Gerald Seymour: Kingfisher

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.'

Early that morning, many hours before Moses had died, his mother had bicycled to where David lived. It was a long journey in the fast-forming heat for a woman suffering the first pangs of arthritis, and the fact that she attempted it indicated the anxiety she held for the overnight absence of her only son. When she arrived it was David who answered her knock, and they had talked at the front door, David blocking her from going inside, determined once he had heard the germ of the news that she carried that she should not meet his own parents.

'He had spoken of taking some food in the city, then going to the library, then he said he would be with you and with the others – with Isaac and Rebecca. He had said he would not be late home.

His bed hadn't been disturbed, and he has never before been out the whole night.'

David had half-listened and half-wondered to himself what had caused the delay. He was aware that only Rebecca and Isaac had joined him the previous evening, and remembered the talk that there had been among the three of them as they considered where Moses might be.

'Always he has been home for the night. And when he went out yesterday he had not taken his police book – his card was at home. That is wrong-not allowed. And without it, if he is in trouble, if he is in the hospital and hurt and cannot speak, then how will they.. .?'

So Moses had acted as instructed – acted as David had told them they all should. He could imagine Moses's mother rummaging in his drawers looking for a clue to his whereabouts and finding no satisfaction, only the card with its Cellophane wrapper with the head-and-shoulders photograph and the official stamp set across it. David had never explained the motive for his order, leaving the others to think for themselves: that if they were taken in – casually, without the link being forged between their activities and the police inquiry in hand – then it would be easier to explain away the absence of identification as a careless lapse. It was usual for the police to pick the Jewish boys off the streets, if they found them out late, if they were in a group – even if they just cared to exist. Not that there had ever been talk among the four of questioning, arrest, imprisonment. It was not a subject David would have tolerated: too chilling, too personal. And therefore it was not considered by the others.