Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(80)

So it was, Forsyth supposed, a stroke of genius of a particularly warped and illogical kind to hide him here, right in the middle of what he presumed was Babykiller’s home territory.

Not that that made him feel at all secure. The thing that had happened to the Georgians had made sure of that.

The evening that he and Leon had visited Chudy, four bodies had been dragged from the river down near Wilanów. When they got back to the flat the news was full of it. The police had confirmed that the bodies were of Georgian citizens, and implied that they were presumed to have been in the city on some kind of criminal business. There was, of course, no way of knowing for sure whether they were the same Georgians who had been doing business with Crispin – Georgians being universally presumed to be both omnipresent and criminal to a man – but to Forsyth the connection seemed obvious.

Leon watched the news item and seemed to go into a trance for a while. Forsyth, student of drugs as he was, watched with a certain academic alarm as his one ally in the whole country appeared to lose his mind for a few moments. Then Leon snapped out of it and started to make phone calls, one of which resulted in Forsyth being deposited, about twenty hours after escaping from the Metro, in this smelly, greasy flat.

The flat belonged to an immensely fat Ukrainian who introduced himself as ‘Fox.’ Fox smoked all the time, lighting one cigarette from the stub of the last, and sat in front of his malfunctioning entertainment set wearing jeans and a filthy singlet and guzzling bottle after bottle of Okocim beer.

“It’ll be okay,” Leon assured Forsyth. “Trust me.”

“This is madness, Leon,” Forsyth said, looking around the flat. “I can’t stay here.”

“It’ll be all right until I can find out what the f*ck’s going on,” his flatmate said. “I promise.”

“I’ve got to get out of the city, Leon. I’ve got to get out of the country.”

Leon nodded and patted Forsyth on the shoulder. “I’ll try to get something organised. Don’t worry. I’ll be in touch.”

And that had been three days ago.





FOX HAD A running conversation with the media which appeared to have been going on for some considerable time. He sat in his worn-out armchair, chugging Okocim and belching and talking back to the newsreaders and the adverts and characters in films. He passed coarse-sounding comments on news reports about the activities of politicians, shouted warnings to the heroes of action movies, made rude noises when someone in a series had a love scene.

He only spoke a couple of words of Polish, and refused to speak Russian. Forsyth had picked up a few phrases of Ukrainian from some of his fellow-workers when he was working the Moscow Metro, but his pronunciation was so bad that he couldn’t get Fox to understand them, so the two of them wandered about in a fog of mutual incomprehension, which seemed to suit Fox all right because he hardly took any notice of his lodger apart from putting huge greasy fried meals on the table at irregular hours of the day and night. Fox took his own meals in front of the entertainment set, and when he was finished he put his plate on the floor. He only seemed to do the washing-up at long intervals: there was always a stack of plates beside his chair, crusted with dried food and congealed grease.

The room Forsyth had been given was full of mismatched furniture: chairs, tables, a sofa, all piled haphazardly one on top of the other. Occasionally Fox would go out and return with another chair or a table and dump it on the stack. What this was all about, Forsyth could only guess, but he had managed to clear a kind of nest for himself amongst all the rubbish, on the floor under a table. He’d padded the floor with three or four big thick blankets, and used his rolled-up jacket as a pillow. Fox liked to keep the heating turned up to equatorial levels, which more or less did away with the need for sheets but subtly enhanced the general miasm of rotting food which filled the flat.

Unable to sleep at night, Forsyth lay on his back staring up at the underside of the tabletop, going over and over the events of that night in the Metro. He still couldn’t work out what had happened. One moment Crispin had been there, chiding him for just assuming he was involved in some kind of drug deal. The next moment, Crispin was gone and Forsyth was lying on the trackbed. Between those two memories, something pretty major had obviously taken place, but Forsyth had no idea what it might have been. He couldn’t even work out how long he’d been lying there insensible.

Nor could he force himself to remember how he’d finally managed to get out of the Metro, or how he had got as far as Mokotów. Or too many things. What he could remember, like that Russian-speaking voice, could only have been some kind of hallucination, there was no other way to explain it.

On the fourth day, the doorbell rang. The doorbell was broken; the only sound it made was a sort of dull dry clicking, but by now Forsyth was in such a state of hypersensitivity from hours wandering back and forth around the flat that when he heard the clicking he had to restrain himself from diving screaming out of the nearest window.

Instead, he settled for retreating into his room and curling up under the table, watching the door and resolving to sell his life dearly, leaving aside the fact that he probably wouldn’t ever know what he was selling it for.

The door opened, and an eye-hurtingly neat young Japanese man stepped into the doorway, as alien a presence in this messy flat as it was possible to be. He looked around the room for a moment. Then he spotted Forsyth under the table, and he bent down and smiled.