Men in Space (21 page)

“Let’s wipe the record, start afresh. I’ll go and get more coffees. Do you want a coffee, Anton?”

Should he take one? This man’s trick is to draw him out, then lunge at him. It’s best not to be drawn at all. And anyway, he doesn’t need a coffee: tense enough already …

“No. Thank you. I’m OK.”

“Coffee, Lieutenant?”

Again, an almost imperceptible shake of the head. The younger man leaves the room. The older one watches Anton while he’s gone, still making notes. He lights another cigarette, blows the first drag’s smoke out and makes more notes. He’s observing Anton now – right now this second, during this supposed hiatus – and
still
garnering knowledge from him, writing it down. Are they that well trained? The wealth of whole decades of Soviet science seems stored up in the portly frame in the room’s corner, secrets fomented in wards of mental institutions. Have they developed ways of telling everything, of reading thoughts just from his posture, where his eyes are pointing, how his fingers shake, each involuntary twitch? Will these notes be typed up, duplicated, catalogued and archived, to be perused at will in subterranean stacks by anyone who cares to look under
M
for Markov,
B
for Bulgaria? Then transferred to computer, pooled with the files of other police forces around the world, some massive network you can’t get out of once you’re in: it’s fed on even to the US Immigration Bureau …

The thin, dark-haired man comes back in. He hands Anton a blue paper towel, places a new coffee on the table and sits down. He extends his hands above the table, fingers fluttering, and whistles through oscillating lips: a long, tremolo whistle that descends in tone as his breath expires.

“That’s better.” He smiles and sits up. “Now, Anton, look: let’s keep it level. Straight. You won’t fuck around with me and I won’t lose my temper. That’s how I suggest proceeding. OK?”

Anton nods but still doesn’t understand. Proceed with what? The only question he’s been asked is whether or not
he wants coffee. The dark-haired man raises his plastic cup towards his lips, blows steam off the liquid’s surface, then sets it down again.

“First principles. Those basics. Fundamentals. We know everything.” He says it softly this time, eyebrows raised. “You give me a date, any date since halfway through December, and I’ll tell you what you did that day You say the fifteenth of December, I’ll tell you you went for a walk on Libeňský Island with Ilievski. I’ll tell you which way you walked. You tell me the nineteenth, I’ll tell you you watched Sparta beat Košice four-nil with Milachkov. I’ll tell you what type of
langoš
you bought at half-time, how many beers you had in the Sokolovna afterwards. I’ll even show you photographs. We haven’t brought you in here to help us establish facts. We know the facts.”

He pauses. If they know the facts, then what …

“Now, what we know that
you
, Anton, do, and every day of every month at that, is run around for Ilievski. You carry an envelope containing this, a suitcase full of that. We’ve known that for ages. It’s no great deal. Of course” – a new urgency here – “of course, it’s illegal, but so’s double-parking, right?”

He opens his hands invitingly, eyes holding Anton’s as he laughs. If Anton doesn’t laugh with him it’s rude, a clear act of rebellion – but if he does, he’s right inside the trap again, defenceless. Anton’s lips quiver up into a smile. The dark-haired man takes this as a cue to continue:

“But!” he says, both index fingers stabbing the air as the other digits curl into the palms. “But! Recently, it’s got a bit more serious. I mean, for example, if, when I ask you to name a date, you were to tell me last Wednesday, Wednesday the thirtieth, I’ll tell you you had a conversation on the phone with Ivan Maňásek discussing picking certain objects up at certain times. I’ll tell you what you said, and what he said, and in what tone of voice you both said what you said. I’ll
play you the tapes if you want.” On
tapes
his finger prods the table and his voice buckles under the weight of its own sense of triumph. He stops, and his nose twitches with excitement several times before he carries on:

“The facts are beyond dispute here. You’ve been ferrying this invaluable painting around town. You’ve paid Ivan Maňásek to make a copy of it. You’ve been caught red-handed with the stolen work itself and with the proof of your conspiracy to defraud. They’re with Interpol now.” As a preface to his next sentence he draws his cheeks in and widens his eyes, mimicking amazement: “And I can tell you, Anton, the prosecutor’s office don’t know where to start. There are crimes committed on Czech soil: one – well, two in fact, possession and conspiracy; same two against the Bulgarian state, makes four; and with intent to transport on to a third country, equals, what? There must be six or seven different charges coming at you just from that.”

He pauses again.
Just from that
? He’s holding something back: Anton can tell from the way he’s breathing lightly – not deep down into his chest but in his throat – that this is just the preamble. He’s holding this other thing back like a wild dog on a leash …

“There’s five, six, seven years already there. But that is
nothing
, nothing at
all
compared to the charge that’s being prepared against you for what happened on New Year’s Eve.”

New Year’s Eve? “I don’t …”

The thin, dark-haired man looks over at the lieutenant, who nods quickly once. Then he turns back to Anton and his eyes be come intense, illuminated:

“Ivan Maňásek’s death.”

“Ivan Maňásek’s … What? When?” The wild dog’s on him: it knocks his breath away and makes him wheeze. He looks up at the two men, as though they’d picked his breath up and were holding it in their hands, their faces, those damn notes,
and were playing keep-away with it, would pass it back to him if he just … just what? How can it be possible for this man to tell him this? If he can say that Maňásek is dead and Anton can understand these words, then their significance must extend beyond this cell; it can’t be true in here and not outside: Ivan Maňásek must actually be dead. And he’s to be
charged
? Both men are scrutinizing him intently: they seem genuinely interested, as though they were trying for the first time in the interview, despite the dark-haired man’s earlier claim to the contrary, to learn something they don’t already know. After five or six seconds the lieutenant looks down at his clipboard again and vigorously scrawls.

The dark-haired man is saying something to Anton, but for Anton words, sentences and the images they trail behind them are unravelling. The dark-haired man is pronouncing Ivan Maňásek’s name again, and saying he went diving, like an Olympic athlete – and Anton’s grappling with a vision of a Soviet athlete diving from a board, trying to slot it into some larger vision of which it should be a part, in which it would make sense. His mind grasps back to that strange lawn beside the house on Libeňský Island, its sculptures, but these don’t help. Ivan Maňásek’s become an Olympic diver, the thin, dark-haired man’s saying. The fingers of his right hand are pirouetting and somersaulting through high air. His lips whistle with Anton’s stolen breath, mimicking the sound of wind, the tremolo effect this time replaced by gusty cycles, peaks and troughs. The fingers land on the desk’s surface in a pool of coffee, then are shaken and slipped into the thin, dark-haired man’s mouth, sucked dry. The man’s talking again, but Anton’s only receiving snatches:

“… landed on the pavement … ice and blood … after he’d finished copying … to keep him quiet … be worth a lot of money …”

He’s got to tell them: tell them how it was. Ivan Maňásek wasn’t a Soviet high diver; there wasn’t blood and ice. Ice, yes
– but no blood on it. Only carp blood: that was everywhere, all over Prague – but that all finished around Christmas, on the twenty-fourth. On the thirty-first he left Maňásek in his studio alive and happy, holding twenty-five thousand crowns. Did the thin, dark-haired man say
a lot of money
? That’s true, then, what the thin, dark-haired man’s saying is true. Twenty-five. But the way Maňásek took it, flicked the notes’ edges: he was raring to go, to get into the game, the night, New Year’s Eve, parties, women … Anton tries to make them see this, to communicate it to them:

“He can’t … he was standing in his doorway … I drove off and he was … I don’t …” This isn’t working: he should get his breath back first, and learn again to organize the words and images in sequences. Ilievski told him to go straight back to Korunní, saying he’d meet him there just before midnight, then called to say he couldn’t come till noon the next day … The dark-haired man’s eyes have narrowed down to slits: is he … is he
laughing
at him?

“You were the last to … seen entering his building just before … photos of this too … easily stick to you … No jury would take long …”

The words and images still won’t make sense. Anton sees a jury traipsing back into a courtroom, sliding into those benches he pictured being dusted earlier, the clerk there with her pre-flexed fingers tapping on her brutally indifferent typewriter, transcribing the foreman’s verdict,
Guilty
, then the judge sentencing him to life: that’s what you get, you get life, only cells and corridors, layer upon layer, like this building but multiplied ten times, multiplied to infinity as far as he’s concerned, he’ll never be outside it again … This picture won’t move aside for any others; it’s become anchored, intractable. And Anton’s there inside it, feels himself there literally: the courtroom is a box around this room’s box and the prison is a bigger box around that, boxes over boxes, each one slightly larger than the last, the
gaps between the sides of each and those of the next forming corridors that lead nowhere, only back round to themselves; and at the centre of the smallest box is him. Coherence starts returning to him now, with his breath. The chaos of words and body has been replaced by sense and order – but both these stem from the inescapable truth of this boxed structure in which he now finds himself. All thoughts that follow move along its corridors, become themselves more cells and corridors, more layers.

With his slit eyes still locked on Anton, the thin, dark-haired man takes a sip of coffee, the first he’s had since walking in here. Then he pulls the cup away and places his finger on his chin:

“There’s still some coffee on your face.”

Anton, mirroring him, dabs at his chin. He can understand things now: they’re very simple. There’s coffee on his face, he’ll dab it off.

“No, other side.”

Anton dabs at the other side and feels the towel blot.

“Oh!” He’s all good-humoured now. “Before I forget: do you know someone called František?”

“František? He might be somewhere else. I haven’t heard of him before.”

“He’s not in your part of the picture, is that it?” Yes, that’s exactly what he meant: that František, whoever he is, must be slinking down some corridor located several layers away, or in some cell just off it. This man understands him perfectly.
Engage
.
Proceed
. The terms make sense now. Anton feels strongly attached to the man and is moved to tell him:

“I’m sorry.”

“About František? It’s not your fault. Don’t worry. If you don’t know him you don’t know him. It’s not something you need to deal with. Your role’s easy from now on. You just stay here, in this building, while we go and prepare your arraignment. Your arraignments, plural. Interpol will get a
report from I.F.A.R. in a day or so from now, and when they do we’ll proceed with all the charges relating to the painting. The murder charge will take a few days more to formalize. They’re still gathering evidence at the scene …” He pauses and looks at Anton sympathetically. “I’m sorry too. Not about František. About you. That it’s you who’s here with all this centred around you.”

He gestures outwards from the room, beyond the walls. That’s what it is: centred around him, all this. Anton waits while the dark-haired man takes another sip of coffee, wanting him to carry on. The dark-haired man sets the cup down, wipes his hand across his lips, then says:

“And for what it’s worth – although we both know, you and I, that this fact has no bearing on the situation – I don’t think you killed Ivan Maňásek.”

The statement rouses Anton. “Maybe you could …” Could what? The whole procedure that’s been landed on him is so big, its layers so infinite – what could this man do to alter it? As though thinking aloud with him, the dark-haired man says:

“Could what, Anton? I don’t make the rules. I’m just caught up in the process, same as you. You have a role, I have a role. You’re the one in the picture, for the painting and for Ivan Maňásek. I help arraign you. The system does the rest.”

He gathers his papers together, lifts them up and lets them slide between his hands a few times so their bottom edges tap against the table, straightening.

“Once the process gets going, tomorrow, once it’s launched, it’s going to run right through. I won’t be able to stop it once it’s started.” He taps the papers on the table one more time, as though straightening a pack of cards, lays them down neatly, then looks up at Anton. His eyebrows shoot up suddenly – a look that heralds something new – and Anton’s shoulder blades rise with them, as if linked to them by invisible nerve-strings.
The thin, dark-haired man holds him like that, half-suspended in the space above the table top, before resuming: “There
is
one thing I
could
do.”

Anton stays suspended, waiting for him to continue. The man seems to be thinking, running his mind over the structure’s layers and corridors. After a few seconds he seems to find what he was looking for, and says:

“What I
could
do – what
we
could do, if you work with me – is to prevent it starting.”

There’s a pause, then Anton says: “I don’t understand. How could we prevent …” The painting was found in his flat, he’s been arrested: hasn’t it already started? …

“Anton,” he’s smiling now, “of course it’s going to start, and right now you’re the one it centres around. What I mean is that we can get you out of here before it starts. Swap you.” He makes a criss-cross switching movement with his hands, as though he were showing off a trick, then leans forwards and says slowly, softly: “It’s not you they want.”