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‘Four,’ he said, very distinctly.

The streetlights came on as I sat back. I could see that I had been kneeling in his blood, and that my trousers were marked with it. And as I looked up I could see two Militia officers, guns out, running along the Zholtovskovo, running with furious haste and towards me.

CHAPTER 8

They put me in a basement cell with no windows. There was an electric light bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling. The blank walls were covered with tooth-sized white tiles. I sat on the bench. After a while I lay down on the bench. It being a Militia cell the bench was long enough for me to lie upon. Had it been KGB the bench would have been too short, and set into the wall at enough of an angle to threaten to roll me off it and onto the floor, so as to make sleep harder. But the Militia are ordinary police, and a fair amount of their work involves locking drunks away and letting them sleep themselves law-abiding. The KGB, conversely, prefer a sleep-deprived prisoner. A prisoner is more useful to the KGB exhausted.

In another reality, perhaps, I stayed awake and plotted my escape. But in this reality, I fell asleep. A couple of hours at the most.

I woke at the sound of footsteps outside, and then the door sang its hinge-scraping song — a pure, soprano tone. Two officers roused me and led me upstairs, both of them as tall and broad and impassive as Klaatu himself. One was carrying handcuffs; but he took one look at me, elderly and shuffling as I was, and evidently concluded they were superfluous.

It was the small hours of the night, and the station was quiet. Decades of cigarette smoking had imparted a warm, stale quality to the declivities and crevices of the building. The smell was a mixture of tobacco, body odour, upholstery and a metallic quality hard, precisely, to identify: gunmetal, perhaps. I was sat at a table in an interrogation room and left to my own devices for perhaps quarter of an hour. The table, no larger than a statue’s plinth, was crowded with enamel mugs: white sides, blue-lipped as if with cold, I counted nine of them. Some were empty. Some held inch-thick discs of cold, oily-looking coffee, as black as alien eyes. I pondered why they had sat me down at this table, with all these used mugs, but my brain was not working as smoothly as would have been good. It was the dead of night. I am an old, tired man.

Eventually a young officer unlocked the door, gathered all the old mugs onto a tray and carried them away without saying a word. The door closed and the key turned with a noise like a blown raspberry; and then, without pause, it blew another raspberry as it was unlocked. The door swung open again.

‘My name,’ said the officer, sitting himself down opposite me, ‘is Zembla.’ He put a tape recorder on the table between us.

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ I said.

‘Are you prepared to assist us in our enquiries?’

‘By all means.’

He peered at me with two midnight-coloured eyes. The cloth of his uniform creaked as he shifted in the chair. On went the recorder. ‘Officer Zembla, interrogation February 20th 1986. Suspect to state his name.’

‘Konstantin Skvorecky.’

‘Occupation?’

‘I work as a translator.’

Zembla looked hard at me. ‘As it might be, foreign languages?’

‘As it might be.’

‘In particular?’

‘The English particular. I speak a little French too.’

‘That’s a job?’

‘Doesn’t it sound like one to you?’

‘Just speaking a language?’ said Zembla. ‘Not really. You speak English? But isn’t England full of people who speak English?’

‘True,’ I said. ‘But not many of them speak Russian.’

‘Why go to England for that? The Soviet Union contains millions of people who speak Russian!’

I looked closely at him to see if he was joking, but he seemed to be serious. ‘You make an interesting point, comrade,’ I said eventually.

‘Anyway. Never mind that. So. You were present at the crime scene?’

‘I haven’t been told what the crime is.’

‘James Coyne, an American citizen, was discovered dead on Zholtovskovo Street by two officers. You were discovered kneeling next to him. This is a serious matter.’

‘Death is rarely otherwise.’

Zembla switched the tape recorder off. ‘The Americanness of the deceased is serious,’ he said, with a poorly repressed fury. ‘Death is absolutely fucking ordinary and everyday in this job, comrade. You understand?’

‘I think so.’

Death is not serious. Death is fucking comedy, as far as I’m concerned. Death is the jester, yeah? He—’ Zembla turned his hand over and back in the manner of an individual searching for right words. ‘He, he does whatever it is that jesters do.’

‘Juggling balls?’ I suggested.

Zembla’s face stiffened. It possessed, in repose, a really quite impressive sculptural quality: massy and stone-coloured. Then his lips started working, and eventually words came out. ‘I’ll cut off your balls and juggle them in the air you fucking little cock-end. You understand?’

‘Perfectly, comrade.’

‘Don’t fuck me around.’

‘No, comrade.’

The tape went on again. ‘Describe how you came to be beside the deceased.’

‘I was walking with him along Zholtovskovo Street when he was killed.’

‘You killed him?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘You knew him, though?’

‘I met him for the first time today. Or perhaps, yesterday. If it is now past midnight.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘I was working as a translator in the Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange. Mr Coyne was there, together with a Miss Norman, discussing—’

‘Wait!’ Zembla took out a notepad. ‘Also an American?’

‘Yes.’

‘Spell her name.’ I did so, and he wrote it down, tracing out large letters like a child with a crayon. ‘His wife? Mistress?’

‘I’ve really no idea, comrade. They were both representing the American Church of Scientology with a view to establishing a cultural exchange in Moscow.’

‘That’s what they said?’

‘Yes, comrade.’

He leered at me. ‘You believed them?’

‘It seems to me that the business of an official translator is to translate,’ I said. ‘Not to believe or disbelieve.’

Zembla’s chunky thumb went back to the tape recorder. Off. He leaned forward. ‘You remember what I said about your balls?’

‘Juggling them, you mean?’

‘You remember that? Do you have memory problems, old man? Or do you remember? You think, perhaps, that was just a figure of speech? It wasn’t a figure of speech. I will literally cut off your testicles and throw them about this room. Do you think I’ve never done it before? Do you think I’ve never cut off a man’s balls?’

‘I’d imagine there’s a considerable loss of blood.’

He glowered at me. ‘Loss of blood!’ he said. ‘That’s right. Not to mention the loss of balls. That’s another loss. That’s a more significant loss. Blood can always be transfused, can’t it? But there’s no hospital in the world will transfuse you new balls.’ He let me ponder this medical undeniability for a moment. Then he said, in a gloating tone, ‘Do you think we didn’t know about Dora Norman? Well we did. We know all about Coyne, and his business here. You don’t fool us.’