Page 95 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

he is so good?” Arkady forgot that his words could be taken as a confession, and

asked his friend to understand that he hadn’t meant to do it. I didn’t mean it. I
didn’t know—Giacomo nodded at those words and said: “Yes, I understand.”
Satisfied with Arkady’s self-incrimination, the officer holding Leporello allowed
the dog to stand on his hind legs and pat Arkady’s cheek and then his own face;
he repeated this a few times as a way of reassuring Arkady that he would be by
Giacomo’s side until the truth came out. Leporello seemed confident that the
truth would come out very soon, and Arkady remembered the vizsla puppy he’d

tried to drive away and was glad he’d failed at that.
—

THOUGH ARKADY BROKE down and confessed after being shown photographs of
the five men and four women who’d died in the fire, his confession was never

entirely satisfactory. He got the timing and exact location of the fire he’d set
wrong, and his statement had to be supplemented with information from his
former landlord, who identified him as the culprit before a jury, pointing at
Arkady as he described the clothing the police had found him wearing the
morning they arrested him. The inconsistencies in Arkady’s account troubled the
authorities enough to imprison him in a cell reserved for “the craziest bastards,”
the ones who had no inkling of what deeds they might be capable of doing until

they suddenly did them.
—

ARKADY’S MEALS were brought to him, and his cell had an adjoining washroom
that he kept clean himself. He no longer had to do long strings of mental
arithmetic, shaving figures off the allowance for food as he went along—after a

few days his mind cleared, he stopped imagining that Giacomo and Leporello
were staring mournfully from the neighboring cell, and he could have been
happy if he hadn’t been facing imprisonment for deaths he dearly wished he
could be sure he hadn’t caused. His cell was impregnable, wound round with a
complex system of triggers and alarms. Unless the main lock was opened with
the key that had been made for it, he couldn’t come out of that cell alive.

—

THE TYRANT held the key to Arkady’s cell, and liked to visit him in there and
taunt him with weather reports. He hadn’t been interested in the crimes of the
other crazy bastards who’d once inhabited this cell, so they’d been drowned. But