Of course, if there’s one thing worse than acting like a jerk, it’s acting like a jerk and still coming up empty-handed …
Min didn’t even decelerate. He clipped someone’s bag as he scythed through pedestrians, and shopping scattered in his wake, a welter of apples and jars and packets of pasta. Someone screamed. The cab was way ahead of him now, might not even be the right cab, and Louisa-in-his-head was gearing up for another verbal onslaught—Getting killed will prove what, exactly?—when Min’s heart stopped as a big white van emerged from his left, directly in his path.
The Russian opened a drawer and found cigarette papers and a packet of tobacco, embossed with rich brown curly writing. Rolling a prisoner’s pinch into a thin smoke, he asked Lamb, “You here to kill me?”
“I hadn’t given it any thought,” Lamb said. “You deserve killing?”
Katinsky considered. “Lately, not so much,” he said at last. Then, “There’s a shop on Brewer Street. You can get Russian tobacco there. Polish chewing gum. Lithuanian snuff.” He scratched a match, and held the flame to his tightly-rolled cylinder, starting a small fire he swiftly sucked out of existence. “At any given moment, half its customers used to be spooks. You’ve been described to me on many occasions.” Match extinguished, he replaced it in the box. “So, what do you want with me, Jackson Lamb?”
“Little chat about old times, Nicky.”
“There are no old times. Don’t you keep up? Memory Lane’s been paved over. They built a shopping mall on it.”
“You can take the man out of Russia,” Lamb observed, “but he’ll still reckon he’s some kind of tragic fucking poet.”
“You think it’s amusing,” Katinsky said, “but not so long ago a mall was what the queen rode down on her horse, and there was only one of them. Now everywhere you look there’s a mall, and they’ve all got cookie stores and burger joints. So I’ll tell you what’s really funny, what’s really funny is, you still think it was Red Russia the Americans beat.” He spat into the wastepaper basket. Whether that was additional comment or a smoking-related necessity wasn’t clear. “So you want to take me down Memory Lane,” he continued, “it’ll be a forced march, you understand?”
Lamb said, “I get the feeling making you shut up is gunna be the hard part.”
He waited while Katinsky locked up, then followed him down the stairs and onto the street. Katinsky led Lamb past six pubs before reaching one he approved of. Inside, he stopped to take bearings before heading for a corner, which either meant he was new here, or hoped Lamb would think he was. He wanted red wine. Lamb might have been surprised about this, if he was capable of surprise at another man’s drinking habits.
At the bar he ordered a large scotch for himself, because he wanted to give the impression of being kind of a lush, and also because he wanted a large scotch. Memory Lane stretched in both directions. He deserved a drink. Because his scotch came first he drained it in two swallows while the wine was poured, then ordered another, and carried them back to the table.
“Cicadas,” he said, sliding Katinsky’s wine in front of him.
Katinsky’s reaction was behind the beat. He lifted his glass, swirled it as if it were something to savour and not just crappy house red, and took a sip. Then said, “What?”
“Cicadas. A word you used in your debriefing. At Regent’s Park.”
“Did I?”
“You did. I watched the video.”
Katinsky shrugged. “And? You think I remember everything I said in a debriefing nearly twenty years ago? I’ve spent most of my life trying to forget stuff, Jackson Lamb. And this, this is ancient history. The bear is sleeping. Why poke it with a stick?”
“Good point. So, when’s your passport up for renewal?”
Katinsky gave him a weary look. “Ach. It’s not enough to suck a man dry. You have to come back and grind up the bones.” In an attempt to rehydrate himself, he gulped more wine. It was a big gulp, a drinker’s gulp, requiring him to wipe his chin after. “Ever been debriefed, Jackson Lamb?”
That was such a stupid question, Lamb didn’t even bother.
“As a hostile? That’s how I was treated. They want to know everything I ever heard or saw or did, and after a while I don’t know if they’re looking for reasons to throw me back or reasons to keep me. Like I say. They suck a man dry.”
“Are you trying to tell me you were making stuff up?”
“No, I’m trying to tell you that every scrap of information I ever had, everything I thought was useful, everything I knew wasn’t, everything I didn’t know what it was, I spilled it all. Every last drop. If you’ve watched the video, you know as much as I ever did. Maybe more, because believe me, I have forgotten more than I ever knew.”
“Including cicadas.”
Katinsky said, “Maybe not so much cicadas, no.”
There was no way to measure the distance between Min and the end of his life in that moment. The van slammed its brakes to avoid slamming into Min instead, and the displaced air kissed Min all over, and then he was gone, leaving chaos behind him. In his wake a horn sounded, but what the hell. Near-death experiences were two-a-penny on the city roads, and it would all be forgotten in minutes.
As for now, speed had become its own point and purpose. Min’s legs were pumping easily, his fists were moulded to the handlebars, and with the road disappearing beneath his wheels, the gift of being alive flowed through him like a shot of tequila. The noise he suddenly barked was halfway between a laugh and a shout, and barely human. Pedestrians stared. Few had been lucky enough to see a cyclist going this fast.
And up ahead lay the junction with Clerkenwell Road, and yet more lights, and the backed-up traffic included at least three black cabs. Min, now immortal, stopped pedalling, and freewheeled towards the waiting cars.
So you’ve caught up with them. Possibly. Now what?
Kyril understood every word we were saying.
Of course he did. So?
Cruising the cycle lane he pulled level with the first cab, and risked a sideways glance. Its lone passenger was on her mobile phone. The second was its mirror image; a male, holding a phone to the opposite ear. Maybe they were talking to each other. Almost at the front of the queue now, Min stopped alongside a bus, perhaps the same one he’d had the altercation with earlier; there were now just two cars between him and the remaining black cab, which was hovering impatiently under the lights. For a moment, the world shimmied. Then his vision cleared, and he was looking at the backs of their heads: Piotr and Kyril, both facing front, lacking all interest in bedraggled cyclists.
So he had caught up with them. Now what?
He had his answer almost immediately: now the lights changed, and the taxi pulled away. Min barely had time to register the first half of its plate, SLR6, before it was through the junction, and heading down Clerkenwell Road. And with it went that feeling he’d had that he could cycle forever; it drifted from him like one of those Chinese lanterns you lit and let go and watched burn into nothingness. Each breath rasped through him like a match on a sanded surface—he could taste blood, never a good sign. By the time he was through the crossroads, the black cab was gone, might be miles away … When he registered that he was being overtaken by a pedestrian, Min pulled over, gave the finger to the car behind him out of cyclist habit, and pulled his mobile from his trouser pocket. His hands shook as he used it. His bicycle fell to the pavement.