‘Good morning,’ he replied.
The red-haired man started and looked around. ‘Hey? What do
you
want? Go on - fuck off.’
‘I’m just waiting, comrade,’ said the big-bearded man, mildly. ‘I’ll wait my turn.’
‘This is none of your business,’ said Red-hair. ‘Go on, fuck off.’
I looked about the little square. Two women, plump and middle-aged, were standing in the corner watching us; deciding, evidently, whether or not to join the queue. Because, of course, two people standing together in a Moscow street is just two people; but three people standing together must be queuing for
something.
‘Whatever it is the wheelchair-bound comrade is selling,’ said Big-beard, ‘I’m sure he’ll have enough to sell to a third customer, after he’s dealt with you two.’
‘Selling?’ barked Frenkel, from his chair. ‘Fuck off!’
The two women were now making their way over towards the dry fountain.
‘Look,’ said Red-hair, bringing his hand gunless from his jacket the better to gesticulate. ‘Go away. Fuck off. This is a private matter.’
The women joined the queue. ‘What’s he got?’ asked the plumper of the two. ‘Oranges, is it?’
‘It’s not oranges!’ snapped Frenkel.
‘This is not a
queue
,’ insisted the red-haired man.
Big-beard looked at him. Then he turned his head to look at the two ladies queuing behind him. He looked back at us. ‘It certainly looks like a queue to me, comrade.’
‘Empirically,’ I put in, ‘I’d have to say he’s correct.’
‘What is he selling?’ asked the less plump of the two ladies.
‘Death,’ I told them, smiling.
‘Death? What is that - cigarettes, you mean? Vodka, you mean?’
‘I was hoping for oranges,’ said the plumper of the two ladies.
‘Nik, get rid of them,’ snarled Frenkel, slaver pooling in the sickle-curve of his twisted lower lip. ‘Just get rid of them! This is KGB business! Tell them!’
‘KGB business,’ said Nik, bringing out his pistol and flourishing it.
The three newcomers looked at him. ‘Since when do the KGB have to queue in the street to buy oranges?’ asked the plumper of the two women.
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said the less plump. ‘Shame on you, young man. You should be in Afghanistan, fighting for the Motherland, like my nephew.’
‘He wants all the oranges to himself,’ said the first woman.
More people, seeing the queue form, were starting to come across and line up. ‘What’s he selling? asked one
‘Rope,’ I said, in a loud voice. ‘Unless,’ I added, turning back to Frenkel. ‘Unless you’re saying, really, that there
is
no rope.’
‘There is no rope!’ barked Frenkel, spittle flying from his mouth in the sunshine like sparks. ‘There
was
no rope, there
is
no rope - you know all about that.’
‘Rope?’ said somebody, joining the queue at the back. ‘Or cord? I will buy cord. I need cord to mend the curtains in my apartment.’
‘I heard it was oranges,’ said the plumper of the two plump women behind me.
‘Nik!’ cried Frenkel. ‘Get rid of them. Shoot if you have to.’
There were now eight people queuing, and more looking on from the edge of the square. Red-haired man stepped a little to one side, so everybody could see him. ‘Listen everybody!’ he called. ‘Do you see? Do you see this gun?’
Everybody was looking at the gun. He held it in the air. Then he brought it down, and aimed it at my head. Its muzzle was no more than an inch from my temples. ‘Do you see?’ he called. ‘Do you understand?’
There was a murmur up and down the line. Three more people had joined the end of the queue.
Shortly the big-bearded man behind me spoke up. ‘How much for the gun, then, comrade?’
‘What?’
‘How much for the gun?’
‘The
gun’s
not for sale, you moron.’
Big-beard stiffened. ‘There’s no need to be impolite, comrade,’ he said.
‘It’s for fucking
killing
people,’ called Frenkel, from his chair. ‘Tell him it’s not for sale. Put the gun in his face, Nik!’
Nik did so. The big-bearded man examined it closely. ‘Looks to be in good order. What’s the price though?’
‘I’m not
showing
it to you, moron,’ said the red-haired man. ‘I’m
threatening
you with it. Can’t you tell the difference?’
There were now twelve people in the queue.
‘Twelve witnesses,’ I pointed out to Frenkel. ‘I suppose that makes killing me a more awkward business than it was before?’
‘Nothing of the sort. Twelve morons, you mean. Twelve witnesses I don’t think.’ A disapproving murmur ran up and down the line. ‘Nik will scare them all away. Nik!’
The red-haired man was glowering at Big-beard.
‘Shoot in the air! Shoot in the ground!’ called Frenkel. ‘
Then
put one in Skvorecky’s head and we can be on our way before the Militia show up.’
Frenkel smiled, to show his death’s-head teeth; the bleached white leather of his cheeks crumpled. Nik made a Г with his right arm, aiming the pistol at the central stock of the desiccated fountain, to his right and my left, and pulled the trigger. I must have heard ten thousand guns firing in my life - more than that number, I daresay. But it’s not a noise you ever get used to. It is always louder than you remember. I flinched. The crash of the gun going off and the clatter of various shards of concrete being blasted from the point of impact were almost simultaneous. The next sound was from further back in the queue, as a small chunk of spattering stone struck somebody - a woman I think - somewhere - on the cheek, I think. ‘
Fuck off
the
lot
of you,’ yelled Red-hair, over the brief echo of this report. Then he rotated his body like the turret of a tank to bring his arm, still sticking straight out at a right angle, to bear on me.
I was aware of the queue dispersing rapidly. The two women nearest me flinched away and scurried, head down, towards the edge of the square, squeaking. Some other people were helping the person hit by ricocheting masonry away. Others were simply slinking off. As quickly as it had assembled, the queue was disappearing.
All except for the large-bearded man, who had been the first to join. He stood his ground, seemingly unfazed. Soon everybody had gone except for Frenkel, Red-hair, myself and this stranger. Although what was strangest about him was how familiar he looked.
But whatever it was, and whatever he was saying, red-haired Nik wasn’t about to wait for it. His job now was to shoot me, and to wheel his boss away before the authorities turned up. He was an experienced KGB assassin, aiming his gun at the heart of his victim.
He pulled the trigger.
The trigger released a firing-hammer, a component inside the body of the weapon, which in turn impacted upon the base-pan of the bullet. The bullet was ready in the chamber. It had been slotted into position by a spring that was pushing up with its coil, and continued its upward push.
Gunpowder ignited, and gases expanded very rapidly, forcing the projectile portion of the bullet along the inwardly-grooved barrel.
‘Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky!’ boomed the bearded man, his mouth barely visible beneath the black carpeting of his beard. The thing that seemed familiar to me about this man clicked in my brain (
click
, as the Pistol Makarova
clicked
and detonated).
‘Why,’ I said, ‘you could be the
son
of Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov! You
must
be Nikolai Nikolaivitch’s son! The resemblance is . . . uncanny.’
‘It’s not the
resemblance
which is uncanny,’ he said, smiling broadly, and shaking his head so that his heavy beard wobbled like a bough of black blossom in a spring breeze.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean what I say!
That’s
not the uncanny thing.’
I turned my head back to watch the bullet coming out of the gun. Its point emerged first, as if the pouting mouth of the barrel were sticking its tongue out at me. Then the whole thing slipped free and began moving through the air towards me,
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I don’t understand why it’s coming so slowly.’
‘It’s easy enough to explain.’
‘Asterinov?’ I said, looking back at him. ‘Are you really Asterinov?’
‘The very same! Don’t you remember, Konstantin Andreiovich, working together in that dacha? Do you remember you and I walking in the meadows outside. I confessed to you that I had stolen most of what I wrote from other writers. I remember that conversation very well, my friend. It was very heartening to me, that conversation.’
‘You’ve aged well,’ I observed. I meant:
You haven’t aged at all.
The bullet was in the air, now, between the gun and myself. It was moving through the air, as a torpedo through water: which is to say, it cleaved the air, or punched a hole in it, sweating DNA-STRANDS of curling turbulence behind it. The strange thing, oddly enough, was not that it was moving so slowly. The strange thing was that it was swelling, like a plump-black kernel of popcorn in the fire. As it expanded it lost its density. In moments it was the size of a grape, and had become semi-transparent. I drew a breath into my lungs. I breathed out again.
‘I don’t, so, I don’t understand,’ I said.
The red-haired man was a ghost now, as transparent as tracing paper. As transparent as mist. As transparent as an image projected upon glass, and he had one arm out firing his gun, or he had both arms out throttlingly, or he had his arms by his side, it wasn’t clear.
Frenkel was scowling. His face was perfectly opaque. I could not see through his face, and I could see the movement
of
his face. But everybody else in that square was growing wispy, glasslike. The air had assumed a certain quality; the sort of impression you get in a heavy downpour: not that water and air are superimposed, because, clearly, in a rainstorm it is a question of
either
water
or
air. Either water or air or some third thing. The interleaving of water and air is temporal, not spatial, although the effect for the viewer is almost like superposition. I’m afraid this isn’t a very good way of putting it.
Frenkel was unaffected; but everybody else in the square was fading. The buildings themselves were flickering on a frequency as rapid as a television image on its cathode screen, too rapidly for my eye to distinguish the
what
and
what
they were flickering between. The sky had a cloudy feel, even though there were no clouds. Or there were clouds.
‘Why have things slowed?’ I asked.
‘I suppose,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, twining a finger into his beard. ‘I think it has something to do with processing density. Something like: if you force water through a narrow pipe it moves quickly, and if you put the same volume of water through a much wider pipe it moves slowly.’
‘The water?’
‘Time. And the pipe - well you can see.’ He looked around. ‘But I’m not really expert in that sort of thing.’
The bullet was a foot from my chest, and the size of a tennis ball: dark grey now. I could not see it spinning, as perhaps I expected to do; but that was because I could not see its edges at all. It was fuzzed, weirdly unfocused. ‘Should I move out of the way?’
‘I don’t think you can.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t think you have time. Between, I mean, the bullet leaving the gun and reaching you?’
‘But it’s taking a
long
time.’
‘Ah! Well it seems that way.’
‘It’s not really taking a long time?’
‘How long does a bullet take to travel a few feet? In one realityline, I mean if we isolate just one - the one you were in a moment ago - it would take less than a second. A single realityline is a very narrow pipe you see: time gushes rapidly along it.’
‘But, then, I am going to die?’
‘You’re still
talking
to me,’ said Asterinov. ‘So, I doubt it. It’ll pass through your heart, yes. But it will slip between heartbeats, I’d say.’
‘Fuck!’ contributed Frenkel. He was wriggling with fury in his chair, although sluggishly.
I looked around once more. ‘It’s everybody except you, and me, and Frenkel.’ I observed. The bullet, now a ball of soot the size of a football, had intersected my chest. I could almost feel it. It was almost wholly spectral. It was both palpable and impalpable at the same time. It with either palpable, or impalpable, or else some third thing.
‘It is everybody save for us three,’ Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov agreed.
‘Why us three.’
‘Use your fucking
noddle
,’ barked Frenkel. ‘Use you fucking
head
.’
‘Asterinov - I must say I’m surprised to see you. Delighted, obviously, but surprised. I’d heard you were dead.’
‘Reports of my death,’ he beamed. ‘I forget how that one ends.’
‘But you haven’t
aged
. Perhaps you’re a ghost?’
‘No such thing. No
such
thing.’
‘I’m trying to get my head around this,’ I informed them.
The air around me was less atmosphere and more immersion, or preparation was of a multiple spectral shift, a shift of spectres, or spectra, an uncanny gloom. It was somewhat like the quality light takes on during an eclipse. The ghosts were now pale, and only some were loitering. Others were on the move, making their way towards the streets that led off the square. Or they weren’t moving. Either they were moving, or they weren’t moving, or it was some third thing.
‘You’re unaged because of
them
,’ I said to Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov. By them I meant - well,
you
know whom I meant.
‘I
am
them, Konstantin Andreiovich.’
‘When you say the pipe is wider . . .’