Текст книги "Hope"

Автор книги: Len Deighton

Соавторы: Len Deighton
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Of course! She had bribed the desk who let her in as if she was one of the whores who serviced the foreign tourists. It was a cover, and she would have to be with me for long enough to make it convincing. Something to be hidden is always a good cover for something worse, as one of the training manuals deftly explained. She said, 'It's George Kosinski isn't it?'

'What?' I must have looked startled.

'Don't worry about microphones,' she said. 'There are none installed on this floor. The Bezpieca know better than to bug these rooms. These are where the committee big shots bring their fancy women.'

'I still don't know,' I said.

'Don't go cool on me, Bernd. Do you think I can't guess why you are here?'

'Have you seen him?'

'Everyone's seen him. As soon as he arrives he shouts and yells and spends his money and gets drunk in downtown bars where there are too many ears. Boris is worried.'

'Worried?'

'Has George Kosinski gone mad? He's swearing vengeance on someone who killed his wife but he doesn't know who it is. He's violent. He knocked down a man in an argument, in a bar in the Old Town and started kicking him. It was only after he convinced them that he was a tourist that the cops let him go. What's it all about, Bernd? I didn't know funny little George had it in him to do such things.'

I shrugged. 'His wife died. That's what did it. It happened in the DDR. On the Autobahn, the Brandenburg Exit.'

'A collision? A traffic accident?'

'There are a thousand different stories about it,' I said. 'We'll never know what happened.'

'Not political?'

I went and got another tumbler and poured myself a shot of whiskey. At the bar I'd been abstemious but I could smell the whiskey on her and it made me yearn for a taste of it.

'Don't turn your back on me, Bernd. I'll start to think you have something to hide.'

I'd forgotten what she was like: as sharp as a tack. I turned to see her. 'There are political traffic accidents, Sarah. We both know that.'

She stared at me as if her narrowed eyes would find the truth somewhere deep inside my heart. What she finally decided, I don't know, but she swigged her drink, got to her feet and went to the mirror to put her hat on.

'Where is George now?' I asked her. Her back was towards me while she looked in the mirror. She turned her head both ways but spent a fraction of a moment longer when looking at the bruised side of her face.

'I don't know,' she said calmly. 'Neither does Boris. We don't want to know. We've got enough trouble without George Kosinski bringing more upon us.'

'I was hoping Stefan or the family might know.'

'The last I heard, he was scouring through the Rozyckiego Bazaar trying to buy a gun.' She looked at me, but I looked down as I drank my whiskey and didn't react. 'You know where I mean? Targowa in the Praga?'

I nodded. I knew where she meant: a rough neighborhood on the far side of the river. Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Jews lived there in clannish communities where strangers were not welcome. Even the antiriot cops didn't go there after dark without flak jackets and back-up.

'Boris said this is what you wanted,' she said, bringing a brown paper parcel from her tote-bag and putting it on the table.

'Have you got far to go?' I asked.

'I'm being met,' she said to the mirror in a voice that didn't encourage further questions.

I let her out and watched her walk down the long cream-painted corridor. The communist management showed the usual obsession with fire-fighting equipment: buckets of sand and tall extinguishers were arranged along the corridor like sentinels. When she reached the ornate circular staircase she turned and said, 'Wiedersehen,' and gave a wan smile, as if saying a final cheerless farewell to those two young kids we'd been long ago.

After she had gone I thought about her and her bruised face. I thought about the way they had allowed her into the hotel, and let her come up to my room. That wasn't the way it used to work in Warsaw; they checked and double-checked, and the only kind of girl you could get into your room was a genuine registered whore who was working with the secret police.

And eventually I even began wondering if perhaps Sarah had got past the desk so easily because she was just such a person.

I opened the brown paper parcel. Inside it Boris had put two tire levers and a looped throttling wire. So he hadn't been able to get a gun for me; or maybe it was too much trouble. Boris was not the most energetic of our contacts.

*

'What did she say?' It was eleven o'clock in the morning. I'd been out and about. I'd avoided Dicky by missing breakfast, and I could see he was not pleased to be abandoned.

For a moment I didn't answer him. Just to be back in the heated hotel lobby, where the warmth might get my blood circulating again, was a luxury beyond compare after tramping the streets of the city looking for George and his bloody relatives.

The old place didn't look so forbidding in daytime. It had been a fine old hotel in its day. A fin-de-siècle pleasure palace built at a time when every grand hotel wanted to look like it railway terminal. Crudely modernized from the empty shell that remained after the war, it wasn't the sort of hotel that Dicky sought. Dicky was unprepared for the austerity of Poland, no doubt expecting that the best hotels in Warsaw would resemble those plush modern luxury blocks that the East Germans had got the Swedes to build, and Western firms to manage for them. But the Poles were different to the Germans; they did everything their own way.

'Come along, Bernard. What did she say?'

'What did who say?'

'The woman who went up to your room last night.'

I'd avoided him at breakfast, guessing that he wanted me to be his interpreter to interrogate the hotel management. It was not a confrontation I relished, for the interpreters are always the ones left covered in excrement, but what I hadn't anticipated was that he'd be able to prize from the staff the secret of my nocturnal visitor.

'It was one of those things, Dicky,' I said, hoping he would drop it but knowing that he wouldn't.

'You think I'm a bloody fool, don't you? You don't send out for whores in the middle of the night; that's not your style. But you are so devious that you'd let me believe you did, rather than confide in me. That's what makes me so bloody angry. You work for me but you think you can twist me around your finger. Well, you listen to me Bernard, you devious bastard: I know she was here to talk with you. Now who was she?'

'A contact. I got the address of George Kosinski's brother,' I said. 'It's in the northwest and it's a lousy journey on terrible roads. I thought I'd double-check that George was there before dragging you out into the sticks.'

Dicky evidently decided not to press me about the identity of my lady visitor. He must have guessed it was one of my contacts, and it was definitely out of line to ask an agent's identity. 'That's a natty little umbrella you're wielding, Bernard.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I bought it this morning.'

'A folding umbrella: telescopic. Wow! Is this a power bid for Whitehall? I mean, it's not really you, an umbrella. Too sissie for you, Bernard. It's just desk wallahs who come into town on a commuter train from the suburbs who flourish umbrellas.'

'It keeps the snow off,' I said. Dicky was of course merely showing me that he didn't like being deserted without permission, but that didn't make being the butt of his tiresome sense of humor any more tolerable.

'An umbrella like that is not something I'd recommend to the uninitiated, Bernard. A fierce gust of wind will snatch you away like Mary Poppins, and carry you all the way to the Urals.'

'But the desk didn't tell you anything about our pal Kosinski?' I asked, to bring him back to earth.

'I left that to you,' said Dicky.

'George knows his way around this town. He speaks Polish. He might lead us a dance before we get a definite fix on him.'

'And by that time he could be on a plane and in Moscow.'

'No, no, no. He won't leave until he's done what he has to do. With luck we'll get to him before that.'

'Very philosophical, Bernard. Abstract reasoning of the finest sort, but can you tell me what the hell it means?'

'It means we can't find him, Dicky. And there are no short cuts except miraculous good luck. It means that you have to be patient while we plod along doing the things that a village policeman does when looking for a lost poodle.'

This wasn't what Dicky wanted to hear. As if in reproach he said, 'Last night, when we first arrived, the reception people admitted that George Kosinski had been here in this hotel. So why won't they tell us where he's gone?'

'No, they didn't say he had been in this hotel, Dicky. They suggested that we try to find him in another hotel with a similar name. It's on the other side of the airport. It's a sleazy dump for overnight stays. He won't be there. It was just a polite way of telling us to drop dead.'

'I'll never get the hang of this bloody language,' said Dicky. He smiled and slapped his hands together in the forceful way he started his Tuesday morning 'get together meetings' when he had something unpleasant to announce. 'Well, let's go there. Anything is better than sitting round in this mausoleum.' He produced his room key from his pocket and shook it so it jangled.

I was tired after doing the rounds of the city. The official line was that the last of the political prisoners had been released the previous year, but for some unexplained reason all the people given to airing political views the government didn't like were still serving indefinite detention in a labor camp near Gdansk which had been doubled in size to accommodate a couple of hundred extra detainees. Most of my other old contacts had moved away after the big crackdown, leaving no forwarding address, and my enquiries about them had not been met by neighborly smiles or friendly enthusiasm.

Now I wanted to have a drink and then sit down to a leisurely lunch, but Dicky was a restless personality, ill-suited to the slow-paced austerity of communist society. I followed his gaze as he looked around with pent-up hostility at everything in the hotel lobby. Its institutional atmosphere was like that of a hundred other lobbies in such gloomy communist-run hotels. The same typography on the signs, and the same graceless furniture, the dim bulbs in the same dusty chandeliers reflecting in the polished stone floor, the same musty smell and the same surly staff.

The skittish way in which Dicky nagged his Department into doing his will was less effective when pitted against the ponderous systems of socialist omnipotence. And so Dicky had found that morning, as he tried to press the hotel manager – and individual members of the staff – into providing him with a chance to search the hotel register for George Kosinski's name. I knew all this because a full description of Dicky's activities had been provided to me by a querulous German-speaking assistant manager who was placated only after I gave him a carton of Benson and Hedges cigarettes.

'I'll have a quick drink, Dicky, and I'll be with you,' I said.

'Good grief, Bernard, it's eleven o'clock in the morning. What do you need a drink for at this hour?'

'I've been outside in sub-zero weather, Dicky. When you've been outside for an hour or two you might find out why.'

'Thank God I'm not dependent upon alcohol. Last night I saw you heading for the bar and now, next morning, you are heading that way again. It's a disease.'

'I know.'

'And the stuff they call brandy here is rot-gut.'

'I can't buy you one then? The barman is called 'Mouse.' Pay him in hard currency and you'll get any fancy Western tipple you name.'

He disregarded my flippant invitation. 'Make it snappy. I'll go and get my coat. I didn't bring an umbrella but perhaps I can shelter under yours.'

When we emerged on to the street Dicky seemed prepared to yield to my judgement in the matter of avoiding a senseless trek to the hotel's inferior namesake on the other side of town. 'Where shall we go first?' he offered tentatively.

'I heard George was trying to buy a gun,' I said.

'Are you serious?'

'In the Rozyckiego Bazaar in the Praga. It's a black market paradise; the clearing house for stolen goods and furs and contraband from Russia.'

'And guns?'

'Gangs of deserters from all the Eastern European armies nm things over there and fight for territory. It may look law-abiding but so did Al Capone's Chicago. Keep your hands in your pockets and watch out for pickpockets and muggers.'

'Why don't the authorities clear it out?'

'It's not so easy,' I said. 'It's the oldest flea market in Poland. The currency dealers and black marketeers all know each other very well. Infiltrating a plain clothes cop is tricky, but they try from time to time. They might think that's what we are, so watch your step.'

'I can handle myself,' said Dicky. 'I don't scare easily.'

'I know,' I said. It was true and it was what made Dicky such a liability. Werner and me, we both scared very easily, and we were proud of it.

The Praga is the run-down mainly residential section of Warsaw that sprawls along the eastern side of the river. Most of its old buildings survived the war but few visitors venture here. Running parallel with the river, Targowa is the Praga's wide main street, the widest street in all the city. Long ago, as its name records, it had been Warsaw's horse market. Now dented motors and mud-encrusted streetcars rattled along its median, past solid old houses that, in the 1920s, had been luxury apartments occupied by Warsaw's merchants and professional classes.

Now the wide Targowa was patched with drifting snow and, behind it – its entrance in a narrow side street – we suddenly came to the Rozyckiego market. Overlooked on every side by tenements, there was something medieval about the open space filled with all shapes and sizes of rickety stalls and huts, piled high with merchandise, and jammed with people. This notorious Bazaar had been unchanged ever since I could remember. It had drawn traders and their customers from far and wide. Gypsies and deserters, thieves and gangsters, farmers and legitimate traders had made it a vital part of the city's black economy, so that the open space was never rebuilt.

'And are you going to buy a gun too, Bernard?'

'No, Dicky,' I said as we went through the gates of the market. 'I'm just going to find George.'

The ponderous sobriety that descends upon Eastern European towns in winter was shattered as we stepped into the active confusion of the market. Women wept, men argued to the point of violence, whole families conferred, children bickered. And scurrying to and fro there were men and women – many bent under heavy loads – shouting loudly to call their wares.

'Those communist old clothes smell worse than capitalist ones,' said Dicky as we made our way through the crowds. Noisy bargainers alleviated the bizarre variety of deprivation that communism, with its corruption, caprices and chronic shortages, endemically inflicts. Here, on display, there were such coveted items as toilet paper and powdered coffee, used jeans in varying stages of wear, plastic hair clips and Western brands of cigarettes (both genuine and fake). Women's shoes from neighboring Czechoslovakia were hung above our heads like bright-colored garlands, while exotic sable, fox and mink furs from far-off regions of Asia were guarded be hind a strong wire fence. Elderly farmers and their womenfolk, enjoying a measure of private enterprise, offered their piles of potatoes, beets and cabbages. A solemn young man sat on the ground before a prayer rug, as if about to bow his forehead upon the rows of used spark plugs that were arrayed before him.

A tall man in a green trenchcoat stopped me, waved a cigarette, and asked for a light. I tucked my umbrella under my arm, held up my lighter, and he cupped his hands and bent his head to it. 'I thought you were on the flight to Paris,' I said.

'They've killed George Kosinski,' he said hoarsely. 'They lured him out to his brother's house, slit his throat like a slaughtered hog and buried him in the forest. You'll be next. I'd scram if I was you.'

'You are not me, Boris,' I said. Tiny sparks hit my hand as he inhaled on his cigarette. He threw his head back, his eyes searching my face, and blew smoke at me. Then with an appreciative smile he tipped his gray felt hat in mocking salute and went on his way.

'Come along!' said Dicky when I had caught up with him again. 'They just want to talk to foreigners. We can't be delayed by every bum who wants a light.'

'Sorry, Dicky,' I said.

By this time Dicky had eased his way into a small group of men who were passing booklets from hand to hand. Two of the men were dressed in Russian army greatcoats and boots; the civilian caps they wore did not disguise them. One was about forty, with a face like polished red ebony. The other man was younger, with a lop-sided face, half-closed eyes and the frazzled expression that afflicts prematurely aged pugilists.

'Look at this,' said Dicky, showing me the book that had been passed to him. It had a brown cover, its text was in Russian with illustrations depicting various parts of an internal combustion engine. Another similar book was passed to him. He looked at me quizzically. 'You can read this stuff. What's it all about?'

I translated the title for him: 'BG-15 40mm grenade launcher – Tishina. It's an instruction manual. They all are.' The booklets were each devoted to military equipment of wide appeal: portable field kitchens, rocket projectors, sniperscopes, night sights, radio transmitters and chemical protection suits. 'They're Russian soldiers. They're selling in advance equipment they are prepared to steal.'

Dicky passed the booklets to the man standing next to him. The man took them and, seeing Dicky's dismay, he looked around the group and snickered, exposing many gold teeth. He liked gold: he was wearing an assortment of rings and two gold watches on each wrist, their straps loosened enough for them to clatter and dangle like bracelets.

The hands of the two soldiers were callused and scarred, and covered from wrist to fingertip in a meticulous pattern of tattoos like blue lace gloves. I recognized the dragon designs that distinguished criminal soldiers who'd served time in a 'disbat' punishment battalion. Until very recently, to suffer such a sentence had been universally regarded as shameful, and kept secret from family and even comrades. But now men like these preferred to identify themselves as military misfits, defiant of authority. Such men liked to use their tattoos to parade their violent nature, to exploit frightened young conscripts and sometimes their officers too.

'Let's move on,' I said.

'What were they saying?'

'Gold-teeth seems to be the black-market king. You heard the soldiers say tak tochno exactly so-to him instead of "yes." It's the way Soviet soldiers have to answer their officers.'

My whispered aside to Dicky attracted the attention of the soldiers. The limited linguistic skills of all concerned were clearly hampering the transaction, and I didn't want to wind up as the interpreter for these Russian hoodlums and their Polish customers. 'Move on,' I said.

Dicky got the idea. He moved away and the black marketeers closed in upon the soldiers again. At the next stall Dicky hunkered down to feign interest in piles of old brass and copper oddments piled up for sale. I took the opportunity to look around. There was no sign of George anywhere.

'Look – umbrellas!' said Dicky, standing up and rubbing his knees, and then pointing to an old woman carrying dozens of them, of all shapes and sizes and colors. 'What did you pay for yours?' When I didn't reply, he said, 'Can you imagine those bloody soldiers selling their weapons! That's what comes of having all those races and nations mixed together. Thank God the British army could never sink to that.'

'The elder of them had four small kids, and his unit hasn't been paid for three months,' I said.

'I knew you'd find some excuse for them,' said Dicky in a voice that mixed jokiness with sincerity. 'Where do you draw the line, Bernard? If you hadn't been paid for three months, would you simply sell off anything you could lay your hands on?'

Knowing that a flippant answer would be stored up in Dicky's memory and used when I least expected it, I found something to occupy his mind. 'I think I see one of George's relatives,' I said.

'Where? Where?'

'Take it easy, Dicky. Or we'll start a stampede.'

'Selling the beads?'

'It's amber,' I said, 'and that can be expensive. But the leather bag round his neck almost certainly contains diamonds. He's a well-known dealer.'

'You know him?' Dicky slowed, as if intending to stride across the aisle to confront the old man, but I took his arm and kept him going.

'I saw him in London at one of George's cocktail parties. But I didn't speak with him; he arrived as I was leaving. He's rich; leave him for another time. Appearances are deceptive in Poland; there are probably quite a few rich people in this market today.'

'And are George Kosinski's family all rich?' Dicky stopped at a staff piled high with sports shoes: Nike, Reebok and all the famous brands in cardboard boxes. It was hard to know whether they were counterfeit or imports. Dicky picked up a pair of running shoes and fiddled with the laces while trying to decide.

'I don't know, but names ending in ski denote the old Polish gentry. It's especially so in the country areas, where everyone knows everyone and you can't get away with adding a ski ending to your name, the way so many of the townspeople have.'

'I like the padded ankle collar. . . . What have you seen?' He started to replace the shoes he was inspecting.

'Keep hold of that pair of shoes, Dicky. Bring them up before your face and admire them.' I was moving round to the other side of the market stall to see better.

'Look, Bernard . . .'

'Do as I say, Dicky. Just keep talking and holding up the shoes.' He held them up for me and provided an excuse for a good look at the far side of the market.

'What's happening?'

'Three of them; at least three. With maybe two or three more watching from other top-storey windows. They've marked us, and two of them are coming this way.'

'Who?'

'Hoodlums. Just take it easy. Stay stumm; let me talk to them.'

'Where?'

'The fat fellow in the fur coat signaled to someone at an upstairs window. Bodyguards. Minders. Stay cool.'

'Your papers?' demanded the first of the men to arrive, and announced himself, 'Inspector Was of the UB.' He spoke in English while showing me a card with his photo on it. He snapped the card closed and put it away. His eyes were jet-black, his face thin and drawn. He wore a woolen hat and a short leather jacket. I held out to him the West German passport that carried the business visa permitting repeated entries into Poland. He passed it to a fat man in a dark fur coat who had by this time arrived slightly flushed and out of breath. The fat one pushed his steel-rimmed glasses tighter on to his ears before reading it. He was red-faced and sweating. I guessed he had impetuously descended too many flights of steps after watching our arrival from his vantage point in the nearby tenements.

'Him?' said the wiry Inspector Was, pointing at Dicky.

'Him?' I echoed, pointing a finger at the fat man and gently prizing from his fingers my bogus passport.

'Search them,' Was told the fat man. I held up my arms and he frisked me, and then Dicky, to see if we were carrying guns.

'Come with me,' said Was when the fat man gave him the okay. 'Both of you.' He unbuttoned his jacket as if he might be making ready to reach for a pistol.

'We have to go with them, Dicky,' I said.

The somewhat Laurel-and-Hardyish pair pushed us ahead of them through the crowds, which parted readily to allow us to pass. As we got into Targowa, our two guards closed in tightly upon us. The streets were crowded with beggars and pedlars and people going about their business. At the curb, two men were changing the wheel of a truck heavily laden with beets, while a man with a shotgun sat atop them balanced on a bundle of sacks. No one gave us more than a glance. It was too cold to enquire too deeply into the misfortunes of others, and too dangerous. There were no cops in sight and no one showed concern as we were escorted along the street. We had gone no more than fifty yards before the thin one signaled to an entrance that led into one of the open courtyards that were a feature of these buildings.

The cobbled yard, littered with rusty junk and rubbish that could not be burned for fuel, held a couple of cars and a line of large garbage bins. It was difficult to decide if the cars were in use or had been dumped here, for many of the trucks and cars on the street were even more rusty and dented than these ancient vehicles.

'Here,' said Was and prodded me with his finger. The fabric of the building was in a startling state of neglect, with gaping holes and broken brickwork and windows that were held in position by improvised patchworks of timber and tin. The only fitments in good order were the bars and grilles that fitted over half a dozen of the lower windows, and the ancient steel door through which we were ushered.

There were more grilles inside. They were made from steel and fitted from floor to ceiling. Along this 'wall' there was a long table, like the lunch counter of a roadside cafe. Behind the counter there was a heavy safe and some Ming cabinets. The other half of the room – the part where we were standing – was windowless and empty of furnishings except for a calendar advertising canned milk.

The man who called himself Was closed the steel door that led to the yard. With only a couple of fluorescent tubes to illuminate the room it became stark and shadowless. 'Through here and upstairs,' said Was. He opened a door and pushed us into a smaller room. 'Upstairs,' said Was again, and we went through a narrow door that opened on to the lobby of a grand old apartment house. I led the way up the wide marble staircase. On the landing wall hung two gray racks of dented mailboxes. Some of the flaps were hanging open; it would need a great deal of confidence to put mail into them. Perhaps the whole building was owned by these men. At the top of the second flight of steps we came upon a silent tableau. Two flashy young women were propping a plump well-dressed man against the wall. He was white-faced and very drunk, his tie loosened and wine stains down his crisp white shirt. The trio watched us as we passed, as curious about us as we were about them, but the three of them remained very still at the sight of our escorts and no one spoke.

'In here,' There were two doors on the top landing. They were freshly painted light brown. They'd been repainted so many times that the decorations in the woodwork, the peephole and the bell push were all clogged with paint. There was a surfeit of wiring too: phone and electricity wires had been added and none ever removed, so that there were dozens of wires twisted and drooping and sometimes hanging to show where a section of them had been chopped away to make room for more. He unlocked one of the doors. 'In here,' he said again and pushed Dicky, who fell against me. And we stumbled into the darkness.

'Stand against the wall,' said Was. He switched on the light. It was a low-wattage bulb but it gave enough light to see that one side of the room had sandbags piled up to a height of six feet or more. Was slipped out of his pea jacket and hung it on the door. This revealed him to be wearing a dark blue sweater and a military-style leather belt with a pistol in a leather holster. It was a Colt 'Official Police .38,' something of a museum piece but no less lethal for that. 'Hand over your wallets, both of you bastards,' he said. The fat one stood by and grinned.

'I don't think you are police,' said Dicky. 'And you can go to hell.'

'What you think doesn't concern me, shitface,' said Was, leaning forward and putting his face close to Dicky. 'Get out your wallet before I break you in two.'

It was now or never, I decided.

Hampered by my back-against-the-wall position, I put both hands high in the air and, so that the men were not frightened by this sudden movement, I said, 'Please don't hurt us. You can have all my money but please don't hurt us.'

Was began to reply as I brought my umbrella down to hit him on the side of the head. It landed with a terrible crunch and he slid to the floor with no more than a short choking sound and a guttural groan that ended as he lost consciousness.

I swung round but the fat man already had his fur coat open wide and was tugging at an automatic pistol that was tucked into his waistband. I watched the gun coming up to point at me as I brought my umbrella round to hit him. It was like one of those agonizingly slow nightmares from which you awaken in a body-drenching sweat. Inch by inch our arms moved in balletic slow motion until his gun fired, making a deafening cannon's roar in the tiny room. As the flash of the gun came, my arm brought the umbrella up under the fat man's jaw. His jawbone snapped and his glasses jumped off his face and flew across the room, spinning and flashing with reflected light.

The fat man dropped his gun and slumped back against the wall. Both his hands clasped his face as he supported his jaw, and I could see him screaming soundlessly as my ears still rang with the sound of the gun. I hit him a second blow, and this time he toppled to the floor with his eyes closed. His cheeks bulged and a tiny drip of blood came from the comer of his tightly closed mouth.

'Jesus Christ,' said Dicky from behind me, but then I saw that Fatty was not out of play. He was scrabbling around on the floor reaching for his gun. I kicked him and then kicked him again, but my kicking had little effect on him through his thick fur coat, so that I had to use the umbrella to hit him again. I was only just in time. His fingers were touching the gun as my blow landed. Perhaps I hit him too hard: his head slumped sideways, his mouth opened and a torrent of bright red blood spilled over the rag-strewn floor.