If he’s still in Kladivo’s possession, there’s a chance he’s being held at the secret police station I’ve just come from. And why not? It’s a ready-made prison, private and secure. Had I been only a few meters away from him and not known it?
I turn the tub’s faucets off, then strip and slide into the water. It’s too hot and my skin turns red, but that’s the point. It’s about sanitizing. It’s about cleansing by pain. I order myself to cry, or at least feel guilt, over the man I killed, to prove to myself there’s some normal human emotion left in me. But it doesn’t work. Besides, sucker punch a gangster on the street, call him faggot and try to kick him to death—how do you think that story ends? Stupid asshole walked into this voluntarily. He could have just walked away from two men kissing and had another beer with his mates. Could have, but didn’t, and now some guy with bleached hair and a diamond tattoo on his neck is tossing his body into a hole in the ground. That’s how I justify the murder, anyway. That’s how I stop myself from taking Roman’s razor and cutting my wrists.
But there is a lesson here I’m meant to learn. I passed the first test, a cursory examination of the Sofia identity and a basic interrogation. But there will certainly be other tests, and for those Sofia won’t hold up. Not under the kind of scrutiny a man like Bohdan Kladivo can bring to bear on me. We’re way beyond the Spycraft 101 Yael taught me, and I will not take well to questioning under the pliers or the power drill or the blowtorch. I need an option. I need an out.
I open the drain of the tub and towel myself off. There’s much to do before Roman gets home.
Everything is untouched in my bag of possessions, even the money. I dress quickly and am about to head out when I stop at the front window. There’s a small ?koda hatchback parked across the street, and two young guys in leather jackets are leaning against it, smoking and staring straight at the entrance to Roman’s building. Not talking, not checking their phones, just standing there smoking and staring. That’s right, I think. I’m Pan Kladivo’s property now, bought and paid for and put away in the nicest closet in Prague. Are they protectors or captors? It doesn’t really matter, I suppose.
I go from room to room, inspecting the windows for a possible alternate exit. But they open only a few inches, and even if I could squeeze through, it’s a five-story drop to the roof of the neighboring building. So instead I slip out of the apartment and down the staircase from the twelfth story to the basement. I follow along a corridor to the garbage collection room where the chutes from every floor empty into a compactor. Just as I suspected, there’s a door leading to the outside, and if I’ve kept my bearings, it will open into the alley running parallel to the street.
My hunch is correct, and the alley is empty. I find a piece of scrap paper on the ground and fold it into a little wedge that I insert into the latch to keep the door from locking behind me.
Then I put the hood of my jacket up and disappear around the corner.
*
Graffiti covers the walls of the subway staircase. Bored, drugged-out teenagers hang out on the station benches, their eyes large and drawn back inside skeletal faces, their bodies drowning in T-shirts three sizes too big.
I push past them to the street. Run-down shops with run-down cars parked outside them. A babushka, old as the earth, pauses to adjust the polka-dot kerchief on her head and scolds me for looking like a boy. Proud women wear their hair long, she says.
There’s a butcher shop and a little bakery, an auto repair garage and a travel agent. But the shop I’m looking for sits a little farther down, between a shop selling used musical instruments and a tanning salon. The sign out front says in Russian RESTAURANT SUPPLIES.
The front of the shop is rolled up like a garage door, and I step inside and pretend to browse. Metal mixing bowls, strainers, and plastic ashtrays are stacked in crooked columns that rise to the ceiling. A fly buzzing around a bare lightbulb leaves its post to circle me for a second before disappearing out the shop’s door. I take a few items and head to the counter where an obese guy with gray skin sits on a stool.
I drop the items on the counter, and he starts tallying them on a pocket calculator. Then I lean in close and speak in Russian. “My boss sent me to this shop because we’re having a hell of a rat problem,” I say.
The guy looks at me over the dirty lenses of his glasses. “Traps and poison, aisle seven.”
“Yeah, I saw those. Thing is, it’s a bad rat problem. My boss sent me here, to your shop specifically, because he said you have the good stuff.”
“The good stuff?”
I nod in the direction of the door behind him, what I assume is the stockroom. “The real stuff,” I say. “Like we had back home.”
The clerk braces his hands on the counter and, with considerable effort, lifts himself to his feet. He disappears into the other room and emerges moments later with a small cardboard box.
“Manufactured in North Korea,” he says.
“The best?” I say.
“Fucking Rolls-Royce.”
I pick the box up and turn it over in my hands. The entire package is yellow and looks like one big warning label with skull and crossbones stamped next to boldface and underlined Korean text.
“Do not handle pellets with bare hands,” he tells me. “Myself, I wouldn’t even handle the box with bare hands.”
I drop it to the counter. “Does it work fast?”
The clerk snorts a little laugh. “A minute. Maybe two.”
“Does it—hurt?”
“They’re rats; they don’t understand pain,” he says, eyeing me. “But if I’m wrong, so what.”
*
It’s a time-honored tradition among spies, the suicide pill. Nazis at the door? Bite down hard. You’ll be dead before they ever touch you. Concentrated cyanide is the usual way, but a pellet of North Korean rat poison will do in a pinch. At least that’s what I’m counting on.
The key is two ingredients banned almost everywhere but North Korea, cyanide and thallium. They are to rat poison what onion and garlic are to cooking. That’s what the connoisseurs on the Internet say. It took me ten minutes of research to find that out. It took me ten more to find a place in Prague where I might get it. Walk into any Russian shop in the world and there’s always a better selection of everything from caviar to vodka to rat poison waiting in the back. You just need to know how to ask.
I enter the apartment the same way I left, avoiding the street out front and Bohdan Kladivo’s men. In the bathroom, I pull out a tube of lip balm, break off the end, and throw the rest away. Then I tuck two pellets of the rat poison into the tube and squish the end of the lip balm on top of them. Now I have my out. My alternative to the pliers and blowtorch. Should it come to that. When it comes to that.