For the Good of the State

Professor Nikolai Andrievich Panin’s foot-in-the-door (like an encyclopaedia salesman who didn’t intend to take ‘no’ for an answer) was as heavily caked in red Devon mud as his own: and the Russian’s stage-policeman’s voice, even down to its one carefully dropped ‘h’, was as unnatural as a two-pound note or a three-dollar bill: and maybe Audley’s sneeze hadn’t been a continuation of his self-pitying common cold, but the beginning of a shared hysteria—

But then Panin added his hand, placed flat against the door in support of his foot-in-the-gap, and his flattened Polish scum edged his shoulder along the wall, closer to the door, with the weapon in his hand aching to be used, not for peace-keeping but for argument-settling if the door started to close. And then it was no kaleidoscope, and the Smith and Wesson under Audley’s raincoat was huge and heavy, and it was no joke—

‘So we don’t want any trouble now, do we?’ Suddenly Panin’s voice also wasn’t funny, as he caught his breath: it was maybe a travesty of the falsely-friendly, deceptively matter-of-fact policeman’s voice in every tight corner, when the unarmed Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State representative of The Law in all its majesty had to humour some mad bastard who was long past law and reason. But then Panin adjusted his position slightly, spreading the hand suddenly towards Audley while keeping his foot in the door. ‘And I have with me…’

The hand passed Audley ‘… Sir Thomas Arkenshaw, of the Home Office—’ The hand came back from Tom to Audley ‘—and also Dr David Audley… who wish to talk with Mr Sizzeemeeack… So, if you would be so good as to inform ’im of our presence… then that would be to our mutual advantage, sir—‘

Tom struggled against the weight of the Smith and Wesson and his sense of unreality again, knowing that he would nevermore be able to address Jaggard, or anyone else, with such old-fashioned deference: after Panin, with this poor damned anonymous murderous fool, no one could ever be ‘ Sir’ again!

But… it was working, it was working: the door was opening, and Panin was moving into it—and… and even Sadowski was dropping the kissing cousin back into the holster inside his coat—

‘Excuse me, David—’ He pushed past Audley in Panin’s wake, out of the way, ahead of the unwinding Major, too ‘—Minder always comes first—sorry!’

A last breath of rain-sodden wind hit him again, just as he entered the hall: one door dead-ahead, with half a lavatory-pedestal in view, glimpsed between Panin and his victim; closed doors each side, left and right, with a small table on the left and an old-fashioned hat- and-coat rack on the right, hung with coats; coats under which two cheap, well-worn suitcases and what looked like a golfing bag were inadequately concealed—they had been the Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State source of that scrape-and-slither he had heard before the door was opened, piled ready for departure in the centre of the hall, he could even see the tramline marks they had left on the dirty linoleum on the floor—

But Szymiac’s man was moving again—crabwise and hesitantly towards one of the doors on the left now, where previously he had backed up unwillingly before the advance of the bogus Chief Detective Inspector Smith of the probably non-existent Exmoor Division; and the man’s smooth unhealthy face was as obsequiously blank as Major Sadowski’s—maybe that was their joint stock-in-trade expression for survival on both sides of the law in their native land.

‘ No! You stay where you are!’ Now that they were inside, Panin’s hold on Chief Detective Smith’s voice was already slipping: where it should have been a bark it came out as a biting snap. ‘Zzz—’ But he just managed to catch Sadowski’s name before it completed the slip ‘—Major!’

Sadowski brushed Tom’s shoulder, as he must also have brushed Audley’s in getting ahead of him after Tom, also in the exercise of his minder’s prerogative.

‘Watch this man.’ Panin didn’t take his eyes off this Son of the Eagle. ‘He’s in here, is he? Mr Sizzeemeeack?’

Tom was half-aware of Sadowski on his right, somewhat entangled with the hat-stand-coat-rack and the pile of luggage, but was equally unwilling to take his eyes off the Son of the Eagle, who merely nodded confirmation, as voiceless and obedient as Sadowski himself.

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State

‘Good!’ Panin caught Tom’s eye now, and nodded, almost as though he knew what was under Audley’s trailing raincoat, as he raised his hand and rapped sharply on the door with his knuckles.

Tom stared, transfixed in the first fraction of a second by the action and the sound; and then, in the next fraction, by Panin’s hand as it grasped the door-knob; and then, in the last and almost simultaneous instant of time, by the unwilling acceptance of the thought that Panin was as brave as Audley, when it came to the crunch of actually risking his skin in the front line—

‘Mr Sizzeemeeack—?’ Panin turned the knob. ‘I am Chief Defective Inspector Smith—and I am coming in—do you hear me?’

The thought amended itself slightly as Panin threw open the door: the knock and the challenge were a calculated risk, that the Poles weren’t about to challenge the British police, whatever they might want to do to General Gennadiy Zarubin; to which might be added the Russian’s confidence that Szymiac was the brains, not the brawn of the operation—the brawn which even now was covered by Major Sadowski’s pale eyes behind them. But then the memory of the Russian’s last nod, which had deliberately appealed to him, activated his own reflexes as Panin stepped over the threshold into the room.

‘Mr Sizzeemeeack?’ Panin confirmed his suspicion by taking his second step to one side, after the first one had been forward, to give him something like a clear field of fire.

Again, Tom had the sense of photographing everything, in that split-second.

Price, Anthony - For the Good of the State Insanely, even as he saw the man himself, the room summed itself up for him: it had come down in the world, just as the man himself must have done to be here inside it, far from home and in a foreign land and doing a dirty patriotic job—

‘ Shim-she-ack!’ Panin snapped the name accurately in Polish.

(In its better days, the room had had pictures on the wall, and other furniture which had left empty ghost-marks behind on the wallpaper; while the man himself was also a shadow, more like the men outside, Sadowski and his charge, but unreal compared with the menace of Panin and Audley.)

‘You know why I am here, don’t you?’ snapped Panin, utterly himself now, in his accentless English. ‘I represent—’