Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

Again, an almost imperceptible shake of the head. The younger man leaves the room. The older one watches Anton while he’s gone, still making notes. He lights another cigarette, blows the first drag’s smoke out and makes more notes. He’s observing Anton now — right now this second, during this supposed hiatus — and still garnering knowledge from him, writing it down. Are they that well trained? The wealth of whole decades of Soviet science seems stored up in the portly frame in the room’s corner, secrets fomented in wards of mental institutions. Have they developed ways of telling everything, of reading thoughts just from his posture, where his eyes are pointing, how his fingers shake, each involuntary twitch? Will these notes be typed up, duplicated, catalogued and archived, to be perused at will in subterranean stacks by anyone who cares to look under M for Markov, B for Bulgaria? Then transferred to computer, pooled with the files of other police forces around the world, some massive network you can’t get out of once you’re in: it’s fed on even to the US Immigration Bureau …

The thin, dark-haired man comes back in. He hands Anton a blue paper towel, places a new coffee on the table and sits down. He extends his hands above the table, fingers fluttering, and whistles through oscillating lips: a long, tremolo whistle that descends in tone as his breath expires.

“That’s better.” He smiles and sits up. “Now, Anton, look: let’s keep it level. Straight. You won’t fuck around with me and I won’t lose my temper. That’s how I suggest proceeding. OK?”

Anton nods but still doesn’t understand. Proceed with what? The only question he’s been asked is whether or not he wants coffee. The dark-haired man raises his plastic cup towards his lips, blows steam off the liquid’s surface, then sets it down again.

“First principles. Those basics. Fundamentals. We know everything.” He says it softly this time, eyebrows raised. “You give me a date, any date since halfway through December, and I’ll tell you what you did that day You say the fifteenth of December, I’ll tell you you went for a walk on Libeňský Island with Ilievski. I’ll tell you which way you walked. You tell me the nineteenth, I’ll tell you you watched Sparta beat Košice four-nil with Milachkov. I’ll tell you what type of langoš you bought at half-time, how many beers you had in the Sokolovna afterwards. I’ll even show you photographs. We haven’t brought you in here to help us establish facts. We know the facts.”

He pauses. If they know the facts, then what …

“Now, what we know that you , Anton, do, and every day of every month at that, is run around for Ilievski. You carry an envelope containing this, a suitcase full of that. We’ve known that for ages. It’s no great deal. Of course” — a new urgency here — “of course, it’s illegal, but so’s double-parking, right?”

He opens his hands invitingly, eyes holding Anton’s as he laughs. If Anton doesn’t laugh with him it’s rude, a clear act of rebellion — but if he does, he’s right inside the trap again, defenceless. Anton’s lips quiver up into a smile. The dark-haired man takes this as a cue to continue:

“But!” he says, both index fingers stabbing the air as the other digits curl into the palms. “But! Recently, it’s got a bit more serious. I mean, for example, if, when I ask you to name a date, you were to tell me last Wednesday, Wednesday the thirtieth, I’ll tell you you had a conversation on the phone with Ivan Maňásek discussing picking certain objects up at certain times. I’ll tell you what you said, and what he said, and in what tone of voice you both said what you said. I’ll play you the tapes if you want.” On tapes his finger prods the table and his voice buckles under the weight of its own sense of triumph. He stops, and his nose twitches with excitement several times before he carries on:

“The facts are beyond dispute here. You’ve been ferrying this invaluable painting around town. You’ve paid Ivan Maňásek to make a copy of it. You’ve been caught red-handed with the stolen work itself and with the proof of your conspiracy to defraud. They’re with Interpol now.” As a preface to his next sentence he draws his cheeks in and widens his eyes, mimicking amazement: “And I can tell you, Anton, the prosecutor’s office don’t know where to start. There are crimes committed on Czech soil: one — well, two in fact, possession and conspiracy; same two against the Bulgarian state, makes four; and with intent to transport on to a third country, equals, what? There must be six or seven different charges coming at you just from that.”

He pauses again. Just from that ? He’s holding something back: Anton can tell from the way he’s breathing lightly — not deep down into his chest but in his throat — that this is just the preamble. He’s holding this other thing back like a wild dog on a leash …

“There’s five, six, seven years already there. But that is nothing , nothing at all compared to the charge that’s being prepared against you for what happened on New Year’s Eve.”

New Year’s Eve? “I don’t …”

The thin, dark-haired man looks over at the lieutenant, who nods quickly once. Then he turns back to Anton and his eyes be come intense, illuminated:

“Ivan Maňásek’s death.”

“Ivan Maňásek’s … What? When?” The wild dog’s on him: it knocks his breath away and makes him wheeze. He looks up at the two men, as though they’d picked his breath up and were holding it in their hands, their faces, those damn notes, and were playing keep-away with it, would pass it back to him if he just … just what? How can it be possible for this man to tell him this? If he can say that Maňásek is dead and Anton can understand these words, then their significance must extend beyond this cell; it can’t be true in here and not outside: Ivan Maňásek must actually be dead. And he’s to be charged ? Both men are scrutinizing him intently: they seem genuinely interested, as though they were trying for the first time in the interview, despite the dark-haired man’s earlier claim to the contrary, to learn something they don’t already know. After five or six seconds the lieutenant looks down at his clipboard again and vigorously scrawls.

The dark-haired man is saying something to Anton, but for Anton words, sentences and the images they trail behind them are unravelling. The dark-haired man is pronouncing Ivan Maňásek’s name again, and saying he went diving, like an Olympic athlete — and Anton’s grappling with a vision of a Soviet athlete diving from a board, trying to slot it into some larger vision of which it should be a part, in which it would make sense. His mind grasps back to that strange lawn beside the house on Libeňský Island, its sculptures, but these don’t help. Ivan Maňásek’s become an Olympic diver, the thin, dark-haired man’s saying. The fingers of his right hand are pirouetting and somersaulting through high air. His lips whistle with Anton’s stolen breath, mimicking the sound of wind, the tremolo effect this time replaced by gusty cycles, peaks and troughs. The fingers land on the desk’s surface in a pool of coffee, then are shaken and slipped into the thin, dark-haired man’s mouth, sucked dry. The man’s talking again, but Anton’s only receiving snatches:

“… landed on the pavement … ice and blood … after he’d finished copying … to keep him quiet … be worth a lot of money …”

He’s got to tell them: tell them how it was. Ivan Maňásek wasn’t a Soviet high diver; there wasn’t blood and ice. Ice, yes — but no blood on it. Only carp blood: that was everywhere, all over Prague — but that all finished around Christmas, on the twenty-fourth. On the thirty-first he left Maňásek in his studio alive and happy, holding twenty-five thousand crowns. Did the thin, dark-haired man say a lot of money ? That’s true, then, what the thin, dark-haired man’s saying is true. Twenty-five. But the way Maňásek took it, flicked the notes’ edges: he was raring to go, to get into the game, the night, New Year’s Eve, parties, women … Anton tries to make them see this, to communicate it to them: