I laughed, until my chest sharply told me to stop.
“So what do people talk about when they’re lying on the bathroom floor?” she asked.
“Well…,” I said. “I might ask, have you found Paulo yet in the pages of his books?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s a man there but I don’t know him. I don’t recognize him. But I don’t know if I ever really knew Paulo.”
“Did you love him?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Very much.”
“But you didn’t know him?”
“Who doesn’t love a good mystery?” she asked.
True. Hadn’t Olesya died a riddle?
“I don’t know why he came here,” she said. “I don’t know why…”
“Anyone would?” I finished.
“I didn’t mean…,” she began, but I gestured that she didn’t even need to finish that thought.
We studied the cracks in the ceiling for a few moments.
“How could he hate himself that much?” she whispered.
I turned to look at her.
“What can I do to help you?” I said.
The Good Brother, who had been sleeping for a long time now, briefly roused himself to warn me that I was becoming dangerously compromised, and I told him to go to Hell. Lily had saved my life tonight. I paid my debts.
“How do you mean?” she asked, confused.
“If the books aren’t working…”
“Oh no, I didn’t say that…”
“Is there anything else we could be doing?”
“Maybe…” She looked uncertain. “Could I see where he lived? How he lived? If I could see where he spent his days that might help me form a better picture?”
She didn’t sound certain, but I was already putting a plan together.
Caspian had not treated Lily well in the time she had been here, but this morning at least it seemed to be trying to make amends. It was a beautiful clear day, chilly but sunny, the kind of day that feels crystal clear, and sharp, and real. Lily and I had a simple but welcome breakfast brought up to the hotel room, and after we had finished eating I took aside one of the DSD gullivers who were posted outside our room.
He was a young man, blond, massively tall and almost amiable looking for his species.
“Excuse me, Agent…”
“Lubnick, sir.”
“Agent Lubnick, I think it might be best if we vary our schedule a little bit. I doubt anyone’s going to be making an attempt on Mrs. Xirau in broad daylight, but we mustn’t credit The Bastards with too much intelligence.”
“As you say, sir,” he said.
“We’re going to leave early. Can you send for the car now?”
“At once, sir.”
Ordering DSD agents around felt like gambling at a racecourse for the first time. It was undoubtedly fun, and absolutely not something I should make a habit of.
The car arrived and we set off, now accompanied by two of our protectors from the DSD crammed into the car with us, with another three following in a second car close behind. I instructed the driver to forgo the most direct route and instead take us on a winding serpentine route through the city’s backstreets until we came to Bernard Charbonneau Avenue, where I told the driver to stop outside of the entrance of a large redbrick, multistoried apartment building of faded grandeur, which was essentially the only type of grandeur still to be found in Ellulgrad.
The DSD men rolled out of the cars like glaciers who had somewhere important to be, and looked at me quizzically.
I ignored them, but pointed the building out to Lily.
“There. That’s Paulo’s flat. Shall we go up? Lubnick, you’re with me. The rest of you stay here and make sure no one tries to steal the hubcaps. Shan’t be long.”
Who was this man? I asked myself as I strode into the apartment building with Lily by my side and Lubnick following close behind us, because he certainly wasn’t acting like Nikolai South.
And yet, after the previous night I felt strangely invulnerable. So what if I had strayed from the itinerary? We weren’t due in StaSec HQ for another forty minutes. What was I doing here? I was helping Lily Xirau identify her husband. I was simply following orders and showing initiative. I might get that promotion after all.
Have you simply decided to forget, the Good Brother inquired, that she is almost certainly a spy sent here in the guise of your wife who has asked to come here because it is part of her mission?
Which is why, I responded, I will be watching her every step, glance and motion.
There were, as always, only two possibilities. Lily was a spy or she was not. She was lying, or she was telling the truth. If she was not a spy, I owed her my life and I would help her however I could. If she was a spy, it was my duty to unmask her. I was pursuing two mutually exclusive goals but for the time being they both had led me here, to Paulo Xirau’s home.
I knocked on the landlord’s door and told him that StaSec required access to Mr. Xirau’s room, and he gave us the key with all the haste that request was due. I like to think that he would have given it to me as quickly if Lubnick had not been behind me creating an eclipse, but I doubt it.
I had Lubnick wait outside in the corridor as I unlocked the door and let Lily in.
The flat was far less impressive than I had expected. Paulo Xirau had been well known and respected, and I had subconsciously also assumed that he was therefore rich. But clearly that was not the case. He lived better than I did, but that did not make him rich. Not close. Although perhaps the place had looked more opulent before StaSec had turned it inside out and then carted off all of Paulo Xirau’s reading material.
I closed the door behind us.
I stood by the door and tried to look disinterested as she stepped carefully through the wreckage of Paulo’s living room.
“Why is it like this?” she asked.
“When they discovered that he was co … AI, they assumed he was a spy. They were looking for evidence,” I said.
She nodded, and began to study the photographs on the mantelpiece.
I, for my part, was studying the photograph that wasn’t on the mantelpiece.
Human beings (and for the sake of argument I assumed AI) have a strong preference for symmetry. But the five framed photographs on Paulo’s mantelpiece were arranged in such a way that there was a large gap between the fourth and fifth that suggested to me that a photograph had been taken out of the sequence. The remaining pictures were: a classy prestige portrait of Paulo seated at his typewriter mid-diatribe, what looked like Paulo and a group of fellow scribes from The Caspian Truth enjoying a drink together, two nature shots taken on a trek up the Caucasus and lastly a group shot of Paulo on a kayaking trip with friends on the Caspian Sea.
Lily was staring intently at the first photograph.
“Is that him?” she asked, and I thought how bizarre it was that I had to tell her who her own husband was.
“Yes,” I said. “That is Paulo X—”
A floorboard creaked from the direction of the kitchen.
Lily glanced wordlessly at me. Whatever she saw in my face clearly did nothing to assuage her fears.
Quietly, I pressed myself against the wall and gestured for Lily to do the same. I took my gun from its holster and prayed that I would not have to use it. I was somewhere that I should not be, with someone I should not be there with, and I desired the kind of low profile that was incompatible with discharging firearms in a residential area.
“Who’s there?” I barked.
I had not expected an answer, much less the one I received.
A voice replied from the kitchen, young and female:
“StaSec! Throw down your weapon and kick it toward me!”
This threw me for a few seconds. The landlord had not said that there were any other StaSec agents in Xirau’s flat.
“What’s your ID number?” I asked.
There was silence.
&nbs
p; “4 … 2 … 9 … 8 … 7 … 2,” the voice stammered.
“You’re lying,” I said sharply. “Come out now.”
The supposed StaSec agent emerged trembling from the kitchen.
She was tall, with long brown hair and sallow skin, and looked to be in her twenties. Her accent was pure Old Baku, and she glanced nervously from my gun to Lily’s bruised face until finally her gaze rested on my hat.
A gray trilby, the crown of a StaSec man.
“I’m sorry…,” she said. “I wouldn’t have said I was StaSec if I’d known who you were, I was just trying to scare you off. I thought you were robbing the place.”
“And why would you think that?” I asked contemptuously as I reached behind her back and grabbed the thing that she was trying very amateurishly to stop me from seeing.
It was hard and rectangular and for a second I thought I’d found the missing photograph from Xirau’s mantelpiece.
But instead, I found myself holding a small wooden box held closed by a small clasp.
“Look, you can keep it,” the girl said. “Keep it, just please let me go.”
“What are you doing here?” Lily asked. “This is my husband’s home.”
The girl’s eyes seemed to double in size.
“Paulo was married?!” she exclaimed.
“Yes. Yes, he was,” said Lily, in a tone that said she had considered the implications of the girl’s reaction and did not much care for them.
I picked up one of Paulo’s chairs that had been knocked on its side and set it right side up in the middle of the room. I gestured to it with my gun.
“Sit,” I said.
The girl dutifully obeyed.
“How do you know Paulo Xirau?” I asked her.
“He was my friend’s boyfriend,” she said.
Ah. I had a suspicion as to who our intruder was now, but I asked her anyway.
“Nadia Evershan,” she replied. Yes, Grier’s golden girl. Worked in the grocers with Sheena Paria. Apparently moonlighting as a housebreaker.
“How did you get in?” I asked.
“Fire escape,” she said. “Lock on the back window is busted. Paulo said he’d asked the landlord to fix it but he never did.”
I decided to rattle her.
“Yes. Nadia Evershan. Twenty-two. Old Baku. Works in Spatsky’s Grocery.”
“How do you know that?” she asked, amazed.
“Your file,” I said.
“You have a file on me?”
“We are StaSec,” I replied. “We have files on everyone.”
I could see her taking a mental inventory of everything she had ever said or done since learning to speak.
Good. She would be far less inclined to lie now.
I leaned in.
“Why did you break in?” I asked. “Just decided Paulo’s dead, so you might as well ransack the place and steal whatever wasn’t nailed down?”
She flushed and glared angrily at me. I had clearly hit a nerve.
“I wouldn’t do that,” she growled. “He was a friend.”
Yes. There was a code in Old Baku. It was everyone for themselves, and if you didn’t look after your own possessions, they would find new owners who knew how to take care of them. But you never stole from a friend. A friend was one of the few things where, if you lost it, you couldn’t simply steal a new one.
She looked down at the floor, sullenly.
“I was just looking for his knock,” she whispered.
Lily looked at me curiously.
I explained.
A “knock” (possibly derived from the Russian “Nakhodka,” although who really knew) was another delightful Old Baku tradition arising from the rich cultural stimulus that was extreme poverty and deprivation. A knock was a stash of money or valuables whose location was known to only you and one other person, usually a spouse or a lover. It was a bequest, to be left to that person in the event of your death. A final gift. A little consolation. A thank you, and goodbye.
Paulo Xirau had not lived in Old Baku, but the tradition had been gaining traction outside the district. Thanks to the embargo, all of Ellulgrad was becoming Old Baku, slowly but surely.
“I don’t understand,” Lily said. “Why would he leave his knock to you?”
“It’s the rules,” said Nadia.
Yes, it would be, wouldn’t it? Paulo’s dead. Sheena’s gone. Yasmin’s gone. Paulo has no surviving relatives in the city. Well, why shouldn’t Nadia have it?
“Sheena told you where his knock was?” I asked.
Nadia nodded.
“After Paulo died. I didn’t know why she did that. It was supposed to be secret. But then she…”
Her voice trailed off.
“I know what she did,” I said.
“So I guess she left it to me,” she said.
I looked at the box in my hand. I set it down on a small table and opened it. I gestured for Lily and Nadia to come and see what was inside.
Inside the box were twelve figurines.
They were cheap little things. Ceramic, and quite ugly. I took them out of the box and laid them out in a neat little row on the table.
“What are they?” Lily asked.
“Each one is a symbol of the zodiac,” I explained. “There’s the lion. The scales. The ram. Twelve of them. They were very popular a few years back. People collected them.”
“Ah,” said Lily. “That makes sense. He liked collecting things. Games. Music. Bad ideas.”
I had seen figurines like these before. They were practically the stock-in-trade of the Azerbaijani when they sold door-to-door. They had first appeared after the Morrison Crisis, a cheeky joke at the expense of the defeated conspirators. You had to collect them all. Catch all the zodiacs. I had to say, I was a little surprised to see them in Xirau’s possession. Fanatics were not known for their sense of whimsy.
“So, they’re the knock?” Lily asked. “Are they valuable?”
Nadia snorted.
I smiled.
“Close to worthless,” I said. “No one would try to steal them. No one would bother.”
I picked up the box and felt with my fingers along the inside lining that had been glued to the box top to cushion the figurines when they were being transported.
“Which, of course,” I said, tearing the lining, “makes this the perfect place to hide something actually valuable.”
Like a magician producing a card, I held up what I had found: a thin wad of notes, around three hundred monetas all told. For me it was around half a month’s salary. For an Old Baku girl working in a grocers, it was a fortune.
I handed it to Nadia. She took it, and turned to Lily.
“Are you really his wife?” she asked.
Lily nodded.
“Sorry,” said Nadia. “My friend, Sheena, she didn’t know he was married. She wouldn’t have gone with him if she knew he had a wife. She wasn’t like that.”
“It’s fine,” said Lily. “We’ve been separated for twenty years. I assumed he’d found someone.”
“Five years,” I quickly corrected her as I saw the look of confusion on Nadia’s face.
Lily had also realized her mistake.
“Five years, five years, yes. What did I say?”
“Twenty,” I supplied, helpfully, and forced a laugh.
“Well, obviously not,” she said. “I mean, clearly I’m not in my forties.”
Which, considering she would be eighty next year, was not even a lie.
“Then this is yours,” said Nadia, holding out the money to her.
Ah, there was an Old Baku girl. They had next to nothing, but they had a code.
Lily handed it back to her.
“How about you take this,” she said. “And you tell me about Paulo.”
“Okay,” said Nadia. “Okay. Um … I didn’t really know him that well. I only saw him a few times. With Sheena. But I liked him.”
“Why?” Lily said softly.
“I dunno,” said Nad
ia. “He was nice. He was good to Sheena. He treated her well. That’s hard to find. Especially these days.”
“Did she love him?” Lily asked.
“I … I think she was getting there, you know?” said Nadia. “I think they were on their way. Before he died. You know he died? They told you?”
“They said he died in a bar fight,” Lily said.
Nadia shook her head.
“No, it wasn’t a fight. He was just murdered. He didn’t fight. He wasn’t the type.”
This Xirau was new to me. Kind, gentle Paulo Xirau. But then, we all have different sides, don’t we?
“It was Nadia who called the police,” I added.
Lily looked back at Nadia.
“You were there? When he died?”
Nadia nodded, uncomfortably.
Lily took a deep breath.
“Please tell me how he died,” she said at last.
“Okay,” said Nadia wearily. “Sheena was there at the bar with Yasmin, her sister. They were twins. Yasmin’s boyfriend, Oleg, was there. Sheena went to the bathroom. Paulo came into the bar and saw Yasmin. He knew Sheena had a twin but I don’t think he’d met her before. So he goes up to Yasmin and tries to surprise her with a kiss…”
“Thinking that she’s Sheena.” Lily nodded.
“Right. And Oleg just … he just loses it. Punched him in the face. Paulo fell and he cracked his head on a table. That’s what killed him. So it wasn’t really a fight. He never had a chance.”
“Instantly?” I asked.
“What?”
“Was he dead when he hit the floor?”
Lily looked at me angrily. That was not something she had wanted to know.
“No,” said Nadia, after thinking for a few seconds. “No. He was still alive.”
“Was he conscious?”
“For a few minutes.”
“Did anyone try to help him?”
“Sheena did. Sheena was on the floor with him, trying to staunch the bleeding. Telling him to stay calm.”
Lily shuddered but I pressed.
“She spoke to him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything to her?”
“He said ‘please…’”
“‘Please’ what?”
“Just ‘please’!” Nadia snapped, losing her patience. “That’s all he said. He held Sheena’s hand, said ‘please, please, please’ and then he died. That was it.”
When the Sparrow Falls Page 17