‘I shall explain everything! By the time we arrive at our friend Saltykov’s flat, where Mademoiselle Norman is sequestered — by the time we arrive there, everything will have been explained to you! You will know everything. And therefore you will understand how high are the stakes.’
‘At the moment, I am completely in the dark,’ I said. ‘So there is a lot you need to explain.’
‘You underestimate the extent of your knowledge,’ he replied. ‘You know more than you think. You know Frenkel, for example. You understand the nature of the threat we face.’
‘I knew him a long time ago.’
‘I meant to say how much I admired your attitude in the chess club yesterday,’ gushed Lunacharsky. ‘Negation! When we threw questions about Project Stalin at you, you simply negated them. It was more than denial, because when somebody denies something it always bears the imprint of its opposite. If an official denies something it is tantamount to an admission! But you — you negated. It was gloriously dialectical. In this, I assume science fiction has prepared you. Because the worlds created by a science fictional writer do not deny the real world; they antithesise it!’
‘You are,’ I said, a little uncertainly, ‘complimentary.’
‘Indeed! You see, that is also the nature of the UFO phenomenon. It is dialectical. In the club the other night, you stated the thesis. You could do this, because you were personally involved, with Frenkel, in the original project. Your thesis is: there are no UFOs, we are alone in the cosmos. The antithesis was advanced, often foolishly, by the other members: yes there are UFOs, they visit us nightly! But without the thesis to counter this antithesis, there could be no synthesis. And the synthesis is…’
‘Is what?’
He looked down his long nose at me, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘It is a mistake to assume that extraterrestrials must be material. Or immaterial. What if they exist in a dialectical superposition of the two conditions?’
‘And if you spoke the same sentence in Russian rather than gibberish?’
He beamed at me. ‘My dear friend, I am being too general. Let me fill you in on specifics. The American, and his lady friend, entered the Soviet Union at Kiev. Now, there was a reason why they entered the Soviet Union via Kiev. A crucial reason.’
The motion of the car slowed. We stopped.
At this point my conversation with Lunacharsky was interrupted. Saltykov had stopped his taxi at a red traffic light. Somebody, outside the vehicle, was shouting. It was a pedestrian who was yelling. Then, startlingly, the door was hauled open, with the result that the noise from outside spilled in. Lunacharsky turned, and began to say, ‘Comrade, this taxi is already full…’ but the shouting drowned him out. Out of the car! Or I shall shoot, swam into focus.
I recognised the voice; hoarse, but distinct. And glancing across I recognised the meaty fist. It was holding a pistol, and the pistol was pointed in through the open door.
‘Saltykov,’ I bellowed. ‘Drive! Go!’
‘The traffic light is red,’ said Saltykov.
‘All of you!’ Trofim was yelling from outside. ‘Out — of — the — car—!’
His huge hand, with its monstrous reach, came snaking into the back of the cab like Grendel reaching for prey; or like the octopus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Underneath the Oceans trying to winkle submariners from the Nautilus.
Lunacharsky was trying to remonstrate through the open passenger door: ‘Comrade, it is a misunderstanding, comrade, please put the gun down.’ He had, I noticed, planted one of his feet against the inside of the car, next to the open door. A great force was hauling at him and trying to draw him out. Trofim shouted at us to get out of the car.
‘Never mind the fucking colour of the light,’ I yelled. ‘Go! Accelerate! He has a gun on us!’
‘It is against the rules of driving. More to the point it contradicts common sense, to drive through a junction when the light is red,’ said Saltykov. ‘Other cars would collide with us, and immobilise the…’
‘Weave through the traffic, you idiot — weave — just go now. He’ll kill us all!’
‘This is the KGB! Out of car!’ shouted Trofim. He had thrust his huge, troll-like left hand inside the taxi, and had taken hold of Lunacharsky’s lapels. ‘Let go!’ Lunacharsky yelped, bracing both his feet now against the frame of the car’s door. I could see Trofim levelling the pistol with his other hand.
‘Go!’ I shrieked at Saltykov. ‘What are you doing? Press your foot onto the accelerator!’
‘The traffic light is red,’ insisted Saltykov.
‘I don’t care! Go! Go!’
‘The traffic light is green,’ said Saltykov.
With a noise from the tires like a soprano’s top note, and a rush of acceleration that yanked me back against the seat, the taxi roared away.
The strain on its engine was such that the exhaust backfired deafeningly.
For a moment Trofim’s arm was still inside the vehicle as we moved away; but then the huge hand lost its grip and slipped out of view. I looked back to see the giant KGB man rolling ponderously in the gutter.
The passenger door slammed to, bounced open again, and slammed once more. I reached over Lunacharsky to grab the handle and heaved with all my might. From being a ridiculously cautious driver, Saltykov was now driving with absurd abandon. We swerved, spun sharp left, and zoomed away. ‘The engine backfired!’ he hooted.
‘I heard it,’ I replied, speaking loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the engine. Relief sparked into rage. ‘What were you playing at?’ I shouted. ‘Why did you just sit there? That was Trofim. Did you drive past exactly the same place you picked me up?’
‘I took a wrong turn,’ he replied, peevishly. ‘Because you insisted on talking to me as I drove! Both of you. I was distracted from the concentration necessary to drive an—’
‘So you took a wrong turn! Surely you didn’t need to retrace exactly the same route to get back on track?’
‘My mind is methodical,’ he insisted. ‘That was the only way I knew.’
‘Your mind is insane,’ I yelled.
‘If you had left me alone and not talked to me,’ he wailed. ‘If you had left me alone to drive, instead of pestering me with questions, I would never have got lost! It’s your fault.’
Lunacharsky seemed uncharacteristically silent. But I was still full of outrage at what Saltykov had done.
‘You drove directly past the house in which they’d been holding me,’ I said, slapping the back of the driver’s seat with my fist in petty rage. ‘Trofim was still standing there! Exactly where we left him! And then you stopped the car!’
‘Stop slapping my seat! That is distracting to the driver! Please do not distract the driver!’
‘Of course he was still standing there,’ I said. ‘He’s an ox. Where would he go? And you drove along the same road, and then you stopped the car. Right in front of him!’
‘The traffic light was red!’
‘And if it was? You could jump the light. People have been known to jump red lights. Have you never seen a film?’
‘I was of course conscious of the need to make a rapid escape,’ he insisted, ‘but I was, equally, conscious of the danger of collision with another vehicle were I to drive through the red light. How could we make good our escape in that circumstance? What if we were injured, or killed, in the collision? How would that serve our purpose?’