“Shit,” said Leon nervily, wiping his hand on the knee of his jeans. He held the envelope up to the light and shook it so the dark object inside jiggled about. “I thought Crispin dealt in drugs.”
“Me too.” Forsyth jerked his chin towards the envelope. “What is it?”
“I haven’t looked, but I’ve got an idea” Leon said. “You think he was killed for this?”
Forsyth rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know that he’s dead, Leon. I don’t know what the fuck happened.”
“But?”
“But I think the Georgians tried to rip him off.”
Leon nodded. “Sounds about right. Well.” He pinched the edge of the envelope between the nails of his thumb and index finger and tore the plastic. “I should tell you to take this thing that belongs to Babykiller, and which the Georgians want but don’t want to pay for, and go away and never come back.” He tipped the envelope and the dark object fell out into his palm, a rectangle of black plastic a few millimetres thick and about half the size of a packet of cigarettes, featureless except for a narrow green stripe around one end and a line of tiny gold dots along one of the short edges. An external hard drive. “However,” Leon went on, “what kind of friend would that make me?”
“It would make you the kind of friend who didn’t care about the rent I owe you,” said Forsyth.
Leon smiled and looked at him. “Everybody in this fucking country is a mercenary, my friend, you must have noticed. If I forget about the money you owe me, where else am I going to get it from?”
“I came here for help, Leon. Not to get involved in another money-making scheme.”
Leon was examining the drive, holding it delicately between his fingertips under an articulated desklamp. “No serial number, but that doesn’t mean anything. Just standard storage.”
“I’m going to take it to the police,” Forsyth said.
Leon’s fist closed gently around the drive. “Just a moment.”
“Give it back, Leon.”
“Think about it,” Leon said smoothly. “You went down into the Metro. Okay, you might be able to explain that because you represent tunnel workers, even though you chose an unusual time of the day to do it. But you took an unauthorised person down there with you.” He shook his fist gently. “An unauthorised person who was a known drugs dealer. And you took him down there so he could retrieve some kind of contraband.”
Forsyth closed his eyes and groaned.
“And that’s just the beginning,” Leon continued. “Let’s assume you explain all that away. Crispin has probably been murdered. Did you go straight to the police to report it? No, you came here. You behave like a criminal yourself, and go running to your old friend Leon.”
Forsyth put his hand to his face.
“And anyway, the chances are that if you go to the police this thing will wind up in the Georgians’ hands in a couple of hours and you’ll be lying in some basement with your throat cut and your nuts in your mouth. No.” Leon stood up. “Let’s not go to the police.”
Forsyth took his hand from his face and opened his eyes. “Can you find out what’s on that thing?”
Leon’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Sure,” he said. “That’s not even difficult.” He flipped open a little door in the front of one of his computers, revealing a row of various-sized slots. He pushed the drive into one of them, tapped a couple of commands, and the monitor in front of him filled with a diagram of the Warsaw Metro.
There was a moment’s silence. Forsyth said, “So?”
“So what?”
“Is that it?”
Leon clicked his way through two or three menus, read the results. “That’s it,” he said. He blinked at Forsyth. “Can you think of a good suggestion why Crispin would want to hide this in the Metro? Or why somebody might want to kill him for it?”
“No.” Forsyth rolled his chair closer to the monitor. The diagram was just the standard one from the original design drawings, the one that was in all the brochures. It showed not just the Metro lines but every tunnel and underground space involved in the project. For that reason it was immensely complicated, and it had been stuck away on the inside back page of the brochures because investors tend to find very complicated diagrams rather dull.
“Okay,” said Leon. “So maybe there’s something encrypted within the picture.”
“Like what?”
Leon shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Well can you find out?”
“There’s no need to shout.”
Forsyth thought there was every need to shout, but he fought himself calm by an effort of what will he had left. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you find out?”
Leon scratched his head. “I can look for the more obvious things, but you really need a specialist.” He smiled. “Fortunately, I know a specialist.”
“Well… good,” Forsyth said.
“In fact, so do you.”
They looked at each other for a few moments, until it dawned on Forsyth who Leon was talking about. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he said.
4.
FORSYTH HAD MET Leon’s friend Chudy a couple of times before, and had dismissed him as just another computer-mad kid who wanted to break into the movies. He kept coming round to the workshop with weird structures he’d programmed himself, bizarre confections constructed from bits and pieces of half a dozen different actors and actresses, up to and including an outrageous thing – Forsyth couldn’t think of any other way to describe it – with Tom Selleck’s head, Chesty Morgan’s breasts, the body of the Mighty Joe Young, the penis of John Holmes and the legs of Betty Grable. That this mess of bits and pieces worked at all spoke of some degree of skill on Chudy’s part, but Forsyth still thought the kid needed psychiatric help.
“You never used that structure I brought you last month,” Chudy said, gently rocking himself from side to side on his swivel chair.
“I keep telling you,” Leon said equably, “I’m looking for the right property to put it into.”
“You never use any of my structures.”
Leon gave a great graphic shrug meant to illustrate how hard it was to find high-quality properties these days. He smiled.
Chudy pouted. ‘Chudy’ was Polish for ‘thin,’ or ‘skinny’; Forsyth assumed the nickname was meant to be ironic, because Chudy was almost spherical, a short, fat, petulant teenager with greasy hair and spots. It was unusual to find this kind of kid in Poland these days, in spite of all the fried food. Poles, Forsyth thought, just had too much nervous energy to be fat.
“So,” Chudy said, casting a sly eye around his bedroom, “you need my help, do you?”
Forsyth got up off the bed. “I’ve had enough of this.”
Leon took hold of his arm and pulled him back. “Sit down. Chudy and I are just negotiating. Isn’t that right, Chudy? Just like film men all over the world.”
This was a compliment which clearly struck home with Chudy. He ran his fingers through his hair and grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Negotiating.”
“Good God,” Forsyth muttered.
Chudy lived with his parents in a flat in Wola, a district of monolithic high-rise blocks, poor sandy soil and scrubby pollution-stricken trees out on the northwestern edge of the city. The door of his bedroom was plastered with adolescent notices of the ‘Keep Out, Genius At Work’ variety, and it was clear to Forsyth that his parents heeded them because the room was a disaster area. The walls and ceiling were entirely covered with posters, in places stuck haphazardly one on top of the other two or three deep, a mural of rock groups and centrefolds and fast cars and aircraft, occasionally all on the same poster. The floor was a sort of archaeological treasure-trove of discarded clothing, training shoes, magazine printouts, pens, sheets of paper, little plastic boxes, wrapping materials, ancient paperback software manuals, food-encrusted plates, items of cutlery, mugs, glasses, antique audio and computer CDs and DVDs and their boxes, suspiciously stiff twists of Kleenex, stuffed toys with the stuffin
g bulging in a sinister fashion out of missing arms and legs. Forsyth had found himself having to walk on tiptoe to reach the bed and sit down, although sitting down on the bed involved sweeping more bits of detritus onto the floor and rearranging the smelly duvet that had been stuffed down between the bed and the wall.
“So how about it?” Leon asked.
“How about what?” Chudy said with the sly look he clearly now associated with negotiation.
Leon shrugged. “You help me out, I help you out. That’s how these things work, isn’t it?”
Chudy affected to look more sly. Forsyth thought it made him look simple-minded, but he didn’t say anything.
The bits of Chudy’s room that weren’t given over to apocalyptic mess and piles of pornographic magazines comprised the reason for Forsyth and Leon’s presence here: a row of four impressive-looking computer systems along one wall, sitting on little folding wooden picnic tables, each with its own printer and three or four different drive formats. Chudy had card drives, old read/write optical disc drives, three sizes of antique floppy drives, external hard drives stacked one on top of the other. One of the monitors was running a scene from Debbie Does Dallas, except it appeared to involve Louise Brooks, Brad Pitt and the golden robot from Star Wars whose name Forsyth could never remember. He was finding it distracting, so he got up and tiptoed across to the window while Leon buffed up Chudy’s vanity.
Chudy’s parents’ flat was up on the eleventh floor of one of Wola’s blocks. His bedroom window looked out on a misty distance of factories and scrubby waste ground and the faraway skyline of central Warsaw. Forsyth could remember much the same view from Agatka’s flat, the girl he had very nearly married and whose father had wanted him to work at the Ursus tractor factory. She had lived somewhere around here. He wondered if she was somewhere close by, in one of the other huge blocks. He wondered if his life would have been any different if he had married her and not Magda. Right on the horizon, between two buildings, he thought he could detect a speck of hot pink, like a street sign pointing at just how different his life would have been. All of a sudden, he found himself wanting to scream.
“Okay,” he heard Chudy say, “let’s see.”
Forsyth turned from the window and saw Leon hand over the hard drive, and it struck him how cosmologically stupid he was. He should never have gone to Leon. He should have got out of town, out of the country, and off of Continental Europe, as quickly as he could manage. He said, “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”
Leon and Chudy both looked at him as if surprised to find another person in the room with them. “Don’t you want to know what’s on this?” Leon asked.
Forsyth thought about it. “No,” he said after a moment or so. “I just want to be out of here.”
“So go.”
“Oh no, Leon. Not without that thing.” He nodded at the drive lying on Chudy’s plump palm. “You’re crazy if you think I’m leaving that with you.”
“Knowledge is power,” Chudy said, holding up the drive, and Forsyth instantly wanted to punch him. “This is just hardware; it’s what’s on it that’s important.” Leon was nodding agreement, and Forsyth wanted to punch him as well. Chudy said, “You can erase a drive like this, but if you know what’s on it you can’t erase it from your brain.”
Forsyth and Leon had both agreed not to mention Crispin or the Georgians or Babykiller, or even the possibly-mythical cammo dudes, but he still felt tempted to tell the kid that you could erase a person’s brain perfectly well with a hollow-point bullet. He leaned back against the windowsill and looked at the two Poles. A friend of mine was probably murdered last night, he told them silently, and all you two can do is behave like you’ve dropped into some bad cyberpunk miniseries. Well fuck you.
He said, “All right. Let’s see what all this is about.”
Chudy grinned triumphantly and slid the drive into a slot in the computer. He typed a few commands and a monitor filled with the Metro diagram. Forsyth went over, feeling untold years of unwashed underwear under his feet, and looked at the screen.
“Well, there’s obviously something embedded in the picture,” Chudy said, seeing the look on his face.
“Oh,” Forsyth said, looking down at the kid. “Obviously.”
Chudy typed some more commands. Nothing happened. He said, “Hm, okay…” and typed some more. The diagram stayed on the screen. Chudy pulled down some menus, loaded some programs, did some more typing. More menus appeared, full of lines of code. Chudy squinted at them, began to hum tunelessly. Forsyth looked over at Leon, who shrugged.
Chudy worked on the file for two hours. Forsyth had no idea what he was doing, but the kid became gradually more and more frustrated, typing like a maniac, checking every few moments to see if the diagram had magically unfolded to reveal a secret message. The only thing that happened was that it changed colour at one point.
Finally he sat back in his chair and said, “There’s nothing there.”
“You’re sure?” asked Leon.
“It’s a vanilla image,” said Chudy. He looked exhausted. “There’s nothing else on the drive. There’s never been anything else on the drive. I tried everything.”
“Something new,” Leon suggested. “I heard the NSA have been –”
“I tried everything,” Chudy insisted. Forsyth thought the boy was close to tears.
“Okay,” Leon said calmly, going over and taking the drive from its slot. The monitor filled with warnings about not closing the media down properly, but Leon and Chudy ignored them. Leon popped the drive into a pocket of his combat jacket and said, “Well.”
“What about my stuff?” Chudy demanded, half-rising from his typing chair. “You promised.”
Leon was already halfway to the door, and Forsyth had only just started to follow. “You’ll get your chance, Chudy,” Leon said. “Bring your three favourite structures over to the workshop on Tuesday and you can watch me programming them in.”
“Hey.” The look of delight on Chudy’s face had clearly erased the puzzling hard drive from his mind. “That’s great. I’ll see you on Tuesday then.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” Leon said, but by then he and Forsyth were out of the bedroom and nodding goodbye to Chudy’s perfectly ordinary but slightly harassed-looking parents.
FORSYTH DIDN’T SAY anything for quite a while after they got back to the van and Leon began to drive, uncharacteristically carefully, back towards the centre of town.
Finally, he said, “Well?”
“It’s a puzzle,” Leon admitted.
Forsyth waited, but apparently no more information was forthcoming, so he said, “Leon, you may have overlooked this, but this whole thing is rather more than an academic exercise to me.”
“Oh, I know,” Leon said. “I know.”
“So what are we going to do?”
Leon looked out through the windscreen. “Let’s go home,” he said.
Home. Forsyth sagged back in his seat. “All right,” he said. “Why not?”
5.
PRAGA, ACROSS THE Vistula from the Old Town, had gone through something of a hipster revival in the early years of the century, but the hipsters had moved on to pastures new and it had returned to its former scruffy self, a run-down district of garages and battered housing blocks and little factories. It was grey and dirty and rubbish blew down the streets on the gritty breeze. It had also been, for many years now, the heartland of Warsaw’s mafia gangs, all of whom would be affiliated in some way to Babykiller and his organisation. Who knew, Babykiller himself might live there.
So it was, Forsyth supposed, a stroke of genius of a particularly warped and illogical kind to hide him here, right in the middle of what he presumed was Babykiller’s home territory.
Not that that made him feel at all secure. The thing that had happened to the Georgians had made sure of that.
The evening that he and Leon had visited Chudy, four bodies had been dragged from the river down near Wilanów. When they
got back to the flat the news was full of it. The police had confirmed that the bodies were of Georgian citizens, and implied that they were presumed to have been in the city on some kind of criminal business. There was, of course, no way of knowing for sure whether they were the same Georgians who had been doing business with Crispin – Georgians being universally presumed to be both omnipresent and criminal to a man – but to Forsyth the connection seemed obvious.
Leon watched the news item and seemed to go into a trance for a while. Forsyth, student of drugs as he was, watched with a certain academic alarm as his one ally in the whole country appeared to lose his mind for a few moments. Then Leon snapped out of it and started to make phone calls, one of which resulted in Forsyth being deposited, about twenty hours after escaping from the Metro, in this smelly, greasy flat.
The flat belonged to an immensely fat Ukrainian who introduced himself as ‘Fox.’ Fox smoked all the time, lighting one cigarette from the stub of the last, and sat in front of his malfunctioning entertainment set wearing jeans and a filthy singlet and guzzling bottle after bottle of Okocim beer.
“It’ll be okay,” Leon assured Forsyth. “Trust me.”
“This is madness, Leon,” Forsyth said, looking around the flat. “I can’t stay here.”
“It’ll be all right until I can find out what the fuck’s going on,” his flatmate said. “I promise.”
“I’ve got to get out of the city, Leon. I’ve got to get out of the country.”
Leon nodded and patted Forsyth on the shoulder. “I’ll try to get something organised. Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch.”
And that had been three days ago.
FOX HAD A running conversation with the media which appeared to have been going on for some considerable time. He sat in his worn-out armchair, chugging Okocim and belching and talking back to the newsreaders and the adverts and characters in films. He passed coarse-sounding comments on news reports about the activities of politicians, shouted warnings to the heroes of action movies, made rude noises when someone in a series had a love scene.
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