LITMIR.BIZ

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of life to a third who had collapsed as the team sprinted upstairs to the emergency.

      Chislenko did not pause but kept going to the seventh floor where by comparison things seemed almost calm. An elderly grey-faced man in lift-operator’s uniform was leaning against a wall. An out-of-breath medic stood by him with a hypodermic in one hand and a jar of smelling salts in the other, but the liftman was taking his own medication from a battered gun-metal hipflask. The smelling salts could not mask the stink of cheap vodka.

      A second medic crouched before the open lift making cooing and clicking sounds as if trying to coax a reluctant puppy out from under a low bed. Two firemen in green overalls stood indifferently by. Along the corridor, fractionally opened office doors were alive with curious eyes.

      Chislenko advanced and looked into the lift.

      There were two women in it. One of them was middle-aged and stout. She was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up under her several chins and her body pressed as close as it could get to the back wall. In addition her fingers were gripping a length of ornamental ribbing along the wall with a knuckle-whitening tightness which might have made sense if she were perched on a narrow ledge overlooking a precipice. Her eyes were wide and round and terrified.

      Beside her knelt the other woman, in her twenties, slim and pretty, her arms wrapped comfortingly round the fat woman’s shoulders.

      ‘All right,’ said Chislenko in his best official manner. ‘Let’s get you out of there, shall we, madam?’

      He stepped into the lift and reached down to pull the fat woman out on to the landing. Her reaction was startling. She opened her large, red, damp mouth, and started to scream.

      ‘You bloody idiot!’ yelled the younger woman, her face still pretty in its rage. ‘Sod off, will you? Get out! Half-wit!’

      Baffled, Chislenko retreated.

      The liftman was looking only slightly less grey than his gun-metal flask, but Chislenko was running short of sympathetic patience.

      ‘You the one who made the calls?’ he demanded.

      ‘That’s right, boss,’ said the man. ‘Muntjan. Josif Muntjan. Oh Christ!’

      He took another drink.

      ‘All right, Muntjan. What happened?’

      The man shook his head as if this were a question beyond reach of any answer he could give.

      ‘You reported a man had fallen down the lift-shaft, is that true?’

      ‘Pushed,’ said Muntjan. ‘Not fallen. Pushed.’

      There was a phone on the wall a little way down the corridor. Chislenko went to it, studied the directory sheet, and dialled the code for the basement.

      A voice said, ‘Hello?’

      ‘Who’s that?’ said Chislenko.

      ‘Who’s that?’ echoed the voice.

      ‘Chislenko. Inspector, MVD. I’m in charge,’ said Chislenko challengingly.

      To his surprise the man laughed.

      ‘You’ll get no quarrel from me, Inspector. Brodsky, Fire Officer. How can I help you?’

      ‘I assume you’re examining the bottom of the lift-shaft. What have you found?’

      ‘Fag-packets. Dust. Cockroaches. Spiders. I can send up samples if you like.’

      ‘No body?’ said Chislenko.

      ‘No body. Nobody. No sign of any body or anybody. Not in the shaft or up the shaft. Oh, and before you ask, Inspector, we’ve checked the north lift too. The same. We’ve been hoaxed.’

      Slowly Chislenko replaced the receiver. No wonder the man had laughed. It was a well-known injustice of the security service world that the man in charge of a wild goose chase usually ended up with bird-shit on his head.

      ‘All right, Muntjan,’ he said, putting on what he thought of as his KGB expression. ‘Start talking. And this time I want the truth! What the hell’s been going on here?’

      Muntjan belched, then began to laugh. True, there was something hysterical in it, but Chislenko was growing tired of people laughing every time he spoke. He clenched his right fist. The medic looked away. Only a fool let himself become a witness to police brutality.

      Muntjan saw the fist too and shrugged. Suddenly he was the sempiternal peasant who knows all things are sent to try him and resistance is pointless.

      He began to talk.

      By the time he’d finished, Chislenko wished he’d never begun.

      According to Muntjan, the lift had been descending from the upper floors. In it were the two women and a middle-aged man.

      On the seventh floor the lift had stopped. When the doors opened, there was one man waiting there.

      ‘Going down,’ said Muntjan.

      The man hadn’t moved. He didn’t seem to have noticed the lift’s arrival. Muntjan looked closely at him to make sure he wasn’t anyone important. He was slightly built, in his mid-twenties, very blond, wearing a double-breasted suit of old-fashioned cut. He wasn’t one of the Building’s regulars.

      Deciding he didn’t look all that important, Muntjan said, ‘If you’re coming, boss, get your skates on. These folk have got places they want to be!’

      Still the man didn’t move. The middle-aged man in the lift cleared his throat impatiently. The two women went on chattering away to each other. And now someone else appeared, an older man in his early thirties who must have been wearing rubber-soled shoes, so silent was his approach. The first man glanced round at him with a smile of recognition. The newcomer responded by putting his arm round the first man’s shoulders in what seemed a simple gesture of greeting.

      And then he thrust the blond man violently into the lift.

      The smile vanished from his face, being replaced by amazement modulating into terror.

      He attempted to draw back, teetering like a frightened child on the edge of a swimming pool. But his centre of balance was too far forward and, willy-nilly he stepped into the lift.

      And now Muntjan hesitated in his hitherto fluent and detailed tale.

      ‘Go on,’ prompted Chislenko.

      Muntjan took a last suck at his flask. It was clearly empty. He shrugged and said, ‘He went through the floor, boss.’

      ‘Went through the floor?’

      Chislenko stepped up to the lift again and looked inside. The two women had not changed position. The floor on which he had stood in his vain attempt to get the fat woman out looked as solid as it had felt. He went back to Muntjan.

      ‘Went through the floor!’ he said angrily.

      ‘You’ve got it, boss. Went through it like it didn’t exist. Clean through it, flapping his arms like a fledgeling too young to fly. And that was it. All over in a second. Clean through. No trace, except …’

      ‘Except what?’ said Chislenko, eager for something – anything – to get a hold of.

      ‘I thought there was kind of a long shriek, tailing away, but very distant, like a train at night, a long long way off, you know what I mean?’

      ‘No,’ said Chislenko. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t begin to know what you mean.’

      He returned to the lift. The two pairs of eyes looked at him, one pair terrified, the other angry.

      ‘Right through?’ he said. ‘You mean, here?’

      He pointed down.

      ‘That’s right, boss.’

      Gingerly he stepped forward on to the solid floor, rocked gently from

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