with the remnants of his rage and with something else I didn't understand. That was why I was listening carefully. 'And finally I got it,' he said, 'I got a connection going between Children's World and Lubyanka. It worried me, you see. I mean, it's like having one of our prisons with its execution chamber right across the street from Harrods. Could only happen in Moscow, couldn't it? Typically Russian - slightly short on good taste.' He got himself a cigarette before Misha could do it for him, and flicked the match away. 'I had to think up a connection, yes. Wandering a bit, am I?' 'No.' Ignatov had finished clearing up and was squatting on a tea chest near the grandfather clock, watching Schrenk, not understanding a word but listening to the sharp dry sibilants that cut through the silence. 'They're so clever these days, aren't they, at making mechanical toys. I mean that monkey, you know, that beats the two little brass cymbals together when you wind it up - that's old hat now, but I'm not thinking of anything more complicated. Surely they could make a small doll, with trousers and a moustache to show he's a man, and hang him upside down from a kind of trapeze with another doll beside him, also in trousers and with bushy black eyebrows slanting down towards the middle to make him look fierce, and a wooden stick in his hand - you see what I mean? It shouldn't be too difficult.' I think he was trying to laugh, at this point, or the laugh was just coming naturally because of his macabre sense of humour, I'm not sure; whatever it was it ended in more coughing, because of the cigarette smoke. I suppose his lungs were in a pretty bad way, with the ashtrays always full. 'Then,' he said when he could, 'you'd wind him up and he'd move the wooden stick up and down, beating the bare feet of the doll who's hanging upside down from the trapeze. I'm sure,' he said and the laughter started now, and I hope I never hear a sound like that again, 'I'm sure all the little boys would tug their mummies along there to buy one - in this country it'd be a smash hit, don't you think?' The laughter went on, the strangest sound I have ever heard from a human throat, a kind of soft yelping, like the cry of an animal caught in a trap. I saw Misha staring at him, her plump hands going slowly to her face, while Ignatov watched him with his thick grey mouth slightly open, his eyes bewildered. Schrenk stood in a crouch as the breath came out of his body in spasms; his eyes were squeezed almost shut, with the glint of tears showing. 'You see,' he said painfully, 'I finally succeeded in making a connection, a connection between Children's World and that other world across the square. I could finally believe they existed within a stone's throw of each other. Of course there's always the funny side to these things, isn't there, I mean quite a lot of good citizens are taken inside Lubyanka for interrogation, sometimes for days on end if they prove obstinate, as you well know.' Ash dropped from his cigarette and he brushed it clumsily off his jacket. 'So you can easily imagine a young mother, worried about the fact that her Jewish husband has disappeared, buying her little boy the funny mechanical toy he's been pestering her for. Then, when he keeps on asking where Daddy is, she can tell him not to worry about him, just go and play with his toy.' He began laughing again, in soft little yelps. 'Don't you think that's an absolute - absolute scream?' But when he swung his head up to look at me I saw the hatred burning in his eyes with a white hot flame. Then I understood. His rage wasn't against me. It was against that jackbooted crowd of thugs in Lubyanka, and the regime in which they operated, and the order of command that structured it from the omnipotent Politburo down to the cocky little militia men in the streets. Dr Steinberg had been surprised that I hadn't grasped that most obvious of facts: that when you damage a man as they had damaged Schrenk, with your bare hands and with special implements and with humiliation, you will engender in what remains of him the most murderous hate. It does, after all, become personal. I could believe him now. Schrenk wasn't a defector. Misha had got him to sit down again on the settee, and for a moment sat with him, her head against his shoulder and her hand cupping his cheek. She looked at me with her face questioning, then withdrew into herself as she remembered what I had done to Ignatov. 'Work for them?' Schrenk said bitterly. He shook off the girl and stared at me. 'What does he say?' she pleaded to Ignatov. 'What is it about, this Lubyanka and this Detsky Mir?' 'I don't know,' he said broodingly. 'Why did the man hit you like that? Should I get the police?' 'You know better,' he said, 'than to get the police.'