Reckoning Point, стр. 5
He has wanted to do what he done last night for so long, ever since he witnessed Niko back home partaking in similar activities. And Lev wasn’t disappointed; the rush of the blood and that alien feeling as he watched her, it was something that he will cherish. But he wants it again and now he checks his watch, it was less than twelve hours ago but already he wants to do it again. He wonders if this is how the drug addicts feel when their high begins to wear off. And maybe he will do it again, but not here, no shitting on his own doorstep, that’s one of the rules he has already made. And although whoever he does it with will be willing, it’s not something that he wants to announce.
Clambering to his feet, he resumes walking and it doesn’t take him long to locate Gevers Deynootweg and he climbs up the external stairway, finding that apartment 1058 is on the fifth floor, offering him views of the promenade and the pier that stretches out over the North Sea.
“Goededag!” The greeting comes from a woman who has walked up the stairs behind him and now she makes her way along the corridor of the fifth floor.
“Hello,” Lev replies in careful English.
The woman is middle-aged, plump and dark-haired and she moves slowly towards him, scrutinising him as she walks. “Are you moving in?”
Lev looks towards the pier again, weighing up his answer. “I’m not sure yet,” he says, glancing at her. “Maybe.”
“In this apartment?” Her tone is disbelieving. “You don’t know what went on in there?”
Lev looks at the door to number 1058, narrowing his eyes as though the action will fill him in on whatever it is that he doesn’t know. The woman waits, eyes wide in expectation and Lev gathers that the little bit of information that she is going to impart has made her day.
“The Monaghan murders! They were tortured, gunned down in there and cut up!” She tuts, eyes gleaming and crosses her arms over her ample bosom.
Lev does not answer and her disappointment is palpable. He turns away, looking out to sea to hide his excitement. Suddenly he cannot wait to get inside number 1058.
In his mind he envisages the interior, the walls pock-marked with a long ago papered over history of bullets and the lingering fragrance of charred flesh. He smiles to himself, almost serenely, and even though he has yet to see inside, he is certain that apartment 1058 is where he is supposed to live.
5
ROLAND
January 5th 2000
The party wasn’t planned. They never were.
It was about lunchtime on a Wednesday. The mood had dipped since the Christmas and New Year celebrations had all finished and as I sat with the three brothers in their apartment, it was Vinnie who had the idea.
“Fuck this shit,” he said. “Let’s throw a party.”
I sat up, excited. Because I’d been to their parties before and there really was nothing like them. Before the three brothers came here, the only parties I went to were at the Civic Community Centre with my mother and the closest thing to high blood pressure there was when someone upped the stakes in a game of klaverjassen.
Mother wasn’t too keen on me spending time with Vinnie, Miles and David Monaghan, she had never been keen on me spending time with anyone except her. I know why, since that time at school when I’d sold a lot of my possessions in exchange for the promise of friendship. She said it wasn’t the way it worked, I told her that unless I done it that way, nobody wanted to be my friend.
She’d cried then, and at her tears I had relented and stopped trying to buy friendship. She kept a close eye on me after that, it was only her and me; I had no father and no siblings, so throughout my childhood and my teenage years it was just the two of us. Then the Monaghan’s came to town, and I came to life.
I was eighteen but I know I appeared younger. Not just in looks, but my behaviour was off too. I wasn’t as clever as some people my age, I was slower to catch on and I hadn’t experienced life the way most youths had. I’d never had a girlfriend and the only alcohol I’d ever had was a jenever at Christmas with Mother. But the Monaghan brothers didn’t seem to care. They didn’t laugh at me, or slap me around like the older boys used to do at school. They were friendly. They were my friends.
And I’d been hanging around with them since just before Christmas. It wasn’t just the four of us, because wherever the Monaghan brothers went, many people followed. They were like the pipers of Hamelin, and all of the rats and mice of Scheveningen came out and surrounded them.
This party was like all of the others. Ice cold beer and whiskey chasers were on tap and drugs were passed around freely, as long as you could pay for them. And in apartment 1058, money wasn’t necessarily the preferred method of payment. Vinnie especially preferred to sell his drugs in exchange for sex and this suited most of his customers just fine. I would watch in awe as my hero led a gorgeous girl into his room. Sometimes he didn’t even take her into his room, occasionally they would just do it right there in