Men in Space (25 page)

But then just twenty minutes ago, after the two of them had settled down into their seats, after the prerecorded message had informed them that the doors were about to close (Helena loves this Czech construction:
It’s a participial adjective
, she said when they first heard it:
“in a state of imminence as far as the act of closing is concerned.” You get them a lot in Julius Caesar’s
Wars …) and they’d started sliding shut, another man was catapulted through them. He skidded across the carriage’s floor and almost fell across Anton, then recoiled immediately, hiding his face as he backed off. As they rattled through the darkness he continued to snatch peeks at Anton from behind a paper which he obviously wasn’t reading. His eyes had a glazed, disoriented look. When they arrived at Hradčanská, the three of them – Anton, his tail and this clown – got off. Anton thought at first that he was mad, but noticed that his real tail seemed unsettled by his presence; as they rode the escalator he even gestured at him to go away, silently snarling at him when he thought Anton wasn’t looking. That lieutenant, or the thin, dark-haired man, or some commissioner in some office in the building on Bartolomějská, must have put a tail on without checking first whether one of the others had. They can throw coffee at you
when they’ve got you in a locked room, threaten you with prison and who knows what else, but they’re idiots really …

A bell starts ringing up above them to the right. Ilievski puts his book down and turns towards the tracks. The bell’s attached to a white wooden signal cabin on the tracks’ far side, just a few metres away. A short, fat woman in grey uniform and a blue hat has emerged from the cabin and is now turning a handle, cranking it round so that two wooden barriers descend jerkily from posts on each side of the tracks, blocking the road and pavement. Even after they’ve come right down some pedestrians duck beneath them and walk across. Anton looks down the line towards Dejvická Station, then down the other way towards Letná: there’s no train coming yet.

“Shall we …” He makes to duck beneath the barrier as well, but Ilievski holds him back.

“No. Wait. I want us to lose these people for a while so we can go inside somewhere and talk. It’s cold out here.”

It is cold. The pavement, even where the snow’s been cleared, is covered in a thin, slippery film of ice. You wouldn’t want to fall, here of all places. The train’s coming into view now, pulling out of Dejvická. Anton wraps his gloved hands round the barrier, placing both in white sections, shuffling them along until they’re equidistant from the red sections on either side. On the far side of the barrier he spots Janachkov walking briskly past a cello which is standing in the snow, apparently abandoned, stepping into the Sokolovna Restaurant.

“Oh my God! There’s …”

“Yes, I see him. I told him to try to meet us, but not in that one … Oh, look there!”

Another man has come around the corner of Bubenečská and Dejvická, strode past the cello and then stopped. He looks around intently for a few seconds, then seems to receive a signal from a spot on his side of the tracks, just to their right,
where several cars are parked.
In there?
he mouths, pointing to the Sokolovna. Then, apparently receiving confirmation, he turns, walks up the steps and disappears inside just as the train comes past them.

“There’s a place …” Ilievski stops and looks to his left. Anton’s second tail is leaning on the barrier with his head down, slightly rolling, as though he were about to be sick. The first one’s further back, behind the bookstall. “No, look forwards.” His voice drops again. “There’s a place a few streets down, a little restaurant called U Kočky, on this street called V. P. Čkalova. If you …”

“I know that street.” The train is moving slowly. It’s one of those local trains, not a sleek international one. Local trains always look slightly like toy trains: brighter colours, bigger windows. Anton can see the passengers sunk in their chairs inside each carriage, looking out at the pedestrians waiting behind the barriers on both sides of the line, or reading – then, suddenly, through the windows in the bit that’s still again, beside the Sokolovna and the cello, he catches sight of … Was it? A windowless segment of train has come and blocked his view across. The yellow panels of the mail or buffet or bicycle carriage glide by, give over to windows once again, and Anton can now clearly make out Milachkov, who seems to be following the guy who followed …

“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Ilievski’s seen him too. “Did you just see …”

“Milachkov, yes!”

“Presumably there’ll be another one following him. It’s not like that that we’re going to … Look: I’ve told the others to try and meet at this place … You said you knew that street, V.P. Čkalova?”

“That’s where I went to that party where I offered Maňásek the commission. You know, with the bird painting we were talking about when …”

“Fucking Maňásek. I’d like to … Actually, we should be
praising him to high heaven, all of us. If he hadn’t turned us over like he did, we’d be – well, you would, I mean – you know …”

“Oh, I know all right.” The irony of it: that Ivan Maňásek made two, not one, copies and handed both these back to Anton, passing one off as the original – this is what saved them, whisked the rug away from under the police’s feet. No stolen artwork, no crime, no case. As Branka explained to him several times, it’s not a felony to possess a copy, or two copies, or a hundred copies for that matter, of a painting. The murder-charge threat was pure front, as Anton would have seen back in the station if he hadn’t been so scared. But then, the double irony: that the police now had nothing to wave at the Bulgarian authorities meant that he had nothing to bargain with – which meant that the whole system he’d miraculously discovered crumbled into nothing. To have gone that far, right to the edge of himself and beyond, only to discover it had all been academic, meaningless: it’s as though a giant train, some nuclear behemoth a thousand times bigger and louder and faster than this cheerful little local, had roared across his life, and he’d been caught right in its path, felt himself churned up by the wheels and pummelled by the spokes and then, somehow, fantastically, cast up into the driver’s chair unharmed and found he could control the thing, take it where he wanted – or so it seemed to him until the roaring and the hissing died away and he realized that he hadn’t been caught up in it at all: it had passed by him, frightened him but not touched him, and then dwindled away to a dot perched on some distant vanishing point, leaving him there in the same old landscape that he couldn’t quite believe was so unchanged after all that …

The bell stops ringing as the short, fat woman cranks the handle round the other way to bring the barriers up vertical again. More than two years ago, soon after Anton, Helena and the children had arrived in Prague, they rode the funicular to
Strahov. Kristof asked him as the car creaked up the hillside how they made it do that; Anton told him there was a giant at the top who winched the cable up there with his own two hands – then found himself, for the rest of the afternoon, as they climbed Eiffel’s downscaled tower and ran around the hall of mirrors underneath, elaborating on this for him, inventing a mystical room full of cogs and pulleys, giving his colossus a beard and sandals, a nod in the direction of the Greek myths Helena would lull both kids to sleep with. The memory of the hall of mirrors chills him now: to think of them both splitting, slinking away, disappearing as he and Helena chased after them, twenty of each, squashed down fat, drawn out tall and thin, turned into lines of hip-joined paper figures, dangled upside down, each of them spectral and unreal – a warning, if they’d only listened, of what was waiting for them out beyond their little world of giants and towers and mirrors …

“You go up towards the overground station. See if you can lose yours in the market. If you turn a corner, make a sudden run or something like that … Only come into the restaurant if you’re sure you’ve shaken him off. If not, we’ll just meet in one hour back here and talk as we walk. OK?” Ilievski’s still murmuring, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Fine.”

Ilievski strides off, heading past the abandoned cello towards Bubenečská. Anton turns left and walks up Dejvická, following this road past the market towards Dejvická Station. There are plenty of people pressing round the stalls selling vegetables and alcohol, but the street’s long and straight. He’ll never lose them both here: nowhere to run to. He can’t cut behind the stalls because these back straight onto the railway line. When he came up here for that party they’d been building these stalls: fresh-cut, light-coloured planks were standing on a bed of sawdust that was carpeting the pavement like the first light coat of snow that came a week
or so later. A spirit level had been left out beside these. Anton remembers stopping to look at it fondly. It was playing with one of those, age fourteen, that had first made him want to be an engineer: watching this bubble-fish of air swimming through green liquid as it showed you the sea’s flatness even though the nearest sea was three hundred kilometres away, and realizing that if you put two lines around it you could build whole cities … He thinks of the saint in the picture, the lines by his head: the straight ones, then that elongated bubble that extended backwards and off-centre from it as he rose up through the greenish, oxidizing gold … He stops in front of a stall selling pyramids of toilet paper and, looking back, sees that one of his tails, the weird one, has either fallen off or been diverted onto Ilievski. One to go.

Anton arrives at Dejvická Station. The main room of the dust-coloured terminal building is given over to a restaurant. He wanders in and sits down at a table beneath an enormous greasy mirror that lines an entire wall. His remaining tail sits at a table on the room’s far side, next to French windows that border the platform. The restaurant’s full, heavy with talk and smoke. There are already two people at Anton’s table: one is eating
guláš
, mopping the brown gravy round the dish with pronged slices of
knedlíky
; the other’s gurgling on mouthfuls of soup. The people he saw gliding by on the brightly coloured train would have been in here fifteen, even ten minutes ago, finishing their lunch or drinking a beer or coffee before climbing aboard. The waiter’s seen him; he signals with his eyes that he’ll be with him in a second as he passes with a tray of dirty glasses. He’s a short man with a dark complexion – not as dark as Gypsies’ skin, but somehow greyer than most white people. It reminds Anton of Bulgarians down in the south, around the Turkish border. He’ll order a Turkish coffee and then pretend to go to the toilet, try to make a dash. The waiter arrives and smiles warmly at him.

“What will you have, my friend?”

My friend? Unusual for a waiter. Maybe because he’s slightly dark-complexioned too. He asks for his coffee.

“Is that all? We have
guláš
and
svíčková
and a special: pigeon stew.”

“Pigeon?”

“It’s delicious.” The waiter places his braced thumb and fingers to his lips. They must be easy to catch in this weather, huddled under low eaves shivering, almost paralysed by cold. But you can’t eat those: it’d be like eating rats. Where do you get clean ones from? Are there such things? Wouldn’t that make them doves, like in the painting? Helena didn’t think they were, but he did. The waiter’s still smiling.

“I don’t think …”

“You just try it. I promise you won’t regret it. I’ll bring you a pigeon stew. OK?”

“Well, OK.”

The waiter winks at Anton, then turns and walks over to his tail’s table, to take his order. There’s a sign for the toilets above a small door to the left of the windows. Anton rises from his seat and walks through this door. A corridor behind it leads to another door which lets a blast of cold air in at him when he pulls it back – because, as he soon realizes, it leads to an outdoor compound. The restaurant’s toilets are the station’s toilets. Anton follows the outside of the building round to the left and finds it leads to the back of the market stalls. There’s a gap between two of them: if he just turns sideways, shuffling his feet until … He’s through, emerging back onto the pavement at Dejvická to strange looks from the stallholder, the toilet-paper one again: probably supplies Dejvická Station, it occurs to Anton as he breaks into a run …

He runs slowly at first so as not to look like a thief who’s just stolen something from the market, but by the time he’s crossed Dejvická he’s virtually sprinting. He doesn’t dare look back. At the top of V.P. Čkalova he passes the phone
cabin from which he called up to the studio of the French artist who, it strikes him now, he should have got to do the copy instead of Maňásek: he remembers having to phone twice before some drunken reveller came down to open number seven’s door for him, which turned out to be on the latch already. He passes the cabin too fast to cut the corner properly and his feet slip slightly sideways on the snow as he turns: he feels like Charlie Chaplin, ducking and scuttling into some alleyway as he runs from baton-wielding cops. He can see the bar Ilievski told him to get to at the far end of this block. Between it and him, dustmen are out collecting rubbish. As he tears past them two pigeons flutter aside from the pavement where they’re picking at a rotten satsuma that’s spilt from a slit bag. Anton thinks of the plate his dark-complexioned friend will soon be bringing to his empty table and, suddenly, feels an intense sense of shame, as though it were this man and not the other, the detective, he’s running from …

He stops beneath the U Kočky’s sign, looks both ways down V. P. Čkalova and, seeing no one but the dustmen, enters. Inside, there’s a small bar area with two tables and a bench in it and, beyond this, down a couple of steps and to the left, a larger dining room. Ilievski and the others aren’t in either of these spaces, but as Anton stands in the middle of the lower one, aware that everybody in there’s looking at him as he pants for breath, he notices some more steps leading to a second, even lower dining room. He finds Ilievski, Janachkov and Milachkov in this room, sitting at a table. They’ve piled their coats and scarves up on a fourth chair; seeing him arrive, Milachkov and Janachkov lift them off and hang them on the backs of their own chairs.