Stolen Souls

21

HERKUS DROVE TO Rugby Road, near Botanic Gardens, where Rasa’s flat occupied the upper floor of a terraced house. A professional couple lived below. He had learned this part of town was called the Holylands, but he did not know why. He couldn’t see anything holy about it, but there were some good restaurants, and an excellent bookstore. Not that he read much, let alone in English, but he enjoyed the shop’s warm soft light, the sight of books stacked on shelves. It reminded him of his school days.

Rasa looked tired and harried when she answered the front door. It was probably an early start for her. She was lucky she got any sleep at all; he’d been running the length and breadth of the city since yesterday morning with no sign of it letting up. And now this damned snow on top of everything else.

He rarely indulged, but he thought he might allow himself a little of the boss’s goods for himself once he purchased them from Rasa’s contact. Just enough to give him a boost and get through the morning.

Herkus followed her upstairs and into her flat. The place smelled of cigarettes laced with the aroma of incense from a joss stick that burned on the coffee table. Clothes and fashion magazines lay strewn on the furniture and floor. A tailor’s dummy stood in the corner, fabric draped around it.

“Did you have to do that to Darius?” Rasa asked as she sat at the small table by the window. Spools of thread cluttered its surface, scissors and needles scattered amongst them. A plant pot rested on the windowsill, its occupant browning with thirst. She lifted a cigarette packet and a lighter.

“Yes, I did,” Herkus said. “Give me one of those.”

Rasa made the sign of the cross, took a cigarette for herself, and handed the packet to him. Herkus suspected she and Darius might have had something going on. It was only natural she’d be sorry for the big man’s passing, but she was stony inside. She would get over it soon enough.

He sat down to face her across the table and pulled a cigarette from the packet. Rasa lit hers, then held the flame out for him.

“What a mess,” she said through the smoke.

Herkus grunted in agreement. He had filled Rasa in on developments when he phoned her, so he had no desire to discuss it further. But she did.

“That idiot,” Rasa said. “Sam Mawhinney. He caused all this. I’m glad you took care of him. His brother’s no better.” Herkus did not answer. He drew on the cigarette.

“Stupid boys. And that little bitch. I knew she was trouble the second I set eyes on her.”

“Then why did you pick her to take to Belfast?” Herkus asked.

“Because she looked good,” Rasa said. “Men will pay serious money for a girl who looks like that. She can become a good worker if you train her right, take the time. But those idiots, the brothers, they wanted to put her to work right away instead of waiting. I told them to give it a couple of weeks, give her a chance to accept it, maybe dope her up, but they wouldn’t listen. Now look at the shit they caused.”

Herkus gazed out of the window, watched snow fall. Rasa had chosen a pleasant spot in which to live, close to the park and all that Botanic Avenue offered. Few students could afford to rent a place on this street. The bustle of the city seemed a world away from the peaceful scene outside.

“When did you last see the girl?” he asked.

“Yesterday afternoon,” Rasa said. “I had to take her in hand.”

“Why?”

“Because she let a customer go without giving him anything. She had the nerve to say he just wanted to talk.”

Herkus kept his eyes on the street below. “Talk?”

“That’s what she said. But I know men. Men don’t want to talk. Men only want to—”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t remember his name,” Rasa said. “But I’ve seen him before. A short man, but heavy.”

“Fat?”

Rasa shook her head. “Not fat. Muscular, broad-shouldered, like my grandfather. Like a barrel on legs. He had a round face and a beard, dark hair swept back. He gave her a necklace.”

Herkus rested his chin on his hand, let his eyes unfocus, allowed his mind to follow the loose thread it had discovered among Rasa’s words.

When he had been silent for a time, she asked, “What’s wrong?”

He turned his attention back to her. “What sort of necklace?”

“A cross,” Rasa said.

Herkus stubbed the cigarette out in the plant pot’s dry compost. He stood and looked around the room, found an envelope and a pen sitting on the coffee table. He brought them to her.

“Draw the man,” he said.

She stared at him, her face loose with incomprehension.

Herkus pressed the pen and paper into Rasa’s hands. “You know how to draw. I’ve seen it. Make a picture of him.”

She thought for a moment, then scrawled on the envelope. Her crude strokes formed a round face, thick hair, a beard just as she’d described. Herkus had no idea if it looked like the man or not, but it wasn’t a bad sketch of somebody. Rasa had worked in the fashion business before she left Lithuania, and had wanted to do the same here, perhaps as a designer. Instead she had become a link in a supply chain for young girls. Not a big difference in career as far as Herkus was concerned.

He took the envelope from her. “Does it look like him?” “From what I can remember,” she said.

He indicated the line that slashed over one of the eyebrows and asked, “What’s this?”

“He has a scar,” she said. “He’s an ugly man.”

He tucked the paper into his breast pocket. “So who’s the dealer you’re sending me to?” he asked.

“His name’s Jim Pollock,” Rasa said. “I always buy from him. He gives me a good price.”

“He knows I’m coming?”

“I called him straight after you phoned me. Why?”

“No reason,” Herkus said.

He turned and walked to the door.

She called after him, “How is Arturas?”

Herkus stopped. “A little on edge,” he said.

“Is he angry?” she asked.

“Of course.”

Rasa stood and crossed the room to him. “I mean, is he angry at me? Because I found the girl. Does he blame me?”

He studied the lines of her face, the coloring of her skin, imagined she must have been beautiful in her youth. A pang he guessed to be sadness sounded in his breast.

“Arturas is angry at everything,” he said. “He’s angry at me. He’s angry at his brother. He’s angry at the fucking air he breathes.”

Herkus noticed the shake in her hand as she took a long drag on her cigarette.

“Listen,” he said. “Maybe you should take off for a while. Spend Christmas away. You might still get a flight out this afternoon if you’re quick. Or you could go across the border. Either way, just get out of this place for a few days.”

She nodded and gave him a flicker of a smile. “Yes. That’s a good idea. Maybe I will.”

He let himself out, left her there in her unkempt flat, alone. A woman like her, he thought, she should be married with children almost grown by now. Maybe even a young grandmother. Not living in a faraway city, selling flesh to the filth that traded in such things.

Five years ago, pity had been an alien emotion to Herkus Katilius. But he had felt it more and more often in recent times, along with the aching in his knees and the small of his back.

“I’m getting old,” he said to himself as he unlocked the Mercedes and climbed in.

TRAFFIC THICKENED AS Herkus drove east, across the Albert Bridge, heading for Sydenham. Motorists kept their speed low as they travelled through slush and compacted ice. He followed the instructions from the car’s sat-nav system until he arrived at a newly built apartment block that sprawled around a small square, looking more like a school or a clinic than a place to live.

He preferred Rasa’s flat on its quiet street to this series of squares and triangles. No matter. He didn’t have to stay here long, just buy the goods and go.

The Merc’s lights blinked as Herkus locked the car. He turned his collar against the cold and shoved his hands down into his pockets. A trail of layered footprints in the snow gave the only indication of a path to the building’s entrance. An array of buttons studded a metal panel by the door. Frost formed a crisp coating on its surface. Herkus selected the buzzer for the flat number Rasa had given him, and held his thumb against it.

No answer.

He pressed again.

A tinny voice crackled, “What?”

“This is Pollock?” Herkus asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“Rasa sent me,” he said. “To buy stuff.”

A pause, then, “Who sent you to what?”

“Rasa,” Herkus said. “She told me she buys from you before. She told me you make a good price.”

“I don’t know any Rasa,” the voice said. “Now fuck off.”

Even through the tiny speaker, Herkus knew fear when he heard it. The voice had that edge, that brittle signal of restrained panic.

But why?

The cogs of his mind turned too slowly, hindered by a lack of sleep, but they connected at last. Adrenalin followed realization, charging his limbs. Instinct took over. Herkus spun away from the door, dropped low to the ground, as the attacker came at him, the knife outstretched in his hand.

The man’s momentum carried him forward, his gut meeting Herkus’s shoulder, the air driven from his lungs with a strangled wheeze. Herkus rammed into the attacker’s midsection, pushing him upward, and let gravity do the rest.

Snow cushioned the man’s fall, and Herkus had a moment to see his upturned face before he drove his heel into it.

Mark Mawhinney fell back, his lip already swelling. The knife slipped from his fingers, a blade that looked like he’d taken it from his mother’s kitchen. He spat blood, red spraying on white, and coughed.

When he tried to regain his feet, Herkus kicked him square in the groin. Mawhinney fell to his side, pulled his knees up, whined like a starving dog.

“Don’t get up,” Herkus said in English. “Your brother was a stupid man. Now he is dead. If you a smart man, you stay down, you stay alive.”

Mawhinney writhed in the snow, hissing through his torn lips. “You bastard,” he said, the words squeezed through his teeth, tears spilling from his eyes, melting tiny pits in the snow where they fell. “Fucking bastard … Sam did nothing … no call to … do that … bastard.”

Herkus crouched beside him and picked the knife from the snow. He pointed the blade at him. “Sam let the whore kill Tomas,” he said. “Arturas will forget this, you think? I don’t think. You go away from here, maybe Arturas can forget you. Go now.”

Mawhinney rolled onto his belly, hoisted himself up on his hands and knees, and crawled. Crimson drool formed a line between his mouth and the ground, leaving a trail behind him.

Herkus stood. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the knife handle clean, and tossed it into the snow as he walked back to the Mercedes. As he approached the car, pain called from his shoulder. He stopped, rotated his arm, felt the tendons and muscles complain.

“I’m getting old,” he said.

Mark Mawhinney had meant to harm him, possibly kill him. Had Herkus not reacted in time, he might have succeeded.

The Irish brothers had messed it up, Rasa said. They tried to put the girl to work too soon. It was their fault. And Arturas would say the same.

Herkus looked over his shoulder.

Mark had reached the wall of the building. He grabbed a windowsill, tried to pull himself to his feet.

“Fuck,” Herkus said.

He turned and marched toward the other man, his hands ready.