Stalker

84

The bulb hanging from the ceiling of the waste-storage room is broken. The floor is stained from leaking rubbish, and four bins reek of rancid food. The tattered remnants of a list of rules and regulations hangs off the wall. In the weak light from outside, Joona can see another door at the far end of the room.

‘Come on,’ he says to Erik.

He cautiously opens the door and peers into a small kitchen with a buckled draining board. Rhythmic thuds echo through the walls. The ceiling lamp is on but there’s no one about. On a table there’s a chopping board with a grease-stained paper bag, surrounded by crumbs and sugar crystals.

There are two closed wooden doors in the far wall. The first is locked, but the second one has no lock.

Joona tries the handle, and they walk slowly into an empty changing room. They can hear music through the walls.

The door to the bathroom is closed.

They walk cautiously across the concrete floor, past three shower cubicles, a mirrored make-up table, and a row of clothes lockers.

Someone flushes the toilet, and they hurry through the room and find themselves in a narrow corridor lined with ten doors. The small rooms off the corridor have no windows, and are furnished with thin beds with shiny plastic mattresses.

Behind a closed door someone is moaning mechanically.

The only light comes from strings of fairy lights draped across the ceiling. Little hearts and flowers illuminate the bare walls in weak, flickering colours.

The corridor leads to a large storeroom with foil-covered ventilation pipes running across the ceiling.

In the flashing lights from a stage they can make out some thirty men and maybe ten women. There are sofas and armchairs everywhere. Along one wall is a row of plastic-wrapped pallets full of furniture.

It’s so dark that it’s difficult to discern any faces.

The throbbing music keeps repeating one particular musical phrase, over and over again.

On the stage a naked woman is dancing round a vertical metal pole.

Joona and Erik walk forward carefully in the weak light. The room smells of damp clothes and wet hair.

They keep an eye out for Rocky’s bulky frame. He ought to be visible against the light of the stage if he stands up.

They know this is a gamble. Rocky may already have been here and left. But if he managed to get hold of any money, he’s probably bought some heroin, in which case he could well still be here in the Zone.

A drunk is trying to negotiate a price with a woman, and one of the guards appears quickly and says something that leaves the man nodding.

The music changes, blending seamlessly into a different rhythm. The woman on the stage squats down with her thighs spread wide on either side of the pole.

A guard is standing by the bar, gazing out at the room with a motionless face.

Joona sees a black German Shepherd moving among the furniture; it looks accustomed to being there as it eats something from the floor, sniffs and moves on.

A large man emerges from the corridor. He blows his nose and heads towards the bar. Joona moves aside and tries to keep an eye on him.

‘It’s not him,’ Erik says.

They stop by the wall not far from the stage. It’s almost dark, but the reflected glow from the lights rigged up on the ceiling is illuminating an assortment of shirts and faces.

Right in front of the stage sits a man in black-rimmed glasses on a red armchair with a label hanging from its arm. On the back of the man’s hand is a tattoo of a cross with a shining star at its centre.

On a low table two bottles are clinking together with the rhythm of the bass. There are very few drugs in sight. Someone is snorting cocaine, a couple more slip pills between their lips, but sex is clearly the main commodity being traded here.

A young woman in a black latex bikini and a studded collar comes over to Erik, smiles and says something he can’t make out. She runs a hand through her short blonde hair as she bats her eyelids at him. When he shakes his head she moves on to the next man.

A film is showing on a television screen behind the bar: an aggressive man is walking round a room, hitting doors and pulling drawers open. A woman is shoved into the room, turns and tries to open the door again. The man goes over to her, pulls her backwards by her hair, and hits her face so hard that she falls to the floor.

Just off to one side of Erik and Joona stands a man with a coarse face and fleshy forehead. The shoulders of his grey jacket are wet with rain.

‘Anatoly? I handed my money over when I was searched,’ he says in a gruff voice.

‘I know, welcome,’ says a voice that sounds adolescent.

Joona moves sideways and sees that the voice belongs to a tall and very young man with yellowish skin and dark rings under his eyes.

‘I was thinking of going to the room – can I buy two wraps of brown?’

‘You can buy whatever you like,’ the young man replies. ‘We’ve got some top quality from southern Helmand, the usual from Iran, Tramadol, or…’

Their conversation tails off as they move away between the sofas and people.

The dog trots after them and licks the young man’s hand. Joona falls in behind them, and sees them turn off to the right at the side of the stage.

Erik manages to stumble into a low lounge table. A beer bottle topples over and rolls onto the floor. He goes a different way, stands on a wet umbrella and carries on round a leather sofa.

The guard by the stage watches him walk.

A young woman with round, pockmarked cheeks is sitting astride a man in a leather vest. He twines a lock of her dark hair around his index finger as he talks on his phone.

In the darkness Joona can no longer see the young man who was dealing heroin. There are too many people everywhere now. He looks round and sees the black dog slip through a swaying beaded curtain. The beads settle long enough to form the Mona Lisa’s face briefly before they part again and a young woman with bare breasts and a pair of tight leather trousers walks out.