Stolen Souls Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Check whatever bars Tomas and Darius drink in. Get more men if you have to. I want them found tonight.”
    He did not wait for Herkus’s response before hanging up. Strazdas returned his attention to the picture of the girl.
    “What did you do with my brother?” he asked.
    His cheeks warmed as the sound of his own voice reverberated in the empty room. Talking to himself. His mother had lectured him earlier that day, saying he was working too hard, putting himself under too much stress and strain, not sleeping. A man’s mind could only take so much, even a man as strong as Arturas Strazdas.
    Strazdas did not argue with his mother. No one argued with Laima Strazdiené.
    His father certainly hadn’t. As a teenager, Arturas had sat at the table in the two-room apartment the family shared in Kaunas, Tomas facing him at the opposite side, their father between them. The fourth place often remained empty when they ate. They would talk to drown out the grunts from the other room as their mother took care of another visitor.
    At night, Arturas and Tomas would share the foldout bed in the same room while their parents talked on the other side of the wall. Or rather their mother talked, and their father listened.
    To feed us, she would say, to keep us warm.
    Once, Strazdas had asked her about the visitors that came and went at all hours. She threw hot coffee in his lap. His father took him to the university hospital, told him to keep his questions to himself.
    His father left their home not long after the Soviets released their hold on Lithuania. He said nothing, left no note, was simply no longer at the table. Strazdas’s mother would not discuss it, as if he’d never existed.
    Soon, men were not the only visitors. Often there were young women, and they would take the men into the other room while Arturas and Tomas ate with their mother at the table.
    Three months later, they moved to an apartment that had two bedrooms. The brothers hoped this would mean a room of their own, but instead it allowed two girls to receive visitors at any one time. But there was money for Tomas to go to a good school, and for the older brother to attend university.
    As a student, Arturas took an apartment of his own. Under his mother’s guidance, he also allowed a room to be used for the entertainment of lonely men. He discovered that he liked having money in his pocket and good clothes to wear. The other students were jealous when he acquired a car, albeit a used one.
    Then there was an incident with Tomas and a teacher at his school, and they had to move away to Vilnius.
    Laima had always indulged her younger son, fool that he was. For every soft kiss on Tomas’s cheek, it seemed Arturas received a hard slap. Still, looking back, he did not hate her for it. Not really. After all, she had taught him how to make a good living from the weaknesses of others.
    Arturas Strazdas stood and crossed the room to the elegant glass-topped sideboard. Herkus had left a small package there, a cellophane bag containing an amount of white powder. Good stuff, Herkus had said, straight from the source. Go easy on it, he had said. Maybe get some rest before taking any.
    Strazdas opened the bag’s seal and poured a little of the powder onto the glass. Using the hotel’s key card, he divided and shaped the powder into three lines. He took a fifty-euro note from his pocket, rolled it into a tube, inserted one end into his left nostril, and inhaled.
    The world snapped into focus.
    He shivered as he exhaled, moved the rolled-up note to his other nostril, and inhaled the second line.
    His head lightened.
    Strazdas switched the note back to his left nostril and took the last line. He threw the note aside and bent down, licked the last of the powder from the glass. As his tongue slipped across the glossy surface, tingling from the cocaine, he opened his eyes and saw their reflection. He stood upright and stared at himself for a moment.
    “Fuck you,” he said.
    His wits