lost.’
‘Why? Why do you want me to realise that? Because it might save your life. And what if my cause is lost? I’ve never thought it was anything else, right from the beginning. With any luck, I’ll be able to achieve my object, do what I’ve always wanted to do as long as I can remember, the only thing I’ve ever really wanted. And that’s merely to inflict some damage, to smash something. To register a protest. Oh, the world will never change, but in a short time from now it’ll have evidence that at least one of its inhabitants hates it, hates it for its complacency, its ignorance, its lack of love, its selfishness, its sentimentality, its lack of any guiding principle, its callousness, its superficiality, its philistinism, its illiteracy…’
Alexander, whose voice had risen, could think of no further grounds on which somebody might hate the world, and time was passing, so he took his pistol out of its holster. The sight of this weapon, with its long butt-magazine, daunted his father extremely; perhaps until now he had not started to believe that he might be going to lose his life. His voice had lost nearly all its firmness when he said,
‘Not one of those bursts, please. At this range, one shot ought to be…’
‘We mustn’t inconvenience the servants. A liberal to the last. No, don’t yell for help, or you get a burst in the stomach straight away.
‘I swear to you… I don’t know what you’ve done in the past hour, but believe me it’s allowed for, it can’t make any difference.’
‘I don’t mind taking the gamble.’
‘Alexander, if you surrender now, lay down your arms and give yourself up, the civilian police would do, it needn’t be Vanag’s men…
‘Oh, so we’re doing deals, are we?’
‘I’ll never bargain with you. This is all so absurd. You and I should be on the same side. Why didn’t you approach me, why didn’t you try to recruit me?’
‘You weren’t worth having. As is now plain.’.
That seemed to go unheard. ‘It’s not too late. Let me join you now. I could be very valuable to you. There are all sorts of-’
‘You know, at first I wasn’t sure I could do this, but a touch of your style works wonders. Time well spent. Good-bye, Controller Petrovsky.’
Alexander’s glance had become remote when he pointed the pistol. There had been no more thunder since the mighty peal and everything was quiet. The Controller fell to his knees and lifted his clasped hands, saying loudly,
‘You can’t do it! Your own father! Who gave you life! You must be raving mad! You’ll never forgive yourself! What good will it do? They’ll shoot you for it! You can tell them you couldn’t find me!’ Petrovsky in his turn was running out of things to say, but he battled on. ‘Think of… think of your mother! Think what it would mean to her! To have her son murder her husband in cold blood! You may hate me, though I can’t think why, I’ve always done my best for you, but she in her goodness and…’
Suddenly Alexander remembered Leo writhing and screaming with pain and fear on the roll of bunting in the store-house that night. He had no intention of giving his father cause to behave in any such way, but the memory was so vivid and distracting that he had begun to wander from his aim when the door burst open to reveal Lomov. Before Alexander could finish turning and raising his pistol at him Lomov shot him through the temple – a single shot. He was dead at once, though the impact of the small low-velocity bullet was slight and it took a moment for his body to finish falling on to the tiger-skin rug that had come from the shore of the Aral Sea.
Cautiously, Lomov advanced into the room, keeping his pistol trained on Alexander until he was sure he was dead. Then he burst into tears.
‘Who are you?’ said Petrovsky, getting shakily to his feet.
‘He was my officer,’ Lomov managed to say.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘He brought us. He told us… Forgive me, your honour.’
Petrovsky put his arm round Lomov’s shoulders. ‘Don’t cry, my boy,’ he said kindly. ‘You did what had to be done. You saved the regiment’s honour. Colonel Tabidze will be proud of you. You’re an excellent soldier, quick- thinking and efficient.’
From somewhere very far away Lomov heard the deep note of a bell, but he was too distracted to take any notice. He dried his tears.
By then, others had come to the room, including the butler Anatol, the batman Brevda, Nina, Tatiana, Lyubimov. There was much talk and sound of lamentation. Anatol looked utterly bewildered, Brevda utterly discomposed. Nina went into a corner by herself. Tatiana knelt down and looked into Alexander’s face; someone had already closed his eyes and the wound was not so terrible. Lyubimov talked quietly to Lomov.
After a minute, Petrovsky drew his wife aside, sending her a look of diffident appeal.
‘What is it, Sergei?’
‘Don’t say…’ He stopped.
‘Say what? Why should it make any difference what I say now, rather than at any other time?’
When he made no reply, she turned away and went to Nina.
At last it began to rain.
21
Director Vanag sat in the passenger’s seat of a converted Range Rover parked in a field about thirty metres from a thick wood; the trees were mostly eucalyptus, poplar, Douglas fir and other quick-growing species. His regular driver, a flat-faced man with closely-shorn grey hair, sat beside him. They did not speak. In eleven years they never had, except for the passing of instructions and functional information. The recent storms had lowered the temperature and the humidity, and the weather was now more seasonable, mild and sunny with cool breezes. It was seven-twenty in the morning.
Establishing this by a glance at his wrist-dial, Vanag climbed into the back of the vehicle. The uniform he wore today differed from the usual run in having large patch pockets. He rubbed his hands and looked expectantly towards the wood. The early sunlight sparkled on the many raindrops that hung about the boughs and leaves, making a pleasant picture. Then they started coming, half a dozen wood-pigeons in an irregular line, flying fast, climbing fast. But Vanag was ready for them. He sent three short bursts of 7.55-millimetre steel-jacketed bullets up at them and knocked one down with the second; the bird lifted as if kicked in the breast and fell turning over and over. For his second sweep he had to increase the angle a good deal and missed altogether, but by then a group of mallards, slower and nearer the ground, had turned up from the pond in the wood, and he got two of them.
The weapon was a replica of a 1 950s Red Fleet anti-aircraft light machine-gun on a ring mounting. A contact who knew of his interest in such matters had picked it up almost complete in a Trieste museum and had it flown home. Vanag had had it stripped down and copied and the copy installed in the back of the Range Rover with a raised chair attached. The thing was ideal for his purposes: easy to handle, reasonably accurate and with a rate of fire too low for the hosing technique possible with more modern weapons, which in his view were not for the sportsman. The ammunition had to be specially made in Birmingham, but that was no problem, any more than raising volunteers to put the birds up for him was a problem.
He was changing magazines when his eye was caught by a movement at the edge of the wood. It soon resolved itself into a rabbit running from the approach of the beaters. Vanag clipped the fresh magazine into place as quickly as he could and swung the muzzle, but in those few seconds the rabbit had come far enough towards him not to be reachable by the machine-gun even if he depressed it to its limit. Instinct for shelter took the creature under the belly of the Range Rover. There it stayed. He got off the firing-chair, took from its hook the heavy old revolver he kept by him for just such unpredictable crises as this, and jumped to the ground. It was not an easy shot, with the wheels and differential casings to avoid, but the rabbit helped by immediately freezing, and quite soon it had no head. In that short interval he had lost a lot of birds; never mind, plenty more were coming.
