He pointed to his reddened nostrils.
Herkus shook his head. “Later, boss. Sit down a while, all right?”
Arturas sighed and sat down on the couch. “All right, I’m sitting.”
Herkus crossed the floor and took a seat facing the boss. “Darius told me everything,” he said.
“I want all of it,” Arturas said.
“You sure?” Herkus asked.
“I’m sure,” Arturas said.
Herkus sighed and nodded. He began.
DARIUS SPILLED IT all, his voice trembling, words scrambling through the terror. He wept as he spoke, already mourning himself. Darius was big and slow, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew he would die. It was merely a question of how badly.
Darius said he and Tomas had been drinking since early afternoon. Nothing unusual about that. Tomas was in good spirits, talking, talking, always talking. Eyeing up the women, grabbing at them. Three times Darius had to grab his skinny frame, swallow him up in a bear hug, laugh and kiss his cheek, just to get him away from trouble.
Darius thought of Tomas as a brother, which meant he hated and loved him in equal measure. Sometimes he wanted to tear the little prick’s head off, other times the scrawny shit made him laugh so hard his big belly hurt.
Today, it had been mostly laughter, but it went wrong as soon as they entered the bar near Belfast’s City Hall. They had drunk there many times before. Some of the girls who waited the tables were Lithuanians, and they had both enjoyed flirting with them. But this evening was different. More men than usual, with just a few cackling women hanging on the arms of effeminate male friends who hooted and cooed at each other.
Darius understood straight away and tried to steer Tomas out onto the street again. But there was no turning him, and he shouldered his way to the bar. It wasn’t until he reached it, money already in his extended hand, that Tomas realized something wasn’t quite right. He stopped, turned a circle, his eyes wide.
“This place is full of queers,” he said.
“Is it?” Darius asked, feigning surprise. “Let’s go, then, before one of these poofs takes a shine to you.”
“No,” Tomas said, swatting Darius’s hand away. “We’ve come here before and it’s been all right. Now it’s full of queers.”
Darius put a big arm around Tomas’s slight shoulder. “So they have a queer night once a week, lots of places do that. We’ll just go somewhere else, eh? How about The Fly? Get a look at some of those little student girls, eh? We’ll call Herkus, he’ll drive us up there.”
“No, no,” Tomas said, twisting away from Darius’s reach. “I won’t leave a place because some queers think it belongs to them. The fucking queers should get out. Not me. I’m not the fucking pervert. I’m not the freak.”
Before Darius could stop him, Tomas seized the arm of one of the men leaning against the bar, spun him around, and swung a clumsy right hook at him. The blow glanced off the man’s lower lip, hard enough to draw blood, but not with enough force behind it to do any real damage.
All around them, homosexuals screamed.
“Fucking freaks!” Tomas roared, though none of the wide-eyed onlookers understood his Lithuanian.
Darius swept Tomas up in his thick arms and dragged him toward the door. “Easy, easy,” he whispered in his friend’s ear.
As soon as they were outside and a street away, Darius called Herkus.
“Fucking queers,” Tomas said as they walked through the crisp, cold evening. Christmas shoppers stepped onto the road to avoid them. “Think they can take over a place just like that. Perverts, all of them. Fucking perverts.”
“Perverts,” Darius agreed. “How about The Fly, eh? Plenty of girls there.”
“No,” Tomas said. He stopped. “What about that whore Rasa brought up from the South? We could go and see her.”
And so they had gone to the flat to the east of the city. Darius and Sam had sat drinking in the lounge while Tomas went to the bedroom and locked the door.
Darius felt bubbling unease in his gut. Perhaps Tomas would take his anger out on the girl. Well, no matter. If worse came to worst, if the girl was marked so badly she was left unsaleable, Darius would ask Herkus for the money to reimburse the brothers, and everything would be forgotten.
When they heard Tomas’s raised voice, they thought little of it. Tomas often got worked up over matters of sex. It was when his voice stopped dead that Darius and Sam exchanged uneasy glances.
HERKUS MASSAGED HIS temples with his fingertips, willing the headache to dissipate. It would not go. He considered taking another vodka, or perhaps a gin, from the minibar, but thought better of it.
“She got away from them,” he said.
“How?” Arturas asked.
“They were squabbling amongst themselves. Darius said he looked up and she was running.”
Arturas stood. “They would have dumped Tomas in the water.”
“Seems that way,” Herkus said.
Rage burned beneath the boss’s skin, barely concealed. “They would have dumped him like an animal.”
“Yes, boss,” Herkus said.
Arturas nodded. “It’s good that you killed them. Better than they deserve.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Now you’ll kill the whore.”
Herkus moistened his lips and shifted in his seat. “Like I said, boss, she got away.”
Arturas leaned over him. “And you will find her.”
“In this city? She could be anywhere by now.”
“You will find her.”
“Sure, I’ll look for her, but—”
Arturas punched the armchair’s cushioned headrest hard enough to make Herkus’s head bounce. “You will find her!”
Herkus got to his feet. “Yes, boss.”
Arturas stood back. “Good. Thank you.”
Herkus went for the door, opened it, and stepped through to the corridor. As he went to close it, Arturas called, “Herkus?”
He stopped, opened the door, looked back into the suite. “Yes, boss?”
Arturas pointed to his reddened nostrils again. “Bring me something, all right?”
Herkus sighed. “Yes, boss.”
18
GALYA WATCHED AS Billy Crawford set a tall glass on the Formica-topped table before her. He half filled it with something that was not quite milk, then topped it up with lemonade.
“Buttermilk shandy,” he said. He lifted the glass and held it out to her.
She caught its sickly sour-sweet odor and turned her head away.
He laughed. “It’s an acquired taste,” he said. He took a long swallow and placed the glass back on the table. White liquid clung to his whiskers. “Coffee?” he asked.
Galya nodded and pulled the blanket tight around herself.
He went to the worktop by the sink and clicked on the electric kettle. The jar of instant coffee he took from the cupboard looked old and seldom opened.
“I don’t know how fresh it is,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. He dropped a spoonful into a mug. “How do you take it?”
“Black,” she said.
The kitchen looked like Mama’s back home, cupboards with old sliding doors, cracked tiles on the floor, an
