Where the Devil Can't Go (15 page)

The sky outside the bathroom window was almost light when Janusz opened his eyes and saw grey floor tiles. He flinched reflexively – for a split second he was back in a cell in Montepulich, after getting worked over by
milicja
thugs. Using the edge of the bath to lever himself up, he rose cautiously to his feet, his head a pulsing balloon of pain. Propping himself against the sink, he risked a look in the mirror.

From his left cheekbone to his eyebrow the swollen flesh was the colour of stewed red cabbage, and the cut on his temple where the fucker had cracked it on the floor had spun a spider’s web of dried blood across his face. At the base of his skull, a bruise the size of his palm was already beetroot purple, and just to round it all off, blood from the wound in his throat had run down in rivulets and clotted obscenely in his chest hair. He looked like the hands-down loser of an illegal cage fight.

Straightening up with exaggerated care, he gasped with pain and fingered his side.
Kurwa!
The fucking bastard had broken, or at least cracked, a rib as well. Seized with a paroxysm of rage, Janusz grabbed the ceramic toothbrush holder off the sink and smashed it into the mirror. It made a satisfying racket. He pulled a savage grin at his reflection, broken and distorted by the cracked glass. “Just wait till I find you,
skurwysyn
,” he said out loud.

A minute or two later he heard an urgent knocking. Holding a wad of bloodied bog roll to staunch the fresh cuts on his hand, Janusz threw open the front door to his flat so hard it hit the wall, sending up a puff of plaster dust. It was his next-door neighbour, a weedy type with trendy thick-rimmed glasses, worked in an art gallery or something. Oskar always insisted the guy was gay – but then, if you listened to Oskar, you’d think the only cast iron guarantee of heterosexuality was a manual job.

At the sight of Janusz, the guy’s mouth fell slackly open.

“I was...I was...I just...”

He couldn’t get the words out.

“I heard…rather, I
think
I heard..”

“I broke a cup,” said Janusz, deadpan. “You want to come in and check maybe?” he swept an arm into the flat, “Be my guest.”

“No. No!” The guy – Sebastian, that was his name – now had both hands out in front of him, palms flat, and started backing away down the hall.

It was only then that Janusz remembered he was stark naked.

“Sorry!” he called out after his neigbour.

He cranked the shower up to its hottest setting and let the jets batter his bruised flesh while he digested the meaning of his nighttime visitation.

Adamski – who else? – had obviously heard that Janusz was on his tail and tracked him down to the flat. The
chuj
could have no idea, of course, that he’d already quit the job.

He had just finished soaping himself all over when the landline started chirping. Cursing, he was tempted to ignore it, but then a thought struck him: it could be Kasia, calling before her shift. Maybe she regretted the stupid row two days before and wanted to meet up. He strode into the living room, towelling off the suds roughly.

“
Czesc?”
he said into the cracked receiver.

“Am I interrupting anything?” It was Marta, and straight onto the attack, as usual.

“No, Marta, I was just in the shower,” he said.

“
Naprawde
, Janusz, I can never get hold of you – haven’t you got a new mobile phone yet?”

He glanced at the black oblong winking in its charger on the mantelpiece.

“I’m still looking for a good deal - shopping around,” he growled, pulling the towel round his shoulders. “What are you calling about?”

She adopted her understanding tone, the one that always made him grind his teeth.

“I know you are busy, Janek, but Bobek is thirteen next month – and it’s over six weeks since you telephoned him.”

Christ. Was it really fourteen years since that stupid drunken night when they nearly got back together? He recalled waking the next morning, gradually focussing on the watercolour landscapes hung on the grey walls – Marta had a modest talent as a painter, and they were her touching, pathetic attempt to enliven the grim Soviet tower block hutch in the Warsaw suburbs that had once been their marital home. Then the sensing of the body next to him and the jab of fear as he remembered her whispered ‘Don’t use anything’.

“I sent him cash at Christmas,” protested Janusz, hunkering down in his towel by the radiator, suppressing a gasp as his rib sent out shards of pain.

“Oh the cheque was fantastic,” said Marta, lapsing into her usual sarcasm. “Let me see. It took him out to play football, it helped him with his homework, it gave him a beating for taking a knife to school...”

“He took a blade to
school
? Mother of God, Marta!” He was gripped by the sudden, irrational fear that Bobek would grow up like Adamski. “You’ve got to be tougher with him!”

“Oh! and now
Londonek Tata
tells me I don’t bring my son up properly!” - when Marta raised her voice it became thin and grating, like a drill going through steel. Anger clawed at his throat.

“Marta...”

“But no doubt you are busy having a great time with some new girlfriend while I get teenage dirty looks and non-stop
hip hop.
” She was on a roll now.

He fought down his rage and guilt.

“Listen Marta, I swear on the Virgin that I will telephone him for a chat – soon.” Ignoring her enraged response he continued: “I have to go - there is someone at the door.”

Crashing the receiver into its battered cradle, he leaned against the radiator, and fingered his swollen and aching face. All this
dramat
, from a single drunken shag – and that after they had been apart for seven years!

Copetka was giving him the silent treatment from the kitchen doorway.

“Don’t you start on me!” he burst out, causing the startled cat to flee, claws scrabbling on the floorboards. Then he realised he hadn’t fed him since the previous morning. Going to the kitchen, he clattered out a double portion of dried food onto a plate and stroked him as he ate it.

Janusz filled a pint glass from the tap and stood drinking it, looking out of the kitchen window. In all his twenty-odd years living here, he’d never been burgled, but now he noticed for the first time how easy it would be to break in. Any reasonably fit guy could scale the two-metre fence at the rear of the block, and from there it was three flights up the handy cast-iron fire escape to the kitchen’s sash window, usually left open so the cat could go to and fro.

“No more Hotel Kiszka for you, Copetka,” he said to the cat as he closed the window and fastened the catch. “You go out in the morning and don’t get back in till I come home, like a homeless hostel.”

The idea that someone had simply strolled in while he slept filled him with impotent rage. Worse, it also made him feel vulnerable, an emotion he hadn’t permitted himself for many years.

Getting dressed was a slow and painful process. Then he propped the medicine chest on the bathroom sink and, using the shattered mirror as a guide, dressed his wounds with antiseptic salve, stuck a small plaster over the cut on his temple which wouldn’t stop bleeding, and wound a bandage round his cut hand.

Marta’s call had dredged up the past like silt in a storm drain. He found himself reflecting that marrying her had been his life’s biggest mistake – no, make that the second biggest. He couldn’t even remember the marriage service: he had been as drunk as a log. Back then, in the weeks after Iza’s death, he had been smashed from the time he opened his eyes in the morning till the moment he fell asleep – lost consciousness, more like – in the early hours.

When he’d finally sobered up, weeks later, he found that somehow, amid all the craziness, he really had married Marta, even though friends like Oskar, and his mother, God rest her soul, said they had tried everything to talk him out of it. Well they’d been proved right. He and Marta were a disaster: the only thing that bound them was Iza, his lover and her best friend. When Marta found out she couldn’t compete with a ghost, she soured faster than a pail of milk in August - and who could blame her?

As for Bobek, he loved the boy – would kill for him, no question – but he wasn’t cut out for parenthood. Whenever he remembered with a jolt that he was a father, he had the sensation of something reaching up from the depths of a murky lake to drag him under.

He decided to make some
kompot
, defrosting his last precious kilo of damsons, retrieved from the back of the freezer. As always, the simple pleasures of cooking – weighing out the sugar, juicing a lemon, the sharp autumnal fragrance as he stirred the simmering berries – helped to settle and focus his thoughts. Until the harsh electronic tone of the doorbell made him drop the wooden spoon.

Pressing the entry phone speaker, he heard the voice of a girl saying she was from the police. He froze for a moment, then buzzed her up – what else could he do? He spun through all his recent deals, racking his brains for what the visit might be about. The Smeg appliances he’d got for Slawek? OK, he hadn’t
stolen
them, but the payment method – a wad of cash handed over in a pub to someone called John – probably wouldn’t go down well with the cops.

And then there was the escapade at Adamski’s cottage: what if someone had got the van’s plate and traced it to Oskar?

Then he opened the flat door – and almost laughed out loud. The girl looked about twenty, for Christ’s sake, she barely came up to his chest, and she was much too pretty to be a policewoman. OK, she had a Met ID card, but from her smart trouser suit, he guessed she was a civilian officer – maybe working in community liaison or some such crap. If it were anything important they would hardly have sent a girl.

Kershaw accepted Kiszka’s offer of coffee and took a chair at the kitchen table. From the moment she set eyes on him, adrenaline had started coursing through her veins. Two metres tall and powerfully built, the guy was the size of a wardrobe, and from the state of his face, he’d been in a major ruck in the last few hours. She noticed him grimace, hand shooting to his side, as he reached up to get some cups off a shelf.
Broken rib, too.
Janusz Kiszka was clearly no stranger to violence.

While he was spooning ground coffee into an old-style steel percolator, Kershaw checked the place out. The scruffy, orange pine kitchen units hadn’t been replaced since the Eighties, and the piles of junk mail and dirty crockery on the worktop screamed ‘man living alone’, but a rack of pricey-looking copper-bottomed pans, and the hot fruity smell emanating from the hob suggested a girlfriend, or wife, in residence.

“That smells good,” she said. “Does your partner enjoy cooking?”

“Partner?” He laughed. “I live alone.” He waved a self-deprecating hand “Anyway, it’s not really cooking – just some
kompot
”.

Go figure
, she thought,
Eastern European thugs make their own jam
.

When the percolator finished burbling, Janusz served the coffee in proper cups and saucers, and offered the girl milk in a china jug – she was a guest, after all. Then he sat down opposite her and leaned both forearms on the table. “Let me guess,” he said, with an apologetic grin. “One of my neighbours called to complain about some noise this morning?”

Kershaw just smiled and took a sip of the insanely strong coffee. The guy’s condescending look, his relaxed body language, suggested he thought a female was nothing to worry about. Well, if it meant he was off his guard that suited her just fine. While he gave her some old bollocks about how he’d slipped getting out of the shower and smashed the bathroom mirror, she gave him the discreet once-over.

Fortyish, with dark brown hair, longish – a style that went out of fashion in the Nineties – and peppered with grey. Not bad looking, if you went in for the caveman look.

“Was that how you hurt your face, Sir, the accident with the mirror?” she asked, scrunching up her forehead in sympathy.

He hesitated, then nodded, touching the swollen flesh over his cheekbone.
Shit
, he’d almost forgotten how he must look.

She lifted the coffee to her lips, “And the bruise on the back of your neck?” meeting his eyes over the rim of her cup. He was about to agree when he realised that wouldn’t wash.

“Actually, I was involved in a car crash last night. Nothing serious but, well I must confess I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt,” he said with an apologetic grin. “I’ve learned my lesson now.”

Bullshit.
“Was this your car, Mr Kizz-ka, or a friend’s car?”

He looked up at the ceiling.

“It was a hackney cab, actually.”

“You mean a
black cab
?” Aside from the odd prehistoric phrase, his English was surprisingly fluent. In fact, if it wasn’t for the accent and something indefinably foreign about his look, his clothes, she might almost describe him, as well,
posh.

“Yes. I missed the last tube, so I hailed one in the street.”

Making it untraceable, of course, should she want to check his story.

“A broken mirror
and
a car crash!” she said. “Would you describe yourself as accident-prone, Mr Kizz-ka?” – a hint of sarcasm entering her voice.

“It’s
Kish-ka
,” he corrected her, stretching his lips into a smile, “
Yan-ush Kish-ka.
” His head had started booming like a timpani, but he knew he had to keep his cool.
What the hell was this girl doing here
?

“Can I ask what you do for a living, Mr Kish-ka?”

“I am a businessman,” he said, cradling his coffee – the cup almost disappearing in his hands, she noticed. “Import and export, mostly.”

Kershaw nodded at a pile of
New Scientist
magazines lying on the table.

“Is your line of work scientific?”

“Not really, I just have a inquiring mind.” He smiled again, to soften any rudeness in the remark.

She drank her coffee. Streaky had told her once that silence was the most underrated weapon in interrogation.