by Simon Logan
“Sit up,” she tells him and he does so, with her help.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“How many whuh?” he asks.
“Fingers. Look at me. How many fingers? Can you see?”
“Three,” he says without focusing properly.
“Look at them first.”
“I am.”
“Nikolai, I’m over here.”
“Whuh? Oh.”
“Shit.”
She decides they’ll need to stay for a short while at least; there is no way he’ll properly keep up with her if they have to split now.
She looks around for the first time, and it’s like some sort of workshop, but one that’s not been used for some time. Metal shelving is pinned to most of the walls and the only window has been blacked out either deliberately or with the natural build-up of grease and dirt. Old machinery is mounted on racks, blades blunted and chains rusted.
There’s a sink in one corner and she tries the taps but isn’t surprised when nothing comes out. Finds a pile of old rags on a worktop and takes one, uses it to dab away some of the blood from Nikolai’s face.
He watches her while she does it and his pupils seem more direct, more alive now.
“Feeling any better?”
“A little. At least there’s only one of you now.”
“Yeah, that’s always a bonus.” She dabs more blood away. “Look, I’m sorry for hitting you but you fucking shot at me, you know? What the fuck were you doing?”
“I thought they would be waiting for me. Using you to lure me out.”
“They?”
“The chemical gang, the people that kidnapped you.”
A faint, brief smile emerges on her face and he likes how it changes her into something softer.
“Chemical gang? Shit, no. That was no chemical gang.”
“Oh.” And he catches himself, as if something has become clear to him all of a sudden. “Uhhh . . . another boyfriend?”
“Jesus, no. My parole officer. Aleksakhina.” And she can’t help but notice relief on his face.
“Oh. I . . . So what’s he doing going into one of Szerynski’s arcades at this time of night?”
“Who the fuck knows . . . wait . . . how do you know the place is Szerynski’s?”
She’s staring right at him, the trach tube wavering slightly, distractingly.
“I . . .”
A beat.
“I play. A little. Used to compete.”
“You know the man?”
“Only by reputation. I mean, I’ve heard his name mentioned.”
She takes these answers, considers them, stores them for later use.
“Whatever. He might be involved in this, then.”
“Does it matter? We should just go, get out of here.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Aleksakhina. He took the vial.”
A weight drops in Nikolai’s chest. “You don’t have it?”
She shakes her head.
“What did he take it for?”
“He’s up to something. His type always are.”
“So . . . what now?”
And he’s intimately aware of how it’s just the two of them, huddled in the middle of the old workshop. The sound of the rain is like a distant war that doesn’t matter.
Katja drops the blood-stained cloth and gets up. Brushes aside some of the dirt from the window but it’s still impossible to make anything out.
“Wait there.”
And she opens the door slowly, carefully, leans her head out and steps through.
Checks the alley in both directions and goes back inside.
“Can you walk?” she asks Nikolai.
She reaches out, helps him to his feet and he staggers somewhat, steadies himself.
“I’m okay.”
“Do you still have that gun?”
He has to think about it, then realizes he doesn’t.
“I must have dunked it . . . dropped it . . . back at the cash. The car. I mean the car.”
She gives him a pained look. “You sure you’re okay?”
He nods, and instantly grimaces as pain shoots across his temples.
“I don’t see anyone,” Katja says, slinging her guitar across her back and around so that she wields the neck like a crowbar. “But be careful, okay?”
He nods and winces again.
Together they edge out into the alley, squinting through a light drizzle and the blurred streetlights. Nikolai has to use the sides of the buildings as support but manages to keep up with her. The pain is subsiding now.
Or maybe he’s losing consciousness.
Katja holds him back as they reach the opening that leads back out toward the arcade.
“Shit.”
“What is it?”
“The car’s gone. Aleksakhina’s gone.”
“My car?”
“You came in your car? Where?”
“I left it farther up the street there, next to a dumpster.”
“I can’t see from here.”
“But Aleksakhina’s car is gone? He’s gone?”
“Looks like it.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
She turns, fixes him with a look that is one step away from a dirty uppercut.
“That means the vial is gone.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.”
And she says, “Shouldn’t have run. Goddamn. Should have just stood our ground, we could have had him. We had the gun.”
The gun.
And she’s running out toward the arcade now. Nikolai takes a few moments to comprehend this, then follows her. She’s scanning the ground for the gun, pushing aside torn newspapers and pieces of trash, can’t find it. Aleksakhina must have found it.
She looks around the neighbourhood as if for inspiration but none comes.
“What do we do now?” Nikolai asks. “Try and find him?”
“I guess,” she answers, unconvincingly.
Without the gun, she thinks. Tightens her grip on the guitar for reassurance. Turns and takes another few paces toward the dead arcade. There is a concrete area out front, pieces of broken glass from vodka bottles, and lots of little shot glasses like the cogs of some translucent machine scattered around.
“Where are you going?”
But she doesn’t listen to him, striding carefully between the debris so as to not make any noise, watching for signs of movement coming from within the darkness of the building. It seems somehow wrong, perverted, for a place of such energy and brightness to be so still.
Unnatural.
Her fingers absently squeeze the cold bulk of the guitar.
Nikolai is lurking somewhere behind her, half crouching as if trying to hide amidst nothing more than the acid atmosphere.
“We have to go inside,” she tells him. “He was up to something in there. I want to know what.”
The shutters are down across the entrance and there are no visible windows. She creeps around the side of the building, stops, motions at Nikolai.
“Are you coming or what?”
And he’s about to answer when they both freeze — voices coming from inside.
Nikolai is still standing before the entrance when a gunshot rings out from inside. Katja ducks around the corner instinctively, drops to her knees. Another shot. Another.
There’s a commotion, then a metallic tremble. The shutters are being opened.
Katja calls to him but Nikolai, he seems stuck there. It’s a fifty yard sprint to get back to the safety of the alleys they just came out of, more than that in any other direction.
“Get over here!” she shout-whispers.
There’s a hand at the bottom of the shutters lifting them up and it sounds as if the pneumatics that operate the door aren’t being used. The door is being forced open.
“Nikolai!”
He thinks of his machines back in the apartment, the electronic solace
they offer, the pixel-heavy haven that’s rescued him so many times. He thinks of pills and powders, spoons and straws.
“Nikolai!”
The shutters are open to knee-height now and the person opening them, they’re scooting down to slide under.
And then something snaps inside Nikolai and he’s moving, sprinting toward the side of the building where Katja waits in the shadows for him, an ice-white arm reaching out.
As he pushes himself in beside her, they hear footsteps crunching on broken glass, heavy breathing.
“Is that Szerynski?” she asks.
Nikolai peers around her cautiously.
The figure stumbles across the kerbing outside the arcade. Stops. Turns, perhaps to see if anyone is following, perhaps because he heard them in the alley.
Moonlight swirls around the fly-like glasses he wears.
The pair duck back into the shadows and Nikolai pins Katja to the wall.
“Well?” she asks.
“It’s not Szerynski,” he tells her.
“So who the fuck is it?”
Swallows. “His name is Kohl. Vladimir Kohl.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Who the hell is Vladimir Kohl?”
Snap-whispered as the man moves farther away, toward the glittering streetlights across the junction.
“He works for Szerynski,” Nikolai says.
And he tenses, staring straight ahead, deliberately not meeting her eyes just in case she sees something there he’s not ready for her to see.
How do you know him? Did he send you? You’re after the vial, aren’t you?
Swallows.
But she doesn’t ask those questions — instead, another:
“What is he doing?”
They both watch as Kohl stops dead. Backtracks several paces, hesitates, then begins forward again. Looks down at his feet, stops. Waits for several moments then restarts his journey, this time without pause, all the way across the empty junction.
“We have to go after him,” Katja says, and Nikolai has to grab her, pull her back toward him.
“No!”
“What do you mean, no? He could have the vial. What if some sort of deal has just gone down? He might have it.”
“But . . .” And he can’t think of a reason not to go after the man, at least not one that he can use. “But he might not.”
“Well there’s only one way to find out.”
And she’s getting up again, twisting in advance this time so that when Nikolai reaches for her he can’t get a decent grip and she slips away from him, and he almost shouts to her with Kohl still in earshot, grabs the neck of her guitar and holds on.
Whisper-shouts, “Wait!”
“What is your fucking problem?!” And she really does shout and they both turn, look, expecting to see Kohl, looking back into the alley, gun in hand.
The gun. If they still had it, they could just fucking shoot him.
Just fucking shoot him and . . .
“He’s gone,” Katja says, straightens up. “For fuck’s sake he’s fucking gone, you moron.”
She paces out to the very lip of the alley, but there’re three ways the man could have gone and no way to know which he chose, or what might lie awaiting them in the darkness.
“I’m sorry, I just . . .”
Katja kicks out at the building’s wall with a heavily booted foot, takes a chunk of brick out the size of her fist. Brings the guitar’s heavy body around for another frustrated swipe but stops in mid-arc.
“There’s still time, maybe we could . . .”
“He’s gone,” she says flatly.
Nikolai lingers, unsure of what to do or say next. He’s still waiting for Kohl to step out of a shadow somewhere, weapon pointed at them and harbouring a serious desire to make Nikolai suffer for a very long time.
If he knew. If he’d already found out the vial was full of nothing but a few dozen millilitres of Nikolai’s piss.
If.
“What are you doing?”
Katja, she’s crouched by the arcade’s shutter-door, examining the locking mechanism.
“This isn’t locked. He didn’t shut it properly.”
She reaches under the metal frame and lifts it slowly, gently, and it moves with a great metal creak.
She winces at the volume of the sound, hesitates.
“We’re going inside?” Nikolai whispers to her, crouching down.
“Of course we’re going inside. I want to know what’s going on with my fucking vial.”
And again there’s that sensation of wanting to run, to just get out of the whole situation and take his chances with whatever Kohl might have planned for him, but then there’s Katja and she’s like a strong current that doesn’t realize or care that she’s dragging him along with her.
She’s already opened the door enough to slide underneath, first checking inside to make sure it’s safe. Nikolai feels an urge to insist he goes first, but he doesn’t know where it comes from and anyway she’s already in, pulling the guitar in after her.
She doesn’t wait for him to follow, doesn’t ask him, she just goes and he is drawn in after her.
They both remain crouched on the other side of the doorway, and a short corridor stretches out before them. Nikolai remembers it vaguely from the few times he’s been and knows there’s an entrance farther up on the right that leads into the main games hall. It’s from this doorway that the place’s only light source emanates a gritty, dirty glow.
They listen; silence.
Katja stands, walks toward the light source, her hands on the body of the guitar as if it is a pistol in a holster. Peeks her head around the corner.
Nikolai only realizes he’s been holding his breath when he feels his chest tighten and the sudden need to exhale overcomes him. He breathes out hard but slowly just as Katja steps inside the games hall, and he’s ready for the gunshot or the shout or something, something to bring this all crashing down around them.
There is an electronic click and beep from one of the machines.
Nikolai steps inside a few paces behind her and there’s the smell of hot circuit boards, the dull glitter of a few machines still running, their reflections scattered across the ceiling.
The cabinets are great dark bulks, blocky shadows like skyscrapers during a blackout, like sentries on duty.
As he watches Katja walk amongst them, he feels certain one will pounce on her, push her to the ground and crush her.
He wants her to slow down, slow down, but she won’t, ducks around the final machine in the row and stops.
“Uh oh.”
Nikolai swallows.
Uh oh? What uh oh?
The initial discomfort he felt at carrying a gun is now gone and he finds himself wishing for it back. Somewhere a timer clicks, clicks, clicks and it’s counting down, counting down to when they are . . .
“Have a look,” she says.
And it’s around the corner, behind a large cabinet with a fake rifle resting on a pair of pegs.
A pair of pegs, then a pair of legs, sprawled out on the floor beneath them and from the legs a torso and from the torso a pool of blood.
Blood.
Blood.
Katja reaches out with the head of the guitar, thinks better of it, pokes the body with the toe of her boot instead.
Nothing.
There’s something akin to an asteroid impact in the body’s chest, a black, charred hole that exposes little pieces of his insides. They can see the pattern of the carpet he lies on through the hole.
“I think he’s pissed himself,” she announces as she carefully crouches beside the corpse. “Can you smell that?”
The eyes are cold and dead and they are Szerynski’s eyes in Szerynski’s body. Szerynski’s corpse.
“This is Szerynski?”
And Nikolai realizes that he has been talking out loud.
Nods.
“Was Szerynski,” Katja corrects herself.
She looks for a moment a
s if she is going to touch the wound but thinks better of it, and Nikolai finds himself going from that gaping hole to the hole in her neck.
“Oh no. No no no no no!” Katja says.
“What’s — ?”
“No!”
And she drops to her knees and leans down toward the shadow of blood that seeps toward her, and there is something glittering there. She grabs something and holds it up.
“No!”
A piece of glass. Thin. Rounded.
And Nikolai sees, as she turns it slightly toward the glow of one of the cabinets, a fragment of watermark.
“NO!” And she throws the piece across the room, a shooting star of light that vanishes into the darkness at the rear, shatters into something out of sight.
“Fucking hell!”
She jumps to her feet, swings the guitar around and smashes it into one of the cabinets’ screen again and again, frantically, desperately, and she doesn’t hear Nikolai tell her, “Wait” until he touches her on the hip and she swings for him instinctively and the instrument whistles past his forehead.
“Stop!”
In his hand, another piece of the shattered vial, this the curved bottom of the piece with a splinter of glass like a half-inch blade up one side. There’s a tiny amount of liquid left in the bottom. He offers it to her and she sniffs.
“Smells like piss,” she says. Her trach tube quivers in her throat at the exertion of smashing up the cabinet.
“I think it is piss.”
“I don’t . . .”
“A fake,” he says.
Katja stares at the pieces, sniffs again. “Just because it smells like piss, doesn’t mean it’s a fake.”
“I’ve heard that’s what they do,” Nikolai lies to her. “As a safeguard to people trying to steal chemicals. Use fakes filled with urine.”
For a moment he isn’t sure if she’s buying it or not, if she’s trying to figure out why he’s so certain it’s a fake — what else he might know. Then Nikolai says:
“Maybe that’s why he was shot.”
“He was trying to screw Kohl over?”
Nikolai shrugs. “Something like that.”
“But I saw Aleksakhina bring the vial in here.”
“So maybe Szerynski did have the real vial.”