it was burned with a cigarette tip. Cold sweat beaded on his face as Poole bit through his lower lip and blood flowed into his mouth. The pain was relieved only somewhat by the removal of the butt.
The man walked slowly back to his previous spot across the table and squatted down again. “Who hired you?”
“Her name was Lena Prosnicki.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not possible.”
“She said her name was Lena Prosnicki,” Poole said, weary with fear and pain.
The man closed his eyes and made a subtle motion with his head. Poole felt his hair being pulled taut.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Puskis poured his tea slowly, careful to prevent any leaves from flowing into the cup. The air in his apartment smelled of tea, mint, and orange rind. He walked carefully from the kitchen into his sitting room, holding the cup by the handle with one hand and the saucer beneath with the other.
He sat, surrounded by hanging rugs. Their colors—reds, oranges, yellows, browns—though muted, retained some of their former brilliance. Their geometric patterns were framed by lighter borders with abstracted scenes from the Serbian past: the Battle of Kosovo, the overthrow of the Ottoman Turks. They were as much a history text as any of the tomes on his bookshelf.
Tonight he was not going to read. Nor was he going to contemplate the rugs, an activity that he often spent hours doing, reflecting on this abstract method of marking the past—a stark contrast to his rational practice. Even the geometric patterns, he felt, contained historical information. He had at times agonized over them, trying to divine their meaning, without progress. But he had his eyes closed tonight, turning his thoughts to 1929 and the Birthday Party Massacre and the furor that had followed.
Puskis was usually isolated from the occasional bustle of police activity following a high-profile crime. But even in the Vaults the repercussions of the Birthday Party Massacre were felt, the first sign being a stack of file requests, all with the notation EU for “extremely urgent.” EU requests were not made lightly, and eighty-six at once was, in Puskis’s considerable experience, unprecedented.
The second sign had been the phone call from Mavrides—the Chief’s assistant at the time—who had never called the Vaults before. The strain in his voice evident, he’d checked to see how the file requests were coming. They were coming along fine. They always came along fine. The only thing preventing Puskis from continuing to fulfill requests was the phone call. Puskis hadn’t said this, of course. He had said that they were coming along well and that he was moving with the greatest haste. Mavrides had said, “Good, good,” without actually seeming mollified.
If there had been any doubt—written requests and a voice on the phone were not fully reliable indicators—the appearance of the pale, exhausted courier (Puskis could not now recall the name, though he felt sure it was Polish) confirmed his suspicions that something big was happening. Puskis found his condition surprising, as couriers did not generally encounter much stress. If the courier was in this state, the rest of the department must be under siege.
“What has happened?” Puskis asked. He had discerned certain things from the files that were requested. Organized crime. Crimes at restaurants. Shotgun murders. Child murders. The sum of these factors was not pleasant, but enough to cause this type of commotion?
“A, uh, mass homicide. At a restaurant.” The courier’s voice had been faint. He had seemed an apparition. Puskis felt that if he closed his eyes, the courier would be gone when he opened them again.
“There were children killed?”
“A lot of children. Gunmen walked in on a birthday party and killed everyone. Children, women, and the men, of course. The mayor wants this taken care of immediately. No one on the force is getting a break until this one’s solved.”
“Who were the victims?”
“Members of the Bristol Gang. Gunmen and their families.”
This made the problem clear. Puskis and the courier stared at each other briefly, knowing that there would be no peace until the culprits were found. The courier left and Puskis busied himself gathering the next stack of file requests.
The obvious suspects were members of the rival gang, the Whites. The Whites and the Bristols had, for many years, engaged in a brutal struggle to control certain parts of the City, but especially the Hollows, where the warehouses offered myriad entrepreneurial, if not quite legal, opportunities. The death toll, Puskis remembered, had been alarmingly high in the decade or so leading up