Nobody was saying anything when Wang stuck his head into the dining room, called Kensi’s name, and beckoned to him.
“That’s the way things go,” Uncle Yura said gloomily. “And just look: the same thing in the West, and back home in Russia, and in the yellow-skinned countries—the same story everywhere. Power is unjust. Ah, no, brothers, what would I want to go back there for? I’d rather be here.”
Kensi came back, pale-faced and preoccupied, and started looking for his belt. His uniform tunic was already fully buttoned.
“Has something happened?” Andrei asked.
“Yes. Something has happened,” Kensi replied in a crisp, staccato voice, adjusting his holster. “Donald Cooper shot himself. About an hour ago.”
PART II
The Investigator
1
Andrei suddenly had a headache from hell. He crushed his cigarette butt into the overflowing ashtray with a sense of loathing, pulled out the middle drawer of his desk, and looked to see if there were any tablets in there. There weren’t any. Just a massive army pistol lying on top of a jumble of old documents and little tattered cardboard boxes of assorted petty stationery items lurking in the corners, plus a littering of gnawed pencil stumps, tobacco crumbs, and broken cigarettes. All this only made his headache worse. Andrei slammed the drawer shut, propped his head up with his hands over his face, and started watching Peter Block through the cracks between his fingers
Peter Block, a.k.a. Tailbone, was sitting a short distance away on a stool, with his red mitts calmly folded together on his knees, blinking indifferently and licking his lips from time to time. He clearly didn’t have a headache, but it was obvious that he was feeling thirsty. And he probably wanted a smoke too. Andrei tore his hands away from his face with an effort, poured himself some lukewarm water from a carafe, and drank half a glassful, subduing a mild spasm. Peter Block licked his lips. His gray eyes were as inexpressive and empty as ever. His massive, gristly Adam’s apple set off on a long glide down the skinny, grubby neck protruding from his unbuttoned shirt collar and then bobbed back up to his chin.
“Well?” said Andrei.
“I don’t know,” Tailbone replied hoarsely. “I don’t remember anything like that.”
You bastard, thought Andrei. You animal. “So what’s this you’ve told us?” he asked. “You hit the grocery store on Wool Lane; you remember when you hit it, you remember who you hit it with too. Good. You hit Dreyfus’s café, and you remember when you hit it and who with as well. But for some reason you’ve forgotten about Hofstadter’s shop. And that was your latest job, wasn’t it, Block?”
“I really couldn’t say that, Mr. Investigator,” Tailbone responded with excruciatingly loathsome politeness. “I beg your pardon, but that’s just someone trying to set me up. Since we quit after the Dreyfus place, you know, since we chose the path of complete rehabilitation and socially useful employment, well, since then I haven’t done any more jobs of that kind.”
“Hofstadter identified you.”
“I really do beg your pardon, Mr. Investigator”—the note of irony in Tailbone’s voice was clearly audible now—“but Mr. Hofstadter is a bit screwy, after all, everybody knows that. So he’s got everything confused, hasn’t he? I’ve been in his shop, sure I have—to buy a few potatoes or onions… I noticed before that he wasn’t quite right in the head, begging your pardon, and if I’d known how things would turn out, I’d have stopped going to his place. I mean, just look, would you ever…?”
“Hofstadter’s daughter also identified you. It was you who threatened her with a knife, you in person.”
“It never happened. Something did happen, but it wasn’t anything like that. It was her that set the knife against my throat, that’s what! One day she boxed me into that back room of theirs—and I had a really narrow escape. She’s got this obsession with sex; all the men in the neighborhood hide away in the corners to avoid her…” Tailbone licked his lips again. “The main thing is, she says to me, you come in the back room yourself, she says, choose the cabbage yourself—”
“I’ve already heard that. Tell me again what you did and where you went on the night of the twenty-fourth. In detail, starting from the moment the sun was switched off.”
Tailbone raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Right then,” he began, “when the sun was switched off, I was sitting in a beer parlor on the corner of Jersey and Second, playing cards. Then Jack Lever invited me to another beer parlor, so we went, and on the way we dropped by Jack’s place, we wanted to pick up his broad, but we stayed too long and started drinking there. Jack got tanked, and his broad put him to bed and threw me out. I went off home to sleep, but I was totally plastered, and along the way I tangled with these guys, three of them there were, they were drunk too. I don’t know any of them; I’d never seen them before in my life. They gave me such a battering, I don’t remember anything after that—I just came round in the morning right on the edge of the Cliff, barely made it back home. I went to bed, and then they came to get me.”
Andrei leafed through the case file and found the medical evaluation. The sheet of paper was already slightly greasy.
“The only fact confirmed here is that you were drunk,” he said. “The medical evaluation does not confirm that you had been beaten up. No traces of a beating were discovered on your body.”
“So the guys did a tidy job, then,” Tailbone said approvingly. “So they had stockings filled with sand… All my ribs are still aching even now… and they refuse to put me in the hospital… I’ll croak in your cells here—then you’ll all have to answer for me.”
“They didn’t ache for three days, then the moment we presented you with the medical evaluation, they suddenly started aching—”
“What d’you mean, they didn’t ache? I was in agony, they were aching so bad, I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I started complaining.”
“Stop lying, Block,” Andrei said wearily. “It’s obscene just to listen to you.”
He was sick and tired of this slimeball. A bandit, a gangster, literally caught with the goods, and Andrei still couldn’t nail him… I haven’t got enough experience, that’s what it is. The others have his kind spilling their guts in no time flat… Meanwhile Tailbone began sighing woefully, screwed up his face pitiably, rolled his pupils back up under his forehead, and started swaying on his seat, moaning feebly and clearly intending to collapse in a faint as adroitly as he could so they would give him a glass of water and pack him off to sleep in his cell. Andrei watched these loathsome antics through the cracks between his fingers with hate in his heart. Come on, then, come on, he thought. Just you dare puke on my floor—I’ll make you wipe it all up with blotting paper, you son of a bitch.