Part 50 (1/2)

The small beads tinkle as Erik and Joona pa.s.s through the Mona Lisa. The air is suddenly thick with sweet smoke, sweat and dirty clothes. All over the coa.r.s.ely polished cement floor are worn and battered sofas and armchairs. The music from the stage is still audible, but only as the thud of the heavy ba.s.s.

Semi-naked people are sitting on the sofas or on the floor itself. Most of them look as though they're asleep, while others move lethargically.

They're all moving with ghostly slowness, drifting through the realm of the stoned.

They walk past a middle-aged woman sitting on a stained sofa with no cus.h.i.+ons. She's wearing jeans that are too big for her and a flesh-coloured bra.

Her face is thin and focused as she holds her lighter under a crumpled piece of tinfoil and then hurriedly inhales the smoke through a small plastic straw. A slender curl of smoke twines up towards the corrugated metal roof.

The cement floor is littered with cigarette b.u.t.ts, sweet wrappers, plastic bottles, syringes, condoms, empty packs of pills and a bundle of fabric samples.

Through the smoke Joona can see the man named Anatoly sitting with the new guest on a sofa that's been sliced open, its stuffing hanging out.

Joona and Erik weave through the furniture.

A skinny man in his seventies is sitting on a stained flowery sofa with two young women.

On the floor behind it a man lies unconscious in just his underpants and white socks. He looks almost like a child, but his eyes and cheeks are sunken. The syringe is gone, leaving the needle with its little plastic end sticking out of a vein in the back of his hand. On an armchair beside him sits a woman with an apathetic expression on her face. After a while she bends forward and pulls the needle from his hand, but drops it on the floor.

Joona sees a guard dragging a man who has thrown up, and can't help thinking that this place is the complete opposite of the rich kids' saturnalias.

No wishes come true in the Zone. Here there are only prisoners and slaves, and the money only flows in one direction. Everyone is alone in their addiction, drained of all they have until they die.

He glances behind him and sees Anatoly stand up and walk through the room. The black dog follows him.

A fat man in camouflage trousers and a black jacket pushes away a woman in pink underwear and high heels. She goes back and tries to kiss his hands as she begs him for a fix. The man is impatient, tells her to pull herself together, that she hasn't earned enough.

'I can't, they hurt me, they-'

'Shut up, I don't give a f.u.c.k you need to do three more customers,' he says.

'But, darling, I don't feel good, I need-'

She tries to stroke his cheek, but he grabs hold of her hand, pulls her little finger and bends it sharply backwards. It happens so quickly that at first the woman doesn't seem to realise what's going on. She stares wide-eyed at her broken finger.

A man with a salt-and-pepper moustache walks over to them, exchanges a few words with the other man, then pulls the sobbing woman through the room towards the curtain. She stumbles and loses a shoe, then he hits her and she falls over, dragging a standard lamp down with her.

Joona and Erik move out of the way.

The man drags the woman to her feet, and the lamp rolls away and s.h.i.+nes straight into the face of a large bearded man.

It's Rocky Kyrklund.

He's sitting completely naked in a red armchair, asleep. His head is leaning forward and his beard looks like it has grown into the hair on his chest. He's injected himself in his right leg, and dark blood is trickling down his ankle.

Rocky isn't alone. Beside him, on a sofa bed with no mattress, sits a woman with bleached-blonde hair, wearing a brown bra. Her pale blue panties are on the floor next to her. A plaster is hanging half off her knee.

She holds a lighter under a sooty spoon, and stares with gla.s.sy eyes at the small bubbles forming in the water. She licks her lips as she waits for the powder to dissolve, leaving the spoon full of pale yellow liquid.

Erik steps over a footstool and walks over to them, smelling the insipid aroma of heroin and hot metal as he comes to a halt.

'Rocky?' Erik says in a low voice.

Rocky slowly raises his head. His eyelids are heavy, his pupils like pinp.r.i.c.ks of black ink.

'Judas Iscariot,' he mumbles when he sees Erik.

'Yes,' Erik says.

Rocky smiles happily and slowly closes his eyes. The woman beside him puts a ball of cotton-wool in the solution, holds her syringe on top of it and sucks up the solution, then attaches a needle to the syringe.

Joona notices that the man in camouflage trousers is sitting on a chair outside the staffroom again, looking at his phone. At the other end of the room the man with the grey moustache disappears through the beaded curtain with the woman.

'Do you remember telling me about the unclean preacher?' Erik asks, squatting down in front of Rocky.

Rocky opens his tired eyes and shakes his head.

'Is that supposed to be me? The preacher?'

'I don't think so. I think you meant someone else,' Erik says. 'You talked about a man in make-up with scarred veins.'

Next to them the woman uses her briefs as a tourniquet round her arm, tightening them as hard as she can by twisting a pen through them a couple of times.

'Do you remember him killing a woman here at the Zone?'

'No,' Rocky grins.

'She was known as Tina, but her real name was Natalia,' Erik goes on.

'Yes, that ... that was him, that was the preacher,' Rocky mutters.

The woman on the sofa bed looks for a vein in the usual places, a soft spot without too many scars.

'I need to know ... are we talking about a real preacher, a priest?'

Rocky nods and closes his eyes.

'Which church?' Erik asks.

Rocky whispers to himself and Erik leans forward until he can smell his rancid breath.

'The preacher is jealous ... just like G.o.d,' he whispers.

The woman inserts the needle and a drop of blood mixes with the yellow liquid before she injects it. With nimble fingers she undoes the tourniquet and lets out a long groan as the kick washes through her. Erik watches her stretch her legs, tense her ankles, then relax as her body goes completely soft.