Katja from the Punk Band

by Simon Logan

  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?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “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.

  CHAPTER NINE

  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.

  PART THREE

  THE MAN WHO KIDNAPPED HER

  CHAPTER TEN

  “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 o
ut. 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.

  She smiles invitingly, rolls her eyes as she is entered from behind by the other woman, wearing some sort of device strapped around her waist.

  “Excuse me,” Anatoli says, and leaves the room.

  It is considerably cooler in the corridor. He wipes his brow with his sleeve and turns, notices a teenager with tattoos all down one side of his face at the same time that the teenager notices Anatoli, and the boy panics, drops the burger he is holding.

  “Shit!”

  And Anatoli tries to grab him, misses. “Wait!”

  But some basic survival instinct has been triggered and the boy is gone, vanishing into the darkness farther down the hall, scurrying off into the innards of the building like a rat.

  Anatoli walks to the third door on his left, leans into it.

  Someone else is coming along the corridor now and their footsteps are slow, cautious. They too must sense his officialdom and that same survival instinct kicks in. Anatoli holds up a hand to stop them from running, let them know that whatever it is they’ve done, that’s not why he’s here.

  He then enters the room and closes the door behind him.

  “Katja?”

  There is a bed, her guitars, an amp, some books. Little else.

  She’s not there.

  It’s possible she is in one of the other squatters’ rooms but for people who spend their lives on hijacked property, Anatoli has found they are inordinately protective of their own little hiding holes. So she’s not there and he doesn’t really care that much.

  It just doesn’t seem that important.

  But he’ll give her ten minutes.

  He crouches next to a stack amp, the mesh of which has been ripped along one seam and is splattered with spray paint, feels the rumble of loud music filtering through the walls from one of the upper floors, and he’s almost started drifting off to sleep when he hears movement nearby.

  It’s the rattle of the metal sheet he has placed up against Katja’s entrance and there she is, her leg coming through now. He steps back into the deep frame of the room’s doorway and it’s enough to douse him in shadows and let him watch her for a few moments.

  When she picks up her guitar he steps forward.

  “Katja.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She doesn’t say a word when he piles her into the back of his car, just sits there as he drives. He’s prepared for the fact that she might be lulling him into a false sense of security, ready to break free when he relaxes his guard, but just to be sure he tells her he just wants to talk to her.

  She knows the drill though, knows that it’s going to mean a night of detention if nothing else.

  He drives through the rainstorm, and she knows the way to the station as if it is tattooed onto her soul, so when he pulls the car over to the side of a street several blocks away, she is instantly put on edge. Aleksakhina turns side-on so he can see her through the metal grate separating them.

  Katja is itchy, nervous. She keeps looking around as if she expects something to happen, like a convict on death row awaiting the last-minute phone call that will call off the execution.

  He can tell she wants to ask what’s going on but she refuses to show any weakness or fear by asking and so decides to put her out of her misery.

  “I could take you to the station right now, book you in. You’d most likely spend at least the night there but probably more.”

  Katja fingers the cuffs, squinting at the silhouette of the man, dissected by the metal between them. She finds other things to look at instead, thinking of how the upholstery is the same pale grey of a smoker’s lung. He offers her a cigarette but she refuses.

  “I could do that. But I want to give you a chance first.”

  “Let’s just get this over with,” she sighs.

  “I thought we were finally getting somewhere, Katja,” he says to her, flicking his lighter to spark his cigarette.

  Her head is slumped to one side, her focus on a dark stain on the headrest.

  Deliberately and obviously uninterested in anything he has to say.

  “I don’t want you to be here any more than you do. You think I’ve not got better things to be doing with my time?”

  “Hey, don’t let me hold you back,” she says, still not looking at him. “If you’ve got a hot date or . . .”

  “Listen to me. I’m trying to help you here. How about you help yourself for a change?” She says nothing.

  “You want to tell me what you were really doing tonight?”

  Still she ignores him. Tongues her lip piercing. “How are things with Januscz?”

  And now she’s looking at him. Now she’s looking at him. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  Raw nerve.

  “It’s not supposed to mean anything.”

  “It’s none of your fucking business. You’re my parole officer not my fucking therapist.”

  “Yes, I’m your parole officer. Which means that it’s my responsibility to make sure you stick to the conditions of your parole, which in turn means I need to know that you are getting some stability in your life, not less.”

  He doesn’t tell her that he’s already checked up on Januscz, that he knows about the man’s involvement in some of the island’s chemical gangs, though admittedly as nothing more than one of their runt-runners.

  “We’re fine,” she says, noncommittally.

  Aleksakhina reaches into his pocket, holds up the vial and watches her demeanour change instantly. For a moment he thinks she is about to try to snatch the thing.

  “What were you doing with this?” he asks her.

  Katja, her face is firm, stoic. He can tell she is trying hard to not give anything away.

  “Where did you get it?” The liquid inside the vial is an almost golden colour under the starkness of the streetlight overhead.

  “Did Januscz give this to you?”

  “I don’t have to answer these questions.”

  “I’m giving you a chance here, Katja. It doesn’t have to be me asking these questions. But I don’t want to have to ta
ke you in.”

  “Don’t act like you’re doing me a favour. You just don’t want to deal with the paperwork. Come on, man! I haven’t done anything. I just forgot to check in, that’s all. Give me a fucking break here. I need to get out for my shift. I need that job! You’re the one that’s saying you want to see me get more stability in my life — how the fuck am I meant to do that if I lose my job?”

  “I told you already, I’ll talk with your boss.”

  “He won’t give a shit. You think he’ll even think twice about firing someone like me?”

  “He will if I ask him not to. Now, I ask again — what is this and where did you get it?”

  She crosses her arms, switches off. That’s as much as he’s going to get from her.

  “Okay have it your way, Katja. You want to spend a night inside, be my guest. We’ll talk again in the morning.”

  She kicks out at the back of the driver’s seat in frustration as he turns away again.

  “I found it, okay?! Jesus. I don’t know where it came from. One of the customers at the diner left it behind.”

  “I thought you hadn’t started your shift yet?”

  “Yesterday,” she says quickly. “I found it yesterday. They didn’t leave a tip so I figured it would even us out. I don’t know what the hell is even in there. I was going to see if Januscz knew someone who would. Maybe see if it was worth something.”

  And she almost convinces him with the story. Almost.

  “Do you know what this means?” he asks her, tilting the vial toward her so the watermark on the glass shows up. She shrugs and perhaps she really doesn’t know or maybe she’s just not saying.

  Aleksakhina knows what it means, however.

  End of conversation.

  “Fine. We’ll go to the station and I’ll be back in the morning. Maybe you’ll be more talkative then?”

  She looks less controlled now, her desperation leaking through, and he lets the sentiment linger to give her one final chance to talk, but she doesn’t. He finds himself grateful for her silence because he has no intention of sitting in the quickly cooling car for much longer, while trying to wring information out of her that might be a dead end anyway.