens the door, quietly, leans in.

And she is there on the bed as she always is.

Her eyes flutter, his bony chest rises and sinks and he knows she is in a deep, chemical-assisted sleep. There is a chair beside the bed, the book he had been reading the previous night still perched open on the seat. He lifts the book out of the way, sits down.

He takes the pill bottle she clasps in her hands and places it next to the rest of them, scattered across her bedside table like the fallen troops of an ambushed army. The bottles are of differing shapes and sizes but most are stickered with the same faded labels, the ones Aleksakhina himself made using the old typewriter in his office, copying the names from a medical encyclopedia, inventing dosages for her. Filling them with cough drops or powdered candies from the corner store, or the fakes the drug teams sometimes used on sting operations.

The only real ones are the sedatives she needs to get to sleep.

He touches her pale wrists, feels like he should squeeze some of his own warmth into her but can’t bring himself to do so. He is as fake as the placebos when around her.

He sits with her, watching her breathe, for how long he does not know, then opens up the bag. It is stuffed with ugly banknotes that seem to have soaked up the electronic glitter of Szerynski’s arcade, now sparkling as he lifts a small handful out.

He places them upon his wife’s chest, then spontaneously adds a few more.

Guilt again.

He leans over, kisses her on the forehead. Her softly puckered skin retains the impression of his lips for a few moments as if it knows that this will be its final contact with him.

He wants to say sorry, feels that he should, but again the sentiment refuses to come. He closes the door behind him, goes back down the stairs, stops by the phone.

He begins to dial without thinking and hangs up just in time, one digit away from the complete number. Would it matter if his calls were traced now? Perhaps not to him but he’d already done enough to his wife. If someone came looking . . .

So he leaves the apartment, trying to persuade himself that this is just another normal night, that he is merely leaving to begin another shift, so that he can make it back to the car without having to fight with himself the whole way.

And then he thinks of Ylena and his pace quickens, past the car and to the payphone on the street opposite. He inserts the last few coins he has and redials the number he first tried in the apartment, completing it this time.

The call is answered almost immediately and at first there is silence.

Aleksakhina is hesitant, wondering if perhaps there is someone else on the other end of the line, just waiting for him to speak.

Finally a low, husky voice says, “Hello.”

“Ylena.” The word bursts from him with relief. “I must see you. I have the answer . . .”

After being caught out that afternoon, Ylena placed the phone under the pillow of the bed she now lies on. She turned the phone back on not long after returning to her quarters but switched the ringer off because she saw the shadows of Dracyev’s men beneath the gap in her door.

She lies back and stares at the fabric above her, a large square of intricately patterned cloth that hangs from her four bed posts. She follows the curvature of the design around and around and it spirals toward a crystalline form in the centre. Then she jumps when she feels the vibration beneath her head.

She flips onto her side, grabs the phone and hits the answer button but hesitates for several moments. Her attention is fixed on the door, just waiting for someone to burst in but nobody comes.

“Hello?” Her voice low, whispered. She wonders if he thinks this is her true voice because it seems every time they speak she has to whisper.

“The answer? What do you mean?”

She’s sitting up now, still fixated on the door. “Off the island? Don’t be stupid, that’s not possible. Look, I can’t talk right now. He’s suspicious. When you called earlier, he almost caught me. It’s too risky, he might . . . What do you mean? Money, what money? Of course it matters . . .”

Her eyes drift from the door; there’s a tingling in her spine.

“I . . .”

A shadow flashes across the floor and she almost drops the phone, but it is fleeting and she hears footsteps receding along the hall.

“Tonight? But . . . yes, of course . . .”

It’s all happening so fast, she feels blood shuttling through her veins, setting little fires in her nerve endings as it goes, and a smile unexpectedly breaks on her face and she finds herself saying, “Yes, okay . . . yes . . .”

She listens as further instructions are passed to her, nods in time with them.

“Okay. Midnight. No, I can be there. It’s too risky for you to come anywhere near here. Yes, I’m sure. Okay.”

And she’s just about to hang up the phone when something else is said and her smile widens.

“I love you too,” she says.

Kohl is fighting the desire, the need, to count his steps, and at the same time indulging himself in it because it is the only thing stopping him going insane with panic at what he has just done and what it might mean.

Szerynski, dead on the floor of his arcade, Kohl’s fingerprints all over the murder weapon, not good, not good.

He loses count, damn it, has to stop where he is, halfway across the open streets where anybody can see him. Thinks he hears a noise coming from the arcade, Szerynski back from the dead to exact his revenge, one of his bodyguards, but can’t see anybody. Movement at the side of the building?

Move.

He starts counting again — one, two, three, four, five — making his strides as large as he can, and he’s almost back into the alleyway, hits twelve, takes two steps back, starts at one again, onward, onward.

Everything has fallen apart, everything will end now. There is no way off the island for him, no chance that he will be able to get away with killing Szerynski. So, what, spend the rest of his life being chased around an island no more than twelve miles long and eight miles wide? Everyone knew everyone and everyone knew him.

He is a dead man.

But he has the vial, the real vial this time, not the phony one fed to him by that fucking junkie Nikolai, the
real
vial, and he realizes it is his only way out of the whole mess.

The mule was to board a ship at the docks at midnight to take it to the mainland but would they know exactly who to expect? Would Dracyev think the transport of the vial important enough to warrant using one of his more trusted men? That wasn’t really the way of the chemical dealers — they tended to rely on desperation and hopelessness in their people to ensure compliance.

And what other choice does he have?

If he reaches the boat and they know he isn’t the real mule, they’d kill him for sure, if he’s lucky, but then wasn’t that the fate that awaited him anyway? At least this way he’s giving himself a chance.

What if they didn’t know who to expect, just that a smuggler would be arriving with a vial to take to the mainland for Dracyev? If he could just make it to the mainland, he would be out of the reach of Szerynski’s revenge, whatever hideous form that might take.

He has to do it, knows this is his only option.

But the gun, he left the gun. What chance will he have if he is unarmed?

He checks his watch, sees that he has enough time to go back to his own arcade first before heading to the docks. But then if Szerynski’s men are already looking for him, surely that will be the first place they will go. There’s a gun in his arcade, hidden behind a loose panel next to his bed. But he can’t bring himself to go back into Czechmate, even knowing the gun is still there.

Eleven. Twelve. Two steps back. One. Two.

He is only five or six blocks away.

He rubs his hands and only then realizes, with horror, that there are blood splatters on them. Szerynski’s blood — and whatever bacteria might lie within it.