by Adam Roberts
I gave this some thought. ‘This individual was blown up, and you were blown up with him?’
‘No,’ said Trofim, looking even more puzzled. ‘I was nowhere near that mine.’
‘I am stumped.’
‘One of his teeth,’ said Trofim. Then he added, ‘Flew. The doctors said that. Like a bullet.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Shall we go on up?’
I made two more flights without much difficulty, and another two with a quantity of rasping and wheezing; and we stopped again. It became evident that Comrade Trofim had been pondering matters during this, for me, tortuous climb. ‘How did you know I was in the army?’ he asked.
‘You have a military bearing,’ I panted.
This pleased him. ‘Comrade,’ he said, standing a little straighter.
I blinked and blinked, but my left eye, where the gun had been forced, was still filled with luminous chaff. I could not see properly out of it. ‘I suppose I would assume,’ I added, ‘that, perhaps, you were flown back for hospitalisation in Moscow, and that your exemplary war record and, uh, personal attributes brought you to the attention of Comrade Frenkel, who seconded you to his personal team.’
If Trofim had been amazed at my stupidity earlier, he was now, clearly, amazed at my insight. ‘Comrade!’ he said, by way of articulating his astonishment. Then after further thought, he added, ‘Did Comrade Frenkel tell you so?’
‘The Comrade Commissar and I don’t have that sort of relationship, ’ I said.
Puzzlement descended again. ‘Commissar?’
‘My little joke,’ I said. ‘Shall we press on?’
We made two more floors before I stopped again. ‘Only one more to go,’ I said, sucking air.
‘Your lungs are bad, comrade,’ he said.
‘You think?’
‘Oh yes, comrade,’ he said, earnestly. He peered vaguely through the landing’s grubby window; a view of housetops, flanked on either side by the elephant-leg grey of two tower blocks. ‘Asthma is a disease of the lungs.’
‘I had not realised that a medical education is part of basic army training.’
‘But you’re mistaken, comrade,’ he said. ‘It is not.’
‘Asthma is a disease of the lungs,’ I said. ‘Emphysema also. But in my case I think it is merely that I am a man in my mid-sixties who has spent over half a century smoking Soviet cigarettes.’
‘Soviet cigarettes are the finest in the world,’ said Trofim, on a reflex. The phrase Soviet x is the finest in the world had evidently been etched into his brain for, I would hazard, any value of x. Indeed, I daresay he believed that Soviet alphabets contained the finest xs in the world.
‘You’re not a smoker,’ I observed.
‘Oh no,’ he agreed.
‘Wise,’ I said. ‘Soviet lungs are the finest in the world, brought up breathing the pure air of the Motherland. We have a duty not to pollute them.’ But speaking ironically to Trofim was precisely as effective, in terms of communication, as speaking Mongolian would have been. ‘It must be a little demeaning,’ I offered, ‘for a warrior such as yourself to be given the mission of escorting an old fart like me up some stairs.’
He considered this for a very long time. Eventually he said, ‘You remind me of my grandfather.’
‘He was an ironist too?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘He was from Tvov.’
‘I daresay,’ I said, rousing myself for the final set of stairs, ‘that comrade Frenkel has told you why this American woman must be located and killed?’
‘Comrade,’ he said, his best effort at stonewalling.
Finally, with a sense of achievement that Sir Edmund Hillary, that New Zealander, would have recognised, I reached the top of the staircase. Trofim brought out a key and opened the door, and I stepped in. It was a perfectly ordinary suite of rooms, left over from the Romanoff era, although in a recognisable state of dilapidation: two settees on wooden claws, clutching golfballs of wood with arthritic intensity. Two wooden chairs. An empty bookcase. A stained rug. Near the curtainless window was a table on which the telephone sat: a skull-sized chunk of bakelite. Two doors, both of them closed, led through to other rooms. There was a musty smell. There are, in point of fact, very many different varieties of musty smell. Some, as in old bookshops, are even actively pleasant. The smell in this room was not pleasant.
Trofim nodded at the table and, as I made my way, breathless, over towards it he locked the door behind him and pocketed the key.
‘Make the call, as Comrade Frenkel instructed,’ he said, balancing his thumb on the stock of his holstered pistol.
‘I’ll just,’ I panted, ‘get my breath back.’ To show willing I picked up the telephone receiver.
Trofim came towards me, trying to look stern rather than just stupid. ‘No funny business,’ he reminded me. ‘Precisely as Comrade Frenkel instructed.’
I took a breath. ‘As he instructed.’ I took another breath.
‘Are you ready?’
‘In the army,’ I asked him, ‘they trained you to kill?’
‘In,’ he said, lowering over me, ‘dozens of different ways.’
‘To kill the enemy. Also to disable him?’
‘In dozens of different ways,’ he repeated.
‘I daresay,’ I said, ‘that these are skills you don’t forget just because you’ve left the army?’
By way of reply, he flexed his meaty right hand into a fist, and then unflexed it.
I held the telephone receiver in my right hand, and my left was upon the dial. In as smooth and forceful as motion as I could manage, I heaved with both hands. The trick, I knew, was to mean the gesture completely. The trick was not to think I’m old, I won’t have the strength; but to think rather I’m still twenty. To think I’ll brain the fucker. To put myself into it completely.
The receiver went hard into Trofim’s left eye; the body of the phone cracked against his right cheekbone. He took a step back, more in surprise than pain I’d say. The electrical cord had come cleanly away from the wall. I threw the entire set at his face. He was alert enough to bring up his arm to shield himself from this projectile, but I had already grabbed the chair, a hand on each side of the seat. With the high back facing away from me I angled the whole thing forward, and jammed it upwards with as much force as I could gather. The top of the chairback went in under Trofim’s chin, making contact with his throat and cracking his head up. It made a sound like a butcher’s cleaver going into a rack of lamb. Unbalanced, the big man tumbled. He banged the back of his head hard enough against the wall to leave a dent in the plaster. Then, like sprawling Goliath, he was on the floor on his back, and his enormous boots were jerking up and down. I leapt forward, the chair still in my hands. I came down hard upon his torso, the chairback resounding as it impacted. The breath went entirely out of him. The chair was on top of him, and I was on top of the chair; and my hip had knocked painfully against the edge of the seat.
For a second time I wedged the top of the chairback under his chin.
‘You were in the army,’ I said, gaspily.
His face was darkening, turning if not quite blue then certainly losing its usual fleshtone. He gurgled something.
‘I was in the army too, comrade,’ I said.
‘You have hurt my windpipe,’ he scraped. His right arm was clutching ineffectually at the chairback. His left arm was trapped beneath his enormous body.
‘My military service was a while ago,’ I panted. ‘But it was a longer tour of duty, and incomparably more toughening than a couple of months in fucking Afghanistan.’
‘Comrade, I think,’ he gasped, ‘you’ve broken my rib.’
I was, in truth, in a rather delicate situation. He was a strong young man, and I a weak elderly one; and, broken rib or not, I worried that my getting off him would be quickly followed by him getting to his feet and repaying in kind. On the plus side, simply squatting on him like the figure of nightmare from that old illustration, leaning all my weight onto
the chair, enabled me to recover some of my puff. Although this was not something that could happen quickly.
He face was a colour that would have indicated rude health in a cheeseplant.
‘Like my - sweet old,’ he wheezed, incredulous, ‘grandfather.’
‘Like many young people,’ I observed, breathing in and out as leisurely as I could manage. ‘You have a mistaken notion about the elderly. You project sentimental notions onto my generation. Appearances aren’t everything, you know.’ I was chattering like this because I was trying to think what to do. ‘And, especially with respect to my generation, you ought to consider that we have drunk more vodka, had more sex and killed more people than you - ever - will. But tell me one thing, Trofim. Tell me this one thing. Do you believe all this stuff about aliens?’
‘Of course,’ he rasped, weakly. ‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘Mngnaow,’ he creaked.
‘I think I might have wet myself a little, in all the excitement.’ I tried to peer down at my trousers, without taking any of my weight off the chair.
‘Mngnaow,’ he repeated, in a weaker voice.
His face now was purple as a plum, and his eyes bulged like sloes.
I glanced about the room with an eye to locating something with which to immobilise Trofim: I pondered tying him up, but there was nothing but the telephone cord, and such cord has too little friction to tie well. I considered removing his pistol from its holster and using that to control him, but I was not at all sure that I could unbuckle the holster and remove the gun without taking my weight from the chair. My fear was that, given the chance, Trofim would simply toss me aside. Then it would be the chute for me.
I decided to try reasoning with him. ‘Comrade,’ I said, ‘I will remove my weight from your throat in a moment.’
He did not reply. There was not so much as a gasp. His face was now a rather fetching deep dark mauve. His eyes had a lifeless cast to them. I could not feel motion in his chest. I weighed up in myself whether he might be shamming, but my options were limited.
I climbed off him, and waited to see if he burst into life. But there was nothing. Perhaps I had murdered him. This was not a comfortable thought, for all that I did not doubt his willingness to ram me in the chute.
I put my skinny, mottled hand into his right trouser pocket, and found the keys. Then, with a mighty creaking inside my own complaining bones, I got to my feet and went over to the door. I was holding a dozen keys on a metal ring. The first I tried did not fit the lock. The second fitted the hole, but refused to turn. My left eye, where the muzzle of the gun had compressed the eyeball, could not focus, and was still buzzy with shiny hallucinogenic flashes and skeins. I held the fourth key close in front of my right eye, and inserted it into the keyhole.
Behind me Trofim drew a huge, beast-like, shuddering breath into his lungs.
‘Infamy!’ he croaked, and then, with a huge phlegm-heavy cough, he spoke the word again, much more distinctly and with rather startling volume. ‘Infamy!’
‘Perhaps,’ I muttered aloud to myself, as the fifth key failed to go into the keyhole, ‘I should have removed his pistol when I had the chance.’
I could hear him getting to his feet. I did not need to look behind me; the sounds he was making were enough. The sixth key would not turn. My face was close to the door, and my compressed retina span odd, insubstantial, neon blue-white spirography upon the wood; my eye, evidently, still complaining at the treatment it had received in the car.
‘Skvorecky!’ Trofim bellowed
I believe that I had, finally, broken through his ox-like placidity and made him angry.
The seventh key, with a nice sense of its own numerological pedigree, rotated through the full three-hundred-three-score degrees, and the bolt slid back. There was not a moment to lose. I yanked the key out, opened the door a foot or so, slipped through, and closed the door behind me. I shuddered the key back in the lock on the outside of the door with a trembly hand. As I turned, and whilst the bolt was in the process of sliding across, the handle suddenly shook with poltergeist ferocity under my hand.
But the lock was engaged.
Something exploded: splinters flew. Smoke billowed through a new hole in the doorway. The detonation echoed in the hall.
‘Open this door,’ yelled Trofim, separated from me by a thin panel of wood. I thought of the size of his fists, and the bulk of his musculature. Then I thought about the flimsiness of the door. It was not a comfortable thought.
‘You have damaged the door!’ I cried out. ‘You have damaged the furnishings!’
‘I’ll kick the door down with one swing of my boot,’ boomed Trofim, like the wolf from the folktale. Or as the wolf might have sounded had he been wearing military boots.
‘What did Frenkel tell you about damaging the furnishings?’
‘I’ll wring your neck, Skvorecky!’ he boomed; and with a noise of splintering wood the toe of his boot appeared through the lower panel of the door.
‘Remember Comrade Frenkel’s commands!’ I cried. ‘He gave you a direct order!’
There was another crash, and a whole panel of wood smashed free. Clearly reminding him of Frenkel’s orders was not going to stop him. I looked about me. There was a cast-iron bootscraper on the floor to the left of the door, black but speckled all over with strawberry-coloured rust. ‘You’ll never catch me, Trofim,’ I shouted. ‘I may be old, but I can run faster than the wind!’
‘I shall kill you!’ boomed Trofim, from behind the rapidly disintegrating door.
I kicked the bootscraper, and it clattered down the stairs. Hard to say whether the sounds it was making were actually like those an old man would make hurriedly descending a staircase. No time to worry about that, because with another smash the door flew open. Trofim came out like a freight train. No: like a military train, filled with high explosives.
I stuck my right leg out, and straightened my toes in the shoe like a ballerina. Trofim tripped. It was a schoolyard trick to play upon him, I suppose; but I shall say this. It was not my outstretched leg that was the enemy. It was Trofim’s own bulk, combined with the velocity with which he came hurtling through the door.
He moved through the air, and his momentum took him, like a ski-jumper, head-first downwards, following a line parallel to the staircase. There was the sound of a stick trapped in the spokes of a freewheeling bicycle, overlaid with a raging roar, and then his head smashed through the plaster of the wall of the half-landing.
He lay there, as if decapitated: visible only from the neck down on the landing, his triffid-thick legs trailing back up the stairway behind him.
I started down the stairs. My legs were trembling a little, making it important I placed my feet carefully so as to avoid falling. I do not know whether they were trembling with fear, or exhaustion, or simple old age. As I reached him I paused over his body, partly to see if he were still alive. He had his pistol in his right hand, and I bent down to retrieve it from him. As I did so he stirred. I recoiled: clearly not dead.
I was a flight down when I heard Trofim speak again. ‘My head!’ he boomed.
I was almost at the bottom of the second flight when I heard him again, a little less distinct: ‘I’ll put your head through the wall.’ There were the sounds of somebody large moving about above, and the small smashes and bashes of chunks of plaster falling and scattering.
I was three floors down when I heard him bellow, and get to his feet.
I hurried my gait, and was at the main entrance to the building as I heard the thunderous thumping of Trofim’s boots coming down the stairs above me. I don’t know where I thought I was going. Trofim was moments from catching me. But my instinct was to run. So I hobbled on.
I went outside, down the stone steps and onto the pavement, turning my head left and right in a desperate attempt to decide which way to go. Neither path looked promising. With the timing of a dream, a taxi pulled up, the door opened of its own accord, and, without even
thinking, I climbed inside. Indeed, I was pulled inside, and bundled across the lap of somebody already on the rear seat. But I hardly paid attention to that.
As the car pulled away I looked back to see the red-faced, bulging-eyed enormity of Trofim bursting from the building’s main entrance, plaster dust smoking from his bashed-up-looking head.
The car swung away, and I saw Trofim recede in vision as he shook his hands in impotent fury, those terrible, man-killing hands.
I was too surprised to be relieved.
I was not alone in the taxi. Sitting beside me was Leon Piotrovich Lunacharsky from the chess club. ‘Lucky we were here, comrade,’ he beamed. ‘[ Jolly luck of the Irishmen,]’ he added in English. ‘[Or is it that it should is,]’ he added, getting tangled in his excitement. ‘[ Jolly luck of the science fictioneers?]’
‘What?’ I stuttered. ‘What?’
‘It took me a little while to process what you told me,’ said the driver. ‘It is a function of my syndrome that sometimes mental processing takes a little while. But I usually will process mental information, given time.’ The driver, of course, was Saltykov.
‘Saltykov,’ I said.
‘Reactor Four,’ Saltykov said, without looking round. ‘The American had found out not only the location, but the reactor number, too. He got the information to you before he was killed.’
‘Bless him!’ sang Lunacharsky. ‘Bless him for an American saint! He will save many lives!’
‘And you trusted me enough to tell me, too! But I was distracted,’ Saltykov went on in his implacable, unpassionate voice. ‘The policemen were attempting to lay hands upon me, even though my syndrome renders such contact intolerable.’
‘We waited outside the police station,’ said the bubbling Lunacharsky. ‘Then we saw the KGB take you away in your big car. We followed them. We thought you were as good as dead!’
‘As good as,’ I confirmed. ‘Since 1958.’
‘When that ape took you into that building . . .’
‘Leon Piotrovich Lunacharsky wanted us to drive away,’ said Saltykov, proudly. ‘I insisted we stay.’
