1 July, 12:10 PM, “The Czernograd Gazette” newsroom
Igor spent the morning doing the work he was actually paid to do, while thinking all the time about the work he was told to stay away from, and to which he would devote the afternoon, having found some convenient, even half-believable excuse to get out of the office. The road beckoned. In the meantime, writing about petty corruption of the city government seemed more tedious than ever. Like some crumbs off the table. That’s right, he thought to himself, your whole life you’ve been living off crumbs. And a never-beginning, never-ending cavalcade of pussy, booze, illegal recreational substances, and other thrills. He could rationalise all these things as compensations for an unfulfilling professional life, but it would have been just that; a rationalisation. He would have been wallowing in the cavalcade even if he were the richest and the most successful citizen of Ruthenia and Galicia, or its most popular and respected journalist. He was born to excess; it wasn’t thrust upon him. The crumbs were. At least until now.
Pansky 144.
So simple, yet... so many possibilities.
Pansky was a surname, for starters. There were in fact 46 Panskys in the Czernograd phone book. He quickly scanned the list. None of them had “144” in their address, or “1/44” or “14/4” for that matter. None of them had these three digits in that particular order as part of their listed phone numbers. He could call of them, one by one, starting with Anton Pansky and finishing with Z & E Pansky, and ask them if “144” or Mathias Maciar meant anything to them. The likelihood was that he would not have been the first one. The Secret Service, which so efficiently had taken over the investigation in order to wind it down as quickly as possible, was in the possession of the same information he had, except with a head start of one or two days. Whether or not the very same Secret Service had anything to do with suiciding Maciar or whether they were merely interested in a picking up the pieces and tying any loose ends, Igor knew that they as sure as hell were looking for the same things that he was; looking with far more resources at their disposal and far more experience, not to mention perhaps a far better idea what they were looking for in the first place and therefore where to start.
To be completely honest, he was flattering himself to even think that he was still in the game and not wasting his time, his competitors having uncovered the secret of Pansky 144 even before he first learned about it from Bohun. Still, as they say, God looks after fools and drunks. He has been both, often at the same time; he figured he might still have a chance.
There was Pansky Street in the Nowe Miasto district, but Google Maps told him the numbers went from 1 to 76 only. There was the Pansky Stol restaurant in the Old Town, probably known among its regulars simply as “Pansky”. “See you at Pansky, Sunday night, the usual time,” they probably would say to each other. There was the Pansky menswear shop. The “144” connection was not apparent in either, not in their addresses or phone numbers, and he did not expect that the restaurants would have that many tables, nor the menswear shop that many... what?
There was also, of course, Pansky railway station, in the Prazsky Park district, second one after the Central Station on the northern line that curved between the Old Town and the Castle Hill before leaving the city through its outskirts to cut through the plains of the Upper Ruthenia.
There were no 144 platforms at the station; Igor would have guessed maybe 6 or 8. There might have been trains or the engines assigned that numerical designation, but they would not have been specifically Pansky’s any more than they would have been Central’s or Ravicz’s.
But there certainly were – as there were at any station nowadays – lockers. Possibly as many as 144, if not more.
Igor smiled to himself, locked his computer with a screen saver of a ginger kitten asleep on a ball of knitting wool – “deceive, disorient, disarm” was his philosophy – and walked across the busy midday newsroom towards the lifts.
Photo by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash