The Scorpion Signal

by Adam Hall

  I don’t want to die.

  Oh it’s you is it. Snivelling little organism starting to panic. Shut up, it won’t hurt.

  We can get out of here if we try.

  Oh really.

  The light shone down. This wasn’t the table with the smooth top; it was the one with the narrow marks on it. The two guards had only just gone out, shutting the door. Vader was standing under the window, watching me with the blank stare of the predator that contemplates the prey without emotion, his honey-coloured eyes unblinking and his big square hands -III hanging by his sides, his booted feet set in a balanced stance ready for instant movement. He was a strong man, and young for his rank. The room was so quiet that I could hear the faint rustling creak of his leather belt as he breathed.

  ‘My patience is exhausted!’ All on one note and with the words drawn out, his mouth moving like a trap. The sound went into my head and beat there, hammering. I hadn’t been ready for it, and my nerves weren’t too good: it made me blink and he noticed it, I saw it in his eyes, the satisfaction of the victor in the presence of the vanquished.

  Sleep. Don’t take any London. Remember London.

  My head came up a fraction and I was warned: it had been dropping, degree by degree, as the soporific wave had crept over me despite the shock of his voice. London, yes.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  The voice of a bull, roaring out of the barrel chest and drumming in the room.

  Think about what has to be done. It has to be done in the next sixty seconds, or I won’t have the strength left.

  I don’t want to die.

  Shuddup.

  I had to take him down, and I had to do it with all the speed I could manage, and with all the force. Standing here thinking about it, I could believe I would never do it; but I knew from experience what the mind can make the body do, if enough depends on it. I wasn’t worried about that. Vader was mine, unless he’d had my specific style of training. The enemy was in myself, in my emotions, in the undisciplined tides of feeling that can stifle logic and inhibit action.

  Moira.

  Is that your own code?

  Five hundred roses for Moira. To be delivered only after she has been informed by the Bureau.

  Where was she now?

  The tides of feeling, yes, that would have to be ignored, because they were irrelevant, and dangerous.

  Take him down, and with as little force as necessary, so that I would find the strength. Let him come .close first.

  ‘I have given you every possible chance of co-operating! And you have refused!’ He began walking, dropping his boots squarely on the worn parquet, walking towards me. ‘Do you happen to enjoy the kind of interrogation you will receive at the Serbsky Institute? M’m?’ He stopped within three feet of me. It wasn’t close enough. ‘Are you a masochist?’ Sleep. Dear God let me sleep.

  He was blurring again in front of me, his thick body swaying gently backwards and forwards, sending me to - wake up, come on, wake up. ‘Answer me!’

  Yes. Keep him talking. Keep him close. ‘I can’t think straight, that’s all. Too tired.’ I heard the words slurring, couldn’t quite recognize the voice.

  ‘Too tired! And you think that is all that’s going to happen to you? Do you?’

  Rehearse. A preliminary shankutsu, my left foot behind his right heel, with a spinning nagashi at the jodan level, my right fingers hooking for the eyes. Then the hand-edge to the throat, half an inch above the khaki serge collar. Then the work on myself, at the median cubital artery. Rehearse. ‘No. I know what’s going to happen to me.’ Rehearse. Shankutsu, nagashi, eyes and the hand-edge. ‘Then why do you refuse to co-operate?’ Shouting at me as if I were fifty yards away, his voice roaring inside my skull.

  ‘Told you,’ I said. ‘I’d betray a friend.’

  ‘Friend!’ He pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sent it crashing into a corner of the room, one of its legs flying off and hitting the barred window. ‘What friend?’ He came closer, his amber eyes staring into my face. ‘You mean Schrenk?’ He came right up to me. ‘Do you mean your friend Schrenk?’

  He was close enough and I shifted my left foot and got the nagashi spinning and in the next tenth of a second I saw surprise beginning in his eyes as he started pitching back with my foot blocking his heel before I formed the claw-hand and raked at his face. He wasn’t off balance yet but his arm swung up and he lost the last of his equilibrium and the strike missed my head and he fell hard, harder than I was ready for, with my fingers too far from his eyes and my hand going Sat and moving fast to bridge the gap and swing down for the throat with enough force to toll, but something crashed and I was on top of him and striking much too short as the door hit the wall and they took me from behind, pulling my arms back and locking them so that I had to stop moving, no go, it was no go-Rage burning inside my skull. Rage and the hot bright light My head had been dropping on to my chest and at first I had pulled it up again from habit to avoid that bloody man’s voice up there where the light was; then I had let it rest there, my head, and nothing had happened, he hadn’t yelled at me to wake up. I might even have slept, but I didn’t know for how long. Not long: the urge to drop my head again and sleep and go on sleeping was overwhelming, but I couldn’t do that: I had to work.

  Rage against myself, of course, for getting it wrong, for not thinking., for not realizing they must have a closed-circuit television camera behind the dark glass of the window: they wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave one of their colonels in there with people who might not like him.

  They’d been worried about him but he’d just said I’m all right and walked out of the room without looking at me, as if I didn’t exist, as if I hadn’t just tried to kill him. I got the point: he’d been obliged to brush off a fly. We hadn’t known each other for long but we’d learned things about each other and he’d learned I had a streak of pride and was therefore sensitive.

  Work, yes.

  I let my head fall again, and waited, but the man didn’t shout, I shut my eyes and waited again, but nothing happened. He might not be there. He might not be watching me.

  The median cubital artery runs down the inside of the arm and it’s easy to reach it with the mouth but the action is obvious, so I took off my shoe and lobbed it up at the light and made sure it missed the butt) before I caught it ‘Stop that! What do you think you’re doing?’

  Message received.

  ‘It’s too bloody bright,’ I said, and sat down again on the stool and put my shoe on and turned round to face the wall and let my head go down. That seemed to be all right because he didn’t say anything. I was to be watched but not forced to stay awake or face the light. What had he said? The Serbsky Institute. Where the clowns worked.

  When?

  There was nothing in here I could drain into. There were only the walls and the floor and this stool and the lamp. I was sitting with my back to him now and I could fold my arms and let my head go down, heavy with sleep, until my mouth was against the inside of one wrist, and he might not see the movement of my jaws from behind; but once it started flowing there’d be a gallon and a half and there was nothing to drain into: he’d see it dripping on to the floor and he’d have time to come in here and use the pressure point and call for help and Vader would ask for a transfusion because he wasn’t finished with me yet, he’d only just started. They wanted to find Schrenk and they thought I knew where he was.

  I could feel the heat of the lamp on the back of my head. My shadow was clear cut, swelling and contracting against the wall as I swayed an inch forward, an inch back, trying to stay awake, trying to think. It became a slow rhythm, and at some time I must have slept, still more or less upright on the stool, backwards and forwards, rocking like an animal in a cage. The footsteps came out of a dream and into reality, thudding from the distance along the corridor outside my cell.

  Then voices.

  I stayed where I was: it was comfortable here against the wall, with my companionable s
hadow. This had become my home, my querencia: this place, defined by my shadow’s height and my shadow’s width, was part of my identity now. They mustn’t ‘Out!’

  Mustn’t take me away.

  ‘Stand up! Out!’

  I hadn’t heard them opening the door. I suppose I’d been asleep, dreaming about identity.

  When I looked round I saw Colonel Vader there with three other men, two of them in uniform. He stood gazing in at me with that predatory stare for a moment; then a look of disgust came to his face. ‘He stinks i Put him under a shower and find some sort of clothing for him, and don’t be long about it!’ He turned and went out.

  He shouldn’t have said that ‘Come on, out!’

  I went with them along the corridor to the prisoners’ ablutions: a stone floor and zinc basins and open toilets and a row of showers, the water freezing, hitting me like a burst of glass fragments, shrinking my head and roaring in my ears, he shouldn’t have said that, the block of abrasive soap scouring my skin, the face wound burning and throbbing but my eyes resting, soothed at last after the glare of that blinding light. A strip of sacking for a towel and my hair still wet when they took me away and threw me a sweater to wear instead of my shirt: it had been soaked in sweat and that was why he’d said what he had, correction, that was the excuse.

  My whole body tingling and most of the torpor gone from my mind, remember London. ‘Come on, in here!’ Back in the cell again, not mine this time: a smaller one with no window, a slatted bench with one leg at an angle and bloodstains across the top and repeated on the wall, the smell of the human animal that had been in here, Schrenk? There was no means of knowing, there were fifty of these cells in the ground-floor block. ‘Wait here.’

  No option: they slammed the door and locked it.

  I realized, yes, that with my shirt like that I was stinking to high heaven, but he shouldn’t have pointed it out. He had done it to humiliate me, crossing the dividing line between the area where the captor and the captive are two civilized men and the area where one is a man and the other has become a pig. It’s a critical stage in the business of interrogation, and he had introduced it deliberately, I knew that. But it didn’t make any difference.

  I walked from wall to wall in the narrow cell, seven paces and back from the door to the window. Drops of water still fell from my wet hair, and I pulled off the sweater they’d given me and tousled my head with it, putting it on again and feeling the dampness against my chest and my back. The lamp in here was a naked bulb of low wattage and gave no heat; I began shivering, and walked faster. There wasn’t anything else I could do: I could see his eyes every time I moved towards the door, watching from the oblong panel above it.

  They came for me soon afterwards, three plainclothes men and Vader, still in uniform and now wearing a greatcoat and peaked cap.

  ‘Is he washed?’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’

  ‘Bring him, then. Hurry.’

  It was some time in the night: pilot lamps were burning along the corridors and the big high windows were dark, with a seepage of neon light from the streets along their frames.

  ‘Tell this man where we are taking him, Grekov.’

  One of them spoke from beside me. ‘We are taking you to the Serbsky Institute.’ He was a squat man in a dark coat; I could smell tobacco on him. The two others had an air of higher rank, walking in front of us, one on each side of Vader.

  ‘Tell him he will now be interrogated under extreme physical duress.’

  ‘You will now be interrogated under extreme physical duress,’ grunted the man beside me. But the sense of it didn’t get through to me: I was thinking of the other thing Vader had said. The man beside me was armed: I could smell the gun oil. They would all be armed. They walked in step with Vader, but I didn’t follow the rhythm. Once, as we passed the main offices near the entrance to the building, the squat man looked down and gave my foot a quick little kick, to get me into step, but I didn’t do what he wanted.

  ‘Has he heard of the Serbsky Institute, Grekov?’

  ‘Have you heard of the Serbsky Institute?’

  I didn’t answer. Vader would have to ask me himself.

  ‘Repeat the question!’

  ‘Have you heard of the Serbsky Institute? Answer!’

  They bothered me with their voices; I needed to think. But I had heard, yes, of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry: it’s an old granite building with iron gates and armed sentries, containing mostly political wards where those straying from the Party line are submitted to ‘special diagnosis’ and subsequent ‘treatment’. One of the techniques involves wrapping the patient in wet canvas, and as it slowly dries he is asked if he feels ready to change his heretical views, or confess, or reveal whatever he is there to reveal.

  I didn’t know how Schrenk had held out against that, without losing his mind. Maybe he’d lost it, and it was an animal that had escaped, not Schrenk at all.

  ‘Have you heard of -‘

  ‘That’s enough, Grekov. He probably doesn’t understand the question.’

  ‘Colonel’

  Then one of the big doors swung back and we went down the steps into the snow. The city had changed since I’d been brought in here: the slate roofs and parapets were white under the black sky, with the greenish neon glowing on it theatrically. The snow was soft under our feet. As we reached the black saloon the man called Grekov opened one of the rear doors and told me to get in. Vader went round to the other side. Another man was right behind me and as I climbed in he gave me a push and got in after me, slamming the door. I was now wedged between him and Vader with the two others in front, Grekov at the wheel. The windows were all closed and the doorlocks down.

  When Grekov started the engine and switched on the headlights the guards at the main gates swung one of them open and we drove through. I could hear chains clinking on the tyres: the snow was still falling and Dzerzhinsky Square was covered. There was no traffic. I couldn’t see a clock but I was watching for one. The heater was now blowing and the chill of my wet hair began warming.

  I had strange feelings about the man beside me. He shouldn’t have said that. I knew it was part of the routine but that didn’t make any difference: he shouldn’t have said it. This comprised most of my feelings about him, but there were other things. I’d seen him as a friendly, cultivated man and as a brute in a towering rage, and these roles had alternated so that my attitude towards him had started to be ambivalent: he’d got closer than he knew to burrowing into my mind while it was half submerged in sleep. I think in another twenty-four hours he would have got me blurting things out between hallucinations. I even believe he might have known how close he’d come to success, but what he couldn’t take was the way I’d attacked him and actually got him on to the floor before the guards had come in. It had hit a major nerve in him, deep in the psyche, and all he lived for now was to see me under treatment at the Serbsky Institute, to hear me scream when the clowns went to work. I believe he was that sensitive.

  I too am a sensitive man.

  One of the chains was slightly loose and kept hitting the underneath of the wing, producing a hollow sound like a drummer tapping for the dead. I could see the gold domes of St Basil’s now in Red Square, and the clock in Spassky Tower - at too sharp an angle to let me read it. The city was beautiful tonight, its floodlit domes and spires and minarets half lost in the veils of falling snow; I was seeing it as I’d never seen it before, like a tourist with time to spare.

  ‘9 Colonel Vader was holding himself away from me as much as he could, and letting me know it. I didn’t stink any more but I was still untouchable, the pig thing that has been squatting there in its cage, mired in its own dirt and unable to urinate or defecate without begging permission. That was his picture of me now and he wanted me to know it; he wasn’t prepared even to talk to me without using Grekov as a sanitizing intermediary. I didn’t mind what he did now: it would be insignificant compared to what he had done, what he had said, w
hen he’d come into my cell. I don’t think he realized that.

  Grekov drove quite fast, considering the state of the streets; I suppose the snow wasn’t deep yet and there were the chains on the tyres and he knew his way. It wouldn’t have been possible without the chains because the car would have gone straight on with the front wheels locked over. At one stage I caught sight of Vader’s face in the fraction of a second, distorting as the rear wheel went over it, but the rest wasn’t easily remembered because everything went so fast: I think one of them had a gun out before I reached the steering wheel but there wasn’t any shot The initial move wasn’t complicated: I had to hit the back of the seat to produce the necessary momentum and get to the wheel as soon as I could. My right foot smashed into the face of the man on that side and I felt the softness caving in but my main concern was to reach that wheel and wrench it over. My shoulder hit the back of the driver’s head and pitched him forward and then the chains bit and the car lurched and lost traction and slid and then lurched again with the chains gouging into the road surface and swinging us halfway round before it rolled.

  The speed at this time wasn’t much less than the eighty kph I’d seen on the speedometer just before I began moving, and the roll took us through most of the deceleration phase and lasted until the rear end hit a street lamp and the windscreen blew out in a shower of glass. Someone had begun screaming and it took me a little time to realize it was the man who’d put a stranglehold on me: I’d broken his thumb to make him release it. It was soon after this that I saw the gun in someone’s hand but I wasn’t worried because he couldn’t use it: we were in the middle of a storm and the car was still moving fast enough to kill the lot of us if it hit another street lamp at the wrong angle. It was sliding on its side at this time and the front end was coming round in a flurry of snow as it ploughed the surface, and I’d have to wait before I tried getting dear because I could get an arm or a leg trapped between the bodywork and the road. Someone was yelling something about not letting me get away and I used his voice as a guide and found his throat and used a half-fist with a short thrust and felt it break the cartilage.