The People's Act of Love by James Meek Page A

recorded the demon’s voice on an acetate disk. ‘You whoring son of a bitch,’ said the shaman in the demon’s voice. ‘What did you come here for? D’you think I’m going to believe your whoring shaman visions and hang myself?’ The demon’s voice crackled through the shaman’s in a distorted European laugh. ‘Folk love blind fortune tellers. They think the less they see, the more they know.’
    ‘I can find and punish this man if you help me,’ said Mutz. ‘Did you know him? Did you meet him before?’
    The shaman breathed deeply in and out and shivered violently several times. In his own voice, he said: ‘Leaving.’
    Mutz heard the sound of Broucek running back. ‘There’s Broucek with the key,’ he said. ‘Soon we’ll have you inside, out of the rain.’
    The shaman put one of his hands palm down in the mud and made a sweeping stroke through it. ‘No deer to carry Our Man to the Upper World, and no horse,’ he said. ‘This mud is soft. Push Our Man through it to the river, push him out into the water, and let the current take him north.’
    Broucek splashed up and Mutz grabbed the key from him and unlocked the padlock.
    ‘The keel slides through the mud and floats free,’ whispered the shaman. There was a sound in his throat like an injured bird in fallen leaves. ‘In the future,’ he said, ‘everyone will have a horse.’ His head fell forward. Mutz lifted his head back, tugged at his jaw to open his mouth a little and held the back of his hand against it. He waved the lighter back and forth in front of the shaman’s good eye, and sought a pulse with his other hand.
    ‘Is he dead?’ said Broucek.
    ‘Yes. He drank himself free,’ said Mutz. ‘How does a chained man get hold of a litre of alcohol in the middle of the night in a town like this?’
    Mutz looked at the shaman’s face, tattooed lengthwise on each cheek and aged with lines crossways as deep and sharp as anything he could cut with a fine engraving gouger. The shaman’s other eye was an empty socket, lost to a bear, which the shaman had considered an honourable loss. On his forehead was the deerskin band covering his third eye, which he said was also blind, but which none of the Czechs had seen. He fought and shouted if anyone touched it. Mutz pushed the band up overthe dead man’s scalp. The third eye was a swelling on his forehead, bone hard under flesh, with a picture of an eye tattooed on it. The tattoo was old, and deformed, as if it had been bestowed on the shaman when he was still young and the bone lump had yet to grow. Over it someone had made a recent, cruder tattoo, cut with a knife point. It was a word: LIAR.
    They carried the shaman to the building in his own coat. As they passed through the rain the alcohol stink faded and they smelled wet rusting iron. They laid him down on the tiles at the foot of the stairs. Balashov was waiting there. He cried out to God when he saw the corpse.
    ‘Was he stabbed?’ he said.
    ‘Why do you think he was stabbed?’ said Mutz.
    ‘Sometimes outlaws come in from the forest. Convicts without a home. Men who have become like beasts.’
    ‘Have you any reason to think there’s a convict in Yazyk now?’
    Balashov shook his head.
    ‘You don’t sell spirit in your store, do you?’ said Mutz.
    ‘Respected lieutenant, as you know, this is a dry town. Our beliefs.’
    ‘Yes, your obscure beliefs. Not even for medicinal purposes?’
    ‘Are they so obscure?’
    ‘Obscure. Yes. All I know is you don’t use the church, you believe in God, you don’t drink or eat meat, you always find a way to turn a straight question, and we never see your children.’
    ‘Turkestan,’ murmured Balashov. ‘We sent them to Turkestan in a special train, you know…while the troubles…’ He rubbed his mouth and ran his hand through his hair as he looked down at the dead man. ‘Who would give him spirits? Perhaps they didn’t mean to hurt him. Only to be kind to another