Саймон Морден - Equations of Life

“There’s paperwork to fill in,” he said mildly. “Why don’t I meet you, and take you over to the station?”

“You’re not listening, Chain. I’m not going to appear to be helping you. I don’t even want to be anywhere near you.” Petrovitch checked the timer. “If this conversation is going to go nowhere, tell me now so I can set some lawyers on you.”

“You can have your whatever-it-is back. It’s clean. But there genuinely is paperwork, and you’re not worth my while cheating the system. Come on, Petrovitch, a little trust goes a long way.”

“You stole my property just so I’d have to call you, and you talk about trust?”

“Okay, point taken. I did want to check it, make sure you weren’t a low-level Oshicora foot soldier, but I could have done so on the quiet and brought it back to you in the hospital.” He coughed again. “I sort of believe you now, and maybe I can let the other side know you’re just some stupid kid who doesn’t know any better than to meddle in the affairs of gods. What do you reckon?”

Petrovitch reined in his anger. “Will you do that? Will it work?”

“Tell you what: I think I owe you, so yes. I’ll do what needs to be done, though talking to Marchenkho’s organitskaya leaves me with heartburn. Wait there, and I’ll come and collect you when it’s done.”

“ Organitskaya? ” said Petrovitch. “ Yobany stos .”

“I imagine you probably are,” said Chain, and cut the connection.

Petrovitch was drinking coffee, brewed in a chipped mug in the Raj Singh back office, when Chain knocked politely on the door and let himself in.

“Ready to go, Petrovitch?” He nodded at the Sikh. “Sran? Keeping it legal?”

“As ever, Inspector Chain.” Sran winked.

“One day, Sran.”

“And until that day, Inspector, we’ll keep trading.”

“Of course you will. Leave the coffee, Petrovitch. I’ve better in my office.” Chain looked around at all the notes pinned to the office walls, testing names, numbers, addresses for a tickle of memory.

Sran wanted Chain out quickly: he leaned forward and took the mug from Petrovitch’s hands. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

Petrovitch threw his bag over his shoulder, and Sran ushered them out: he shooed them all the way to the bottom of the basement steps that led up to street level to make sure the policeman didn’t have time to see clearly what some of the shop’s customers were doing.

The door was shut firmly behind them.

“You know him, then?” said Petrovitch, his ears adjusting to the blare of noise falling on him from above.

“I know everyone,” said Chain, checking inside his jacket. He patted his shoulder holster, and unfastened a tab. “Let’s make this unremarkable, shall we?”

“I thought you’d talked to whoever it was you needed to talk to.”

“I did. You’re not the only one with a price on your head.” Chain led him up the steps, then elbowed his way into the pedestrian stream. Petrovitch was almost standing on the man’s heels so as not to lose him.

They made it to the crossing and, on the next green light, shuffled across the road to a building that sat squat and lonely, surrounded on all sides by streets. Armed police—not paycops, but the real thing—guarded the entrance. They were tall and wide in their armor and utterly anonymous behind their targeting visors. One of them watched Petrovitch as he trailed after Chain, and Petrovitch saw his reflection in the curved faceplate.

He wasn’t looking anywhere near as angelic as he had first thing that morning.

He also had to sign in at the desk. The man behind the bullet-proof glass was brisk and businesslike, but Petrovitch still felt a frisson of fear as the optical scanner was pressed against his eye socket.

His identity passed muster, and he was issued with a tag similar to the one he’d worn in the hospital.

“It’s an offense not to keep this on while you’re in the building,” said the man as he watched Petrovitch clip it around his wrist. “Offense as in five years and a ten-thousand-euro fine.”

“Is that all?” said Petrovitch.

“We can choose to shoot you.” His gaze left Petrovitch and slid onto Chain. “He’s all yours.”

“You’re a humorless bastard, George. Give the kid a break.” Chain took Petrovitch by the arm and pulled him away toward the lifts. “Nothing else in that bag I need to know about, is there?”

“Apart from the hole where someone tried to cut me a new zhopu, no.”

While they waited, Chain inspected the damage. “What did they use?”

“A clear plastic knife. Behind the screen, too.”

“Perspex. Covert weapon of choice at the moment.” The lift doors shuddered apart. “Get in, and we can have our little chat.”

Petrovitch and Chain rode the lift to the seventh floor and walked along the corridor until they reached a door marked “DI H. Chain SCD6.” Petrovitch hadn’t seen another soul the entire time. The place was a ghost ship, adrift in the heart of the Metrozone.

Despite his disquiet, he dropped gratefully into a leather chair opposite Chain’s desk, and watched without comment as the detective busied himself with the domestic chore of making proper coffee.

“I like you,” said Chain, once the water had started gargling noisily through the machine. “So I’ll tell you how the conversation with Marchenkho went.”

“Marchenkho? The organitskaya boss?”

“I’ve got him on speed dial. Now Marchenkho might be a vodka-soused old villain who models himself on Stalin, but we go back a long way, so he takes my calls. I tell him that two of his lieutenants are in the mortuary, having been scraped off the steps of a church, and guess what?”

“He already knows?”

“He already knows.” Chain went to the window and peered past the vertical blinds at the face of the glass monolith being erected opposite. “But he’s not apologizing. Marchenkho apologizes a lot, especially when he doesn’t mean it, so I guess he’s livid that his carefully planned, once-in-a-lifetime chance at taking Oshicora’s daughter hasn’t worked out.”

“This isn’t sounding good,” said Petrovitch, slumping further down.

“I mention that I’d talked to some of the witnesses. That I can link all the innocent bystanders gunned down by those two idiot slabs of Ukrainian pork directly to him.” Chain ambled back to the coffee pot, which hadn’t finished, and opened up a packet of nicotine patches lying on the table. “He doesn’t like that.”

“Does that mean the hired help screwed up?”

“It does indeed.” He peeled a patch off its backing strip, and pulled up his sleeve. He pressed it into place above his wrist, revealing that there was another just further up under his shirt cuff. “You catch on quick, Petrovitch. Tell me what happens next.”

Petrovitch frowned. “You traded me,” he said after a moment.

“Pretty much. I wouldn’t be able to stick anything on Marchenkho, but I might take out one or two of his upper management and they’d be watching their backs for months. So he’s called off the attack dogs on you in exchange for some peace and quiet.” Chain got fed up from waiting, and grabbed the coffee pot. As he poured the black liquid into two mugs, spatters of steam hissed on the hot plate. “Want to know how much you were worth?”

“Not particularly.”

“Two fifty.”

“Thousand?” Petrovitch sat bolt upright. “ Huy na ny! ”

“Enough for a new heart, even. Marchenkho was really very cross with you.” Chain pushed the coffee along the desk at Petrovitch, and sat awkwardly on one corner. “I hope you don’t take milk, because I haven’t got any. Or sugar. Anyway, putting out a contract takes no time at all. Information like that moves fast, and it reaches all the right people—or wrong people—very quickly. Rescinding that same contract takes longer. News that no one wants to hear crawls along. Sometimes it doesn’t get to everyone who needs to know until it’s too late.”