«Perhaps you had old scores to settle?» the lanky officer asked Saam, lowering his head. Big rabbit-teeth protruded onto his bottom lip and the large gap between them meant that when he talked he whistled as if in surprise.
«What's to settle? He's got his job, we've got ours. That's why he was kept on, so that our paths didn't cross,» said Saam, making a face.
The Chief, the crazy old man Trebenko replaced in office, was shouting below the window. He used to call his deputy a gangster and threatened to catch him red-handed. He read Trebenko's cunning face like a court brief, seeing through all his tricks and hated him more than he hated Coffin. The Chief had no wife or children. It was as though he was handcuffed to his work day and night. «I am not for sale!» he warned the gangsters and, indeed, they didn't buy him. Instead, they loaded him into the boot of a car, drove out of town, and beat him so badly against a rock that it turned red with blood. They threw him out at the morgue, stark naked. «When the attendants turn up in the morning, there'll be a nice little body waiting for them,» said Coffin, roaring with laughter as he settled the policeman on the steps of the morgue.
But he didn't die. A year later, people began to meet him in the streets, his shaved head bandaged. Puffing out his cheeks, the Chief would seize passers-by by the elbow and demand, «Name?» They answered and he left them alone. Occasionally, though, he would stare with his mad eyes and ask all of a sudden, «What's my name?» Trebenko took the Chief to a psychiatric hospital and found him a place in a care home but he kept on turning up in town.
At Trebenko's funeral when the sealed coffin was displayed outside the police station, the Chief nearly knocked it over, throwing himself on the dead man and howling like the north wind as he hammered on the coffin lid. Later at the wake, remembering his cries, some people said he had been in tears, others that he was laughing, and an elderly cleaner in a headscarf as old and faded as the cloth she used to wash the police station floors maintained that she had been able to make out the words: «They got me in the head and they got you dead!» but no-one believed her and put what she said down to drunken imaginings.
Children teased the crazy old man, throwing stones at him, and then fled in all directions, shrieking. When Lapin remembered that he had thrown snow in the Chief's face himself when he was at school, he blushed.
«What were you doing out at the garage?» the officer asked the gangsters' Big Man timidly.
Saam clenched his teeth as he looked askance at Lapin.
«Visiting.»
Lapin was cleaning his nails with a matchstick, turning the mayor's words over in his mind. He had already seen enough of life not to trust people but had not drunk sufficiently deeply of it to have lost all hope. As a result, Krotov's voice rang in his head like a bell and the investigator felt that he was getting closer and closer to the gang with whom he had vowed to settle scores when he heard his father crying in the kitchen.
The gangsters lit their cigarettes as they left the station where they felt as cramped as in a common grave while the bars on the windows had scratched their eyes like shards of glass. Once outside, they shook themselves down, stretched their joints and, peering up at the sun, yawned wearily not bothering to put their hands over their mouths. The police officers standing by the car shrank back uneasily and the Chief looked out of the corner of his eye, dribbling.
Saam had become as suspicious as Coffin, as if the latter's morose mistrust had been catching. He expected to find a murderer round every corner, read judgement in every regard and sought to cheat fate by being a nice guy on even dates and a bad guy on odd ones. To the gangsters, his face seemed to be taking on the features of their murdered chief.
Jaws working, Saam looked at his sidekicks, suspecting each one of betraying him. His gaze pierced their cheeks and foreheads, making the gangsters start scratching as if Saam's mean little eyes were biting them like fleas.
«Someone tried to set me up!» Saam said through clenched teeth. «Sound out your informers. Dig around. Find out anything we don't know but they might.»
The gangsters rushed off in different directions like cockroaches startled by the light and the old cleaner, who was washing the ground-floor windows, crossed herself as she watched them go.
At night, they gathered at an abandoned quarry, the polar sun clinging to its edge. There was water in the bottom and the gang threw the people they had tied up down the slope. They rolled down and into the water, choking on the muddy slime.
«Silent as the grave,» said the gangsters, shrugging their shoulders. «Seems they really don't know anything.»
«Then let them go to the grave,» said Saam, gesturing to them to bury the bodies.
His sidekicks weren't in any hurry to grab their spades. Exchanging glances they froze in expectation so that Saam had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and reached for his gun to hide his fear.
«But they're our people,» said one of the gang, digging at the earth with the toe of his boot. «They worked for us, trusted us…»
«One of them polished off Trebenko to set me up and there's no time to find out who it was. One of them,» Saam said, looking into the quarry, «will get what he deserves. The rest will go to heaven.»
The gangsters climbed down cautiously, sliding down slopes that glittered with mica, and set about burying the bodies lying in the water.
The town withdrew into itself when it found out about the gangsters' massacre. Petty thieves cowered in their holes and the police, sensing a war, were afraid of night duty since at night all cats are grey and the gang was armed. There were rumblings in the gang. They discussed the massacre at the quarry, which not even Coffin would have carried out, and Saam, aware that knives were being sharpened behind his back, panicked and grew more and more afraid.
He went to the cemetery at night when no-one could see him and sat down on a dirty chair left over from the wake. His eyes bored through the ground as he imagined Coffin and Shorty lying there. He already missed the good old days when Coffin ruled the town, and Shorty would set up his marked cards, face down, so that no-one could tell whether he'd win his game of patience or not. He remembered the look of surprise on the face of the dead Coffin who hadn't expected his second-in-command to have loaded the gun, and he knew that cards should be kept up your sleeve, fists behind your back and your gun never trusted to anyone, friend or foe.
Coffin and Mayor Krotov had avoided one another, had never met, as if they lived in parallel worlds, and the mayor hoped the new gang leader would do the same. When his office door swung open and there was Saam on the threshold, Krotov gasped in surprise. His frightened secretary peered out from behind the gangster.
«He just came in. There was nothing I…» she said thickly in an attempt to explain but Krotov waved her away.
Saam shut the door, walked through the office as if he owned it, pulled up a chair and sat down facing the mayor, legs crossed.
«Have you gone crazy turning up here?!»
«I'm here to get to know you better.»
Since Trebenko's death and the gangsters' carnage, the streets had been as quiet as a cemetery and Krotov had begun to fear for his life. He couldn't sleep at night, alert to the slightest sound. When he looked in the mirror, he pinched his nose and cheeks with his fat, sausage-like fingers as if unable to recognize his own face.
Saam stared at the bridge of the mayor's nose and Krotov, sweat pouring off him and running down his neck, prayed moving his lips without making a sound.