‘Comrade,’ he said; meaning, ah!
I dragged two breaths in. A third. Trofim was breathing silently, and without apparent motion of his chest.
‘So,’ I tried, to fill the silence. ‘You were in the army?’
‘Comrade,’ he said in the affirmative.
‘Afghanistan, is it? Why aren’t you there now?’
‘I needed medical attention,’ he said, with a slow, offhand deliberateness that implied multiple bullet wounds.
‘Really? What for?’
He pondered this, and then said, ‘Because I was wounded.’
‘Obviously,’ I said. ‘But how?’
‘A tooth,’ he said, and a dark look passed over his face.
‘Nasty,’ I said. ‘Impacted, was it? In the jaw?’
‘Skull,’ he said.
‘I’ve often thought they’re more trouble than they’re worth, molars.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, looking at me as if I were some kind of a simpleton. ‘It wasn’t my tooth.’
‘Your skull, though?’
‘Oh yes.’
I thought about this. ‘Were you bitten by one of the mujahadeen, comrade?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, clearly surprised at my obtuseness. He pondered for a bit, and then said, ‘The landmine disassembled him pretty thoroughly, comrade.’ He pondered further. ‘He wasn’t in any state to bite anybody after that,’ he said.
I gave this some thought. ‘This individual was blown up, and you were blown up with him?’
‘No,’ said Trofim, looking even more puzzled. ‘I was nowhere near that mine.’
‘I am stumped.’
‘One of his teeth,’ said Trofim. Then he added, ‘Flew. The doctors said that. Like a bullet.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Shall we go on up?’
I made two more flights without much difficulty, and another two with a quantity of rasping and wheezing; and we stopped again. It became evident that Comrade Trofim had been pondering matters during this, for me, tortuous climb. ‘How did you know I was in the army?’ he asked.
‘You have a military bearing,’ I panted.
This pleased him. ‘Comrade,’ he said, standing a little straighter.
I blinked and blinked, but my left eye, where the gun had been forced, was still filled with luminous chaff. I could not see properly out of it. ‘I suppose I would assume,’ I added, ‘that, perhaps, you were flown back for hospitalisation in Moscow, and that your exemplary war record and, uh, personal attributes brought you to the attention of Comrade Frenkel, who seconded you to his personal team.’
If Trofim had been amazed at my stupidity earlier, he was now, clearly, amazed at my insight. ‘Comrade!’ he said, by way of articulating his astonishment. Then after further thought, he added, ‘Did Comrade Frenkel tell you so?’
‘The Comrade Commissar and I don’t have that sort of relationship, ’ I said.
Puzzlement descended again. ‘Commissar?’
‘My little joke,’ I said. ‘Shall we press on?’
We made two more floors before I stopped again. ‘Only one more to go,’ I said, sucking air.
‘Your lungs are bad, comrade,’ he said.
‘You think?’
‘Oh yes, comrade,’ he said, earnestly. He peered vaguely through the landing’s grubby window; a view of housetops, flanked on either side by the elephant-leg grey of two tower blocks. ‘Asthma is a disease of the lungs.’
‘I had not realised that a medical education is part of basic army training.’
‘But you’re mistaken, comrade,’ he said. ‘It is not.’
‘Asthma is a disease of the lungs,’ I said. ‘Emphysema also. But in my case I think it is merely that I am a man in my mid-sixties who has spent over half a century smoking Soviet cigarettes.’
‘Soviet cigarettes are the finest in the world,’ said Trofim, on a reflex. The phrase Soviet x is the finest in the world had evidently been etched into his brain for, I would hazard, any value of x. Indeed, I daresay he believed that Soviet alphabets contained the finest xs in the world.
‘You’re not a smoker,’ I observed.
‘Oh no,’ he agreed.
‘Wise,’ I said. ‘Soviet lungs are the finest in the world, brought up breathing the pure air of the Motherland. We have a duty not to pollute them.’ But speaking ironically to Trofim was precisely as effective, in terms of communication, as speaking Mongolian would have been. ‘It must be a little demeaning,’ I offered, ‘for a warrior such as yourself to be given the mission of escorting an old fart like me up some stairs.’
He considered this for a very long time. Eventually he said, ‘You remind me of my grandfather.’
‘He was an ironist too?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘He was from Tvov.’
‘I daresay,’ I said, rousing myself for the final set of stairs, ‘that comrade Frenkel has told you why this American woman must be located and killed?’
‘Comrade,’ he said, his best effort at stonewalling.
Finally, with a sense of achievement that Sir Edmund Hillary, that New Zealander, would have recognised, I reached the top of the staircase. Trofim brought out a key and opened the door, and I stepped in. It was a perfectly ordinary suite of rooms, left over from the Romanoff era, although in a recognisable state of dilapidation: two settees on wooden claws, clutching golfballs of wood with arthritic intensity. Two wooden chairs. An empty bookcase. A stained rug. Near the curtainless window was a table on which the telephone sat: a skull-sized chunk of bakelite. Two doors, both of them closed, led through to other rooms. There was a musty smell. There are, in point of fact, very many different varieties of musty smell. Some, as in old bookshops, are even actively pleasant. The smell in this room was not pleasant.
Trofim nodded at the table and, as I made my way, breathless, over towards it he locked the door behind him and pocketed the key.
‘Make the call, as Comrade Frenkel instructed,’ he said, balancing his thumb on the stock of his holstered pistol.
‘I’ll just,’ I panted, ‘get my breath back.’ To show willing I picked up the telephone receiver.
Trofim came towards me, trying to look stern rather than just stupid. ‘No funny business,’ he reminded me. ‘Precisely as Comrade Frenkel instructed.’
I took a breath. ‘As he instructed.’ I took another breath.
‘Are you ready?’
‘In the army,’ I asked him, ‘they trained you to kill?’
‘In,’ he said, lowering over me, ‘dozens of different ways.’
‘To kill the enemy. Also to disable him?’
‘In dozens of different ways,’ he repeated.
‘I daresay,’ I said, ‘that these are skills you don’t forget just because you’ve left the army?’
By way of reply, he flexed his meaty right hand into a fist, and then unflexed it.
I held the telephone receiver in my right hand, and my left was upon the dial. In as smooth and forceful as motion as I could manage, I heaved with both hands. The trick, I knew, was to mean the gesture completely. The trick was not to think I’m old, I won’t have the strength; but to think rather I’m still twenty. To think I’ll brain the fucker. To put myself into it completely.
The receiver went hard into Trofim’s left eye; the body of the phone cracked against his right cheekbone. He took a step back, more in surprise than pain I’d say. The electrical cord had come cleanly away from the wall. I threw the entire set at his face. He was alert enough to bring up his arm to shield himself from this projectile, but I had already grabbed the chair, a hand on each side of the seat. With the high back facing away from me I angled the whole thing forward, and jammed it upwards with as much force as I could gather. The top of the chairback went in under Trofim’s chin, making contact with his throat and cracking his head up. It made a sound like a butcher’s cleaver going into a rack of lamb. Unbalanced, the big man tumbled. He banged the back of his head hard enough against the wall to leave a dent in the plaster. Then, like sprawling Goliath, he was on the floor on his back, and his enormous boots were jerking up and down. I leapt forward, the chair still in my hands. I came down hard upon his torso, the chairback resounding as it impacted. The breath went entirely out of him. The chair was on top of him, and I was on top of the chair; and my hip had knocked painfully against the edge of the seat.