Stuart Macbride - Blind Eye

Logan checked his watch. 'Seven forty-three.'

Frown. 'Zytka should be here by now.'

'We want to talk to you about the man who…' Logan tried to think of a tactful way to put it, and couldn't. 'The man who blinded you.'

Gorzkiewicz felt for the vodka bottle again, filling their glasses. 'There is a story that long ago the wealthiest families in Krakow would build clock towers to show how grand and important they were. But every time a family unveiled one, someone else would commission an even more beautiful clock.' He knocked back his vodka. 'And so one day the head of the greatest house in all of Krakow called for the best watchmaker in the world and asked him to make a timepiece so wonderful that no clock would ever outshine it. And the watchmaker did. He made a clock so beautiful that the angels stopped singing, just to hear it chime.'

He slipped his sunglasses back on, hiding the scars. 'But the head of the house was a jealous man: he knew that the next clock the watchmaker made would be even more beautiful. Then his would no longer be the finest in the land. So he called the old man to him, and burned his eyes out with a poker from the fire; that way the family's clock would always be the best.'

Wiktorja shook her head. 'That never happened.'

'It is a good story all the same.' He turned to Logan. 'That is why they call me the Watchmaker.'

'Only you didn't make clocks, did you?'

He smiled again. 'Sometimes the things I make go tick, tick… BOOM!' Gorzkiewicz slammed his hand on the table, making everyone jump. He laughed. 'Or so people say.'

'Who was it? Who blinded you?'

There was a long pause. Then Gorzkiewicz reached up beneath his sunglasses, rubbing the place where his eyes used to be.

'The SB — secret police bastards — come to my house in the middle of the night, they throw me in the back of a truck and I never see my wife or daughter again. Someone said they ran away. Someone said they were sent to Warsaw, sold to some Politburo skurwysyn. And someone said they were just taken out to the steelworks and shot. That my wife and child fuelled the furnaces to make more Soviet steel…'

He poured himself another drink. 'The SB beat me for days. Lied to me: said my comrades had informed on me because I was a liability to Solidarity — too dangerous.' He laughed, cold and hard. 'All lies! The SB wanted me to confess to the bombings in Krakow, tell them who else was involved. But I wouldn't tell them anything.'

Gorzkiewicz shivered. 'Then he came. He…' There was silence for a moment as the old man fidgeted. 'He came with his knives and pliers. And I talked. I screamed like a woman and I told him everything he wanted to know.' This time the vodka slopped over the edge of the glass, soaking into the red-and-white checked tablecloth. 'Then he cut out my eyes and burned me.'

Wiktorja swore, reached out, and put her hand over the old man's.

He didn't seem to notice. 'The SB rounded up my friends two hours later. They were never seen again. And when the bastard was done with me he drove me back to Nowa Huta and threw me out onto the street for everyone to see. With a sign around my neck saying, "Communist Spy".' Another refill disappeared. 'I could hear the crowd: shouting, swearing… They tied me to a tree and beat me until everything was blood and darkness. Broke both my legs. My jaw. My arm. Left me tied there for two days, without food or water, until my brother came and cut me down.'

Logan winced. 'Dear God…'

'It was 1981 in the People's Republic of Poland. There was no God, there was only Lenin.' He finished the bottle. 'If it was me, I would have killed me… But maybe that would have been too kind.'

Wiktorja said, 'Then why do you stay here? Why not get out, somewhere else, far away from the people who did this?'

'Because Nowa Huta is my home. I fought for these streets, I killed for them, I was blinded for them. They are my streets. That is why I stay.'

'Who was he? The man?'

Gorzkiewicz stood, then hobbled to the rattling fridge. The open door cast a sudden bloom of cold white light, then it clunked shut and they were back in the gloom again. The old man returned carrying a fresh bottle of vodka and a jar of pickles. 'He was Old Boney. King of the Underworld. Kostchey the Deathless.'

Wiktorja threw back her head and laughed. 'The Devil gouged out your eyes?'

Gorzkiewicz shrugged and poured three fresh shots. 'That's what he called himself in those days: Kostchey the Deathless. But his real name was Vadim Mikhailovitch Kravchenko. He was an army Major when I was in Afghanistan, forced to fight for those Russian bastards. I never met Kravchenko, but I heard of him. Every time they wanted a prisoner questioned… The screaming would last for days.'

The old man downed his vodka. 'He ended up in the SB, running the hunt for dissidents and anti-Communist sympathizers. And people like me — people he blinded — we were his warning. We were what happened if you disobeyed the regime.'

'Where is he now?'

'If I knew, he would be dead. I heard a rumour he was working for some gangsters in Warsaw, but that was many years ago.' Gorzkiewicz helped himself to a tiny yellow pickled squash. 'The shopkeepers in your Aberdeen, they are blinded yes? Eyes gouged out, sockets burned?'

'What does Kravchenko look like?'

There was a long, slow pause, then the old man took off his sunglasses, giving Logan another look at the mess where his eyes should have been. 'I haven't seen him since 1981, remember?'

Stupid question. 'Sorry.'

'But…' He scraped his chair back from the table and hobbled from the room, navigating the twisted maze of junk with surprising ease. He was back ten minutes later with a tatty brown folder. He held it out, and Wiktorja took it. 'This,' he said, 'is everything I know about the man. I did a Russian entrepreneur a favour involving a business rival and sixteen pounds of Semtex. He arranged for the Politburo to misplace Kravchenko's file. Started asking questions for me.'

Wiktorja flicked through the contents in the semi-darkness, then whistled, pulled out a photo, and showed it to Logan. 'Do you recognize him?'

It was a black-and-white shot, head and shoulders, of a man in military uniform, staring at the camera. Hard eyes. Squint nose. Short black hair. A small scar on the tip of his chin.

'Never seen him before.'

A buzzing noise sounded from somewhere out in the hall, and Gorzkiewicz's head snapped up, as if scenting the air. 'Wait here.' And he was gone again.

'So,' said Logan, holding out his hand to Wiktorja for the folder, 'how the hell does a blind man make bombs?'

'Very carefully.'

'You're all mad.'

There wasn't a huge amount in the Kravchenko dossier. Twenty or thirty sheets of A4 — all in Russian and Polish — a handful of fading photographs, and a lock of hair. Logan pulled it out and twisted in the dim light. Long and blonde — the same colour as Wiktorja's — wrapped up with a red silk ribbon.

'It is belong to his daughter.' A young girl appeared at the kitchen door. She was thirteen, maybe fourteen years old — wearing far too much makeup — carrying a strange stacked pot thing. Her eyes were huge, the pupils so dilated in the dark that there was almost no colour visible. 'Are you make mess in Uncle Rafal front room? Now I must to spend much time making tidy.'

Logan dropped the hair back in the folder, feeling guilty for even touching it. 'Are you Zytka?'

The young girl hefted the pot onto the working surface and unclipped the lid. There was a poom of steam, and the smell of warm food filled the little room. 'I am look after him.'

The sound of a toilet flushing came from somewhere in the flat.

Zytka opened a cupboard and came out with two plates. 'You must to go now. He is old and tired.'