What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(36)

—

THEN ARKADY turned his back on Leporello’s growling and Giacomo’s sobs as he tried to snatch the key back from the grate. He fell asleep with the intention of kidnapping Eirini the Fair in the morning. The palace watchwords hadn’t changed; he had checked. He would be glib and swift and resolute and have the girl at his mercy before she or anyone grasped the situation. He would demand that the tyrant take his damn foot off the nation’s neck and let everybody breathe. Money too, he’d ask for a lot of that. Enough for medicine and wholesome meat broth and a proper bed and all the sea breeze his friends could wish for.

—

HE DREAMED of the key writhing in the fire, and he dreamed of faces coughing out smoke amidst the flames, each face opening up into another like the petals of a many-layered sunflower, and he was woken by police officers. They shone light into his eyes and pummeled him and ordered him to confess now while they were still being nice. Confess to what? The officers laughed at his confusion. Confess to what, he was asking, when the building he’d been evicted from had burned to the ground overnight and he’d been the one who’d set the fire. Almost half the inhabitants had been out working their night jobs, but everybody else had been at home, and there were nine who hadn’t escaped in time. So there were nine deaths on his head. Arkady maintained that he’d set no fire, that he hadn’t killed anybody, but he knew that he’d been full to the brim with ill will and still was, and he thought of the burning key and he wasn’t sure . . . he believed he would have remembered going out to the edge of the city, and yet he wasn’t sure . . . he asked who had seen him set the fire, but nobody would tell him. Giacomo and Leporello were so quiet that Arkady feared the worst, but when he got a chance to look at them he saw that one of the policemen had somehow got a muzzle and leash on Leporello and was making gestures that indicated all would be well as long as Giacomo stayed where he was. After a few more denials from Arkady his friends were removed from the room: Giacomo asked why and was told that his friend had killed people and wouldn’t admit it, so he was going to have to be talked to until he admitted it. At this Giacomo turned to Arkady and asked: “But how could Arkady do this, when he is so good?” Arkady forgot that his words could be taken as a confession, and asked his friend to understand that he hadn’t meant to do it. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know—Giacomo nodded at those words and said: “Yes, I understand.” Satisfied with Arkady’s self-incrimination, the officer holding Leporello allowed the dog to stand on his hind legs and pat Arkady’s cheek and then his own face; he repeated this a few times as a way of reassuring Arkady that he would be by Giacomo’s side until the truth came out. Leporello seemed confident that the truth would come out very soon, and Arkady remembered the vizsla puppy he’d tried to drive away and was glad he’d failed at that.

—

THOUGH ARKADY BROKE down and confessed after being shown photographs of the five men and four women who’d died in the fire, his confession was never entirely satisfactory. He got the timing and exact location of the fire he’d set wrong, and his statement had to be supplemented with information from his former landlord, who identified him as the culprit before a jury, pointing at Arkady as he described the clothing the police had found him wearing the morning they arrested him. The inconsistencies in Arkady’s account troubled the authorities enough to imprison him in a cell reserved for “the craziest bastards,” the ones who had no inkling of what deeds they might be capable of doing until they suddenly did them.

—

ARKADY’S MEALS were brought to him, and his cell had an adjoining washroom that he kept clean himself. He no longer had to do long strings of mental arithmetic, shaving figures off the allowance for food as he went along—after a few days his mind cleared, he stopped imagining that Giacomo and Leporello were staring mournfully from the neighboring cell, and he could have been happy if he hadn’t been facing imprisonment for deaths he dearly wished he could be sure he hadn’t caused. His cell was impregnable, wound round with a complex system of triggers and alarms. Unless the main lock was opened with the key that had been made for it, he couldn’t come out of that cell alive.

—

THE TYRANT held the key to Arkady’s cell, and liked to visit him in there and taunt him with weather reports. He hadn’t been interested in the crimes of the other crazy bastards who’d once inhabited this cell, so they’d been drowned. But as somebody who had by his own admission dispatched people and then gone straight to sleep afterward, Arkady was the only other person within reach that the tyrant felt he had a meaningful connection with. Arkady barely acknowledged his questions, but unwittingly gained the affections of the guards by asking a variant of the question “Shouldn’t you be staying here in this cell with me, you piece of shit?” each time the tyrant said his farewells for the day. As per tyrannical command the guards withheld Arkady’s meals as punishment for his impudence, but they didn’t starve him as long they could have. One night Arkady even heard one of the guards express doubt about his guilt. The guard began to talk about buildings with doors that could all be opened with the same key. He’d heard something about those keys, he said, but the other guard didn’t let him finish. “When are you going to stop telling old wives’ tales, that’s what I want to know . . . anyway no landlord would run his place that way.”