Blind Eye

by Stuart MacBride

  At least the stairwell didn’t stink of piss.

  Logan froze. ‘Wait a minute, how do you know dangerous people are after him?’

  She kept on going. ‘It was in the file.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you say anything about it?’

  ‘I did not think it mattered – we thought he was too long ago, remember? We were concentrating on Löwenthal. Now come on…’

  They stopped again on the fifth floor, outside the only door that didn’t want to be different. It was a plain, bland slab, painted black. ‘This is it.’

  Wiktorja reached into her pocket, the one with the gun. Then she knocked.

  A voice muffled out from the inside. ‘Otwarte.’

  She tried the door handle and it creaked, then the door swung open, groaning like a sound effect from a horror movie.

  The corridor on the other side was dark and cluttered – piles of old newspapers, a broken sewing machine, shoe boxes, bricks, an ancient radio with the valves poking out. The walls were covered in 70s-style red velveteen wallpaper, the swirly pattern disappearing into the darkness, and the only illumination came from a twisting ribbon of little white fairy lights.

  The same voice as before came from a room further down the hall, saying something about pierogi?

  Wiktorja placed a finger on her lips and crept into the gloom, picking her way around the obstacles. Swearing quietly, Logan followed her, closing the front door behind them – shutting out what little natural daylight had oozed in from the stairwell. And now there was nothing but the fairy lights.

  It was impossible to walk in a straight line, the piles of junk made the confined space into a twisting maze. Claustrophobic.

  Wiktorja held up a hand and stopped, peering through an open door into the room beyond. She stepped inside, motioning for Logan to follow her.

  It was the living room that time forgot, and just as dark as the hallway. More piles of junk, more Christmas lights. And as Logan’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the gloom he could see the stripy wallpaper, the swirly-patterned rug, the fake-teak sideboard, the old Bakelite phone, the framed pictures of Jesus, Pope John Paul II, and the Virgin Mary. The boarded-up windows. A broken alarm-clock-radio sitting on top of a stack of boxes. The man sitting in the armchair pointing a gun at them.

  He had grey hair, liver spots, dark glasses, big rounded shoulders and hands like dinner plates. A bear in a cardigan. A three-quarters empty bottle of vodka sat on the table by his side. He was right in the middle of his maze of junk. A minotaur with a semi-automatic pistol.

  He waggled the gun at them. ‘Co zrobiliście Zytka?’

  Wiktorja answered him in English, ‘We have not done anything to Zytka.’ She eased her hand slowly out of her pocket – bringing her own gun with it. ‘We are not—’

  ‘Stop right there.’ His accent was a strange mix of Polish and American. As if he’d learned to speak the language from watching Hollywood movies. ‘You stop, or I will shoot you.’

  She froze. ‘I’m not doing anything.’

  He raised his arm and aimed straight for her chest. ‘Put it on the floor.’

  She looked back at Logan, then did as she was told, laying the gun down with a clunk on the threadbare carpet.

  ‘Good, now you sit. Over there, in the seat.’ The gun waggled again, this time in the direction of a rickety dining-room chair, hard up against the wall. He kept the gun on her until she was sitting, ignoring Logan. ‘You tell that cholernik Ehrlichmann I am not an idiot. He touches one hair on Zytka’s head and I’ll blow him and his whole pierdolony family back to the Stone Age. Do you understand?’

  ‘I … I don’t know who Ehrlichmann is.’

  Logan stepped into the room. ‘She’s telling the truth.’ And the gun snapped round. Oh God… He was looking right down the barrel. He put his hands up. ‘We’re not here to hurt anyone.’

  ‘Where is Zytka?’

  Logan glanced at Wiktorja, and edged a little closer. ‘We don’t know. We’ve not seen anyone since we got here.’

  The man grunted. ‘Then what do you want?’

  Wiktorja: ‘We’re police officers.’

  He swung the gun round again. ‘Pierdolona suka!’

  Logan lunged.

  47

  He smashed through a stack of hardback books, sending them flying into the shadows. The string of little white lights caught around his waist, hauling things from the walls of the junk-yard maze – a glass lamp hit the floor and shattered – Logan kept on going.

  The gun came back round, the old man was fast, but Logan was already too close.

  He ducked under Gorzkiewicz’s arm, grabbed the vodka from the table and swung it like a tennis racket: using the man’s head as the ball.

  Only Logan’s foot went down on one of the scattered books and it shifted beneath him mid-swing. The bottle missed its target, just catching the edge of Gorzkiewicz’s sunglasses as Logan crashed into another pile of junk, sprawling out flat on his back. Something sharp digging into his spine.

  The old man swore, ‘Kurwa!’ and Logan was looking down the barrel of the gun again. Gorzkiewicz was canted over to one side, clutching the armchair. He was trembling, sunglasses skewed off to one side, exposing a twisted knot of scar tissue where there should have been an eye. ‘You made a big mistake, piździelec! I’ll blow your fucking—’ He stopped dead.

  Senior Constable Wiktorja Jaroszewicz had a slab-like chunk of Soviet-built semiautomatic jammed in his cheek hard enough to force his face into a lopsided smile. ‘No,’ she said, twisting the barrel, ‘you are going to drop the gun and hope I do not paint this shitty little apartment with your brains.’

  The kitchen was another blast from the past: old-fashioned units, painted a sickly shade of avocado, lurked in the darkness; yellow linoleum floor worn almost through to the underlay; a rectangular, mahogany clock with the hands stuck at twenty to two; kitchen gadgets that looked as if they’d fallen off the back of a dinosaur. There was just enough room for three people to sit around a tiny table, bathed in the faint glow of yet more fairy lights, and the gurgling hummmm of an antique refrigerator.

  Gorzkiewicz opened a bottle of vodka and poured three stiff measures, keeping a finger on the lip of each shot glass – filling them right up to the brim and never spilling a drop.

  He raised his glass. ‘May we live to bury our enemies.’

  Logan and Wiktorja joined the toast – her throwing the drink back in one, Logan taking an experimental sip … then deciding it was probably better not to taste the stuff on the way down. He coughed and spluttered as the alcohol hit: raw and bitter.

  She pounded him on the back. Then asked Gorzkiewicz why all the windows were boarded over. ‘I mean,’ she said, filling their glasses again, ‘I know you are blind, but do you not like to feel the sun on your face?’

  ‘A sniper’s rifle only works if he can see his target.’ The old man downed his vodka, then removed his sunglasses. Both eyes were gone, and all that was left were deep furrowed scars, following the contours of the sockets. ‘In my line of work, it is not good if people can see you, when you can’t see them.’

  ‘Uh-huh…’ Logan looked around the cramped kitchen, ‘Your line of work?’ Whatever it was it couldn’t be paying too well.

  Gorzkiewicz smiled, his teeth too perfect to be true: dentures. ‘They call me Zegarmistrz: the Watchmaker.’

  Logan looked over his shoulder at the boarded-up windows. ‘So why does a watchmaker need to worry about snipers?’

  ‘It is a very competitive marketplace.’

  Logan stared at him. Those scarred sockets were the most disturbing things he’d seen in a long time … which was saying something. The longer he looked at them, the more convinced he became that they were staring straight back. He suppressed a shudder. ‘Who’s Ehrlichmann? He make watches too?’

  ‘Ehrlichmann is a German … businessman. He is not important.’ Gorzkiewicz glanced up at the dead c
lock. ‘What time is it?’

  Logan checked his watch. ‘Seven forty-three.’

  Frown. ‘Zytka should be here by now.’

  ‘We want to talk to you about the man who…’ Logan tried to think of a tactful way to put it, and couldn’t. ‘The man who blinded you.’

  Gorzkiewicz felt for the vodka bottle again, filling their glasses. ‘There is a story that long ago the wealthiest families in Kraków would build clock towers to show how grand and important they were. But every time a family unveiled one, someone else would commission an even more beautiful clock.’ He knocked back his vodka. ‘And so one day the head of the greatest house in all of Kraków called for the best watchmaker in the world and asked him to make a timepiece so wonderful that no clock would ever outshine it. And the watchmaker did. He made a clock so beautiful that the angels stopped singing, just to hear it chime.’

  He slipped his sunglasses back on, hiding the scars. ‘But the head of the house was a jealous man: he knew that the next clock the watchmaker made would be even more beautiful. Then his would no longer be the finest in the land. So he called the old man to him, and burned his eyes out with a poker from the fire; that way the family’s clock would always be the best.’

  Wiktorja shook her head. ‘That never happened.’

  ‘It is a good story all the same.’ He turned to Logan. ‘That is why they call me the Watchmaker.’

  ‘Only you didn’t make clocks, did you?’

  He smiled again. ‘Sometimes the things I make go tick, tick … BOOM!’ Gorzkiewicz slammed his hand on the table, making everyone jump. He laughed. ‘Or so people say.’

  ‘Who was it? Who blinded you?’

  There was a long pause. Then Gorzkiewicz reached up beneath his sunglasses, rubbing the place where his eyes used to be.

  ‘The SB – secret police bastards – come to my house in the middle of the night, they throw me in the back of a truck and I never see my wife or daughter again. Someone said they ran away. Someone said they were sent to Warsaw, sold to some Politburo skurwysyn. And someone said they were just taken out to the steelworks and shot. That my wife and child fuelled the furnaces to make more Soviet steel…’

  He poured himself another drink. ‘The SB beat me for days. Lied to me: said my comrades had informed on me because I was a liability to Solidarity – too dangerous.’ He laughed, cold and hard. ‘All lies! The SB wanted me to confess to the bombings in Kraków, tell them who else was involved. But I wouldn’t tell them anything.’

  Gorzkiewicz shivered. ‘Then he came. He…’ There was silence for a moment as the old man fidgeted. ‘He came with his knives and pliers. And I talked. I screamed like a woman and I told him everything he wanted to know.’ This time the vodka slopped over the edge of the glass, soaking into the red-and-white checked tablecloth. ‘Then he cut out my eyes and burned me.’

  Wiktorja swore, reached out, and put her hand over the old man’s.

  He didn’t seem to notice. ‘The SB rounded up my friends two hours later. They were never seen again. And 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.’ Gorzkiewi
cz – 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.