‘Okay,’ he says. ‘First we need a name.’ He looks up. ‘Your name is …?’
The man looks and says nothing.
‘No name,’ Beg says. He takes a deep breath and leans forward. ‘My name is Beg,’ he says then. ‘I’m the commissioner around here.’
The man stares at a spot on the wall behind Beg. His shoulders are a clothes hanger for the jacket of his tracksuit. It’s hard to imagine what he would look like with flesh on his bones.
Beg has seen the washed-out tattoos on his body — the icons of the convict — and the tracks of the needle. That’s why he’s the first one to be interrogated. You can negotiate with junkies.
‘Okay,’ Beg says, as though picking up the thread of a momentarily interrupted conversation. The man doesn’t move. That he still has no name makes things difficult. You can use a name to flatter and to flog; it’s the start of an understanding. The game begins with a name — the negotiations. But no identification has been found on any of them.
‘We found the head,’ Beg says. ‘Which one of you was carrying it?’
Silence.
‘Was that your bag?’ He snaps his fingers. ‘Hey, do you hear me?’
The man’s eyes pull away from the wall for a moment, but are drawn back to it right away.
‘That’s where we’ve got a problem,’ Beg resumes. ‘Whatever you people were planning, I can’t judge that, but the head …’
The man says nothing, and now and again his eyes fall shut. It’s as though he hasn’t slept for years.
Beg recalls a sentence from a police academy handbook: ‘The victim is deceased when the head has been lastingly separated from the body.’
That ‘lastingly’, that was the thing. They had laughed so hard about that.
Beg scratches at a minuscule bump on the tabletop. They’ve been sitting across from each other for ten minutes already. It doesn’t bother him. If there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s remaining silent — waiting and remaining silent. He’s in no hurry.
The creature sitting across from him, Beg had learned at the academy, was thinking back over its sins. Louder and louder, the crime he had committed was echoing inside him. It looked for an opening through which to crawl out, to shout itself from the rooftops. Even if the crime had taken place in the deepest darkness, he was seeing it before him now in the clearest of light. There was nothing else he could think about anymore. You could almost see it taking place behind his eyes. His body seemed to do its utmost to drive out the crime, to be shut of the guilt; only the spirit was still resisting. But his body would betray him. It made the spirit ripe for capitulation.
Beg looks at the man across from him, and has his doubts. It seems as though the man isn’t even here, but somewhere far away.
‘Smoke?’ Beg asks.
He lights a cigarette himself and slides the pack with the lighter on top of it across the table. A junkie rarely has only one addiction.
The man reaches for the pack with both hands; but because his cuffs are chained to a ring on the table, he can barely get to it. Two fingers on his right hand are missing. He takes a cigarette from the pack and puts it between his lips. The wheel scrapes across flint, and then comes the flame, and the quiet crackling of paper and tobacco. He keeps his eyes closed as he sucks the smoke into his lungs. Pleasure has returned to his life, thanks to the man across from him. He doesn’t know it yet, but inside him gratitude and dependence have formed a reluctant alliance — he is being made ripe for a regimen of punishment and reward. He will be thankful for either; he has earned both the punishment and the reward.
The little bump on the table is a tough one. Beg can’t get it off with his fingernail.
There is no ashtray, and the cone of ash on Beg’s cigarette is growing longer and longer. He gets up and walks to the door. Holding it open with his foot, he shouts to someone out there to bring him an ashtray.
Halfway through his cigarette, the man begins coughing violently. He sounds like he’s choking.
‘Been a long time, I suppose?’ Beg asks once he’s calmed down a bit.
The man nods, his eyes filled with tears.
‘How long?’ Beg asks.
The man smiles and shrugs. Long ago.
‘A few months? Six months?’ Beg asks.
The smile fades. An expression of endless melancholy takes its place. He leans forward and puts out the cigarette in the ashtray. The question dissipates along with the smoke.
‘Where are you from? Is there someone we can inform about your being here? Wife, children, family? Isn’t there anyone who wants to know where you are?’
‘No family,’ the man says in an unsteady voice.
‘And where do you come from?’
He shakes his head. ‘The thicket … of horrors.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The poacher says … he says we have to pass through that, that then we’ll get home.’
‘Who’s the poacher?’
The man remains silent.
‘Do you know where you are right now?’
But he has sunk back into himself already, to a place where Beg can’t reach him.
‘You’re here because a man’s head was found in the baggage of someone in your group,’ Beg said. ‘You are all suspects, unless you tell me who crushed that man’s skull. If you do that, you’ll be a free man soon.’
The man says nothing.
‘This thicket you were talking about, what does it look like?’
Not a word. Beg raps his knuckles on the tabletop. The highest row of windows is as grey as a television screen. It snowed again last night. When he left the house, the morning was windless and cold.
The man’s chin has sunk to his chest. His breathing is deep. Has he fallen asleep again?
Earlier that morning, as he came into the office, Oksana said to him: ‘The mayor’s here.’
There could have been no worse way to start the day. Oksana rolled her eyes.
‘He’s down in the cellar.’
Whenever she rolled her eyes, Beg knew, it meant trouble.
Blok had arrived with two of his men and made someone take them downstairs. When Beg came in, he had just summoned the prisoners. They were standing lined up in front of him, shivering.
‘Pontus!’ Blok shouted.
The door fell closed behind him with a click. He stood there and looked. Looking had a way of slowing down the events, of giving you time to think about what to do.
‘What a bunch of beanpoles, man,’ Blok said. ‘And what’s this I hear? They were carrying a head? A head? Pontus, listen … Why don’t you call me about things like that? One little call, right?’ He held up his thumb and forefinger to mimic a telephone. Beg made a mental note: boisterous, talkative. Red eyes; pupils like keyholes.
The prisoners stood in a wretched clump, their shaven heads bowed. Broken sunflowers.
With brusque, pent-up waves of his arms, Beg herded the prisoners back into their cells.
‘Hey, Pontus, what are you doing now, man, hey?’
Beg turned. Semjon Blok came closer, as though he were planning to push Beg aside. Beg smelled whisky. They had been up all night drinking and snorting cocaine. Then they’d decided to have a little fun. The party must go on.
‘And now I want everyone out of here,’ Beg said. ‘This is not a fashion show.’
Blok wagged his index finger in front of his face. ‘No, Pontus, you’ve got it all wrong. This is not up to you.’
Beg didn’t budge. Rage had cleared the way for him; now there was no going back. ‘Shoo,’ he said, ‘get out, now.’
‘Pontus, Pontus.’ Semjon Blok shook his head, but his dash had shrivelled, he was suddenly so incredibly tired. Wasn’t there someplace around here where he could lie down?
<
br /> ‘You’re a gutsy one, Pontus,’ he said. ‘Real gutsy.’
He gestured to his companions. The guard pressed the buzzer, and the electric lock clicked open. Laughing feebly in disbelief, Blok left the room, defeat like a monkey on his back.
The guard cleared his throat. ‘Commissioner, you put them back in the wrong cells, I’m afraid.’
Beg’s index finger punched thin air. This was the fucking limit. The guard’s mouth slammed shut like the muzzle of a dog snapping at a fly.
Blok will never forgive him for this. Somewhere, in an unguarded moment, he will strike back, and Beg will think back on this morning.
The office of mayor has given Semjon Blok almost limitless power. Michailopol is his private domain. He parks his black Cadillac Escalade on the sidewalk, he drives too fast, he ignores all the traffic lights. During his term of office, the property he owns has doubled. No one crosses him in any way; he stands above the law.
Feathering one’s own nest, giving and taking bribes, nepotism — all part of a system, true enough, but that system is defective and shortsighted. In the last ten or fifteen years, Beg has seen everything slow down, as the city’s entire economic life has fallen under the spell of favouritism and greed: no land is sold, no house built, without dubious permits and money changing hands under the table — which means that, often enough, nothing is built at all. Social relations have become bogged down in the mud of corruption; no one can call anyone else to account, for they all have dirt on their hands. No one looks beyond his own interests. Not a single manager or government official thinks about the long term. It’s a system that demands your participation; if you don’t join in, you relegate yourself to the sidelines. In the end, it corrupts even the purest soul. This way, everything goes rotten.
This morning, he not only hurt Semjon Blok’s pride, but he also ran the system off the rails. Not for long, though. It will avenge itself. It will exclude him, somewhere, at some point, not long from now. His position will be undermined, and he will have to step down. He knows that; that’s the way it works. The system protects you as long as you play along.
It doesn’t bother him; it had to happen sometime. In some ways, the overt hostility between him and Blok comes as a relief. He has jammed the tip of the scalpel into the abscess, and the stinking pus that wells up reminds him of a dignity he lost long ago.
Later today, Blok will get his letter.
He has the prisoners separated. Isolation will make them emerge sooner from the spell that binds them.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Astro Boy
He follows the shadow of the psychiatric hospital to the entrance. Snow chirps beneath his shoes. The plaster on the walls is flaking — the building is suffering from psoriasis. The windows are tall and arched; the entrance is flanked on both sides by sandstone knights in niches, their faces almost obscured by their helmets. The realisation that Vienna’s influence once reached all the way to Michailopol never fails to amaze Beg.
The boy is in bed, in a bright, high-ceilinged room. A drip is infusing high-calorie nutrition into his veins. His skin has the dark hue of a Gypsy or an Arab. His head is on the pillows; he is asleep. The nurses have been spoiling him with candy and fondant hearts. On the bedside table is a bottle of Coca-Cola — the real stuff, not an imitation. He’d never tasted Coca-Cola before, the nurse said. They’ve stuck colouring-book illustrations of stags and pirates to the walls, even though he seems a bit too old for that. Their down-to-earth nurses’ hearts have been touched by his story. They know that he has eaten from garbage cans. News of the severed head has reached the hospital, too, but they can’t imagine that the boy — their fledgling — has done anyone any harm. The pregnant woman just down the corridor doesn’t seem that way to them, either. And besides, they were travelling with a group of men, weren’t they? Men are the bane of this world.
Beg looks at the boy through the little window in the door. Suddenly, behind other doors, a few crazies begin screaming at the same time — a zoo. The boy frowns in his sleep. The senseless cries of alarm cut through you like a knife.
The boy looks like he’s about to die of some ancient disease, he’s that skinny — translucent, almost.
‘Has he been talking?’ Beg asks the nurse.
She nods. ‘Sometimes.’
‘What about his name? Did he tell you that?’
‘No. But he said other things. We wrote it all down, like they asked. Nothing very special, though. That this is softest bed he’s ever slept in. And that he has a brother. He comes from a farming family. He’s a good kid.’
She unlocks the door and leads him into the room. ‘I’ve got a visitor for you.’ The boy looks wide-eyed at Beg. The nurse checks the drip, and then leaves the room.
Beg has brought along a few comic books, which he lays on the bed. ‘I guess it can get pretty boring around here,’ he says. The comic books are Japanese — they’re about Astro Boy, a boy automaton with a heart. Beg had flipped through one of them: Astro Boy fights on earth and in the cosmos against the forces of evil, and when he flies his legs look like the flame from the afterburner of a fighter plane. The boy snatches the comics and hides them under the blankets.
Scarcity, Beg thinks.
He slides a chair up beside the bed, but doesn’t sit down. Instead he stands at the barred window, his hands behind his back, looking out at a radiant white park. The north side of each tree is flecked with fine snow. Maybe, when his days on the force are over, he will become a gardener — a man with a wheelbarrow and a hoe. He knows a few things about plants and the seasons. His flowerbeds will be a comfort to the patients.
‘It’s been snowing,’ he says. ‘There’s more on its way. You people got in just in time.’
He turns around, walks to the bed, and sits down. The neutral coldness in the boy’s eyes feels unpleasant. Children sometimes make him feel inferior, as though he’s sold out by becoming an adult. Again the faint memory returns of the boy he once was at the weir — his thin, effective body, still devoid of both fat and memories, pinned in place between dive and impact. That’s how a fifty-three-year-old man looks at a boy of thirteen, from a distance as far away as it is close by.
These are things he can’t tell the boy in the bed, because he wouldn’t believe him if he did. In the boy’s world, grownups have always been the way they are now; earlier manifestations are too hard to believe.
‘What’s your name?’ he asks.
No reply.
‘Where do you people come from?’
Somewhat to his amazement, he hears the boy say: ‘I don’t know.’
He has a high, clear voice, almost like a girl’s.
Beg leans forward, his elbows resting on his knees. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You know where you come from, don’t you?’
The boy shrugs his skinny shoulders — a sparrow’s bones. Then he says: ‘I saw you when that man shaved off my hair.’
‘That’s right,’ Beg says. ‘I’m the boss at the police station.’
The boy runs his free hand over his shaven head.
‘You have no idea how filthy it was,’ Beg says. ‘When was the last time you’d washed your hair?’
‘We didn’t have any soap,’ the boy says, offended.
‘That’s true,’ Beg says. He clears his throat. ‘But now I still don’t know who you are or where you people come from.’
‘You weren’t there,’ the boy says. ‘So you don’t have to know.’
Beg grins. ‘I wish I could say you were right, but we found a human head in your baggage. Did you know about that?’
The boy remains motionless.
‘One of you beat that man’s brains in,’ Beg says, ‘and then cut off his head. That puts you on my turf, criminal turf. I want to know everything about who did it, and why. Then the rest of you c
an go home.’
A veil has descended over the boy’s eyes. ‘You weren’t there,’ he repeats feebly.
‘That’s exactly why I need you to tell me what happened, because I wasn’t there. The sooner you do that, the sooner you’ll be out of here. You don’t want to stay here, do you?’
The boy shakes his head. His gaze wanders across the wall.
‘You want to go home, don’t you?’ Beg asks.
The boy purses his lips and shakes his head almost imperceptibly. Somewhere a madman begins screaming. ‘Shut! Up! Shut! Up! Shut! Up!’ another one shrieks.
‘They scream all day and all night,’ the boy says quietly. ‘Why do they scream like that?’
‘That’s what crazy people do. No one knows why.’
The boy slides his feet back and forth under the blanket.
‘What’s your name?’ Beg asks. ‘You can tell me that, can’t you?’
‘No one needs to know that.’
‘I do. I need to. Without a name, I’m not leaving here.’
‘Nacer Gül,’ the boy says.
‘So your name is Nacer Gül,’ Beg says slowly. ‘And where are you from, Nacer Gül?’
‘You said you were going to leave.’
‘Whoa, wait a minute, I said I wasn’t going to leave without a name, not that I would leave with a name.’
He sees the boy’s amused surprise. The wordplay appeals to him.
‘So then when will you leave?’
‘As soon as I know everything.’
A sigh. ‘Not before that?’
‘Not before that.’
‘It’s nobody’s business. Only the ones who were there. I can’t explain it. You weren’t there.’ He looks at Beg. ‘So you can’t understand.’
Two bumps slide back and forth under the blanket at the foot end.
‘Don’t underestimate me too quickly,’ Beg says. ‘There are a lot of things I can understand. Even things that happened when I wasn’t there. I’ve been a policeman for thirty-four years, I’ve seen a lot. Really nasty things, but also really funny things. In fact, maybe I’m able to understand too much.’
These Are the Names Page 17
