Chapter 15: VIOLETS

'You are giving yourself up?'

'No.'

The colonel looked at me, his head going down a degree and his eyes remaining on my own. The light wasn't too bad in here; this wasn't an interrogation room, just a holding cell by the look of it, with a small barred window and a steel door with a look-through panel in it. The door wasn't closed; there was still quite a bit of bustle going on out there, militia tramping about, phones ringing; I heard my cover name several times: Viktor Shokin was quite a catch.

'Then why are you here?' the colonel asked me.

He had an intelligent face, unsurprisingly in terms of his rank, and didn't seem to think I was playing the fool when I'd told him I wasn't giving myself up. If he'd thought I was playing the fool he would have given immediate orders to have me beaten into a different frame of mind.

'You've got a woman here,' I told him, 'Tanya Rusakova. Is that correct?'

He went on watching me while he thought it over. He was a big man, bigger still in his greatcoat, and had the kind of eyes that would be able to watch a war-trained Doberman tearing a fugitive to pieces, for instance, without showing anything, except possibly a hint of amusement.

'Yes,' he said at last. "That is correct'

'I want her released, Colonel.'

I left it at that for the moment. I wanted to feed information into him slowly, so that I could catch and weigh his reactions, because this was the man who was going to decide, at some hour of this long and perilous night, whether he was going to let me walk out of here or hand me over to Homicide Investigation and start the machinery of justice rolling over me.

Someone in the passage outside was asking where Colonel Belyak was, and in a moment a junior officer was standing in the doorway, glancing at me and away again.

'Telephone, Colonel. In your office.'

'Who is it?'

'OIC Catering, sir.'

'Take a message. Are you monitoring my telephones?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Then go on taking messages and don't come to me with anything unless it sounds urgent. Are those not the orders passed on to you?'

'Yes, sir. I'm — '

'Catering is not urgent, you clod. Get out.'

Everyone brought themselves an inch straighter — the junior officer and the two guards at the door and the sergeant who stood behind and to the left of Colonel Belyak. The sergeant was a short square man with a pock-marked corpse-coloured face, its eyes lost in hollows, its nose broken and its jaw skewed. He hadn't spoken since I'd been brought in here ten minutes ago. He watched Colonel Belyak when he asked me questions, and watched me when I answered them. He would be the one, this sergeant, who would be ordered to beat me up if I looked like playing the fool, or refused to give the information the Colonel was looking for, or in any way tried bitching him about.

'So you want the woman released.' Belyak watched me steadily with the polished black stones in his face.

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Because she's innocent of any wrongdoing. She was set up.'

'Explain that for me.'

'She was set up as bait in the assassination of General Gennadi Velichko.'

He brought his head down a degree and left his eyes on mine, a mannerism I was beginning to understand. I'd caught his attention.

'Continue,' he said. His voice had the tonelessness of a surgeon's asking for another scalpel.

I must have moved on the chair, because it creaked. It was a straight-backed kitchen chair and I'd noticed stains on it when the Colonel had told me to sit down. I've seen chairs like this one before, stained and gone in the joints; professional interrogators all over the world use the same tricks, and one of them is to sit the detainee down so that he has to look up at the other people, which makes him nervous, and so that he's conveniently positioned if they decide to make him still more nervous by smashing him backwards onto the floor, chair and all. They use the back of their fist or their boot or whatever they choose, and although I know how to stop that kind of thing right in its tracks I never do, unless there's a chance of turning the odds and getting clear.

Tonight there was no question of that: I'd come here of my own free will.

'I'm not going to tell you very much at this stage, Colonel Belyak. First the woman has to be released. We shall need Chief Investigator Gromov here, won't we, for his authority.'

'He is on his way,' the Colonel said 'How long will it take him to get here?'

'Why do you ask?'

'Because we've got to hurry.'

Colonel Belyak lifted his head slightly, still watching me; I'd seen him do that before when I'd told him something he didn't intend to take.

'We have all night, Mr Shokin.' He used Gospodin, as Chief Inspector Gromov had done on the train when he'd questioned me; its closest equivalent in the West was 'Mr'. Tovarishch was out now in Russia, a quaint Leninist trapping. 'We have as long as I decide we shall have,' the Colonel said.

He was standing with his feet apart, the polish on his jackboots glinting in the light from the bare electric bulb overhead, his shadow huge against the wall. His hands were behind him, and there was nothing in them; they'd been empty when he'd come in here. There was nothing in the sergeant's hands either; he was a man who liked the feel of bone on flesh when he went to work, a former pugilist with the gloves off now and real toys to play with.

'I want you to realize,' I told the Colonel,' that you're going to be very pleased indeed with the information I shall be giving you eventually, once Gospozha Rusakova has been released. I'm not setting any kind of deadline, you see; it's just a fact of life: we can't afford to waste any time.'

Not in fact true. Certainly I was setting a deadline, because I had to keep up the pressure. If I gave these people all the time they wanted they'd simply put me through intensive interrogation and I'd come out days later with not much more than pulp where the flesh had been, with a torn urethra and clouded conjunctivae and the kidneys contused and pouring blood into the urine and my sight gone and my brain out of synch and Meridian blown to hell.

There was also the risk of Tanya Rusakova's brother losing patience. I'm no good at waiting, doing nothing, he'd said on the telephone. If I'm not there — at the rendezvous — it will mean I changed my mind.

He could wreck everything I was trying to do.

'If there were any deadlines to be set,' Colonel Belyak was saying,' I would set them myself.'

'Of course.'

He was touchy and I'd have to watch it. I had begun paying out a thread so fine that one wrong word could break it.

'Tell me what you know,' the Colonel said, 'about the assassination of General Velichko.'

There was the sound of snow-chains locking across concrete outside the building and the slamming of doors, so I took a chance and left the question unanswered, turning my head as the tramping of boots loudened and voices began echoing along the passage and Chief Investigator Gromov came in, shouldering his way between the guards and nodding briefly to the Colonel and staring down at me with his hands dug into the pockets of his coat.

'So we have you.'

Cold air was still coming in from the passage, laced with exhaust gas.

'Not quite that,' I said.

'What, then?'

I missed the patience in his caramel-brown eyes that I'd seen on the Rossiya. He'd had all the time he needed, then, but now he was more energized: he'd thrown a net across the city of Novosibirsk and here suddenly was the minnow, squirming, and he wanted facts and he wanted them fast.

'I decided to come here of my own free will,' I told him, 'to obtain the immediate release of Tanya Rusakova. She did nothing wrong, intentionally, and I want her out of here.' I spoke carefully, articulating; it wasn't a time for misunderstandings. 'I will then deliver into your hands — if it's not too late — the man who shot Zymyanin on board the Rossiya the night before last, who also set a bomb in one of the compartments with the intention of killing General Velichko, General Chudin and General Kovalenko, and — having failed — shot General Velichko to death last night in the street'