Katja from the Punk Band (7 page)

She smiles invitingly, rolls her eyes as she is entered from behind by the other woman, wearing some sort of device strapped around her waist.

“Excuse me,” Anatoli says, and leaves the room.

It is considerably cooler in the corridor. He wipes his brow with his sleeve and turns, notices a teenager with tattoos all down one side of his face at the same time that the teenager notices Anatoli, and the boy panics, drops the burger he is holding.

“Shit!”

And Anatoli tries to grab him, misses. “Wait!”

But some basic survival instinct has been triggered and the boy is gone, vanishing into the darkness farther down the hall, scurrying off into the innards of the building like a rat.

Anatoli walks to the third door on his left, leans into it.

Someone else is coming along the corridor now and their footsteps are slow, cautious. They too must sense his officialdom and that same survival instinct kicks in. Anatoli holds up a hand to stop them from running, let them know that whatever it is they’ve done, that’s not why he’s here.

He then enters the room and closes the door behind him.

“Katja?”

There is a bed, her guitars, an amp, some books. Little else.

She’s not there.

It’s possible she is in one of the other squatters’ rooms but for people who spend their lives on hijacked property, Anatoli has found they are inordinately protective of their own little hiding holes. So she’s not there and he doesn’t really care that much.

It just doesn’t seem that important.

But he’ll give her ten minutes.

He crouches next to a stack amp, the mesh of which has been ripped along one seam and is splattered with spray paint, feels the rumble of loud music filtering through the walls from one of the upper floors, and he’s almost started drifting off to sleep when he hears movement nearby.

It’s the rattle of the metal sheet he has placed up against Katja’s entrance and there she is, her leg coming through now. He steps back into the deep frame of the room’s doorway and it’s enough to douse him in shadows and let him watch her for a few moments.

When she picks up her guitar he steps forward.

“Katja.”

She doesn’t say a word when he piles her into the back of his car, just sits there as he drives. He’s prepared for the fact that she might be lulling him into a false sense of security, ready to break free when he relaxes his guard, but just to be sure he tells her he just wants to talk to her.

She knows the drill though, knows that it’s going to mean a night of detention if nothing else.

He drives through the rainstorm, and she knows the way to the station as if it is tattooed onto her soul, so when he pulls the car over to the side of a street several blocks away, she is instantly put on edge. Aleksakhina turns side-on so he can see her through the metal grate separating them.

Katja is itchy, nervous. She keeps looking around as if she expects something to happen, like a convict on death row awaiting the last-minute phone call that will call off the execution.

He can tell she wants to ask what’s going on but she refuses to show any weakness or fear by asking and so decides to put her out of her misery.

“I could take you to the station right now, book you in. You’d most likely spend at least the night there but probably more.”

Katja fingers the cuffs, squinting at the silhouette of the man, dissected by the metal between them. She finds other things to look at instead, thinking of how the upholstery is the same pale grey of a smoker’s lung. He offers her a cigarette but she refuses.

“I could do that. But I want to give you a chance first.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” she sighs.

“I thought we were finally getting somewhere, Katja,” he says to her, flicking his lighter to spark his cigarette.

Her head is slumped to one side, her focus on a dark stain on the headrest.

Deliberately and obviously uninterested in anything he has to say.

“I don’t want you to be here any more than you do. You think I’ve not got better things to be doing with my time?”

“Hey, don’t let me hold you back,” she says, still not looking at him. “If you’ve got a hot date or . . .”

“Listen to me. I’m trying to help you here. How about you help yourself for a change?” She says nothing.

“You want to tell me what you were really doing tonight?”

Still she ignores him. Tongues her lip piercing. “How are things with Januscz?”

And now she’s looking at him.
Now
she’s looking at him. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Raw nerve.

“It’s not supposed to mean anything.”

“It’s none of your fucking business. You’re my parole officer not my fucking therapist.”

“Yes, I’m your parole officer. Which means that it’s my responsibility to make sure you stick to the conditions of your parole, which in turn means I need to know that you are getting some stability in your life, not less.”

He doesn’t tell her that he’s already checked up on Januscz, that he knows about the man’s involvement in some of the island’s chemical gangs, though admittedly as nothing more than one of their runt-runners.

“We’re fine,” she says, noncommittally.

Aleksakhina reaches into his pocket, holds up the vial and watches her demeanour change instantly. For a moment he thinks she is about to try to snatch the thing.

“What were you doing with this?” he asks her.

Katja, her face is firm, stoic. He can tell she is trying hard to not give anything away.

“Where did you get it?” The liquid inside the vial is an almost golden colour under the starkness of the streetlight overhead.

“Did Januscz give this to you?”

“I don’t have to answer these questions.”

“I’m giving you a chance here, Katja. It doesn’t have to be me asking these questions. But I don’t want to have to take you in.”

“Don’t act like you’re doing me a favour. You just don’t want to deal with the paperwork. Come on, man! I haven’t done anything. I just forgot to check in, that’s all. Give me a fucking break here. I need to get out for my shift. I need that job! You’re the one that’s saying you want to see me get more stability in my life — how the fuck am I meant to do that if I lose my job?”

“I told you already, I’ll talk with your boss.”

“He won’t give a shit. You think he’ll even think twice about firing someone like me?”

“He will if I ask him not to. Now, I ask again — what is this and where did you get it?”

She crosses her arms, switches off. That’s as much as he’s going to get from her.

“Okay have it your way, Katja. You want to spend a night inside, be my guest. We’ll talk again in the morning.”

She kicks out at the back of the driver’s seat in frustration as he turns away again.

“I found it, okay?! Jesus. I don’t know where it came from. One of the customers at the diner left it behind.”

“I thought you hadn’t started your shift yet?”

“Yesterday,” she says quickly. “I found it yesterday. They didn’t leave a tip so I figured it would even us out. I don’t know what the hell is even in there. I was going to see if Januscz knew someone who would. Maybe see if it was worth something.”

And she almost convinces him with the story. Almost.

“Do you know what this means?” he asks her, tilting the vial toward her so the watermark on the glass shows up. She shrugs and perhaps she really doesn’t know or maybe she’s just not saying.

Aleksakhina knows what it means, however.

End of conversation.

“Fine. We’ll go to the station and I’ll be back in the morning. Maybe you’ll be more talkative then?”

She looks less controlled now, her desperation leaking through, and he lets the sentiment linger to give her one final chance to talk, but she doesn’t. He finds himself grateful for her silence because he has no intention of sitting in the quickly cooling car for much longer, while trying to wring information out of her that might be a dead end anyway.

He starts the engine, drags the complaining vehicle through the ghostly night traffic. Before he reaches the station, however, he suddenly jerks the wheel and pulls over again.

“Wait here,” he tells Katja, and he stalks across to a callbox daubed with bright yellow spray paint. He keeps one eye on the girl as he lifts the receiver, and is glad to hear a tone when he puts it to his ear.

He taps in the beginnings of a number. Stops.

Puts the phone down.

Picks it up, dials the number and finishes it this time.

“It’s me,” he says. “Nothing’s the matter. I know I said I wouldn’t call but . . . I just wanted to hear your voice. I can’t talk for long. She’s not here. No, I’m out. At work. Nothing, really. I just needed a break. Yes, I know. I miss you too.”

And he says, “Goodbye,” but the line is already dead.

He stands there for another few minutes and then takes out the vial, examines the watermark. He isn’t well-versed enough to know which of the dealers’ marks it is but it won’t take too much effort to find out.

He walks back to the car feeling, for some reason, worse than before he made the call. Colder.

He knows he should go home.

But he stops, returns to the phone, dials another number, which this time he has to look up first. It’s written in a notepad with no name or other means of identification beside it and the pad is filled with other numbers and addresses.

“It’s Anatoli,” he says when the connection is made. He avoids the use of his second name. “Oh. Will he be long? I see. No . . . I have something I’d like to show him. Something he might be interested in. Perhaps I should wait until I can speak to him. . . . Yes. Tonight, if possible. Yes. Thank you.”

He puts the phone down, rolls the vial between his fingers. Katja is staring at him now through the rear window of his car, watches him all the way until he gets in.

“What’s going on?” she asks suspiciously.

“Nothing, I just needed to make a few calls.”

“Calls to who?”

“Nothing you need concern yourself with.”

“So you’re taking me in now?”

“Soon,” he tells her. “I have to meet with someone first. You don’t have any other plans do you?”

Katja sneers.

“Let’s just get this over with,” she says.

The thing is, when you’re summoned by Szerynski, you go to him. You don’t really have a choice in the matter. There is no, “Maybe later.” There is no “I can’t, I’m busy.” And there is certainly no “Fuck off, I’ve got better things to do be doing with my time.”

There is only:

“Yes, Mr. Szerynski.”

So Kohl, that’s what he says, into the phone. “Yes, Mr. Szerynski.”

And when he presses a button to hang up the phone, he adds this:

“Fuck.”

Then he picks up the phone again and puts it to his ear. He wants to make sure he hung it up properly and that Szerynski didn’t hear that last comment.

The line is dead.

He hits the on/off button just to make sure. Static hums in his ears and there is no Szerynski.

He checks once more, just to be absolutely certain.

Spread out across the table before him are dozens, if not hundreds, of little pieces of metal and plastic. There are coils, springs, washers, and ball bearings. There are round knobs and angular ones. There are little spikes and there are rods of varying length. Most of them are scattered around the surface but there are some that he’s already arranged into neat piles. He’s categorizing them by size and type and material, having emptied them from the dozens of little drawers of the cabinet that stores them. They were already organized before he took them out but he performs this procedure every once in a while anyway.

It calms him.

He moves the coils to one side, separates them out depending on size, but then he finds that there are some of different size to every other coil there and that will not do. He needs even numbers. That’s what makes sense.

Odd numbers are . . . odd.

He shoves all the coils back into the main pile, losing them again to the other pieces of metal. Decides he will need to find another method of organization.

Weight?

Shape?

Reflectivity?

Something that will fit them all into place. Something that will make sense.

But there’s no time, Szerynski has summoned him. He must go.

He tightens the red-tinted goggles over his glaucoma-shot eyes, then quickly pushes all the fragments on the table into a single pile in the middle. He adjusts the pile minutely until it is as close to a perfect circle as he can manage, pokes the final few pieces that stick out.

It will have to do.

He puts on an old biker jacket, the symbols and patches of which have become worn and tattered, tells Misha that he is going out for a while. She is stretched out on the couch in the hallway, her oiled and muscled legs draped over the couch’s arm as she performs crunching sit-ups. Grunts at him.

Szerynski’s hole is ten blocks away and by the time Kohl gets there, his legs are wet up to the calves from the rainwater puddling the streets. The hole is actually a multi-storey garage with automated shutters instead of doors, and instead of windows, hatches large enough to crane cars out of. Automobile corpses are stacked three high on either side of the entrance and Kohl knows from past experience that Szerynski will have one of his men hidden in them.

He hits a buzzer and a moment later a shutter is opened at eye level and then there is the painful grinding sound of the door being opened.

The man who greets Kohl is like a bagful of meat. He probably once had a firm, muscular figure but for whatever reason his body has relaxed now, giving the effect of a melting sculpture.

“My name is Vladimir Kohl. I’m here to see Mr. Szerynski. He is expecting me.”

And as he is led inside, Kohl finds himself thinking about the pile of arcade machine pieces lying on his workbench. He thinks of the errant pieces that stick out at the sides and feels a desperate need to return and fix them.