Андрей Воронин – CURSED PRINT RUN (страница 2)

The pedal sank softly to the floor with no resistance.

Vera’s breath caught. She pressed again, and again, harder. Nothing. The brake pedal had gone to the floor. The car, pulled by the slope of the old asphalt, slowly rolled forward — straight toward the low granite curb beyond which the icy water of the Fontanka blackened. The flash of the headlights caught the dark, hungry waves of the river.

— No, no, no! — Vera screamed, yanking the handbrake, but the old cable snapped with a metallic crunch somewhere under the bottom.

The car was accelerating. The speed was low, at most twenty kilometers an hour, but the door locked from the inside would not yield, and ahead, only five meters away, waited emptiness and death. The phone clock lit up: 00:15.

Suddenly the side window exploded with a crash, showering the cabin with a thousand small shards. Cold air and the smell of wet wool hit Vera in the face. Someone’s strong hand in a black leather glove burst into the cabin, gripped the steering wheel tightly, and twisted it hard to the right.

The Toyota spun. There was a deafening scrape of metal against the granite parapet. The car jumped, hit the curb with a wheel, and with a heavy sigh stalled half a meter from the drop.

Vera sat, clutching the seat tightly, unable to move. Her heart was pounding somewhere in her ears like a crazed printing press.

The car door was yanked open from outside. In the opening stood a tall man in a thoroughly soaked black coat. The hood had fallen back, revealing sharp cheekbones as if carved from marble and tousled dark hair from which water was dripping. His eyes, deprived of any color in this darkness, burned with fury.

Christian. The author of “Ink of Dead Words”. Somehow Vera, who had never met the writer before, recognized him at once. The man was breathing heavily. Vera shifted her gaze to his hand holding the car door. The leather glove was torn, and from under it, right across the back of the hand, thin scars-letters glowing violet snaked.

Christian leaned sharply forward, grabbed Vera by the shoulders, and literally pulled her out of the cabin into the pouring rain. The tension between them was so dense you could touch it.

As if through a thickness of water, Vera heard the phrase: “You must learn about the order and the curse…” Suddenly her right wrist felt as if scorched by heat; it ached with sharp, unbearable pain. Vera lowered her gaze and cried out at the unreality of what she saw: through the layer of skin, violet letters had come through like scars.

CHAPTER 2. BUSINESS ON BLOOD

Six days left until the publication of the novel “Ink of Dead Words”. The ink is starting to thicken.

Morning sun broke through the grey Petersburg haze, but this light seemed unnaturally white, almost hospital-like. Vera sat in the back seat of a taxi, pressing her forehead to the cold side window, and watched the granite embankments floating past. Thoughts appeared and vanished, lazy and sticky; they created a whirlpool in her head, a chaos that caused physical pain. The rain had stopped, leaving behind only dampness, the smell of wet asphalt and a sticky, suffocating feeling of unreality. Christian had left at night as suddenly as he had appeared. He dissolved into the fog by the Fontanka, leaving her alone with the broken window of her old car, the jammed handbrake and the burning wrist. The letters under the skin no longer glowed with violet neon, but they ached with a dull, exhausting pain, like an old burn scar.

The city around lived its ordinary, noisy, and deeply indifferent life to other people’s troubles. People hurried to the metro stations, wrapping themselves in scarves; by the roadside kiosks it smelled of over-fried coffee and fresh pastry, at the crossroads cars lazily argued with their horns. No magic. No curses. An ordinary Petersburg morning. For a few minutes Vera even believed that the night nightmare had appeared to her because of the wild fatigue accumulated over the weeks. But the violet outline of her own name on the right hand, reliably hidden under the wide leather strap of the watch, sobered her better than any ice-cold shower. It was real.

The publishing house “Slovo” was located in the historical center, in a restored three-story mansion on Vasilevskiy Island. Inside, everything breathed that very European polish which their general director valued so much: expensive oak shelves with the company’s best releases, muted light, soft carpets that completely muffled footsteps, and the polite, barely audible hum of employees’ voices. This empire of success was built on letters.

Vera wasn't walking; she was almost running down the third-floor corridor, ignoring the greeting nods of colleagues and designers. She clenched her handbag so hard that her knuckles turned white. She needed to see Mark Aristarkhovich. Right now, before the fear completely paralyzed her will.

She pushed the heavy door of the general director’s office without knocking, breaking all possible rules of corporate etiquette.

Mark Aristarkhovich, as always impeccable, in a grey three-piece suit of individual cut and with perfectly styled grey hair, sat behind a huge table of solid dark walnut. He unhurriedly drank espresso from a tiny porcelain cup and looked through the pre-order graphs on a tablet. The office smelled pleasantly of expensive perfume, with subtle notes of fine tobacco and conditioned air.

— Verochka? — he raised a carefully plucked eyebrow in surprise, assessing her disheveled look, pale face, and bruises under the eyes. — Why aren’t you at home? Uncle Kolya already reported last night that you checked the advance copy and signed the papers. Well done, dear; the print run has already gone to the rotary presses. The book is breaking all sales records even before the official release. We will skim the cream of this season.

— Mark Aristarkhovich, stop the presses. — Vera approached the table, leaned on the lacquered surface with trembling hands, and looked the boss straight in the eyes. — This book cannot be released. It cannot be given to people at all. It is dangerous.

The director set the cup down on the saucer slowly, with a light clink. The expensive porcelain rang too warningly in the silence of the huge office. Not a shadow of fright appeared on his face, only a slight, condescending irritation with which adults usually look at capricious or overworked children.

— Dangerous? And how exactly? Has our secretive genius Christian again overdone the anatomical details in the murder scene? Vera, drop this philological snobbery. This is a high-flying thriller. The reader wants blood; he wants to feel fear, and he pays good money for it.

— It is not about the text on paper — Vera exhaled noisily, feeling how her pragmatic mind was finally surrendering under the pressure of facts. — The plot of the book comes true in reality. At night in the printing house I opened the three-hundredth page. Christian had handwritten a correction in violet ink. In it, in every detail, it was written that the brakes of my car would fail at a quarter past midnight on the Fontanka and I would fly into the river. And they really did fail, Mark Aristarkhovich! I was saved by the author himself, who came there because he himself got scared of that line.

Mark Aristarkhovich froze. For a second, his gaze turned cold, calculating, and sharp, but then he leaned back against the high leather chair and laughed quietly. His smile was warm, inviting, but his eyes remained completely dry and motionless.

— Verochka, my dear. You have overworked; you have classic burnout syndrome. Christian has a heavy, sticky style; he professionally presses on a strengthened psyche. I myself sometimes sleep with the floor lamp on after his drafts. But the brakes in an old Japanese car break because of metal wear and bad weather, not because of lines in a novel. Kovrovsky, our main city critic, has been pouring dirt on Christian in the press all week too, shouting on every corner that the author has written himself out and it is time to throw him in the dump of history. And so what? Alive, healthy, probably right now scribbling another nasty thing in his blog.

— Kovrovsky is dead, — Vera interrupted him quietly, almost soundlessly. — Look at the internal crime reports for the morning if you don’t believe me. He was found two hours ago in his own bed. He suffocated. And around the body, pages of his own scathing article were carefully scattered. This is page forty-five of Christian’s new novel. I proofread that paragraph the day before yesterday afternoon and asked the author to soften the scene. He refused.

The director’s laughter cut off instantly, as if the wire through which it came had been severed. Mark Aristarkhovich slowly stood up from the table, walked to the huge panoramic window overlooking a quiet Petersburg side street, and put his hands behind his back. The silence in the office became tangible, heavy. One could hear how, in the corner, the old floor clock with a pendulum ticked measuredly and dully. Each swing brought the deadline closer.