Stolen Souls (19 page)

“If you should happen to realize you know something about your associate’s death, give us a shout.”

Herkus stowed the envelope and card away and started gathering up the rest of the scraps from the roof of the Mercedes. “I go now?” he asked.

“All right,” Lennon said. “But remember, we’ll be keeping an eye on you and your boss. I expect I’ll see you soon.”

Herkus walked around to the driver’s side of the car. “Happy Christmas,” he said, a smirk on his lips.

Lennon did not reply.

38

T
HE COPS WAVED
Herkus through the traffic. This detective smelled of trouble. Herkus had known a policeman like him in Vilnius. He was buried in the woods not far from Herkus’s wife.

He dialed Arturas and said, “I’m on my way.”

“About time,” Arturas said.

“The cops pulled me over,” Herkus said. “They kept me there until a detective showed up. His name was Lennon.”

“Broad-shouldered, blond hair?”

“Yes,” Herkus said.

“He was here this morning.”

“He knows about the whore,” Herkus said. “He knows she killed Tomas, and he knows we’re looking for her.”

“He knows nothing,” Arturas said. “He’s just reaching.”

“He knows enough,” Herkus said. “He has the passport she used to travel here. There are two more flights to Brussels today. One from Belfast, one from Dublin. You should be on one of them, get out of here until this blows over.”

“I promised my mother,” Arturas said. “I promised her I’d find the whore. Do you want to tell her we ran away?”

Herkus thought about this for a moment. He had met Laima Strazdiene. only once. He had been in Belgium for less than a year, struggling with the French language when in Brussels, confounded by Flemish when he set foot outside the city.

He had been working at a brothel near Gare Bruxelles-Central that serviced the business and diplomatic travelers who commuted through the station. His job description was simple: man the door, refuse those who looked like bad news, and beat the shit out of anyone who caused grief inside.

It had been a busy enough night, but nothing out of the ordinary until an English client, a politician called Edward Hargreaves if Herkus remembered correctly, kicked up hell because one of the girls had taken money from his wallet. Herkus went to the room and stood between the whore and the client. The girl denied it. Hargreaves’s face reddened with anger.

“She say she not take it,” Herkus said in English.

“She bloody did,” the client said as he pulled on his trousers. “I had seven hundred euros when I came here. When I went to get the money to pay her, there was only three hundred. That’s four hundred euros gone.”

Herkus looked back to the girl. She ranted in French, the words coming hard and fast. The only one he made out was
enculer
, which he knew meant something bad. Hargreaves understood it too, going by his reaction.

A hard clearing of the throat from the doorway caused Hargreaves to pause. Herkus turned to see Laima Strazdiene. enter the room. She stood no higher than his shoulder and had a thin build with elfin features. But he knew there was nothing playful about her.

It wasn’t the way she wore a business suit and rings that dwarfed her fingers, or the set of her shoulders as she crossed the room, or the tightness of her mouth. It was the dark chill in her eyes, like pieces of coal embedded in the sockets.

“What seems to be the problem?” she asked in perfect English.

Herkus explained as best he could over the protestations and interruptions of both the whore and the client.

Laima nodded once and gave a polite smile. “One moment,” she said.

Herkus, the girl, and Hargreaves watched her leave the room.

“Where’d she go?” Hargreaves asked.

Before Herkus could answer, Laima returned with a roll of hundred-euro notes in her hand. She counted off four and handed them to the client.

“Of course, there will be no charge for your visit today,” she said.

“Thank you,” Hargreaves said.

Without his anger to shore him up, he was left with only the sordid nature of his business here. He dressed quickly, and thanked Laima once more.

“Please show this gentleman out,” she said to Herkus.

He obliged, guiding Hargreaves out of the room, and she closed the door behind them. The Englishman and he exchanged no more words on the way to the front door. Their eyes did not meet as the first screams came from the room they had just left.

The client gone, Herkus lingered there by the door, no desire to hear the cries with any more clarity. The other girls gathered in the hall, exchanging fearful glances, some of them flinching with each new shriek.

Soon the screams became moans, and then faded to silence interrupted by grunts of exertion. The girls drifted back to their rooms, tears in their eyes, unable to bear what they heard.

Eventually, Laima emerged. She mopped her brow with a handkerchief, her breath hitching in her chest. The lacy fabric left a red smear on her forehead. Herkus would have told her so, offered to fetch her a clean tissue, but he noticed her rings then.

The strands of hair wafted from them like wisps of candy floss. Skin clung to the diamonds.

“That young woman no longer works for us,” she said. “Please escort her from my property.”

Herkus left the girl within crawling distance of the hospital’s emergency entrance. It took the best part of a bottle of vodka to get him to sleep that night.

* * *

“N
O,” HE SAID
. “I don’t want to tell her.”

“So we stay,” Arturas said. “Besides, if this detective really had anything, he’d have formally questioned one of us by now. Keep looking.”

“All right,” Herkus said. “But it’s dangerous.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be generous to you this Christmas.”

“How generous?”

A pause, then, “Very generous.”

“Okay,” Herkus said.

“But first, bring me what I asked for.”

The hotel came into view. “Soon,” Herkus said.

39

G
ALYA KNEW BE FORE
she tried that the doors would be locked, but hope and fear made her do it anyway. She went to the front first, found it sealed tight, reinforced by a heavy padlock. She pulled inward, aware of the futility of it as she did so, but the door was solid. Wood, no glass, its surface glossed by thick paint.

She went to the kitchen, and her stomach reminded her with a growl that she hadn’t eaten in … how long? No time to think of that. Instead, she turned her mind to the door leading to the backyard. She jerked the handle. Again, no movement. A flutter of panic in her breast. She placed a hand over her heart, kept the fear in its place.

The window above the sink.

She grabbed the net curtain that covered it and pulled. It fluttered to the floor like a dying angel. She lifted one of the wooden chairs from around the small table and threw it against the glass. It clattered to the floor, the window intact, but a mug dropped from the drainer and smashed on the tiles. She looked down at the shards and saw red spreading across a yellow football shirt. She blinked the image away.

Reinforced double glazing, the same as the room she had been locked in. She knew that to try to break it would waste what strength she had remaining. But what to do? She couldn’t stand here waiting for him to return.

Galya went back to the door and took hold of the padlock, turned it as far as its bar would allow.

Every lock has a key.

Look for it.

She opened each drawer in the kitchen, found nothing but blunt cutlery and useless junk: old batteries, plastic fittings from self-assembly furniture, rolls of tape. The kinds of things people threw away when they had no use for them. But not this man.

In the last drawer, right at the back, she found an old mobile phone. Its casing was bright pink, a shining flower sticker applied to the back of it. She wondered for a moment where he had acquired what looked like a little girl’s phone, but she halted her thoughts before they went too far down that path and caused the fear in her breast to rise up and overpower her. She pressed and held the phone’s power button.

The screen remained a blank gray, so she dropped it back into the drawer.

When the cupboards revealed nothing more, Galya left the kitchen. Two more rooms led off from the entrance hall. She opened the first, but the door met resistance after a few centimeters of movement. She could barely squeeze her head through the gap and see the darkened interior.

Boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, some containing papers, others holding worn tools or household items. Amongst them, bags of old clothing, blankets, and sheets. One of the piles had collapsed, pushing rubbish against the door. A smell lay thick on the air, damp and dust lingering, unable to escape. Galya guessed the door hadn’t been opened in months, perhaps years. She pulled it closed, returned the gathered detritus to darkness.

The second door opened onto a living room. A single couch stood at its center, a low table in front of it, a large Bible upon that. The ticking clock on the mantelpiece was the only other item she could see in the room. Another net curtain softened the muted daylight from outside.

She crossed the floor to the table and looked down at the book. A faded and yellowed bookmark lay across the pages, a picture of Jesus kneeling, his blue eyes meeting those of a child, a verse in a complex script beneath the image. Galya read the word “suffer” and searched her memory for its meaning in Russian. When she found it, she looked away.

She noticed another piece of furniture in the room, obscured behind the door she had entered through. An antique writing desk, its roller top open, a dozen or more small drawers arranged around a larger one, all looming over a leather mat like the walls of a castle. Drawers perfect for hiding a key.

Galya opened one after another, finding each empty save for a few scraps of paper. Finally, she pulled the handle of the larger drawer, but it did not move.

A certainty she knew to be foolish settled in her gut: the key she sought was in there. She pulled out the smaller drawers on each side of it, four in total, leaving gaps big enough for her hands. The wood felt cool and dry against her fingers as she reached in and ran them along the drawer’s flanks. She twisted her hand so that her fingertips squeezed through the narrow gap at the top, hoping she could reach inside to feel the drawer’s contents.

Something was there, something soft, like a velvet cloth. She pushed harder, the wood digging into her flesh, until her knuckles jammed in the small space. It hurt, but she ignored that sensation, concentrated on another. Something hard— no, several somethings—beneath the velvet, their presence barely perceptible to her touch.

Galya pulled her hands free, skin tearing from her knuckles, red beads appearing in the tiny channels the wood had cut. She sucked at them, tasted salty metal, and remembered the Lithuanian, his eyes wide, the bubbling in his throat.

Nausea came in a warm wave. She rode it out as she thought.

The kitchen. Find something to pry open the drawer.

She went as fast as her stinging soles would allow and found a knife, heavy stainless steel, an ivory hilt. The kind of knife Mama would have used to cut hard butter, passed on to her by her own grandmother.

Galya returned to the desk and slid the knife into the gap at the top of the drawer, close to the lock. She pushed up and back, but the desk rocked against the wall, its movement stealing most of her force. She braced it with her hip and tried again.

This time, all her strength was applied to the thin panel of wood. It bowed, but did not break. She crouched down, wedged herself against the desk, pushed up with her legs.

The wood cracked. Galya giggled. Pressure pulsed against her temples.

Once again, she pushed with all the power in her body, and the wood gave way, the drawer’s face splitting in two, leaving the lock clinging to a few splintered scraps. Galya breathed hard, her cheeks hot. She pulled the wood away and reached inside.

The velvet bag snagged on the splinters. She slipped her fingers inside the red circle and felt the hard things inside. She knew immediately they weren’t keys, or anything like keys, even before they spilled out onto the cracked leather desktop.

Her mind stumbled over the objects, trying to match them to some context from her experience. Jewels, she thought, creamy white pearls with jagged ends like plant roots.

Roots.

Not jewels.

Her stomach turned on itself. She pulled her hand away from the small hard things, scattering them across the leather. They formed a loose circle, arranging themselves prettily for her, a chorus line of enamel and blood flecks.

A row of teeth smiling up at her.

The dizziness might have dragged her to the floor if not for the faint sound of an engine outside.

40

B
ILLY
C
RAWFORD APPLIED
the hand brake and removed the key from the ignition. The old Toyota Hiace van shuddered and rattled as the engine died. He sat silent, thinking about the day ahead.

If he got everything done that needed doing, he might have time to attend the late carol service at his church. He enjoyed the event every year, along with the Christmas morning service, and he would have been disappointed to miss them. But the girl had been delivered unto him unexpectedly, and who was he to question the Lord’s will? If he couldn’t attend church, then so be it. God would pardon his absence.

He climbed out of the van’s cabin and walked to the back gate, his boots crunching on the snow. It swung closed with a tired creak, and he refastened the padlock. He returned to the van, opened the sliding side door, and retrieved the drill bit and saw blades he’d purchased. The sack of ballast would wait until later.

Trudging to the back door, he sorted through his keys, his breath misting as he hummed “Silent Night” to himself. He remembered how, as a boy, he had seethed at the other children in assembly mocking the sacred tune. When they sang the line “sleep in heavenly peace,” they would whoop through the last word, making it
peeeee-eeeace
, and giggling amongst themselves. He imagined Jesus on high, weeping at their disrespect, and he had to fight to stop himself from screaming,
Enough! Don’t laugh at our Savior!