For a second time I wedged the top of the chairback under his chin.
‘You were in the army,’ I said, gaspily.
His face was darkening, turning if not quite blue then certainly losing its usual fleshtone. He gurgled something.
‘I was in the army too, comrade,’ I said.
‘You have hurt my windpipe,’ he scraped. His right arm was clutching ineffectually at the chairback. His left arm was trapped beneath his enormous body.
‘My military service was a while ago,’ I panted. ‘But it was a longer tour of duty, and incomparably more toughening than a couple of months in fucking Afghanistan.’
‘Comrade, I think,’ he gasped, ‘you’ve broken my rib.’
I was, in truth, in a rather delicate situation. He was a strong young man, and I a weak elderly one; and, broken rib or not, I worried that my getting off him would be quickly followed by him getting to his feet and repaying in kind. On the plus side, simply squatting on him like the figure of nightmare from that old illustration, leaning all my weight onto the chair, enabled me to recover some of my puff. Although this was not something that could happen quickly.
He face was a colour that would have indicated rude health in a cheeseplant.
‘Like my — sweet old,’ he wheezed, incredulous, ‘grandfather.’
‘Like many young people,’ I observed, breathing in and out as leisurely as I could manage. ‘You have a mistaken notion about the elderly. You project sentimental notions onto my generation. Appearances aren’t everything, you know.’ I was chattering like this because I was trying to think what to do. ‘And, especially with respect to my generation, you ought to consider that we have drunk more vodka, had more sex and killed more people than you — ever — will. But tell me one thing, Trofim. Tell me this one thing. Do you believe all this stuff about aliens?’
‘Of course,’ he rasped, weakly. ‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘Mngnaow,’ he creaked.
‘I think I might have wet myself a little, in all the excitement.’ I tried to peer down at my trousers, without taking any of my weight off the chair.
‘Mngnaow,’ he repeated, in a weaker voice.
His face now was purple as a plum, and his eyes bulged like sloes.
I glanced about the room with an eye to locating something with which to immobilise Trofim: I pondered tying him up, but there was nothing but the telephone cord, and such cord has too little friction to tie well. I considered removing his pistol from its holster and using that to control him, but I was not at all sure that I could unbuckle the holster and remove the gun without taking my weight from the chair. My fear was that, given the chance, Trofim would simply toss me aside. Then it would be the chute for me.
I decided to try reasoning with him. ‘Comrade,’ I said, ‘I will remove my weight from your throat in a moment.’
He did not reply. There was not so much as a gasp. His face was now a rather fetching deep dark mauve. His eyes had a lifeless cast to them. I could not feel motion in his chest. I weighed up in myself whether he might be shamming, but my options were limited.
I climbed off him, and waited to see if he burst into life. But there was nothing. Perhaps I had murdered him. This was not a comfortable thought, for all that I did not doubt his willingness to ram me in the chute.
I put my skinny, mottled hand into his right trouser pocket, and found the keys. Then, with a mighty creaking inside my own complaining bones, I got to my feet and went over to the door. I was holding a dozen keys on a metal ring. The first I tried did not fit the lock. The second fitted the hole, but refused to turn. My left eye, where the muzzle of the gun had compressed the eyeball, could not focus, and was still buzzy with shiny hallucinogenic flashes and skeins. I held the fourth key close in front of my right eye, and inserted it into the keyhole.
Behind me Trofim drew a huge, beast-like, shuddering breath into his lungs.
‘Infamy!’ he croaked, and then, with a huge phlegm-heavy cough, he spoke the word again, much more distinctly and with rather startling volume. ‘Infamy!’
‘Perhaps,’ I muttered aloud to myself, as the fifth key failed to go into the keyhole, ‘I should have removed his pistol when I had the chance.’
I could hear him getting to his feet. I did not need to look behind me; the sounds he was making were enough. The sixth key would not turn. My face was close to the door, and my compressed retina span odd, insubstantial, neon blue-white spirography upon the wood; my eye, evidently, still complaining at the treatment it had received in the car.
‘Skvorecky!’ Trofim bellowed
I believe that I had, finally, broken through his ox-like placidity and made him angry.
The seventh key, with a nice sense of its own numerological pedigree, rotated through the full three-hundred-three-score degrees, and the bolt slid back. There was not a moment to lose. I yanked the key out, opened the door a foot or so, slipped through, and closed the door behind me. I shuddered the key back in the lock on the outside of the door with a trembly hand. As I turned, and whilst the bolt was in the process of sliding across, the handle suddenly shook with poltergeist ferocity under my hand.
But the lock was engaged.
Something exploded: splinters flew. Smoke billowed through a new hole in the doorway. The detonation echoed in the hall.
‘Open this door,’ yelled Trofim, separated from me by a thin panel of wood. I thought of the size of his fists, and the bulk of his musculature. Then I thought about the flimsiness of the door. It was not a comfortable thought.
‘You have damaged the door!’ I cried out. ‘You have damaged the furnishings!’
‘I’ll kick the door down with one swing of my boot,’ boomed Trofim, like the wolf from the folktale. Or as the wolf might have sounded had he been wearing military boots.
‘What did Frenkel tell you about damaging the furnishings?’
‘I’ll wring your neck, Skvorecky!’ he boomed; and with a noise of splintering wood the toe of his boot appeared through the lower panel of the door.
‘Remember Comrade Frenkel’s commands!’ I cried. ‘He gave you a direct order!’
There was another crash, and a whole panel of wood smashed free. Clearly reminding him of Frenkel’s orders was not going to stop him. I looked about me. There was a cast-iron bootscraper on the floor to the left of the door, black but speckled all over with strawberry-coloured rust. ‘You’ll never catch me, Trofim,’ I shouted. ‘I may be old, but I can run faster than the wind!’
‘I shall kill you!’ boomed Trofim, from behind the rapidly disintegrating door.
I kicked the bootscraper, and it clattered down the stairs. Hard to say whether the sounds it was making were actually like those an old man would make hurriedly descending a staircase. No time to worry about that, because with another smash the door flew open. Trofim came out like a freight train. No: like a military train, filled with high explosives.