Blind Eye

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.' Gorzkiewicz — 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.

Wiktorja stopped halfway down the concrete slab path, then dug about in her huge handbag, coming out with the litre of vodka they'd bought on the way out here. 'I forgot to give it to him.'

'Well, too late now. Unless you want to go back up there and-'

The bottle exploded in her hands. One heartbeat it was there, the next it was all over the ground — shards of glass and puddles of liquid — leaving Wiktorja holding onto the shattered neck. They both stood, staring as the vodka seeped away between the warm paving slabs.

'Do they usually-'

This time he heard it: a muffled crump. And Logan looked over his shoulder to see a fresh hole in the stairwell door. Bullet-sized.

'I think someone's-'

Wiktorja screamed. She stared at her right arm as bright red soaked through the sleeve of her jacket. Logan grabbed her and dived behind a tiny, Lego-block-shaped car.

'Are you OK?'

She gritted her teeth, tears rolling down her cheeks, blood dripping from one trembling hand. The other was wrapped tightly around her bicep, trying to staunch the bleeding. 'Cholera jasna…'

Logan poked his head over the bonnet of the car and scanned the shadows. No sign of anyone. Why couldn't they hear any gunshots?

A little chunk of concrete path exploded, followed by the sound of a ricochet.

Wiktorja flinched back against the car, then stopped. A look of horror crawled across her face. 'We have to move!'

'What? Where? This is the only cover for-'

'This is a Trabant! Made of fibreglass: the bullets will go straight through it!'

And right on cue a fist-sized hole appeared in the car's bodywork next to Logan's head. 'Shit!'

'Shoot back!'

'At what? I can't see anything.'

THUMP — another hole.

'JUST SHOOT!'

'Jesus…' He scrabbled through his jacket pockets, looking for a pair of latex gloves, pulling out evidence bags, a notebook, little yellow forensics stickers… the collected debris of a dozen crime scenes back home. There was a pair of gloves buried at the bottom, sealed away in their own sterile plastic pack. He stuffed everything else back in his pockets, peeled the pack open, then snapped the gloves on.

'What the hell are you doing?'

'You think I'm leaving my fingerprints all over a strange bloody gun?' He unwrapped the thing from its square of paisley-patterned fabric. It was some sort of heavy-duty semiautomatic pistol and it weighed a ton. Nothing like the nice light Glock 9mm they'd taught him to shoot with during firearms training. Logan ejected the clip, checked it was full, then slapped it back in. He hauled the slide back and let go — it clacked forward into place. Ready.

'Well?' Wiktorja was starting to go pale, her lips taking on a delicate shade of blue. No way she'd lost that much blood already, so it was probably shock. 'What are you waiting for?'

'I can't just shoot into the dark at random! I might hit someone.'

'That is the point!'

THUMP — another hole in the Trabant.

He rolled the paisley handkerchief into a thin rope and tied it above the hole in her arm. 'Try not to pass out on me, OK?'

She grabbed him by the lapel, leaving a bloody handprint. Then kissed him. 'For luck.' Pause. 'You know, like in Star Wars?'

He was right: they were all mad.

Logan snapped up, tried to pick a spot in the shadows where he wasn't going to accidentally shoot someone through their living-room window, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Of course: it wasn't a Glock, was it? He flicked off the safety catch as the car's windscreen blew cubes of glass everywhere. This time when he squeezed, the gun roared, kicked like a mule, and pinged a brass cartridge case out to bounce along the fibreglass bonnet.

BOOOM!

'Bloody thing's a cannon!'

Two more shots came in reply. One shattered the wing mirror and the other thunked into the nearest tree. And this time Logan actually heard a 'futttt' in the darkness. Silencers. He fired a couple back, trying to aim for the noise.

BOOOM! BOOOM!

Ears ringing, he ducked back down again as they retaliated. The Trabant was beginning to look like a badly engineered piece of Swiss cheese.

Voices in the darkness — shouting instructions.

'What are they saying?'

Wiktorja closed her eyes. 'They… they're going to rush us from both sides.'

'How many of them?'

She shrugged, then hissed in pain. 'Three. Maybe four.'

'Sodding, bastarding hell.' He popped his head back over the bonnet, scanning the darkness. There were people standing at their apartment windows now, looking out. One by one the lights went off. No one was coming to help. 'We've got to make a run for it — back into the apartment block, OK? Can you do that?'

Wiktorja bit her bottom lip and nodded.

'Right, on three. One, two…' Logan jumped to his feet, ready to give covering fire. A man was charging towards them: mid-thirties, big moustache, dark curly hair, leather jacket. Gun. Logan shot him.

The man didn't fly backwards like they did in the movies, he just folded up, his momentum carrying him forwards into the other side of the Trabant. The whole car rocked as he slammed against the bodywork.

'Oh God.'

The man started to scream.

Wiktorja grabbed Logan by the sleeve and tried to drag him back towards the building. 'Run!'

'I shot him…'

The car's rear window exploded in a shower of glass.

'You have to move!'

Logan backed up a couple of steps. 'I… I've never shot anyone before…'

She tugged at his sleeve again as chunks of brickwork flew from the wall behind them. 'They are getting closer.'

Logan started forwards. 'We need to get him an ambulance!'

'SHUT UP AND RUN!'