by Adam Roberts
Though as old as me, Frenkel was considerably more muscular, and in much better health.
Trofim stirred in the front seat, readying himself to intervene if it proved necessary. He was not, of course, preparing to intervene on my behalf.
‘Comrade,’ I said, mildly.
‘You’re still not listening to me Konstantin Andreiovich,’ he said. ‘You’re not listening to me because you’re too busy trying to fuck with me. Don’t think I don’t understand what you’re about. You’re trying to commit suicide. The traditional Russian method, the vodka, takes too long. Setting fire to your own cranium was too shocking a method to proceed with. Am I right? Am I right?’ He took his thumb away, and I relaxed the muscles across my back. ‘Fucking idiot. You, Konstantin Andreiovich, I’m talking about you. Do you understand?’
‘You have a very eloquent thumb,’ I said. My ribs were sore.
‘That’s what I mean by an ironist. You can’t take the direct route. The direct route would be a rope around the neck and jump off the table, but you won’t do that. You exist in a haze of possible paths through life. That’s not the way!’
‘Or a leap from a bridge,’ I said.
‘Because you’re incapable, you want me to do your dirty work. The question is: Why?’
‘Or in front of a train.’
‘The question in other words is: Why me?’ Frenkel leered. ‘We go back a long way, I suppose. You and I stood in line and met comrade Stalin in the flesh. How many people can boast that?’
‘Since boasting requires breath,’ I said, pretending to calculate an answer, ‘and since meeting Stalin usually preceded the confiscation of that very quality . . .’
‘Fuck you, Konsty. I’m not your enemy. Don’t make me out to be your enemy. You could help me, if you chose to. You could perform a life-saving service for the Soviet Union, if you’d only work with me and stop fighting me.’
I looked at him. I felt enormously weary. ‘I’ve decided,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘Jumping off a bridge in front of a river cruiser with a rope around my neck,’ I said. ‘To make assurance doubly sure.’
‘Fucker,’ said Frenkel.
‘Shakespeare,’ I corrected.
Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Frenkel began laughing. ‘Do you know what, Konstantin? Do you know what?’
‘What is only one of a great many things I do not know.’
‘I’m not used to this. I’m a senior figure, comrade. I’m KGB, you understand? When I talk to people they’re almost always polite and deferential.’
‘Almost always?’
He waved this away. ‘Oh, sometimes I speak to my superiors. They’re usually curt. But this . . . bantering! It makes a change, I can tell you.’
‘I don’t think you’re right,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘About Communism being government by old men. Revolution is a newness coming into the world. Revolution is a continual youth, the resurgence and eternal youth of mankind.’
‘Comrade,’ he said, and again his hand came up, only this time it was to my shoulder. ‘You’re an old man.’
‘So are you.’
‘Exactly! Who knows better how to run a country? The young have crazy ideas. They have absurd, destructive energy. But the old have - wisdom. Which quality is better for governance? Don’t answer, I’m being rhetorical. Besides, you misunderstand the logic of Revolution. Revolution is the manifestation of historical necessity. It is the coming-into-the-world of inevitable historical consequences. History is old. History is an old man. What’s older than history?’
‘Death,’ I said.
But Frenkel wasn’t in a mood to be metaphysical. ‘History is the oldest man there is. That’s what Communism says. That’s what Marx says, if you boil him down. He says: You can’t escape history. You can’t avoid him, or trick him, or bribe him. He rules. That’s all. The capitalists think they’ve overthrown history, they think history has come to an end and there is no history. They think there’s only money. But they’re fooling themselves. History can’t be escaped. History doesn’t care for youth, or money, or fancy clothes. History is the tyrant that makes rulers like Stalin look weak and benign.’
‘Speaking personally,’ I said, ‘my interpretation of Marx sees him as being more dialectical and less monolithic.’
At this Frenkel laughed loudest of all. ‘Your personal interpretation of Marx!’ he repeated, and I was unsure whether he was amused by the fact that anybody actually read Marx, or by the notion that it was possible to have a personal perspective on a figure so marmoreal.
The car pulled up by the side of the road. Frenkel shifted in his seat the better to look straight at me. ‘Tell me what he said,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘I will ask you the question once,’ said Frenkel. ‘I shall even ask it twice. But thrice I will not ask.’
“‘Thrice”?’ I repeated, unable to keep the incredulous tone from my voice.
‘Quiet! You hear? Be quiet! I want to hear you answer the question, not banter with me.’
‘I understand, comrade. Nevertheless, as one writer to another, I must query thrice.’
‘Trofim - put a gun in his ear.’
The huge fellow swivelled, a little awkwardly, in his seat at the front of the car, and glowered at me. He did not look comfortable. ‘I’m not sure I can manage the ear, sir,’ he said in a slow voice.
‘What?’
‘Unless Comrade Skvorecky turns his head? Otherwise the angle is not correct. Perhaps the eye?’
‘The eye then! I don’t care! Menace him, you idiot!’
With an impressively fluid gesture for so large a man Trofim unholstered his pistol and reached round the back of the seat in which he was sitting. His left hand grasped my neck and held it in place; and with his right hand he pressed the end of the muzzle against my left eye. Naturally I tried to flinch backwards, but Trofim held me firm, with an insulting ease. His reach was long enough for this to be no effort for him. He possessed arms a gorilla might have envied for length, muscularity and, I daresay, hairiness. My head was pressed against the upholstery of my seat, and the gun was digging against my eye. This was very far from comfortable. I put my hands up, on reflex, and wrapped my fingers about Trofim’s left wrist, where his hand had fixed my neck, but it availed me nothing. He was much too strong for me.
‘Now that we have your attention,’ said Frenkel. ‘You fucking ironist. You went for a walk with Coyne. The American. You are now going to tell me exactly what he said to you.’
‘Gladly, comrade,’ I said, in a slightly strangulated voice. ‘I have just given the Militia a complete transcript, and am happy to do the same for the KGB.’
‘Fuck you, Konsty,’ said Ivan. ‘What did you tell the police? I’ll have Trofim scoop your skull out and feed your brains to your wife.’
‘My ex-wife,’ I said. ‘She might be less distressed by the scooping than you imagine.’
‘Quiet! Fucking be quiet!’
The pain in my eye was sharp, like a migraine. ‘I’ll be quiet.’
‘What did you tell the police?’ Frenkel was yelling at me. ‘You fucker, what did you tell them?’
‘I told them what happened,’ I gasped. ‘I was walking with Coyne. That’s what I told them. He seemed to think I was privy to a plan, although I assured him I wasn’t. That gun is hurting my eyeball.’
‘Where? Did he tell you where?’
‘He said aliens were going to attack a nuclear reactor,’ I said. ‘I’m starting to worry I’ll lose the sight in that eyeball.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, but did he tell you where?’
‘Lithuania,’ I improvised. ‘He said it was connected to the ghost rockets after the war. I think he believed it, too.’
Frenkel, I was relieved to see, accepted this. ‘Better!’ He sank back into his seat. ‘I like you when you’re cooperative, Konstantin Andreiovich. You can do one more thing for me, to prove that you are in
a properly cooperative mood. Or perhaps I should let Trofim squeeze the eyeball right out with his gun.’
‘That wouldn’t be my preference.’
‘Tell me where the woman is. The American woman.’
Suddenly the gun was taken out of my eyeball, a very relieving sensation, although it left my vision scattered and lanced across with weird neon cobwebs and blobs of light. I rubbed at the eye with the heel of my hand, which didn’t help particularly but seemed the thing to do. Trofim had reholstered his weapon.
‘Where is she?’ Frenkel asked me again, sitting forward to be able to turn his head and look properly at me.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know?’ This answer infuriated him. He flung himself back against the seat and bounced forward. The car rocked on its suspension. ‘Give me the pistol! Give it to me, Trofim.’
The weapon was handed back.
‘Open your mouth, you fucking idiot,’ he ordered.
I opened my mouth. So, I noticed, did Trofim, although he snapped it shut soon enough when he realised that his superior had not been addressing him.
The barrel went between my teeth. I tasted the distinctive, slightly marine flavour of gunmetal.
‘No more nonsense,’ Frenkel declared, in a tone of businesslike savagery. ‘You know where the fat woman is hiding. You are going to tell me. If you tell me, and if you are not lying to me, I shall lock you away. If you don’t tell me, or if you lie to me, I shall pull this trigger, here, now, in this car.’ He yanked his hand up, hinging the pistol downwards against my lower teeth. ‘And here’s a KGB trick: I’ll shoot you down your throat. That way I don’t get your fucking brains all over the interior of my car. It will have the added bonus of causing you to die slowly and in great pain from internal bleeding. Do. You. Understand?’
‘Gghhah,’ I affirmed.
‘It is possible,’ he went on, ‘when one has a prisoner in this position, to shoot so that the bullet goes right through the gut and exits through the anus. But it is much more painful, and less messy, if I angle the trajectory slightly so that the bullet goes into the inside of your thigh. Where is she?’
‘Ghaah ghg ga-gahh, ghhah geh-h-ho gughu,’ I said.
There was a silence. In a low, controlled voice, like a bomb disposal expert about to remove a vital component from an infernal device, Frenkel said, ‘I’m going to slide this gun out of your carious mouth, Konsty. When it is out you can repeat what you just said. If it is a wisecrack, or if you say that you don’t know, then these will be the last seconds of your mortal life.’
He pulled the gun barrel out of my mouth. I wriggled my tongue against the inside of my mouth. ‘Thank you, Jan,’ I said.
‘Where,’ he asked, in a low voice, ‘is she?’
‘I don’t have the address, just a telephone number,’ I said.
Frenkel pondered this. ‘Write it down,’ he told me. He pulled out a small piece of card and a pencil stub from his pocket. I scribbled my ex-wife’s telephone number on the card and handed it back. My jaw ached. My eye was still spooling out luminous patterns into my brain. I couldn’t see properly.
Frenkel took the card, and pencil, back from me. ‘Then this is what we are going to do,’ he said, calmly. ‘Nik’ - this to the driver - ‘take us to the Heights.’
The car scraped to life, and we pulled away from the kerb. Nik, the one with the cropped red hair, did not signal, or even look where he was going. One car was forced to swerve, and several others to brake, but nobody sounded their horns, or shook their fists. Ordinary Muscovites had no desire to tangle with official business.
‘Trofim, you are to take him to the safe room,’ ordered Frenkel.
‘At the top of the building?’
‘Of course at the top of the building, you ox!’ The car slowed, turned a corner, and then accelerated. ‘Take him up there, make him phone the fat woman. You,’ he said to me, ‘will tell her to go to - I don’t know, somewhere a tourist would know.’
‘Red Square?’ I suggested.
‘Yes. Tell her you’ll meet her in Red Square. She’ll be able to find that. Tell her to wait outside the GUM. Tell her to go straight there: to get a taxi, and go straight to the GUM side of the square. Tell her that you must meet her, absolutely and straight away. Are you listening to this, ox?’
‘Sir,’ said Trofim.
‘Make sure he says all that. If he says anything else, or tries any nonsense, kill him.’
‘Sir.’
‘And if you do have to kill him, remember to put him in the chute.’
‘Sir.’
‘The chute, you hear? Don’t just leave him lying there. Yes?’
Trofim had coloured. ‘Sir.’
‘In fact, the best thing would be to take him to the chute, put his head in and shoot him there. Please, I’m asking you as one civilised man to another, please try not to get too much mess on the furnishings. Yes?’
Trofim nodded. Nik, the driver, was chuckling quietly.
‘Don’t break anything, no?’
‘No, comrade.’
‘And no blood on the carpet this time?’
‘No, comrade.’
‘I must say I hope there will be no need for the chute,’ I said, in a worried voice.
‘Do as I tell you and there may not be,’ said Frenkel, complacently. ‘Konsty, you can still be of use to me. You can be of use by delivering us this woman, obviously, but perhaps beyond that as well. You may still have a use, and usefulness is your best bet at extending your lifespan. There may be a future for you after all.’
‘As a science fiction writer,’ I said, ‘I have a particular interest in the future.’
CHAPTER 11
The car pulled up outside a tall block, in a uniform and fairly clean street of tall houses. Trofim clambered and lumbered out of the car, unpacking himself, as it were, from the front seat. He opened the door for me.
‘Trofim will look after you,’ said Frenkel.
‘An ambiguous phrase,’ I noted.
Frenkel laughed. ‘Upstairs with him, Trof. Take him to the room. The first thing he does is make the call. After that, settle him in. If he differs by so much as a thread from what we agreed - settle his final account.’
‘His account, sir?’
‘Kill him, you idiot.’
‘Comrade,’ said Trofim, meaning yes, and snapping to attention on the pavement. I realised this about Trofim: that, when in his military mode, he used that word as a universal signifier. The other thing I realised about Trofim, as he ushered me through the main entrance to the building, was that he really was enormous. He would have stood six foot six in his stockinged feet, excepting only that it was impossible to imagine him ever removing his boots, or going off duty. He appeared to have borrowed, or more likely to have been issued by the authorities with, the musculature of a much larger animal than a human: a bear, say. Or a Grendel. His neck was thicker than his head. Indeed, his neck was thicker than my waist.
We were at the foot of the stairs. ‘Is there no lift?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Yes,’ he added, as an afterthought.
‘Yes there is a lift? Why do we not avail ourselves of the lift?’
He stared at me as if I had posed a metaphysical conundrum.
‘It’s not working?’ I prompted, after long seconds. ‘Is that it?’
‘Comrade,’ he said to me, tipping his chin to the stairway.
I peered up the stairwell. ‘How many flights?’
‘Seventh floor.’
I sighed. ‘I’ll warn you now, comrade, I am not as fit as once I was.’ He greeted this news with his default, meaty impassivity. His general bearing was somewhere between I don’t care and I don’t understand.
‘Off we go, then,’ I said, gloomily.
We ascended one flight of stairs, half a floor, before my lungs began complaining. Another flight and I was gasping like a cracked steamvalve. Comrade Trofim walked moodily on and I followed, but by the time w
e reached the second-floor stairwell landing my breath was positively hooting. ‘I need to rest, comrade,’ I gasped.
He loomed over me. ‘Your lungs, is it?’
‘An expert diagnosis, comrade’ I said, between breaths. ‘Old model, you see. Early revolutionary design. Single cylinder, two-stroke lungs. They’re noisier than the newer models.’ I saw his huge face touched, distantly, with puzzlement. ‘I just need to catch my breath,’ I said. ‘An old man’s lungs are not as efficient as a young man’s.’
‘Comrade,’ he said; meaning, ah!
I dragged two breaths in. A third. Trofim was breathing silently, and without apparent motion of his chest.
‘So,’ I tried, to fill the silence. ‘You were in the army?’
‘Comrade,’ he said in the affirmative.
‘Afghanistan, is it? Why aren’t you there now?’
‘I needed medical attention,’ he said, with a slow, offhand deliberateness that implied multiple bullet wounds.
‘Really? What for?’
He pondered this, and then said, ‘Because I was wounded.’
‘Obviously,’ I said. ‘But how?’
‘A tooth,’ he said, and a dark look passed over his face.
‘Nasty,’ I said. ‘Impacted, was it? In the jaw?’
‘Skull,’ he said.
‘I’ve often thought they’re more trouble than they’re worth, molars.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, looking at me as if I were some kind of a simpleton. ‘It wasn’t my tooth.’
‘Your skull, though?’
‘Oh yes.’
I thought about this. ‘Were you bitten by one of the mujahadeen, comrade?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, clearly surprised at my obtuseness. He pondered for a bit, and then said, ‘The landmine disassembled him pretty thoroughly, comrade.’ He pondered further. ‘He wasn’t in any state to bite anybody after that,’ he said.
