Blind Eye

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, pizdzielec! 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 clock. '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 Krakow 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 Krakow 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 Krakow, 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.'