“It was that punk, Kowalski.”
“How do you know?”
“I picked up a tip while on ice.”
“On Frunze?”
“That’s right.”
Dickerson had read Smith’s last report, which clearly included information on Dickerson being sprung by his landlord from the nuthouse on Frunze Street, not far from Taras Shevchenko Metro Station.
What Smith didn’t include and couldn’t have known was just how the landlord, Petya – a former alcoholic and veteran manic-depressive currently employed pro-bono as a spiritual healer for any idiot who happened to rent one of his wife’s flats in Podil – had come in contact with Dickerson (who wasn’t opposed to unsolicited advice), and pulled it off.
Dickerson had been fast asleep, which is to say that a turnip-faced bitch in nurse’s uniform had again caught him off-guard with a sharp hypodermic to the buttocks, sending the hapless sleuth into drug-induced slumber until well into the early hours.
It was then, no earlier than half past one and maybe later, that Petya had scaled up to the window of Dickerson’s ward and was eyeballing the cots from the windowsill to try to determine just where Dickerson had been quartered.
Dickerson saw those eyeballs, which he immediately recognized due to their regular appearance through the peephole in his apartment door at the end of each month to collect the rent.
What Dickerson didn’t know was that Petya had selected that particular window to gain entrance to the facility, as he knew it to be unencumbered by strong steel bars because he himself had kicked them out during a passion-filled sojourn in that very ward not so long ago.
Petya was also likely attracted to the second floor as opposed to possible entries higher up due to his age, being well into his sixties.
But as Dickerson was making his way to the window, commando style, crawling on all fours along the sticky tiles, permeated with the smell of antiseptics but no cleaner as a result, passing cot after cot with a fork in his teeth that he’d pilfered for protection against the other patients during his very first breakfast, he saw another figure, just a shadow really, approach the window and go into a crouch.
Dickerson continued his crawling but now took a detour around the ward’s only certified schizophrenic so as not to alert the two window figures to his presence and thus, he assumed, possibly listen in to what they would say.
Dickerson was correct in this assumption and quickly discovered to his surprise but not shock that Petya had been the lover, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, to the turnip-faced bitch, who turned out to be that second person at that window.
Dickerson also discovered, in addition to the romantic proclivities and peculiarities of his landlord and the nurse, that Petya had taken the risk of his nighttime climb – by which he could not only break his neck but also, if found, be promptly readmitted to the always welcoming facility – NOT to rescue Dickerson or even to see his angel of mercy (which Dickerson, with some disgust, had overheard Petya calling the Turnip that night), but to possibly collect Dickerson’s overdue rent, or at least get a firm oral commitment that it would be paid by the detective or someone entrusted by him, and thus avoid all the ugly consequences encountered by deadbeats in Kyiv and elsewhere regardless of their supposed mental illness or similar unfortunate circumstances.
All of these earthily unpleasant details of Dickerson’s stay at the Frunze facility for the spiritually disturbed couldn’t and wouldn’t have been known by Smith, which is why Smith (being the cocky, priggish and shameless careerist that he is), in his last report published by the Kyiv Unedited website, had brushed past all these same details in characteristic ‘can’t-tell-you’ fashion with clever phrasing, such as “more on that later”.
But where Smith did get it right – which Dickerson attributed unequivocally to expatriate Kyiv’s wordsmith-turned-wonder boy, that pimple-faced poet with a penchant for rape fantasy, punching bag for The Ferret, and now playing tough-guy reporter at The Cantankerous Curmudgeon… that’s right, Steve the Stool Pigeon Kowalski – was that Dickerson had learned something about the infamous Finno-Ugric faker Dmitry!
And once again, this valuable intelligence was gained during the Boy Dick’s night crawl along the filthy antiseptic reeking floor at the facility on Frunze.
For in between fond remembrances of Petya and turnip-faced Tanya’s stolen moments in the medicine cabinet, her surreptitious pinching of Petya’s over-sixty buttocks every morning, and other tender talk, Dickerson learned that Dmitry himself had been a guest at the Hotel Frunze and had served to some extent as Petya’s confidant, or the two had at least played the occasional game of virtual backgammon, using rusty kopecks and crayon drawings on the ward’s tile floors.
The turnip-faced bitch apparently trusted Dmitry as well, and may have played a role in his escape, not long before the charlatan’s pieces began appearing on the KU site, Dickerson figured.
But worst of all was, Dirk now realized, finished chewing and began swallowing, the hard, bitter truth that he, the detective’s detective, had made all this possible by revealing, willy-nilly, here and there, during tear-jerking spiritual healing sessions with Petya of past, the general outline and gist of a still ongoing investigation… namely, the incredible murder, flight, trial and escape of Saint Stephan.
And Petya passed it on to Dmitry in the nuthouse!
Dmitry no doubt saw the potential for yet another impersonation, indulged by his natural-born inclination for Finno-Ugric intrigue and mass deception… and the rest is all history.
“But what does Kowalski have to do with it?” asks Step, still seated near the window of the New Place, a cheap, pretentious pizzeria that had replaced the recently closed and sadly gutted Commix Café.
“Nothing… absolutely nothing,” shouts Dickerson, spewing spittle onto Step’s new tie.
“And that’s the fucking problem. He couldn’t make it with Commix Girl… everyone knows that one. He couldn’t even hold his own in the company of men like Lynch, Goldstein, and good old Clint Eastwood.
“So he shows up at another half-baked English-language newspaper. How many times have we seen this same thing? ‘I’m a writer; I want to be loved by a Ukrainian girl; find my place, my fame, my calling’ – in of all places… Kyiv, Ukraine?”
“Ok, I got that bit…”
“Then get this. Kowalski wasn’t covering the Hasidic Strip Bar story when CG dissed him. He was looking into Saint Stephan. And guess who the little fuck was using as a source?”
“Dmitry?”
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, late night while apparently drunk, September 15, 2017