Yellow Blue Tibia (13 page)

‘What?’

‘
React!’
he ordered.

‘I don’t understand what you want me to do. Laugh? Clap?’

He rolled his eyes.

‘You want me to, what?’ I said, growing angry, and conscious for the first time of how rapidly my heart was beating. ‘What, burst into applause?’

He seemed to be nodding. ‘Or—’ he started to say, his lips working as if he were chewing the pavement.

‘Or what?’ I snapped at him. My startlement was converting itself into anger. How
dare
he scare me like this? ‘Or how else am I supposed to react to such an absurd performance? Or what will you
do
, exactly?’

As abruptly as it had switched on, the light went out. The darkness was everywhere. I blinked and blinked, and only very slowly did his body start to become visible to me again. There was a sudden movement of the rope, a repeat of the whiffling sound - or perhaps it was a broken, gaspy breath from Coyne’s lungs, squeezed from his broken ribcage. In fact, the more I consider it, I wonder whether this wasn’t exactly the sound of the
death rattle
. I had read about such a thing as a death rattle, though I had never heard one in life before. I leant further forward, pulling off my right glove to place a finger on the artery in his throat. Touching his neck was an uncanny thing, and not pleasant. His felt like a sack of knucklebones from a butcher’s, not a neck. There was no pulse at all. The last of his breath whiffled out of him.

‘Four,’ he said, very distinctly.

The streetlights came on as I sat back. I could see that I had been kneeling in his blood, and that my trousers were marked with it. And as I looked up I could see two Militia officers, guns out,
running
along the Zholtovskovo, running with furious haste and towards me.

CHAPTER 8

They put me in a basement cell with no windows. There was an electric light bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling. The blank walls were covered with tooth-sized white tiles. I sat on the bench. After a while I lay down on the bench. It being a Militia cell the bench was long enough for me to lie upon. Had it been KGB the bench would have been too short, and set into the wall at enough of an angle to threaten to roll me off it and onto the floor, so as to make sleep harder. But the Militia are ordinary police, and a fair amount of their work involves locking drunks away and letting them sleep themselves law-abiding. The KGB, conversely, prefer a sleep-deprived prisoner. A prisoner is more useful to the KGB exhausted.

In another reality, perhaps, I stayed awake and plotted my escape. But in
this
reality, I fell asleep. A couple of hours at the most.

I woke at the sound of footsteps outside, and then the door sang its hinge-scraping song - a pure, soprano tone. Two officers roused me and led me upstairs, both of them as tall and broad and impassive as Klaatu himself. One was carrying handcuffs; but he took one look at me, elderly and shuffling as I was, and evidently concluded they were superfluous.

It was the small hours of the night, and the station was quiet. Decades of cigarette smoking had imparted a warm, stale quality to the declivities and crevices of the building. The smell was a mixture of tobacco, body odour, upholstery and a metallic quality hard, precisely, to identify: gunmetal, perhaps. I was sat at a table in an interrogation room and left to my own devices for perhaps quarter of an hour. The table, no larger than a statue’s plinth, was crowded with enamel mugs: white sides, blue-lipped as if with cold, I counted nine of them. Some were empty. Some held inch-thick discs of cold, oily-looking coffee, as black as alien eyes. I pondered why they had sat me down at this table, with all these used mugs, but my brain was not working as smoothly as would have been good. It was the dead of night. I am an old, tired man.

Eventually a young officer unlocked the door, gathered all the old mugs onto a tray and carried them away without saying a word. The door closed and the key turned with a noise like a blown raspberry; and then, without pause, it blew another raspberry as it was unlocked. The door swung open again.

‘My name,’ said the officer, sitting himself down opposite me, ‘is Zembla.’ He put a tape recorder on the table between us.

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ I said.

‘Are you prepared to assist us in our enquiries?’

‘By all means.’

He peered at me with two midnight-coloured eyes. The cloth of his uniform creaked as he shifted in the chair. On went the recorder. ‘Officer Zembla, interrogation February 20th 1986. Suspect to state his name.’

‘Konstantin Skvorecky.’

‘Occupation?’

‘I work as a translator.’

Zembla looked hard at me. ‘As it might be, foreign languages?’

‘As it might be.’

‘In particular?’

‘The English particular. I speak a little French too.’

‘That’s a job?’

‘Doesn’t it sound like one to you?’

‘Just speaking a language?’ said Zembla. ‘Not really. You speak English? But isn’t England full of people who speak English?’

‘True,’ I said. ‘But not many of them speak Russian.’

‘Why go to England for that? The Soviet Union contains
millions
of people who speak Russian!’

I looked closely at him to see if he was joking, but he seemed to be serious. ‘You make an interesting point, comrade,’ I said eventually.

‘Anyway. Never mind that. So. You were present at the crime scene?’

‘I haven’t been told what the crime is.’

‘James Coyne, an American citizen, was discovered dead on Zholtovskovo Street by two officers. You were discovered kneeling next to him. This is a serious matter.’

‘Death is rarely otherwise.’

Zembla switched the tape recorder off. ‘The
Americanness
of the deceased is serious,’ he said, with a poorly repressed fury. ‘Death is absolutely fucking ordinary and everyday in this job, comrade. You understand?’

‘I think so.’

‘
Death
is not serious. Death is fucking
comedy
, as far as I’m concerned. Death is the jester, yeah? He—’ Zembla turned his hand over and back in the manner of an individual searching for right words. ‘He, he does whatever it is that jesters do.’

‘Juggling balls?’ I suggested.

Zembla’s face stiffened. It possessed, in repose, a really quite impressive sculptural quality: massy and stone-coloured. Then his lips started working, and eventually words came out. ‘I’ll cut off
your
balls and juggle them
in the air
you fucking little
cock-end
. You understand?’

‘Perfectly, comrade.’

‘Don’t fuck me around.’

‘No, comrade.’

The tape went on again. ‘Describe how you came to be beside the deceased.’

‘I was walking with him along Zholtovskovo Street when he was killed.’

‘You killed him?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘You knew him, though?’

‘I met him for the first time today. Or perhaps, yesterday. If it is now past midnight.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘I was working as a translator in the Office of Liaison and Overseas Exchange. Mr Coyne was there, together with a Miss Norman, discussing—’

‘Wait!’ Zembla took out a notepad. ‘Also an American?’

‘Yes.’

‘Spell her name.’ I did so, and he wrote it down, tracing out large letters like a child with a crayon. ‘His wife? Mistress?’

‘I’ve really no idea, comrade. They were both representing the American Church of Scientology with a view to establishing a cultural exchange in Moscow.’

‘That’s what they said?’

‘Yes, comrade.’

He leered at me. ‘You believed them?’

‘It seems to me that the business of an official translator is to translate,’ I said. ‘Not to believe or disbelieve.’

Zembla’s chunky thumb went back to the tape recorder. Off. He leaned forward. ‘You remember what I said about your balls?’

‘Juggling them, you mean?’

‘You
remember
that? Do you have
memory problems
, old man? Or do you
remember?
You think, perhaps, that was just a figure of speech? It
wasn’t
a figure of speech. I will
literally
cut off your testicles and throw them about this room. Do you think I’ve never done it before? Do you think I’ve never cut off a man’s balls?’

‘I’d imagine there’s a considerable loss of blood.’

He glowered at me. ‘Loss of blood!’ he said. ‘That’s
right
. Not to mention the loss of
balls
. That’s
another
loss. That’s a more
significant
loss. Blood can always be transfused, can’t it? But there’s no hospital in the world will transfuse you new
balls
.’ He let me ponder this medical undeniability for a moment. Then he said, in a gloating tone, ‘Do you think we didn’t
know
about Dora Norman? Well we did. We know all about Coyne, and his business here. You don’t fool us.’

‘Comrade, I’m honestly not trying to fool you.’

‘When I got you to spell her name just then,’ he said, ‘I already knew it! It was a
trick
. We’ll soon have Norman Doriski in custody. Very soon.’

‘Dora Norman,’ I said.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Think of your ballbag,’ he said. ‘Think about it long and hard. Give your ballbag careful thought.
I
would, if I were you.’

‘You would?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’d think about my ballbag?’

‘The tape recorder isn’t king in here,’ he told me, his eyes going from side to side. ‘
I’m
king in here.’

‘I had always assumed that the optimum interrogation strategy was
nice cop nasty cop
,’ I said. ‘Not
nice cop confusing cop.’

He opened his eyes very wide at this, but didn’t say anything. Perhaps he couldn’t think of a retort. Instead he pointed his forefinger at my face and gave me a severe look. Then he jabbed his meaty thumb at the tape recorder. The spindle-wheels of the cassette again began turning again. ‘How did you come to be walking with Mr Coyne along Zholtovskovo Street after midnight?’

‘I encountered him quite by chance.’

‘By chance? You didn’t
arrange
to meet him again?’

‘No. I went to the Pushkin Chess Club, and he happened to be there.’

‘You went to the Pushkin Chess Club?’

‘Yes.’

He turned off the recorder again. ‘Big chess fan, are you?’ he sneered.

‘The club has a social function in addition to the playing of chess.’

‘Ever played chess with your own
balls
instead of the kings? Eh? Have you? Because I can arrange exactly that sort of game. I’ll cut them off myself with my penknife, and you can use them as the two white kings. Understand?’

He turned the tape recorder on again. I’ll confess I was finding his one-note attempt to intimidate me strangely endearing. ‘There’s only one white king,’ I said. ‘One king per player in a game of chess.’

He jabbed the tape recorder off. ‘I know that!’ he snapped. He poked his thumb at the machine, turned it on, turned it off again, perhaps by accident, turned it on again. ‘Don’t fuck with me, little man. You seem to
enjoy
being disrespectful to me. Do it once more and I won’t cut your balls off, I’ll fucking
rip
them off with my own right hand.’

I considered telling him that he was recording this tirade onto his cassette, but elected, after a moment’s consideration, not to. It was his machine, after all. ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

‘OK. We’re going to proceed with the interview in a moment. I’ll ask questions, and you’ll give me the answers I want to hear, OK? No more disrespect, or your balls will no longer be attached to your body.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘Good.’ He pressed the cassette button, turning the machine off. He seemed to believe that he had turned it on.

‘So, comrade. You met Mr Coyne in the Pushkin?’

‘He was there, yes.’

‘And you didn’t expect to see him there?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Why not?’

‘For one thing, I assumed he couldn’t speak Russian.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, I suppose I reasoned: if he spoke Russian, why had he needed my services as a translator in the ministry, that afternoon?’

‘Why indeed? So he
did
speak Russian?’

‘Fluently.’

‘Why, then,
had
he asked for an interpreter at the ministry?’

‘I’ve no idea, comrade.’

‘You can’t guess?’

‘I suppose he didn’t want the ministry to know the extent of his Russian knowledge. As in a game of poker, one keeps certain cards hidden from the other players.’

‘So he was playing poker?’

‘Metaphorically, yes, I suppose so.’

‘What
was
he playing, though?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Poker?’ I hazarded.