Читать книгу: «Naked Angels», страница 2

1
Budapest 1981

The child was intrigued by a small speck of light that danced away somewhere deep in the heart of the darkness. He had been scared many times before but never so much that it hurt.

He wore a small plastic submarine pinned to the inside of his vest which was a medal for valour given to him by Father Janovsky for beating the shit out of Istvan Gosser, even though the boy had been armed with a knife. The trophy meant nothing today, though. Today his mouth felt like it was full of pitch and his heart was trying to punch its way out of his chest. If he had encountered Istvan Gosser down there in the dark he would have greeted him like a long-lost friend, and meant it, too.

The light squirmed some more. Perhaps it was a ghost – the soul of one of the newly dead. It might even be Andreas. The thought turned the boy’s knees to sponge. The place smelt funny. He wished he were somewhere else, somewhere with proper light. Anywhere. If he could have remembered his prayers he would have said them. Then a door opened from nowhere and he thought he would die from the shock.

The sudden glare startled him. The darkness felt almost better now. Dark was bad but that bright glare was a million times worse. Someone – not a ghost, because ghosts don’t wear rubber aprons and smell of tobacco – pushed past him and the door fell back almost shut again. The boy was quick, though, pushing his fingers between the crack and preventing the door from closing properly, even though it hurt. When the corridor was quiet he prised the door open. Then, with a quick glance around first to check he was unseen, he stepped inside.

The local mortuary was one vast, watery-smelling place that was tiled and lit like a public convenience. The bare bulbs strung in a line overhead made everyone look like a corpse whether they were dead or not. If the boy could have seen his own reflection in a mirror right then he would have made himself jump.

His face was whey-white with guilt and his hair, in contrast, looked black. The lights bleached the grime and dirt on his body so that he looked almost clean and his mouth had shrunk into a slit. It was hard for him to imagine he was above ground in that room. It was harder still for him to imagine he would ever get out of there alive.

There was a noise. There were other people in that long room. The boy fled to hide, scuttling across the floor like a rat.

Joszef Molnar farted and Laszlo Kovacs giggled. It was the echo that made it so funny. Whistling was good for that, too. The corpse that lay between them on a trolley did nothing, of course. Not that you could always rely on a corpse to play dead. Sometimes they moved, sometimes they even sat up – it was something to do with the escaping gasses as they decomposed. Joszef and Laszlo had seen it all in their time.

The corpse was covered in the regulation green rubber sheet but attached to the sheet were two pink balloons and a badly hand-written card that read: ‘Happy Birthday Lisa’.

Lisa Janus was the local pathologist, a great heifer of a woman who was, nevertheless, the nearest thing to a sex object either man was ever likely to meet. They had been courting her half-heartedly for over a decade and the smell of Lysol was now like an aphrodisiac to them both.

As they heard her galoshes squeaking down the dark labyrinth of outer corridors both men assumed appropriately sober expressions. The aprons they wore covered their police uniforms and that was a shame, but it was the rules. Molnar cleared his throat in readiness and Kovacs licked at his moustache to make it neat. Not that it needed further neatening; he’d spent fifteen minutes on it already that morning, trimming it into a straight line with his wife’s toenail clippers.

Lisa Janus was not an ugly woman, although she could have been taken for one as her face puckered with annoyance at the sight of the two policemen. Every time those two brought a body in they behaved like fishermen displaying a catch. Then her eyes moved down to the rubber sheet and she noticed the pink balloons for the first time.

‘Is this supposed to be a joke, gentlemen?’

A grin broke out on Inspector Kovacs’s face.

‘Ta-daa!’ He pulled the rubber sheet back with a flourish. The sudden movement caused the corpse’s head to roll to the side and he straightened it quickly.

Lisa Janus let out a gasp and the two men smirked.

‘We thought you’d be impressed,’ Kovacs said. ‘The doctor was keen to get his hands on this one but we saved him for you.’

The body was that of a young man, not more than twenty years old at the most. He was tall and slim but – most of all – he was extremely, outstandingly beautiful. His fair hair lay curled and plastered around his face. His skin had yellowed but it was a clear complexion, showing that he had, at least, eaten good food at some time in his upbringing.

Looking at his slender corpse was like admiring one of the white marble statues in the National Museum. Earlier on, Kovacs had tied a red ribbon around the young man’s penis but then thought he might be taking the joke too far and removed it. Molnar had been disappointed at that – he had thought the red ribbon a hilarious touch.

‘Who is he?’ Janus asked. She was impressed. Her voice had shrunk to a whisper.

Molnar shrugged. ‘Who knows? Lowlife. We found him collapsed in the street. No one has missed him – can you imagine that? What a loss to womankind, eh?’

‘Someone might miss him,’ Kovacs said. He twisted the corpse’s arm a little. ‘Look.’ The name Paulina was tattooed on the white forearm. ‘I should imagine this proves he had at least one girlfriend.’

‘It might be the name of his mother.’ Janus leant closer, fingering the tattoo gently.

‘Can you work out what he died of?’

Lisa Janus tutted softly. ‘Drugs,’ she said, ‘he died of an overdose.’ There was no question in her voice.

The two men shared a quick glance over her head.

‘No.’ Inspector Kovacs sounded equally sure. ‘No drugs, Dr Janus.’

‘How can you tell?’ She sounded tired rather than angry.

‘No syringe nearby, no needle marks. I checked. The boy is clean. He must have had a weak heart, or a fit, or something.’

The pathologist gazed at him. Her eyes were a watery shade of hazel. Brown eyes. That meant she was not a true blonde. That meant …

‘Would you be prepared to risk money on your theory, inspector?’ she asked.

Kovacs sucked in his top lip. A bet? That was different.

‘Look.’ Janus leant forward and the men leant forward too, because her overall had gaped a little at the top. There was a sweepstake back at the station over whether she wore underwear beneath her gown or not. Confident of a captive audience, she held the corpse’s upper arm with both hands and squeezed. To the policemen’s amazement a tiny teardrop of red blood appeared at the inner elbow.

‘No apparent needle marks,’ Janus said. ‘He used a sharp syringe and most likely he was not an actual junkie. I suspect I could do the same trick with the other arm. He probably injected heroin in one and cocaine in the other. I believe they call it a Speedball in the United States. I dare say the heroin was too pure. There is a batch doing the rounds at the moment. We had a similar death in here last week.’ She smiled then, for the first time that day. ‘Never take appearances for granted, inspector,’ she said, ‘they can easily be deceptive, you know.’

‘He didn’t use drugs! He wasn’t a junkie!’ Anger had overcome the young boy’s fear and guilt and he stepped out into the full glare of the light for the first time. They all turned to see who had spoken. For a second they looked shocked. He stared at the adults’ faces; for a while they appeared guilty, then they started to look angry too.

He had a round, shining face, like an angel, and his eyes were swollen with tears. His nose was running because he had not dared to move in order to wipe it. His clothes were clean enough – cleaner than him, at any rate – but they were old clothes, well out of style, and looked strange, somehow not right. The policemen tried to gauge the boy’s age. Kovacs guessed eleven and Molnar thought maybe twelve. They knew his sort straight away; the streets were running with them in parts of the city. Lisa Janus did not know his type. She thought he just looked very young and very sad.

‘What are you up to, son?’ Molnar asked. He had three kids of his own at home and they all got up to tricks but none of them would have been stupid enough to hang around a mortuary for fun. Then he noticed the boy was shaking with fear.

‘I was sent here,’ the boy said. ‘I came to identify …’ He pointed to the corpse on the trolley in front of them.

‘You know this lad?’ Kovacs asked.

The boy nodded slowly. ‘He’s my brother.’

Even in the bright lights he could see the policeman blush. Kovacs looked down at the balloons. He prayed the boy was lying.

‘How can you tell?’ he asked. Perhaps he was lying. After all, he could barely see from where he stood.

‘I can smell him,’ the boy said. ‘I can smell his cologne. I could even smell it in the corridor. That was why I came in here. I knew he was here. I found him myself. He’s my brother. I would know him from his smell. He’s dead, isn’t he?’ He tried hard but his voice broke on these last words. Until you say it you don’t have to believe it. Now he had said it. Andreas was dead.

Molnar and Kovacs looked at each other.

‘How long have you been standing there?’ Lisa Janus asked the boy.

‘A few minutes. Before you arrived.’

The pathologist tugged the balloons off the sheet and threw them in the policemen’s faces.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ she whispered. ‘At least let him come and see if he’s right, poor little fellow.’

Kovacs motioned the boy forward. He had to stand on tiptoe to see the body properly. The policemen stood back, their faces grave. Then the boy leant across and kissed the corpse full on the mouth.

Molnar looked away with an expression of distaste.

‘Peasants!’ he muttered, and Lisa Janus gave him a stern look.

Kovacs pulled the boy away, noticing it took quite a deal of strength to do so, even though the kid felt like a sack of bones underneath his clothes.

The boy was fighting for breath. He had to get some answers out of him before the tears started in earnest.

‘What’s your brother’s name, son?’ he asked.

‘Andreas.’

‘And your name?’

The boy stared at his brother’s body. He felt dead inside himself, now. Did it matter who he was? Would they arrest him for what he had done? ‘Mikhail,’ he said, though he had not heard his full name used for years, ‘Mikhail Veronsky.’ There was no point in lying now. Andreas was dead. Nothing mattered any more.