Выбрать главу

‘There’s nothing out there.’ I said, aloud. I didn’t say this for Frenkel’s benefit. I suppose it was for my benefit. I suppose it was to confirm that I had never seen the thing in the sky.

‘Out the window you go, old friend. You can take a closer look, as you go down.’

He stepped towards me, and his left hand clamped onto (because I was facing him) my right arm, and his right arm clamped on to my left arm. Behind me the window was unlatched. A quick shove and I would tumble against it, and it would swing open, and I would fall.

‘The elephant in the room,’ I said again.

‘That’s it.’

‘The elephant is — in the room.’

Dora was right behind him.

She was holding a book in her hand: a thousand-page hardback book with a gaudy-coloured cover illustration of tentacled aliens. ‘[Mr Frenkel,]’ she asked, in the politest tones, ‘[would you sign my copy of your novel?]’

Frenkel’s expression twitched at the sound of her voice. He craned round to look back over his shoulder, and tried to twist his torso to face her. His hand went towards the pocket in which he had cached his knife; but I saw what he was doing and my two hands went towards his hand. He was stronger than me, but I was strong enough, and motivated enough, to grab his wrist and yank his hand down below the level of his jacket. I did this to prevent him grasping his knife. He strained to lift it and get inside his jacket pocket.

‘[Oh my mistake!]’ said Dora, and now I could hear the strain in her voice. ‘[This novel is not by you. It is by Konstantin Skvorecky.]’

‘Wait,’ grunted Frenkel, still straining to pull out his knife. He was reaching with his right arm, being right handed. My right side had been weakened by my injury. But luckily I was facing him, so I was using my left hand to prevent him from bringing out his knife.

Dora swung the book in towards his face, blushing red with the effort. Her prodigious jowls quivered.

She swung the book so that its spine collided with Frenkel’s nose. His head snapped back, and a gasp stuttered from his mouth. I danced to the side as quickly as my old legs could manage, and levered him onwards, and Dora pushed forward with her considerable, her beautiful, her life-saving bulk. With me on his right side, and Dora on his left, and blood coming out of his nose, Frenkel found himself propelled forwards and out. His head struck the unlatched window with a boom. The panel swung open, and Frenkel toppled out, and Dora and I released him at exactly the same moment.

Down he went.

He fell straight down the height of four floors. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t, for instance, call out. He had tipped over onto his back, and we could see him looking up at us, but the expression on his face was not even especially surprised: although a small quantity of blood had come out of his nose and covered his upper lip, like a black-red paint-on Hitler moustache. Like Hitler, or like Charlie Chaplin. It was four floors down to what the Americans call the [sidewalk]. He landed with the sound of cowflop hitting the ground. The first portion of his body to connect with the ground was the back of his head, and then his spine, and hips, and then his arms and legs: each segment of his body followed rapidly one after the other. He did not bounce. He did not move after the impact. Not so much as a twitch.

I felt wobbly, and unwell, and exhausted; but I felt better than Dora evidently did. It was not an easy matter for a fellow as elderly and infirm as I was to assist a woman as weighty as she across the floor, but I did my best, and was able to help her stagger over to the couch. She half-sat and half-collapsed, and I knelt down beside her. ‘[There is some blood,]’ I told her, lifting her shirt and examining the mouth-shaped wound.

‘[It hurts!]’

‘[My poor love — I’m so sorry — my poor girl.]’

‘[It hurts, but I don’t think there’s any serious damage. Thank heavens I’m so fat!]’

‘[Thank heavens,]’ I agreed, earnestly. ‘[It has saved your life.]’

‘[Oh!]’ she said. [‘Oh, it hurts! But if I’d been some rake-skinny girl…]’

‘[Then you would have died],’ I said. ‘[Frenkel knew what he was doing. He was aiming the knife at vital organs.]’

‘[Thank heavens,]’ she said, in a fainter voice, ‘[that all my vital organs are wrapped in my protective layer!]’

‘[Didn’t he stab you twice?]’

‘[My arm.]’ She was holding her left arm stiffly, awkwardly. I had not noticed this before.

‘[Let me look.]’

‘[He got me in the side,]’ she said. ‘[I moved my arm to where he’d cut me, and then he cut me again.]’

Her arm was sopping and wet, and her hand bright red. There was blood, I saw, dipping downwards from her fingers’ ends onto the carpet. This wound looked much more serious. ‘[I will get help,]’ I said, creakily rising and going to the bed where the room’s phone was. In a moment I had called the reception desk, and within a minute two people were in the room with me. A first aid box was brought in. By the look of it, it dated from before the war.

‘Have you called an ambulance?’ I asked the concierge. ‘There’s also a man on the pavement outside. He fell from the window. He might need help.’

He looked from the window. ‘There’s no one there,’ he said.

I went with Dora to the hospital. In the ambulance they gave her something for the pain, and then told me to talk with her. Don’t let her go to sleep, they told me. So I talked with her. ‘[Where did you get the book?]’

‘[It’s yours.]’

‘[I know it’s mine. It’s the omnibus edition of Three Who Made a Star. It’s all three volumes in one. That’s why it is so big; a thousand pages, more or less. But I have not seen a copy for half a century. I don’t even have a copy at my flat!]’

‘[Saltykov found it in an old bookshop, somewhere near the hotel. He bought it for me, as a present. He knew I would be interested, because it was by you.]’

There seemed to me something wrong with my burn-scarred face. I could feel a strange loosening behind the skin, near the eyes and the bridge of the nose.

‘[I got up, quietly, after he stabbed me. I lay there for a moment,]’ Dora was saying. ‘[Until I got my breath back, and then I got myself up. It stung to move. I looked around for something to hit him with. He was a dangerous man. But I couldn’t see anything — well, I thought about the lamp.]’

‘[The lamp?]’

‘[Only it was plugged in, and the plugs you have over here aren’t like proper American plugs, and I wasn’t sure I could unplug it easily. Then I saw the book. Your Three Who Made a Star. So I picked that up.]’