Lost (8 page)

“Somebody must take responsibility for this.”

“Yes, but first help me remember.”

He laughs wryly and points at me with his hand. His right index finger is aimed at my head and his gold thumb ring is like the hammer of a gun. Then he smoothly turns his hand and frames my face within a backward “L”.

“I want my daughter or I want my diamonds. I hope that's clear. My father told me never to trust Gypsies. Prove him wrong.” Even after Aleksei has gone I can feel his presence. He's like a character from a Quentin Tarantino film with an aura of violence held barely in check. Although he hides behind his tailored suits and polished English accent, I know where he comes from. I knew kids just like him at school. I can even picture him in his cheap white shirt, clunking shoes and oversize shorts, taking a beating at lunchtimes because of his strange name and his peasant-poor clothes and his strange accent.

I know this because I was just like him—an outsider—the son of a Romany Gypsy, who went to school with
ankrusté
(smal bal s of dough flavored with caraway and coriander) instead of sandwiches, wearing a painted badge on my blazer because we couldn't afford to buy a stitched one.

“Beauty cannot be eaten with a spoon,” my mother would tel me. I didn't understand what she meant then. It was just another one of her queer sayings like, “One behind cannot sit on two horses.”

I survived the beatings and the ridicule, just like Aleksei. Unlike him I didn't win a scholarship to Charterhouse, where he lost his Russian accent. None of his classmates were ever invited home and the food parcels his mother sent—with their chocolate dates, gingerbread and milk candy—were kept hidden. How do I know these things? I walked in his shoes.

Aleksei's father, Dimitri Kuznet, was a Russian émigré who started with a single flower barrow in Soho and cultivated a smal empire of pitches around the West End. The turf war left three people dead and five unaccounted for.

On Valentine's Day in 1987 a flower sel er in Covent Garden was nailed to his barrow, doused in kerosene and set alight. We arrested Dimitri the fol owing day. Aleksei watched from his upstairs bedroom as we led his father away. His mother wailed and screamed, waking half the neighborhood.

Three weeks before the trial Aleksei left school and took over the family business alongside Sacha, his older brother. Within five years Kuznet Brothers control ed every flower barrow in central London. Within a decade it held sway over the entire cut-flower industry in Britain with more influence over prices and availability than Mother Nature herself.

I don't believe the urban myths or bogeyman stories about Aleksei Kuznet but he stil frightens me. His brutality and violence are by-products of his upbringing; an ongoing act of defiance against the genetic hand that God dealt him.

We might have both started off the same, suffering the same taunts and humiliation, but I didn't let it lodge like a bal of phlegm in my throat and cut off oxygen to my brain.

Even his brother disappointed him. Perhaps Sacha was too Russian and not English enough. More likely Aleksei disapproved of his cocaine parties and glamour-model girlfriends. A teenage waitress was found floating facedown in the swimming pool after one such party, with semen in her stomach and traces of heroin in her blood.

Sacha didn't face a jury of twelve. Only four men were needed. Dressed in balaclavas they broke into his house one night, smothered his wife, and took Sacha away. Some say Aleksei had him strung up by his wrists and lowered into an acid bath. Others say he took off his head with a wood-splitting ax. For al anyone knows Sacha's stil alive, living abroad under a different name.

For Aleksei there are only two proven categories of people in the world—not the rich and the poor or the good and the evil or the talkers and the doers. There are winners and losers. Heads or tails. His universal truth.

Under normal circumstances, better circumstances, I try not to dwel on the past. I don't want to envisage what might have happened to a child like Mickey Carlyle or to the other missing children in my life.

But ever since I woke up in the hospital I can't stop myself going back there, fil ing in the missing hours with horrible scenarios. I see the Thames littered with corpses that bob along beneath the bridges and tumble in the wake of passing tourist boats. I see blood in the water and guns sinking into the silt.

I look at my watch. It's 5:00 a.m. That's when predators do their hunting and police come knocking. Human beings are more vulnerable at that hour. They wake and wonder, pul ing the covers close around them.

Aleksei mentioned a ransom. He and Keebal both knew about the diamonds. I must have been there—on the ransom drop. I wouldn't have gone ahead without proof of life. I must have been sure.

Against the quietness comes commotion—people running and shouting. I can hear a fire alarm.

Maggie appears in the door. “There's been a gas leak. We're evacuating the hospital. I'l get a wheelchair—I don't know how many are left.”

“I can walk.”

She nods approval. “We're taking the sickest patients first. Wait for me. I'l come back.”

In the same breath she has gone. Police and fire sirens wail against the glass. The sound is soon masked by gurneys rattling down the corridors and people shouting instructions.

After twenty minutes the noise level abates and the minutes stretch out. Maybe they've forgotten me. I once got left behind on a school field trip to Morecambe Bay. Someone decided to dare me to walk the eight miles across the mudflats from Arnside to Kents Bank. People drown out there al the time, getting lost in the fog and trapped by the incoming tides.

Of course, I wasn't foolish enough to take up the dare. I spent the afternoon in a café eating scones and clotted cream, while the rest of the class studied waders and wildfowl. I convinced everyone that I'd made it. I was fourteen at the time and it almost got me expel ed from Cottesloe Park but for the rest of my school days I was famous.

My aluminum crutches are beside the door. Swinging my legs out of bed, I hop sideways until my fingers close around the handles and my upper arms slip into the plastic cuffs.

Leaving the room, I look down a long straight corridor to a set of doors and through the glass panels I see another corridor reaching deeper into the building. There is a faint smel of gas.

Fol owing the exit signs I start walking toward the stairs, glancing into empty rooms with messed-up bedclothes. I pass an abandoned cleaner's cart. Mops and brooms sprout from inside like seventies rock stars.

The stairs are in darkness. I look over the handrail, half expecting to see Maggie on her way up. Turning back I catch sight of something moving at the far end of the corridor, the way I've come. Maybe they're looking for me.

Retracing my steps, I push open closed doors with a raised crutch.

“Hel o? Can you hear me?”

Behind green-tinted Perspex I find a surgery with a bloodstained paper sheet crumpled on the operating table.

The nursing station is deserted. Files are open on the counter. A mug of coffee is growing cold.

I hear a low moan coming from behind a partition. Maggie is lying motionless on the floor with one leg twisted under her. Blood covers her mouth and nose, dripping onto the floor beneath her head.

A muffled voice makes me turn. “Hey, man, what you stil doing here?”

A fireman in a ful face mask appears in the doorway. The breathing apparatus makes him look almost alien but he's holding a spray can in his hand.

“She's hurt. Quick. Do something.”

He crouches next to Maggie, pressing his fingers against her neck. “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing. I found her like this.”

I can just see his eyes behind the glass but he's looking at me warily. “You shouldn't be here.”

“They left me behind.”

Glancing above my head, he stands suddenly and pushes past me. “I'l get you a wheelchair.”

“I can walk.”

He doesn't seem to hear me. Less than a minute later he reappears through a set of swinging doors.

“What about Maggie?”

“I'l come back for her.”

“But she's hurt—”

“She'l be fine.”

Nursing the aluminum crutches across my lap, I lower myself into the chair. He sets off at a jog down the corridor, turning right and then left toward the main lifts.

His overal s are freshly laundered and his heavy rubber boots slap on the hard polished floor. For some reason I can't hear the flow of oxygen into his mask.

“I can't smel gas anymore,” I say.

He doesn't respond.

We turn into the main corridor. There are three lifts at the far end. The middle one is propped open by a yel ow maintenance sign. He picks up the pace and the wheelchair rattles and jumps over the linoleum.

“I didn't think it would be safe to use the lifts.”

He doesn't answer or slow down.

“Maybe we should take the stairs,” I repeat.

He accelerates, pushing me at a sprinter's pace toward the open doors. The blackness of the shaft yawns like an open throat.

At the last possible moment I raise the aluminum crutches. They brace across the doors and I slam into them. Air is forced out of my lungs and I feel my ribs bend. Bouncing backward, I twist sideways and rol away from the chair.

The fireman is doubled over where the handle of the wheelchair has punched into his groin. I scramble up and pul his arm through the wheel of the chair. Spinning it a half turn, I jam his wrist against the frame. Another quarter turn wil snap it like a pencil.

He is flailing now, trying to reach me with his other fist. I keep twisting away from him, with the chair between us.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

Cursing and struggling, his mask is nearly off. Suddenly, he changes his point of attack and sinks his fist into my damaged leg, grinding his knuckles into the bandaged flesh.

The pain is unbelievable and white spots dance in front of my eyes. I spin the wheelchair sideways, trying to escape. At that same moment I hear the crack of his wrist breaking. He groans.

Both of us are on the floor. He launches a kick at my chest, sending me backward. My head slams against the wal . Up on his knees, he grips me by the back of my shirt with his good hand and tries to drag me toward the lift shaft. I kick at the floor with my one good leg and wrap my fingers around the harness on his jacket. I'm not letting go.

Exhaustion is slowing us down. He wants to kil me. I want to survive. He has strength and stamina. I have fear and bloody-mindedness.

“Listen, Tarzan, this isn't working,” I say, sucking in air between each word. “The only way I'm going down that hole is if you go with me.”

“Go to hel ! You broke my fucking wrist!”

“And someone shot me in the leg. You see me crying?”

Somewhere below us an engine grinds into motion. The lifts are moving. He glances up at the numbers above the door. Scrambling to his feet, he stumbles down the corridor, carrying his busted wrist as though it's already in a sling. He is going to escape down the stairs. There is nothing I can do.

Reaching for my shirt pocket I feel for the smal yel ow tablet. My fingers are too large for such a delicate task. I have it now, squeezed between my thumb and forefinger . . . now it's on my tongue.

The adrenaline leaks away and my eyelids flutter like moth wings on wet glass. Someone wants me dead. Isn't that strange?

I listen to the lifts rise and the murmur of voices. Pointing down the corridor, I mumble, “Help Maggie.”

6

There are police patrol ing the corridors, interviewing staff and taking photographs. I can hear Campbel berating some poor doctor about hampering a police investigation. He makes it sound like a hanging offense.

The morphine is wearing off and I'm shaking. Why would someone want to kil me? Maybe I witnessed a murder on the river. Maybe I shot someone. I don't remember.

Campbel opens the door and I get a sense of déjà vu—not about the place but the conversation that's coming. He takes a seat and gives me one of his ultra-mild smiles.

Before he can speak I ask about Maggie.

“She's in a room downstairs. Someone gave her a broken nose and two black eyes. Was it you?”

“No.”

He nods. “Yeah, that's what she said. You want to tel me what happened?”

I go through the whole story—tel ing him about “Fireman Sam” and the wheelchair sprint down the corridor. He seems happy enough with the details.

“What did the cameras pick up?”

“Sod al . He blacked out the lenses with spray paint. We got one image from the nursing station but no face behind the mask. You didn't recognize him?”

“No.”

He looks disgusted.

“I'm convinced this has something to do with Mickey Carlyle,” I tel him. “Someone sent a ransom demand. I think that's why I was on the river—”

“Mickey Carlyle is dead.”

“But what if we got it wrong?”

“Bul shit! We got it right.”

“There must have been proof of life.”

Campbel knows about this. He's known al along.