John Smith enters the broken-up and frozen-over flat of his colleague Detective Dirk Dickerson through the window.
Smith uses a penknife to pry open the window frame, then props it up with a paperback copy of “Pilgrim’s Progress” that he invariably carries on his person.
Dickerson’s nowhere to be seen. Smith isn’t surprised but treads lightly through the barren rooms with characteristic professional caution, his cold blue revolver on ready in the pocket of his light-gray suit coat, the safety off, a round in the chamber.
In the bedroom – if it can be accurately described as such in its present condition – Smith’s eyes are drawn to the nightstand, practically the only piece of furniture on the premises in serviceable condition.
In the top drawer, covered by a stack of freshly laundered baby-blue boxer shorts and some ankle-high black socks, Smith finds a diary. But it’s locked.
Smith’s hands run over the handsome cowhide cover, his fingers along the gilded edges of its leaves, sturdy in their binding, stitched ever so carefully to the spine.
‘I’ll have to pick the lock,’ he thinks, then retrieves a simple hairpin from a silver cigarette case in the breast pocket of his jacket.
“You just gotta fuck with people, don’t you?” reads the opening line of the journal.
Smith’s thin lips curl into the corners of his face, now illuminated in orange from the burning cigarette that he’d managed to stick in his mouth and ignite with a free hand.
“I mean, why not leave people alone, let dead dogs lie, and live dogs lick under their tails… because they can… unlike you and me. But you and me are different, aren’t we?”
‘Dogged by personal demons,’ thinks Smith; and then a mental image of Dickerson takes hold in his head… not an image from memory or real-life experience.
Smith had never partnered up with Dickerson on the job, but knew of him only as a schoolboy knows of an upperclassman, from others who have spoken of his daring but reckless antics, his breaking down of doors and breaking his head in the process… the perennial problems with his wife…
“Do I fuck with you?” continues the journal entry. “Do I keep you from doing what you want, anywhere that might be, not to mention whom you might want along for company?”
Smith recalls his own wife, to be, Faith, her butchered bloodied body discovered on Trukhaniv Island.
“But that doesn’t stop you, does it?” begins the next entry, followed by a full page of “HAH, HAH, HAH,” in large scribbled print.
‘Who’d be crazy enough to do such a thing to her?’ thinks Smith, ‘The Ferret – too easy. Rico Soiree – but why? Step – as part of some scheme… Dickerson – cuz he now hates all women… and me?’
“No, no, no. Nothing stops you, or gets you going either, does it? Instead, you neither speak nor keep quiet, move or sit still, blink your eyes or bulge ‘em out of your head like a nut, like some men get, like I get but you don’t… not because you’re not a nut but cuz you’re not a man… Ah, hah, hah. Hah!”
Smith remembers how he’d started with the agency and not so long ago, full of ambition and pride, how the Old Man had taken to him, how he had taken to Kyiv, Podil, prying off its cover and peering into the sleaze, greed, pathetic pretensions and shocking stupidity of the city’s expatriate community.
“Did you hear what I said? You’re not a man – clown, idiot, loser, jackass, jackoff, fuckface, fumblebutt, late for work and late for life, down and out with no cement under your ass, because someone kicked it in and now nothing will support it, nothing, nothing: not a job, a woman, or a runny-nosed kid that calls you Papa because he doesn’t know your first name. Not a kind neighborly woman who would stain her apron picking up a filthy stinking drunk from her door stoop but leave you lying in the bushes, cold and hungry with a stupid look on your face like you expect a morsel of food to be thrown at you, maybe even a biscuit, or heaven forbid a piece of pie fresh-baked and sitting on the window sill to cool.”
Smith winces then draws back from the pages held open in his hands. The day’s closing out, shadows creeping in around the flat. It’s freezing cold with the windows broken out, and bird feathers are sprinkled everywhere.
“Are you talking to me?” reads another entry, again written in huge scribbled print, taking up two pages and inscribed deep into the thick soft paper of the diary.
Smith closes Dickerson’s diary, removes a cardboard-covered notepad from the inner breast pocket of his jacket and writes in it:
“Please Note: There are no sultry shapely blondes in this crime scene, no phone calls intercepted from desperate men or hard-boiled cops. Dickerson apparently lives quite alone in the flat, save for the company of a chair that looks about to break, a mirror that won’t, and an old man in medals staring him down from the frame of a dog-eared photo on his bedroom dresser.
“Not so with Jack Step – Dickerson’s erstwhile partner at the agency. This man’s not to be found at home, as he likely doesn’t have one. Send all post to Harry Christian’s convenience store, Podil, Kyiv, in care of Detective First Class, loitering in the magazine section, just behind the racks of warm beer and fake whisky, where one can’t miss the glossy colored photos of mustachioed middle-aged Indian men tugging at the saffron gowns of dark-eyed maids on the front pages of Delhi Delights.
“P.S. And Harry Christian can’t miss Step in the mirror that he’s hung over that section of his store, above the potato chip rack and hot sauce tins.”
Filed by John Smith… but who knows, January 26, 2018