Katja from the Punk Band (9 page)

He clears more blood from one of the other cuts, dips his finger in the ink again.

“Did he give you a time?”

“Nothing that specific,” the girl says dreamily. She’s entranced by his self-harm, his self-control. “He was just mouthing off, I think. Trying to impress me.”

“And did he?”

“No,” she says simply and quietly.

He presses the ink into the cut, works it along the wound’s length and this time he’s more ready for the pain and ducks away from it before it reaches him. It’s a feeling of ascendance, one which he will experience to a greater degree later that night as he performs. At these times he feels as if he is growing, evolving. His body becoming a conduit.

He is aware of the ink being absorbed into his bloodstream, of the glare of the light and the girl reaching between his legs — but he doesn’t experience any of it in the way that is normal.

The plan to hijack Dracyev’s merchandise from the carrier is already fully formed in his head, though he has no recollection of working it out. He just knows what will be done and how.

Now all he needs is to get someone dumb enough and desperate enough to get the vial for him.

And he thinks of Vladimir Kohl.

And he thinks of Vladimir Kohl again as the suspension chains dangle him thirty feet above the ground and the small crowd gathered below. He thinks back to when the man was just another junkie lining up outside the very first arcade Szerynski opened, before he had expanded to over a dozen of them scattered across the island. When Kohl had come back night after night with those frazzled eyes of his exposed to the neon glows and electrical pulsing to get whatever he could with the measly funds he had managed to beg, borrow, or steal.

When Szerynski had seen the opportunity to wield Kohl’s desperation to his own end and install him as one of the first who would deal out of his arcades.

The crowd below are caught between cheering as they would were they watching a band perform and silently appreciating as they would in an art gallery.

They don’t know what Szerynski is and he likes that. He closes his eyes and lets himself drift toward the whitespace again. It’s a mother’s womb and the calmness of suicide and more, but already it’s starting to shiver and fade. It flickers like the last frames of an old movie and he concentrates on holding it steady but it moves, it moves in his grasp and he knows he can’t hold it if he has to think about it so he stops thinking and then it slips further.

And he fluctuates like this for some time, bobbing up and down on the tide of some great white ocean that refuses to swallow him or spit him out.

He thinks perhaps he will stay there until Kohl arrives with the vial.

But eventually the undulations cease and he is broken from the moment by a grating, cranking sound. It takes him time to realize it is the noise of the pulleys working.

He is being lowered to the ground once more. It must be over.

The crowd, for the most part, has waned, although he has no idea how long he has been suspended up there. What is left of those gathered regard him with only a vague interest and it seems as if they’ve forgotten why they came.

What exactly had they been expecting to see?
Szerynski wonders.

His body aches all over except for the points where the hooks puncture his skin.

In these places there is a certain numbness, a dullness void of feeling or unfeeling, and even as he presses his finger against them, there is no response. Mina, his fetish nurse, helps him onto a gurney and checks over his wounds with disinterest.

He feels as if he has lost something vital to his very being and she knows this.

“How long was I up there for?” he asks her.

“Three hours,” she tells him. “Just like you asked.”

“Are you sure? I wasn’t brought down early?”

She takes out the hooks one by one. Squeezes congealed blood from them.

“You ask for three hours, you are up there for three hours. You did not get anywhere?”

Neither of them know where it was he had been heading but wherever it was, he hasn’t made it yet again.

“No,” he snaps.

Mina removes the final hook with a satisfying pop from the stretched skin and Szerynski sits up.

“We’ll try it again in two nights,” he says, and Mina doesn’t respond.

She has left him, walked off into the darkness at the edges of the room, her job complete for the night.

Szerynski remains on the gurney, his legs dangling into the darkness below him, and for several moments he is captured by the intense feeling that if he were to drop himself down into it he would fall forever.

He looks up when someone emerges from the shadows of the now-silent room.

This man, Drago, is thick and full of meat like an overstuffed sausage. His fingers flex nervously as he stands before the naked chemical lord. He is holding a robe.

Szerynski steps into the garment and walks away without saying anything. Stops when Drago tells him that someone has been trying to contact him on his private line.

“Who was it?” Szerynski demands irritably. He is aware of the stigmata tears of blood trickling from each of his wounds.

Drago tells him, keeping a certain distance between himself and Szerynski.

“What did he want?”

“He wouldn’t say, specifically. Wanted to talk to you. Tonight.” Szerynski isn’t in the mood for that. Isn’t in the mood for anything now.

“I’m going to Czechmate,” he tells Drago, striding past him, the robe flowing in his wake.

“What if he calls again?” Drago says.

But Szerynski is already through the door and doesn’t slow his pace until he reaches his personal quarters on the third floor. He changes quickly, feels little jolts of numbpain where his clothes brush against the fresh wounds.

It’s a seven-block walk to the arcade and his pace doesn’t falter once the entire length of the journey. He avoids the fetish pull of the street girls whose eyes and posture seem to be filled with the glitter-sparkle of the stars above, whose boney hook-nailed fingers try to latch onto him as he passes.

He isn’t in the mood.

The arcade is cold and dead when he reaches it, the corrugated shutters rolled down over the entrance and the gas in the neon signage whispering gently through the glass tubing. He unlocks the side entrances and steps inside.

The air retains a constant electric charge like the pinhead of a great lightning storm, and if he hadn’t shaved himself clean several days earlier his body hairs would now be standing on end. It is a familiar, god-like aura.

Most of the cabinets are shut down, but a few remain switched on, glowing morosely amongst their dormant fellows. These ones are the old faithful, the ones whose electronics are so fragile it would be too great a risk to switch them off for fear they might never return to life again.

He only opens the place occasionally now, when the inclination takes him.

For the most part, this is his personal zone, his own scratched and battered version of the whitespace he knows awaits him elsewhere. He wanders amongst the cabinets, running his hands across their dusty surfaces like a shopkeeper surveying the wreckage of his store after riots.

He stands before a machine that scrolls through a series of animations intermingled with lists of the top scores, and as he places his hands on the controls he feels a vibration at the back of his leg.

He pulls out his pager and reads the message scrolling across the LCD display. Hesitates with the device held in mid-air, about to be launched toward the room’s opposite wall.

Something makes him stop and read again.

Instead of destroying the pager, he taps in the number to a payphone that has been rigged with a piece of aluminum that tricks it into thinking coins have been fed into it.

“What do you want?” he says, his voice thick and flat. “Sorry, I’m not interested. If you . . . a what?”

His voice changes. His posture changes.

The hum of the machines fills his ears.

“Where did you get it?” He says this slowly, deliberately. He is silent for several moments and the voice on the other end says
hello
? To check that he is still there. “Bring it over. I’m at the Czechmate arcade, it’s on . . . yes that’s the one. Okay. I’ll be waiting for you.”

And the line goes dead but he doesn’t put down the phone, not yet. The static hisses in his head and he has the feeling he used to get when he was still just a street-dealer passing out whatever chemicals he could get his hands on to whomever might want them. It’s the feeling that a pickpocket gets when he realizes he’s just snatched the wallet of an undercover cop, that a hooker gets when she’s lead into an alley before things turn nasty, that an addict gets the moment they inject bad gear into their veins.

But he swallows his suspicions for now, plays a couple of games of a sideways-scroller until he hears the sound of a car pulling up outside. He goes to one of the building’s few windows, peers around the piece of black plastic that covers the glass, and watches a man in a long dark coat walking nervously up toward the front door. Szerynski is still trying to figure out whether the shape in the back of the car is human when there is a knock.

He has a gun tucked into his waistband, a knife slotted into a sheath on his calf.

He opens the door and lets the man in.

“Thank you for seeing me.”

“You have it with you?” Szerynski asks.

The man shifts nervously and Szerynski senses the man suddenly realizing the risk of bringing the object in question with him, but it’s too late now.

“Let me see it.”

Again the man hesitates. Control. They all want control of situations.

“If I’d have been interested in killing you for it, I would have already done so,” Szerynski tells him flatly. “I’ve been good enough to spare you a moment of my time, the least you can do is show me what you have contacted me about.”

Reluctantly the man reaches into his pocket, and when he brings out the vial, Szerynski’s jaw flexes visibly. The dealer opens his palm and stares at it until the vial is placed there.

He tilts his hand and rolls it, then flicks on a lamp that hovers above a row of booths running along the near wall. He tilts the vial until the watermark reveals itself.

“You got this from a contact, you said?”

“Yes.”

“His name?”

“Her,” the man says, then seems to catch himself. “I can’t give you that information.”

“I see.”

And Szerynski, he goes into his back pocket, fishes out a little pen-like device, flashes it across the vial.

“Where did they get it from?”

“I don’t know. Look, is it worth something to you? Because if you don’t want it, I can — ”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Szerynski tells the man. “How much do you want for it?” And he sees the man quickly calculating how much he thinks he can wrangle from the dealer, but this doesn’t matter, this doesn’t interest him.

The man feeds him an amount and Szerynski smiles just for the sake of it. He has triple that in the arcade’s small safe and the only reason it’s in there is that it isn’t worth the effort of getting it transferred to the vault back at his warehouse.

The dealer cuts ten grand from the amount for no good reason and the man agrees only too eagerly. Szerynski tells him to follow and together they go to the office that is practically stapled to the rear wall — a simple timber frame lined with sheet metal that chills the room.

He opens the safe and removes the entire stack of notes within, dumping them on the table for the man to see.

Szerynski separates the agreed amount, then holds another 30 Gs over it, ready to drop in with the rest.

“You sure you don’t want to tell me where you got this?”

The man licks his lips, a subconscious and utterly primal gesture that makes Szerynski smile. He stares at the wad of notes for a few moments, closes his eyes, then shakes his head.

Then the man takes the money, as if it will disappear as some sort of knock-on effect of his refusal. He seems unsure what to do with it at first, then shoves it into his jacket pocket.

“If you change your mind,” Szerynski says. “You have my number.”

The man nods. Leaves.

Szerynski stares down at the notes still scattered across his desk, sits down in a chair that creaks with neglect. He examines the vial once more, his eyes lingering on Dracyev’s seal imprinted on its glass.

Something is obviously going on. Something fucked up.

He will not be played with.

Kohl is up to something.

He ponders his options for a time and then finally picks up the phone. He dials the number of Kohl’s arcade and a woman with a voice like sludge answers.

“He’s not here,” she says. “What do you want?”

Szerynski smiles at the fact she is being as rude to him as any other punter who might be calling up, not realizing that without him, there would be no Digital Drive-by. Not realizing that her job was just a sham, an excuse to get people in and out.

“Where did he go? When?”

“Look, who is this? If it’s so fucking important then why don’t you move your lazy ass and come down here? I’ve got better things to be doing with my time than . . .”

Her voice fades suddenly and Szerynski hears her barking at a customer in the background.

“Look, I’ve got work to do,” she says, voice back to its full, searing clarity. “You want to leave a message or something?”

“Just tell him that Mr. Szerynski wants to speak to him.”

“Mr. Whuh?”

“Szerynski. S-Z-E . . .”

“Oh . . . wait. Waitaminute. Here he comes.”

Her voice fades again and there are a few moments of shuffling noises.

“Mr. Szerynski.”

Kohl’s voice.

“Vladimir.”

“I’m glad you called,” the man says, sounding genuinely relieved. “Very good timing.”

“Really,” Szerynski replies cautiously. “Why’s that?”

“Because I have your vial. I have it right here in my hands.”

Szerynski sits forward in his seat. “You have the vial.”