Chapter Twenty Six #2
“Spoken like my own true son.” Petrica leaned forward in his
throne. “This Fitzroy wants to hear some of my poetry. I mustn’t
disappoint the son of a king... By the way, you reached high,
didn’t you, my Alexandru? To try and grab yourself a prince. I
watched. I know about some of it. It’s wearisome, isn’t it—when you
win so much, to have to hold on to it all.” He smiled. “That’s a
fine subject for a poem. Can you still hear me,
Fitzroy?”
Laurie
could, but only through the peal of distant bells. He got his head
up, struggled upright far enough to show Sasha that he was still
functional. To show Petrica that he was still attentive, and to
make good on his silent promise to the shadowed man that he would
buy him time. “I hear you.”
“I wrote in Romanian, of course. But simple words translate
well. The lesson of mahala is this only—to
lose all is to find a kind of peace. I built a city fire of broken
furniture, the bones of poor men’s homes. Do you recall, my
brown-eyed son, how the ghetto wind snatched off the woodsmoke—how
it fled in rags, and burned down the small fire I’d built for you
to ash?”
The words were like woodsmoke themselves. Petrica’s voice had
changed. Even in English, he could call the ghetto wind into this
place, evoke the scents and crackle of the fire. The desolation...
The fire had burned in a concrete yard. “Yes, I recall,” Sasha
said. “I remember when you wrote that. The first time you read it
out to your friends, as well. One of them had brought an undercover
journalist from a literary magazine—Cultur? si Cuvantul, wasn’t it? That was the
beginning.”
Petrica chuckled harshly. “The beginning of obscurity. Ah, the
well-heeled Bucharesters loved my songs over the breakfast table,
didn’t they? An ex-con singing their city’s death-knell while they
ate their mamaliga and toast.”
“But it never brought you anything. You couldn’t even use your
real name. Then, you didn’t really build the fire for me, did you?
You built it because you’d just had a batch of assault rifles
delivered in a truckload of furniture. You were burning off the
packaging and registration papers. The poor men’s bones were
incidental.”
Laurie tensed. Sasha was doing a much better job of keeping
Petrica talking than he could have managed himself, but Petrica had
turned the Makarov around again so that its black snout was
pointing towards them. He seemed to find something funny in his
son’s ruthless piercing of the poetic mist, however, and he only
nodded, rocking forward once more in his chair. “Ah. Fifty
Kalashnikovs, that was, with a ready market in Tajikistan. Your
memory is good,
Alexandru. That was fourteen years ago.”
“And as for your brown-eyed son, you got pissed on rotgut
liquor that night and tried to sell him off along with the guns. I
remember too much, don’t I?”
“Much too much.” Petrica’s expression altered in the dim light,
as if in an echo of tenderness. “I always knew you were a living,
walking record of all my worst misdeeds. The Tajiki conflict’s over
now. I have to find my underground wars elsewhere. There’s never
any shortage of those, God be praised—Syria and Egypt need me now,
and I have three dozen M4 carbines boxed and waiting here. I buried
them during my last visit, when the Afghani black market was so
good. You’ll remember that too, won’t you, son?”
“For all the good it’ll do me.”
“For all the good. We understand each other. Come, now,
Alexandru—I hunted you, sent men to scare you, keep you silent. But
I only gave Luca his final orders when you started fucking this
gajo brat. I let you have a good long run.”
Sasha looked around the room. It could have been any of the
Bucharest warrens where his father and his gang had taken refuge
over the years. The ghetto wind snatched
off the woodsmoke... Petrica, sitting there
in his makeshift throne, could have been any version of his younger
self—a tortured, noble figure if you didn’t look too close,
chanting Romani verse to his cronies over the fire, the rotgut
bottle going round.
If you didn’t look close. If you didn’t remember. Sasha
couldn’t dig out one good recollection of him, not from his life’s
deepest mud—not even a dream of learning how to swim. The last
flicker of affection in him snuffed out and died. “You gave me a
good run?”
“Ah, now you sound pure Roma. Ice blocks cracking in the
fire... Yes, a run, boy—I could have had you killed at any
time.”
“I ran onto the streets.” Sasha tried to steady his voice. He
found Laurie’s hand with his in the shelter of their coats and
wrapped his fingers round it, grabbed it hard as death. A wild rage
was rising in him. “Your long fucking run... It put me into a
container ship at Dover with a bunch of frozen corpses. It dropped
me into a city where there was nothing for me, not one scrap of
safety and shelter. I was sixteen years old. You might as well have
been the first man I sold myself to so I could buy food. You might
as well have raped me yourself.”
Sasha ran out of breath. The last of it burned in his throat.
To spit the words into this monster’s face at last was worth a
lifetime of therapy, but the outpouring had scoured him, taken the
last of his strength. Laurie was propping him now. Stefan was
allowing this. Sasha knew why. He would often let his victims cling
to one another in their last few moments. He’d have called himself
compassionate, but Sasha knew the kindness was only meant to
heighten the anguish of loss. Of leaving a world where the
other lived—other heart,
other half, other soul. “Laurie,” he whispered. “Forgive
me.”
“Christ, sweetheart—for what?”
“For bringing you here. He’s going to finish us
now.”
The man
in the shadows stood up. He was staring into the darkness beyond
the door. Laurie couldn’t pay him attention any more. This was a
moment between predator and prey: Stefan was oblivious too, wholly
focussed on the scene at his feet. Gently he clicked the safety off
the gun.
The darkness in the doorway took on form. The shadow man
folded back his hood. He held out a hand, his gesture calming but
full of command: stop
there. He nodded in recognition, then spoke
softly. “Hello, Elizabeth.”