His first attempt at speech materialized in some kind of rambling that even he realized made little sense.
“Easy,” he heard a voice say, “take it easy.
You’re okay. You’re just fine. You’ve lost some blood, but…” The voice trailed off and Bogner closed his eyes again.
“How’s he doing?” he heard another voice say.
For some reason he thought that perhaps in some other time and some other place he had heard it before. Recognition came and went. He opened his eyes again, but the world was dark with eerie red. There were blinking lights and sounds of static. He could smell smoke and more carbonate ammonium. Then he heard his name.
“T. C.,” the voice said, “T. C.” can you hear me?”
The man who was talking moved closer, and for the first time Bogner could see the face behind the voice. It was Peter Langley. His face was blackened and he smelled of smoke.
“Can you understand me?”
Bogner was grasping.
“Lang — Langley?” he finally coughed out. His voice was dry and brittle; he recognized the face but nothing else made sense.
“H — h—how did…?”
Suddenly there was another voice and face to contend with. The new voice was clipped. The face was one he didn’t recognize.
“I’m Colonel Rogers,” the image informed him.
“We’re just a few minutes out from the landing strip at Pasabachi in Turkey. We’ll be landing in a few minutes. The pilot has radioed ahead and they’ll have some medics standing by to…”
Whatever else the man had to say, Bogner never heard. At that point, he began the dizzying spiral back into his other world and the man with the clipped voice ceased to exist.
One more time Peter Langley sagged back against the bulkhead of the Hormone’s fuselage and asked for a cigarette. When Rogers handed him one, he admitted that he hadn’t had one in years.
“In view of the fact we probably don’t have any scotch on board,” Langley said with a sigh, “one of these will have to do.”
It was an old building, in deplorable condition, not at all like the newer, more modern apartment complexes that had been built in the last eight to ten years. It was likewise a section of the city where there had been a great deal of crime in recent years: gang wars, a flourishing black market, drug deals, rapes, and not all that infrequently, a murder.
Like most officers in his department. Homicide Detective Kuri Lyalin, and the two uniformed officers who assisted him, knew this section of Moscow well.
The three men from the Sector 5 precinct trudged up the three flights of stairs looking for the woman who had called just after their lunch hour. They found her standing on the landing at the top of the stairs, waiting.
“What took you so long?” she complained. “I called you over two hours ago.”
Lyalin mumbled something that was intended to serve both as an apology and a rebuff and moved past her.
“Do you know the victim?” he asked.
“The room is rented by the day,” the old woman snapped.
“I do not get names, I get money in advance.”
“How long has he been here?” Lyalin pushed.
“Two days and he only paid for one. That is why I came up here today. He owes me money.” The woman had a crooked mouth and had obviously been drinking. She slurred her words.
“Tell me what happened?”
The woman shrugged.
“What is there to tell? He came here with a small suitcase and a radio. The first night he played the radio all night and the woman next door to his room complained. I don’t know why she thought she had the right to complain, what with her having a parade of men in and out of her room all night. She is a whore but she pays her rent in advance.”
Lyalin waited for the woman to finish.
“Which room?”
“That one.” The woman pointed. “3B.”
“Open it.”
The old woman grumbled, fumbled in her apron pocket for the key, found it, and opened the door. The heat had been turned off and the room was cold. On the bed was the body of a man with a bullet hole in the middle of the head. The muzzle had obviously been held close to his head when the weapon was fired. There were powder burns.
Lyalin knew at a glance that the killer had used a gas silencer. The enlarged bruise on the victim’s forehead and the size of the hole told him everything he needed to know. He looked at the two assisting officers and observed that the victim had been killed in his sleep.
“Did he have any visitors?” Lyalin asked.
The old woman shrugged.
“Do you think it was a woman who did this?”
“Men have men visitors too. It could have been anyone, a man or a woman.”
“See the blood on the wall?” the woman complained.
“Who is going to clean it up? I can’t rent this room again until it is cleaned up.”
Lyalin sat down on the foot of the victim’s bed, took out his notebook, and began jotting notes to himself. While he did he instructed one of the officers to see if they could find some sort of identification in the man’s belongings. Moments later the officer handed him a tattered billfold and a passport. Lyalin thumbed through the contents and threw the wallet on the bed. The old woman snatched it up, looking for money.
“He owes me a night’s rent,” she reminded the detective.
After that, the detective walked back over to the bed and pulled the covers up over the victim’s face.
“Rest in peace, Josef Solkov,” he said.
“We will probably never know why you were killed or who pulled the trigger.”
Trauma disrupts time; minutes are hours, days have no beginning or end, and the voids in memory only add to the overall state of confusion. Bogner had been there before. Time, meaningless.
Continuity, non-existent. He was never really awake or asleep. At times he could hear voices. At times there was a tomblike silence. At first he could hear Langley, even see his face, but there was nothing to tie him back to the events of which his friend spoke or the sounds he was hearing.
Meaningless words. Bogner would listen. Then he would escape. Listen, try to comprehend, escape; a pattern. Painkillers.
Now Langley was sitting beside his bed again.
How to describe him? Rigid? Troubled? Anxious?
Not worried, but concerned? He handed Bogner a glass of water — water Bogner had already forgotten he had requested.
“Drink all of it,” Langley was saying.
“The doctor says you’re dehydrated.”
Bogner was mentally preoccupied with taking some kind of census, making a kind of statistical analysis, establishing an index, plowing a furrow back to reality. A nurse had shown him what he looked like in a mirror. His face was a patchwork of abrasions and cuts: puffy, red, swollen. His lips were blistered. His left arm had a bullet hole in it and it was bandaged from the shoulder to the elbow.
And he had furthered his misery when he jumped from the locomotive, picking up a few more scrapes and bruises in the process. As Bogner viewed it, if it was somehow attached to him, or in any way a part of him, it hurt.
He could hear Langley talking again. Some of what the man was telling him made sense; much of it didn’t. Langley, he realized, had no way of knowing this and continued on.
“… the Kurd woman was able to give us a pretty good idea of the layout of the complex. She was even able to clear up some of the things that weren’t apparent from the satellite photos…”