Pavel & I (22 page)

‘Who?'

He walked past her and threw open first the kitchen, then the bedroom door. There, upon the edge of her bed, sat the Colonel, stroking the monkey upon his knees. He was so fat that his stomach came halfway to his thighs. The monkey clung to it like a suckling babe.

‘Ah, Pavel! How do you do?'

Pavel stood in the doorway, hands clenched into fists, unsure of himself.

‘A glass of brandy perhaps? You look like you are freezing. Sonia, a glass for our guest, and make it quick.'

Fosko rose, depositing the monkey on the floor. Once again Pavel marvelled at how effortlessly he moved.

‘But we should go through to the living room. A lady's boudoir – it is no place for men to talk. Not amongst crumpled linen.' He waved carelessly towards where Sonia's negligee peeked out from under one pillow. ‘I sense you have something important to convey.'

They returned to the living room, the Colonel leading Pavel by the elbow, Pavel allowing himself to be led. Sonia lined up two glasses, and poured from the half-empty bottle. They raised them solemnly in front of their faces; stood eye to eye like duellists; drank. Pavel's left, he noticed, remained in the guise of a fist.

‘You have been out and about on business?' Fosko asked, as though innocently.

‘You know I have.'

‘Then perhaps it was imprudent to go. Unhealthy, even. For you and your associates.'

‘You wouldn't dare.'

A flicker of amusement ran through the Colonel's face. He shaped his lips into a smile.

‘It is not a phrase you should grow fond of.'

He waved for Sonia to top them up. It occurred to Pavel that Fosko might be very drunk just then.

‘I should go,' he muttered, thinking that he must run back to Paulchen's, and warn the boys.

‘On the contrary – you should stay awhile. It is I who has to leave. Duty calls.'

Fosko's eyes ran over Sonia's body, ignoring her face.

‘She's quite something, wouldn't you say, Pavel? Good legs on her, and that husky voice. Oh-la-la. And the tits are a dream. She's morally tainted, of course, but I know what you'll say. The world has ill used her. So it has, my friend, so it has.'

‘Don't you dare –'

‘My mistake, forgive me. I forgot that you are delicately put
together, though I daresay there's a cock on you some place. In any case, where's my coat? I have some business to attend to.'

He dressed with great rapidity, drawing his mink coat around him. At the door, he stopped himself like a man who has forgotten his umbrella.

‘You enjoy yourself. My house is your house. There will be time to speak further – later.'

Through all this Pavel could do nothing but stand and stare. It was that, or launch himself at the man and strangle him with his bare hands. It was an unbecoming thought.

No sooner had Fosko closed the door behind him than Sonia ran past Pavel and into the bedroom. Pavel did not understand her urgency until he heard the tinkle of her urine stream, violent against the chamber pot's side. Embarrassed for her, he retreated to the far end of the room and even turned his back. She re-emerged a minute later, rubbing at her hands with a shard of ice.

‘Nerves,' she shrugged, and he smiled to assure her he quite understood.

‘I should go. He sounds like he's planning … mischief.'

She laughed at his word. Pavel sat down upon the sofa.

‘I really should go,' he repeated.

‘Forget it,' she whispered. ‘You're finished. The minute you walk out this door.'

She stepped over to him and sat by his side. Through his anger and his fear he could smell the fragrance of her hair. He reached for her hand, not looking. By accident he touched her thigh instead. She recoiled and moved a half-foot away from him. They sat next to each other, conscious of the gap, and stared at the wall.

‘What did he do to you?' he asked at length.

She shrugged, sought his eyes, then evaded them once they'd found her.

‘Nothing,' she croaked. ‘But he knows.'

‘Knows what?'

‘He knows that I – but what's the use in saying it?'

Pavel wished that, just once, she would use the word.

‘I love you?' he murmured.

She got up to blow her nose. Perhaps she had not heard him. He watched her pace the room, then settle herself before the piano. Her fingers stroked the keys but did not strike them. Things would have been better had she played.

‘We could just give him what he wants.' Sonia's eye travelled to the teapot in the cupboard. ‘It might change things for you.'

He shook his head.

‘No, we can't do that. Not if he killed Boyd we can't.'

His voice sounded stubborn to himself, like a child's, but Sonia did not argue the point.

‘Fine,' she said. ‘Better that way. For myself, that is.'

‘Just tell me one thing,' he asked meekly.

‘Yes.'

‘Did you know Boyd would die?'

‘I knew he was a pawn who thought himself king.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I knew he would die. I helped kill him.'

‘You had no choice.'

‘How do you know?'

He heard her say it and fell to thinking.

Thinking that Sonia had grown hard in the war, hardest of all on herself.

‘I must go,' he said yet again, and struggled to raise himself from out of the couch. She did not stir at the announcement but sat round-shouldered upon her stool. And then, just as it seemed they would part in anger, another kiss, their third, pressed up against the piano, his hand sounding bass notes. In all his life there had been no kiss such as this.

‘You taste of brandy,' she said, light-heartedly, the only time he had known her to blush.

‘And you of the Colonel's cologne.'

He turned around then and walked out the door, not daring to look back and see whether or not his words had hurt her.

Pavel left her apartment, unsure what to do next. He had half expected the Colonel's men to be waiting for him there, and place him under formal arrest, but the staircase was empty of life, and dark too, with only the moon to draw its outlines. For the briefest of moments he considered whether they had misunderstood Fosko; whether the man had just been drunk, and had shuffled off to bed in order to sleep off the liquor. Pavel dismissed the notion at once. He knew better than to delude himself. His kidneys sat uncomfortably in his back and he decided that, whatever else happened, he had better take his evening medicine. As he walked towards his apartment door, he noticed that it stood ajar. There was no light on the inside.

Pavel pushed open the door, felt for the light switch, flicked it to no effect. There he stood upon the threshold, his heart beating in his throat suddenly, wedged snug against the base of his tongue. Inside, a familiar smell, of unwashed body, piss and blood. He squinted, trying to make things out. The shadows were deeper here, the moon sickly behind the double pane of frozen glass, half obscured by the curtain's swinging curve.

Only he no longer had any curtains.

He had taken them down weeks ago, to fashion blankets for the boy, leaving a bare copper rod. A dozen times or more he had used it in lieu of a drying rack, had hung up dress shirts, socks and underwear and watched the water drip upon his windowsill, until it had got too cold for washing and the sickness had made him oblivious to his stink. The rod had been empty when Pavel had left the apartment.

It was no longer empty.

He panicked, dug in his heels, stared at the shadow that must not be; took in the rod's bend, and the tautness of the rope, his hands casting around for a book of matches. He broke one against the box's gravelly side; broke another; broke a third, his fingers stiff and clumsy. On the next attempt, Pavel dropped the whole box; crouched and searched for it in the darkness of the floor. Then, finally, a match caught fire: a wild flare of light that recoiled into itself before gradually transforming into the steady flame of burning wood. Shadows danced before it, exposed, then scuttled back into the dark. At the window, one such shadow refused to budge; instead it solidified, took on features, four foot something, and skinny.

Its head stuck out of the noose at an impossible angle.

Pavel breathed and moved towards the hanging boy. He grabbed his foot – had he not been told of such a thing but two hours ago? – and spun him round. He found a death mask of a face, an angel's face, a murdered angel, young, and a little cracked on one side. Pavel spun him, faced him, placed his match so close it was as though he wished to light him up, the dead boy hanging from his curtain rod. Spun him, faced him, saw – and laughed.

Sweet mother of Jesus. He laughed! It nearly did me in, that laughter.

You must understand, of course, that I had been sitting there all along, splayed out on top of his bed, my back propped up against some pillows. He never noticed me, not until he had faced the boy, that is, and shot out that frightening bark of laughter. Only then – when I yelled at him to stop – did he turn and make my acquaintance.

I imagined I peeled out of the shadows for him, in my bulky overcoat and the eye-patch, like some divine messenger bringing news of final things. I remember his looking at my shoes, which I had
placed carelessly upon his sheets, with some special sort of loathing. He had been raised better than that, and chances are he thought I should have been, too. But I was tired and cold that night, and my feet hurt from standing around outside the boys' hideaway, and besides, he wasn't going to be using his bed for a while. I suppose I could have taken them off, my shoes, but how is a man to arrest another in his stockings? It would have been absurd, particularly in combination with the gun that was in my hand. Pavel looked at it with tired eyes. It did not seem to hold much meaning for him.

But events are getting the better of me, and I am in danger of unravelling this yarn from the wrong end entirely. Let me retrace the steps that served to place me within that room, upon that bed, dirty shoes soiling Pavel's sheets and the broken eye itching under its patch like something rotten. You last found me watching elsewhere, out in the street across from Paulchen's quarters, placing an anxious phone call for company in my vigil. It was a long and tiresome wait. There was a curious diversion not long after I had established myself – the other men had just come out to join me – but it was not the sort of thing liable to comfort a man's spirits. Quite the contrary. It concerns the boy, the one hanging from the rafters, dead, I amafraid, and never to wake. He showed up all of a sudden, God only knows from where. He might have been in the house, or in the courtyard behind it, or up in a tree for all I know. The first knowledge I had of him was his drawing up short, mid-step, not two yards from where I stood guard, and giving a mighty start.

‘Good God!' said I, similarly startled, and thinking that the Colonel had laid a claim to this child. ‘You are Pavel's little friend.'

And off he bolted.

Looked at me, a twitch of the lip – a curious sort of curling – and then he was off, flying like the wind, or rather like a nasty little gust, down the street as fast as his little legs would carry. I had no choice but to give chase, my superior limbs encumbered by my superior
girth, clambering after him, shouting (like a fool, no doubt!) for him to stop. He had no intention of complying with my request.

I chased him down the empty street and was getting within perhaps five feet of him when he, nimble as a rabbit, feinted to the left and then cut to the right, down some dark alley with bomb rubble peeking out of the snow every five yards. I tried to follow his motion, unaware that my bulk would not take to sudden changes of direction with the selfsame elegance the boy had just displayed, hence stumbled, hit upon a nasty patch of ice, one foot shooting to the right, the other to the left and my arms turning into a veritable windmill. In short, I fell, and fell in a rather dramatic manner that hurt my rump and brought a curse to my lips.