Robert Knightly - The cold room

‘Most of the time,’ she volunteered, ‘he comes back in time for dinner. If not, he always returns for the ten o’clock curfew.’

By three thirty, my lower back nearly in spasm, I was ready to call it a day. I was expected at the Nine-Two and I was in desperate need of a quick shower, not to mention a change of clothes. I hurriedly packed my kit, then stole a last peek through the broken window just as the fat man emerged, carrying a bag of garbage in each hand.

I watched him walk to the curb, his gait quick and graceful despite an extra fifty pounds, watched him look, very deliberately, up and down the block. For just a second, as his head swept from right to left, his narrow eyes crossed mine. No more than slits, they were as disfiguring as a birthmark or a tattoo. Kelly’s identification would be quick and sure, and beyond challenge in a courtroom.

The fat man nodded once after completing his sweep, then crossed the street, disappearing from view. A moment later, he returned with his hands empty. The garbage, apparently, had gone over the fence.

I was up and moving before the door closed behind the fat man. Down the corridor, through the lot, across the street. I tried to compose myself as I went. A pure waste of time. I entered the small office as though I owned it.

On the far side of the room, Aslan and the fat man sat behind large desks placed at right angles to each other. The woman with the red hair was standing to my right, at the foot of a stairway leading to the second floor. She had a toddler by the hand, a boy wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. Aslan said something to the woman in a language I didn’t understand. Without answering, she picked the child up and climbed the stairs. I let her go, not because I wouldn’t have relished a conversation with her, but because I was much more interested in the joint Aslan held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

Aslan stared at my badge, then into my eyes. I expected him to make some effort to conceal the joint, even to swallow it whole. Instead, he laid it on the edge of a glass ashtray in a gesture of pure defiance that I would later make him regret.

‘Okay,’ he said, his tone echoing his earlier gesture, ‘you are big-deal cop. Now can put tin badge in pocket and show me search warrant.’

‘Hey,’ I said, looking directly into the narrow eyes of Aslan’s companion, ‘what’s with your buddy’s attitude? He doesn’t even know what I’m here for and already he’s asking for a warrant. Gimme a break.’

When neither man replied, I inventoried the room, taking my time about it. Perhaps twenty feet square, the office was paneled with sheets of some material halfway between wood and wallpaper. Dark blue tiles, shot with irregular veins of silver, covered the floor.

The tiles were bright and shiny, as they should have been, given the number of servants who lived there.

Above my head, an air conditioner blasted away. A pair of three-drawer filing cabinets to my left were arranged along the front wall. I registered these items quickly, suppressing an urge to open those cabinets and examine their contents, until my attention finally settled on a flag mounted behind Aslan’s desk. The flag was bright green, with three stripes — white, red, white — about two-thirds of the way down. At the flag’s center, in stark black and white, a large disc contained a semicircle of nine stars. The stars supported a pedestal on which an animal lay with its legs dangling and its head facing outward, so that it stared at me through a pair of ghost-white eyes.

‘That a cat or a dog?’ I asked Aslan, pointing to the flag.

He stared at me for a moment, then blinked twice before swiveling his chair in a half-circle to face the flag. ‘This is wolf of Chechnya,’ he told me. ‘All Chechen peoples are coming from wolfs. This is in our national song. This is what we believe.’

‘Yeah? It must be a pretty wild place then. You do a lot of hunting?’

He broke into song at that point, singing to the flag in a language I assumed to be Chechen. I stepped forward, took the half-smoked joint from the ashtray and put it in my shirt pocket. Then I winked at Aslan’s companion, who stared back at me, so unmoving he might have been carved from clay. Dimitri had been right about the man’s gaze. He was, indeed, looking at me like I was shit on the sidewalk.

I came forward to sit on the edge of his desk, leaning down to study an open checkbook. I barely had time to register a signature on the top check, Konstantine Barsakov, before Aslan challenged me.

‘I have ask you before. In America, man’s home is castle. Where is search warrant for castle?’

‘Well, it’s a funny thing, but your castle is exactly what I’m here about. What’d you say your name was?’

‘I don’t have to say name. Is unconstitutional.’

‘Nope, you’re wrong there. Any police officer can ask any citizen for identification at any time. If that identification is not produced, that police officer can detain that citizen until such time as it is.’

This was a complete lie, but not one likely to be unmasked. Aslan’s eyes traveled to the ashtray, now minus the joint he’d laid down a few minutes before. Then his eyes jumped to mine, displaying a blind and unreasoning hatred.

‘Also,’ I added, ‘your attitude is really bad here. I just asked for your name. I didn’t ask you to submit to a strip search.’

The clear implication, that a strip search would follow a second refusal, didn’t escape Aslan. I could see the struggle in his eyes. He was going to have to back down and he didn’t like it.

‘Aslan Khalid.’

‘There, was that so hard?’ I glanced down at the second man. ‘And what’s your name, pal?’

‘Konstantine Barsakov.’

‘And what do you do for Domestic Solutions? What’s your job?’

‘I am president,’ Barsakov replied, his English much better than Aslan’s. ‘Now tell us what you want or I will call the lawyer. And remove your ass from my desk.’

‘Okay.’ I rose to my feet, leaving a sweaty stain behind, then spread my hands defensively. ‘See, it’s really just a routine complaint. This building is zoned industrial and you have people living here. That’s the complaint, anyway. That you have people living here and the conditions are unsafe.’

I might have left all this unsaid. My intention, when I came through the door, was to use the building code violation as a pretext to detain Konstantine. That ploy was no longer necessary; the joint in my pocket was pretext enough. Still, I couldn’t resist an urge to needle Aslan, to play to his rage. Turned down at the corners, the man’s small mouth had hardened into the sort of petulant frown I associated with a bratty toddler about to launch a temper tantrum.

When Konstantine failed to reply, I turned to his partner. ‘Do you deny the charges?’ I asked.

Aslan stared at me for a moment, his eyes traveling from my soggy hair, to the t-shirt plastered to my chest, to my frayed jeans. That my mission had nothing to with the building code was obvious and I had to assume he was already thinking of the murdered girl his partner had dumped six weeks before.

‘No more I am playing with you this game,’ Aslan finally declared, reaching for the telephone on his desk. ‘I am calling lawyer.’

‘Here, let me help you.’

I hooked my fingers under the lip of the desk and flipped it over. Aslan tried to get out of the way, but he wasn’t fast enough. The desk caught him in the hips and his chair went flying. Then the monitor of his Dell computer imploded a few feet from his head and he cried out, despite himself. I drew my Glock and put on my game face. These were the foreign gangsters Capra had warned me against. I would treat them accordingly.