Yellow Blue Tibia (18 page)

The pain in my eye was sharp, like a migraine. ‘I’ll be quiet.’

‘What did you tell the police?’ Frenkel was yelling at me. ‘You fucker, what did you
tell
them?’

‘I told them what happened,’ I gasped. ‘I was walking with Coyne. That’s what I told them. He seemed to think I was privy to a plan, although I assured him I wasn’t. That gun is hurting my eyeball.’

‘Where? Did he tell you
where
?’

‘He said aliens were going to attack a nuclear reactor,’ I said. ‘I’m starting to worry I’ll lose the sight in that eyeball.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, but did he tell you
where
?’

‘Lithuania,’ I improvised. ‘He said it was connected to the ghost rockets after the war. I think he believed it, too.’

Frenkel, I was relieved to see, accepted this. ‘Better!’ He sank back into his seat. ‘I like you when you’re cooperative, Konstantin Andreiovich. You can do one more thing for me, to prove that you are in a properly cooperative mood. Or perhaps I should let Trofim squeeze the eyeball right
out
with his gun.’

‘That wouldn’t be my preference.’

‘Tell me where the woman is. The American woman.’

Suddenly the gun was taken out of my eyeball, a very relieving sensation, although it left my vision scattered and lanced across with weird neon cobwebs and blobs of light. I rubbed at the eye with the heel of my hand, which didn’t help particularly but seemed the thing to do. Trofim had reholstered his weapon.

‘Where is she?’ Frenkel asked me again, sitting forward to be able to turn his head and look properly at me.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t
know
?’ This answer infuriated him. He flung himself back against the seat and bounced forward. The car rocked on its suspension. ‘Give me the pistol! Give it to me, Trofim.’

The weapon was handed back.

‘Open your mouth, you fucking idiot,’ he ordered.

I opened my mouth. So, I noticed, did Trofim, although he snapped it shut soon enough when he realised that his superior had not been addressing him.

The barrel went between my teeth. I tasted the distinctive, slightly marine flavour of gunmetal.

‘No more nonsense,’ Frenkel declared, in a tone of businesslike savagery. ‘You know where the fat woman is hiding. You are going to tell me. If you tell me, and if you are not lying to me, I shall lock you away. If you
don’t
tell me, or if you
lie
to me, I shall pull this trigger, here, now, in this car.’ He yanked his hand up, hinging the pistol downwards against my lower teeth. ‘And here’s a KGB trick: I’ll shoot you
down
your throat. That way I don’t get your fucking brains all over the interior of my car. It will have the added bonus of causing you to die slowly and in great pain from internal bleeding. Do. You. Understand?’

‘Gghhah,’ I affirmed.

‘It is possible,’ he went on, ‘when one has a prisoner in this position, to shoot so that the bullet goes right through the gut and exits through the anus. But it is much more painful, and less messy, if I angle the trajectory slightly so that the bullet goes into the inside of your thigh.
Where is she?’

‘Ghaah ghg ga-gahh, ghhah geh-h-ho gughu,’ I said.

There was a silence. In a low, controlled voice, like a bomb disposal expert about to remove a vital component from an infernal device, Frenkel said, ‘I’m going to slide this gun out of your carious mouth, Konsty. When it is out you can repeat what you just said. If it is a wisecrack, or if you say that you don’t know, then these will be the last seconds of your mortal life.’

He pulled the gun barrel out of my mouth. I wriggled my tongue against the inside of my mouth. ‘Thank you, Jan,’ I said.

‘Where,’ he asked, in a low voice, ‘is she?’

‘I don’t have the address, just a telephone number,’ I said.

Frenkel pondered this. ‘Write it down,’ he told me. He pulled out a small piece of card and a pencil stub from his pocket. I scribbled my ex-wife’s telephone number on the card and handed it back. My jaw ached. My eye was still spooling out luminous patterns into my brain. I couldn’t see properly.

Frenkel took the card, and pencil, back from me. ‘Then this is what we are going to do,’ he said, calmly. ‘Nik’ - this to the driver - ‘take us to the Heights.’

The car scraped to life, and we pulled away from the kerb. Nik, the one with the cropped red hair, did not signal, or even look where he was going. One car was forced to swerve, and several others to brake, but nobody sounded their horns, or shook their fists. Ordinary Muscovites had no desire to tangle with official business.

‘Trofim, you are to take him to the safe room,’ ordered Frenkel.

‘At the top of the building?’

‘Of course at the top of the building, you ox!’ The car slowed, turned a corner, and then accelerated. ‘Take him up there, make him phone the fat woman.
You
,’ he said to me, ‘will tell her to go to - I don’t know, somewhere a tourist would know.’

‘Red Square?’ I suggested.

‘Yes. Tell her you’ll meet her in Red Square. She’ll be able to find that. Tell her to wait outside the GUM. Tell her to go
straight there
: to get a taxi, and go straight to the GUM side of the square. Tell her that you
must meet her
, absolutely and straight away. Are you listening to this, ox?’

‘Sir,’ said Trofim.

‘Make
sure
he says all that. If he says anything else, or tries any nonsense, kill him.’

‘Sir.’

‘And if you do have to kill him, remember to put him in the chute.’

‘Sir.’

‘The chute, you hear? Don’t just leave him lying there. Yes?’

Trofim had coloured. ‘Sir.’

‘In fact, the best thing would be to take him to the chute, put his head in and shoot him there. Please, I’m asking you as one civilised man to another,
please
try not to get too much mess on the furnishings. Yes?’

Trofim nodded. Nik, the driver, was chuckling quietly.

‘Don’t break anything, no?’

‘No, comrade.’

‘And no blood on the carpet this time?’

‘No, comrade.’

‘I must say I hope there will be no need for the chute,’ I said, in a worried voice.

‘Do as I tell you and there may not be,’ said Frenkel, complacently. ‘Konsty, you can still be of use to me. You can be of use by delivering us this woman, obviously, but perhaps beyond that as well. You may still have a use, and usefulness is your best bet at extending your lifespan. There may be a future for you after all.’

‘As a science fiction writer,’ I said, ‘I have a particular interest in the future.’

CHAPTER 11

The car pulled up outside a tall block, in a uniform and fairly clean street of tall houses. Trofim clambered and lumbered out of the car, unpacking himself, as it were, from the front seat. He opened the door for me.

‘Trofim will look after you,’ said Frenkel.

‘An ambiguous phrase,’ I noted.

Frenkel laughed. ‘Upstairs with him, Trof. Take him to the room. The first thing he does is make the call. After that, settle him in. If he differs by so much as a thread from what we agreed - settle his final account.’

‘His account, sir?’

‘Kill him, you idiot.’

‘Comrade,’ said Trofim, meaning
yes
, and snapping to attention on the pavement. I realised this about Trofim: that, when in his military mode, he used that word as a universal signifier. The other thing I realised about Trofim, as he ushered me through the main entrance to the building, was that he really was enormous. He would have stood six foot six in his stockinged feet, excepting only that it was impossible to imagine him ever removing his boots, or going off duty. He appeared to have borrowed, or more likely to have been issued by the authorities with, the musculature of a much larger animal than a human: a bear, say. Or a Grendel. His neck was thicker than his head. Indeed, his neck was thicker than my waist.

We were at the foot of the stairs. ‘Is there no lift?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Yes,’ he added, as an afterthought.

‘Yes there is a lift? Why do we not avail ourselves of the lift?’

He stared at me as if I had posed a metaphysical conundrum.

‘It’s not working?’ I prompted, after long seconds. ‘Is that it?’

‘Comrade,’ he said to me, tipping his chin to the stairway.

I peered up the stairwell. ‘How many flights?’

‘Seventh floor.’

I sighed. ‘I’ll warn you now, comrade, I am not as fit as once I was.’ He greeted this news with his default, meaty impassivity. His general bearing was somewhere between
I don’t care
and
I don’t understand.

‘Off we go, then,’ I said, gloomily.

We ascended one flight of stairs, half a floor, before my lungs began complaining. Another flight and I was gasping like a cracked steamvalve. Comrade Trofim walked moodily on and I followed, but by the time we reached the second-floor stairwell landing my breath was positively hooting. ‘I need to rest, comrade,’ I gasped.

He loomed over me. ‘Your lungs, is it?’

‘An expert diagnosis, comrade’ I said, between breaths. ‘Old model, you see. Early revolutionary design. Single cylinder, two-stroke lungs. They’re noisier than the newer models.’ I saw his huge face touched, distantly, with puzzlement. ‘I just need to catch my breath,’ I said. ‘An old man’s lungs are not as efficient as a young man’s.’

‘Comrade,’ he said; meaning,
ah!

I dragged two breaths in. A third. Trofim was breathing silently, and without apparent motion of his chest.

‘So,’ I tried, to fill the silence. ‘You were in the army?’

‘Comrade,’ he said in the affirmative.

‘Afghanistan, is it? Why aren’t you there now?’

‘I needed medical attention,’ he said, with a slow, offhand deliberateness that implied multiple bullet wounds.

‘Really? What for?’

He pondered this, and then said, ‘Because I was wounded.’

‘Obviously,’ I said. ‘But how?’

‘A tooth,’ he said, and a dark look passed over his face.

‘Nasty,’ I said. ‘Impacted, was it? In the jaw?’

‘Skull,’ he said.

‘I’ve often thought they’re more trouble than they’re worth, molars.’

‘Oh no,’ he said, looking at me as if I were some kind of a simpleton. ‘It wasn’t
my
tooth.’

‘Your skull, though?’

‘Oh yes.’

I thought about this. ‘Were you
bitten
by one of the mujahadeen, comrade?’

‘Oh no,’ he said, clearly surprised at my obtuseness. He pondered for a bit, and then said, ‘The landmine disassembled him pretty thoroughly, comrade.’ He pondered further. ‘He wasn’t in any state to bite anybody after that,’ he said.

I gave this some thought. ‘This individual was blown up, and you were blown up with him?’

‘No,’ said Trofim, looking even more puzzled. ‘I was nowhere near that mine.’

‘I am stumped.’

‘One of his teeth,’ said Trofim. Then he added, ‘Flew. The doctors said that. Like a bullet.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Shall we go on up?’

I made two more flights without much difficulty, and another two with a quantity of rasping and wheezing; and we stopped again. It became evident that Comrade Trofim had been pondering matters during this, for me, tortuous climb. ‘How did you know I was in the army?’ he asked.

‘You have a military bearing,’ I panted.

This pleased him. ‘Comrade,’ he said, standing a little straighter.

I blinked and blinked, but my left eye, where the gun had been forced, was still filled with luminous chaff. I could not see properly out of it. ‘I suppose I would assume,’ I added, ‘that, perhaps, you were flown back for hospitalisation in Moscow, and that your exemplary war record and, uh, personal attributes brought you to the attention of Comrade Frenkel, who seconded you to his personal team.’

If Trofim had been amazed at my stupidity earlier, he was now, clearly, amazed at my insight. ‘Comrade!’ he said, by way of articulating his astonishment. Then after further thought, he added, ‘Did Comrade Frenkel tell you so?’

‘The Comrade Commissar and I don’t have that sort of relationship, ’ I said.

Puzzlement descended again. ‘Commissar?’

‘My little joke,’ I said. ‘Shall we press on?’

We made two more floors before I stopped again. ‘Only one more to go,’ I said, sucking air.

‘Your lungs are bad, comrade,’ he said.

‘You think?’

‘Oh yes, comrade,’ he said, earnestly. He peered vaguely through the landing’s grubby window; a view of housetops, flanked on either side by the elephant-leg grey of two tower blocks. ‘Asthma is a disease of the lungs.’

‘I had not realised that a medical education is part of basic army training.’

‘But you’re mistaken, comrade,’ he said. ‘It is not.’