27 June, 12:35 PM, “The Czernograd Gazette” newsroom
Igor only started firing up after the fourth coffee of the day, brought up in a tall Styrofoam cup from a small cafe opposite “The Gazette” building. The cafe, ambitiously called Rue de Paris, was valiantly competing with the Starbucks franchise on the corner of the street. Even though the Rue de Paris coffee seemed to come from the detritus of the Ethiopian harvest roasted to death by drunken peasants Igor valiantly supported the locals. Easter European patriotism always entailed sacrifice.
Bohun still hasn’t returned his call, or rather his three calls so far. It wasn’t all that unusual; the old boar would generally only talk if he had his own agenda to run or if he was in a particularly good mood. So pretty much only when he had his own agenda to run.
Igor couldn’t wait for him to develop one here. Lis, the lord of the metro section, started harassing him for a follow-up on the staking as soon as Igor slinked into work in the morning, half an hour late, having overslept in an apartment on the far eastern outskirts of the city. Once again, Igor wasn’t quite sure if it was worth it, but he told himself that it must have been, otherwise he wouldn’t keep on doing it over and over again. Still, he promised himself, not for the first time this month, that the next time he would try to drink less and remember more.
His next phonecall proved no more fruitful than the attempts to reach Bohun, even if Igor actually managed to speak for half a minute to Superintendant Barszcz. Yes, he was in the middle of something at the moment actually. No, he did not have anything to do with the vampire suicide case. Which was probably just as well since he wasn’t exactly known for a deep sympathy towards non-humans. Thanks anyway. Click.
It was the third time lucky for Igor.
Detective Gawenda was not involved with the case either, but her best friend was. And Gawenda would usually talk, if she could. Igor didn’t think it was because she fancied him; he wasn’t that delusional. More likely it was the fact that years ago, when she was only just starting on the force and mucked up the chain of evidence which resulted in a probably guilty man walking free, Igor decided for some reason to downplay the story that could have destroyed Gawenda’s career almost before it had really begun. It was a calculated choice that paid many dividends over time.
“This is strictly off the record,” she was whispering on the other end of the line, and Igor was straining to hear her through the white noise of the newsroom, “You can’t print it.”
“Well, that sort of doesn’t go very well with what I do for a living,” he laughed.
“I mean it,” she sounded serious. “This is big. Beyond the normal big. You-“
“And what am I supposed to do with this beyond the normal big story?” he drained the last of the coffee and threw the empty cup aiming for the rubbish bin. He only got a bounce off the rim.
“Sit it on it,” she said, almost a pleading. “There will be a statement coming out... later. In the meantime you can do whatever else that you do while you’re waiting for a story to break.”
“I-“
“Igor, I’m really, really serious,” she cut him off. “If it leaks before they’re ready to go public, there will be a witch-hunt like never before, and I kind of enjoy my job.”
“OK, OK,” Igor leaned forward on his desk, the handset cradled between his head and shin. “That much beyond the normal big?”
There was a grunt at the other end.
“OK, shoot,” he said. “I might give this whole discretion thing a try. Some people have highly recommended it to me in the past. And thanks in advance.”
There was a brief pause, and for a second or two Igor thought that Gawenda got cold feet. But then he heard her conspiratorial whisper again.
“It turns out that our deceased wasn’t just your ordinary undead...”
“Aren’t they all,” Igor said.
“Does the name Mathias Maciar ring any bells?” she ignored his interjection.
He thought about it for a moment. “No. But I gather that it should?”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “It wouldn’t with most people, I imagine.”
“And yet, not just your ordinary undead.”
“No. It transpires that Mr Maciar is... was,” she quickly corrected herself, “one of the three private secretaries to Prince Piotr.”
Igor stiffened in his chair. He swung around to face the wall, as if he wanted to shield the secret with his own body from the rest of the newsroom. He imagined for a moment that Gawenda, too, was hunched over at her desk, covering the microphone of her handset with her hand as she went on spilling the secrets.
“You’re shitting me,” Igor whispered. He wasn’t given to overt shows of emotion, but this was like picking up a discarded lottery ticket and discovering that you’ve won one of the main prizes.
“It seems that Mathias Maciar has been a loyal servant of the royal family for about a decade,” Gawenda said. “No high public profile, but obviously a pretty important position.”
“And then what?” said Igor. “One night he decided he’s had enough of rubbing shoulders with the royalty?”
“Well,” she hesitated for a moment, “it seems so. That’s all I really know. Now you understand, I hope, why everyone around here is walking on eggshells and why we never had this conversation and you still don’t know what’s going on.”
King Stefan is dying of cancer – has been slowly dying of cancer for years now, yet he lingers. But surely the end can’t be far off. Waiting in the wings, his only son and the heir to the throne, Prince Piotr, the uncharismatic former playboy who has tried and to some extent succeeded in carefully reconstructing his image in anticipation of the role of his lifetime. And in the middle of all this, his trusted right-hand vampire adviser – or would that be a left-hand, since the undead are supposed to be cat’s-paws? – turns up well and truly dead, with a stake through his heart, having apparently decided to end his long, unnatural life under a bridge in a lonely, dilapidated district of the capital. Talk about unfortunate timing.
“You’re right,” said Igor, turning ever so slowly in his chair. “This is beyond the normal big. Whatever the hell actually happened there.”
“Remember,” Gawenda whispered, “Mum’s the word.”
Click.
Thank you anyway.
Photo by Aleks Dorohovich on Unsplash
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