"Where is your passport?"
"The hotel takes it from you when you check in.”
“Remain in this position."
From the pocket of his tunic he extracted a small camera, which he trained on me at a yard's range. It flashed twice. He walked round me with slow proprietorial steps. He photographed me from both sides, wound the film through the camera, shook it into his palm, and handed it to a guard, who hastened from the room with it. The man in the chair let out a choked cry, put back his head, and began bleeding from the nose. Issa murmured another order; two boys unlocked the handcuffs and led the man down the corridor. The brown-suited beadle continued passing hundred-dollar bills through his machine and noting them on the abacus.
"Sit here."
Issa sat himself at a desk. I sat the other side. He fished a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He set a pocket tape recorder between us, reminding me of Luck and Bryant at the police station. His hands were large and adept and mysteriously elegant.
"What is the full name of the man you call Misha?”
“Dr. Lawrence Pettifer."
"What are the aptitudes of this man?"
"I'm sorry?"
"His skills. His accomplishments. What is wrong with aptitudes?"
"Nothing. I didn't understand you for a moment. He's a student of revolution. A friend of small nations. A linguist. Like yourself."
"What else is this man, please?"
"A former agent of the KGB but in reality an agent of the British Secret Service."
"What is the official situation in Britain regarding this man?"
"He's a fugitive. The British suspect him of stealing a large sum of money from the Russian Embassy. So do the Russians. They're right. He did."
Issa studied the paper before him while at the same time holding it out of my sight. "When was your last meeting with the man Misha?"
"On September eighteenth of this year."
"Describe the circumstances of this meeting."
"It occurred at night. At a place called Priddy, high up in the Mendip hills in Somerset. We were alone."
"What was discussed?"
"Private matters."
"What was discussed?"
There is a Russian bureaucratic snarl I had occasionally called upon to good effect, and imprudently I called upon it now.
"Don't you talk to me as if I were a peasant. If I tell you it was private, it was private."
I had been slapped at school, too often. I had been slapped by women, though they were never allowed a second bite. I had boxed. But the two slaps that Issa dealt me as he leaned across the desk were like colours I'd never seen and sounds I'd never heard. He hit me with the left hand, then with the right hand almost simultaneously, and the right hand felt like an iron pipe because of the line of gold rings at the stem of each hard finger. And while he hit me I saw between his hands his brown marksman's eyes fixed on me so steadfastly that I was afraid he was going to go on hitting me till I was dead. But at a summons from across the room he stopped and, pushing aside the accountant, grabbed the cellular telephone that was being proffered to him by the boy at the television monitors. He listened, handed back the phone, and turned in question to the accountant, who shook his head, still counting hundred-dollar bills.
"They're jokers," the accountant complained in Russian. "They call it a third, and it is not even one-tenth of a third. It is not enough to pay their dues; it's not enough to feed a mouse. They are such stupid robbers you wonder how they became crooks."
With a skip of his elbows he scooped up the money, presented it to Issa, executed a few quick flicks of the abacus, seized a ruler and a red pencil and drew a line through each of four pages of the ledger, removed his spectacles and placed them in a steel case and posted the case in an inside pocket of his brown suit. At once the whole party of us—accountant, fighters, Issa, and myself—were hastened down the crimson corridor to the lobby. The iron door stood open, the stone staircase beckoned, armed boys were flitting everywhere, fresh air washed over me like a draught of freedom, last stars winked from a pale morning sky. A long car was drawn up at the top of the steps. Magomed's gaunt companion was installed in the driving seat, gloved hands on the steering wheel. At the rear door stood Magomed himself, holding a dotted head scarf, which, with all the deftness of a nurse, he proceeded to bind round my eyes.
I'm passing through the looking glass, I told myself, as the blackness engulfed me. I'm drowning in Priddy Pool. I'm a Berkeleyan. I can't see, therefore I can't breathe. I'm screaming, but everyone's deaf and blind. The last thing I saw was Issa's elegant Italian shoes as Magomed slowly pulled the blindfold tight. They were of woven strips of brown leather and had buckles of gold chain.
* * *
What do they want?
Who are we waiting for?
Something has gone wrong. Plans are being revised.
I dreamed I was going to be shot at dawn, and when I woke it was dawn and I could hear footsteps and soft voices outside my door.
I dreamed that Larry was sitting on my bed, staring down at me, waiting for me to wake up. I woke and saw Zorin stooped over me, listening to my breathing, but it was only my young guards bringing me my breakfast.
I heard Emma playing Maxwell-Davies in the church at Honeybrook.
* * *
My cellar was a fitness club with ancient gymnasium apparatus shoved against the wall and a notice on the door saying CLOSED FOR REPAIR. It was situated beneath a monstrous slab apartment block one hour's blindfold drive from metropolitan Moscow, at the end of a bumpy gravel road amid smells of garbage, oil, and rotting trees, and it was the unfittest place on earth or under it. The humid air stank, water dripped and gurgled all night long from pipes that ran along the ceiling and down to the cracking concrete floor—pipes for sewage, pipes for hot water and drinking water, pipes for heating, and pipes that were ducts for electricity and telephone, and small grey rats, mostly on their way to somewhere else. To the best of my arithmetic, I stayed there nine days and ten nights, but time was irrelevant because when you are first imprisoned, years go by without your wristwatch advancing more than a few seconds, and the distance between two meals is a march across the entire desert of your life. In one night you sleep with every woman you've known, and when you wake it's still night and you're still shivering alone.
* * *
My cellar had no windows. The two grilles high in the wall that were supposed to provide ventilation had long been screwed shut. When I clambered onto a rat-eaten vaulting horse and examined them, I found that their iron frames were welded together with rust. For the first day the stench of my cell was unbearable, by the second day it bothered me a little less, and by the third it had disappeared, and I knew I was part of it. But the smells from above me were a constant theatre of the senses, from sunflower oil and garlic and onion and roasting lamb and chicken to the universal fug of large families in tiny crowded rooms.
* * *
"Bashir Haji!"
I woke with a great shudder to the cry uttered in marvel or agony by my guards at dead of night.
First their field telephone had rung. Then this tortured or delighted cry.
Were they celebrating him?
Were they declaring him their creed, shouting his name to the hilltops?
Were they calling down curses on him? Lamenting him?
I lay awake, waiting for the next act. None came. I fell asleep.
* * *
A prisoner of the Ingush may be lonely, but he is never alone.
A childless man, I was inundated with children. They ran over my head, jumped on it, beat it, laughed at it, and screamed at it, and their mothers screamed back at them. Now and then a loud smack was followed by a bitter, breathless silence, and more screaming. I heard dogs howling, but only from outside the building. While I craved to be let out, the dogs demanded to be let in. I heard cats from everywhere. I heard the pompous boom of television sets switched on all day. I heard Mexican soap opera dubbed into Russian, and an urgent announcement interrupting it, reporting the crash of yet another financial company. I heard the slap of washing, the skirmishing of men in anger, men drunk, women in outrage. I heard weeping.