'Has he heard of the Serbsky Institute, Grekov?'
'Have you heard of the Serbsky Institute?'
I didn't answer. Vader would have to ask me himself.
'Repeat the question!'
'Have you heard of the Serbsky Institute? Answer!'
They bothered me with their voices; I needed to think. But I had heard, yes, of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry: it's an old granite building with iron gates and armed sentries, containing mostly political wards where those straying from the Party line are submitted to 'special diagnosis' and subsequent 'treatment'. One of the techniques involves wrapping the patient in wet canvas, and as it slowly dries he is asked if he feels ready to change his heretical views, or confess, or reveal whatever he is there to reveal.
I didn't know how Schrenk had held out against that, with out losing his mind. Maybe he'd lost it, and it was an animal that had escaped, not Schrenk at all.
'Have you heard of — '
'That's enough, Grekov. He probably doesn't understand the question.'
'Colonel.'
Then one of the big doors swung back and we went down the steps into the snow. The city had changed since I'd been brought in here: the slate roofs and parapets were white under the black sky, with the greenish neon glowing on it theatrically. The snow was soft under our feet. As we reached the black saloon the man called Grekov opened one of the rear doors and told me to get in. Vader went round to the other side. Another man was right behind me and as I climbed in he gave, me a push and got in after me, slamming the door. I was now wedged between him and Vader with the two others in front, Grekov at the wheel. The windows were all closed and the doorlocks down.
When Grekov started the engine and switched on the headlights the guards at the main gates swung one of them open and we drove through. I could hear chains clinking on the tyres: the snow was still falling and Dzerzhinsky Square was covered. There was no traffic. I couldn't see a clock but I was watching for one. The heater was now blowing and the chill of my wet hair began warming.
I had strange feelings about the man beside me. He shouldn't have said that. I knew it was part of the routine but that didn't make any difference: he shouldn't have said it. This comprised most of my feelings about him, but there were other things. I'd seen him as a friendly, cultivated man and as a brute in a towering rage, and these roles had alternated so that my attitude towards him had started to be ambivalent: he'd got closer than he knew to burrowing into my mind while it was half submerged in sleep. I think in another twenty-four hours he would have got me blurting things out between hallucinations. I even believe he might have known how close he'd come to success, but what he couldn't take was the way I'd attacked him and actually got him on to the floor before the guards had come in. It had hit a major nerve in him, deep in the psyche, and all he lived for now was to see me under treatment at the Serbsky Institute, to hear me scream when the clowns went to work. I believe he was that sensitive.
I too am a sensitive man.
One of the chains was slightly loose and kept hitting the underneath of the wing, producing a hollow sound like a drummer tapping for the dead. I could see the gold domes of St Basil's now in Red Square, and the clock in Spassky Tower — at too sharp an angle to let me read it. The city was beautiful tonight, its floodlit domes and spires and minarets half lost in the veils of falling snow; I was seeing it as I'd never seen it before, like a tourist with time to spare.
Colonel Vader was holding himself away from me as much as he could, and letting me know it. I didn't stink any more but I was still untouchable, the pig thing that has been squatting there in its cage, mired in its own dirt and unable to urinate or defecate without begging permission. That was his picture of me now and he wanted me to know it; he wasn't prepared even to talk to me without using Grekov as a sanitizing intermediary. I didn't mind what he did now: it would be insignificant compared to what he had done, what he had said, when he'd come into my cell. I don't think he realized that.
Grekov drove quite fast, considering the state of the streets; I suppose the snow wasn't deep yet and there were the chains on the tyres and he knew his way. It wouldn't have been possible without the chains because the car would have gone straight on with the front wheels locked over. At one stage I caught sight of Vader's face in the fraction of a second, distorting as the rear wheel went over it, but the rest wasn't easily remembered because everything went so fast: I think one of them had a gun out before I reached the steering wheel but there wasn't any shot. The initial move wasn't complicated: I had to hit the back of the seat to produce the necessary momentum and get to the wheel as soon as I could. My right foot smashed into the face of the man on that side and I felt the softness caving in but my main concern was to reach that wheel and wrench it over. My shoulder hit the back of the driver's head and pitched him forward and then the chains bit and the car lurched and lost traction and slid and then lurched again with the chains gouging into the road surface and swinging us halfway round before it rolled.
The speed at this time wasn't much less than the eighty kph I'd seen on the speedometer just before I began moving, and the roll took us through most of the deceleration phase and lasted until the rear end hit a street lamp and the windscreen blew out in a shower of glass. Someone had begun screaming and it took me a little time to realize it was the man who'd put a stranglehold on me: I'd broken his thumb to make him release it. It was soon after this that I saw the gun in someone's hand but I wasn't worried because he couldn't use it: we were in the middle of a storm and the car was still moving fast enough to kill the lot of us if it hit another street lamp at the wrong angle. It was sliding on its side at this time and the front end was coming round in a flurry of snow as it ploughed the surface, and I'd have to wait before I tried getting clear because I could get an arm or a leg trapped between the bodywork and the road. Someone was yelling something about not letting me get away and I used his voice as a guide and found his throat and used a half-fist with a short thrust and felt it break the cartilage.
At this stage I began noticing blood, quite a lot of it, shining with an odd purplish colour because of the neon lights: someone must have been trapped by the weight of our bodies against the glass of a window as it shattered on impact with the road. It would be the man who'd been yelling.
Inside the storm of the vehicle there was the storm of Vader's rage: he was in first class condition and had kept most of his orientation when the car had rolled and he was the worst thing I had to contend with because it depended a lot on chance whether any of us got out of the wreck, but Vader wanted to kill me and he knew how to do it and he knew where I was. Conscious imagery was sporadic and the sequence of events so fast that the brain had to select and analyse as best it could: I'd actually glimpsed Vader's face three or four times but there'd been no particular expression on it until now, when I suddenly saw it very close and immediately above me. Part of my mind was occupied with data to do with the engine, which had been screaming under full throttle with the gears knocked into neutral; the scream was now dying away as the fuel emptied from the carburettor and the cylinders began starving. I could smell the stuff and was alerted: if the car caught fire I would get out without waiting for the speed to decrease. The main cerebral area was occupied with the split-second sight of Vader's face as he in turn saw mine and recognized it.
His was totally animal, as I suppose mine was: teeth bared and the eyes luminous, the nostrils wide and the scalp drawn back, totally primitive. I only saw him for this small fraction of a second before the car hit something again and we were tumbled, all of us, into a different order; but his hands knew where I was and they came for me, working for my throat and doing it so fast that I wasn't ready: I used a four-finger eye dart with both hands but missed and tried again and missed again and felt softness close to me and went for that with one knee and got it right. His hands came away and I waited but he couldn't find me again because the car was rolling for the last time and the rear window burst and sent glass flying against our faces.