‘I understand,’ I said, placidly. ‘But he can tell me something I need to know. To fill in the holes in my… in my…’ There was something else I meant to say, but it was sliding out from the speech centres of my brain, and playing peek-a-boo in other portions. A car. A deer. A man lifted bodily into the night air and dangling up there.
‘Does Death have red hair?’ I asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘Do you think Death is a redhead?’
‘Isn’t he supposed to be a skeleton?’ was the reply, and I didn’t recognise the voice. It wasn’t Dr Bello’s voice; she was no longer there. It was a new voice. It possessed a breathy, underpowered quality that I didn’t like.
‘I’ve met you before,’ I said, sitting up a little in the bed.
Here was a man, with red hair, sitting in the room’s single chair, surveying me in bed. I did not like his smile. He did not work for the hospital.
He and I were alone in the room together. The light was on. Perhaps turning on the light had woken me up. I don’t know.
He smiled at me. This was not a pleasant smile.
‘You were Frenkel’s driver,’ I said. ‘You drove us around, whilst Trofim was pushing his pistol into my eye socket. And then,’ I added, for this memory had just that moment come back to me, ‘Frenkel himself put his gun inside my mouth. And you drove the car. You work for Frenkel. You’re KGB.’
‘I am KGB,’ he agreed.
‘You’ve come to kill me?’
‘I have come to kill you.’
I thought about this. It seemed a flavourless, angstless statement. The words had the quality of facts rather than emotions.
‘It seems I am hard to kill,’ I said.
‘I’m sure I’ll manage it.’
‘And why are you going to kill me?’
His eyes said I need a reason? but his mouth said, ‘Orders.’
‘I suppose it has to do with poor Trofim,’ I croaked. I thought about my meeting with the Steel-Stalin. ‘I suppose I’m getting in Comrade Frenkel’s way. He wanted to recruit me, in order to intensify the…’ But I couldn’t think of the word. ‘To do,’ I went on tentatively, curious in a dispassionate way, to see what words would come out of my mouth, ‘something… for the creatures. The aliens. But whatever he hoped, I’m having the opposite effect.’
‘Gabble gabble,’ said the red-headed man. I knew I had met him before, but I couldn’t recall his name. ‘I’ll give you this: you hide your fear pretty well, old man.’
I thought about fear. Shouldn’t I be afraid? But if there was any sensation there it was, rather, the memory of fear than fear. I contemplated my situation. It seemed clear to me — mental clarity sometimes drew its ticklish bow across the violin string of my consciousness — that I needed to get out of bed if I wanted to save my life. I needed to get up and lock the door. I needed, however hard it might be, to rise from my bed and get to the door. If I could lock the door, I would survive. Did the choice really present itself to me so starkly? Death here, life there, a key in a keyhole the difference. I had the memory of an elongated chopstick of light shining through a keyhole and into a darkened room. Why was the room so darkened? What was the light on the other side of the door that spilled so promiscuously through the tiny hole? Where was it shining from? A chink of light. Then I thought to myself: Of course the light is defined by the darkness. I don’t know why I thought this.
I moved my legs round until they dangled over the edge of the bed, like two sleeves of cloth. Then I pulled the wormy plastic tube from my arm and got, unsteadily, to my feet. Red-haired Death was sat in the chair, regarding me with a complacently predatory expression. I suppose he was wondering what I thought I was doing.
‘After the first death,’ I told him, with a grunt, ‘there is no other.’
‘Gabble gabble,’ he said again. From a holster inside his jacket he withdrew a pistol.
Three steps, doddery, and I was at the door. This motion tired me out. I paused for a moment to breathe.
‘Are you thinking of making a run for it?’ he asked. ‘A stagger for it? A bumble for it?’ He was amusing himself. ‘A shuffle for it?’
‘I don’t think I’d get very far,’ I said. I needed to pause twice in the middle of this short sentence in order to catch my breath. There was a deep-bone ache in my legs. I felt nauseous. This was too much exertion for me. But at least I was at the door now.
‘I’ve been involved in various pursuits of suspects in my time,’ he said. ‘This will be an interesting, if brief, addition to that body of experience.’
I opened the door an inch, two inches, and I reached an arm round to the outside. I could feel, without needing to look round, the pistol aimed between my shoulder blades. ‘I think,’ I said, groping for the key in the lock, ‘you mis—’ and there it was, and I fumbled it from its hole, ‘—understand.’
I pushed the door shut, and leant against it for a moment, to recover. But my labour was almost completed now.
‘Get back in the bed, old man,’ said the redhead. ‘I have no objection to shooting you, but it might be simpler all round if I just smother you with a pillow.’ He did not move from the chair. ‘It’d be demeaning to have you lurching down the corridor at half a mile an hour. I’d shoot you in the back, you know. I have no compunction about shooting people in the back. You’d bleed out on a hard hospital floor. Wouldn’t you rather die in bed? You’re an old man. Old men always hope to die in their beds’.
‘There,’ I said, slipping the key into the keyhole on the inside of the door, and turning it round. ‘A little privacy.’ I pulled the key out.
Make no mistake: the physical effort this manoeuvre required, and, without wishing to sound vainglorious, the courage and application it entailed, was greater than any effort I had made for decades. But I was fighting for my life. And, without anxiety or fear, and without any strong preference for living over dying, I so fought.
‘What are you doing?’ the redhead demanded, a peevish tone entering his voice. ‘Have you locked us in?’
I turned. One step and my knee almost folded. Another step. I didn’t want to collapse in a heap on the bed; or, worse, miss the edge of the bed and tumble to the floor. That wouldn’t do at all. It required a focus of effort. ‘A little,’ I gasped, ‘privacy.’
‘Give me the key,’ he ordered, flourishing his pistol.
The final step and I paused. ‘A moment,’ I gasped. ‘Let me get. Back into the bed.’
‘Why did you lock the door?’
‘A little,’ I panted, ‘privacy.’
I was standing with my hands down on the mattress. My intention had been to swallow the key straight down, but now that I had it in my hand it seemed far too large and jagged. I thought about taking a drink of water, but even so I could not see it going down the gullet. Things are often different in imagination to the way they are in reality.
I put my hip against the edge of the bed, and levered myself round into a sitting position, facing him. The mattress felt hard beneath me. Still in his chair, he was aiming the pistol directly at my face.
‘Is this about delay?’ he demanded. ‘Come on, old man. You’re a hero of the Patriotic War. Don’t demean yourself.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. Leaving the key tucked into my bedclothes I raised my right hand, empty, and put it to my mouth. With what I hoped was a convincing dumb-show I made as if to swallow the key.
‘Hey!’ said the redhead, leaping to his feet. ‘What are you playing at?’
‘Gah!’ I said. Did that sound like somebody with a key sliding down his gullet? ‘Gur! Gah! That is uncomfortable.’ I leaned back against my pillows, and slid my heels along the mattress until my legs were flat. Then, perhaps too theatrically, I patted my stomach. ‘The condemned man,’ I puffed, ‘can choose his last meal.’