in the sun of noonday, and into a concrete bunker only two storeys high.
The yard was pleasantly warm, but a wall of heat hit us as we entered the maximum-security wing. The guards must have felt it even more than we did inside their elaborate body armour, but they gave no sign of discomfort. Anastasiadis fanned himself gently with the back of his hand. The air smelled of sweat, urine, disinfectant and something greasy and insinuating that might have been pomade.
The space inside was open-plan: ground floor and first-floor gallery all of a piece, both with cells leading off a bare, bleak central space. The cells we passed were open-plan too, with bars for walls. Each held two men: two pallets, side by side rather than bunked one above the other, two chairs, a table, a slop bucket. Men played cards in monastic silence or lay on their pallets and read. A uniformed guard sat at one end of the structure on a plastic chair, lethargic and disengaged. He looked as though he wouldn’t have stirred himself for anything less than a full- scale riot.
We went up to the first floor via a circular staircase, blocked off at the bottom by a lockable grille. There was a second grille at the top, which another guard had to open before we could step out onto the landing. Up here, close to the ceiling of the low building, the smell of piss was pervasive, hanging heavy in the still, overheated air. The prisoners in these second-storey cells lay to a man on their pallet beds, as still as the dead, arguably more so. A suicide net was slung over the open space in the centre of the gallery; more bizarrely, so were a few clothes lines on which socks and T-shirts in subtly varied shades of institutional grey hung limply.
Anastasiadis led the way to the furthest cell on the right, then waited while one of the two guards unlocked the door. Both guards remained in place while we entered, locking us in and then standing to either side of the door like unlovely bookends.
Jovan Ditko was sitting on the floor of the cell, dressed only in vest and pants. His head was bowed, the slop bucket cradled between his spread legs. He’d vomited into it, and he looked as though he might be about to do so again. Anastasiadis looked back through the bars at the guards, pointed to the bucket and spoke to them again. They shook their heads, only very slightly out of synch. Anastasiadis shouted, his face flushing suddenly red. One of the guards shouted back, while the other turned his face aside as though the controversy embarrassed or upset him.
‘They will not empty the bucket,’ the lawyer said to me apologetically. ‘I reminded them that this is Jovan Ditko’s last night on Earth, but they say the buckets are only emptied on the morning shift.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, although the stench in the room was close to stomach-churning. I tuned it out with an effort of will. My preferred sense is hearing, so I focused on the sounds of the place: the sounds and the meta- sounds – the spirit music that plays in the background for me wherever I happen to be. Irdrizovo was a symphony in a minor key, bleak and formless and unresolved.
‘Jovan,’ I said gently.
He looked up at me and nodded, then ducked over the bucket again. It wasn’t really a greeting, just an acknowledgement that I was there. He had Rafi’s face but harder and heavier, a lot less handsome. A three-day growth of stubble darkened his chin, and his face glistened with sweat.
‘Do you speak English?’ I asked him.
He muttered something that I didn’t catch. Mister Anastasiadis translated at once. ‘He understands English, but he doesn’t speak it very well. He’ll answer you in Macedonian.’
‘Okay.’ I turned back to Jovan. ‘Thank you for seeing me. I know it’s the worst possible time, in a lot of ways, but I thought you might like some news of your brother, Rafael.’ I thought of my cover story and decided it might be useful to have something to show for this trip besides one less notch on my conscience. ‘And I’d like to talk to you about your memories of him,’ I added.
This time Jovan didn’t even look up. He just rattled off a quick response to Anastasiadis, who replied to him rather than to me. For a while they batted something around between the two of them. I suspected the three-way communication system was going to be a real pain in the arse.
‘He says it’s been years since he even saw Rafael,’ Anastasiadis said to me at last. ‘They argued, a long time ago. When their father died, Rafael did not even come to the funeral. There is nothing between them now.’
‘How long ago was that?’ I asked. ‘When their father died?’
Another quick exchange yielded the answer. ‘Three years ago.’
That was after Rafi’s botched necromancy and my botched exorcism had landed him with his demonic passenger. He was already locked up in the Stanger by then.
‘He didn’t know,’ I explained. ‘He was in a hospital and . . . not really in touch with the outside world.’ Not in touch with anything, I thought. Rafi’s life had become pretty surreal at that point. His time perception, his awareness of self, his ability to lay down new memories and to make sense of the world, all had to be compromised.
I tried to explain this to Jovan, but it was a tricky concept to get across and I hit the rocks almost immediately. ‘Rafi has a demon inside him,’ I said, and Jovan was off on a tirade, glaring up at me from the floor.
‘Yes,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘He has a demon. I have a demon. Everybody has a demon. It doesn’t change who you are. It doesn’t change your obligations. You have to be a man, don’t you? Whatever else you are.’
‘Yeah, but I’m not trying to be poetic,’ I said. ‘Rafi tried to do some magic, and he messed it up. There’s a demon stuck inside him like a . . .’ Having no clue what sort of referents Jovan would feel comfortable with, I groped for a non-technical simile. ‘. . . like a toad in a well. He’s been like that for years now. And for most of that time, he’s been locked up in a lunatic asylum. The demon controls his body, his actions. He’s not free to do what he wants to do.’
The lawyer was staring at me with an almost comically surprised expression, but Jovan emitted a snort that needed no translation. Clearly he didn’t think demonic possession was a good enough reason to miss your dad’s funeral.
‘Rafi wanted to tell you that he was sorry,’ I persisted. ‘Not specifically for that. For losing touch with you, I guess, and for any other bad blood there was between you. That’s why I came. To deliver that message. It seemed to be very important to him.’
In Jovan’s terse reply, Rafi’s name appeared twice.
‘The only thing that was ever important to Rafael,’ Anastasiadis translated, ‘was Rafael.’ Jovan was speaking again, with more animation, and the lawyer slipped into simultaneous translation. ‘He was always selfish. He cared nothing about the family, or anyone else besides himself. He always wanted to get out of here, and when he did he never looked back. Once or twice he’s written to me, but only to ask me to send his things on to him. His photos and his journals especially. I didn’t reply. If he wants those things so badly, he can come back – pardon me, he can
A silence followed this speech. Jovan seemed drained by it. His head lolled lower than ever over the foul, stinking bucket.
‘Is there anything I can get you while I’m here?’ I asked lamely. If nothing else it would be a way of keeping the dialogue open, but Jovan made a slashing gesture with his right hand.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered in English. ‘Give me nothing. And give him nothing, from me. No word.’
He lapsed into Macedonian again, and Anastasiadis laid a hand on my arm. ‘He wants us to leave,’ he said apologetically. ‘He says he won’t answer any more of your questions.’
‘The journals,’ I persisted. ‘Rafi’s journals. Do they still exist?’ I felt ashamed to ask, but I was thinking again about having something to show Jenna-Jane. More than that though, there was an outside chance – a tenuous thread of possibility – that the journals might throw up something we could actually use. I was a good salesman, obviously. I’d talked myself into believing there was some point in having come here.
‘
I offered my hand, but Jovan didn’t take it. No exchange of hostages, no using the last few hours of the present to ransom back some little piece of time past. Jovan Ditko was beyond that now. He was preparing himself for a drop much longer than the precisely measured fall from the gibbet.
I left him to it.
Back in the city I found a café – walking past three bars with increasing difficulty – and knocked back
