‘Tassi,’ Khuv murmured, leading her on through the almost deserted, dimly lit night corridors, ‘I want you to think very carefully. Much more carefully than you’ve been thinking so far. And if there’s anything at all you can tell me about the subversive activities of your brother, your father, the people of Yelizinka in general – and in particular about the underground, anti-Soviet organization to which any or all of them belonged … I mean, this really is going to be your last chance, Tassi.’
‘Major,’ she gasped the word out, ‘sir, I know nothing of any of these things. If my father was what you say he was -‘
‘Oh, he was,’ Khuv glanced at her and nodded gravely. ‘You may be sure that … he was!’
It was the way he said the last word, its ominous emphasis. And in a moment it had Tassi’s free hand flying to her mouth. ‘What . . . what have you done to him?’ Her question was the merest whisper.
They had arrived at a door bearing a legend familiar to Khuv but one which Tassi had never seen before. She only glanced at it; it said something about a keeper and security classified persons only. Using his plastic ID tag, and as the door’s mechanisms were activated, Khuv turned to Tassi and answered her question:
‘Done to him? To your father? Me? I have done nothing! He did it all himself – with his refusal to cooperate. A very stubborn man, Kazimir Kirescu . . .’
The door opened with a click. Khuv held it open a crack, called out: ‘Vasily, is all in order?’
‘Oh, yes, Major,’ came back an unctuous reply. ‘All ready.’
Khuv smiled at Tassi. The smile of a shark on its attack run. ‘My dear,’ he said, shoving the door open wide and leading her into the room of the creature, ‘I’m going to show you something unpleasant, and tell you something even more unpleasant, and finally suggest the most unpleasant thing of all. Following which you shall have the rest of the night and all day tomorrow to think about where you stand. But no more time than that.’
The room was in near-darkness, to which the ceiling lights added only an eerie red glow. Tassi could make out the figure of a small man in a white smock, and the shape of a large oblong box or tank covered with a white sheet. The tank must be of glass, for a small white light in the wall behind it shone right through, casting on the sheet a milky, ghostly outline, the silhouette of something that flopped sluggishly inside the tank.
‘Come closer,’ Khuv drew Tassi toward the tank. ‘Don’t be afraid, it’s perfectly safe. It can’t hurt you – not yet.’
Standing beside the KGB Major, unconsciously clutching his arm in her innocence as she stared wide-eyed at the weird silhouette on the sheet, Tassi heard him say to the scientist in the white smock: ‘Very well, Vasily, let’s see what we have here.’
Vasily Agursky tugged at one corner of the sheet and it began to slide slowly from the tank, letting a little more of the subdued light shine through. Then the slide accelerated and the sheet whispered to the floor. The thing in the tank had its back to the three; feeling their eyes upon it, it glanced over one hunched shoulder. Tassi looked at it, stared at it in disbelief, shuddered and clung to Khuv that much more fiercely. He patted her hand almost absent-mindedly, in a fashion which in other circumstances might almost have seemed fatherly. Except this was not her father but the man who had let Karl Vyotsky terrorize her.
‘Well, Tassi,’ he said, his voice very low, very sinister, ‘and what do you think of that?’
She didn’t know what to think of it, and later she would give anything to be able to forget it entirely. But for now: the shape of the thing was vaguely manlike, though even in this poor light it was quite obviously not a man. It appeared to be feeding, using taloned hands to tear its food and stuff strips of raw red meat into its mouth. Its face was mainly hidden, but Tassi could see the way its jaws worked, and the baleful glare of the very human eye that peered back over its shoulder.