29 June, 4:45 PM, Czernograd, the Kranberg district
He was in Kranberg within half an hour. The traffic has been particularly heavy at this time of the afternoon, and he struggled to make his way from the northside, having to cut across the main thoroughfares and railway lines radiating out of the city centre.
Lipska Street was as peaceful as he remembered it from yesterday. It seemed even darker, with the afternoon sun finding it difficult to penetrate the dense foliage overhead. It’s a jungle out here, Igor thought, minus humidity, and the rot was most likely metaphorical. The predators were not.
The black Audi wasn’t there anymore, on the other side of the street. He parked directly outside number 34, got out of his car not bothering to lock up and walked briskly to the gate.
He pressed the bell twice and waited. After half a minute of eternity, trying to listen in through a wall of silence taller and thicker than the rampart surrounding Maciar’s house, he pressed the bell again. He waited another minute, but there was no sound of the front door opening, no footsteps, no click of the lock.
He rang the bell four or five times, insistently, as if the very urgency was going to make a difference this time. It didn’t. He stepped back from the gate and looked at the iron fence. It offered no purchase and it was too tall to climb unaided. He started looking up and around at the giant trees sprouting out of the sidewalk, weighing in his mind whether he could climb either of the nearest ones and then use one of the branches to make his way over the iron spikes, when he heard soft footsteps coming towards him along the sidewalk.
He turned his head. An elderly man was slowly walking towards him, a long-haired dachshund the colour of burned chocolate on a leash a few steps ahead of his owner. Its long, ungainly body wobbled with every exertion of tiny legs, and the dog was already baring its yellowish teeth in an as yet silent snarl directed at Igor. The man’s face was by contrast an expressionless mask, set on a nearly bald head, with a few wisps of white hair around his large ears. He was dressed in khaki corduroy trousers, white shirt and a vest, his soft leather loafers barely making a sound on the pavement.
The man stopped a few feet from Igor, shortening the dachshund’s leash. The dog wasn’t happy and gave a high-pitched growl.
“I’m afraid that you won’t find who you’re looking for,” he said. He had a ruddy complexion and two dead embers of eyes that smoothly scanned Igor up and down in a matter of a second or two.
“Oh, I know about Mr Maciar,” Igor said. “I’m actually looking for his... house-keeper. Alicia, I think.”
The eyes stayed fixed on Igor, as the old man shifted from foot to foot. “Oh,” he said, and Igor didn’t know whether this was genuine surprise or not because the man’s expression didn’t change at all. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, young man, but the... house-keeper... she hanged herself sometime last night.”
Igor felt as if a giant hand squeezed his throat and his lungs gave up on their work. He took a step back, nails digging into the palms of his hands.
“The police came in this morning, because they still had some things to finalise regarding Mr Maciar’s death, and they found her, hanging from the railing on the main stairway,” the old man’s voice was flat, and Igor thought that if it had a colour it would be that of dirty water.
“Grief is a powerful emotion indeed,” he finished with a sigh, finally tearing away his gaze from Igor. The dachshund barked, and the old man pulled the leash even tighter, the dog’s front legs now almost off the ground.
Blood was pounding in Igor’s ears, and instead of fresh air in his lungs he tasted the bile. “Did you... Do you-“
“What would I know, young man,” the old man’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “Why would I want to know,” he said and started walking, keeping the dog by his left side, away from Igor.
Igor let him pass.
“You should be careful, grandfather,” he heard himself say, every word like a flint scraping the pavement. “There seem to be a suicide cluster forming around here. Who knows who might be next.”
The old man kept walking away from him, softly shuffling with every short step. He didn't look back.
Photo by Ekaterina Novitskaya on Unsplash