Blind Eye lm-5

by Stuart MacBride

  Gorzkiewicz felt for the vodka bottle again, filling their glasses. 'There is a story that long ago the wealthiest families in Krakow would build clock towers to show how grand and important they were. But every time a family unveiled one, someone else would commission an even more beautiful clock.' He knocked back his vodka. 'And so one day the head of the greatest house in all of Krakow called for the best watchmaker in the world and asked him to make a timepiece so wonderful that no clock would ever outshine it. And the watchmaker did. He made a clock so beautiful that the angels stopped singing, just to hear it chime.'

  He slipped his sunglasses back on, hiding the scars. 'But the head of the house was a jealous man: he knew that the next clock the watchmaker made would be even more beautiful. Then his would no longer be the finest in the land. So he called the old man to him, and burned his eyes out with a poker from the fire; that way the family's clock would always be the best.'

  Wiktorja shook her head. 'That never happened.'

  'It is a good story all the same.' He turned to Logan. 'That is why they call me the Watchmaker.'

  'Only you didn't make clocks, did you?'

  He smiled again. 'Sometimes the things I make go tick, tick… BOOM!' Gorzkiewicz slammed his hand on the table, making everyone jump. He laughed. 'Or so people say.'

  'Who was it? Who blinded you?'

  There was a long pause. Then Gorzkiewicz reached up beneath his sunglasses, rubbing the place where his eyes used to be.

  'The SB — secret police bastards — come to my house in the middle of the night, they throw me in the back of a truck and I never see my wife or daughter again. Someone said they ran away. Someone said they were sent to Warsaw, sold to some Politburo skurwysyn. And someone said they were just taken out to the steelworks and shot. That my wife and child fuelled the furnaces to make more Soviet steel…'

  He poured himself another drink. 'The SB beat me for days. Lied to me: said my comrades had informed on me because I was a liability to Solidarity — too dangerous.' He laughed, cold and hard. 'All lies! The SB wanted me to confess to the bombings in Krakow, tell them who else was involved. But I wouldn't tell them anything.'

  Gorzkiewicz shivered. 'Then he came. He…' There was silence for a moment as the old man fidgeted. 'He came with his knives and pliers. And I talked. I screamed like a woman and I told him everything he wanted to know.' This time the vodka slopped over the edge of the glass, soaking into the red-and-white checked tablecloth. 'Then he cut out my eyes and burned me.'

  Wiktorja swore, reached out, and put her hand over the old man's.

  He didn't seem to notice. 'The SB rounded up my friends two hours later. They were never seen again. And when the bastard was done with me he drove me back to Nowa Huta and threw me out onto the street for everyone to see. With a sign around my neck saying, "Communist Spy".' Another refill disappeared. 'I could hear the crowd: shouting, swearing… They tied me to a tree and beat me until everything was blood and darkness. Broke both my legs. My jaw. My arm. Left me tied there for two days, without food or water, until my brother came and cut me down.'

  Logan winced. 'Dear God…'

  'It was 1981 in the People's Republic of Poland. There was no God, there was only Lenin.' He finished the bottle. 'If it was me, I would have killed me… But maybe that would have been too kind.'

  Wiktorja said, 'Then why do you stay here? Why not get out, somewhere else, far away from the people who did this?'

  'Because Nowa Huta is my home. I fought for these streets, I killed for them, I was blinded for them. They are my streets. That is why I stay.'

  'Who was he? The man?'

  Gorzkiewicz stood, then hobbled to the rattling fridge. The open door cast a sudden bloom of cold white light, then it clunked shut and they were back in the gloom again. The old man returned carrying a fresh bottle of vodka and a jar of pickles. 'He was Old Boney. King of the Underworld. Kostchey the Deathless.'

  48

  Wiktorja threw back her head and laughed. 'The Devil gouged out your eyes?'

  Gorzkiewicz shrugged and poured three fresh shots. 'That's what he called himself in those days: Kostchey the Deathless. But his real name was Vadim Mikhailovitch Kravchenko. He was an army Major when I was in Afghanistan, forced to fight for those Russian bastards. I never met Kravchenko, but I heard of him. Every time they wanted a prisoner questioned… The screaming would last for days.'

  The old man downed his vodka. 'He ended up in the SB, running the hunt for dissidents and anti-Communist sympathizers. And people like me — people he blinded — we were his warning. We were what happened if you disobeyed the regime.'

  'Where is he now?'

  'If I knew, he would be dead. I heard a rumour he was working for some gangsters in Warsaw, but that was many years ago.' Gorzkiewicz helped himself to a tiny yellow pickled squash. 'The shopkeepers in your Aberdeen, they are blinded yes? Eyes gouged out, sockets burned?'

  'What does Kravchenko look like?'

  There was a long, slow pause, then the old man took off his sunglasses, giving Logan another look at the mess where his eyes should have been. 'I haven't seen him since 1981, remember?'

  Stupid question. 'Sorry.'

  'But…' He scraped his chair back from the table and hobbled from the room, navigating the twisted maze of junk with surprising ease. He was back ten minutes later with a tatty brown folder. He held it out, and Wiktorja took it. 'This,' he said, 'is everything I know about the man. I did a Russian entrepreneur a favour involving a business rival and sixteen pounds of Semtex. He arranged for the Politburo to misplace Kravchenko's file. Started asking questions for me.'

  Wiktorja flicked through the contents in the semi-darkness, then whistled, pulled out a photo, and showed it to Logan. 'Do you recognize him?'

  It was a black-and-white shot, head and shoulders, of a man in military uniform, staring at the camera. Hard eyes. Squint nose. Short black hair. A small scar on the tip of his chin.

  'Never seen him before.'

  A buzzing noise sounded from somewhere out in the hall, and Gorzkiewicz's head snapped up, as if scenting the air. 'Wait here.' And he was gone again.

  'So,' said Logan, holding out his hand to Wiktorja for the folder, 'how the hell does a blind man make bombs?'

  'Very carefully.'

  'You're all mad.'

  There wasn't a huge amount in the Kravchenko dossier. Twenty or thirty sheets of A4 — all in Russian and Polish — a handful of fading photographs, and a lock of hair. Logan pulled it out and twisted in the dim light. Long and blonde — the same colour as Wiktorja's — wrapped up with a red silk ribbon.

  'It is belong to his daughter.' A young girl appeared at the kitchen door. She was thirteen, maybe fourteen years old — wearing far too much makeup — carrying a strange stacked pot thing. Her eyes were huge, the pupils so dilated in the dark that there was almost no colour visible. 'Are you make mess in Uncle Rafal front room? Now I must to spend much time making tidy.'

  Logan dropped the hair back in the folder, feeling guilty for even touching it. 'Are you Zytka?'

  The young girl hefted the pot onto the working surface and unclipped the lid. There was a poom of steam, and the smell of warm food filled the little room. 'I am look after him.'

  The sound of a toilet flushing came from somewhere in the flat.

  Zytka opened a cupboard and came out with two plates. 'You must to go now. He is old and tired.'

  'And hungry.' Gorzkiewicz — fastening his belt. 'Jakie mosz pierogi?'

  'Ruskie.'

  Whatever that meant it must have been good, because the old man smiled.

  Logan held up the folder. 'Can we borrow this?' Then realized Gorzkiewicz couldn't actually see him doing it. 'I mean, the file on Kravchenko?'

  'No. But Zytka will make a copy for you tomorrow. Write down your address for her.'

  Logan dug one of the Grampian Police business cards out of his wallet and scrawled down the name of the hotel they were staying in.

 
; They left the old man sitting at his table tucking into a plate heaped with pale white dumplings.

  The young girl showed them to the door, weaving her way through the gloomy corridor's maze of books and news papers just as easily as the old man had. Logan and Senior Constable Jaroszewicz stumbled along behind her, trying not to fall over anything.

  At the door, Zytka stopped and fixed them with a stare, dark eyes glittering like a feral animal in the fairy lights. 'You must to find this Kravchenko and you must to kill him.'

  'Excuse me?' Wiktorja loomed over the little girl. 'We are police officers, we do not go around-'

  'Uncle Rafal is hero of Poland. Kravchenko — he deserve to be dead for what he do. And if you not kill him, Kravchenko kill you. Now you go away and you leave Uncle Rafal alone.' She slammed the door on them.

  They stood in the corridor outside, listening to the rattle and clank of chains and deadbolts being fastened. 'Well,' said Logan, 'she was… nice.'

  Wiktorja turned and started down the stairs. 'At least we found a victim that was still alive.'

  'Yeah, a blind bomb-maker who does favours with Semtex, and wants us to kill a sadistic ex-secret policeman for him.' It was even gloomier in the stairwell than before, music oozing out from behind closed doors. 'And did you see the state of that apartment? He's off his head.'

  They pushed through the door at the bottom and out into the muggy evening. The sky was the colour of fire, high clouds laced with burning gold against the red. In the square between the buildings, the yellow lights of occupied apartments shone in the blue-grey shadows.

  Wiktorja stopped halfway down the concrete slab path, then dug about in her huge handbag, coming out with the litre of vodka they'd bought on the way out here. 'I forgot to give it to him.'

  'Well, too late now. Unless you want to go back up there and-'

  The bottle exploded in her hands. One heartbeat it was there, the next it was all over the ground — shards of glass and puddles of liquid — leaving Wiktorja holding onto the shattered neck. They both stood, staring as the vodka seeped away between the warm paving slabs.

  'Do they usually-'

  This time he heard it: a muffled crump. And Logan looked over his shoulder to see a fresh hole in the stairwell door. Bullet-sized.

  'I think someone's-'

  Wiktorja screamed. She stared at her right arm as bright red soaked through the sleeve of her jacket. Logan grabbed her and dived behind a tiny, Lego-block-shaped car.

  'Are you OK?'

  She gritted her teeth, tears rolling down her cheeks, blood dripping from one trembling hand. The other was wrapped tightly around her bicep, trying to staunch the bleeding. 'Cholera jasna…'

  Logan poked his head over the bonnet of the car and scanned the shadows. No sign of anyone. Why couldn't they hear any gunshots?

  A little chunk of concrete path exploded, followed by the sound of a ricochet.

  Wiktorja flinched back against the car, then stopped. A look of horror crawled across her face. 'We have to move!'

  'What? Where? This is the only cover for-'

  'This is a Trabant! Made of fibreglass: the bullets will go straight through it!'

  And right on cue a fist-sized hole appeared in the car's bodywork next to Logan's head. 'Shit!'

  'Shoot back!'

  'At what? I can't see anything.'

  THUMP — another hole.

  'JUST SHOOT!'

  'Jesus…' He scrabbled through his jacket pockets, looking for a pair of latex gloves, pulling out evidence bags, a notebook, little yellow forensics stickers… the collected debris of a dozen crime scenes back home. There was a pair of gloves buried at the bottom, sealed away in their own sterile plastic pack. He stuffed everything else back in his pockets, peeled the pack open, then snapped the gloves on.

  'What the hell are you doing?'

  'You think I'm leaving my fingerprints all over a strange bloody gun?' He unwrapped the thing from its square of paisley-patterned fabric. It was some sort of heavy-duty semiautomatic pistol and it weighed a ton. Nothing like the nice light Glock 9mm they'd taught him to shoot with during firearms training. Logan ejected the clip, checked it was full, then slapped it back in. He hauled the slide back and let go — it clacked forward into place. Ready.

  'Well?' Wiktorja was starting to go pale, her lips taking on a delicate shade of blue. No way she'd lost that much blood already, so it was probably shock. 'What are you waiting for?'

  'I can't just shoot into the dark at random! I might hit someone.'

  'That is the point!'

  THUMP — another hole in the Trabant.

  He rolled the paisley handkerchief into a thin rope and tied it above the hole in her arm. 'Try not to pass out on me, OK?'

  She grabbed him by the lapel, leaving a bloody handprint. Then kissed him. 'For luck.' Pause. 'You know, like in Star Wars?'

  He was right: they were all mad.

  Logan snapped up, tried to pick a spot in the shadows where he wasn't going to accidentally shoot someone through their living-room window, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Of course: it wasn't a Glock, was it? He flicked off the safety catch as the car's windscreen blew cubes of glass everywhere. This time when he squeezed, the gun roared, kicked like a mule, and pinged a brass cartridge case out to bounce along the fibreglass bonnet.

  BOOOM!

  'Bloody thing's a cannon!'

  Two more shots came in reply. One shattered the wing mirror and the other thunked into the nearest tree. And this time Logan actually heard a 'futttt' in the darkness. Silencers. He fired a couple back, trying to aim for the noise.

  BOOOM! BOOOM!

  Ears ringing, he ducked back down again as they retaliated. The Trabant was beginning to look like a badly engineered piece of Swiss cheese.

  Voices in the darkness — shouting instructions.

  'What are they saying?'

  Wiktorja closed her eyes. 'They… they're going to rush us from both sides.'

  'How many of them?'

  She shrugged, then hissed in pain. 'Three. Maybe four.'

  'Sodding, bastarding hell.' He popped his head back over the bonnet, scanning the darkness. There were people standing at their apartment windows now, looking out. One by one the lights went off. No one was coming to help. 'We've got to make a run for it — back into the apartment block, OK? Can you do that?'

  Wiktorja bit her bottom lip and nodded.

  'Right, on three. One, two…' Logan jumped to his feet, ready to give covering fire. A man was charging towards them: mid-thirties, big moustache, dark curly hair, leather jacket. Gun. Logan shot him.

  The man didn't fly backwards like they did in the movies, he just folded up, his momentum carrying him forwards into the other side of the Trabant. The whole car rocked as he slammed against the bodywork.

  'Oh God.'

  The man started to scream.

  Wiktorja grabbed Logan by the sleeve and tried to drag him back towards the building. 'Run!'

  'I shot him…'

  The car's rear window exploded in a shower of glass.

  'You have to move!'

  Logan backed up a couple of steps. 'I… I've never shot anyone before…'

  She tugged at his sleeve again as chunks of brickwork flew from the wall behind them. 'They are getting closer.'

  Logan started forwards. 'We need to get him an ambulance!'

  'SHUT UP AND RUN!'

  49

  They burst through into the building's stairwell. The sound of screaming trailed away as Logan dragged Wiktorja up the stairs. Now the only noise was the blood pounding in his ears, their feet hammering on the concrete steps, and the angry shouting outside. Oh God, the man he'd shot was dead. He'd killed someone. Or maybe the man had just passed out? Please dear God, let him have passed out.

  One more storey to go and they were back at Gorzkiewicz's front door. Logan hammered on the plain wooden surface. There was music playing inside: something cheery and upbeat. Down below he coul
d hear feet clattering up the stairs after them.

  'GORZKIEWICZ, OPEN THE BLOODY DOOR!'

  Nothing.

  Footsteps getting closer.

  Logan backed up to the banister, and slammed his foot into the wood, next to the lock. The frame burst as the deadbolt tore loose, but the chain still held firm. He kicked again and the chain ripped free in a shower of splinters.

  He shoved Wiktorja into the darkened apartment, then turned and fired two shots at random down the stairwell. BOOOM! BOOOM!

  Outside the gun had been loud, in here it was deafening, the roar bouncing back at them from the solid walls.

  Swearing came from the floors below.

  Logan charged in after Wiktorja, shutting the door behind him, looking for something to jam against it… only he couldn't see a thing. The fairy lights had been switched off, and with the windows all boarded up the place was in utter darkness.

  The cheery music boomed out of speakers somewhere deep inside the flat — Katrina & The Waves singing Walking On Sunshine. Not exactly appropriate.

  Where the hell were Gorzkiewicz and his bloodthirsty niece?

  Junk — there was junk everywhere, they could use that to barricade the door. Logan grabbed whatever was closest to hand and dragged it against the wood. Then had a moment of epiphany. This was stupid — they didn't have enough time to make a barricade out of newspapers and assorted crap. The men would barge straight through and kill them. And Logan didn't want to die in a crappy flat full of rubbish and 1970s wallpaper.

  'Gorzkiewicz?' Wiktorja was moving, he could hear her stumbling through the maze of junk. Logan charged after her, tripped over something in the darkness and went sprawling. The gun bounced from his hand and skittered away.

  'FUCK!'

  He scrabbled forwards on his hands and knees, trying to find the bloody thing.

  Wiktorja muttered something in Polish and Logan froze.

  'What?'

  He could hear the footsteps patter to a halt on the landing outside. The gunmen had caught up with them.

  Wiktorja's voice was high-pitched and trembling. 'There is something in here…'