when the bastard was done with me he drove me back to Nowa Huta and threw me out onto the street for everyone to see. With a sign around my neck saying, 'Communist Spy'.' Another refill disappeared. 'I could hear the crowd: shouting, swearing… They tied me to a tree and beat me until everything was blood and darkness. Broke both my legs. My jaw. My arm. Left me tied there for two days, without food or water, until my brother came and cut me down.'
Logan winced. 'Dear God…'
'It was 1981 in the People's Republic of Poland. There was no God, there was only Lenin.' He finished the bottle. 'If it was me, I would have killed me… But maybe that would have been too kind.'
Wiktorja said, 'Then why do you stay here? Why not get out, somewhere else, far away from the people who did this?'
'Because Nowa Huta is my home. I fought for these streets, I killed for them, I was blinded for them. They are my streets. That is why I stay.'
'Who was he? The man?'
Gorzkiewicz stood, then hobbled to the rattling fridge. The open door cast a sudden bloom of cold white light, then it clunked shut and they were back in the gloom again. The old man returned carrying a fresh bottle of vodka and a jar of pickles. 'He was Old Boney. King of the Underworld. Kostchey the Deathless.'
48
Wiktorja threw back her head and laughed. 'The Devil gouged out your eyes?'
Gorzkiewicz shrugged and poured three fresh shots. 'That's what he called himself in those days: Kostchey the Deathless. But his real name was Vadim Mikhailovitch Kravchenko. He was an army Major when I was in Afghanistan, forced to fight for those Russian bastards. I never met Kravchenko, but I heard of him. Every time they wanted a prisoner questioned… The screaming would last for days.'
The old man downed his vodka. 'He ended up in the SB, running the hunt for dissidents and anti-Communist sympathizers. And people like me — people he blinded — we were his warning. We were what happened if you disobeyed the regime.'
'Where is he now?'
'If I knew, he would be dead. I heard a rumour he was working for some gangsters in Warsaw, but that was many years ago.' Gorzkiewicz helped himself to a tiny yellow pickled squash. 'The shopkeepers in your Aberdeen, they are blinded yes? Eyes gouged out, sockets burned?'
'What does Kravchenko look like?'
There was a long, slow pause, then the old man took off his sunglasses, giving Logan another look at the mess where his eyes should have been. 'I haven't seen him since 1981, remember?'
Stupid question. 'Sorry.'
'But…' He scraped his chair back from the table and hobbled from the room, navigating the twisted maze of junk with surprising ease. He was back ten minutes later with a tatty brown folder. He held it out, and Wiktorja took it. 'This,' he said, 'is everything I know about the man. I did a Russian entrepreneur a favour involving a business rival and sixteen pounds of Semtex. He arranged for the Politburo to misplace Kravchenko's file. Started asking questions for me.'
Wiktorja flicked through the contents in the semi-darkness, then whistled, pulled out a photo, and showed it to Logan. 'Do you recognize him?'
It was a black-and-white shot, head and shoulders, of a man in military uniform, staring at the camera. Hard eyes. Squint nose. Short black hair. A small scar on the tip of his chin.
'Never seen him before.'
A buzzing noise sounded from somewhere out in the hall, and Gorzkiewicz's head snapped up, as if scenting the air. 'Wait here.' And he was gone again.
'So,' said Logan, holding out his hand to Wiktorja for the folder, 'how the hell does a blind man make bombs?'
'Very carefully.'
'You're all mad.'
There wasn't a huge amount in the Kravchenko dossier. Twenty or thirty sheets of A4 — all in Russian and Polish — a handful of fading photographs, and a lock of hair. Logan pulled it out and twisted in the dim light. Long and blonde — the same colour as Wiktorja's — wrapped up with a red silk ribbon.
'It is belong to his daughter.' A young girl appeared at the kitchen door. She was thirteen, maybe fourteen years old — wearing far too much makeup — carrying a strange stacked pot thing. Her eyes were huge, the pupils so dilated in the dark that there was almost no colour visible. 'Are you make mess in Uncle Rafal front room? Now I must to spend much time making tidy.'
Logan dropped the hair back in the folder, feeling guilty for even touching it. 'Are you Zytka?'
The young girl hefted the pot onto the working surface and unclipped the lid. There was a poom of steam, and the smell of warm food filled the little room. 'I am look after him.'
The sound of a toilet flushing came from somewhere in the flat.
Zytka opened a cupboard and came out with two plates. 'You must to go now. He is old and tired.'
'And hungry.' Gorzkiewicz — fastening his belt. 'Jakie mosz pierogi?'
'Ruskie.'
Whatever that meant it must have been good, because the old man smiled.
Logan held up the folder. 'Can we borrow this?' Then realized Gorzkiewicz couldn't actually see him doing it. 'I mean, the file on Kravchenko?'
'No. But Zytka will make a copy for you tomorrow. Write down your address for her.'
Logan dug one of the Grampian Police business cards out of his wallet and scrawled down the name of the hotel they were staying in.
They left the old man sitting at his table tucking into a plate heaped with pale white dumplings.
The young girl showed them to the door, weaving her way through the gloomy corridor's maze of books and news papers just as easily as the old man had. Logan and Senior Constable Jaroszewicz stumbled along behind her, trying not to fall over anything.
At the door, Zytka stopped and fixed them with a stare, dark eyes glittering like a feral animal in the fairy lights. 'You must to find this Kravchenko and you must to kill him.'
'Excuse me?' Wiktorja loomed over the little girl. 'We are police officers, we do not go around-'
'Uncle Rafal is hero of Poland. Kravchenko — he deserve to be dead for what he do. And if you not kill him, Kravchenko kill you. Now you go away and you leave Uncle Rafal alone.' She slammed the door on them.
They stood in the corridor outside, listening to the rattle and clank of chains and deadbolts being fastened. 'Well,' said Logan, 'she was… nice.'
Wiktorja turned and started down the stairs. 'At least we found a victim that was still alive.'
'Yeah, a blind bomb-maker who does favours with Semtex, and wants us to kill a sadistic ex-secret policeman for him.' It was even gloomier in the stairwell than before, music oozing out from behind closed doors. 'And did you see the state of that apartment? He's off his head.'
They pushed through the door at the bottom and out into the muggy evening. The sky was the colour of fire, high clouds laced with burning gold against the red. In the square between the buildings, the yellow lights of occupied apartments shone in the blue-grey shadows.
Wiktorja stopped halfway down the concrete slab path, then dug about in her huge handbag, coming out with the litre of vodka they'd bought on the way out here. 'I forgot to give it to him.'
'Well, too late now. Unless you want to go back up there and-'
The bottle exploded in her hands. One heartbeat it was there, the next it was all over the ground — shards of glass and puddles of liquid — leaving Wiktorja holding onto the shattered neck. They both stood, staring as the vodka seeped away between the warm paving slabs.
'Do they usually-'
This time he heard it: a muffled crump. And Logan looked over his shoulder to see a fresh hole in the
