Vasily Ikashev will take his (razborka) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-05-30 15:43:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !dc comics, *narrative, vasily ikashev |
Narrative: an introduction
When: Several weeks ago + now
What: An introduction
Where: Gotham
It was one small prison rather than the grand madhouse. The prisoners, they lived in rows, stacked like shoe-boxes full of empty, restless dreams written on discarded postcards. Dear mother, today was like all the other days. I slept fitfully. I walked the limit of my cell. Tomorrow will be the same again.. It was not Arkham. For this, he was grateful: the screams at night were intermittent. Men resigned to their fates were sullen. The walls of his cell were thick with paper. A breeze through the bars sent them fluttering, a cloud of butterflies. Bible verses, sent from well-meaning housewives with too much time and cognizant that the world was a Godless one. Pictures drawn from memory in a slow, untalented but tutored hand. Lists of names. Above all there were the lists of names. The lay chaplain did not approve of names. There was no rehabilitation in jail but there was repentance. The chaplain, Vasily thought, was intuitive but there was no room for intuition in the dull paperwork. Had there been, that voice among the chorus might have spoken no. There was sticky heat in an airless room, a pile of beige folders on the desk, a panel of people who had never lived where death dogged their footsteps. There were chains. His wrists were raw, his fingertips ran over scabbed skin as he sat with his head bowed, his heels together, his knees spread. Awaiting the stamp in his file, the extended sentence. No hope buoyed his chest, a breath clamped against his rib-cage. Another five years, said the file. The prison stank in summer, of unwashed men and of fear. The door rattled on chains behind him, and it slammed like a gaol gate. Vasily dreamed of skies at night in the thin bed cleaved to the wall. Of the clear, pure white of Siberia where the snow colored the clouds yellow. Of the smoky gray of Gotham city. Above, there was smog. Beyond, the highway hummed and the city was a paper cut-out against the skyline. Walking, he found, was painful. Knees broken in prison (they came, the men with a look of the outside and a martyred certainty in why they were there. He'd broken every bone over the years: the man who worked in the infirmary was never genial but he had softer eyes) and poorly reset, they creaked as he went. In need of grease. He took the bus that threaded every backstreet until it found the city, swaying bodies dressed in cheap office-wear, tinny music from someone's headphones. Everyone clutched electronics, their faces lit in a dim blue glow. Fascinating. He took the wallet from the coat pocket of the man in front. Habit. Keeping his hand in. The man was watching a show, one with laughter on repeat. Gotham had grown. It did not stay still, it never had in his memory. Street signs painted over, buildings torn down, concrete edifices raised. Consistency was knowing where the rats fled to, the holes in the walls. Limping painfully, in the pilling artificial-fiber tracksuit they had handed him on the way out, he sought one of the old businesses. A laundrette, but the man lurking to make change was not Loretta. He waited until closing, watching mixed-loads circle as the strip-light flickered. At ten, when not-Loretta moved toward the back, he removed a key from behind the fourth drum. Still the same. The apartment was still there. There had only been a flicker of panic that the building might have been knocked to pieces, to make way for a market, or a blind office-block, plate-glass and hissing air-conditioning units. But it was there, crawling iron and blackened brick. This was not the old place, ergonomic furniture and suited men waiting outside until the night ended. The street-lamp was broken, the bulb extinguished. Somewhere in the near distance, an alarm yelped ceaselessly. This had been a safe-house once. A last resort. His breath rattled in his throat after the seventh flight of stairs, and his hands shook until the keys sang against the lock, but the fourth lock gave and the door gasped open, stale air and quiet. The mat was thick with unrequested mail. Cheap. The hall-mirror returned his face: wild-haired, grayed, his face looked thinner, as if gravity had dragged it south. Not a man to be recognized, even if he hadn't used the old evasions. He opened the second drawer from the stove, turned it over, unfastened the bundle of cash with fingers that remained steady if he took it slow. Cash would buy a suit, it would buy shoes, it would buy a drink at the old haunts long enough to listen. To test the air. The floorboards beside the bed yielded an ugly, blunt-nosed gun, dulled metal that fit into his hand with remembered ease. --- The bar was familiar. Different name painted over the door out front, but names changed hands easily. Atmosphere, you could not buy or sell. The doorman swept him over, the sharp-cut gray suit, the smoothed, silvered hair. He had a taste for claret on his tongue, and he took a seat in the back-booth and listened to the whispers swell. This place, it was not Russian. It had been when he left, and now they spoke with Italineate force, and the woman who came over to serve him (young, so so young. Had they always been that young?) lingered briefly, until he smiled coolly. "What's your name?" she said, when she brought him his glass. She did it badly, her hands gave her away. It was always the hands, but he did not tell her. She looked so young, the roots of her hair were dark against the artificial yellow that tumbled over her shoulders. Her eyes were thickly lined. "My name," he told her carefully, he told her, he told the bar. "Is Vasily." He was back. Let Gotham do with that what it would. |