this tiny chamber would become his tomb. He sank back on the floor, shaking. Surely now Chekulayev would decide that he had had enough. There was no need to continue the farce. He was broken. He would confess. Natalya Pavlovna would understand. There would be no gloating, no rebukes. Just relief that their ordeal was over. But no one came.
He was not sure when the thought first came to him that something was very wrong indeed. He had conducted interrogations himself, he knew the score. Isolation was a valuable tool: it could break a stubborn spirit. But there were limits to its usefulness. It could drive someone over the edge for days or even weeks. His captors did not have that sort of time: he was certain of it. They wanted answers now. Something was amiss.
He took a chair and stood with it for a long time in front of the mirror. His intention was clear. Still nobody came. Turning his head away, he lifted the chair by its back and swung it in a long arc. It crashed against the mirror with a roar of fragmenting glass. Something sharp flew against his cheek. He let the chair fall. The room beyond was empty.
TEN
Careful as glass, he stepped into the tiny room. There was an audio console on his right, fitted with two rows of tapes: one group to record, the other to play back. The console was illuminated as though someone had been there and gone a moment ago. A pad lay in front of the console, covered in Cyrillic longhand. On top of it someone had left a pen with the top unscrewed. A bank of green and red digital counters glowed like fairy lights against burnished metal. A single tape was spinning like a circus wheel, its free end flapping against the controls. On top of the console someone had left a half-finished cup of coffee. Patrick lifted it up. It was stone cold, days old.
As he set the cup down, his hand brushed the console. He heard the sound of breathing, then a voice, whispering, close by.
‘When will you understand? When will you believe me? I don’t know anything. I can’t help you. I can only tell you what I know.’
His own voice. He shuddered and switched off the toggle he had accidentally touched. Silence regained control.
He waited, tense, behind the door, expecting someone to come, holding the cup in his hand, the nearest thing he could find to a weapon. Cold coffee lay spilled on the floor, a dull, khaki pool soaking into the carpet. There was an electric clock above the console. It said twenty to ten: night or morning, he had no way of knowing. He let five minutes pass. No one came.
The door opened into the little anteroom through which he had passed on his arrival. Like the interrogation room, the monitoring cubicle was disguised behind the brown papered wall. The door closed behind him, and it was as though neither his cell nor the cubicle beside it had ever existed. He stood in an ordinary room, breathing ordinary air. He had only the white cotton shift to remind him of his ordeal.
He paused on the landing, uncertain what to do. Sense told him to go directly down the stairs: with luck he could make it to the front door and be on the street before anyone came. But a more deep-seated instinct told him that no one was going to come. To leave without knowing why could only be dangerous. If his instinct was wrong, at least he had the element of surprise.
In a junk-room on the third floor he found a long-handled hammer. It felt lethal in his hand and gave him renewed confidence. The other rooms - all bedrooms - were empty. A glance through one curtained window told him it was ten o’clock at night. Outside, the streets were endless, mocking, scarred with rain. There was no way down.
He descended the stairs to the second floor, willing himself to move slowly, fighting back an urge to run until he reached the street. He heard a sound like music, a muffled, almost ethereal sound. It was music, and yet not quite music.
On the landing, he hesitated, listening. Now he realized what the sound was: a gramophone needle stuck in a record groove was playing the same snatch of music over and over again.
The sound came from a room on his left. He opened the door. Here, as elsewhere, the light had been left on. A coffee table with English-language magazines, two easy chairs, an empty glass that had been knocked to the floor. In one corner, a cheap gramophone ground out its single phrase. He stepped across and lifted the needle. The sleeve stood on a shelf nearby: the Elmer Bernstein recording of Sean O’Riada’s Mise Eire, played by the RTE Concert Orchestra. Someone had been getting into the spirit of things.
Next door was a bathroom. Stainless steel and dingy porcelain, a toilet like the one upstairs, a razor on a shelf. He closed the door.
There were six people in the next room, five men and one woman, Natalya Pavlovna. They sat facing him in a row, their eyes fixed on the door. No one spoke. No one asked him to come in. He stood in the doorway for a long time, returning their stare. Such strange postures, such tortured expressions. No one moved a muscle. Patrick closed the door behind him.
Whoever had tied them had done a good job: not too tight, not too loose. Just right. Once they were firmly fastened in their chairs, of course the rest had been easy. They had probably bought the plastic bags and rubber bands in Quinnsworth’s. They could not have cost them more than a pound.
Behind the plastic, the faces were chalk white. Natalya Pavlovna’s alabaster neck was creased and swollen. A small patch of cerulean blue had appeared on her left cheek. Chekulayev’s tongue protruded like a rubber cork, black and ugly.
The heads had been shaven. Hair lay discarded on the floor, an innocent reminder of old barber shops. Patrick stepped up close. On each scalp three figures had been inscribed in ballpen: 666.
He looked up. On the wall behind, the same pen had been used to write a single line in Greek:
Patrick recognized it. The words came from the Book of Revelations:
Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?
He glanced at the shaven heads and remembered another verse from the same chapter:
Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
‘666’: the number of the Beast. He prayed nobody he knew was behind all this.
ELEVEN
They were walking through St Stephen’s Green, a little like lovers, a little like strangers. Everywhere, sculpted faces watched them pass: Mangan and Markievicz, Emmet and Tone and Kettle - poets and freedom fighters turned to civic amenities. There was a little sunlight: not enough to send the clouds packing, but sufficient to lift people’s spirits an inch or two. Buskers had played for them at the top of Grafton Street, A Raibh Tu ag an gCarraig, the pipes muted, the tin whistle sweet and swollen with its painful melancholy. They had taken lunch at the Shelbourne, then crossed the road directly into the park.
Everything seemed normal here: children played or fed the ducks on the tiny lake, lovers embraced on benches, old men in shabby coats lingered by the bandstand, as though waiting for it to fill again with music. It was not yet spring, but the air held a promise of change. On Grafton Street, old Lord Mustard danced to jazz tunes in a silly hat.
Sometimes she held his hand, at others she folded her arms and walked ahead of him, as though impatient to be somewhere. She was wearing a long fur coat from Zwirn with Pancaldi shoes, and for the first time he thought she looked out of place. She wore them as a means of distancing herself from the squalor of her occupation, from the everyday demeaning acts she performed in the name of reason. He thought of her clothes more as symbols or guarantees of loyalty: Ruth Ehlers could not be bought. Not, at least, for money.
‘I want you to leave, Patrick,’ she said. Beside them, a fountain of green and bronze bulrushes threw water high into the February sky. ‘I mean it: don’t get involved in this thing any further.’
It was the first time she had referred to the subject all day. Oddly enough, it seemed to bring her closer, as though she felt easier dealing with an impersonal matter.
‘I am involved. I was involved from the beginning.’
‘But that’s as far as it goes. Let somebody else handle it now. You gave this all up, remember?’
‘I’ve been recommissioned, Ruth. You don’t just walk away from a friend’s body.’
They were standing beside the white marble relief of Roisin Dubh, beneath Mangan’s placid bust. Ruth stroked the pale face with a gloved hand.
