Katja from the Punk Band (8 page)

“This way.”

Melting Man leads Kohl through the expansive room the door opens onto, obviously the main work area back when the place was still a working garage. The ramps that would have once jacked the cars up so engineers could look at their undersides remain in place and a number of pale, spidery-limbed girls and boys are variously leaning and lying on them.

Kohl ascends a metal staircase to the second floor, watching the way the Melting Man’s flesh moves hypnotically with each step.

He thinks of little pins and screws. Of curved and L-shaped edgings. Of hexagonal mouldings. And if he just keeps thinking of these, he won’t think about why Szerynski has summoned him there and what it might mean.

He hears the sound of chains as they approach the doorway to another workshop, of chains clanking together as if something wrapped within them is moving. He hesitates when a groan emerges from within and the Melting Man turns to him with a grin on his jiggling face. The grin says, I know you don’t want to go in there and I know you realize you have to.

Kohl is shoved inside and the smell of spices washes over him. There are about a dozen people gathered inside, mostly milling around in small groups next to an oil drum burning cool, green flames. The room is as tall as those downstairs, and he realizes the clanking sounds are coming from a pulley system of some sort being tended to by a couple of bare-chested, tattooed men.

Kohl is led to the other side of the shadowy room, to a medical gurney partially surrounded by a dirty plastic screen. Szerynski is naked and laid out on the table on his stomach. A woman in a tight white latex uniform stands behind him, a two-inch hook in one hand and a wad of redstained cotton in the other.

Szerynski looks up, notices Kohl and fixes his eyes upon the other man.

The woman in latex rubs a point on Szerynski’s back with the cotton, smearing the dark substance Kohl takes to be iodine. Then she pinches his skin between her thumb and forefinger, shoves the hook into it and it stretches the skin for a moment before popping and the hook goes straight through him.

Szerynski barely flinches, just keeps looking directly into Kohl’s eyes.

Then he says, “Kohl.”

As if they’re just sitting around in his office or one of his labs. As if he’s not lying there with six hooks perforating him along either side of his spinal column.

As if this was normal.

Kohl tries to play along.

“I was told you wanted to see me.”

“Indeed.”

Szerynski flinches a little as another hook punctures him, this time farther out toward his shoulder, where his deltoids meet his infraspinatus muscles. Little tears of blood trickle across his skin, weeping for him because he will not.

Kohl’s fingers are entwined. He’s trying to fight back the anxiety caused by the open wounds, fresh blood, and rusted metal. He thinks he hears bugs or rats in the walls.

Half-inch washers. Three-quarter-inch ones.

Arrange the coils according to age, not size. How will he know how old they are? So according to their condition, then.

No, too subjective.

“Kohl.”

And Kohl snaps himself out of his daydream. Szerynski is waving him to one side, the latex nurse standing behind the gurney now. Kohl steps aside and she pushes the prostrate, punctured man past and toward the gurney the tattooed men are still working on.

The rest of them, the others gathered there, are turning now, preparing themselves for what is to come.

Kohl’s stomach clenches.

He goes to Szerynski’s side once more and wonders if this is some sort of twisted warning.

“I have some information,” Szerynski tells him as he is swung around on the bed. The tattooed men pull on the chains and Kohl sees sturdy metal loops on the end. “Dracyev is onto something new. He’s cooked it up already.”

One of the men pulls the nearest hook up toward the metal loop he holds in one hand, stretching Szerynski’s skin out several inches until it is spread thin enough that Kohl can see the blood pumping through the veins within. Szerynski grimaces and another trickle of blood begins and then he is hooked into the first loop.

“He’s getting one of his mules to take it to the mainland tonight. He’ll be travelling on a cargo ship at midnight.”

A second hook is latched onto a loop. The skin remains stretched because the chains don’t come all the way down. It looks like little volcanoes of flesh erupting along the chemist-dealer’s back.

“I want you to intercept the man before he can get there. Take the chemical from him using whatever means necessary.”

Another hook, another.

Szerynski’s features contort. When they soften once more he says, “You understand?”

“Dracyev?” Kohl says. “I’m not . . .”

“Not what?” Szerynski asks. “Not one of my employees? Not bothered about pissing me off and returning to being the fucking useless junkie you were when I first met you? Not what, Vladimir?”

“Nothing.”

A high-pitched humming sounds and the chains begin to tighten. They are being slowly, slowly dragged toward the ceiling and soon, therefore, will Szerynski.

“I ask you a favour and I give you a reward, is that not my way?”

And his words are almost drowned out by the sound of the machinery and the excited gasps of the gathered crowd — most of whom, Kohl notes, are young women.

“Yes,” Kohl says weakly.

“Good. If you do this for me then I will find a position for you which will reward you justly.”

Kohl stands and watches as Szerynski drifts toward the ceiling, suspended from the eight hooks poking out of his skin like parasitic worms, vanishing into the darkness above.

Fuck that.

He’s not going to get stuck in the middle of any gang rivalry. Szerynski has been good to him in his own unique way but Kohl knows where his limits lie. He knows what can happen when you start dicking around with other dealers; he’s seen the results himself.

He’s back in his workshop and he’s finished organizing the washers and coils and other miscellanea and neatly put them back into the little drawers in the cabinet and he’s not feeling any better for it. The world doesn’t make any more sense. Size and shape and material. Everything just blurring at the edges, chaos.

He picks up a fragged circuit board that has been pulled out of a battered cabinet he doubts will ever return to the floor. He can see where the solder lines that bus the game’s information from one chip to another have cracked and so grabs his blowtorch and fires it up.

Distraction.

Deviation.

And the buzzer goes — the buzzer that’s connected to the booth downstairs where Fat Rita sits for sixteen hours a day in return for as much coffee and cans of processed food as she can handle.

He ignores it at first but it goes again and so he answers and it’s Rita because it’s always Rita and Rita tells him that one of his customers is here to see him and the rest, the rest has already been told.

So skip forward to Kohl, pinning the useless fucking junkie, pinning Nikolai, to the wall with the blowtorch looming in his face like an angry serpent.

The junkie has been unlucky enough to catch Kohl at this awkward moment and Kohl has exploded in the man’s face as the circuit boards do from time to time, taking his money, fucking him over just because he can, because he’s feeling fucked over by Szerynski. He’s taking it out on Nikolai as if he can encourage some sort of transference that will rid him of the problem of Szerynski’s offer.

His instruction.

He lets the torch bring hundreds of little marbles of sweat to Nikolai’s brow, then sweeps it across his neck.

“If you ever want me to even consider selling you or any of your junkie friends anything ever again then you’ll do what’s good for you and get the fuck out of my joint right now.”

The junkie seems confused by Kohl’s gentle tones and so the chemical dealer sweeps the torch across Nikolai’s throat once more.

Kohl shouts for Misha and the woman barges in, hooks Nikolai cleanly and catches him before he falls to the ground. She holds him up so Kohl can sneer into his face.

“You bring me the rest of what you owe me by tomorrow night, Nikolai. Then we can talk further.”

And then Misha drags the little piece of shit away and the door slams shut and Kohl slumps back into his seat.

And it’s not until later that he realizes how stupid he has been.

But he does realize, eventually, as he’s still sitting in his workshop stewing over being forced into helping Szerynski when all he wants is for his life to be calm, controlled, ordered. To make sense.

He realizes that there’s no need to risk anything at all.

Szerynski wants the vial. He wants Kohl to get it for him.

He didn’t specify, however, that it should be Kohl personally, who gets it.

Szerynski is getting Kohl to do his dirty work so why shouldn’t Kohl do the same? Dog eats dog eats dog eats dog and so on, and Kohl says to himself, as he walks away from Nikolai’s run-down apartment building: “A place for everything and everything in its place.”

Nikolai, he realizes, has his place.

The joystick junkie fitted neatly into the socket Szerynski created, as easily as a lithium ion battery would clip into the motherboard of a games cabinet.

So Kohl, he’s back at the arcade now but not hidden away in his workshop, instead knee-deep in pixel-air and gamer-shouts. Bathing in the buzz generated by a room full of spaced-out kids and groggy old timers who can no longer play because their fingers have become too gnarled.

Many know who Kohl is, many don’t. But he’s not after recognition.

The glow of the machines bleeds into the air before him, a strange side effect of the goggles he wears, and at times he is walking through these colourful tides and swears he feels them wash over him. And he is smiling because he is thinking about Nikolai bringing him the vial in return for a pittance of product, risking his itching junkie neck for a couple of hits.

And he is thinking about then calling Szerynski and giving the vial to him and in return getting whatever reward the chemical lord has in mind with little real risk to Kohl himself.

And he is thinking about rearranging the cabinets sometime soon, giving them a fresh sense of order, organizing them by height or age or game-play style.

He sits on the ledge created by the high backs of the booth seats, watching the gamers, listening to the cries of joy and annoyance and waiting, just waiting for Nikolai to come back to him with the vial, and he has no idea how wrong things are about to go.

He uses the tattoos as guides and presses the end of the scalpel blade into his skin where the design curves from one tribal spike to another. Drags the blade along the arc, drawing a line of blood that rises through the cut and chases the implement like fire running along a kerosene trail.

He pauses, wipes the blood away, then starts again at another part of the design. He’s in lab 34, one of the smaller rooms toward the back of the complex and away from the permanent partying that takes place in the main warehouse where he would, later that night, put on a display of either suspension or kavadi. It will depend on how he feels nearer the time.

The room is dark, save for the surgical light he points down at his arm, laid out upon an empty instrument tray. He wipes away new blood as it rises to the surface, then with his free hand picks up a bottle of India ink and offers it to the girl sitting on the worktop beside him.

She’s made a vague attempt at putting her clothes back on after that afternoon’s activities but looks as if she got bored after a few minutes or perhaps hadn’t had full control of her limbs. She’s missed one of the arm straps of her t-shirt and one of her stockings has slouched back down to calf-level, like a half-shed skin. She doesn’t notice Szerynski offering her the ink bottle because she’s too busy examining the fresh, wet welts left by the ropes he had used on her.

“Open this,” he says to get her attention.

She hops off the worktop and the stocking tumbles to her ankle. She opens the bottle for him and places it back down on the instrument tray. His blood, meanwhile, is making patterns like the scrawl of some ancient language upon his skin. She leans into the light for a closer look.

Szerynski wipes the blood away again then touches the index finger of his free hand to the ink. Pauses.

“What you told me earlier, you heard this from Dracyev yourself?” he asks the girl.

She says
yeah
distractedly. She’s watching the ink droplet gathering on the tip of his finger, precariously held there by surface tension alone, lingering over the fresh cuts.

“You fucked him?”

“Yeah.” Distractedly again. “Are you going to . . . ?”

“In a minute. You’re sure it’s tonight? The courier is taking it to the mainland tonight?”

“Yes.”

The droplet is stretching now, straining against the laws of physics, as if desperate to plunge into the wound itself.

“Tonight. A guy called . . . called . . . shit . . .”

And she tries to remember quickly, wanting him to just get on with it.

“. . . Januscz. I don’t know his second name. He’s just a runner.”

“Why would Dracyev pick him to take it? If it’s as important to him as you said . . .”

“I don’t know. Maybe because he’s disposable.”

“Everyone’s disposable.”

And Szerynski suddenly hisses as the ink drops into one of the fresh cuts. He presses his finger down and rubs the ink along the groove of the opened flesh, working it in deeply, and it feels like hydrochloric acid because of the way it burns. His arm shakes with pain and so he concentrates on swallowing the sensation, drawing it into himself.

His eyes close and in his mind is whitespace. Nothingness.

He opens his eyes again and the girl, she’s still there, staring down at the wounds. The cuts would take about a week to heal, another week or so to scab off, and after that there would just be the thick clear lines of the ink rubbing.