None should claim the privilege by right, in the cell they were as one, she had said, and seemed to mock at David. The leader had rejected her, demanded it for himself, the prerogative of the front runner, but Isaac would not yield. Rebecca had spoken again, chided David. Were they not all capable? It was a simple thing, was it not? She had opened the door, disappeared for a minute, not more, and when she returned there were four twigs in her fist, their tips arranged in line, their length hidden in her closed palm. David had drawn first, expressionless, watching and waiting, then Isaac with a smile lightening his features because his was shorter, Moses third, and the winced sigh of disappointment from the other two men when they saw the stubbed length of the one which he had chosen. A protest from Isaac, a taunt from Rebecca that already they would divide themselves – officers and men, commissars and proletariat – a shrug from David. No remark from the boy himself. Again and again in his mind Moses had worked over the plan, digesting the part that he would play, remembering the details.
The first blow they would strike, and Moses Albyov had been chosen; not David who was their leader, not Isaac who fancied and believed in his fitness, but Moses, the last of the recruits to arrive before the cell had been sealed. To curse
Rebecca or to love her for the chance she had wished on him – he had not known the answer as he stumbled from shadows of the wood to the roadside.
But his hand had shaken, and the wool had drifted across his eyes. The mistakes of Moses Albyov. Errors that the others would not have made. And if he now collapsed, if he buckled, then all would pay the penalties for the faults that were his alone.
If there could only be someone to speak to, or just the sound of a human voice, however distant…
No food, and his belly aching with the deprivation and bowels grinding an extract from the last meal. God knows how many hours before.
Pray God let it finish.
Those were the thoughts of Moses Albyov. And they stayed with him till the moment he was roused by the sounds of keys turning in the lock of the door and of the bolt being withdrawn from its socket.
Four men for the escort. Not gentle, yet not brutal. Guiding him uncomfortably down the darkened passageway. His arms were pinioned and the men's fingers dug hard down into his muscles, and the manacles that they had put on his wrists were set tight so that the encompassing steel bit into his flesh. He was classified as 'political terrorist', 'enemy of the people', one who had sought to kill a guardian of the State; and Moses knew that there was no possibility of sympathy.
No words as they moved and their feet were rubber-shod so that the party – more like a cortege, he thought – went silently on its way. That was why he hadn't heard them, but they must have come, every few minutes, must have come to the door to spy at him, only he had not been aware of it.
Fear now. A horrible, clinging terror, something that was new and that he had not experienced before, compressing the muscles of his stomach and leaving his throat parched and dry.
More doors and more guards and more keys. Out into a brighter corridor where men sat at a low wooden table with a radio playing light music, men who interrupted their card game to stare at him, the look that men have for a fellow creature that is not a part of them, contaminated, condemned. Fit and strong men who were taking him, not tolerating his weakness of step as they bustled their way up the flights of stairs down the lengths of the passageways. Another door, another lock, another staircase, and they were half-pulling him with them. His lagging was not a conscious decision; if anything he wanted to please, like a dog about to be beaten that nestles against its master's legs. But he could not follow at their speed, so they dragged and pushed him to maintain their momentum.
The cold of the cell was gone, replaced by the warmth of midday, a fierce summer's day.
There was sweat on the faces of the men that took him, straggling on the corners of the staircase landings, then flattening themselves and their prisoner against the wall to allow free passage for a senior officer in his pressed trousers and tailored tunic, the medal ribbons of his service on his chest. Seven flights they climbed, then a closed and polished door in front and the respectful knock of the starshina with the stripes on his arm, and the command, distant but impatient, for them to enter.
One on each arm, one behind and the sergeant in front. Through the outer door and across the outer office, then the inner room, and the door open. Moses could see three men at a desk facing him as he was propelled forward. His trousers were sagging, still held up by his hands, his stockinged feet bruised and chafed from the stair surface of concrete and stone. Cold eyes, looking at him, boring into him, examining and stripping him. The sanctum of the enemy. There was a breeze now on his face, soft and winnowing against his cheeks, playing on his hair, cooling at his chest. On the left the source of the draught, an opened window, double- glazed for winter but pulled back now to permit the free flow of air.
No bar, no impediment.
If they saw him look at it… if they gauged his intention.. . These were the ones who would bend and break it out of him, who would make him tell them of David and Isaac, and Rebecca with the black hair and the dark eyes and the breasts that he was afraid of and the waist that he yearned to encircle… Moses's eyes were riveted to the front, locked on the man who sat at the central chair of the table.
The guards, preoccupied with delivering their charge to such august company – a full colonel of militia, the KGB major and the major of police – did not detect the flexing of his arm muscles, the bow-string tightness of his legs.
Moses Albyov closed his eyes, closed his mind at the moment that he catapulted himself the seven feet from where he stood to the window-sill. There was a delay as he scrabbled, impeded by the handcuffs, to swing the weight of his torso out into the void, and for a brief second one of the guards was able to claw at his trousers, now flapping and loose at his knees. If his ankle had been held they might perhaps have been able to arrest his fall, but the fingers of the guard were clamped only on to the cotton cloth of the trousers; it was not enough for him to grip at when he took the full weight of the diving Jew.
As he fell there was a sudden clarity in his mind, and an image of a group, of young faces that were laughing together and smiling, and their arms were all around him, and then- voices pealed as bells for him…
All ended by the sledgehammer impact on to the tarmac of the headquarters car park.
Hot water into an ant's nest. Men running and shouting and reacting to orders, forming excited, shifting patterns around the broken figure in their midst. From high above the colonel of militia, sharing the seventh-floor vantage-point of the window with the police major, surveyed the chaos below. Alone among them the man from KGB remained at the interrogation table.
It was he who broke the shocked silence of the room.
'Dead?' he asked.
From the window the reply, muffled because the head was still craning outwards. There is no possibility of survival, not from such a height.'
'And no preliminary interrogation, no initial questioning?'
'There had been none, as you requested. As you had asked. Just the forensic on the hair and the photograph. You were specific: there were to be no questions until he had cooled. Not even his name and his address, not even why he did not carry the card. You were specific.'
A nodded head, enough of the games, enough of the point- scoring. Wouldn't bring him back, didn't matter now. The KGB man made a gesture of dismissal to the four guards.
'So we have just a photograph. No address, not even a name..
'You had said there should be no questioning.' 'I am aware of what I said. So we take again our starting- point. We have the photograph. He is -' and the dry smile, the suggestion of humour – 'he was Jewish. The forensic have confirmed that the hair textures matched. It becomes a job for policemen. It will not be difficult to identify him – many ways – and once we have achieved that then the associates will be easy. We shall have them in a few days. It will take that time, a few days, but less than a week, and then we shall have the little bastards. And we have saved ourselves a bullet. Perhaps that is the way we should look on it: we have saved Mother Russia the price of a bullet.'
CHAPTER TWO
