Hunched down, crouching or squatting there on the sandy floor of its tank, the thing might have been an ape; but its leprous skin was corrugated and its feet gripped the floor with too many hooked, skeletal digits. An appendage like a tail – which was not a tail – lay coiled behind it; Tassi gasped as she saw that this extraneous member, too, was equipped with a rudimentary, lidless, almost vacant eye.
The thing was entirely freakish, and as for what it fed upon . . .
Tassi gave a massive start, jumped back from the tank. The creature had snatched up more food from the floor of its glass cell – and a human arm had suddenly flopped into view, dangling from its terrible hands! As Tassi’s eyes bulged in horror, so the thing commenced munching on the dismembered arm’s hand and fingers.
‘Steady, my dear,’ said Khuv quietly, as the girl moaned and reeled beside him.
‘But… but… it’s eating a . . . a -‘
‘A man?’ Khuv finished it for her. ‘Or what’s left of one? Indeed it is, yes. Oh, it will eat any sort of meat, but it appears to like human flesh the best.’ And to Agursky: ‘Vasily, do you have something for Tassi?’
The strange little scientist came forward, pressed something – several somethings – into her hand. A wallet? A ring? An ID card? And however familiar these things were, for a long moment her mind wouldn’t recognize them, refused to make the final, terrible connection. Then-
She felt dizzy and put her free hand on the glass wall of the tank to steady herself, and her eyes went from the items in her hand to the thing where it crouched. Horrified but at the same time fascinated, she stared and stared at it. Were these men trying to tell her that . . . that this creature was eating her father?!
Agursky had gone to one side of the room, where suddenly he switched up the lighting. Everything sprang into sharp, almost dazzling definition. The creature threw its food to one side and turned snarling toward Khuv and Tassi where they both shrank instinctively back.
And that was when she fainted and would have fallen to the floor if her wrist hadn’t been cuffed to the Major’s, and if he hadn’t turned quickly to catch up her sagging body in his arms.
For the thing in the glass tank was … oh, it was something hellish, yes, nightmarish. But the greater nightmare was this: that however monstrous and warped, however altered and alien that thing’s caricature of a face was when it had snarled at her, still she’d recognized it as the face of her father!
Jazz Simmons’s Georgian terrace bachelor flat in Hampstead was colourful, cluttered, and when Harry Keogh had first moved in a little over twenty-four hours ago it had been bitterly cold and the telephone was off. He’d had E-Branch clear it for him to use the place as his base, and he’d warned them not to come bothering him. He had Darcy Clarke’s word that he could play the entire game his way, without interference.
His way had been to attempt to absorb something of the atmosphere of the place first. Maybe he could get to know Simmons by understanding how he’d lived: his tastes, likes and dislikes, and his routine. Not his work routine, his private routine. Harry didn’t believe that a man was what he did professionally; he believed a man was what he thought privately.
The first thing that had impressed itself upon him was the clutter. Privately, Jazz Simmons had been a very untidy man. Maybe it was his way of relaxing. When you’re trained to a knife-edge you have to have a place where you can sheathe yourself now and then, or else you might cut yourself. This had been Jazz’s unwinding place.
The ‘clutter’ consisted of books and magazines dropped any and everywhere, more off the bookshelves than on them. Spy-thrillers (not unnaturally, Harry supposed) lay alongside piles of foreign language publications, most of the latter being Russian. There was also, beside Jazz’s bed, a dusty, foot-thick stack of Pravdos – topped by a copy of the latest Playboy. Harry had had to smile: hardly the most compatible meeting of ideologies!