A Case of Noir (Atlantis) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Red Esperanto

  Death on a hot afternoon

  The Kelly Affair

  The Big Rain

  One of those days in England

  Paul D. Brazill

  A Case of Noir

  di Paul D. Brazill

  1

  Red Esperanto

  Warsaw

  The winter night had draped itself over Warsaw’s Aleja Jana Pawla like a shroud, and a sharp sliver of moon garroted the death black sky. I was in the depths of a hangover and feeling a touch claustrophobic in Tatiana’s cramped, deodorant-reeking apartment.

  I poked my trembling fingers through a crack in the dusty slat blinds and gazed out at the constellation of neon signs that lined the bustling avenue. Sex shops, peep shows, 24-hour-bars, booze stores and kebab shops were pretty much the only things that I could see, apart from The Westin Hotel, with its vertigo-inducing glass elevator. Looking at it always made my stomach lurch a little.

  I fought back the acrid bile that burned my throat as I watched a black taxi jump a red light and cut across the road, narrowly missing a rattling tram. A police car’s siren wailed and pierced my pounding head like a stiletto. Another cop car joined the chase, overtook the cab, swerved and screeched to a halt in front of it. The taxi driver tried to stop but the taxi skidded back across the icy road, just missing another tram, before eventually stopping on the pavement outside a garish-looking peepshow. A tall blond dressed only in red high heels and suspenders looked out of its front door, saw the police cars and went back inside, slamming the door behind her.

  A massive, bull-necked man with a bald head and wearing a black leather jacket raced from the taxi towards the front of Tatiana’s apartment block but, before he could get close to the front door, a swarm of policemen had surrounded him and dragged him down onto the snow-smothered ground. They attacked him with truncheons before handcuffing him and hurling him into the back of a police van, giving him the occasional kick on the way.

  I turned back towards Tatiana. She handed me a glass of bourbon. The smell made my stomach roll. I took a furtive sip and balked.

  ‘Not a Maker’s Mark fan?’ she said.

  ‘I prefer Jack Daniels,’ I said. ‘With coke. But, to be honest, I usually only drink whisky when I’m so drunk I shouldn’t be drinking anything at all. When I’ve drank the pint of no return.’

  Tatiana grinned as I persevered with the drink. After a while, the burning sensation was cleansing. I turned back towards the window. A mob of English football fans wearing jeans and T-shirts were staggering down the street singing a song about three lions.

  Tatiana came up behind me.

  ‘When the last Pope — the Polish one — died, the whole street was lined with multi-coloured candles, in tribute,’ she said, looking almost tearful.

  Her English was perfect but her Ukrainian accent was as dark and as bitter as the Gauloise that she deeply inhaled. ‘It was a thing of rare beauty,’ she continued, a halo of smoke floating above her.

  She switched off the flickering light and switched on a small lamp with a dusty red bulb. My mouth was dry and I felt as if my heart was caged tightly within my chest and struggling to burst free. Tatiana finished her drink and carefully placed the glass on the rickety bedside table.

  ‘Ready?’ she said.

  I nodded and she let her crimson silk kimono drop to the floor and stepped over it. Her skin was white as the snow falling outside her window. Her stockings and panties were black, her short-cropped hair blonde. She picked up her snakeskin handbag, took out a lipstick and traced her blood red lips.

  I took out my wallet and fished out a handful of notes. I placed them on the bedside table. Unsteadily, I sat down, on the edge of the bed. Throbbing with guilt, I could hear the thump of a bass line coming from one of the pubs across the road and for a moment I wished I was there.

  Tatiana dropped to her knees and licked her lips as she crawled towards me. She spread my legs and placed her scarlet painted talons on my hard penis. She dug in her nicotine-stained fingers so deeply that I suppressed a groan. Then she moved in closer, her head above my crotch. She smiled warmly as she unzipped my fly, took out my erection and kissed my cock before licking it all over.

  Ten minutes later, as she poured me another drink, there was loud banging on the door. I stumbled to my feet, zipped up my jeans and picked up my black sweater from a rocking chair.

  ‘Who the hell is that?’

  Tatiana put a finger to her lips.

  ‘Keep quiet. It’s only Bronek. Wait,’ she whispered. ’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, he’s just a customer who has problems separating business from pleasure.’

  The banging continued. And then the shouting began. Well, it was more like the cry of a wounded animal. Repeating Tatiana’s name over and over again.

  She shook her head and leaned close to me.

  ‘Wait until he has gone, eh?’

  She kissed my cheek and poured the last of the bourbon into my glass. She held up a finger and stepped into the bathroom

  Tatiana showered and dressed in a black polo-necked sweater and leather skirt. She cracked open another bottle of bourbon, sat down next to me and we slowly drank in silence until, just before midnight, the noise stopped.

  ‘I think you can go now,’ said Tatiana, standing, stretching, and yawning.

  ‘Are you sure? Is it safe?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. He will be at mass now and then he’ll return home to his wife and children.’

  I stood up, a little unsteady. Tatiana produced a handful of business cards from her bag and sifted through them.

  ‘Maybe we can get a taxi together?’ she said.

  ‘Safety in numbers, eh?’ I said, and I forced a smile which Tatiana didn’t return.

  ‘Oh, I think we’re outnumbered where Bronek is concerned,’ she said, with the hint of a smile.

  I took the last of my notes from my wallet and stuffed them into the tax driver’s sweaty paw while Tatiana wiped the white powder from her nose. She pulled a zippo from the pocket of her black PVC raincoat and lit another French cigarette, dissolving into the darkness as the flame flickered out.

  ‘We made it in one piece, then,’ she said.

  ‘Just about,’ I said. My nerves were shot.

  Before I’d come to Warsaw, I’d heard stories about ‘The Night Drivers.’ Legend had it that they were a group of amphetamine-pumped young men who, each midnight, tied fishing wire around their necks, and the cars’ brakes, and then raced each other from one end of the city to the next.

  So, when I saw the cut-marks on the taxi driver’s neck and his swollen red eyes, I didn’t exactly have the Colgate ring of confidence.

  I was relieved, then, when, minutes later, we pulled up outside The Palace of Culture and Science, Josef Stalin’s unwanted neo-classical gift to the people of Warsaw, which loomed over the city like a gigantic gargoyle keeping evil at bay. A large red banner was stretched across its entrance advertising an avant-garde jazz concert.

  ‘So, same again next month, then?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, why not,’ I replied, to the fading sound of her high heels click-clicking on the Palace’s wet, concrete steps.

  I waited a moment until she was inside and then rushed across the road into Rory’s Irish Pub. I ignored the wrinkled cloakroom attendant and headed straight into the putrid smelling toilets to puke.

  ‘Out with the old, in with the new,’ said a familiar, well-spoken, sandblasted voice from the next cubicle.

  I wiped my mouth with toilet paper, flushed and walked up to the wash-basin. As I splashed my face with water, Sean Bradley stumbled out of the cubicle.

  �
��We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at it through the bottom of a rather nice glass of gin and tonic, eh?’ he said.

  He swayed as he zipped up his fly, waved to me and walked out the door.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once described London as being a ‘great cesspool into which the flotsam and jetsam of life are inevitably drawn’ and the same thing might reasonably be said of the world of TEFL teaching. A Teacher of English as a Foreign Language can usually be described as either flotsam — perhaps a fresh-faced young thing taking a break from university — or jetsam — the middle-aged man with the inevitable drinking problem and enough skeletons in his closet to keep a palaeontologist happy for months.

  And, I’ll make no bones about it, Sean fit rather snugly into the latter category. I literally stumbled into him the first week I arrived in Warsaw. After that, we seemed to orbit each other. Sean was a permanently drunk, dapper, nicotine-stained example of jetsam, who supplemented his teaching income by chess hustling.

  I walked into the half-empty bar, ordered a beer, and a shot of vodka to cleanse my palate.

  ‘Oh, bollocks,’ I said, as I realised I had no more folding money left.

  ‘Can I pay by credit card?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, of course’ said Blanka, the tiny barmaid with the striking purple Mohican haircut. ‘But there’s a minimum amount you have to spend.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll run up a tab.’

  And then I headed towards oblivion like rainwater down a storm-drain.

  I sat at a checkerboard table with Sean and watched Yankee -Doodle-Andy, a big, dumb-looking American I’d seen shuffling around the ex-pat pub circuit, play pool with Rory, the owner. Rory was a pallid, prune-faced old man with all the charm of a pit-bull.

  ‘Evening gents, ‘I shouted.

  Rory glanced up, irritated.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he grunted, by way of a greeting.

  Like I said, he wasn’t known for his charm. But, in his favour, he had no time for the smoking ban that had been introduced in Poland’s bars and restaurants. The air in the bar was as thick as pea soup. Little blue clouds of cigarette smoke hung below the green lamps that dangled from the low ceiling.

  The sound of Van Morrison’s version of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ crept out of crackly speaker as a nicotine-smudged TV screen showed an episode of ‘McGyver’.

  Andy sat at the seat opposite Sean, sipping a Diet Coke and keeping an eye on the door.

  ‘The thing is, some people absolutely loath the place,’ said Sean, jabbing a yellow finger at a postcard of The Palace of Culture and Science that Andy had been using as a beer-mat. ‘The locals call it the Russian Wedding Cake, you know? And, indeed, that’s what it looks like; a wedding cake plonked in the middle of the road.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ said Andy, who quite clearly didn’t.

  The night staggered on. Andy bailed out pretty quickly and then the cloak-room attendant left. Sean and I were soon in our pots, sitting at the end of the bar smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky, watching the ice cubes glimmering and shimmering in the wan light. Blanka had gone home, too, and Rory clearly wasn’t enjoying Sean and I exploiting the Polish tradition that a bar can only close when the last customer has gone. I was about to order another round of drinks when I heard a loud bang that seemed to send seismic tremors through the pub.

  I turned and saw a stunningly beautiful blonde burst through the frosted glass door and rush into the bar bringing a trail of snow behind her. Her wet hair hung down like party streamers.

  Even in my drunken stupor, just looking at her was like lightning hitting a plane. She was tall, with long blonde hair and a slash of red lipstick across her full lips. She was wearing a long black raincoat which flapped in the rain behind her.

  ‘Ding dong,’ I said ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Oh. That’s C.J., Crazy Jola. Better watch out for her,’ said Sean. ‘She’s eaten more men than Hannibal Lecter.’

  ‘Looks like a pretty tasty morsel, herself,’ I said.

  ‘No, really, she’s trouble. She’s a married woman, for a start,’ said Sean.

  I shrugged.

  ‘That’s not the greatest of sins.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s married to Robert Nowak. You know who he is?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He’s a twat, that’s who he is,’ said Rory, as he went over to Jola’s table.

  ‘He’s a mid-level gangster who owns a lot of property in the area. He’s also a second-hand clothes Baron,’ said Sean.

  ‘Who and a what?’ I said.

  Sean finished the last of his drink and shuffled off the bar stool. He staggered close to me and, even as pissed as I was, he stunk of booze. I recoiled.

  ‘He’s a mid-level gangster, basically,’ said Sean.

  ‘Yes, you said that.’

  Sean tried to gather his thoughts.

  ‘He owns a couple of bars. Peep shows. And another one of his business enterprises is to get Poles that live abroad to collect donated clothes that’s been left outside charity shops overnight in, say, London or Edinburgh, and ship them back to Poland to sell in second-hand shops. You can get some damn good stuff, actually,’ said Sean, pointing to the Hugo Boss label on his shirt.

  ‘The only crime is getting caught,’ I said, shrugging.

  ‘Yes, but if a butterfly beats its wings in the forest, a one-handed man claps, and a tree falls down.’ said Sean, and he stumbled off in the direction of the Gents.

  I ignored him and tried to catch Jola’s eye. Rory was placing a drink in front of her. She said something to him and, for the first time since I’d known him, I actually saw him laugh. Though, when he turned back to me he had the same grimace he always wore.

  Jola took out her mobile and began to text someone. Fuelled by Scotch courage, I walked over.

  ‘Would you like another drink?’ I said, swaying a little.

  Jola looked up and tried to focus on me, as if she were attempting to take in a magic eye painting.

  She sipped her drink and shook her head.

  ‘Well, I would but I really shouldn’t,’ she said, with a fake sounding transatlantic accent. ‘I should go home and hit the sack. I’ve hit the bottle enough for one night.’

  ‘Maybe one for the Ulica?’ I said.

  She laughed.

  ‘Fantastic use of Polish. You’re a regular polyglot. I’m guessing you’re an English teacher?’

  ‘Surprisingly not,’ I said.’ Do I look like one?’

  ‘Well,’ she took in my worn leather jacket, scuffed Doc Martins and frayed jeans. ‘You certainly don’t look like a businessman.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Hack?’

  ‘Bingo!’

  ‘So, do you work for one of those shitty rags that dig out all the sleazy tales about Poland and sell them to the English tabloids for shock horror stories?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Although I have done it in the past. ‘I’m freelance but mostly I work for EuroBuilder Magazine.’

  I gave her a sweaty business card.

  ‘Heard of it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. My asshole husband has a lot of property in this city so he buys it and reads all of those fascinating articles about warehouses and shopping malls.’

  ‘All my own work,’ I said. ‘Well, some of it.’

  She looked at the card. ‘Luke Case. That’s a cool sounding name.’

  ‘Not that cool,’ I said. ‘At school, my nickname was Head.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you do,’ I sniggered.

  Jola stared blankly at me.

  ‘Never mind. So?’ I said, gesturing towards the bar.

  ‘Oh, why the hell not.’

  I ordered another whisky for me and a Gin and Tonic for Jola.

  ‘Gin makes you sin,’ I said as I put the drinks on the table.

  ‘Oh, I don’t need a drink for sinning,’ she said.

  Sean had
disappeared and we were the only customers in the bar.

  I put some money in the ancient jukebox, sat down and asked her where she was from.

  Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott sang about someone with a ‘Bad Reputation.’ Something that always attracted me to a woman, of course.

  Jola sipped her drink and seemed to hold on to the table to steady herself.

  ‘Your home town?’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ she said, knocking back her drink in one. And then her words staggered out like drunks at closing time.

  ‘I’m from the industrial wastelands of the east,’ she said, playing with a lighter with a picture of a matador on it. ‘Bialystok. Heard of it?’

  ‘Amazingly, I have.’ She looked as if she didn’t believe me.

  ‘It’s true. I had a friend from there. He showed me a photograph of a big soviet tank in the town centre that was painted a very camp pink.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ she said. ‘Not the most exciting place. A real ‘one-whore-town,’ as they say. So, as soon as I could, I got out of there fast.’

  ‘And you came here to Warsaw?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No. First, I headed off to Chicago for a couple of years. And then to London. Which is where I met my wonderful husband.’

  ‘Where in London?’

  ‘Ealing? Know it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I worked there for six months back in the eighties, looking for the streets that are paved with gold. Still looking, mind you.’

  ‘Well, there’s a golden shopping mall here in Warsaw, as I’m sure you know, but the streets are as grey and cold as anywhere else.’

  Jola took out a Marlborough from a battered pack and I lit it with one of my Embassy Regal.

  ‘What line of work are you in?’ I said.

  ‘I manage a bar. Robert, my husband, is the owner. The Emerald Isle? It’s over in the Esperanto district. Do you know it?’ said Jola.

  I nodded.

  ‘Another one of Poland’s authentically Irish pubs,’ I said.

  Jola laughed. ‘Well, there are pubs in Ireland selling Polish beer and food, so, why not?’

  ‘Why not, indeed.’