'He offered me a deal,' I said over my shoulder. 'He said he'd let me leave Moscow if I gave him my word not to tell anyone where he is.' 'Don't turn round,' he said, and I could hear that he meant it. I suppose the Moskvich was worrying him: it might be a friend of Schrenk's or someone he knew, and they might come over for a chat. 'I refused the deal,' I said. 'But I think that was unwise. I'd like to reconsider.' I wanted time. 'The Syrena,' he said. There was a note of warning in his voice. 'If Viktor knew I was ready to accept the deal, he'd prefer it that way. We've worked together, you know. He must have told you.' More than anything I wanted time. 'He told me nothing.' A man got out of the Moskvich and crunched across the snow. He didn't look in our direction. In the quiet of the night the distant tram went on droning. My senses had become finely tuned in the last few minutes and I was acutely aware of the environment. 'Viktor and I are good friends,' I said over my shoulder, 'that's why we all had a drink before we started talking. It's just that he thinks I want to stop this little protest he's going to make - you know, about Borodinski. You can quite understand how I feel about it now. I'd like to reconsider the deal he offered me. I want to talk to him again.' My voice sounded odd in the silence of the car park, the voice of a man talking to himself. 'Viktor would come down very hard on you if he ever found out I was finally ready to do the deal with him.' Time. Give me time. But it meant nothing, except that a drowning man was grasping at straws, worse, fabricating them out of thin air. Ignatov didn't bother to answer. The Syrena was twenty feet away from me now and I was walking straight towards it. With my head still turned I couldn't tell if he'd come any closer to me; I didn't think so; I think he was still walking in my footprints, hoping to keep the deep snow out of his shoes. Fifteen feet. Ten. The car stood broadside on. The passenger's door was closed, just as I'd left it when I'd cut the scarf from his wrists and ankles and let him get out. The keys would still be in the ignition: I hadn't been concerned about them at the time because I'd seen that the man hobbling across the car park was Schrenk. 'Open the door,' Ignatov said from behind me. His voice faded a little as he spoke: he'd stopped, to keep a safe distance between us when I opened the door. Thought was becoming rarefied, and reality slipped out of focus: I nearly asked him who was going to drive. The Syrena looked bigger than it had before, a large brown container for the body, snow covering its roof like a white pall and a dead man's face in the window: my own reflection. Take him out to your car and when he is inside it, shoot him dead. The night was totally still. I could feel the cold creeping into my left foot, and smell the faint residue of the exhaust gas the Moskvich had left on the air. A long way off I could see the glint of a gold dome: one of the churches, with an illuminated red star at the tip of a spire. Beyond it the sky was black. In the immediate environment I saw my pale reflection in the window of the Syrena and Ignatov's crooked shadow across the bodywork. There was no one else in the car park, so he would have taken the gun from his pocket by now, in order to shoot accurately. 'Open the door,' he told me again. His voice was still heavy and authoritative, and there was something else there now, distinct but difficult to define. I think it was a kind of awe: my heightened awareness told me that he had never killed a man before. I opened the door, and the snow fell away. 'Get in.' I did as he told me. He was still six feet away from the side of the car and he wouldn't come any closer, in case I tried to attack him at the last minute. I was right: the gun was now in his hand, and I saw him lift it to eye level and hold it forward so that he could line up the sights. 'Wind the window down,' he said. 'Hurry.' He wanted to get it done with before anyone else drove into the car park. I turned the cheap aluminium handle and the window went down in a series of jerks, sticking on the rubber flanges and then freeing. 'Shut the door.'