I stuck my right leg out, and straightened my toes in the shoe like a ballerina. Trofim tripped. It was a schoolyard trick to play upon him, I suppose; but I shall say this. It was not my outstretched leg that was the enemy. It was Trofim’s own bulk, combined with the velocity with which he came hurtling through the door.
He moved through the air, and his momentum took him, like a ski-jumper, head-first downwards, following a line parallel to the staircase. There was the sound of a stick trapped in the spokes of a freewheeling bicycle, overlaid with a raging roar, and then his head smashed through the plaster of the wall of the half-landing.
He lay there, as if decapitated: visible only from the neck down on the landing, his triffid-thick legs trailing back up the stairway behind him.
I started down the stairs. My legs were trembling a little, making it important I placed my feet carefully so as to avoid falling. I do not know whether they were trembling with fear, or exhaustion, or simple old age. As I reached him I paused over his body, partly to see if he were still alive. He had his pistol in his right hand, and I bent down to retrieve it from him. As I did so he stirred. I recoiled: clearly not dead.
I was a flight down when I heard Trofim speak again. ‘My head!’ he boomed.
I was almost at the bottom of the second flight when I heard him again, a little less distinct: ‘I’ll put your head through the wall.’ There were the sounds of somebody large moving about above, and the small smashes and bashes of chunks of plaster falling and scattering.
I was three floors down when I heard him bellow, and get to his feet.
I hurried my gait, and was at the main entrance to the building as I heard the thunderous thumping of Trofim’s boots coming down the stairs above me. I don’t know where I thought I was going. Trofim was moments from catching me. But my instinct was to run. So I hobbled on.
I went outside, down the stone steps and onto the pavement, turning my head left and right in a desperate attempt to decide which way to go. Neither path looked promising. With the timing of a dream, a taxi pulled up, the door opened of its own accord, and, without even thinking, I climbed inside. Indeed, I was pulled inside, and bundled across the lap of somebody already on the rear seat. But I hardly paid attention to that.
As the car pulled away I looked back to see the red-faced, bulging-eyed enormity of Trofim bursting from the building’s main entrance, plaster dust smoking from his bashed-up-looking head.
The car swung away, and I saw Trofim recede in vision as he shook his hands in impotent fury, those terrible, man-killing hands.
I was too surprised to be relieved.
I was not alone in the taxi. Sitting beside me was Leon Piotrovich Lunacharsky from the chess club. ‘Lucky we were here, comrade,’ he beamed. ‘[ Jolly luck of the Irishmen,]’ he added in English. ‘[Or is it that it should is,]’ he added, getting tangled in his excitement. ‘[ Jolly luck of the science fictioneers?]’
‘What?’ I stuttered. ‘What?’
‘It took me a little while to process what you told me,’ said the driver. ‘It is a function of my syndrome that sometimes mental processing takes a little while. But I usually will process mental information, given time.’ The driver, of course, was Saltykov.
‘Saltykov,’ I said.
‘Reactor Four,’ Saltykov said, without looking round. ‘The American had found out not only the location, but the reactor number, too. He got the information to you before he was killed.’
‘Bless him!’ sang Lunacharsky. ‘Bless him for an American saint! He will save many lives!’
‘And you trusted me enough to tell me, too! But I was distracted,’ Saltykov went on in his implacable, unpassionate voice. ‘The policemen were attempting to lay hands upon me, even though my syndrome renders such contact intolerable.’
‘We waited outside the police station,’ said the bubbling Lunacharsky. ‘Then we saw the KGB take you away in your big car. We followed them. We thought you were as good as dead!’
‘As good as,’ I confirmed. ‘Since 1958.’
‘When that ape took you into that building…’
‘Leon Piotrovich Lunacharsky wanted us to drive away,’ said Saltykov, proudly. ‘I insisted we stay.’
‘And I am very grateful indeed that you stayed,’ I said.
‘And now,’ said Leon Piotrovich Lunacharsky, like a radio continuity announcer, ‘we shall take you to Dora Norman, the American.’
CHAPTER 12
I had previously only encountered Lunacharsky in the darkness of the Pushkin Chess Club, and it was a strange thing to see him by the light of the day. He seemed, somehow, less robotic. He had a broad face, with wideset eyes, slightly downward-pointing at their outside points. There was a streak of white in his thick, black broadbrush mane of hair, like a badger. His moustache lay languid, like a black odalisque, across his plump upper lip. Forty years of age, or thereabouts, I would guess.
Saltykov’s taxi crossed into a right-hand feeder lane and turned into a new road. It blended with the dusty, rusty mass of Moscow traffic and swept passed a series of industrial buildings.
‘I’m more excited than I can say,’ Lunacharsky bubbled. ‘To be in the same car as the great Skvorecky!’
I was having difficulty with my breath.
‘Oh dear,’ said Saltykov, from the driver’s seat.
My nerves were enormously jangled. ‘Oh dear?’
‘I have come the wrong way,’ said Saltykov. ‘That was an incorrect turn.’
‘What?’ I snapped. ‘Saltykov, where on earth are you going?’
He became, as far as his buttoned-down manner permitted it, annoyed. ‘It is because you have distracted me by talking! You should not distract the driver of a vehicle!’
‘Don’t distress yourself, my friend,’ said Lunacharsky, whose mood was perfectly irrepressible. ‘I see where we are! We need to turn right again and make our way back onto the ring road.’
‘If you talk to me,’ Saltykov said, with a mosquito whine curled into the words, ‘then I will be unable to concentrate properly upon the driving.’
‘Don’t upset yourself, my friend. Take the right turn that is — never mind, you missed it. There’s another right turn, up here. Take this one and…’
‘Could you please,’ I said, ‘tell me what is going on?’
‘I shall explain everything!’ boomed Lunacharsky.
An open-topped lorry, trailing a huge conical sleeve of dust like a crop-spraying plane, thunderously overtook the little taxi. Our car shook monstrously in the wake. ‘Speed up!’ I bellowed.
‘I am driving at the optimal speed for fuel efficiency,’ retorted Saltykov in no placid voice.
‘Come, my friend,’ Lunacharsky told him. ‘Simply circle round, circle round. We need to get back on the correct road. Mademoiselle Norman is waiting!’
‘Yes! Yes!’ Saltykov peeved, as another car swept past, its horn howling. ‘Do not talk to me, or expect me to talk to you, because if you do so I will be unable to concentrate upon the driving!’
‘He suffers from,’ said Lunacharsky, turning in the seat to face me, ‘a particular syndrome…’
‘I gather,’ I replied.
‘But he is an expert man! He knows everything about nuclear power stations!’
‘Comrade, I would be obliged if you could tell me,’ I said, as the car slowed, turned, and accelerated again, ‘what on earth is going on?’