A Negotiable Instrument

Chapter Eighteen - Friday

He lay still. He didn't know where he was. He didn't know how or why he had got there. The slightest movement provoked waves of nausea that rippled with dizzying speed through his spread-eagled body. He felt as weak and helpless as a baby, as hot as the devil's breath and as cold as the Siberian taiga, sensitive beyond bearing yet numb to the core.

After an indeterminate length of time, unsure if he had blacked out or lost the will to exist, he made a foolhardy attempt to stand up. The heat, he realised with a clarity that shocked him, was his body's response to the pain that seared through every fibre of his being. The cold, it took him longer to discover, had seeped into his body out of the frigid floor that he lay face down upon. He eased himself up onto one elbow and another sensation began to impinge upon his dulled senses. The floor was wet and his bottom half was lying in a pool of liquid. He panicked, sure it must be his own blood, and collapsed back onto the floor. He turned his head to look beneath him and his bloodshot eyes confirmed what his nose had begun to suggest. He was lying in a puddle of cold piss and vomit.

He rolled his body with agonising slowness on to his right side and had to stifle the urge to cry out. Another quarter turn brought him face up. He forced his eyes to focus on his immediate surroundings. He took in the vomit-stained front of his shirt and trousers, was assailed by their noisome smell, and collapsed back onto his side in a spasm of dry retching.

Several more minutes passed before Tursunov was able to summon the strength to haul himself up from the floor and drag himself across to the sink. He threw cold water over his face, his head, and his shirt-front, and he lurched out of the kitchen. When he reached the bedroom he pulled off his soiled clothes item by loathsome item. He sat on the bed after he had removed each garment bathed in sweat, the exertion too much for him despite the icy cold that gripped the apartment. As he stumbled around in the early morning gloom searching for clean clothes to cover himself he caught a glimpse of a pathetic shambles of a man in the small mirror on the dressing table and he recoiled in disgust. He hadn't thought it possible to look worse than he felt. He stubbed a toe on a leg of the bed and cursed, his voice thick and hoarse, his throat curdled with clotted phlegm. When he had pulled on coat, hat, gloves, boots, and scarf he limped to the door.

It was still dark outside but the storm had blown itself out. He stumbled along the street towards the Neva, his head pounding and his stomach churning. The snow was a grey blanket that smothered the streets, the trees, and the buildings in the crepuscular half-light, and he was grateful for the lack of contrast. His one thought was to reach the sanctuary of the banya. Only there could he begin the process of cleansing his mind and restoring his body to some semblance of normality. Only there could he steel himself to do what had to be done.

* * *

The raid on the factory was a model of police efficiency. Dolmatov rode out towards the Obvodnyi canal on the first wagon with a handful of half-asleep patrolmen. It was slow and uncomfortable, but better than riding on the second wagon. That would have left him to spend thirty minutes thinking of reasons not to punch Boyarsky. He would have preferred to walk, but Superintendent Radostev had insisted that they would all leave together, and that they would all arrive together. No doubt, Dolmatov thought sourly, they would all have to piss and shit together.

The one exception to this mass mobilisation was Radostev himself. His exalted rank required him to travel en privé and had furnished him with the necessary means in the form of a Benz Velo-Duce motor car complete with official driver. The Jakovlev-built cars were one of the first petrol driven cars to be manufactured in St. Petersburg, but were still vanishingly rare in the police service. For some reason this raid must be very special, Dolmatov thought. The motor car reminded him of Yemelin and he corrected himself. There were three exceptions to the mass mobilisation. The lad had an excuse, laid up in hospital as he was. But Tursunov, as far as he knew, had no such excuse. When he had asked, Radostev had made it clear that he wasn't going wait for Tursunov to put in an appearance. This was despite the fact that it was Tursunov's investigation, and it was Tursunov who had discovered the location of the factory. It was Radostev's insistence on leading the raid, a previously unheard of departure from his desk-bound routine, which had first aroused Dolmatov's suspicions. Radostev's casual indifference to Tursunov's presence had served to reinforce his unease.