'Yes, Viktor.'
A change in Ignatov's voice, too: it sounded strong now, and deeper. He said to me: 'Open the door.'
The senses had become acute. I heard Misha whispering, so softly that I didn't catch the words. Some kind of prayer? I was quite moved, and had a sudden hatred of Schrenk for doing this in front of her, for being so coarse: he could have sent her out. Slightly short on good taste, I thought as I opened the door, and wondered who had said that, where I'd heard it.
'Pyotr. If he makes any attempt to get away, shoot at once, and to kill.'
'Yes, Viktor.'
Then I heard a long shuddering breath, and Schrenk spoke softly in English. 'Good times.'
16: SHOOT
He fired six rapid shots at short range into the spine and the impact pitched my body forward in a series of jerks as the chips of bone and cartilage from the shattered vertebrae were forced out through the rib cage in an explosion of blood and plasma. As my face hit the snow I thought Schrenk you bastardI hope they burn you for this.
Have to do better. Gut-think wouldn't help me.
I listened to his footsteps along the corridor behind me. I estimated the distance at something like six feet, not nearly dose enough to do anything in safety. We kept on walking towards the door leading to the car park at the rear.
He fired directly into the back of the head and the brain matter burst and splattered against the walls in a welter of skull fragments. There was no more time for conscious thought, even of Moira, even of roses: life was simply present, then absent. Executive deceased.
Have to do much better, yes. A normal reaction to awareness of imminent death with the imagination running wild but gut-think useless and dangerous: survival possible only through rational thought, brain-think.
Man in a worn brown overcoat and horn-rimmed glasses. 'Good evening, comrade.' Ignatov.
'Good evening. They say it's going to snow again.' 'Surely we've had enough!'
A chance, obviously, to move extremely fast and get the man in the brown overcoat between me and the gun, but Ignatov might have fired precipitately and shot him by accident.
'Keep walking.'
I quickened the pace a little. He had the gun in the pocket of his coat; otherwise the other man would have seen it. He couldn't take accurate aim like that but it didn't make a lot of difference: at this range he could hit me lethally with three or four shots, shifting the aim according to the visible point of impact. I didn't know if he'd handled firearms before but it seemed likely: Schrenk wouldn't leave me in the hands of an amateur.
'Open the door.'
His voice was heavy, its tone entirely changed by his possession of a killing instrument. There had been no power in his voice before, no authority; now there was both, and something else, something like anticipation. I'd pictured the end of the world for him too often, with his three children asking Galya where Daddy had gone, and now he had the end of my own world in his hands and he was impatient for it. Once the eight lumps of spinning metal had gone burrowing into me he would be safe again, and go home to Galya and the children. You could see his point.
The night air was freezing.after the heat of the apartment. The heavy door slammed shut behind us.
'Over that way.'
He was closer, I thought. Or it might simply be that the wall of the building was projecting his voice forward and making it sound louder. I would have to watch things like that.
His mud-brown Syrena was obliquely to our right, not far from the entrance to the car park and facing this way. I hadn't locked it after I'd got him out. The street lamps cast a sick greenish light across the area and the albedo was high, the reflections bouncing off the cellulose of the parked cars and the blanket of ground snow. Shadows were sharp.
Pyotr. If he makes any attempt to get away, shoot at once, and to kill.
But he was going to do that anyway as soon as we reached his car so I didn't have much to lose.
He fired into the neck and I felt the spine explode -
Steady.
One, two, three… twelve cars. In the far corner, a pick-up truck. Thirteen objects of good cover, but too far away, the nearest car at least twenty feet from where I was walking: we were crossing an open space. No one in sight. A long way off, the drone of a tram. No sound of other traffic: the evening rush hour was over and in this city by night the streets are almost empty.
What would she do with them?
'Make for the car. The Syrena.'
Authority in his tone, the authority of death itself.
Five hundred were an awful lot: they'd fill the whole flat and what could she do with them afterwards, change the water every day, sit and stare at them, what pretty roses?
I listened to his footsteps on the snow behind me. I seemed to be crunching more than he was: perhaps he was walking in the hollows I was leaving, putting his feet exactly where I had placed mine. It would look rather comic, like a couple of ducks on their way to the pond, picking their feet up and putting them down at orderly intervals. But there was no one here to see. He would be the last person on earth I was going to see, a dough-faced plodding man with a wife and three little children and a gash on his temple and a gun in his -
'Keep walking.'
The sound of his voice jarred my nerves. Why had he said that? Had I been slowing? I must have. Perfectly understandable, as Schrenk would have said, squinting through the cigarette smoke: you don't run to your funeral.
'Which is your car?' I asked him.
'You know which one it is. It's the brown Syrena, near the entrance.'
I nodded and walked on.
Just sit and stare at them for God's sake? After twenty-four hours she wouldn't even be able to stand the smell, because it would remind her of what had happened. She'd go out and get stinking, that was all she'd do, or take her Lotus up the Mi flat out in the dark with the headlights swallowing up the night and everything she could ever remember of me, and when she got back to the flat she'd just think oh my God what am I going to do with all these bloody roses.
The snow crunched under our shoes. I think one of my shoes was leaking, or some snow had got in over the top: my left foot felt wet. Useless enough sensory data, if you like. I began turning my head very gradually, so that I could trap the sounds from behind me in the auricle of the right ear; his footsteps loudened slightly. I estimated he was still a good six feet behind me, so that there was no chance of turning on him. But I kept my head slightly to one side, exposing the right ear to the auditory source for the left hemisphere to process. I could hear his breathing now; he was a heavy man, too well fed by his loving wife.
So in fact the rose thing wasn't really going to work out after all — it was just a grandiose gesture, a juvenile urge to make an impression from out here in the never-ending dark. It would have been subtler to send one rose, one sublime and perfect rose to remember me by, not an ostentatious barrowload. Ignatov, old boy, do you mind if I just phone Harrods before we wind up the evening?
Something like laughter, a long way down in the psyche, a neural reaction perhaps, while the slow cold wave went down the spine and the sweat gathered and ran, the reaction of the beast that smells the slaughterhouse: he was squeezing his finger at every step we took and I could feel the impact and hear the shrill jangling of the nerve system as the organism took the shock.