by Adam Roberts
Poor old Saltykov.
‘I thought you said,’ I put in, in as steady a voice as I could manage, ‘that your gun has been taken from you?’
‘Pending investigation,’ he confirmed. ‘But my muscles are still there - I have not lost my muscular strength.’
‘You always were a big Slav,’ I agreed.
‘And now, in your enfeebled state, you are frankly no match for me.’ I saw the glint of metal tucked into the sleeve of his coat. ‘Come! Take me to the hotel.’
‘We’ll need to get a tram,’ I said. ‘It’s quite a long way from here. Or we could get a taxi.’
‘Distance,’ said Frenkel, giving me another slap on the back to move me along. ‘In a sense it is a subjective quality, is it not? Distortions in the space-time continuum. For what you describe as a long way, reachable only by taxi, I would call just across the road.’ He pointed at the entrance to our hotel. ‘The very building from which I saw you and Saltykov come out not half an hour ago.’
Another push, and I stumbled a few more steps. ‘It’s really not a very nice hotel,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we find somewhere nice for a drink? We can continue our conversation. I was enjoying our conversation.’
‘Come on,’ he said, giving me another shove. ‘I have something special for you. You can still serve the greater good.’
The road was not busy, which was fortunate since it took me a long time to shuffle across to the far side. I felt enormously decrepit. I felt this because it was true. And there I was, standing in front of the main entrance to the hotel, with Frenkel’s wrestler’s torso pressed up against my back. I could feel the sharp point of his knife against my kidney. ‘Straight through the lobby and into the lift,’ he said, into my ear.
‘The key.’ I said. ‘I’ll need to collect the key from the concierge.’
‘You really think I’m a fucking idiot,’ said Frenkel, not unkindly. ‘That I should fall for such a thing? You didn’t leave the key with the concierge. She’s still up there in the room. You can just knock on the door, and she’ll let you in.’
The lift door opened as soon as I pressed the button, and closed as soon as we were inside. I could smell Frenkel’s body odour, shrimpy and dense. That I could smell it suggested that it was a potent stench indeed. The blade he was holding against my back had poked through the cloth of my coat, and my shirt, and my vest, and was a sharp point of hurt on my skin. The upward motion of the lift in motion made my stomach quail.
At the top the lift door opened, and Frenkel shoved me out, and into the corridor. It was ten yards, at most, along the dingy thread-bare carpet to our door. I was trying to think on my feet, but my bashed old brain was not functioning well. ‘This isn’t the right floor,’ I said.
‘Yes it is. Go along and knock on the door,’ he told me.
I stepped towards the wrong door and lifted my fist, but Frenkel ‘a!-a!’ -ed me, and angled my body in the right direction.
I was carried inevitably towards the door.
‘I don’t understand why you want to kill her,’ I said. It was, to a degree, infuriating to me that I felt so little by way of fear. But I had a bone-deep sense of the intellectual and emotional wrongness of any harm coming to Dora.
‘What’s she to you?’ he snapped. ‘A foreigner. A stranger. You barely know her.’
‘I barely know Ms Norman,’ I conceded.
‘So you’ll be barely upset when I kill her.’
‘I know almost nothing about her,’ I said, slightly stiffly. ‘I have spent only a few days in her company. She is from a different nation, and a different generation, to me. I would have to say that the word that best describes the relationship between herself and myself would be engaged.’
‘Engaged?’
‘Yes.’
‘To be married?’
‘Certainly not engaged to be stabbed,’ I said.
‘Konsty!’ gasped Frenkel. But I saw at once that he was not gasping, but laughing. ‘You never cease to amaze me. You old goat!’
‘In the circumstances . . .’
‘In the circumstances it’s a great shame she has to die,’ he said. ‘Before she’s been able to enjoy the conjugal delight of your wheezy old body humping about on top of her!’
I flipped through the pages of my mental notepad, but there was almost nothing there. I had to do something. I couldn’t permit this man to murder the woman I loved. ‘Ivan,’ I said, ‘we’ve been through a lot together. You said you considered me a friend. I am asking you as a friend - do not kill her. I’ll help you do what you want to do. I’ll do anything you tell me. There’s no need for her to die.’
‘I tell you what,’ said Frenkel. ‘Do as I say, and I’ll not kill her. Engaged! You getting married again? And to an American! Hey - you could claim US citizenship! Assuming the authorities ever let you go there.’
‘That’s not why I’m doing it.’
‘No? Why, then?’
‘I love her.’
And Frenkel laughed like a barking seal. ‘Splendid! Splendid! Well, knock on the door, introduce me properly to your wife-to-be. ’
‘You promise not to kill her?’
‘I promise. On the understanding that you promise to do everything I tell you.’
‘It’s understood.’
‘Go on then.’
I knocked. Almost at once Dora opened the door. The light was behind her and her face was enshadowed, though I could see enough to see that was smiling. More, I could see that she was looking past me to the man behind expecting to see Saltykov. But there was no mistaking burly Frenkel for scrawny Saltykov. Her expression darkened.
With a hefty push Frenkel threw me into the room, straight past her. There wasn’t even time for me to reach out and touch her as I shot in. I tried to balance myself on my rickety legs, staggered several steps and began to fall, striking the back of the settee with my hip and collapsing over. Then I was on the ground, moaning with the pain, and struggling ineffectually to get up. Dora stepped back, her dainty feet moving with characteristic nimbleness to balance her large body. Frenkel came in. The blade flashed in his hand, and went into Dora’s side. It came out bloody, and then it went in again.
She did not cry out. She danced back another two steps, with her head cocked to the side and her face crumpled with pain, or surprise, or the combination of the two; and she rolled down onto the floor with a thud. Hungry knifeblade - to take the life first of Saltykov in the park, and yet not to be satiated! Straight away to take the life of gracious, beautiful Dora Norman in that hotel room! How strange it was that an old and feeble man, such as I, could be blown to pieces by a grenade and yet survive; where a young and vigorous woman, such as she, could be killed by a few inches of polished metal.
I cried out, ‘Dora!’
Frenkel was shutting the door to the room. ‘Get up,’ he said to me. ‘Get off the floor. This is no time for lounging about.’
It’s a mistake to talk about being full of grief, as if grief were a tumour, or a full stomach, or some manner of swelling. Grief is an absence. It doesn’t push, it sucks. To make a metaphorical cut or slice in the sealed membrane of the grieving self is not to permit matter to gush out. On the contrary, it is to permit the unbearable world to come surging in. I had lain there and watched as Frenkel stuffed a knife blade into the pliant flesh of the woman I loved. ‘What have you done?’
He was hauling me to my feet, and shoving me over towards the window. ‘Sacrifices have to be made,’ he said. He still had the knifeblade in his right hand. There was blood.
‘You promised me you wouldn’t kill her,’ I observed, nearly falling over my own feet.
‘A KGB officer not keeping his promises? You amaze me.’
He shoved me.
‘I can’t believe it!’ I cried. ‘[Dora? My love?]’ Shove, and shove, and I was at the window. ‘[Dora, can you hear me?]’ I was calling. ‘Dora!’ I could see her, over Frenkel’s shoulder, a heap of flesh piled motionless on the floor.
‘She’s dead,’ said Frenkel. ‘Forget about her. Consider instead your own imminent extinction.’
I was pressed up against the glass now. The prospect of my own death did not bother me in the slightest. ‘You could have killed me at the hospital,’ I said.
He was holding the knife against my torso with his right hand and fiddling with the latch for the window with his left. ‘I rebuked Nik thoroughly for his failure, don’t worry.’
‘I don’t mean the red-haired man,’ I said, still trying to see past Frenkel to the body of my fiancée, humped upon the carpet like a small hill of flesh. ‘I mean when you visited me personally.’
‘I never visited you in hospital. What, you think I’m going to bring you a bundle of flowers?’
‘When you injected this thing in my neck.’ I wasn’t really concentrating on what I said. I was straining to look at Dora’s ample body, lying on the carpet. Not moving.
Frenkel had stopped fiddling with the latch. He was looking at me.
‘What did you say?’
‘You stuck me in the neck with this mosquito bite.’
‘I never did that,’ he said. He was speaking, all of a sudden, curiously slowly.
‘I remember it.’
‘You don’t remember,’ he insisted.
‘Again with your hypnotism nonsense? That tone of voice? I remember what I remember.’
He looked at me long and hard. Then he looked at the knife in his hand, turning the blade back and forth. ‘Believe me, I never came to your hospital. It was under Militia guard, you know. Nik failing in his bid to have you killed meant I’d missed my chance.’
‘You came,’ I told him, casting my mind back, ‘in the middle of the night, and you shone a torch in my face, and then you reached round and jabbed me in the neck.’
‘And how did I get past the guards?’
‘You told me you were invisible.’
‘I told you that!’ he said. It looked at though his face was about to crumple into anger, or perhaps even despair, but then, with that odd little knight’s move of the emotions that was characteristic of him, he suddenly burst out laughing. ‘I did tell you that! I told you I was invisible? Fuck, I was invisible!’
‘If you’d simply killed me there,’ I said, trying to access the full range of anguish I knew to be inside me, ‘then I wouldn’t have been able to lead you back to her now. I wish you’d done it then.’
Frenkel was looking at me in a very strange way. ‘It wasn’t the hospital, Konsty.’
‘But I remember you! You came in the middle of the night!’
‘Ah! Now couldn’t that have been a dream? Don’t you have dreams in the middle of the night, like everybody else?’
Of course it could have been a dream. ‘On the other hand,’ I said. ‘This lump is definitely in my neck. The mosquito definitely bit me. Even though the weather is much too cold for mosquitoes.’ Saying this brought the memory of Trofim’s huge bovine face swimming in front of me. I was back, momentarily, in the Moscow restaurant; back in the place where Frenkel had told me his whole peculiar abduction story. I blinked.
I blinked.
I was in a Kiev hotel room, and the woman I loved was lying dead upon the carpet, and the man who killed her was standing right in front of me. ‘You know what?’ he was saying. ‘It’s remarkable.’
‘What is this thing you’ve put in my neck, anyway?’
‘It’s very precious, old man. Miniature and powerful and made by no human hands.’
‘Still with this? Genuine alien technology? Give it up, Jan! You and I know better than that.’
‘I’m very struck that you remembered,’ he mused. ‘I suppose it’s the brain injury. Who knows what effect that would have?’
‘Mashed up,’ I said. ‘But I’m still capable of feeling grief.’ I wished that were true.
‘Konsty, you goat,’ he chortled. ‘I did jab you in the neck. I did it in a seedy little restaurant in Moscow, weeks ago. Weeks and weeks. Then I made you forget that I had done it. I made you forget, and you really had forgotten for good. And now here you are remembering! What I mean to say is: the memory has been jumbled up out of the ooze of your brain. You’ve relocated the experience in your memory. I was invisible to you when I jabbed you. So you’ve relocated the memory to the night-time, when people generally are invisible. And you’ve attached it to the hospital. It didn’t happen in the hospital.’
‘I remember that restaurant.’
‘Of course you do!’
‘Are you saying,’ I asked him, ‘that you hypnotised me? Are you a hypnotist?’ A thought occurred to me. ‘Did you hypnotise Trofim into seeing aliens? Little green men?’
‘No, no. Hypnotism is no good for those sorts of special effects. What hypnotism is good for is encouraging you not to notice things that are there.’
‘There’s no such thing as hypnotism,’ I said.
‘There’s no such thing as hypnotism,’ he agreed. ‘No magical trance state in the brain, no. It is nothing. Shall I tell you what it is? It is wholly a question of suggestibility. I’ll tell you something else. It works best with people who are conditioned to respect authority and who are used to doing what authority figures tell them. The Soviet Union is full of such people. Most of this century has been an experiment in creating an entire population of such people. Ex-army are best of all. When somebody with a suitably authoritative manner tells you something, you tend to believe it. Even if what they are telling you is: I am invisible, you cannot see me, you will not remember this.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Isn’t it, though? Still, you didn’t see me, and didn’t remember. Until that explosion knocked your brain about.’
‘Mesmerism, though?’
‘It’s a technical discipline - one mastered by the KGB.’
‘KGB mind control?’ I scoffed.
‘It’s not mind control,’ he said. ‘It’s alternate realities. It’s tuning the brain into an alternate timeline. It’s purely technical - there’s a generator, and it superimposes a slightly different quantum reality upon the . . .’ He put a finger out and rotated an imaginary telephone dial in the air in front of him. ‘Etcetera and etcetera,’ he concluded, airily.
‘How very plausible,’ I observed, craning my neck to see Dora’s body.
‘It’s of especial use for a secret policeman,’ he explained. ‘I say, “You can’t see me,” and you can’t see me. The important thing is in making sure you can’t see certain things. Things,’ he added, slipping the knife into his pocket, and readying his stance, prior to pushing me, ‘like aliens.’
‘You want people not to see the aliens?’
‘People not seeing the aliens is precisely the point!’ This seemed to animate him tremendously. ‘You need to understand. Getting people to see the aliens is everything we have been working towards! People are distressingly good at not seeing things. Have you never had the experience of looking for a pen, and searching your desk, and looking everywhere, and only at the end realising that the pen was right there in front of your face the whole time?’
‘The elephant in the room,’ I said.
‘Exactly - that’s it exactly. We are trying to get people to see the fucking elephant.’
‘Not pen?’
‘The elephant is a better analogy.’
‘It is a bigger analogy, I suppose.’
He ignored this. ‘If things go to plan - and you have been a fucking pain in the arse about that, by the way - but if they go to plan then people will suddenly see the elephant that’s been in front of them all along. Like now: you’re chatting with me, and in doing so you’re entirely failing to see the big thing here, your own death. It’s right outside the window, there - look - huge, and you can’t even see it.’ And the strange thing is that there was something outside the window: vast, metal, oval or spherical; it occupied the sky; it hung in air. It was so huge you couldn’t miss it. You could not not see it. But I looked again, and understood th
at it was too huge to be seen. I couldn’t see anything: just sky, and the Kiev skyline. As if it might be: hold a coin-sized circle of glass, with its shine and its scratches, at arm’s length and you’ll see it. And hold it in front of your eye and you’ll see it. But your cornea, shining and scratched and closer than anything else, you cannot see. For a moment I saw the machine in the sky, and then I could only see sky.
‘There’s nothing out there.’ I said, aloud. I didn’t say this for Frenkel’s benefit. I suppose it was for my benefit. I suppose it was to confirm that I had never seen the thing in the sky.
‘Out the window you go, old friend. You can take a closer look, as you go down.’
He stepped towards me, and his left hand clamped onto (because I was facing him) my right arm, and his right arm clamped on to my left arm. Behind me the window was unlatched. A quick shove and I would tumble against it, and it would swing open, and I would fall.
‘The elephant in the room,’ I said again.
‘That’s it.’
‘The elephant is - in the room.’
Dora was right behind him.
She was holding a book in her hand: a thousand-page hardback book with a gaudy-coloured cover illustration of tentacled aliens. ‘[Mr Frenkel,]’ she asked, in the politest tones, ‘[would you sign my copy of your novel?]’
Frenkel’s expression twitched at the sound of her voice. He craned round to look back over his shoulder, and tried to twist his torso to face her. His hand went towards the pocket in which he had cached his knife; but I saw what he was doing and my two hands went towards his hand. He was stronger than me, but I was strong enough, and motivated enough, to grab his wrist and yank his hand down below the level of his jacket. I did this to prevent him grasping his knife. He strained to lift it and get inside his jacket pocket.
‘[Oh my mistake!]’ said Dora, and now I could hear the strain in her voice. ‘[This novel is not by you. It is by Konstantin Skvorecky.]’
‘Wait,’ grunted Frenkel, still straining to pull out his knife. He was reaching with his right arm, being right handed. My right side had been weakened by my injury. But luckily I was facing him, so I was using my left hand to prevent him from bringing out his knife.
