The Master Of Rain

He pressed his knuckles against his forehead, then tried to block his ears, but Prokopieff’s companion was crying loudly now and Prokopieff was hitting her harder.

Field jumped onto the bed and thumped the wall with the flat of his hand. “Shut the fuck up!”

The beating stopped, the girl’s crying dropping to a strangled whimper. “Shut the fuck up, Prokopieff,” Field repeated, breathing heavily before slumping back onto the bed and once again staring at the ceiling.

Prokopieff began talking to the woman roughly in Russian, and after a few minutes Field heard her getting dressed. Prokopieff, he knew, was paying her.

She walked away, her heels clicking loudly in the corridor.

“Get fucked, English boy,” Prokopieff said, but Field didn’t answer.

He closed his eyes and tried to relax, but his heart was thumping.

He thought of the fear in Natasha’s eyes tonight and recalled what Maretsky had told him about Lena not being the first victim, nor, probably, the last. Why hadn’t he told Caprisi about that already? They should have been working with a much greater sense of urgency.

Field wanted the new day to begin immediately.

Seventeen

Field was waiting next to Caprisi’s desk when the American arrived for work. Caprisi put down his leather case and hung his raincoat from the hatstand in the corner. “All right,” he said, “I get in early, but this is . . . How long have you been waiting?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“No shit?” The American shook his head. “And you couldn’t shave, either?”

“I forgot.”

Caprisi sucked his teeth. “You’re anxious to get to work?”

“I was just thinking . . .”

“Hold your horses.” Caprisi lifted a finger. “Let me stop you. In the spirit of the overworked and underpaid Criminal Investigation Division, unlike your own department, Chen and I now have to deal with this armed robbery yesterday and—”

“That can wait.”

“Says who?” Caprisi shook his head. “We’ll get back to the Orlov case, but—”

“No, we can’t do that.”

“We can’t?” Caprisi cleared his throat before turning to pour himself a glass of water from the purified jug in the corner.

Field took his hands out of his pockets. “Lena wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last.”

“Is that so?”

“Maretsky doesn’t believe this was the first case, and he is sure the perpetrator will now have a taste for it.”

“A taste for roughing up Russian girls narrows it down.”

“You sound like Sorenson and Prokopieff.”

Caprisi’s mouth tightened. “Be careful, polar bear. We’ve a heavy workload and this can wait.”

“It can’t.”

“Now . . .”

“I saw your face in Lena Orlov’s flat and down in the Chinese city. Why was Chen restraining you?”

“Back off, polar bear.”

“What happened to Slugger?”

“I said back off.”

“Was he a homosexual?”

Field held Caprisi’s stare. The American suddenly took a pace closer. “Slugger was twice the man you’ll ever be.”

“And Lu had something to do with his death?”

“Slugger liked men, Field, you’re right.” He shook his head. “You want to know, I’ll tell you. Slugger liked men. I didn’t know, his wife didn’t know, his kids didn’t know, but Lu found out. As I said, we were closing down a lot of opium dens on the Foochow Road, angering Lu and upsetting the cabal, and Slugger wouldn’t be bought, so they set him up. There were pictures, just for fun. Slugger wouldn’t bend to the blackmail and decided to leave. He told us what had happened, put his wife and family on the boat to England, and some men in raincoats met them as they came down the gangplank in Hong Kong and handed his teenage son a photograph of Slugger fucking another man. So Slugger walked up to the top of the Peak and blew the back of his head off.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not. You didn’t know him.”