When the Sparrow Falls

by Neil Sharpson

  I decided to switch tack. Grier owed me a debt now, and he was not close to being paid off.

  “How’s our case going?”

  “Ours? We have a case, do we?”

  “Have you made progress on the Parias?”

  “Oh yes,” said Grier sarcastically. “I solved the bloody thing, didn’t you hear? I’m the hero of the hour. They threw me a parade down Koslova Square and a marching band played ‘Man Stands Tall on Caspian’s Shore.’”

  Suddenly, he seemed to deflate and rubbed his eyes tiredly.

  “Sorry,” he said at last. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. I do appreciate”—he gestured to the now empty plates—“this. I do, truly.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you found anything at all?” I asked quietly.

  Grier shrugged. “It was definitely Yozhik,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” I asked, not particularly surprised.

  “As sure as any of them,” said Grier.

  “Yozhik” (the Russian for “hedgehog”) was the code name for the Needle Man (or, more likely, Men) behind the most recent spate of contran in Ellulgrad. Contran was a service sought by the rich and poor alike, and there were Needle Men for all classes. At the very bottom of the ladder were the Rusty Nails, not even true Needle Men but opportunistic criminals who would pose as Needle Men to swindle desperate people out of their money and then stab them through the head with a metal spike, transporting them not to the Machine world but a hereafter even more mysterious and unknowable. Above them were true Needle Men who used obsolete and faulty equipment. They might get you to the Machine world, but in such a shredded state that you’d most likely be deleted as a mercy. Then there were the Do Gooders, idealistic young men and women from America or Europe who would provide a safe and reliable contran service. They were always coming to Caspian and offering their skills as a matter of almost religious duty. However, when it came to the business of living undetected in Caspian they were laughably incompetent, and StaSec and ParSec had a friendly ongoing competition to see who could catch, imprison and shoot the most in any given month.

  Lastly, there were a few well-organized criminal gangs who would provide a reasonably reliable and safe contran service, but only if one was willing to pay an exorbitant fee.

  Yozhik did not fit comfortably into any of these categories. He was obviously using up-to-date equipment and provided his services to rich and poor alike, which suggested a Do Gooder. But he was exceptionally skilled at avoiding detection and amazingly prolific. If StaSec had four hundred contran cases on its books, and ParSec another two hundred, fully three-fifths were estimated to be the work of Yozhik. It was a lot of needles. Hence the name.

  Grier suddenly stopped speaking and I watched his eyes trace a line over my shoulder. The waiter was coming toward us. For a moment I feared the worst but he simply leaned in and whispered to me that, compliments of the house, a glass of brandy was included as part of the meal and, if we preferred, we could have it in the hotel living room where the fire had just been lit.

  Grier and I sat in front of the roaring fire and drank our brandy and felt like kings.

  “South,” said Grier drowsily, “do you know I’m starting to come around to you?”

  “To Lily,” I said, raising my glass.

  “God bless her ones and zeroes,” he responded amiably, clinking my glass with his. “Her,” not “its.” He was mellowed indeed.

  Grier would likely never be in this good a mood again, so I pressed him on the case.

  “Good God, South,” Grier muttered. “I have to keep my boot permanently lodged up your arse to get you to do any work, and the second you’re taken off the case you can’t let it go. You’ve been given a holiday, man. Enjoy it, can’t you?”

  I couldn’t, and I told him so. The dark mechanism was still whirring overhead, and seemed to be getting closer. Xirau, the Parias, Niemann, Lily … too many coincidences.

  Grier nodded in agreement. He took my point.

  “Right, well. Where do you want me to start?” he said.

  “Let’s start with Sheena and Paulo,” I suggested. “They’re the link between our two cases.”

  “You don’t have a case,” Grier said. “You have a babysitting job.”

  Brandy and the fire had gifted me with the patience and beneficence of a Buddha, and I let it pass.

  “How did you find out that they were involved?” I asked.

  “Sheena Paria worked in Spatsky’s, the local grocers. Another girl worked there with her, Nadia Evershan. Twenty-two. Zoloto.”

  The Russian word for “gold,” which in StaSec slang meant a witness with a good memory, a willingness to talk and with something useful to say. It was a word I’d heard many old StaSec hounds use over the years, but never Grier. But he spoke it now with an almost paternal warmth and gave the distinct impression that, if there were more Nadia Evershans in the world, in Grier’s opinion we would be so much the richer for it.

  “She practically drew me a diagram of their social circle,” Grier said. “Wonderful girl. I have half a mind to drop down there again and give her a recruitment brochure. God knows, we could use some young things like her on the floor.”

  Perhaps “paternal” was not the word. I was starting to see that Grier would indeed have liked to have Nadia Evershan on the floor.

  “The Parias,” I persisted.

  “Arrived in Ellulgrad four years ago from Nakchivan. Outskirts of Babek. Came here looking for a better life.”

  I nodded. One might wonder why anyone would come to Ellulgrad for a better life, but only if one had not visited Nakchivan. I had, and found no mystery in the Parias’ decision to leave.

  “They were living with an aunt or distant cousin or something for the first year and a half,” Grier continued. “South side of the city, haven’t been able to track her down yet. And then in March of ’08 they take Smolna’s room in Old Baku. Sheena takes the job in the grocers where she meets Nadia. Nadia becomes fast friends with Sheena, and through her, Yasmin.”

  Grier, despite his earlier reluctance to talk shop, was getting into the flow of things. That was the thing about Grier, for all his terseness and irritability, once his inner raconteur got into the saddle there was no stopping him.

  “Sheena was a sweetheart,” says Grier. “Generous, good-natured, give-you-the-bra-off-her-back kind of girl. Nadia adored her. Loved her like a sister. Absolutely gutted about what happened. I suspect, terribly hurt that Sheena didn’t invite her along (not that she’d admit it to me, of course). Smart girl.”

  “And Yasmin?” I asked

  “The evil twin,” said Grier melodramatically. “No, but certainly not as mellow. Quick-tempered. Sharp-tongued. Moody. Restive.”

  “Looking for a way out?” I asked.

  “That’s how I see it,” Grier agreed. “Nadia does, too. She thinks contran was definitely Yasmin’s idea, and Sheena was brought along for the ride. It was a joke among them; Sheena may have been a few minutes older, but Yasmin was most definitely the big sister.”

  “So if we’re to find the Needle Man,” I said, “Yasmin is where we start, not Sheena. Yasmin was involved with Mansani, who has unsavory connections like a dog has fleas and who might have been her link to Yozhik.”

  “I don’t know, South,” said Grier. “After all, it was Sheena who turned out to have been in bed with code.”

  Yes, the men, the men. Paulo and Oleg. A case could be made for either of them being the likely Needle Man except for the fact that both had rather rock-solid alibis: When the Paria sisters had been contranned, Paulo was dead and Oleg was in jail for killing him.

  It was the kind of jigsaw puzzle that made one want to reach for the scissors.

  Still, just because a bridge has been burned, does not mean that it was never crossed. Neither Oleg nor Paulo could have contranned the Parias, but that didn’t mean that either man couldn’t have played some part in putting the Parias in touch with their Needle Man.

&
nbsp; “What could Nadia tell you about Oleg and Paulo?” I asked.

  “Oleg was a cunt, all the way down,” said Grier. “Nadia saw plenty of him, whenever they went out drinking. Too much of him. Felt too much of him, too. If Yasmin was there, so was Oleg. Viciously jealous. They’d fight constantly. Sheena and Nadia had an ongoing war to try and get Yasmin to break up with him, but it never took.”

  “Did he beat her?”

  “I got the distinct impression, yes. Drank too much, slept around, insulted her openly, tried his luck with her friends and sister. Frankly, I’ve never been so happy to see someone five-twoed.”

  I sat up. This was news to me. Article 52 of the constitution empowered the government to hold anyone indefinitely without trial if they were deemed to be a threat to national security. No appeal possible. In all the instances it had been applied, it had never been repealed. It was a life sentence of the most permanent kind; that is, a death sentence with time as the instrument of execution.

  “Why is Oleg Mansani a threat to national security?” I asked. “He can’t know anything.”

  “He knows nothing but what nature put in his head,” Grier agreed. “But how do you try him? For what?”

  “For murder,” I said.

  “So we must say that Paulo Xirau was a human being? I mean, one can only murder a human being, correct?” Grier asked, like a college professor who has proven his point and is just waiting for the dullest student in the class to catch up with him. “Do we set that precedent?”

  “And he can’t be let go.” I nodded.

  “Exactly. If a man who murdered another in front of sixteen witnesses were suddenly to be back walking the streets … well, people do talk, don’t they? No. Much cleaner if everyone just agrees to forget about Mr. Mansani. Mr. Who? Exactly. Let him rot, I say.”

  And he finished off his brandy like a man who drank it in front of roaring fires in opulent rooms every day of his life. You might almost forget there was mashed potato stuffed in his pockets.

  15

  The years after the Second World War were the highwater mark of Liberal Democracy. The early 21st century saw the rise of Illiberal Democracy. Now with the rise of the Triumvirate and the practical inability of any legislature in the world to act meaningfully without the imprimatur of one of the three triunes, we have entered the final stage of the democratic era: Irrelevant Democracy.

  —Leon Mendelssohn, The Slave Enthroned: The Triumvirate and the Death of Democracy

  Oleg Mansani had been thrown into the black chasm of 52. He would spend the rest of his life in a cell and would never know why. I almost felt a flicker of pity but doused it instantly. Pity was like anything else during an embargo, you hoarded it closely, and gave it only to those who truly deserved it. I almost asked Grier if he’d managed to speak with Mansani but I already knew the answer. If he’d been five-twoed he was now in the custody of the army. He might as well be on the moon, for all the chance Grier would have of gaining access to him. Dead end, then.

  “What about Paulo? What did Nadia have to say about him?”

  “Not much, unfortunately.” Grier sighed. “Sheena and Mr. Xirau had only been going out for a few weeks. She didn’t even know his last name. He was just ‘Sheena’s boy, Paulo the Writer.’”

  “Did she know what he wrote?”

  “The younger generation don’t sit around reading The Caspian Truth, South. They have better things to be doing, namely each other.”

  “Very well, what did she think of Paulo the Writer?”

  “She liked him. She was worried at first, he was quite a bit older than Sheena. But he treated her well and that was enough for Nadia. She said he was quiet, but a decent sort.”

  I thought about Paulo Xirau spitting on the hanging corpse of Leon Mendelssohn. It didn’t quite jive with Nadia’s description of him. But then, love does bring out a different side in men. And machines, evidently.

  “She was happy for them,” Grier went on. “She was glad that Sheena had met a nice man with a good job who might get her out of Old Baku.”

  Money. Now, there was a thread to pull. How had Sheena and Yasmin paid the Needle Man? Yozhik was a professional, providing safe, discreet contran. Perhaps he wasn’t charging as much as the high-level gangs, but he couldn’t be cheap, either.

  “Sheena worked in the grocers,” I said. “What about Yasmin?”

  “I’m honestly not sure,” said Grier. “Nadia wasn’t, either. She seemed to do different things. Odds and ends. Mostly she lived off Oleg. Probably why she wasn’t willing to dump the bastard.”

  I had a sense that Grier wasn’t telling me everything.

  “And?” I prodded.

  “Well…,” said Grier, a little uncomfortably, “Nadia and Sheena suspected that Oleg might have been trying to persuade her to…”

  Grier was an odd one. When referring to women he could be leering and downright crude, but when confronted with something like rape or forced prostitution he became positively demure, leaving long silences to finish the sentences that he could not bring himself to close.

  “I see,” I said.

  “Yes. Nothing concrete, mind. Nadia was quite insistent on that. It was just something they feared might be happening. Yasmin never said anything. But … well, yes. They were worried that he might be.”

  It would hardly have been surprising. Oleg Mansani was a true Old Baku gulliver, a thug, a drunkard, a letch, an abuser. Would he scruple to add “pimp” to his résumé? I doubted it. I found myself thanking the framers who, in their wisdom, had decided the constitution should not stop at Article 51.

  “Anyway, if it was going on, Nadia put a stop to it. She was the one who called the EPs on Mansani.”

  The Ellulgrad Police, our brothers-in-arms who dealt with all the murders, thefts, rapes and drug trafficking that did not represent a threat to the nation and were therefore beneath StaSec’s notice.

  I sat up.

  “Do you mean to tell me she was there?” I asked. “When Xirau was killed?”

  Grier nodded “Yes. She was in the bar with the twins and Oleg. She saw the whole thing. Oleg punched Paulo; Paulo falls, cracks his head on a table on the way down. Some of the regulars restrained Oleg, and Nadia put in the call from the bar phone.”

  Zoloto, indeed. I was starting to warm to Nadia Evershan almost as much as Grier.

  However, it wasn’t enough.

  Paulo was dead, Oleg had been fifty-twoed, the twins had been contranned and I couldn’t leave the hotel to go chasing down anyone else who might have been in the bar that night. Any chance of uncovering any connection between Paulo, Lily and Yozhik had finally hit a dead end.

  I asked Grier a few more questions, but it was clear that I’d gotten everything of value.

  We sat in silence for a while until Grier, realizing that he was becoming too comfortable and might fall asleep any moment, made his excuses and rose to leave. I walked him to the entrance of the hotel. It had started snowing, and I waited as Grier ponderously buttoned up his coat and donned his hat and scarf against the cold.

  “Thank you, South,” he said, looking me straight in the eye, and to my shock actually took my hand in a firm handshake.

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  “Listen, um…,” he said awkwardly. “I must have you over for dinner sometime. Meet Marie and the boys.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  “Not right now, obviously,” he added. “But, you know, when the embargo’s over.”

  “Whenever that is,” I said.

  “Yes, well. That’s your job, isn’t it?” he said. “Make sure Mrs. Xirau gives us a glowing report. Do what you have to do, old man. I won’t judge you.”

  He gave me a conspiratorial wink and set off for home.

  He wasn’t a bad sort, Grier. Not really.

  I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had ever had a chance to have dinner in his house and meet his family. Perhaps we would, after nine years of a frosty
and acrimonious partnership, have finally become friends?

  It wasn’t to be, of course. As things turned out, I never saw Alphonse Grier again.

  16

  Drab décor, mediocre food and the cleaning staff ignited a civil war that killed thousands. Would not stay again.

  —Anonymous review left in the guest book of the Morrison Hotel, Ellulgrad

  I should have headed straight back to the hotel room, but even a few moments of exposure to the night air had chilled my bones, so I headed back to my place by the fire. The fireplace was a magnificent, intricately decorated, cast-iron affair with a sylvan motif around the mouth. A design of leaves, branches and berries girded the opening, with small woodland creatures peeping out here and there, foxes, squirrels and even, I noted with amusement, a hedgehog (Yozhik! The scoundrel was everywhere!). The design terminated with a large cast-iron bird in the center, right over the fire, head downward and wings spread. I wondered if the artist had considered that when the fire was lit, it would give the impression that the bird was swooping to a fiery death.

  Every sparrow shall be caught. Wasn’t that what Mendelssohn had written? No one was lost. Not even the dead. I thought about the woman lying upstairs in our hotel room. Maybe Mendelssohn had been right after all.

  * * *

  Olesya and I first met during a failed attempt on my part to procure the services of a prostitute.

  It was not quite as romantic as I make it sound.

  In my first year of college I was nineteen and living at home with my mother (my father had been killed in action during the Syunik War when I was a year old). I had become obsessed with the problem of my own virginity, a problem that was seemingly becoming more insoluble with every passing year. I was very slight, bookish, plain looking and excruciatingly shy, and the girls of Ellulgrad, quite reasonably, were not in the market. So, after a long, lonely first year in college, I had decided that the time had come to seek professional help. There was, I was informed by my classmates, a lady who lived in an apartment off Koslova Square for whom young men in my predicament were something of a specialty.