The Carnival Master

7.

Again, Maria found herself anchorless in time. She had no idea how long she had been asleep or unconscious. It could have been a few minutes or a few days. Her first awareness on awakening was pain: in her ribs, in her face, and a hot, sharp tingling on her rasped skin. Maria grabbed onto the pain. It was the lesson that Vitrenko had taught her: that pain meant life.

She awoke to find herself lying on a mattress on top of a metal camp bed. They had dressed her again and her clothes smelled musty and dirty. There were several blankets over her and she saw that she was still in the cold-meat store. No, not still; she realised that they must have taken her out of the store to warm her up and stop her terminal decline into a hypothermic death. That would have taken time and skill. Maria rolled up the sleeves of her coat and jumper. She found what she was looking for on her left arm: a fresh puncture wound into a vein. Her brain was still running sluggishly and her head pounded but she knew what this meant: they would have administered a warm dextrose and saline drip to increase her core body temperature, and they would probably have put a mask on her to administer warm, humidified oxygen.

Maria knew that she was already a dead woman. And before she died there would be a lot of pain: both for Vitrenko’s enjoyment and to extract whatever information he could from her. But Maria was aware that what she knew was not enough for him to keep her alive. He was going to use her somehow to gain access to the dossier he was obsessed with. She had to escape: it was the only way for her to survive. And to stop Vitrenko from winning.

Maria still felt chilled to the core. She sat up on the edge of the bed and gathered the musty blankets around her. She removed her glove and waved her naked hand through the air. The temperature in the cold store was tolerable. It would have taken a long time to remove the chill from the air. There were no heaters in sight but she surmised that they must have been used. Maria’s guess was that she had been taken out, treated for hypothermia and kept sedated somewhere until the temperature in the store had risen sufficiently. This was no longer a torture chamber, merely a place of confinement. For the moment.

Maria tried to stand but an electric shock of pain from her cracked ribs jolted her. She allowed her fingers to explore gingerly beneath her jumper. Her ribs had been strapped. She eased back on the camp bed and thought about Buslenko, someone who had existed for her only through Vitrenko’s masquerade. She lay still, looking up at the ceiling with its bleak, relentless neon light and mourned a man she didn’t know.

The door opened and a tall heavy-set man came in, carrying a bowl. Maria didn’t recognise him but he had a distinctly Russian or Ukrainian look. His hair was cropped short and his nose showed signs of an ancient break. He placed the bowl next to her bed and left the cold store without speaking. So there were others now. For all she knew, Vitrenko had left and was going about his more important business. Maria made a mental picture of the guard who had delivered the food. I’ll call him The Nose, she thought. She ate the stew. It was so hot that it burned her mouth but she didn’t care. She relished the scalding heat in her chest and belly and consumed every morsel.

She had been surprised to find a metal spoon in the bowl. When she finished the stew she licked it clean and rubbed it against the stone floor next to the camp bed. After a minute or two she ran her thumb along the edge of the spoon: yes, she could sharpen it; create a weapon. She picked at the stitching of the mattress and concealed the spoon inside. She pulled the blanket over her eyes as a shield against the perpetual light from the neon strip. She couldn’t sleep. Her head buzzed as she conceived, elaborated and then rejected one plan of escape after another. She might not be fed again that day, but that was the only opportunity for escape. Even when she was fully fit she would have been no match for The Nose. She would have to take him by surprise and kill him quickly. If she worked at sharpening the edge of that spoon, she could maybe have a go at slashing the artery in his neck. She would have only one chance.

The door opened. Maria feigned sleep beneath the blanket. She heard the sound of heavy boots approaching. There would be no surprise attack now. It would need at least another day of preparation, of sharpening the spoon into a killing edge. The blanket was ripped from her head. She turned, blinking, to look up at The Nose who had collected her food bowl. He held out his hand, moving his fingers in a ‘give me’ gesture. Maria frowned as if confused. He repeated the gesture and she shrugged. The Nose sighed wearily, put the bowl back down and unholstered his heavy automatic. He snapped back the carriage, clicked off the safety and rammed the barrel of the gun into Maria’s cheek. He then repeated the ‘give me’ gesture with his free hand. Maria reached into the pocket she had fashioned in the mattress and removed the spoon. She handed it to The Nose with a cynical grin, which he returned, simultaneously slashing her across the forehead with the barrel of his automatic.

Maria glared defiant hate at The Nose, focusing on staying conscious and feeling the blood from the gash on her forehead trickle down the side of her face. Neither of them were in any doubt that she wanted to kill him, but The Nose simply gazed back at her impassively before turning and leaving with the bowl and the spoon. After he left, the light went out. Maria remembered there was a switch just outside the door. She was grateful for the sudden total darkness. She could sleep without cowering beneath the stinking blanket. She lay back in the pitch black and vowed not to touch the wound on her head.

Something was happening to her. It was as if the pain was shaping her resolve, sharpening her mind. She felt new clarity, a new purity of thought. Mortification of the flesh, they called it. The pain became like a background noise: the further she placed herself from it the more dislocated from her physical being she would become. Maria focused all her energy on her thoughts. There had to be a way out of this.