‘As a political!’
‘Nevertheless. You were the last person to see the deceased alive. You admit you were walking along the Zholtovskovo with him. Then one of two things happens: either he is snared by a rope and hauled upward, or else you and he quarrel and fight. The latter seems more likely, to us, than the former. Either way, the next thing, the American is lying on the ground with a broken neck.’
‘Look at me!’ I said. ‘Note my physical decrepitude. Do you think I have the strength of arm to break a man’s neck?’
‘The crime is being investigated, comrade,’ Liski said, pulling the door closed as he went out, ‘and perhaps other leads will emerge; but as it stands — I’d advise you to cultivate patience.’
He slammed the door behind him. I lay back on the bench. There didn’t seem to be much more to do.
I slept, I sat, I slept some more. Many hours passed, although in that windowless space I could not gauge exactly how many. Eventually I was removed from the cell by two militia officers and marched up the stairs into a room with windows, which at last gave me some sense of the time of day. It was now late afternoon. It had been raining in the day, and the wet rooftops were lacquered yellow by the low sun. Light came in shafts through the windows. I was led through to the captain’s office. I was not offered a seat.
The captain, seated behind his desk, looked up at me with a fauvist face rather startling in the severity of its primary colours: choleric red skin, intensely blue eyes, and white smoothed-back hair.
‘I have yet to be charged with a crime,’ I said. ‘I believe that under the law I must be officially charged, so as to know the crime of which I have been accused.’
‘Konstantin Skvorecky,’ said the captain, in a voice simultaneously deep and buzzing. ‘We’ve had interventions from higher authorities. From high up in the government no less.’
Perhaps I was a little drunk with lack of sleep. ‘You misunderstand the nature of government, comrade,’ I said, in a tone of polite correction. ‘It comes from the people, from the ground up. No altitude there.’
‘Believe me, friend,’ said the captain, signing a document. ‘You have no cause for levity.’ He coughed, but when he spoke again the wasp was still in his voice box. ‘We are releasing you into the custody of the KGB.’ He said this as he might have said May God have mercy on your soul.
‘KGB?’ I repeated, with some alarm.
‘Indeed. You are still under arrest, of course. There, signed and completed.’ This last, I understood, was addressed not to me, but to somebody standing behind me. ‘He’s yours now.’
‘Thank you, captain,’ said a familiar voice. It took me a moment to place it.
‘We would appreciate,’ continued the captain, ‘if you could keep us informed of developments. The murder of an American, you know…’
‘Oh, I’ll undertake personally to keep you in the loop.’
I turned. The first person I saw was the vast frame of Trofim, tall as Andre the Giant. And standing beside him, zoo-keeper-like with his gorillan charge, Ivan Frenkel. ‘Hello again, Konstantin,’ said Frenkel. And then, with a slow distinctiveness, he smiled broadly.
CHAPTER 10
Frenkel and Trofim led me away. They did not even handcuff me. Like the Militia, they clearly thought there was no point in restraining so elderly and broken-down a figure. ‘You told me you were a lowly employee of an obscure ministry,’ I remonstrated with Frenkel mildly.
‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’
‘You certainly didn’t tell me you were KGB.’
‘You are upset that I kept my membership of the KGB secret from you,’ he observed. ‘Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that the KGB is a secret organisation?’
Trofim’s huge hand was on my shoulder as we stepped through the main entrance and onto the street. The afternoon was in the process of burning coldly into the deeper blue of evening. The streetlamps had been lit. The sky over the roofs was a garish lamination of yellow, salmon, lime and — higher up — dark-blue and black. Light shimmied and shifted on the wet pavement, like an untrustworthy thing. There were puddles in the gutter in which vodka, or petroleum, mixed oily rainbows. A large black auto was parked at the side of the road, and into this I was shuffled, Trofim’s enormous hand on the top of my head to make me duck.
The driver, sitting up front, was a gentleman I had not previously met: a skinny fellow with red hair trimmed close over the back of his head, and a hard-edged, freckled face. The cut of his hair swirled like rusty iron filings on a magnet. This is the fellow who, in a matter of some few months, would shoot a bullet from his standard-issue Makarov automatic pistol right through my heart. I don’t mean to confuse you: but it seems fair to give you, the reader of this memoir, a glimpse of my future; and the glimpse is of a bullet bursting from the end of his pistol and going directly through the heart in the middle of my chest — out the other side, too.
We’ll come to that in due course. I suppose I am saying, at this point in the narrative, keep an eye on this red-headed man.
Trofim got in the front passenger seat; which is to say, he somehow folded himself small enough to squeeze into the front passenger seat. Frenkel sat himself down next to me. ‘Off we go, lads,’ he said.
The car growled as a dog growls when somebody menaces its bone. It pulled smoothly away, and into traffic.
Frenkel sat in contemplative silence for a while before addressing me. ‘It was one day in the 1950s,’ he said in a serious voice. ‘I had occasion, on account of my work, to look at an atlas. It struck me then — there was Russia. I put my hand,’ and he held his broad hand up in front of me, ‘over Siberia and the east. Let’s not concern ourselves with them, I thought. Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, that’s enough. And here was Germany, East and West, so small. The Mammoth and the Polecat. Goliath and David. Excepting only that Goliath was us, and Goliath won. Germany, such a small place, so underpopulated — compared, I mean, with us. Then I thought: We were so joyful about winning the war! We thought we were David and they were Goliath. But it was the other way about ! We were much bigger than them. Defeating them was as inevitable as Josef Vissarionovich constantly claimed in his wartime speeches.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a shock, you know? Realising that.’
‘Tell me, Jan,’ I said. ‘Were you abducted by space-aliens? Did that really happen to you?’
‘You’re not listening to me, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ Frenkel replied, sternly. ‘My revelation? It was the Force of Necessity. There’s nothing else in the cosmos. You know science fiction.’
‘Not for many years. I haven’t kept up.’
‘You know one of the main varieties of American science fiction? The alternative history. And you know the most popular form of alternative history?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘They call it Hitler Wins. It’s that mode in which the Nazis are victorious in the war. Dozens of novels about what the world would have been like. Imagine!’
‘I imagine things would have been rather unpleasant.’
‘Here’s my point: Soviet science fiction writers never write that sort of story. Alternative history has no pedigree in Soviet science fiction. Do you know why? Because we understand necessity. Russia could not have lost to Hitler. Postulating what things would have been like had he won is meaningless to us.’
‘The moral of this story?’ I prompted, feeling light headed. I had not, you see, eaten during my Militia captivity.