For my part, it seemed likely that I would die in this place for little more than a speculation. For a crystal in a radio which was a few years ahead of its time; for the name of a man who saw the future; for a secret hidden by men with guns.
The commander was so good as to point all of this out to me. “You’re going to die here,” he explained as we sat in his office, waiting for Karpenko to come. “Make it easier for yourself.”
I grinned. “Make it easier for yourself” implied that death was my primary concern, as well as being a phrase I associated with New York policemen rather than Soviet commanders in a hidden base. My levity surprised him, his thin grey eyebrows twitching over his paper face. “You’re handling this very calmly,” I pointed out, “for a man on the wrong end of a gun.”
He shrugged. “I’ve had my time and lived it well. You, though–you are a young man. You will have things which tie you to this world. Are you married?”
“That’s a very pious question,” I answered. “Will it have the same emotional implication if I say that I enjoy living in sin?”
“What else do you enjoy? Perhaps you can enjoy them again.”
“That’s a really nice thought–” I sighed “–and I’m grateful for it, but there comes a point when one realises that gratification of the flesh is only so fulfilling. It’s fantastic while it lasts, but comes with so many questions of emotional baggage and doubt that frankly I begin to question whether the grief involved outweighs the satisfaction gained.”
To my surprise, he raised his eyebrows. “You clearly aren’t having the right sort of gratification.”
“A professional ear masseuse in Bangkok once said exactly those words to me.”
“You’re not Russian,” he suggested.
“Is there something wrong with my accent?”
“No Russian would do this.”
“That’s a terrible indictment of the Soviet spirit.”
“You misunderstand. You do not appear to be in a fragile enough state to have chosen this as your particular suicide, and yet neither do you seem to have an agenda which could further the cause of others. I see in you no clear explanation for what you do…”
“So why assume I’m foreign?”
He shrugged. “Call it instinct.” That was a little distressing. Instinct was one of the few factors which I had no great ability to alter or control. “Comrade,” he went on, “you seem too intelligent to be doing this for nothing. Is there really no other path open to you?”
“None which engages me so much,” I replied. A knock at the door cut short any further soul-searching. I gestured at the commander to be silent behind his desk and, tucking the gun into my coat, slipped on to the one stool besides his desk.
A nod, and the commander called,
“Enter!”
The door opened. The man who came in was already in the middle of a sentence, which had clearly begun for him some several seconds before actually receiving permission to come inside.
“… very busy right now and really can’t be—”
The sentence stopped.
The man looked from the commander to me, and his face broke into a smile. “Good God,” he said, each word dropping like a pebble in a pond. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Chapter 44
Many lives ago, in that busy summer when Vincent Rankis and I first began to truly examine each other’s minds, and before that cold night when he learned of the Cronus Club and left me with some light bruises and some heavy doubts for my pains, we went punting down the river Cam.
I have never liked punting, always feeling that, as means of transport went, it was one of the least sensible available and, more to the point, as it appeared to be practised in Cambridge, a skill as much valued in the incompetence as the mastery. A good trip on the river would not be complete for both students and some of my peers unless it involved hitting a bridge, causing a pile-up, running aground on a muddy bank, dropping the pole in fast-flowing waters and, ideally, at least one person falling in. I have similar feelings about gondolas in Venice, where the skill of the pilot is almost entirely cancelled out by the size of the fee and the sense that you are, in your own na?ve way, contributing to a cliché that will in later years serve more gondoliers to defraud more tourists of their cash.
“That’s your problem, Harry,” Vincent had explained. “You’ve never understood the concept of doing things by halves.”
I had grumbled my way to the riverbank, and grumbled my way on to the punt, and grumbled as we bumped our way between students, and grumbled as Vincent opened up his wicker basket, packed for the purpose, to produce flasks of gin with a dash of tonic, and perfectly cut cucumber sandwiches.
“The cucumber sandwiches,” he’d explained, “are vital if we are to fulfil our roles.”