Quiller Balalaika

21: KEY

'How is she?'

'Worried about you,' I said, 'of course.'

'I suppose so.' He sat shivering on the coconut matting, hunched in his striped greatcoat. He felt the cold.

We were in the gymnasium, if you want to call it that, a bigger hut than the others with no stove, just a few moth-eaten mats strewn around and a rickety vaulting-horse and some parallel bars made of gnarled pit props, no punch bag – any kind of combat training was strictly prohibited in Gulanka. Place reeked of sweat, as you can imagine.

It was the evening end-of-work hour, what we called free time.

'Natalya didn't send her love,' I told Marius, 'because she didn't know I was coming here.'

He moved his head. 'How much warning did you get?' Justice was summary in the capital these days.

'I came here on my own account, chose my own time.' There was a pause. He listened attentively, Marius, then considered before he spoke. He was the kind of man, I thought, who would have been good at running the Sakkas empire; cool, intelligent, creative. In Gulanka he worked in the commandant's office as a book-keeper, he'd told me, his talents not totally wasted.

'You came here on your own account,' he said. 'And what does that mean?'

'I fiddled my way onto the train, with false papers.'

'To Gulanka.' Listening very hard now.

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'To look for you.'

Watching me with his pale attentive eyes. 'For me.'

'I'm taking you back to Moscow. I assume you've no objection.'

He blinked, which he didn't do often. He was a bit like Ferris, a cool cat, raised an eyebrow when he felt moved, instead of the roof.

'Taking me back to Moscow,' he said. 'And how long have you been here?'

'Four or five days.'

'Not long enough,' he said, 'to learn anything about Gulanka.'

'I learn fast. But do me a favour. Imagine for a moment that I could in fact get you back to the city.'

Two beats. 'I should tell you it's entirely academic, but very well.'

'What would you want to do in Moscow, after you'd seen your sister?'

He thought for a long time now, turning his head away, turning it back. Then quietly he said, 'Destroy Sakkas.'

I caught something in his eyes for the first time, a brightness; hatred, I thought, an intense hatred.

'Destroy,' I said. 'You mean kill?'

'Not immediately. Bring him down first. Destroy everything he has, first. Then kill, or have killed: I'd bring in a professional, to make certain I didn't bungle things. That's something I would very much like not to bungle.'

The door at the other end of the gym came open with a bang and someone came in, the snow under the lamps outside casting a wash of light across the rafters. He shot us a look, slammed the door and shook off his greatcoat, dropping onto a mat and stretching out.

'This is because,' I asked Marius, 'of what he did to your sister?'

'For the most part. And for what he did to me.'

'I didn't come here,' I told him, 'just to give you the chance of destroying Sakkas, though I wouldn't object. I need your services in return.'

In a moment, 'My services. And what are they?'

'I'll tell you when we reach Moscow.'

Watching me with steady concentration. 'Who are you?'

'I work for a European government, but as a freelance.'

'I see.' He was too intelligent to ask which government, or what post; if I'd wanted him to know I would have told him.

'Let me ask you something. Have you done much training?'

He looked at me. 'Training?'

'In athletics. Or just – you know – jogging, aerobics, that kind of thing. How fit are you?'

'Oh, all right I suppose. I used to jog every day in Gorky Park.'

'How long for?'

'Maybe half an hour.'

'Do anything with the arms?'

'Arms?' He was thinking suddenly of assault rifles. 'Oh, lifted a few weights when I had the time.'

'Press-ups?'

'Too boring.'

'They are, aren't they.' I left it. It was too late to tell him to start a crash-program now: he'd get muscle-bound.

'You're pretty fit yourself,' he said in a moment. 'I heard what you did to that man Gradov.'

'He was easy meat, run to fat.' I watched the man on the mat over there, doing some leg-raising now, his breath steaming under the bleak yellow lights. 'How's the commandant these days?'

No surprise in the eyes: he fielded unexpected questions well. 'He's a very angry man.'

'Why?'

'Someone tried to bribe one of the guards.'

'The CO doesn't like that?'

'He hates it. He considers himself an honourable man, and feels demeaned if anyone attempts to buy him. We get mafiya types sent here' – looking at me obliquely – 'and some of them are millionaires, of course. The first thing they try to do is get the CO to let them escape, at pretty well any price he cares to name. Wrong again – he's proud of his record in keeping his prisoners captive, since those are his orders.'

'So I've heard.'

'I expect so. His thinking runs right down through the ranks. One or two guards take bribes, probably, but they must know how dangerous it is. The punishment's always the same – a public flogging in the gym here, over that vaulting horse. It's not pretty. So if you thought you could simply buy our tickets to Moscow, I advise you to forget it.'

'I didn't.'

'I'm so glad. Your back would have taken six months to heal.'

The man who'd come in here to train was on the parallel bars now, grunting in time with his swings. In the next three days I'd be working on those myself, would need the vital difference between a muscle that held and a muscle that ripped.

'You work,' Marius was saying, 'for a government agency. But not at a desk, I imagine.'

He was thinking of the Gradov thing again, I suppose. 'I'm pretty active,' I said. 'But look, I want to know, first, whether you're ready to get out of Gulanka. I can look after you through the entire operation, but there'll be risks, some of them unpredictable.' I was watching him now, watching his pale eyes, their depths, needing to see the truth there, whatever he might put into words.

In a moment he said, 'You've got the kind of madness in you that seems to have worked, historically. There are legends, aren't there, that pass on -'

'I'm not sure what you mean by madness.'

'Oh. No offence, but you tell me you can get me out of a place like this, where no one's escaped for twenty years, since the present CO took over. I mean -'

'I see, yes. But my mind is perfectly sound, so I haven't been concentrating on the difficulties, only on the solutions. You'll have to make a mental switch yourself there, in the next three days – that's our count-down period. But for now I need your answer to one question, and it's critical. You tell me you want to destroy Sakkas if I can get you to Moscow, and – as I've said – there are unpredictable risks. So here's the question, and I want you to take your time: exactly how much are you prepared to risk? What's the ultimate?'

I watched his eyes, the way they changed, grew darker, until in a moment or two he felt he was ready.

'Death,' he said, 'if you put it like that.'

I saw Alex again soon after midnight. He came to me at the rendezvous we'd arranged, in the gap between the garbage dumps and the wire on the west side.

'Last one,' he said, and thrust the sacking bundle into my hands.

'Took some getting.'

'I hung around.'

'You're a good friend.'

'It's an honour.'

He watched me in the light of the three-quarter moon, his young face pinched, his eyes bright, waiting for me to say something more, giving me the impression that whatever I said he'd listen to it, and take it to heart. Anything, anything, so that one fine day he could vanquish the monster of all his nightmares, break his pride, shatter his reputation, obliterate his face. Annihilate Gradov, in front of a hut full of men. God only knew what I'd started.

But I suppose it was the boy's readiness to listen to me, whatever I might say, that prompted me to wrap the whole thing up for him, because I wouldn't be seeing him the next day: I would be too busy.

'Listen, we've got to get our sleep.' We were extending the mine in the morning, twenty minutes for breakfast, only half an hour for the midday break. 'But first I want to add a bit to what we've been doing in training.'

'Okay.' The wind was rising a little, and he pulled the collar of his greatcoat tighter.

'Although this doesn't apply only to training. It applies to whatever you want to do in life, whatever you've got to do. It's the ultimate key to success, and it's the only one, so when you've found it, don't lose it.' It was coming out like an avuncular homily, but I couldn't help that. At the core it was sound, and that was what mattered.

The boy's eyes were brighter still as he locked them onto mine in the moonlight. 'Okay,' on a shiver of breath.

'We create our own reality, Alex. You've seen those bumper stickers in Moscow on the back of some of the trucks – Shit happens. And those people are dead right – that's what happens to them, because that's what they expect – they get what they're looking for, what they've created for themselves.'

I waited, hearing the snuffling beyond the wire, watching the coloured glint of eyes across the snow. We could see them on most nights when the weather was clear.

'On the other side of the coin there are the miracles. I'll bring it down to size for you, in terms of training. When you make a strike, any kind of strike, you look first to the physical needs – drive from the ball of the foot, bring the force in through the hips, attend to the bodywork. But there are two final requirements in making the strike a success. The first is psychological: as you commit yourself to the target, there's just the one thought you've got to hold in your mind, to the exclusion of all others. Get there.'

Alex nodded with little jerks of his head. 'Okay. Get there.'

'Right.' I noticed my voice sounded as if it were coming from a distance now, from well outside the aura, or perhaps it wasn't my voice, but someone else's, because things were going on that didn't really concern Alex, things that would concern me later, tomorrow, when the moon would be full and the choice taken and the bridges burned.

'The final requirement,' I said, 'is drawn from the field of the spiritual. It's not a thought, but a feeling. Be there.'

The wind rose again, fluting among the eaves of the huts, dying away.

'Okay,' Alex said. 'Be there. Okay.'

I don't think he'd really got it; it was a lot to ask of a man his age. But maybe he'd work on it, lying in his bunk in the quiet of the night.

'Right,' I said, and thought of the towering dark where tomorrow night the moon would be floating, of the towering odds against success, which could only be defeated if I could manage, during the torments of the trial by ordeal, not to lose the key.