He jerked his narrow head to look at me. “No.”
“Does she work for the KGB?”
“No. She is my wife, and that is all.”
“Your legal wife?”
A slight hesitation. “Yes.”
I didn’t go into it. The art of interrogation is a paradox: you learn more from the questions than the answers, if you know how to bring out those questions by your silences; you also learn more from the way the answers come than from what they purport to tell you. Most of them are deliberate lies and this is accepted by both parties, but lies will protect you only up to a point: the point where you produce so many of them that you get lost in the confusion of your own making; the truth is easily remembered because it exists, but lies demand a trained memory and the stress can become overwhelming. This again is paradoxicaclass="underline" the more you lie, the more you reveal the truth.
She wasn’t, for instance, his legal wife. Because of the hesitation.
“Does she have any connection with the KGB?”
“No. I’ve told you, she — ”
“Or any other police or intelligence or security organization?”
“No. None.”
“Is she afraid of anyone?”
“Of course not!”
“So she doesn’t need protection.”
“No.”
“Even the protection of a gun?”
His hesitations lasted only a fraction of a second but they were beautifully consistent.
“No.”
“All right. Now I want a general preliminary picture: your contacts with the KGB, your contacts with Peking, then liaison, couriers, communications and security background. Take your time.”
He hissed in his breath again and began pointing with that long nose of his like a parrot trapped in a cage and I watched his hands because they’d be the first sign of movement and at some stage in the interrogation he was going to try making a break for it.
I could feel the tension in him and it was communicable: I was getting on edge. There was something about this man that I couldn’t place, some extra dimension that explained the inner shaking of his nerves. All right, he knew I could blow him and he knew what they’d do to him as a result; but I’ve been in the company of men in the final stages of stress and I’ve been there myself and all I knew as I sat in the cramped confines of the Trabant with Alexei Kirinski beside me was that his tension was a part of him and not wholly induced.
“I have no regular contacts,” he said, shivering.
“Names,” I said, “come on.”
“But I tell you I — ”
“I want their names.”
He began making them up and I let him because their names wouldn’t mean a thing to me and he didn’t seem to know that: he wasn’t KGB himself because even those people are put through a modicum of training and he wasn’t even a beginner — you don’t just walk away from a missed rendezvous and settle for a bowl of soup without even looking behind you.
We worked at it for fifteen minutes and I didn’t interrupt except to goad him on, and after a time he picked up the tricks and started hesitating deliberately to make me believe I’d asked a sensitive question.
“There is no direct contact with Peking. I use couriers for material, through Yumen.”
“What about signals?”
He hesitated and for no reason: there was no equipment in his apartment and he could throw me another bunch of phony names and get away with it.
“I signal through a frontier post.”
“Both ways?”
“No.”
“Come on then — which way?”
“From here to Sinkiang.”
“What about the other way — look, I want you to go on talking.”
“The other way I use a contact in Yelingrad.”
With a transmitter and cyphers and onward transmission to his contacts in the KGB, so forth. I let him go on talking while I listened for the right lie in the wrong place and watched the scene through the windscreen. Only a dozen people had crossed the waste ground since we’d got here and only a few vehicles had come past the corner, all of them with chains on. The cold was coming into the car and slowly cancelling out the heat of our bodies and Kirinski began rubbing his hands together but his teeth went on chattering as he talked.
“How much money do they pay you?”
“Not very much.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred rubles a month.”
“This bonuses?”
“Bonuses? What kind?”
“For a special assignment, or special information. There must be bonuses.” It’s a major part of Russian economic thinking.
“I received an extra hundred rubles for the decoy airfield photographs on the Chinese side of the frontier.”
“What about Peking? How much do they pay?”
He was tremendously fast and caught my throat with a curving ridge-hand before I could block it and followed this with his elbow rising as my head came forward on the reflex but I avoided it and formed a four-finger eye shot with my left hand but it wasn’t any good because all that tension was coming out of him and he was like a wildcat and I stopped trying to do anything formal because any kind of reaction would have to be instinctive if I were going to get out of this alive.
The first thing he’d go for was the gun but the magazine was under the seat and he knew that. The second thing he’d go for was the envelope because without that stuff I couldn’t blow him and he knew mat too. At present there wasn’t time for him to go for either the gun or the envelope because I was catching up on the initiative and had his left arm in a clamp while I went for his face again. He was trying to get leverage against the dashboard with his foot and I saw the heel of his black leather boot gouge into the speedometer as he straightened his leg and got the pressure he needed and started to use it, his shoulder braced against my throat and his right hand darting for the eyes and missing and darting free again as I blocked him every time until he used a wedge-hand against the throat and half-succeeded: I began choking and brought my knee up and smashed it into his ribs and forced some of the pressure off.
The horn had sounded three or four times because we were milling inside the confines of the car and whatever we hit we smashed: the windscreen went and I saw his boot rip from the heel to the top because this stuff wasn’t safety glass. The envelope had slipped down between the driving-seat and the door and I freed my left hand and tried to push it under the seat but he saw what I was doing because if he couldn’t get the gun he’d settle for the envelope: it was all he really needed. The horn was sounding again and I realized I had my knee against it as he wrenched his arm free and drove a palm-hand downwards and connected with a shoulder-blade.
I tried three consecutive eye-darts and they fell short because my arm was half locked but they worried him and he spun sideways and got purchase again on the dashboard and kicked away from it and broke the seat frame and sent me on my back with the effect of a rabbit chop as my neck hit the edge of the rear seat: bright flashing lights and momentary paralysis, dangerous and I rolled over to miss his boot as it crashed down and ripped some of the seat fabric away, sensation of losing touch, sounds muted, felt him lurch across to the driver’s side as someone began shouting, which I didn’t understand unless it was the noise the horn had been making, face at the window and a gloved hand shooting out and trying to stop Kirinski as he hit the door open and pitched through and began running, knocking one of them down there were more people here and I got up and heard someone asking what had happened, was it a thief, so forth, down on my knees so I made a lot of effort and got up again, still choking because of the wedge-hand strike, still seeing flashes.
Men running and calling out stop thief stop thief and I told them no, it was just a quarrel that was all and someone said hospital and I made another effort and said no, I didn’t want a hospital. That would mean the police and statements and what I had to do was get away from here as soon as I could because he’d taken the envelope and that was going to change the whole situation: he’d let the KGB loose on me now because there was nothing to stop him.