Firewall (43 page)

From the window I watched the traffic lining up at the checkpoint. It looked even more like a movie scene now that floodlights were soaking the area in a brilliant white glow. The same couldn't be said for the lighting this side of the river.

All four now sat at the table, pouring the last of the whiskey and lighting up. There was a lot of talk from them, which drowned out the low-volume gunfight Kirk was winning on the opposite side of the room.

The old guy pulled packets of sausage and dark rye bread from the shopping bag and threw them onto the table, while the others tore open the plastic protection around the sliced meat and ripped off lumps of bread.

I watched, feeling a bit hungry myself, but I didn't imagine I'd be on the guest list.

It became obvious, as heads nodded in my direction, mixed with quick glances, that I was the subject of conversation. One of the boys said something and they all looked over. There was a little joke said and a few snickers. Then it all got serious again as they got back to eating.

I kept pretending to look out of the window and be unaware of what was going on behind me.

A chair scraped on the bare wooden floor and shoes echoed on the boards as one of them came toward me. I turned and smiled at the old guy in his hat, watching as the TV shone on him in the gloom when he passed the screen. He was facing me, but talking back to the others, looking very serious. This wasn't another leg pulling. An index finger started pointing at me as he got closer, as if to reinforce whatever he was jabbering off about. I looked down in submission and slightly turned back toward the window.

From less than a foot away he began to poke me in the back, shouting very close to my head. I turned and looked at him, confused and frightened, then looked down, just like Tom would have. I smelled garlic and alcohol, and as he continued to rant and poke, flecks of sausage hit my face. His face, creased and leathered and showing a day's stubble, was now no more than a few inches away as the fur from his hat brushed against my forehead. He bellowed at me again.

I wasn't going to react by moving or wiping away his shit from my face; it might antagonize him even more. I just stood and let him get on with it, just like I'd done at school when teachers went ballistic.

I was never scared; I knew they would finish or get bored with it quickly, so fuck 'em, let them get on with their fun so I could skip school straight afterward. It was one of the attitudes that had fucked up my life.

I moved my left hand to the window and supported myself, as I was getting the four-finger poke now, my body jerking back with each jab.

Glancing across, I could see the other three at the table, their cigarettes glowing in the semidarkness, enjoying the cabaret.

The shouting and bad breath continued.

Sounding as frightened as I could I stammered, "I am here for Eight… er… Vv-vorsim."

He mocked me. "V-v-v-orsim." Turning toward the table, he mimed injecting his arm, laughing along with the other three.

He turned back and gave me one last shove against the window. I took it and then steadied myself as he headed back for more garlic sausage.

He was obviously talking about me as he pretended to take a line from his index finger, to the accompaniment of further laughter. Let them think it; the drama was over. Now where the fuck was Eight?

I looked out of the window again, slowly wiping all the shit off my face as the floorboards echoed toward me once more. He was coming back for seconds.

He got right up on me again and gave me a push with both hands. He was fucking with me; he was having some fun, maybe taking out some frustration. The others laughed as I rode the pushes and tried to lean against the window frame, still showing no resistance, looking forlornly at the floor to appear even less of a threat.

He got more serious with each push and I began to get pissed. After one particularly hard one I stumbled backward toward the television.

He followed me, the pushes now punctuated with the odd slap round the head. I kept my face down, not wanting him to see in my eyes what I was really thinking. He kept repeating the same word over and over, then he started gesturing, rubbing fingers and pointing at my boots.

Did he want my money and Timberlands? Money I could understand, but boots?

This was getting out of control. If I was right he would be getting a lot more than he bargained for if my boots came off. I couldn't let that happen.

I held my hands up in submission. "Stop! Stop! Stop!"

He did, and waited for his cash.

I slowly reached into the inside pocket of the jacket and pulled out the insurance policy, still inside its protection. He looked at the condom and then at me, his eyes narrowing.

Untying the knot at the end, I probed inside with two fingers.

He barked a question at me, then, shouting something at the others, he grabbed the condom and roughly fished inside. Opening the thin paper and partly tearing it in the process, he turned to the table and waved it at them, as if sharing the lucky prediction in a fortune cookie.

Bending down into the light given off by Kirk on his horse, he pushed the note in front of the screen. His laughter subsided as he started to read. Then it stopped completely. Whatever the bit of paper said, it was doing the business.

He walked over to the others, looking extremely pissed as he muttered, "Ignaty. Ignaty."

I hadn't a clue what that meant and I didn't really care. They all had a read, and it had the same effect on everyone. They slowly turned their heads and stared at me across the room. I brought my hands together in front of me, not wanting to appear a threat. It was good the policy had worked, but it meant I might have to put up with their loss of face. Some people have the fuck-it factor when this sort of thing happens, and regardless of the possible fallout they'll still retaliate because their pride has been hurt. I couldn't afford to fuel that by appearing at all cocky; I still wasn't out of the woods.

Walking over to the table, my face full of respect, I put out my left hand, making sure that Lion King wasn't exposed. It wouldn't exactly help me maintain my new standing. I nodded at the sheet of paper.

"Please."

He may not have understood the word, but he knew what it meant. He handed it back, hating every second of it, and I folded it carefully and put it in my pocket. Now wasn't the time to start putting it back into a condom. "Thank you." I gave a little bow of the head and, with my heart pumping as hard as if it was forcing crude oil through my arteries, I turned my back to them and walked to the TV.

Sitting as casually as I could in the chair facing the screen, I watched Kirk still taming the Wild West, leaning forward to hear what was happening out there in the desert. My pulse was louder than the TV.

I could tell that once I was out of earshot there was going to be some very loud shouting, but for now there was just low, disgruntled murmuring behind me. Where the fuck was Eight? Not wanting to turn or look in any other direction than the screen, I sat like a child who thinks he can't be seen at bedtime if he just concentrates hard and doesn't move.

They carried on mumbling as glasses were banged with the neck of the whiskey bottle to drown their anger. My eyes were on the screen and my ears were on them.

Five minutes later, just as Kirk was about to save the girl, Eight came back into the room. I didn't understand what he was saying as he fought with the zip on his leatherette jacket, but by the look of it, we were leaving. Muttering a silent prayer of thanks, I got to my feet and tried not to show my relief.

As Eight went to the door and I passed the table, they got a respectful bow from me before I followed him downstairs at the speed of sound.

35

Eight was a happy camper the moment he caught sight of his beloved Lada in the noisy parking lot.

"Where do we go now, Vorsim?"

"An apartment." He already had the Lada's hood open.

I heard two metallic bangs as the starter motor got a reminder as to what it did for a living.

The Lada eventually fired up and he drove us both out of the parking lot and turned right, toward the traffic circle. The "komfort baars" all had enormous doormen standing under their flashing neon to control the evening's trade. Turning left this time at the traffic circle, away from the river, we drove past even more establishments and parked trucks.

The baars' lights slowly disappeared and the darkness took over again.

Now apartment and industrial buildings lined the road, in between electrical towers and shells of crumbling masonry.

Fighting with two trucks that were trying to overtake each other, both throwing up waves of ice and snow, we turned left without indicating, then left again down a narrow street, with apartments to the left and a tall wall to the right.

Eight threw the Lada into the side of the road and jumped out. "Wait here, my man."

Skirting the inevitable tower leg, he headed for the main door of one of the buildings. He stopped and checked the stenciling, gave me the thumbs up, then turned back toward the Lada to lock up. I got out and waited.

The loud, constant noise of machinery came from behind the wall as I entered a very cold, dimly lit hallway, so narrow I could easily have put my arms out and touched both walls. It stank of boiled cabbage.

Tiles were missing from the floor and the walls were painted blue, apart from the places where big chunks of plaster had fallen to the ground. Nobody had bothered to sweep them up. The apartment doors, which were one-piece sheet metal with three locks and a spy hole, looked so low that you'd have to stoop when entering.

We waited for the elevator by rows of wooden mailboxes. Most of the doors had been ripped from their hinges and the others were just left open. I'd have felt more comfortable walking into a South American jail.

The wall by the elevator was covered with a mass of hand painted instructions, all in Russian. It gave me something to look at while we listened to the motor groaning inside the shaft.

The machinery stopped with a loud shudder and the doors opened. We entered an aluminum box, its paneling dented everywhere it was possible for boots to have connected. It reeked of urine. Eight hit the button for the fourth floor and we lurched upward, the elevator stopping suddenly every few feet, then starting again, as if it had forgotten where to go. Eventually we reached the fourth floor and the doors opened into semidarkness. I let him step out ahead of me. Turning left, Eight stumbled, and as I followed I found out why: a young kid was curled up on the floor.

As the doors slammed shut again, cutting out even more of the dim light, I bent down to examine his small body, bulked out by two or three badly knitted sweaters. By his head lay two empty chip bags, and thick, dried snot hung from his nostrils to his mouth. He was breathing and he wasn't bleeding, but even in the feeble light from the ceiling bulb it was obvious that he was in shit state. Zits covered the area around his mouth and saliva dribbled from his lips. He was about the same age as Kelly; I suddenly thought of her and felt a surge of emotion. As long as I was around she would never be exposed to this kind of shit. As long as I was around… I could see the expression on Dr. Hughes' face.

Eight looked down at the boy with total disinterest. He kicked the bags, turned away, and carried on walking. I dragged the local glue head out of the way of the elevator and followed.

We turned left along a hall, Eight singing some Russian rap song and pulling a string of keys from his jacket. Reaching the door right at the end, he messed about, trying to work out which key went where until finally it opened, then groping for the light switch.

The room we entered definitely wasn't the source of the boiled cabbage stench. I could smell the heavy odor of wooden crates and gun oil; I would have known that smell anywhere. Proust's friend's childhood might have rushed back to him when he caught a whiff of madeleine cakes; this one took me straight back to the age of sixteen and the very first day I joined the army as a boy soldier in '76. Cakes would have been better.

The inevitable single bulb lit up a very small hall, no more than a couple of feet square. There were two doors leading off; Eight went through the one on the left and I followed, closing the front door behind me and throwing all the locks. Only one of the four bulbs worked in the ceiling cluster that any 1960s family would have been proud of. The small room was stacked with wooden crates, waxed cardboard boxes, and loose explosive ordnance, all stenciled with Cyrillic script. The whole lot looked very Chad-Chad that was dangerously past its use-by date.

Nearest to me was a stack of brown wooden crates with rope handles.

Lifting the lid off the top one, I recognized the dull green bedpan shapes at once. Eight, grinning from ear to ear, made the noise of an explosion, his hands flying everywhere. He seemed to know they were land mines too. "See, my man, I get what you want. Guarantee of satisfaction, yes?"

I just nodded as I looked around some more. Piles of other kit lay wrapped in brown military wax paper. Elsewhere, damp cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other had collapsed, spilling their contents onto the floorboards. Lying in a corner were half a dozen electric detonators, aluminum tubes about the size of a quarter-smoked cigarette with two eighteen-inch silver wire leads coming out of one end. The silver leads were loose, not twisted together, which was frightening stuff: it meant they were ready to act as antennae for any stray extraneous electricity-a radio wave, say, or energy from a mobile phone-to set them off and probably all the rest of the shit in there, too. This place was a nightmare. It seemed the Russians hadn't been too fussed about where this kind of stuff ended up in the early nineties.

Picking up the detonators one by one, I twisted the leads together to close the circuit, then checked out the rest of the kit, ripping open cardboard boxes. Eight did the same, either to make me think he knew what he was doing or just out of curiosity. I gripped his arm and shook my head, not wanting him to play with anything. It would be nice to get out of here with all my bits and without him losing any more fingers.