30 June, 2:45 PM, Czernograd, Police Station Number 5
Maciejewicz was there, behind his desk, as if he has not moved more than a few inches either way since the last they saw him. Jake could have sworn he was even wearing the same suit and the facial expression.
This time Milos was there too, sitting by the side of the desk, on Maciejewicz’s right hand side. A right-hand man, literally. Slick and polished, from the top of his product-soaked and slicked back hair to his shiny beige leather shoes, one tracing a little arc in the air with its pointed tip, Milos sitting with his legs crossed, somewhat restless. He looked like a beneficiary of some exchange and training program, maybe with the Scotland Yard, or maybe even with the Americans; somewhere where he learned to sprinkle his English with all the correct law and order terminology. Or maybe he just spent his spare time watching the whole seasons of “Law and Order” on whatever streaming service they had in Ruthenia.
“I’ve got good news and bad news for you,” said Maciejewicz.
“It sounds like a beginning of a joke,” Jake coughed into a clenched fist.
“The good news is that we have your man,” Maciejewicz ignored the comment.
“My man?”
“The driver of the car,” Maciejewicz said.
Jake livened up. “That’s excellent.”
Maciejewicz did not seem to be share Jake’s enthusiasm. “His name is Pavel Duplic. A small-time bad guy. A try hard. Long rap sheet, going back to early teenage years; mostly property crimes, but some tendency to violence. Including an attempted murder a year ago for which we unfortunately had to let him go for lack of sufficient evidence.”
“Sounds like a pleasant sort of fellow,” Jake said. An attempted murder only made you small time around here? Jake didn’t quite know whether to feel encouraged about the effectiveness of the local police or concerned that the worst fears about the incident were being confirmed. “Did he say anything?”
“No,” said Maciejewicz. “Which brings me to the bad news. He’s dead.”
Before it hit Jake, the Inspector leaned across the desk and pushed towards him and Marina a ten by five colour photo. It was a close up of the head and naked shoulders of a prematurely balding and prematurely pudgy man in his thirties laying on a metal table with his eyes closed, a peaceful, somewhat bored expression on his face, rather at odds with a neat round bullet hole in the middle of his wide, sloping forehead. As if he was thinking, not to worry, it’s only a small hole.
“Jesus H Christ,” Jake murmured.
“Not quite,” he said. “He’s not a messiah; he’s just a very naughty boy.” Deadpan. Maciejewicz and Milos both chuckled.
“What?”
“Monty Python,” Marina leaned over and explained.
“What?” Jake shook his head again.
“English comedians,” Marina said.
“They’re very good,” Milos added.
Jake shrugged. Yes, it was all hilarious, except for him, the supposed target. A punchline. With a car doing the punching.
Maciejewicz leaned back in his chair and put his hands on the edge of the desk as if he was trying to push himself away.
“This is, as I see it, where we stand now,” he said. “Someone out there, for some reasons we still do not know, wants you dead. That someone hired Duplic to do the dirty deed. Duplic had a reputation; for all we know he had probably done a few jobs like that before. What that someone who hired him did not realise was that Duplic would be stupid enough to try to run you over just outside the airport, the most heavily surveillanced piece of real estate in Ruthenia and Galicia outside of the royal residence and the parliament building. It was a long shot we would be able to ID Duplic from the security footage, but whoever hired him couldn’t take a risk that Duplic might lead us to them. So no Duplic, no problem. Except for us, who now have one murder investigation and one attempted murder investigation – that’s you, by the way - on our hands, with no suspects, no motive, and no leads. At this stage, at least,” he added hopefully and then waited, slightly out of breath, looking at Jake for any reaction or comment.
“Fantastic,” Jake said, unobliging.
“So as you can see we have a whole lot of problems on our hand,” the Inspector added. A whole lot of problems, indeed. “It is, of course, possible that the two incidents – Duplic trying to run you over and his getting shot in the head – are unrelated, but we suspect they’re not.”
No more pretending that none of it was real, Jake thought, or that it did not really matter, or, the best of all rationalisations, that it was all not what it seemed: a string of accidents and coincidences that added up to something coherent and meaningful only in a mind of a paranoid observer. Like Marina. It’s a funny feeling, somewhere deep inside you, deep in your gut, when you realise that the worst case scenario is the actual scenario.
“To be perfectly frank with you,” Milos leaned forward, relishing his turn to play the part in the drama, “the most ideal solution from our point of view would be for you to leave the country as soon as possible. However, since you have not committed any crime, that we are aware of,” he added, “we cannot expel you, but can only ask you to expedite your stay here. For your own good.”
Jake laughed. His heart was beating faster and he could actually feel the thumping inside his chest. “For my own good? Well, cheers to Galician and Ruthenian law enforcement...”
“Jake-“ Marina started but he interrupted her.
“You’re right; I have not committed any crime; quite the contrary, someone tried to commit a crime on me. Kill me, as you now believe. As such, however convenient it might be for you guys for me to simply disappear back where I came from, that would just seem to me like a pretty damn clear case of blaming the victim. And I hate to disappoint you, but that’s not how I like to play it. The fact that someone wants to kill me is your problem-“
“It is also your problem,” Milos cut in.
“Yes it is,” Jake turned to him. “So do something about it. For the sake of both of us.”
Maciejewicz listened impassively, drumming his fingers on the desk.
“Don’t get me wrong,” the Inspector finally said. “Of course we are investigating, and of course we shall do our best to ensure your safety – in fact, we will assign a 24 hour police protection to you-“
Jake didn’t even flinch. It might have sounded ridiculous some other time and some other place, but not now.
“-But in the end,” Maciejewicz went on, “we cannot guarantee your safety. That’s why expediting your stay here is one certain way of minimising the risk...”
“That assumes that whoever wants me dead only, for some reason, wants me dead here, in Ruthenia,” Jake said, “and won’t follow me back to America.”
“That’s a reasonably safe assumption,” Milos piped in, “considering that whoever wants you dead waited to try to kill you in Ruthenia.”
“Maybe it’s something about your country that makes organising a killing easier,” Jake shrugged.
Milos didn’t like the imputation. His foot stopped moving and fixed Jake with a glare of an offended local patriot. Tough, Jake thought. Then again, he had even less of an idea why someone would want to kill him back in the States than they would in the Kingdom of Ruthenia and Galicia.
“Anyway,” Maciejewicz sighed, “we will communicate once again with the Customs and try to persuade them, in light of the new circumstances, to do their best to expedite their procedures. So that you can dispose of your grandfather’s ashes as soon as possible...”
“What if I want to stay longer?” Jake said, trying not to look at Marina.
“Mr Voynich-“ the Inspector started, his fingers playing the invisible piano in front of him on the desk.
“I’m sure the American embassy won’t be impressed by all this... turn of events,” Jake said.
“Your embassy, Mr Voynich,” Milos uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, as if to build intimacy before sharing of a secret, “will tell you pretty much what we have just told you; keep your head down, don’t do anything stupid, and minimise the risks. And leave as soon as you can.”
Welcome to Ruthenia and Galicia. But make it quick.
Photo by Teodor Kuduschiev on Unsplash
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