Bearded men and veiled women
Bow down in the dirt
Their heads bent low
Lined in a row
While heathens look to heaven
Smith exits Puzata Khata on Kontraktova Ploshcha just after 10:00 PM. He crosses the broad bend of road at the red and white zebra and skirts the south end of the square on the right. He walks in the road against traffic but close to the curb, presumably to avoid the occasional pedestrian bottleneck.
Rounding the outside of a makeshift green metal porch that replaces the sidewalk along the columned colossus under construction that is the center of the square, he cuts diagonally across a small dark park of drunks and punks at the north end of the square just opposite the university. Then he executes another street crossing to begin negotiation of a wide, people-filled passage flanked by cheap street eateries and kiosks on both sides.
Arriving at the tram tracks, he halts and appears prepared to board the No. 14 about to make its last rumbling rounds through Podil District, but then darts in front of the dim yellow lights of the red rusty wagon in narrow avoidance of impact and certain bodily dismemberment. At the south entrance to Kontraktova Metro Station, he stops again to mingle briefly among an audience to some second-rate street musicians on their last tune.
At this point, Smith removes a tightly folded newspaper from the left-hand pocket of his knee-length raincoat and shoves it firmly into one of the debris-filled concrete urns near the Metro station doors.
Instead of entering the station he turns back, heading further north along a back row of buildings, then through a deep-set arch that opens out into sight of the station’s opposite exit, much less well-lit and peopled.
Once again, he appears intent on entering the station, descending the subterranean steps into the underpass. But he comes out the other end, slips between two close-set buildings and on to Nizhny Val, in seeming defiance of the high-speed motorists that race its lanes.
On the other side of the boulevard – called Verkhny Val – he skips over the barrier and heads toward Kostyantinyvka Street, with the Coffee House on the right seeing off its last tired-eyed customers. From here, he passes Andrew’s Irish Pub, well lit up at this time of night, and further along toward the newly restored Zhovten Cinema.
“What does he do then?”
“He doesn’t go into the cinema but casually glances at the movie posters in the light boxes on his right. Then it’s across one more street, another set of tram tracks, the electricity crackling betwixt pole and wire.”
“There’s another square there, isn’t there?”
“That’s right, across from the cinema, and it’s almost pitch-black by this time of night. The dog walkers have gone home, and it’s mostly too cold for exercise men and teen lovers.”
Smith enters the square, moving deftly among its short but tortuous paths, each nearly invisible by design of the dark. One wrong step and you spill onto the lawn, scrape a low-hanging branch with your eye or stumble painfully into a bench.
Smith is seated now, the pale gray gleam of his raincoat defining the young detective’s otherwise invisible figure. Voices, vague and indifferent, sound off and on into the night.
It’s peaceful and a man can think, including Smith, with the worries of the world under his hat, the moon overhead, not bright but new, unseen, yet to be outlined by the light of the next day’s sun.
In the kitchen of a third-floor flat not far removed, The Hunched Cornish is making himself a ham and cheese sandwich. Thin layers of mayonnaise ooze out from under thick slabs of pink and yellow stacked several inches high. A few cold and crunchy pickle slices would nicely firm up this bread, thinks The Cornish, whose narrow savage eyes examine the neat snack from all angles, dangling it between thick fleshy fingers, in breathing distance of the huge vein-stained nostrils that open up and out of his bloodshot face.
The Guinea is leant over the kitchen sink where’s he’s cut off the top of his index finger, now lying in a pool of cold tap water in the metal basin below. His other hand still holds a large butcher knife hanging limp along the seams of his green corduroy trousers.
“Saint Stephan was a martyr, you know, a sacrificial lamb of his faith. They stoned him – his own people – including another so-called saint of the faith before he saw the light. They would throw rocks at one another, crush someone’s skull piece by piece, like a troupe of baboons, can you imagine…?”
The Cornish has his eyes still fixed closely on the ham and cheese sandwich dangling from his two stumpy fingers. It’s packed tight to luncheon perfection so not even a drop of mayonnaise drips out from between the bread, where the meat and cheese stick firm like bricks mortared into a wall.
“Catch you cheating on your husband, a crowd picks up, chases you into a dead-end street and then starts pelting you with bricks, hunks of building material flying at you from all around. These are your neighbors, mind you, the guy next door or some other bearded good-for-nothing who thinks he’s doing right by God.”
The Cornish has put down his sandwich with the vague air that he no longer intends to eat it, as if the phone suddenly rang or someone has started knocking at the door.
“Are you listening to me? These assholes not only looked down their sand-burnt noses at the shaved and civilized, but would go after one another with deadly… bestial… fury, without even bothering with a trial…”
The Cornish is sitting with his arms folded, looking straight ahead, at anything but the moist meaty morsel that he has so carefully prepared.
“Yeah, well, anyway, he was a martyr, supposedly the first of his faith, but certainly just one in a countless number of people back then and there to get their brains bashed in for things you and I wouldn’t raise an eyebrow over…”
Filed by 42M from the lunchroom, March 8, 2016