Katja from the Punk Band (6 page)

He finds himself unable to move as the man’s car is started and Katja is still in the back, still cuffed. Were there others after the vial? Where were they taking her? Or was this just another part of some elaborate show designed to torment and punish him? His thoughts blossomed at the idea of some extensive plot involving the chemical gangs and their couriers and girlfriends and waitresses and just about everybody on the island, all knowing what was going on, playing with him, toying with him.

He ducks into his seat as the car sweeps past him and doesn’t catch another glimpse of Katja though he tries to, wants to see the expression on her face, if she is still playing a part or whatever. And the car turns when it reaches the end of the road, is gone.

Shit.

Katja was gone, the vial was gone.

Kohl was still around, however. Waiting for the vial.

Waiting for Nikolai.

Back at his apartment, pacing from one end of the room to the other, listening to the sounds of the rolling demo from the games cabinet, trying to think of what to do next.

He had to get to the vial, had to get it. Had to help Katja. Or maybe it would be easier if he just took it and gave it to Kohl and fuck any thoughts about eloping with her to the mainland and those ideas he’s been having about how maybe when they get to the other side they won’t just go their separate ways but maybe she doesn’t even have the vial any more, maybe she’s dead, maybe she’s fucking dead like Januscz, like stone-cold concrete, on the floor of some anonymous garage.

He presses his hands into his face, accidentally squeezes the bruising over his eye and yelps in pain, and there’s a little bit of blood there. He goes to the bathroom and checks himself in the mirror, sees that he’s split a welt that had formed at the top of his cheek. It looks like another eye, blinking at him as he wipes at it.

He opens a cabinet, searches for some iodine but instead his eyes settle on something else. It’s a small cardboard box filled with old, crusted tubes. Vials.

Something he’d bought from a friend several months before, there had been a shot of some chemical in each one and though he normally never touched liquids, he’d been desperate at the time. He recalled how they tasted like stale lemons and how the only real affect they’d had on him was to irritate his bowels for a week.

He didn’t even know where they came from.

He takes out one of the vials, rinses it under a quick blast of cold water and there’s a watermark of some kind there, a little symbol that’s only visible when the light hits it in a certain way.

This could work, he tells himself. How would Kohl even know?

He looks around for something to pour into the receptacle. Rejects old mouthwash because it’s bright blue but then he hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the stuff before to know what colour it was meant to be. Clear? Probably it would be clear. Or is that too obvious? doesn’t know, doesn’t know.

He glances at the toilet beside him.

A minute later and the vial is filled and he’s shoving a stopper in it. He washes his hands to get the last of the urine off, holds the vial up to the light.

Should it be that colour? Surely that can’t be healthy. Stupid, stupid idea. There would be no way Kohl would fall for it, no way.

And now the phone is ringing.

The phone is ringing.

The fucking phone is ringing.

“Shit.”

He turns off the tap, shoves the vial into his pocket, goes back through into the main room. He stares down at the phone as if he will be able to sense who is calling if he can just concentrate hard enough.

It could be Kohl.

It could be Katja.

Or it could be someone else entirely.

It’s still ringing and he’s chewing on a nail.

But Katja didn’t have his number, how could she? Maybe she knew it already, maybe she really has been setting him up and she was going to warn him there was someone coming to get him, to finish him off for trying to steal the vial in the first place or maybe they thought he had Januscz or Katja had . . .

“Hello.”

And he’s picked up the phone just to make it stop ringing.

“You have the vial?”

Kohl. Fucking Kohl.

“Yes,” Nikolai answers without thinking about it.

“Good. Wait for me there. I’m on my way.”

And Nikolai begins to say something but the other man has already hung up. He drops the phone without putting it back on its cradle, strides to the front door, stops.

Has to get out of there.

Get away.

Fuck all this, fuck all of it, all he wanted was a single lousy hit, he never asked for any of this.

But what if they were waiting for him, ready for him to try and escape? He couldn’t go out the front. Instead he turns and runs to the bedroom, slides open the window and climbs out onto the fire escape that leads down to the alley below. It’s not the first time he’s had to make a quick exit from the place and he’s sure it won’t be the last, if he is ever able to return.

He jumps over the balcony and jogs down the rattling steps two at a time, throws himself from the last set and lands awkwardly on the ground below. He grimaces in pain, turns over.

And is looking up at a set of gleaming red wraparound glasses.

Kohl takes a drag on the cigarette he holds.

“Going anywhere in particular?”

“I was just . . .”

“Just . . . ?”

Nikolai can’t think, can’t speak.

“Where is it?” Kohl asks.

“I have it,” Nikolai says.

“I know you have it, you just told me that.” And Nikolai sees the phone in Kohl’s hand. “So where is it?”

Nikolai licks his lips, sweeps his hair back. What else can he do?

He reaches into his pocket, gratefully finds the vial intact despite his hurried descent, and maybe it’s just the street lighting but the colour looks even worse now as he hands it to Kohl.

The dealer examines it for a few moments and Nikolai almost decides to run there and then, just run and take his chances, but before he can Kohl says, “You did good, Nikolai.”

“I did?”

Nods.

“There was a girl,” Nikolai tells him. “I think it was a friend of Januscz’s.”

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t say girlfriend, though he isn’t sure either way of their relationship. But he doesn’t want to say girlfriend.

“A girl?”

“When I went to the house. There was a girl. I think they had an argument. A fight. She took the vial from him. Then I took it from her. I don’t know what’s going on with this shit but we’re done, right? I did what you asked?”

Kohl is rolling the vial around between his fingers and Nikolai is certain he can smell his own piss.

Please
, he begs.
Please
.

“You’ve done what I asked. And I’m grateful.”

Kohl takes another, closer look at the vial. Nikolai tenses because now he is certain he can smell piss.

“You come round to the arcade later tonight and I’ll have something special for you, okay?”

Nikolai nods. He feels as if he isn’t there. He feels as if he’s looking down on this conversation from his bedroom window.

And he just stands there numbly as Kohl walks away with the vial.

And it’s done now, he’s done it, he’s sold Kohl a fake.

Wriggled his way out.

He feels the deft lightness of relief as he climbs the rickety steps that lead back up to his apartment and grins at the added bonus of whatever it is Kohl will have waiting for him when he goes to the arcade later that night. As he gets near his apartment window, the air quality changes tangibly, thickens and acidifies. Clots.

He pulls himself in through the window and the motion seems to knock his momentary relief to the ground in one hard blast.

He’ll find out. Kohl will find out.

Nikolai was lucky to have gotten the vial past him in the alley but surely he couldn’t pass his own piss off as some new chemical drug forever? Kohl will know. He’ll test it, find out it’s a fake.

Or perhaps he already knows. Perhaps the story about Nikolai going back to the arcade later that night is a trick. They’ll be waiting for him, the woman in the bikini and more, just waiting to punish him for thinking he could get away with this.

He ducks his head out of the window, suddenly certain there would already be a troupe of ogre-like bodyguards on their way up, impatient to get down to business.

Sees nothing.

He isn’t safe.

He hasn’t gotten away with anything.

All he’s done is made things worse by not only fucking up on getting the vial but lying about it afterward. Nikolai has known people who have had their necks slit by dealers because they couldn’t shit out the full contents of their stomachs and all the drug-stuffed condoms inside. He knows of a girl beaten to death because she tried to pay for her junk with her crumbling, angular body instead of hard cash. He knows of a man beheaded because he questioned the dealer’s measuring of a shipment.

Nikolai, on the other hand, has faked an entire vial full of chemical and used his own bodily fluids to do so. How the fuck will Kohl take that when he finds out?

And Nikolai, he says aloud, “I’m fucking dead. Fucking dead!”

What the hell had he given Kohl the vial for? Why couldn’t he have just told him the truth and said the girl had taken it, then was kidnapped? Kohl could surely not have held Nikolai responsible for that, or even if he had, at least it wouldn’t have been as serious a betrayal as deliberately faking the vial.

“I should have just told him!” he shouts at the bare walls. Bare except for a couple of bill posters stripped from the sides of boarded up buildings across town and one of them is for The Stumps.

Katja’s band.

Kohl will find out what he has done, sooner or later. And when he does he will come looking for Nikolai and he will have plans — dirty, dark plans, plans that will most likely end with Nikolai stuffed into a container in an alleyway somewhere.

And he will find Nikolai because on the island there are only a small number of places where you can hide, and someone like Kohl, he will know every single one of them because he will probably have hidden in them himself at one point or another.

Therefore Nikolai knows that his only option is to get off of the island — and soon. Easier said than done.

There probably isn’t a person on the island who isn’t willing to do whatever it takes to get across to the mainland and the authorities know it, and they also know that they need to keep a handle on their captive workforce. To turn the handles and work the machines and drive the trucks and mould the plastics and bury the waste.

Getting off the island isn’t something you do on a whim or without a seriously solid plan as to how you are going to do it.

But Nikolai, standing there looking at the poster, realizes he has one of those methods.

And she’s out there, in the city, somewhere.

He knows he must find Katja and he also knows that means he will have to confront the man who kidnapped her.

“I have to go,” he tells her.

“You can’t go!” she shouts back, slamming her fists against the moist, dirty bed sheets.

He doesn’t know how she gets them so dirty so quickly. He washes them every other day. Perhaps if she didn’t spend so much time wrapped in them . . .

“But I have to,” he says calmly, flinching at her anger. “I’ll be as quick as I can, I promise.”

“You always say that and I’m always left here! You’re out all day; do you need to be out all night, as well?! What if something happens to me?!”

“Nothing will happen to you.”

He is standing beside her, blocking the light from the streetlamp outside. His shadow is cast over her bony, pale face.

“How can you say that, Anatoli?!” she screeches. “Anything could happen! This headache . . . this headache . . .”

“You’ve already taken too many pills tonight. You’ll give yourself a stomach ache.”

“I already have a stomach ache,” she says coldly. Accusingly.

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” he tells her, puts on his coat.

“You couldn’t give a fuck about me! You care more about those criminal bastards than you do your own wife!”

He breathes, rolls with the comment just as he would roll with one of the punches or slaps she occasionally doled out. Accepts it numbly.

“If I don’t work then I can’t afford your medication,” he says after a few moments as her fury hisses in the air, and then she is crying because he is about to leave and the shouting hasn’t worked.

He sits on her bedside, takes her hand. She pulls herself up toward him, grips him more tightly than her supposedly weak frame should manage. He has to pry her from him and, as he shuts the bedroom door, he hears the TV flicker to life.

He stops by the phone on his way out and tries Katja’s number one more time but, as before, there is no answer. So he steps out into the rain, stands before his car. The side of it is now patched up with white paint to cover the various vandalism attempts courtesy of the neighbourhood kids.

Now that they know what he does during the day.

It is probably only a matter of time before he will be having to visit each of them, dragging them to and from courthouses and detention centres. He doesn’t know whether it will bring him any satisfaction or not.

He starts the engine and drives across town to the aging brownstone that houses Katja’s squat. He has been there before, knows which entrance she uses to get in. He lifts a piece of scrap metal lying on the overgrown lawn that runs up the side of the building and wedges it against some old rotten crates that he knows conceal a gap in the wall, just in case she tries to escape there. Then he walks around the back and squeezes himself through the pane of a long-vanished window that lies at ground level, drops into the room below.

The sounds of fucking hit him immediately and he turns to see a man and two women sprawled across a grubby mattress in the middle of the room. The man is sandwiched between the two women and Anatoli cannot make out whose limbs belong to whom. It is as if some mythical beast writhes before him until one of the women turns, crawls onto her knees toward him. She looks up at Anatoli, at his officious posture and the line of sweat rising on his brow and blade-like cheekbones.