Men in space, p.17
Men in Space, page 17
The other’s in his thirties, just a year or so older than Anton. He was one of the officers who burst into the apartment when Helena opened the door. He’s thin, dark-haired: where the older man’s shirt and grey-brown pullover have customized themselves to his frame, stretched and folded till they’re part of him, an outer body, this one’s clothes seem less inhabited. The light-blue jacket hangs stiff from his shoulders down his back. The tie, too, seems stiff. It’s black, the same colour as his hair, which is abundant but straight, parted from the left at the front, stopping just short of his collar at the back. He’s carrying a cup of coffee, which he sets down on the table. He’s just about to sit down when he notices the older man is smoking.
“Oh! Should I …”
The older man shakes his head almost imperceptibly, then rises from his chair and walks out of the room. The younger one starts towards the door behind him but then catches him self and turns back. His eyes meet Anton’s for an instant and glance away again. The older one’s footsteps are coming back. The younger one places his hands on the back of the chair that’s left on his side of the table and, catching and holding Anton’s eyes now, sits down. The older man walks in with an ashtray. No nuts. In his other hand he holds some papers, which he waves forwards so they brush against the younger’s shoulder. The younger turns round and sees the papers.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. Thank you.”
He takes the papers, lays them on the table and sits down. The older man takes a step backwards and, without glancing behind him, places his hand on his chair’s back and sits down too. Like a footballer: he knows the space exactly, doesn’t need to look. He sets the ashtray on the floor beside him, rests the clipboard on his knees, checks the pen once more, then lifts its point slightly from the paper’s surface and holds it there, poised to write. The younger, thin, dark-haired man flips through the pages in front of him, giving each a cursory glance before bringing his head up, locking Anton’s eyes again and speaking to him:
“Dobar den.”
He’s said it in Bulgarian. Instinctively, Anton smiles at him as he replies: “Dobar den.”
“Mr Markov. Anton. I understand your Czech is excellent.” There’s an indulgence in his tone that’s bordering on kindness.
“Your Bulgarian is pretty good too.”
“That’s possible, but we’ll be speaking in Czech.” The tone is slipping now, becoming more aggressive with each word, the pace of the speech quickening. “And you’ll use our language to engage with me frankly and clearly.” Anton feels a surge inside his chest. The older man makes his first note. What does the dark-haired man mean, engage with me? How engage? Does he mean answer questions, or …
“You’ve been found,” the dark-haired man’s coming at him again, “in possession of a stolen work of art.”
That’s not a question, but the man’s looking at him as though it had been, and is waiting for a response. Perform, then. Step into this silence and perform. Intuit: that was the mantra …
“I think there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. Nobody knew it was stolen. If you’re saying it’s stolen, like you’re saying now, that’s news to me.” He should have said that the other way round; he can hear his sentences denounce him even as he couples each onto the one before. The dark-haired man’s smirking. He leans his head and shoulders forwards so they’re over the table and snarls:
“I strongly advise you not to fuck around with me. I can’t overemphasize how strongly I advise you not to.”
Anton can feel his muscles suddenly contracting. He didn’t tell them to do that: they just did, like midfielders taken by surprise, a fast break down the wing or a long ball to the opponents’ centre forward, rushing backwards, merging with defenders as they shrink into formation round their own goal. The dark-haired man’s staring at him piercingly.
“Let’s get some basics clear. Some fundamentals. First is: we know everything. We know all about Ivan Maňásek …”
The older man grunts and shuffles in his chair. The dark-haired man turns and looks at him. The older one, eyes still on the paper in front of him, holds his finger up and makes it skip further down some imaginary line. The dark-haired man resumes:
“We probably know more about what you’ve been doing than your own wife – who, by the way, didn’t stand up very well to being in custody.”
“My wife knows nothing about anything! Even less than me! Where is she now?’ The thought of Helena locked up, interrogated, who knows what else, fills him with terror. The dark-haired man’s turned round to smile with wide eyes at the older one, who returns the look. They both seem amused by his reaction.
“No, Anton.” The dark-haired man’s eyes are still chuckling. “You haven’t got the basics straight.” His hand becomes a claw placed on his chest, pushing the straight tie upwards so it has to fold below the chin as he says: “I’m not here to answer your questions.” Now the claw turns to Anton, threatening him as he continues: “You’re here because you’re a criminal. And you’re going to listen to me when I tell you something, and when I ask you to respond, and only then, you’ll do so quickly and directly and politely. Do you understand me?” His voice crescendoes as he says this, reaching its peak on the final tonal rise into the question mark.
“If I’m allowed to see a lawyer, I mean if I have that right, I’d like to use it now.”
The dark-haired man’s risen to his feet, swept the coffee cup into his hand and flung it at him before he can react or get his hands up. It hits him on the shoulder, throwing its hot brown liquid out across his chin and neck and chest. The coffee stings. The dark-haired man’s upper body has crossed to his side of the table. His eyes have got him pinned down in his chair. Both arms are twitching: he could swing at him with either.
“Rights!”
Then a quieter, sub-linguistic boiling on the tongue, as though it were about to form expletives, gives over to a pursing of the lips. His right arm’s cranked right back, then frozen just before being released. The lips unpurse:
“You have no fucking rights! You understand? I’m your rights, you little Jewish shit!”
The eyes still pin him, daring him to move, to see if he’s fast enough to dodge the blow that will come the instant he does. Anton’s half-hidden his face behind his own hands, but not totally, in case the overly defensive posture brings the punch down on him. The two men stay in those positions, Anton with his hands up, the thin, dark-haired man with his arms tensed to swing, fists clenched, for several seconds. Eventually the dark-haired man breathes out in one long sigh, lets his shoulders and arms deflate and draws his head back to his own side of the table. He looks down at his papers, which are messed up, wet with coffee, and throws his arms up in a theatrical, Italianate way: Look what you’ve made me do. Anton breathes out too – and feels pain biting into his chest where his shirt’s wet with hot coffee. He pinches the shirt and pulls it forwards so it’s not in contact with his skin. The dark-haired man steps back, turns away from Anton and paces a small, ponderous circle before turning to face him again. Then:
“Let’s wipe the record, start afresh. I’ll go and get more coffees. Do you want a coffee, Anton?”
Should he take one? This man’s trick is to draw him out, then lunge at him. It’s best not to be drawn at all. And anyway, he doesn’t need a coffee: tense enough already …
“No. Thank you. I’m OK.”
“Coffee, Lieutenant?”
Again, an almost imperceptible shake of the head. The younger man leaves the room. The older one watches Anton while he’s gone, still making notes. He lights another cigarette, blows the first drag’s smoke out and makes more notes. He’s observing Anton now – right now this second, during this supposed hiatus – and still garnering knowledge from him, writing it down. Are they that well trained? The wealth of whole decades of Soviet science seems stored up in the portly frame in the room’s corner, secrets fomented in wards of mental institutions. Have they developed ways of telling everything, of reading thoughts just from his posture, where his eyes are pointing, how his fingers shake, each involuntary twitch? Will these notes be typed up, duplicated, catalogued and archived, to be perused at will in subterranean stacks by anyone who cares to look under M for Markov, B for Bulgaria? Then transferred to computer, pooled with the files of other police forces around the world, some massive network you can’t get out of once you’re in: it’s fed on even to the US Immigration Bureau …
The thin, dark-haired man comes back in. He hands Anton a blue paper towel, places a new coffee on the table and sits down. He extends his hands above the table, fingers fluttering, and whistles through oscillating lips: a long, tremolo whistle that descends in tone as his breath expires.
“That’s better.” He smiles and sits up. “Now, Anton, look: let’s keep it level. Straight. You won’t fuck around with me and I won’t lose my temper. That’s how I suggest proceeding. OK?”
Anton nods but still doesn’t understand. Proceed with what? The only question he’s been asked is whether or not he wants coffee. The dark-haired man raises his plastic cup towards his lips, blows steam off the liquid’s surface, then sets it down again.
“First principles. Those basics. Fundamentals. We know everything.” He says it softly this time, eyebrows raised. “You give me a date, any date since halfway through December, and I’ll tell you what you did that day You say the fifteenth of December, I’ll tell you you went for a walk on Libeňský Island with Ilievski. I’ll tell you which way you walked. You tell me the nineteenth, I’ll tell you you watched Sparta beat Košice four-nil with Milachkov. I’ll tell you what type of langoš you bought at half-time, how many beers you had in the Sokolovna afterwards. I’ll even show you photographs. We haven’t brought you in here to help us establish facts. We know the facts.”
He pauses. If they know the facts, then what …
“Now, what we know that you, Anton, do, and every day of every month at that, is run around for Ilievski. You carry an envelope containing this, a suitcase full of that. We’ve known that for ages. It’s no great deal. Of course” – a new urgency here – “of course, it’s illegal, but so’s double-parking, right?”
He opens his hands invitingly, eyes holding Anton’s as he laughs. If Anton doesn’t laugh with him it’s rude, a clear act of rebellion – but if he does, he’s right inside the trap again, defenceless. Anton’s lips quiver up into a smile. The dark-haired man takes this as a cue to continue:
“But!” he says, both index fingers stabbing the air as the other digits curl into the palms. “But! Recently, it’s got a bit more serious. I mean, for example, if, when I ask you to name a date, you were to tell me last Wednesday, Wednesday the thirtieth, I’ll tell you you had a conversation on the phone with Ivan Maňásek discussing picking certain objects up at certain times. I’ll tell you what you said, and what he said, and in what tone of voice you both said what you said. I’ll play you the tapes if you want.” On tapes his finger prods the table and his voice buckles under the weight of its own sense of triumph. He stops, and his nose twitches with excitement several times before he carries on:
“The facts are beyond dispute here. You’ve been ferrying this invaluable painting around town. You’ve paid Ivan Maňásek to make a copy of it. You’ve been caught red-handed with the stolen work itself and with the proof of your conspiracy to defraud. They’re with Interpol now.” As a preface to his next sentence he draws his cheeks in and widens his eyes, mimicking amazement: “And I can tell you, Anton, the prosecutor’s office don’t know where to start. There are crimes committed on Czech soil: one – well, two in fact, possession and conspiracy; same two against the Bulgarian state, makes four; and with intent to transport on to a third country, equals, what? There must be six or seven different charges coming at you just from that.”
He pauses again. Just from that? He’s holding something back: Anton can tell from the way he’s breathing lightly – not deep down into his chest but in his throat – that this is just the preamble. He’s holding this other thing back like a wild dog on a leash …
“There’s five, six, seven years already there. But that is nothing, nothing at all compared to the charge that’s being prepared against you for what happened on New Year’s Eve.”
New Year’s Eve? “I don’t …”
The thin, dark-haired man looks over at the lieutenant, who nods quickly once. Then he turns back to Anton and his eyes be come intense, illuminated:
“Ivan Maňásek’s death.”
“Ivan Maňásek’s … What? When?” The wild dog’s on him: it knocks his breath away and makes him wheeze. He looks up at the two men, as though they’d picked his breath up and were holding it in their hands, their faces, those damn notes, and were playing keep-away with it, would pass it back to him if he just … just what? How can it be possible for this man to tell him this? If he can say that Maňásek is dead and Anton can understand these words, then their significance must extend beyond this cell; it can’t be true in here and not outside: Ivan Maňásek must actually be dead. And he’s to be charged? Both men are scrutinizing him intently: they seem genuinely interested, as though they were trying for the first time in the interview, despite the dark-haired man’s earlier claim to the contrary, to learn something they don’t already know. After five or six seconds the lieutenant looks down at his clipboard again and vigorously scrawls.
The dark-haired man is saying something to Anton, but for Anton words, sentences and the images they trail behind them are unravelling. The dark-haired man is pronouncing Ivan Maňásek’s name again, and saying he went diving, like an Olympic athlete – and Anton’s grappling with a vision of a Soviet athlete diving from a board, trying to slot it into some larger vision of which it should be a part, in which it would make sense. His mind grasps back to that strange lawn beside the house on Libeňský Island, its sculptures, but these don’t help. Ivan Maňásek’s become an Olympic diver, the thin, dark-haired man’s saying. The fingers of his right hand are pirouetting and somersaulting through high air. His lips whistle with Anton’s stolen breath, mimicking the sound of wind, the tremolo effect this time replaced by gusty cycles, peaks and troughs. The fingers land on the desk’s surface in a pool of coffee, then are shaken and slipped into the thin, dark-haired man’s mouth, sucked dry. The man’s talking again, but Anton’s only receiving snatches:
“… landed on the pavement … ice and blood … after he’d finished copying … to keep him quiet … be worth a lot of money …”
He’s got to tell them: tell them how it was. Ivan Maňásek wasn’t a Soviet high diver; there wasn’t blood and ice. Ice, yes – but no blood on it. Only carp blood: that was everywhere, all over Prague – but that all finished around Christmas, on the twenty-fourth. On the thirty-first he left Maňásek in his studio alive and happy, holding twenty-five thousand crowns. Did the thin, dark-haired man say a lot of money? That’s true, then, what the thin, dark-haired man’s saying is true. Twenty-five. But the way Maňásek took it, flicked the notes’ edges: he was raring to go, to get into the game, the night, New Year’s Eve, parties, women … Anton tries to make them see this, to communicate it to them:
“He can’t … he was standing in his doorway … I drove off and he was … I don’t …” This isn’t working: he should get his breath back first, and learn again to organize the words and images in sequences. Ilievski told him to go straight back to Korunní, saying he’d meet him there just before midnight, then called to say he couldn’t come till noon the next day … The dark-haired man’s eyes have narrowed down to slits: is he … is he laughing at him?
“You were the last to … seen entering his building just before … photos of this too … easily stick to you … No jury would take long …”
The words and images still won’t make sense. Anton sees a jury traipsing back into a courtroom, sliding into those benches he pictured being dusted earlier, the clerk there with her pre-flexed fingers tapping on her brutally indifferent typewriter, transcribing the foreman’s verdict, Guilty, then the judge sentencing him to life: that’s what you get, you get life, only cells and corridors, layer upon layer, like this building but multiplied ten times, multiplied to infinity as far as he’s concerned, he’ll never be outside it again … This picture won’t move aside for any others; it’s become anchored, intractable. And Anton’s there inside it, feels himself there literally: the courtroom is a box around this room’s box and the prison is a bigger box around that, boxes over boxes, each one slightly larger than the last, the gaps between the sides of each and those of the next forming corridors that lead nowhere, only back round to themselves; and at the centre of the smallest box is him. Coherence starts returning to him now, with his breath. The chaos of words and body has been replaced by sense and order – but both these stem from the inescapable truth of this boxed structure in which he now finds himself. All thoughts that follow move along its corridors, become themselves more cells and corridors, more layers.
With his slit eyes still locked on Anton, the thin, dark-haired man takes a sip of coffee, the first he’s had since walking in here. Then he pulls the cup away and places his finger on his chin:
“There’s still some coffee on your face.”
Anton, mirroring him, dabs at his chin. He can understand things now: they’re very simple. There’s coffee on his face, he’ll dab it off.
“No, other side.”
Anton dabs at the other side and feels the towel blot.
“Oh!” He’s all good-humoured now. “Before I forget: do you know someone called František?”
