Moskva

10 Not Enough Room to…

Something in his flat was wrong. Tom knew it the moment he opened the door.

It wasn’t the smell, although that was metallic and flat, a slight odour underpinning the sourness of unemptied bins and sheets that needed washing. He’d been planning a bath, hot water allowing, to rid himself of the stink from the warehouse that infected his clothes. But the stench of something older and darker made hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

Later, with a whiskey in his hand and his back to the wall in the living room, sitting on the floor in the dark, he came up with a logical explanation for his split second of atavistic fear of what he’d believed an ancient evil.

He recognized, without realizing it, the smell of blood.

That thought held for the time it took him to sip dry his whiskey, time he spent going back over what he’d found on returning home. If you could call a top-floor flat in a Moscow block reserved for foreigners home.

His living room had been undisturbed.

The ashtrays still overflowed. The cactus he’d inherited looked as miserable as ever. His briefcase, with its combination lock, lay exactly where he’d left it. His bedroom was a mess, but no worse than when he’d dragged himself from sleep and rolled out of bed that morning.

Pillows adrift, duvet thrown back, greying sheets.

Tom knew, because his flat at Sad Sam was tiny, and its bathroom door was open and nothing looked different in there either, that what awaited him must be in the kitchen.

He was right.

A dead cat hung above his sink.

It was suspended by its back legs from a string tied to the fluorescent tube above. Tom knew it was Black Sammy, the cat he’d seen the night he came back from the New Year’s Eve party, because whoever had skinned it had left its pelt on the worktop.

Thinner than blood and thicker than lymph, the liquid that pooled in his sink told him the animal had been alive when the torture began. Rigor was well set in though, stiffening the carcass. Tom cut it down with scissors.

He used scissors because his only kitchen knife rested on the folded skin, where it had been placed after it had been used to flay the animal. Under the knife was a photograph of Tom on the corner by the Khrushchevka, with his shadow away to one side and an old woman he didn’t remember huddled in a doorway.

Picking it up, Tom took the photograph into the hall where the light was better.

The depth of field was so flat it had to have been taken with a telephoto lens. From high up, looking down. If it was taken from the top of a block of flats, then the photographer must have been there waiting, which meant he had known where Tom was headed. Someone didn’t want questions asked about Alex.

For all Tom knew, that same someone was watching his flat now to see how he’d react. Would he call his embassy? Would he simply wrap the poor bastard cat in newspaper and dump it in the communal bins? He could imagine the children of one of the journalists who lived in a bigger flat below finding it.

Returning to his kitchen, Tom took down the chopping board left by the previous tenant and ran the cat under cold water to make it less slippery. Then he began with the head, which he removed by putting the knife on the back of its spine and smacking the blunt edge of his blade. It was the most noise Tom would make that evening and the action he found hardest.

Dealing with the carcass was easy enough after that.

Having split the head down the middle, he rinsed and flushed both pieces, before filleting the rest and jointing it cleanly, running each piece under the tap before flushing it down the loo. He opened the ribs with scissors, washed the contents of the stomach down the sink, and flushed out the viscera.

Tom thought he was beyond shock. But unfolding Black Sammy’s pelt, he discovered he had exactly half of it. That was when he realized the pan he’d left dirty had been neatly washed up. As had a spatula and fork. Plus, his olive oil was out, along with his salt and pepper. A neat little threesome on the countertop.

Like a small family.

Tom took care not to clog the lavatory with flesh or fur and to leave long enough between flushes to keep what he was doing from being obvious to those below. What had happened never happened. He wanted anyone watching to know that.

When he was finished, Tom scrubbed the board and hung it back on the wall, washed the knife and the scissors, rinsed out the sink, put away his olive oil and salt and pepper, and poured himself another whiskey, taking it through to the darkness of his sitting room.

The alcohol would help, but it wasn’t enough to dull the rage at what some bastard had done to the poor bloody cat, and he knew he’d still be seeing its carcass hung above his sink as he tried to sleep.