Yellow Blue Tibia (16 page)

‘Such abuse is merely unbecoming.’

‘I boarded your taxi-car in the understanding you would take me home.
Had
you taken me home, I would presently be asleep in my own bed, with no other worries in the world. Instead you took me, against my will, to the Pushkin Chess Club, where I became entangled in the death of this American. I hold you responsible for the fact that my life has taken this dire turn!’

‘Pff!’ he said. He turned his face away.

‘I shall probably go to prison for the rest of my life,’ I said. ‘And it will be your fault.’

After this little outburst we sat in silence for a long time. We were brought breakfast on a tray (black bread, thin-sliced cheese, milk in enamel mugs) by a young Militia officer, with little plugs of shaving cream tucked into his ears like hearing-aids and nicks on his red-raw chin and cheeks. He blinked at us, yawned oxishly, and went out again.

Saltykov began eating at once. The food seemed to thaw his ill-humour. ‘Eat, comrade,’ he said.

‘I’m not very hungry,’ I said, truthfully; for lack of sleep leaves me feeling rather nauseous. ‘I believe I shall skip breakfast.’

‘Ah,’ said Saltykov, ‘that is one thing you cannot do!’

‘Can I not?’

‘By definition, whichever meal you next eat will break your fast. Do you see? It is in the nature of the word.’

This did not dispose me to conversation with the fellow. I folded my arms and put my chin on my chest. For a while there was only the sound of Saltykov’s munching and chewing.

‘So,’ he said, eventually. A full belly had put him in a much better humour. He tried for a smile, but managed only a sort of crookedness of the lower face. Then he winked. I was surprised at this. He was acting, indeed, for all the world like a child attempting to insinuate himself into the confidence of an adult. ‘So. You were the
last person
to see the American alive?’

‘A dispiriting thought.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Say?’

‘Come come, don’t be coy. You can tell me.’

‘I am not usually remarked upon for my coyness.’

‘Then out with it!’ He tried the weird face-stretching exercise once again, and once again failed to manage a smile.

‘What did he
tell you
? He was very interested in,’ and Saltykov, I am certain with perfect genuineness, glanced back over his shoulder, as if to check that there were any eavesdroppers nearby, ‘a certain
project
, initiated by a certain
dictator
. A certain, now
deceased
, ruler of all the Russias. You know that of which I am talking.’

‘I would answer your question if I understood it.’

‘Walls have ears,’ Saltykov said brightly. ‘Or is it: walls
are
ears? I forget. The latter would imply that we are inside a gigantic ear. Either way it would be foolish of me to blurt out a name like Project Stalin, or to mention the impending alien attack upon Chernobyl.’ He stopped. A troubled look passed over his face. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘said more than I meant.’

‘Remembering that you are a member of the Pushkin Chess Club, your credulity ought not to surprise me.’

‘Credulity?’

‘Concerning UFOs.’

‘Psshh! Not so loud. Not
out
loud.’

‘I shall be more circumspect, and adopt your cunningly impenetrable code.’

‘But what did Coyne say?’ he asked. ‘Had he found out whether it is truly to be Ukraine? We only suspected. But is it? And
which
of the reactors?’

At this, belatedly, and with a piercing sense of my foolishness for not comprehending earlier, I finally understood what Coyne had been saying as he died. I opened my mouth, and then shut it for mere foolishness.

At that exact moment we were interrupted. Singsong, the door turned on its musical hinges.

‘Comrade,’ declared a voice, forcefully. It was Officer Liski. ‘You are free to go. The people of the Soviet Union thank you for your assistance with the investigation of this crime.’

‘Me?’ I said.

‘No, comrade. The other one.’

Saltykov bobbed to his feet, like an amateur debater. ‘I object. I wish to make official complaint. I have been brutally handled by your men, despite suffering from a syndrome that makes such contact odious to me. I deeply resent such treatment.’

‘Resent it all you like,’ Liski said. ‘But resent it
outside
.’

‘Do-on’t!’ said Saltykov, his tone changing from brittle annoyance to wailing apprehension, as Liski advanced upon him, as if with the intention of grasping him by the arm and hauling him through the door. ‘Do-o-on’t to-o-ouch
me
! No
touching
! No hands
touching
!’ He had backed his small body so hard against the cell wall it was as if he hoped to topographically transform himself from a three- to a two-dimensional being.

‘Comrade,’ I said to Liski, from my seated position. ‘He dislikes being touched. He will go, with no need for coercion, if you simply tell him to.’

Liski stopped. ‘Prove what this prisoner says,’ he told Saltykov. ‘Go.’

‘Reactor Four, Saltykov,’ I said, as clearly and distinctly as I could. ‘That’s the answer to your question.’ But the look on the man’s face made my spirit sink; for it seemed inconceivable that he would comprehend my words. Terror was seated in that face, and his mouth was as round as a drainpipe’s end. ‘No!’ he said, flapping his hands in the air in the direction of the uniformed man.

‘Reactor
Four
,’ I said again. ‘Saltykov!’

‘Get him out,’ said Liski to one of his officers.

‘O-o-o-o-o,’ replied Saltykov, cringing, and dancing round the uniformed man like a crab. ‘O-o-o,’ he added, as he darted through the open door. Doppler shift nudged the tone of his wail downwards a notch as he ran up the stairs outside.

Liski sighed, and returned to the door.

‘And what of me, comrade?’ I asked. ‘When can I look forward to my release?’

‘You?’ he said. ‘If we constellate the severity of the crime, the length of sentence likely to be passed upon you, and your advanced age, then the likelihood is - never.’

‘With respect,’ I put in. ‘You must include my
innocence of the crime
in your constellation.’

‘You are our prime suspect,’ Liski said in a flat voice. ‘To be honest, you are our only suspect. You have a criminal record. You were, we discover, in the camps for many years.’

‘As a political!’

‘Nevertheless. You were the last person to see the deceased alive. You admit you were walking along the Zholtovskovo with him. Then one of two things happens: either he is snared by a rope and hauled upward, or else you and he quarrel and fight. The latter seems more likely, to us, than the former. Either way, the next thing, the American is lying on the ground with a broken neck.’

‘Look at me!’ I said. ‘Note my physical decrepitude. Do you think I have the strength of arm to break a man’s neck?’

‘The crime is being investigated, comrade,’ Liski said, pulling the door closed as he went out, ‘and perhaps other leads will emerge; but as it stands - I’d advise you to cultivate patience.’

He slammed the door behind him. I lay back on the bench. There didn’t seem to be much more to do.

 

I slept, I sat, I slept some more. Many hours passed, although in that windowless space I could not gauge exactly how many. Eventually I was removed from the cell by two militia officers and marched up the stairs into a room with windows, which at last gave me some sense of the time of day. It was now late afternoon. It had been raining in the day, and the wet rooftops were lacquered yellow by the low sun. Light came in shafts through the windows. I was led through to the captain’s office. I was not offered a seat.

The captain, seated behind his desk, looked up at me with a fauvist face rather startling in the severity of its primary colours: choleric red skin, intensely blue eyes, and white smoothed-back hair.

‘I have yet to be charged with a crime,’ I said. ‘I believe that under the law I must be officially charged, so as to know the crime of which I have been accused.’

‘Konstantin Skvorecky,’ said the captain, in a voice simultaneously deep and buzzing. ‘We’ve had interventions from higher authorities. From high up in the government no less.’

Perhaps I was a little drunk with lack of sleep. ‘You misunderstand the nature of government, comrade,’ I said, in a tone of polite correction. ‘It comes from the people, from the ground up. No altitude there.’

‘Believe me, friend,’ said the captain, signing a document. ‘You have no cause for levity.’ He coughed, but when he spoke again the wasp was still in his voice box. ‘We are releasing you into the custody of the KGB.’ He said this as he might have said
May God have mercy on your soul.

‘KGB?’ I repeated, with some alarm.

‘Indeed. You are still under arrest, of course. There, signed and completed.’ This last, I understood, was addressed not to me, but to somebody standing behind me. ‘He’s yours now.’

‘Thank you, captain,’ said a familiar voice. It took me a moment to place it.

‘We would appreciate,’ continued the captain, ‘if you could keep us informed of developments. The murder of an American, you know . . .’

‘Oh, I’ll undertake personally to keep you in the loop.’

I turned. The first person I saw was the vast frame of Trofim, tall as Andre the Giant. And standing beside him, zoo-keeper-like with his gorillan charge, Ivan Frenkel. ‘Hello again, Konstantin,’ said Frenkel. And then, with a slow distinctiveness, he smiled broadly.

CHAPTER 10

Frenkel and Trofim led me away. They did not even handcuff me. Like the Militia, they clearly thought there was no point in restraining so elderly and broken-down a figure. ‘You told me you were a lowly employee of an obscure ministry,’ I remonstrated with Frenkel mildly.

‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’

‘You certainly didn’t tell me you were KGB.’

‘You are upset that I kept my membership of the KGB secret from you,’ he observed. ‘Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that the KGB is a secret organisation?’

Trofim’s huge hand was on my shoulder as we stepped through the main entrance and onto the street. The afternoon was in the process of burning coldly into the deeper blue of evening. The streetlamps had been lit. The sky over the roofs was a garish lamination of yellow, salmon, lime and - higher up - dark-blue and black. Light shimmied and shifted on the wet pavement, like an untrustworthy thing. There were puddles in the gutter in which vodka, or petroleum, mixed oily rainbows. A large black auto was parked at the side of the road, and into this I was shuffled, Trofim’s enormous hand on the top of my head to make me duck.

The driver, sitting up front, was a gentleman I had not previously met: a skinny fellow with red hair trimmed close over the back of his head, and a hard-edged, freckled face. The cut of his hair swirled like rusty iron filings on a magnet. This is the fellow who, in a matter of some few months, would shoot a bullet from his standard-issue Makarov automatic pistol right through my heart. I don’t mean to confuse you: but it seems fair to give you, the reader of this memoir, a glimpse of my future; and the glimpse is of a bullet bursting from the end of his pistol and going directly through the heart in the middle of my chest - out the other side, too.

We’ll come to that in due course. I suppose I am saying, at this point in the narrative, keep an eye on this red-headed man.

Trofim got in the front passenger seat; which is to say, he somehow folded himself small enough to squeeze into the front passenger seat. Frenkel sat himself down next to me. ‘Off we go, lads,’ he said.

The car growled as a dog growls when somebody menaces its bone. It pulled smoothly away, and into traffic.

Frenkel sat in contemplative silence for a while before addressing me. ‘It was one day in the 1950s,’ he said in a serious voice. ‘I had occasion, on account of my work, to look at an atlas. It struck me then - there was Russia. I put my hand,’ and he held his broad hand up in front of me, ‘over Siberia and the east. Let’s not concern ourselves with them, I thought. Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, that’s enough. And here was Germany, East and West, so small. The Mammoth and the Polecat. Goliath and David. Excepting only that Goliath was us, and Goliath won. Germany, such a small place, so underpopulated - compared, I mean, with us. Then I thought: We were so joyful about winning the war! We thought
we
were David and
they
were Goliath. But it was the other way about ! We were much bigger than them. Defeating them was as inevitable as Josef Vissarionovich constantly claimed in his wartime speeches.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a shock, you know? Realising that.’

‘Tell me, Jan,’ I said. ‘
Were
you abducted by space-aliens? Did that really happen to you?’

‘You’re not listening to me, Konstantin Andreiovich,’ Frenkel replied, sternly. ‘My revelation? It was the Force of Necessity. There’s nothing else in the cosmos. You know science fiction.’