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‘I’ve had so much good luck recently,’ I told him, ‘I was getting sated with it. It’s like sugar, good luck. At first its very sweet, but after a while you start to think: any more of this and I shall be sick.’

We were standing on a main thoroughfare, and people were coming and going. But of course none of them stopped to interfere with two men having so intimate a conversation. I wondered if there might be Militia officers somewhere who might want to intervene, but there was nobody. ‘At least,’ I said, ‘Dora is safe. I’m content to die, given that.’

‘Come on,’ he said, directing me down the street. ‘Down here,’ he said, down a side road on the left. ‘Along there.’ This was much less busy, and a much better arena for an assassin to shoot an old man and leave his body on the side. ‘Here?’ I asked, in a disinterested voice.

‘Further on.’

‘Trofim tried to kill me, and he didn’t manage it,’ I said, conversationally. I was walking alongside a huge pane of glass, in which my shuffling reflection seemed to step ghostly through the dust-covered and empty display spaces. ‘Then you tried to kill me, in that hospital in Kiev, and you didn’t manage it. Then Frenkel himself — your boss — tried to kill me in a hotel room, and he didn’t manage it either.’

‘Fourth time lucky,’ said the red-haired man.

‘But where are you taking me, though?’ I complained. We were passing, now, a pockmarked stone fa¸ade arrayed with closed shutters. ‘My legs get tired easily. Why not just do it right here?’

We walked into an open space with a dry fountain in the middle, and there was Frenkel, waiting for me. I understood then that Frenkel wanted to rant at me before I was dispatched. He had always been a choleric individual. I hoped it wouldn’t take too long. I really was very tired of all that.

He was sitting in a wheeled chair, with a red blanket tucked over his lap and a pair of sunglasses — for by now the hot Moscow spring had heated itself up, and the sky was bright and the sun bore down with an almost radioactive intensity. The concrete bowl of the fountain, and its central stone spire from which water had long since ceased to flow, looked rather like a satellite dish; except that all it had gathered from being pointed at the sky was a layer of dried and blackened human detritus: old paper and discarded rubbish cartons.

‘Hello Jan,’ I said.

‘Konsty,’ he slurred. His mouth was curled round in a left-heavy sneer. The red-headed KGB man looked into the middle distance with an expression of vague disgust.

‘How delightful to see you,’ I said.

The red-haired man took up position behind me. There was something ostentatious about the way he had his hand on his gun.

‘You pushed me out of a fucking window,’ Frenkel gobbled, and saliva cried from his mouth. With a claw-like hand he dabbed at his face with a handkerchief.

‘You were about to push me.’

‘I was trying to close off your timelines, you fucker, not kill you. But you were trying to kill me. Don’t you understand anything?’

‘Close off my what?’

‘You think your luck in evading death is down to… what? God just really likes you?’

My temper rose half a degree or so. ‘You stabbed Dora.’

He nodded. ‘I thought I’d killed her too,’ he said, shortly. ‘But she fucking came back to life, didn’t she?’

‘Dora Norman has left the country,’ I said. ‘You won’t be able to get to her now. But Comrade Red-hair here knows all about that. He has followed me here from the American embassy. Haven’t you, comrade?’

‘Don’t talk to him,’ slobbered Frenkel, padding at his face again with the cloth. His arm came up and went down like a mechanical spar, pivoting at the elbow. He was clutching a square of cloth in his birdclaw right hand, dabbing at his mouth with it after each little speech. ‘Fucking red-headed imbecile.’

‘The injury to his head has disinhibited him,’ murmured the red-headed man, in a disappointed tone of voice.

‘How unfortunate,’ I said.

Frenkel wriggled in his chair. ‘Can’t keep my fucking mouth shut, now, can I? It’s not just the swearing. It’s the secrets. I can’t stop babbling them. We almost had it in 1977. People — the world — people almost saw them in fucking 1977. Petrazavodsk. We were thwarted by — certain persons. And since then, haven’t things gone to shit? Haven’t they?’

‘Hard to think we could get any closer to shit than we were in the 1970s,’ I said.

‘Scientology,’ Frenkel growled. ‘Interference pattern. Mass belief systems. Communism is the creation of the people. Religion is the creation of the people. It gets in the way. We can’t — oh! ah! Fuck! You know what Lenin said-fuck?’

‘Said-fuck? What do you mean?’

Said. Fucking said. Do you know what Lenin fucking said. Fuck.’

‘I also suffered an injury to my head, to the frontal lobe,’ I observed. ‘I assume, from Colonel Frenkel’s propensity to profanity, that an injury to the back of the head is associated with a different set of symptoms?’

‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ said red-hair, grimly.

‘Lenin said,’ slobbered Frenkel, ‘that if we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views, will have to be revised. Lenin said that! That was Lenin! Coyne was fond of quoting that.’

‘Coyne?’

‘Fucking American bastard.’

‘Coyne was yours?’

‘Of course! What did you think? Fuck. He was supposed to persuade you of the reality of the attack on Chernobyl. Fuckfuck.’

‘He was trying to warn me,’ I said, curiously unsettled by this information.

‘In a fucking manner of speaking,’ slurred Frenkel, dabbing at the corner of his mouth. ‘He was trying to warn everybody. That’s what we are fucking doing.’

‘You killed him!’

Frenkel twitched his face about. ‘Don’t be, don’t be,’ he snarled, and pressed his handkerchief against his mouth. ‘Don’t be fucking — stupid,’ he said, through the fabric. Why would we kill him? He was ours.’

‘Nonsense. Don’t swear and talk nonsense, Jan. Do one or the other. Coyne and Dora were…’

‘He’d called me when L-Ron,’ Frenkel interrupted. ‘When L-Ron. Fuck! He’d brought the woman over to me,’ said Frenkel, flapping his arm away, with its square of white cloth, as if surrendering. ‘She’s a special case. There aren’t many like her! That’s why he brought her. He usually came on his own. You think I was loitering outside the ministry that evening just by chance? And then! And then! Hubbard’s death was the perfect opportunity. The moment had come. We figured: a loosening of that whole system. We figured a defocusing. All we needed to do was give the collective blindness of people one fucking jolt. It was the perfect fucking opportunity to pull together the…’ He coughed, and then dropped his head.

‘Scientology? What has that to do with anything?’

‘Aa. Oo. I don’t know why I keep talking,’ slurped Frenkel. ‘I can’t seem to stop babbling.’

‘No,’ agreed the red-haired man, snide. ‘You can’t.’

‘Fucking brain injury. Mass hypnosis. They’re techniques. Brainwashing. Fuck. That’s too strong a term for it, brainwashing, but — you know. Belief systems. Belief. Oh, garoo. You saw them fucking kill him, and then you magicked a fucking rope out of your brainpan to explain it away. Why would you do that?’