‘Open your mouth, you fucking idiot,’ he ordered.
I opened my mouth. So, I noticed, did Trofim, although he snapped it shut soon enough when he realised that his superior had not been addressing him.
The barrel went between my teeth. I tasted the distinctive, slightly marine flavour of gunmetal.
‘No more nonsense,’ Frenkel declared, in a tone of businesslike savagery. ‘You know where the fat woman is hiding. You are going to tell me. If you tell me, and if you are not lying to me, I shall lock you away. If you don’t tell me, or if you lie to me, I shall pull this trigger, here, now, in this car.’ He yanked his hand up, hinging the pistol downwards against my lower teeth. ‘And here’s a KGB trick: I’ll shoot you down your throat. That way I don’t get your fucking brains all over the interior of my car. It will have the added bonus of causing you to die slowly and in great pain from internal bleeding. Do. You. Understand?’
‘Gghhah,’ I affirmed.
‘It is possible,’ he went on, ‘when one has a prisoner in this position, to shoot so that the bullet goes right through the gut and exits through the anus. But it is much more painful, and less messy, if I angle the trajectory slightly so that the bullet goes into the inside of your thigh. Where is she?’
‘Ghaah ghg ga-gahh, ghhah geh-h-ho gughu,’ I said.
There was a silence. In a low, controlled voice, like a bomb disposal expert about to remove a vital component from an infernal device, Frenkel said, ‘I’m going to slide this gun out of your carious mouth, Konsty. When it is out you can repeat what you just said. If it is a wisecrack, or if you say that you don’t know, then these will be the last seconds of your mortal life.’
He pulled the gun barrel out of my mouth. I wriggled my tongue against the inside of my mouth. ‘Thank you, Jan,’ I said.
‘Where,’ he asked, in a low voice, ‘is she?’
‘I don’t have the address, just a telephone number,’ I said.
Frenkel pondered this. ‘Write it down,’ he told me. He pulled out a small piece of card and a pencil stub from his pocket. I scribbled my ex-wife’s telephone number on the card and handed it back. My jaw ached. My eye was still spooling out luminous patterns into my brain. I couldn’t see properly.
Frenkel took the card, and pencil, back from me. ‘Then this is what we are going to do,’ he said, calmly. ‘Nik’ — this to the driver — ‘take us to the Heights.’
The car scraped to life, and we pulled away from the kerb. Nik, the one with the cropped red hair, did not signal, or even look where he was going. One car was forced to swerve, and several others to brake, but nobody sounded their horns, or shook their fists. Ordinary Muscovites had no desire to tangle with official business.
‘Trofim, you are to take him to the safe room,’ ordered Frenkel.
‘At the top of the building?’
‘Of course at the top of the building, you ox!’ The car slowed, turned a corner, and then accelerated. ‘Take him up there, make him phone the fat woman. You,’ he said to me, ‘will tell her to go to — I don’t know, somewhere a tourist would know.’
‘Red Square?’ I suggested.
‘Yes. Tell her you’ll meet her in Red Square. She’ll be able to find that. Tell her to wait outside the GUM. Tell her to go straight there: to get a taxi, and go straight to the GUM side of the square. Tell her that you must meet her, absolutely and straight away. Are you listening to this, ox?’
‘Sir,’ said Trofim.
‘Make sure he says all that. If he says anything else, or tries any nonsense, kill him.’
‘Sir.’
‘And if you do have to kill him, remember to put him in the chute.’
‘Sir.’
‘The chute, you hear? Don’t just leave him lying there. Yes?’
Trofim had coloured. ‘Sir.’
‘In fact, the best thing would be to take him to the chute, put his head in and shoot him there. Please, I’m asking you as one civilised man to another, please try not to get too much mess on the furnishings. Yes?’
Trofim nodded. Nik, the driver, was chuckling quietly.
‘Don’t break anything, no?’
‘No, comrade.’
‘And no blood on the carpet this time?’
‘No, comrade.’
‘I must say I hope there will be no need for the chute,’ I said, in a worried voice.
‘Do as I tell you and there may not be,’ said Frenkel, complacently. ‘Konsty, you can still be of use to me. You can be of use by delivering us this woman, obviously, but perhaps beyond that as well. You may still have a use, and usefulness is your best bet at extending your lifespan. There may be a future for you after all.’
‘As a science fiction writer,’ I said, ‘I have a particular interest in the future.’
CHAPTER 11
The car pulled up outside a tall block, in a uniform and fairly clean street of tall houses. Trofim clambered and lumbered out of the car, unpacking himself, as it were, from the front seat. He opened the door for me.
‘Trofim will look after you,’ said Frenkel.
‘An ambiguous phrase,’ I noted.
Frenkel laughed. ‘Upstairs with him, Trof. Take him to the room. The first thing he does is make the call. After that, settle him in. If he differs by so much as a thread from what we agreed — settle his final account.’
‘His account, sir?’
‘Kill him, you idiot.’
‘Comrade,’ said Trofim, meaning yes, and snapping to attention on the pavement. I realised this about Trofim: that, when in his military mode, he used that word as a universal signifier. The other thing I realised about Trofim, as he ushered me through the main entrance to the building, was that he really was enormous. He would have stood six foot six in his stockinged feet, excepting only that it was impossible to imagine him ever removing his boots, or going off duty. He appeared to have borrowed, or more likely to have been issued by the authorities with, the musculature of a much larger animal than a human: a bear, say. Or a Grendel. His neck was thicker than his head. Indeed, his neck was thicker than my waist.
We were at the foot of the stairs. ‘Is there no lift?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Yes,’ he added, as an afterthought.
‘Yes there is a lift? Why do we not avail ourselves of the lift?’
He stared at me as if I had posed a metaphysical conundrum.
‘It’s not working?’ I prompted, after long seconds. ‘Is that it?’
‘Comrade,’ he said to me, tipping his chin to the stairway.
I peered up the stairwell. ‘How many flights?’
‘Seventh floor.’
I sighed. ‘I’ll warn you now, comrade, I am not as fit as once I was.’ He greeted this news with his default, meaty impassivity. His general bearing was somewhere between I don’t care and I don’t understand.
‘Off we go, then,’ I said, gloomily.
We ascended one flight of stairs, half a floor, before my lungs began complaining. Another flight and I was gasping like a cracked steamvalve. Comrade Trofim walked moodily on and I followed, but by the time we reached the second-floor stairwell landing my breath was positively hooting. ‘I need to rest, comrade,’ I gasped.
He loomed over me. ‘Your lungs, is it?’
‘An expert diagnosis, comrade’ I said, between breaths. ‘Old model, you see. Early revolutionary design. Single cylinder, two-stroke lungs. They’re noisier than the newer models.’ I saw his huge face touched, distantly, with puzzlement. ‘I just need to catch my breath,’ I said. ‘An old man’s lungs are not as efficient as a young man’s.’