One of them spoke from beside me. 'We are taking you to the Serbsky Institute.' He was a squat man in a dark coat; I could smell tobacco on him. The two others had an air of higher rank, walking in front of us, one on each side of Vader. 'Tell him he will now be interrogated under extreme physical duress.' 'You will now be interrogated under extreme physical duress,' grunted the man beside me. But the sense of it didn't get through to me: I was thinking of the other thing Vader had said. The man beside me was armed: I could smell the gun oil. They would all be armed. They walked in step with Vader, but I didn't follow the rhythm. Once, as we passed the main offices near the entrance to the building, the squat man looked down and gave my foot a quick little kick, to get me into step, but I didn't do what he wanted. 'Has he heard of the Serbsky Institute, Grekov?' 'Have you heard of the Serbsky Institute?' I didn't answer. Vader would have to ask me himself. 'Repeat the question!' 'Have you heard of the Serbsky Institute? Answer!' They bothered me with their voices; I needed to think. But I had heard, yes, of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry: it's an old granite building with iron gates and armed sentries, containing mostly political wards where those straying from the Party line are submitted to 'special diagnosis' and subsequent 'treatment'. One of the techniques involves wrapping the patient in wet canvas, and as it slowly dries he is asked if he feels ready to change his heretical views, or confess, or reveal whatever he is there to reveal. I didn't know how Schrenk had held out against that, with out losing his mind. Maybe he'd lost it, and it was an animal that had escaped, not Schrenk at all. 'Have you heard of -' 'That's enough, Grekov. He probably doesn't understand the question.' 'Colonel.' Then one of the big doors swung back and we went down the steps into the snow. The city had changed since I'd been brought in here: the slate roofs and parapets were white under the black sky, with the greenish neon glowing on it theatrically. The snow was soft under our feet. As we reached the black saloon the man called Grekov opened one of the rear doors and told me to get in. Vader went round to the other side. Another man was right behind me and as I climbed in he gave, me a push and got in after me, slamming the door. I was now wedged between him and Vader with the two others in front, Grekov at the wheel. The windows were all closed and the doorlocks down. When Grekov started the engine and switched on the headlights the guards at the main gates swung one of them open and we drove through. I could hear chains clinking on the tyres: the snow was still falling and Dzerzhinsky Square was covered. There was no traffic. I couldn't see a clock but I was watching for one. The heater was now blowing and the chill of my wet hair began warming. I had strange feelings about the man beside me. He shouldn't have said that. I knew it was part of the routine but that didn't make any difference: he shouldn't have said it. This comprised most of my feelings about him, but there were other things. I'd seen him as a friendly, cultivated man and as a brute in a towering rage, and these roles had alternated so that my attitude towards him had started to be ambivalent: he'd got closer than he knew to burrowing into my mind while it was half submerged in sleep. I think in another twenty-four hours he would have got me blurting things out between hallucinations. I even believe he might have known how close he'd come to success, but what he couldn't take was the way I'd attacked him and actually got him on to the floor before the guards had come in. It had hit a major nerve in him, deep in the psyche, and all he lived for now was to see me under treatment at the Serbsky Institute, to hear me scream when the clowns went to work. I believe he was that sensitive. I too am a sensitive man.

One of the chains was slightly loose and kept hitting the underneath of the wing, producing a hollow sound like a drummer tapping for the dead. I could see the gold domes of St Basil's now in Red Square, and the clock in Spassky Tower - at too sharp an angle to let me read it. The city was beautiful tonight, its floodlit domes and spires and minarets half lost in the veils of falling snow; I was seeing it as I'd never seen it before, like a tourist with time to spare. Colonel Vader was holding himself away from me as much as he could, and letting me know it. I didn't stink any more but I was still untouchable, the pig thing that has been squatting there in its cage,