by Adam Roberts
‘And I am very grateful indeed that you stayed,’ I said.
‘And now,’ said Leon Piotrovich Lunacharsky, like a radio continuity announcer, ‘we shall take you to Dora Norman, the American.’
CHAPTER 12
I had previously only encountered Lunacharsky in the darkness of the Pushkin Chess Club, and it was a strange thing to see him by the light of the day. He seemed, somehow, less robotic. He had a broad face, with wideset eyes, slightly downward-pointing at their outside points. There was a streak of white in his thick, black broadbrush mane of hair, like a badger. His moustache lay languid, like a black odalisque, across his plump upper lip. Forty years of age, or thereabouts, I would guess.
Saltykov’s taxi crossed into a right-hand feeder lane and turned into a new road. It blended with the dusty, rusty mass of Moscow traffic and swept passed a series of industrial buildings.
‘I’m more excited than I can say,’ Lunacharsky bubbled. ‘To be in the same car as the great Skvorecky!’
I was having difficulty with my breath.
‘Oh dear,’ said Saltykov, from the driver’s seat.
My nerves were enormously jangled. ‘Oh dear?’
‘I have come the wrong way,’ said Saltykov. ‘That was an incorrect turn.’
‘What?’ I snapped. ‘Saltykov, where on earth are you going?’
He became, as far as his buttoned-down manner permitted it, annoyed. ‘It is because you have distracted me by talking! You should not distract the driver of a vehicle!’
‘Don’t distress yourself, my friend,’ said Lunacharsky, whose mood was perfectly irrepressible. ‘I see where we are! We need to turn right again and make our way back onto the ring road.’
‘If you talk to me,’ Saltykov said, with a mosquito whine curled into the words, ‘then I will be unable to concentrate properly upon the driving.’
‘Don’t upset yourself, my friend. Take the right turn that is - never mind, you missed it. There’s another right turn, up here. Take this one and . . .’
‘Could you please,’ I said, ‘tell me what is going on?’
‘I shall explain everything!’ boomed Lunacharsky.
An open-topped lorry, trailing a huge conical sleeve of dust like a crop-spraying plane, thunderously overtook the little taxi. Our car shook monstrously in the wake. ‘Speed up!’ I bellowed.
‘I am driving at the optimal speed for fuel efficiency,’ retorted Saltykov in no placid voice.
‘Come, my friend,’ Lunacharsky told him. ‘Simply circle round, circle round. We need to get back on the correct road. Mademoiselle Norman is waiting!’
‘Yes! Yes!’ Saltykov peeved, as another car swept past, its horn howling. ‘Do not talk to me, or expect me to talk to you, because if you do so I will be unable to concentrate upon the driving!’
‘He suffers from,’ said Lunacharsky, turning in the seat to face me, ‘a particular syndrome . . .’
‘I gather,’ I replied.
‘But he is an expert man! He knows everything about nuclear power stations!’
‘Comrade, I would be obliged if you could tell me,’ I said, as the car slowed, turned, and accelerated again, ‘what on earth is going on?’
‘I shall explain everything! By the time we arrive at our friend Saltykov’s flat, where Mademoiselle Norman is sequestered - by the time we arrive there, everything will have been explained to you! You will know everything. And therefore you will understand how high are the stakes.’
‘At the moment, I am completely in the dark,’ I said. ‘So there is a lot you need to explain.’
‘You underestimate the extent of your knowledge,’ he replied. ‘You know more than you think. You know Frenkel, for example. You understand the nature of the threat we face.’
‘I knew him a long time ago.’
‘I meant to say how much I admired your attitude in the chess club yesterday,’ gushed Lunacharsky. ‘Negation! When we threw questions about Project Stalin at you, you simply negated them. It was more than denial, because when somebody denies something it always bears the imprint of its opposite. If an official denies something it is tantamount to an admission! But you - you negated. It was gloriously dialectical. In this, I assume science fiction has prepared you. Because the worlds created by a science fictional writer do not deny the real world; they antithesise it!’
‘You are,’ I said, a little uncertainly, ‘complimentary.’
‘Indeed! You see, that is also the nature of the UFO phenomenon. It is dialectical. In the club the other night, you stated the thesis. You could do this, because you were personally involved, with Frenkel, in the original project. Your thesis is: there are no UFOs, we are alone in the cosmos. The antithesis was advanced, often foolishly, by the other members: yes there are UFOs, they visit us nightly! But without the thesis to counter this antithesis, there could be no synthesis. And the synthesis is . . .’
‘Is what?’
He looked down his long nose at me, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘It is a mistake to assume that extraterrestrials must be material. Or immaterial. What if they exist in a dialectical superposition of the two conditions?’
‘And if you spoke the same sentence in Russian rather than gibberish?’
He beamed at me. ‘My dear friend, I am being too general. Let me fill you in on specifics. The American, and his lady friend, entered the Soviet Union at Kiev. Now, there was a reason why they entered the Soviet Union via Kiev. A crucial reason.’
The motion of the car slowed. We stopped.
At this point my conversation with Lunacharsky was interrupted. Saltykov had stopped his taxi at a red traffic light. Somebody, outside the vehicle, was shouting. It was a pedestrian who was yelling. Then, startlingly, the door was hauled open, with the result that the noise from outside spilled in. Lunacharsky turned, and began to say, ‘Comrade, this taxi is already full . . .’ but the shouting drowned him out. Out of the car! Or I shall shoot, swam into focus.
I recognised the voice; hoarse, but distinct. And glancing across I recognised the meaty fist. It was holding a pistol, and the pistol was pointed in through the open door.
‘Saltykov,’ I bellowed. ‘Drive! Go!’
‘The traffic light is red,’ said Saltykov.
‘All of you!’ Trofim was yelling from outside. ‘Out - of - the - car—!’
His huge hand, with its monstrous reach, came snaking into the back of the cab like Grendel reaching for prey; or like the octopus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Underneath the Oceans trying to winkle submariners from the Nautilus.
Lunacharsky was trying to remonstrate through the open passenger door: ‘Comrade, it is a misunderstanding, comrade, please put the gun down.’ He had, I noticed, planted one of his feet against the inside of the car, next to the open door. A great force was hauling at him and trying to draw him out. Trofim shouted at us to get out of the car.
‘Never mind the fucking colour of the light,’ I yelled. ‘Go! Accelerate! He has a gun on us!’
‘It is against the rules of driving. More to the point it contradicts common sense, to drive through a junction when the light is red,’ said Saltykov. ‘Other cars would collide with us, and immobilise the . . .’
‘Weave through the traffic, you idiot - weave - just go now. He’ll kill us all!’
‘This is the KGB! Out of car!’ shouted Trofim. He had thrust his huge, troll-like left hand inside the taxi, and had taken hold of Lunacharsky’s lapels. ‘Let go!’ Lunacharsky yelped, bracing both his feet now against the frame of the car’s door. I could see Trofim levelling the pistol with his other hand.
‘Go!’ I shrieked at Saltykov. ‘What are you doing? Press your foot onto the accelerator!’
‘The traffic light is red,’ insisted Saltykov.
‘I don’t care! Go! Go!’
‘The traffic light is green,’ said Saltykov.
With a noise from the tires like a soprano’s top note, and a rush of acceleration that yanked me back against the seat, the t
axi roared away.
The strain on its engine was such that the exhaust backfired deafeningly.
For a moment Trofim’s arm was still inside the vehicle as we moved away; but then the huge hand lost its grip and slipped out of view. I looked back to see the giant KGB man rolling ponderously in the gutter.
The passenger door slammed to, bounced open again, and slammed once more. I reached over Lunacharsky to grab the handle and heaved with all my might. From being a ridiculously cautious driver, Saltykov was now driving with absurd abandon. We swerved, spun sharp left, and zoomed away. ‘The engine backfired!’ he hooted.
‘I heard it,’ I replied, speaking loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the engine. Relief sparked into rage. ‘What were you playing at?’ I shouted. ‘Why did you just sit there? That was Trofim. Did you drive past exactly the same place you picked me up?’
‘I took a wrong turn,’ he replied, peevishly. ‘Because you insisted on talking to me as I drove! Both of you. I was distracted from the concentration necessary to drive an—’
‘So you took a wrong turn! Surely you didn’t need to retrace exactly the same route to get back on track?’
‘My mind is methodical,’ he insisted. ‘That was the only way I knew.’
‘Your mind is insane,’ I yelled.
‘If you had left me alone and not talked to me,’ he wailed. ‘If you had left me alone to drive, instead of pestering me with questions, I would never have got lost! It’s your fault.’
Lunacharsky seemed uncharacteristically silent. But I was still full of outrage at what Saltykov had done.
‘You drove directly past the house in which they’d been holding me,’ I said, slapping the back of the driver’s seat with my fist in petty rage. ‘Trofim was still standing there! Exactly where we left him! And then you stopped the car!’
‘Stop slapping my seat! That is distracting to the driver! Please do not distract the driver!’
‘Of course he was still standing there,’ I said. ‘He’s an ox. Where would he go? And you drove along the same road, and then you stopped the car. Right in front of him!’
‘The traffic light was red!’
‘And if it was? You could jump the light. People have been known to jump red lights. Have you never seen a film?’
‘I was of course conscious of the need to make a rapid escape,’ he insisted, ‘but I was, equally, conscious of the danger of collision with another vehicle were I to drive through the red light. How could we make good our escape in that circumstance? What if we were injured, or killed, in the collision? How would that serve our purpose?’
My attention, now, was distracted by Lunacharsky. He was staring at me with a unpleasant intensity. I returned his gaze. ‘Your car did not backfire.’
‘I heard it distinctly. I like to keep my engine clean. It’s a clean machine. I may need to service it. The diesel available in Moscow is inferior quality.’
‘Your car,’ I repeated, ‘did not backfire.’
Saltykov’s flat was part of the Gorky Estate, an accumulation of tottery-looking towerblocks in a concrete park, from the very peak of the tallest of which, if you stood on tiptoe, you might be able to see some of the treetops from Gorky’s more famous park. The blocks all stood on fat concrete legs, and Saltykov drove his taxi in underneath the belly of the nearest. He parked beside the pillar. There was space, here, for a hundred cars; but only half a dozen were parked. The rest of the space was taken up with metallic rubbish bins, like huge oil-drums, overfilled and spilling their waste onto the floor. A black-faced tractor, blushing with rust, sat beside a large heap of mechanical bits and bobs.
Saltykov killed the engine, and for a while we two sat in silence. ‘You are certain he is dead?’
‘I fought in the war,’ I said. ‘I saw enough dead bodies then. I know a dead body when I see one.’ We sat for a further moment in silence. ‘Believe me,’ I said, shortly, ‘I’m sorry to say so.’
‘It is very regrettable that he has been killed,’ Saltykov replied. ‘I am sad. You must not think otherwise. You may think otherwise, because my syndrome interferes with my capacity to express emotion. ’
‘Your syndrome,’ I said, in an unfriendly tone, as I fiddled a cigarette out of its pack.
‘This death is regrettable in many different ways,’ said Saltykov, in a precise voice. ‘For one thing—’
But I interrupted him. ‘Please do not itemise the various ways in which it is regrettable. We can both agree it is regrettable. You are not a machine, after all.’ I lit my cigarette.
‘In many ways, there is something machine-like about the processes of consciousness that characterise my syndrome,’ said Saltykov, with, I thought, a hint of smugness. ‘Nevertheless, we have to decide what to do now.’
‘We have to get out of Moscow,’ I said. ‘It’s not a difficult deduction. The KGB are looking for us. Trofim may be an ox, but he’ll be able to remember the registration of this car. We need another car, or we need to find another mode of transport, but either way we need to remove ourselves from the city. We need to go a long way away.’
‘I do not possess another car,’ said Saltykov. ‘As to removing ourselves, that was precisely our plan. And do not forget Mademoiselle Norman.’
I had indeed forgotten her. ‘Where is she?’
‘In my apartment. But first we must do something with Lunacharsky, or to be precise, the deceased body of Lunacharsky.’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, unable to stand it any more, and yanking open the door of my side to stumble out of the car. ‘Let us dispose of Lunacharsky.’
I stood in the shadow of the vast building’s underside whilst Saltykov fussed from rubbish bin to rubbish bin, each almost as tall as he. From one he retrieved a torn sheet covered with the chocolate brown patches of dried blood (from what, who knows) that he laid on the ground beside the passenger door. Onto this we pulled Lunacharsky and wrapped the cloth about him, and in this undignified and dirty toga we heaved him up and into a bin. It was a sordid business. Then I smoked another cigarette whilst Saltykov fussed, like an old maid, at the back seat of his car. ‘A little blood has pooled in the space between the back of the seat and the base of the back,’ he reported, in a quasi-scientific tone of voice.
‘Why did you not drive through the red light?’
‘I reasoned,’ said Saltykov, in what was indeed a reasonable tone of voice, ‘that were I to do so I would involve my taxi in a collision with a car coming through the junction from another direction.’
‘I still can’t believe,’ I pressed, ‘that you retraced exactly your previous route in order to find your way back to the correct road.’
‘What you need to understand about my syndrome,’ he said, indistinctly, his head inside the car, ‘is that . . .’
‘I have heard enough about syndromes,’ I reported. ‘Let us all agree the death is regrettable.’
‘Yes, we can agree that.’ He stood up, and ran, like a chicken, to the nearest bin to rid himself of whatever cloth he had been using to wipe away the blood. His knees came up almost to his chest when he ran. Then he went round to the boot of the car and drew out of it a perfectly clean, folded blanket. This he arranged fussily over the back seat. ‘Dora Norman,’ he said, ‘has been very distressed at the death of her American friend, Coyne.’
‘Understandably,’ I said.
‘Perhaps for her to learn of the death of Lunacharsky would only augment her distress?’
‘I don’t suppose she needs to know.’
‘Then let us go up. We must collect her, and we must leave Moscow.’
‘Collect her?’
‘We can hardly leave her here!’ said Saltykov. ‘I am a registered taxi driver. The authorities have my address and details. The KGB will come to this address and detain her. To leave her would be to condemn her to death.’
‘Collect her makes her sound like a piece of luggage.’
Saltykov locked his taxi. Then he turned the key again to u
nlock it. Then he locked it once more. Unlock, lock. Unlock, lock. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we are ready to go up.’
We crossed to the main entrance. When we opened the main door we let a Moscow breeze inside, and litter rustled and moved over the entrance-hall floor like paper wildlife. We waited beside the pockmarked steel doors of the lift. There was nobody else around.
‘We must go straight away,’ I said. ‘Who knows how quickly the authorities will put two and two together, and raid this address?’
‘To be precise,’ he said, ‘it is a question of how easily the KGB can retrieve details from the Militia. It may not happen rapidly.’
‘That is not a reason to be dilatory.’
The lift door creaked open, and a fantastically shrunken and wrinkled old woman shuffled out, carrying a string bag bulging with provisions. Her head was located in the space directly in front of her torso, as if her neck fitted into the centre of her sternum rather than between her shoulders, and her black hump traced a curve of mathematical purity. We waited until she had gone by and stepped inside the lift. The inside was urinous.
‘Our deceased comrade and friend,’ I said, as the doors wheezed shut, ‘was about to tell me what on earth is going on.’
‘He was?’
‘He promised me a full explanation.’
‘He did?’
‘He did. But then he was shot dead. Perhaps you could provide the explanation instead?’
‘I’m afraid I cannot,’ said Saltykov. ‘I am not apprised of the complete picture. Comrade Lunacharsky was apprised of the full picture.’
The sinking sensation in my stomach was only partly a result of the lift’s motion. ‘You are making a joke?’
‘By no means. I knew James Coyne, a little, through professional contacts. I would have called him friend. It was Coyne who introduced me to the Pushkin Chess Club, and to Comrade Lunacharsky. I understand only a few indistinct elements of the larger picture. They, I believe, saw the whole thing.’
‘They saw the big picture. You never saw the big picture?’