Dan Fesperman - Lie in the Dark

“I wouldn’t think so. I haven’t been able to phone him and I’ve just come from downtown.”

She seemed impressed, even wistful, merely to think of having been in downtown only moments ago.

“Then knock hard,” she said, “and be prepared to wait.”

“Is he hard of hearing or just slow on his feet?”

“Both, but only when he wants to be. Mostly he’s just old and grouchy and a bit of a bastard sometimes. Or at least he likes us to think he is.”

“Is he likely to be in?”

“He almost always is. Stand outside his door long enough and you’ll hear him coughing. It’s how we know he’s still alive, in there hacking away like a dog who never stops barking. Winter or summer, he never stops. If you live next door it can be like water torture. Sometimes you pray for the shelling to drown him out.”

Vlado smiled. “I’ll offer him some cigarettes. Maybe that will help it.”

“Yes, you do that.” She smiled back. “And good luck with him.”

Vlado reached the fourth floor and rapped loudly, then stood back looking at the heavy green door. He listened to the sounds moving up and down the stairwell, children racing down a hallway, a shout from somewhere below. There was a smell of old cooking and dampness. Somewhere in the distance a gun began to chatter.

Vlado knocked again. Still no answer but the echo of the door.

Then from within the apartment, as the woman had predicted, he heard a deep rattling cough. It accelerated into a fast series of hacks, dry and croupy, with a sound like sheet metal being torn apart in short wrenching snatches. My God.

He knocked a third time, waited a minute. Then a fourth. Nearly ten minutes passed before Vlado finally heard an approaching shuffle, the slide of slippers across linoleum, then a rattling safety chain, a sound one didn’t often hear in the city. One bolt slid back with a crack. Then another, followed by a deep wheezing cough and a wet snuffle. Finally, the click of the knob and a metallic groan as the door swung free.

He was greeted by a shocking face, not for its ravages of age or illness-although those signs were present as well in great wrinkles and splotches-but for its immediate suggestion of a neat, fastidious presence suddenly gone to seed. First there was the man’s hair, a thick explosion of whiteness radiating from a face of gray stubble where the signs of aborted shavings could be found in numerous nicks and scratches.

Yet there was still something of the refined old gentleman about him, the way the lines of a magnificent old garden still show through even after weeds have taken over. There was once an elegance at work here, Vlado guessed, once a man who might have kept his nails filed and trimmed, who might have tucked a handkerchief neatly in a breast pocket, and worn pleated trousers perfectly creased. Yet what the man wore now was a navy wool bathrobe over thick wool pants, with a green blanket thrown across it all like a tarpaulin.

There was an essence of old sweat in the air, yet also a light scent of soap and body powder, as if he had just emerged from a steaming bath.

Glavas stood carefully inspecting Vlado a few moments before finally announcing in a deep old croak, slow-roasted by decades of cigarettes, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

His open mouth exposed a number of yellow, blunted teeth, bent inward like those of an old skull.

“And for that matter, who in the hell are you, coming all the way out here from town to bother me.”

“Vlado Petric. Police investigator. You are Mr. Glavas?”

“Milan Glavas, yes,” he said, and a brief glint of interest flashed in his eyes. He tilted his head slightly upward, as if to take a better look, but said nothing further.

“How did you know I’d come from the city?” Vlado asked.

“Because you don’t smell of cabbage,” Glavas said. “Or of filthy children and their diapers and runny noses. And you aren’t coughing like a tubercular case, or look as if you’ve spent the last twenty months running through the mud or cowering in a corner away from your windows. Should I continue? Then, please, as long as you’ve come all this way at such great risk, step inside.”

They moved to a back room, probably once a guest bedroom but now the living room, judging by the furniture, doubtless chosen for its location away from the busiest lines of fire. A small handmade woodstove sat in one corner, a model fashioned roughly from heavy sheet metal. It looked as if it would crumple if you sat on it, and hardly seemed fit for a strong fire. It was cold, barely blackened.

“My genius neighbor built it,” Glavas said, following Vlado’s stare. “Nearly burned down the apartment first time I tried it. But it worked, in its way. No matter, though. Ran out of wood after three days. And that’s after it cost me forty marks. Live and learn.”

Glavas picked up a second wool blanket from the couch and draped it across his back as he sank onto the couch. A half-filled bowl of beans sat on an end table.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted your lunch,” Vlado said.

“If only you had. That is a time when I would always welcome an interruption. That and when I have to take a shit on these stinking toilets. I allow myself one flush a week. I just can’t bring myself to waste water by pouring it down the john after hauling it up six flights of stairs.”

Vlado glanced around the room. There was a stylish green wing chair in silk upholstery, a thick Oriental rug on the floor, finely woven. He glanced upward and saw two nice pen and ink sketches, elegantly framed, and an oil painting that, even to Vlado’s unpracticed eye, looked worth a small fortune.

“Please, Mr. Petric, do tell me, although I’m hardly the impatient sort who needs to get straight to the point, what would bring a police inspector to my door.” He leaned forward slightly, as if harboring his own little surprise.

“I’m investigating a murder. The victim had your name and address in his pocket, and I thought he might have visited you recently, perhaps even sometime in the last several days.”

Glavas slowly leaned back, raising his eyebrows. “Ah. Esmir Vitas, then?”

“Yes. So he was here.”

“Oh yes. Tuesday, I believe it was? Or whatever day it was three days ago. I don’t bother to identify the days as such anymore. They are either good or bad, mostly depending on the visibility, and then they’re dead and gone. But I remember Vitas all right, yes. My only visitor in months, quite literally And until you arrived I thought he might be the last one for several months more. When you knocked I assumed you were just another of the bored children with nothing to do but make themselves a nuisance by knocking on an old man’s door, then run away laughing as soon as the door opens. Or worse, they don’t run away at all. ‘Please,’ I tell them, ‘why don’t you run along and play out in the shelling. Call down some artillery on us. Let us watch out our windows while you run for your lives.’ ”

He broke into a wheezy chuckle, burbling toward the ledge of a deep cough before somehow bringing himself under control.

“So then,” he continued, now smiling. “You have decided, perhaps, that I am a suspect in this murder?” saying it as if the prospect pleased him.

“Mostly what I think is that I’d like to ask you some questions. I want to know why Vitas came here, and what, if anything, he wanted to talk about. Were you friends?”

“No. I’d never met him until that day. A Tuesday, did I say? And a horrible Tuesday it was. Grenades zipping around all morning. Man next door was killed, just stood in the courtyard like he was waiting for it. Some people do that, you know, just give up and go out there asking for it. Boy just above here was out on his balcony. Lost an arm. And in the middle of all that there’s a knock at the door. Three of them actually, and when I finally open up this Vitas fellow is waiting, filling the doorframe in a dark blue overcoat. I knew he wasn’t from around here, too. Clean as a whistle. Not a speck of mud on him.”