'You visit the United States?' Hadn't missed it.

'I spent six months there a few years ago. These days I'm there every month or two. It depends on what I can dig up in the icon mines here, and who wants to buy it in the Big Apple.'

'The big -'

'New York. I'm not sure why they call it that.'

'I see.'

He was giving things a lot of thought again, and I let the silence in and did some thinking of my own. If this man was going to play ball I would ask for the use of a telephone and call Legge – not Ferris – 'Oh, this is Berinov. I want you to set up a few things for me. I need a supply of some really good icons, rare ones, make it a half dozen and throw in some jewellery, Faberge if you can locate it at short notice. I'll come round for them when you name the contact point – use the utmost discretion as always.'

Take it from there, leave it to Legge's imagination: perhaps he could find some good reproductions, put up a show, give me the time and the chance to get out of this place and meet him at the contact point heavily escorted, right, but once in the open streets again I could use some imagination of my own, create a last-ditch chance and go for it, shit or bust, life or death, I shall need your prayers, my good friend, and I would ask you to be generous with them, even stylish, indulge me, think of some Latin.

'I'm not sure,' Vishinsky said at last, 'if I should believe all your -' and then the telephone rang and the nearest bodyguard picked it up and listened. Vishinsky had stopped what he was saying at once: the call was important and he'd been expecting it.

The guard brought him the phone. 'Moskolets, boss.'

Vishinsky took it. 'Well?'

I could hear the caller's voice faintly, couldn't catch the words, but Vishinsky's eyes had changed. The fury in them was suddenly explicit, blazing, and I was warned: this man was capable of anything, any act, however appalling, once he had enough rage to drive him.

'What?' Very softly.

I took a quick look at the guard standing behind him and saw the skin draw tight on his face and the fear come into his eyes.

'Why not?' – Vishinsky.

The time on the clock over the bar was now midnight plus forty-seven, and I noted it simply because the scene in here was going to change and it might become important to remember when things had happened. I heard a sound, slight as the rustle of a dry leaf, from behind me as the man there shifted his feet, and the silence was so intense now that I heard him swallow.

Vishinsky was looking nowhere, at no one, his eyes set in a brilliant stare as he listened for another five seconds, ten, and then said, 'Get here. Get up here,' and threw the phone for the guard to catch.

I leaned the back of my head against the wall to conserve the energy of the vertebrae, breathing a little deeper, tensing the major muscles and not finding any soreness critical enough to stop mobility, ultra-mobility if a chance came to do anything while Vishinsky was dealing with Moskolets, offering a diversion.

With five guards in here?

Christ, not you again.

To no one Vishinsky said in a different tone now, of a honed knife slitting snakeskin, 'He didn't make the kill.'

A soul saved, then, somewhere out there in the night, a banker or a judge on his late way home, or just some merchant tardy with his dues. But the Cougar was not pleased, and I thought of the guillotine again: perhaps he used it for purposes other than interrogation, for the teaching of lessons, par example.

'There were people around,' he said, and I saw the guard near him flinch. 'There were people around, so he thought it wasn't a good time to do it. He thought it wasn't a good time.'

He got out of his chair so fast that it was sent spinning as he stood staring at the guard. 'What do you think of that, Vitali?'

'He should've made the kill, boss.'

'Of course he should have made the fucking kill!'

Metal vibrated somewhere on the bar, perhaps the handle of the ice bucket. I tensed the muscles again, relaxed them, took slow, deep breaths. Five guards, right, but they were all scared to death of this man and the degree of fear in them would diminish their muscle tone by half, more than half, and slow their reactions, decisively if I could make any kind of move.

You're out of your -

Shuddup. I'm handling this.

Vishinsky had swung round again and was staring at me now, the rage so hot in his eyes that I could see he was trying to remember who I was, what I was doing here propped against the wall with blood caked on my head.

Then a buzzer sounded and he jerked his attention away, stood perfectly still in the middle of the room and watched one of the guards go to the door and look through the security lens before he opened it.

Moskolets came in quickly as if someone had pushed him, his thick body sloping ahead of his feet, a clot of caked snow coming off one of his boots. He saw Vishinsky and brought himself to a halt, his eyes tensed as if he were looking into strong light.

'Boss,' he said, 'I -'

'Get over there. Against the wall.'

'Boss, I can explain – there were too many people in the -'

'Get over there.'

The man ducked his head, pulling off his fur hat as he trotted across the room, turning when he reached the wall and standing there with the collar of his coat still turned up against the chill of the streets, one lapel bent back untidily, his thin hair pulled away from the bald patch by the action of taking off his hat, his face grey as he forced himself to look into the eyes of the Cougar. A hit man, Moskolets, older than the chorus boys in their monogrammed jump suits, a more experienced attendant, a specialist in the art of the distant kill, rat-tat-tat, wishing perhaps that he had his gun out now and ready to make the most important hit of his life, the one that would end the terror that was in him now.

In the silence I could hear tyre-chains clinking in the street below, even through the double-glazed and possibly bullet-proof windows. Snow must be falling again, and this too was noted as a change in the environment. A red sector is a red sector, and the most trivial factors can suddenly become critical.

Vishinsky moved at last, going back to the chrome-and-vinyl chair and sitting down, and as he turned I saw his eyes had changed again, were almost expressionless as he looked across at the man standing against the wall.

'Explain, then,' he said, sing-song, as if to a child.

'Boss, there were five or six people – more than that – maybe seven or eight people, and two of them were -'

'Don't fiddle with your hat, Yuri.'

The man looked down at his hands, stilling them, bringing his head up again with his face crumpling. This new role-playing – of parent and child – began to fascinate me as I was shown yet another side to Vishinsky's psychotic character: from a blaze of explicit rage he was capable of getting himself back under control, of driving his emotions inwards and holding them there with the potential of an unexploded bomb. And there was something appropriate in the parent-child relationship – the Russian word 'sobri' was as close as the mafiyosa could get to the Al Capone title of 'boss', but it also had a suggestion of 'father' about it, as in the French 'patron'.

'Two of them were cops, boss. You wouldn't have wanted me to make a hit in front of the cops, I knew that, I was sure of that.' His small mouth hanging open, his breath fluttering, his eyes pleading now.

'Was it snowing, Yuri?'

'Snowing? Yes. Starting to come down quite a bit. The cops – '

'How was the street? '

'The street, boss?'

'The surface. Try and understand what I'm saying, Yuri. And straighten your collar.'