‘But,’ Frenkel went on, adopting an incongruously oleaginous voice, ‘I still think of myself as your friend, Konsty,’
‘Is that why you sent the red-haired fellow to smother me with a pillow in my hospital bed?’
‘I wonder if you’ll be able to understand why I would do such a thing?’ he mused.
‘Wonder away.’
‘Besides he was unsuccessful — wasn’t he? You’re still alive — aren’t you?’
‘Not for want of trying.’
‘The important point is,’ said Frenkel, locking his fingers together, and pushing his palms out, producing thereby a Geiger-counter crackle of pops and snaps in his joints. ‘You don’t believe in UFOs?’
This question, calmly posed, seemed to me to distil the entire hectic week into a quiet intensity. It was, it occurred to me, it. I did not rush an answer. I opened my mind to my thoughts, as a person flips through a well-read novel. What evidence was there? None. ‘Let us say, no,’ I said.
‘Would you say that you can prove there are no UFOs?’
‘The burden of proof is not mine,’ I noted. ‘It is on the people claiming the extraordinary.’
‘But who is to say which state of affairs — aliens, no aliens — is extraordinary? At any rate, you accept that you cannot prove that aliens do not exist.’
‘It’s a big cosmos.’
‘Exactly! Let us say, then, that I cannot prove to you that aliens exist. Even though I believe it with a perfect certainty. And you cannot prove to me they do not exist.’
‘We should, then, go on the balance of probabilities. My belief is more probable than yours.’
‘I disagree.’
‘We can agree to disagree. I think we both know what is going on.’
‘And what is that?’ Frenkel asked.
The words came smoothly, and easily, although I am not sure I had arranged all the elements in the picture until that moment. But as I said it, there, it all cohered. It was my brain’s new-found ability to understand the picture. It was my new brain.
This is what I said to him. ‘The world is changing,’ I said. ‘Gorbachev is dismantling the Soviet Union. You, and people like you — people with authority, people hidden and secret — do not want it to happen. You are engaged upon an illegal and covert operation to destabilise perestroika, and unseat Gorbachev; to create — no, wait: to recreate — the crisis days of the Great Patriotic War. Because the USSR is losing the Cold War, you have decided that America will not function as the enemy. But because you, like all old and stubborn Communists, revere Stalin, you have decided to resurrect the old man’s plan. And so you have spent years building the narrative of alien invasion, and adding heft to it by scattering clues, props, assertion and even creative denial to fix the belief in people’s minds. It’s nonsense, but it is surprising how much nonsense people will believe. Particularly in worrying times.’
‘Go on,’ said Frenkel.
‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe the American, Coyne, was part of a secret team assembled to blow up the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. That is the main event: that’s what you’re really doing. You blow up Chernobyl — and then go public with the story. Aliens! War! Special measures — roll back glasnost, remilitarise the nation, the Soviet Union steps to the vanguard! It leads the world against the new threat. And of course, you have all the evidence, all the props and trimmings, kept, you say, in a secret warehouse in Moscow since being dug out of the ground in Kiev after the war.’
‘You tell a compelling story,’ said Frenkel. ‘I always admired your storytelling powers.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Except that this story is not science fiction. It is a murder story. Trofim said as much, inside the reactor. These people would be laying down their lives, by the million, for the greater good. The survival of Communism.’
Frenkel seemed to be considering this. ‘But Trofim believed, literally, in the aliens. Didn’t he?’
‘That you were able to persuade Trofim of this absurd story,’ I said, ‘does not surprise me. He was hardly the most nimble-witted individual I have ever met.’
‘And Nik?’
‘Nik?’
‘The gentleman I sent to your hospital to kill you.’
‘Ah — Comrade Red-hair.’
‘Did it seem to you that he believed?’ Frenkel asked.
‘In the aliens.’ I recalled. ‘I suppose so. But, Jan, so what? Naturally you need a story capable of being believed by many people. That is necessary. Naturally you have worked to convince your underlings that it is the truth. It is after the manner of a cult,’ I said. ‘Look at Trofim: he believed the aliens were attacking Chernobyl, even though he was himself planting the bomb!’
‘Or perhaps he believed that he himself planting the bomb was the method by which the aliens were attacking Chernobyl?’
I thought about this for a while. It was a curiously resonant, and oddly disconcerting, observation. ‘Wouldn’t aliens be more likely to use laser cannons, or photon torpedoes?’
‘And wouldn’t Hitler be more likely to fire V2 rockets and atom bombs at Soviet troops? Yet I once fought a Nazi in a farmyard, and he was armed with a shovel.’
‘Hardly the same situation.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Jan, you were planning to tell the world that aliens had blown up Chernobyl. I was a witness that Trofim was the agent of destruction, not space visitors. Thus I had to be eliminated.’
‘That wasn’t the reason.’ He grimaced, with glee, or pain, it was hard to say. ‘And besides you are getting things the wrong way around. You think we concocted a story of aliens in order to shore up Communism. I have seen what the USSR was capable of under a strong Communist leadership. So have you. And now we need only look to Afghanistan to see what it is capable of under a weak, reformist, crypto-capitalist leadership. I know which system is better geared to protecting humanity. I do not wish to invent space aliens in order to shore up Communism. I wish to shore up Communism because it is the best defence against alien invasion.’
‘By shore up Communism you mean things like… murder Americans.’
‘Coyne?’ Frenkel seemed actually shocked. ‘I didn’t murder him.’
‘But of course you want to pretend that the aliens murdered him.’
His eyes were wide open in his solid, Slav face. ‘Konsty,’ he said. ‘You were there when Coyne was murdered.’
‘He was hooked up in a poacher’s snare, by somebody leaning out of a window, hoisted twenty feet above ground, and then dropped down to break his back.’
‘Ah,’ said Frenkel. ‘Lifted up, how?’
‘By a rope.’
‘Ah,’ said Frenkel. ‘You remember there being a rope?’
‘I do.’
‘But I have read the police reports. No rope was discovered at the scene.’
‘I saw the rope,’ I said.
‘The Militia officers did not.’
‘I was there.’
‘And yet there is no material evidence.’
‘I suppose the rope was removed from the scene by the murderers.’
‘And how, exactly, did they do this? It was tied around his ankle, no? So did you see somebody come down and untie it?’
‘No,’ I conceded.
‘And yet you stayed by the body until the Militia arrived?’
‘They arrested me immediately.’
‘So, there was no rope. And yet you remember seeing a rope. Now: if the physical evidence contradicts witness testimony, wouldn’t you be inclined to mistrust the witness? People sometimes see things that aren’t there, after all. They may not be lying; they may be genuinely mistaken. Genuinely hallucinating.’ He smiled broadly at me.