Reckoning Point, стр. 23
“All right,” she replies haltingly. “But not too much, and not anywhere that it’s going to show, okay?”
Feeling secure now she has set down some ground rules, she leads him inside, locks the door and snaps her curtain closed. The man hesitates, still looking at the window.
“Come on then, tell me how you want me,” she says, and he looks over at her now naked form, appearing to forget his concern that he had noticed the curtain isn’t closed entirely.
His mouth goes slack and his eyes are hazy, she notes, with a self-satisfied smile.
Later, as she daubs at the red raw patch on her thigh, she curses that she let him do it. It wasn’t the fact that it was painful, although it was, but not more than she can stand, but she’s going to have to cover it with a bandage or something. It’s oozing blood the same way that a graze to the knee would, and it’s going to be an inconvenience to conceal it.
She hasn’t even opened her curtain all the way to announce that she is open for business when she hears the door handle turn.
“I’m not open!” she yells, swearing as she hastily fixes a large plaster to her thigh before turning around to see who the visitor is who has now entered the room. “Oh, it’s you. What are you doing here?”
He walks in, and she knows him so she doesn’t protest, though his action needles her. She looks up from tending to her leg as he walks past her, over to her window, and he pulls the curtains together so they are firmly closed.
He walks back again, still not looking at her, still not speaking, and for the first time she feels a flicker of fear as he locks the door.
She stands up and faces him. “You shouldn’t come in here, we need to agree a price, I need to say–”
He holds a hand up and her words trickle away to silence.
“Do you want me to look at that?” His words are gentle, kindly, and she relaxes a little at his tone.
“No, it’s all right,” she says and moves over to him. “But you really shouldn’t come in and lock my door before we’ve talked. You know that’s not how we do things.”
He moves so fast that she doesn’t know what has hit her. He has hit her, but it was so quick she’s not sure if it was his fist or if he was holding something else. She feels blood spurt from her nose but before she can react his hands are gripped vice-like around her throat. She feels his gloves, and it occurs to her that it’s not good that he is wearing gloves. And then, as the darkness covers her completely, she has no other thoughts at all.
22
LEV
1058 GEVERS DEYNOOTWEG
6.7.15 Mid-morning
Lev is sleeping on the sofa when his door his busts open and half a dozen cops pile in. They stand, motionless, parting in order to let a red-haired man walk through them. Lev struggles to sit up, his mind churning as to what he could have possibly done to have his new home raided. But before he can move off the couch the red-haired guy plants a hand on Lev’s chest, a silent order to remain where he is.
He speaks rapidly in a stream of Dutch, too fast for Lev to comprehend.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand!” In his panic Lev responds in his native Russian and the guy backs off and exchanges a glance with the other officers before repeating himself in English.
“I’m Inspectuer Fons, these are my colleagues. We need to ask you some questions about your whereabouts last night.”
Lev breathes out. “Oh, okay. What do you want to know?” He sits up, moving back as far as he can out of reach of the Inspectuer.
“Why don’t you tell me everything you done yesterday evening?”
Lev glances at his door, hanging now from only one hinge, and hopes he won’t get charged for the damage. “I had a late supper at a place down the beach, then I took a tram to the town, had a couple of beers in a pub there, The Fiddler, I think it’s called.” He pauses and swallows; his mouth suddenly very dry. “I went across town and er, spent some time with a girl and then I came home.”
The man called Fons nods as Lev runs through his itinerary. “And what time did you get home?”
Lev coughs. “I don’t know, eleven, maybe?”
“Are you asking us or telling us?” Fons smiles, but it’s anything but friendly.
“It was around eleven.” He shifts on the sofa. “What’s this about Inspectuer?”
“Do you know the name of the girl you spent time with, or where she was located?”
“It’s next to a loading bay or something, under a red awning down a passageway. I don’t know her name. She’s tall, white. Black hair.”
The inspectuer turns away and Lev hears him mutter something to his colleague.
“What’s your name?” He turns back to Lev.
“Levart Abramov,” he replies instantly, giving his long dead mother’s maiden name.
“And you’re from …” Fons trails off, eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer.
“Georgia,” Lev says, again without hesitation. He doesn’t worry that they might check out his story, his roots were once in Georgia, and the soviets are so tight at giving out information that Lev knows he can be out of here by