“Excuse me?” He was still smiling, but his eyes grew cold.
“This reminds me of a popular Soviet joke. Henry Kissinger attends a reception in Washington, where he meets Valentine Zorin, the Soviet expert on the US. ‘Tell me, Mr. Zorin,’ he asks, ‘what is your ancestry?’ ‘I'm Russian,’ answers Zorin, nearly choking on his watercress. ‘That’s great,’ smiles Kissinger. ‘If you’re Russian then I'm American.’”
Geskin’s face turned crimson. It seemed that I have angered him; just what I intended! A polite chat would’ve gotten me nowhere. I needed a fight, an explosion, a curse in any language, anything to create an atmosphere in which I could play my trump card to its maximum effect.
“I'm afraid I did not quite get the gist of that joke.”
“Oh come on, Baron! You got it.”
“Explain yourself, please!” Geskin's voice was as dry as sand.
Both of us were near the breaking point that I had planned. Surprisingly, I wasn't scared, probably because at that moment Geskin looked exactly his age. His luster was gone, the capillaries under his discolored eyes became visible, and his hands were shaking. If only he were dressed in a Bolshevik suit, like the ones sold in the Sakhalin penal colony, this flashy British aristocrat would be indistinguishable from any other aging Russian man, who spends his days in a long grocery line.
Ah, my dear Baron, I thought with satisfaction, your blue blood isn’t so different after all. You wait, we're just getting started; let's see what you say to this!
“By the way, Mr. Geskin, do you know what they call you in the KGB?”
“Please stop this idiotic talk!” Geskin stood up and grabbed his magnificent jacket. “Your jokes have crossed the line. This is simply insulting, and I'm not obliged …”
“The Little Kike.”
“What?” Blood drained from the Baron's face. “What did you say?”
“I said that the KGB officer who briefed me before my trip to Argentina, mentioned your carefully hidden Jewish ancestry, and that you are referred to as ‘the Little Kike’ in the KGB files.”
If I could measure the barometric pressure of Baron Gerald Geskin's soul right now, it would definitely point to ‘hurricane’. At this moment, I finally experienced the deep, sweet delirium of gambling, but I was trembling inside. I realized that my blind guess had hit such a festering wound, a tip of an iceberg of such enormous pride, vanity, snobbery, and ferocious hatred, that …
Suddenly, I was really scared. The Baron's wrinkled neck swelled and turned red, his eyes bulged out, and his hands feverishly searched the pockets of his trousers, the breast pocket of his shirt, then the jacket, which was still hanging on the back of the chair. He was seeking something, like a drug addict, without looking, simply relying on his touch. It resembled a séance, where one of the participants is slowly driven insane by the voices from beyond.
“Baron, are you all right?”
But Geskin couldn’t hear me. He slowly collapsed on the bed, awkwardly tumbling to one side, and began wheezing.
An instant later, I heard a strange, raspy sound, similar to slowly scraping nails on the chalkboard. I covered my ears to escape the nasty noise, which was piercing my nerve-endings, but it still reached me, evoking a feeling of doom. It took a few more minutes to realize that this horrible sound was my own screaming. * * *
Thirty or so minutes later, Geskin began coming around. I have no idea what he experienced during that half-an-hour, but I had enough time to recollect my whole life; all of my relatives, friends and schoolmates; plus a few things I knew about the detention of women in Latin America, the phone number of the Soviet embassy, and a totally irrelevant dry-cleaners receipt that vanished. That’s it, he is going to kick the bucket now, I thought sadly. There will be a police investigation, the forensics will find Luminal in his blood, and I’ll be interrogated. God, why has this all happened to me?
No knowing what to do, I turned on the TV. Staring at the screen like an imbecile, I listened to the harsh Spanish words, bursting like bullets from the news anchor’s frog-like mouth, and adding to the terror inside me. Geskin was breathing unevenly, occasionally snorting like an old irritated horse.
“Wake up, Baron,” kneeling near the bed, I cautiously patted Geskin's flabby cheek, noting that he looked more and more like a cooling corpse. Geskin snorted again, this time with a different, more optimistic resonance, and opened his eyes.
“I need Terstagen, quickly,” he said very quietly, almost whispering.
“Who's that, the British cultural attaché?”
“It's my medicine — pills,” rasped the Baron. “They are in the pocket of my valise, in my room. Please bring it, I do not feel well at all.”
“Yes, of course,” I murmured, standing up. The Baron's resurrection was very timely. Without hesitation, I grabbed his keys and rushed along the already familiar route: hallway, elevator, hallway, door, and ….
Nothing had changed in the luxurious apartment during the hour of my absence. I flew upstairs, thrust the bedroom door open, threw open the valise, and in one of its compartments I indeed found a batch of stiff packets with colored pills.
“Don't waste your time, there's no Terstagen there,” a familiar voice spun me around. The Baron was standing in the doorway, his jacket and tie on, showing no signs of the recent attack. In his right hand, he held a gun.
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