Stolen Souls

14

ARTURAS STRAZDAS PRESSED the red button on his phone before Herkus finished speaking. He stared at the display, but saw nothing.

Tomas dead.

Killed by a whore.

Abandoned at some roadside like a dog.

Strazdas roared and threw the phone at the wall. He burned inside, his heart incandescent. He grabbed fistfuls of his own hair and pulled until his scalp screamed. He formed a fist with his right hand and struck his forehead and temples again and again until he staggered, dizzy like a drunk, into the wall.

But still, the fire would not dim.

He tugged at his left shirtsleeve to expose his forearm and closed his teeth on the pale flesh.

Oh, the pain, white hot and fierce, at last blotting out the anger. His mind found balance. He eased his jaw open, tasted metal.

The shame hit hard, like a punch to his gut. He had never, would never tell a living soul about his anger. How sometimes it made him hurt himself. How, now and then, he bruised himself. How, albeit rarely, he occasionally drew his own blood.

Strazdas breathed hard, in through his nose, out through his mouth, until his heartbeat settled in his chest. He went to the suite’s bathroom and turned the cold-water tap on the washbasin. Leaning against the black marble, he held his forearm beneath the stream and watched the red streaks run down to the drain.

He cursed himself.

Ten years or more he’d been doing this. Always out of the blue, always over as soon as it began. First the anger, then the pain to drown it out, then the shame.

Once, in his Brussels apartment, the housecleaner had seen him slap his own face and bite the back of his hand. She had asked if everything was all right. He had said yes, everything was fine, not to worry.

Her body had never been found.

Strazdas tore off half a dozen sheets of toilet paper, wadded them into a ball, and pressed them against the bloody ellipse. He straightened and looked at himself in the mirror. A handsome man, he had been told. Thick dark hair and blue eyes. Good skin, fine features.

He spat at the mirror.

Saliva sprayed and dripped down the glass.

Arturas Strazdas knew he was unwell, but had no idea how to get better. Often it seemed his life played out before him, and he was a spectator of his own days. He had never had a woman he hadn’t paid for, he had never had a friend who didn’t fear him, and he knew he would die alone.

He had always known he would bury his brother.

Oh God, Tomas.

Strazdas grabbed a hand towel and wiped spittle from the mirror, avoiding his own gaze in the reflection. He dropped the towel in the basin, walked to the bedroom, and sat on the edge of the bed.

Tomas, dead.

What did grief feel like? Strazdas had never knowingly experienced it. When he got word from an uncle that his father had died, he had played the part of the mournful son, but deep down, he had rejoiced. He had never wept over the passing of another.

Strazdas closed his eyes, reached inside himself, searched for any sense of loss. Something nestled there, in his heart, that might have been a keening for his brother. But it was matched by the relief that he would never have to deal with Tomas’s catastrophes again. And that in turn was dwarfed by the anger at his own kin being snuffed out by a whore.

There, seize on that, take hold of the anger.

Surely a real human being would feel anger at the murder of his brother? Yes, they would. Murdered by a whore. Strazdas took hold of his rage and brought it close to his heart.

Don’t call until you’ve found him, his mother had said.

“I found him,” Strazdas said to the empty room.

He had to call her. Tell her what happened. He thought about waiting until he had more information, but it would do no good. She would resent every second he held the knowledge from her and punish him for it. Every minute he spared himself the act of telling was a minute of fury earned from her.

He stood, walked to the suite’s lounge, retrieved his mobile phone from the floor. A crack or two in the casing from the impact against the wall. He opened the contacts list. Her number was stored under Laima. He would never call her that to her face, of course, but it felt foolish to have “Mother” in one’s collection of phone numbers.

Before he hit the dial button, he mopped up white powder from the glass desktop with his fingertip. He worked it across his gums, relishing the cool numbing sensation that followed.

Now, dial.

Strazdas listened to the tones as the mobile connected to the apartment in Brussels. His mind’s eye pictured the large, open living area, and the telephone on the elegant side table next to the plush couch he had bought for her. He saw her switch on lights in the darkened apartment, walk to the phone, reach for the handset, her eyes blurred by sleep and tears.

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s me.”

Silence for a moment, then, “Tell me.”

“Tomas is dead,” he said.

A distorted clatter as the phone fell to the apartment floor. A strangled cry, like an animal caught in a trap. He listened for a minute or more, choked sobs and keening wails, until it stopped like a needle lifted from the groove of an old vinyl record. She lifted the phone again.

“How?”

Strazdas told her all of it. About the whore, how Tomas wanted to break her in, how she cut his throat with a shard of glass, how Darius and that idiot he ran with tried to dump the body in the water, and how the whore got away from them.

When he was done, he listened to her steady breathing. Eventually, she said, “Kill her.”

“I will,” Strazdas said.

“Make sure the bitch suffers for what she did to my boy,” she said.

He was a child again, shamed because he’d wet his bed, red imprints of her hard hand against the skin of his legs. “I will,” he said.

“And anyone else who was responsible, anyone who gets in your way. Do you understand me?”

Or a young teenager, caught with his fingers in his trousers, her mouth slashed wide in disgust. “Yes,” he said.

“Kill them all.”

His bladder ached. “Yes.”

A hard click, and she was gone.

He ran to the bathroom.