A Man Without Breath

‘No, sergeant,’ I said, casting my eye down the list. None of the names meant anything to me. ‘I’m just being nosy.’

‘That’s the job, isn’t it? People don’t understand. But where would any of us be without a few nosy cops to keep us safe?’

*

The church was in an isolated and quiet part of the city west of the Kremlin wall and well away from any civilian houses or military outposts. Built of pink stone with just the one cupola, it was positioned at the top of a gentle grassy knoll and looked like a smaller version of the Assumption Cathedral; there was even a surrounding wall made of white stucco with an octagonal bell tower and a large green wooden gate through which entrance to the church and its grounds could be gained. There were no lights on inside the church, and although the gate was open, the place looked as if even the bats in the bell tower had taken the night off to go somewhere more lively.

I parked at the bottom of a small path that led up to the gate and helped myself to a handful of broom-handle. The automatic felt comfortingly large in my hand and easy against my shoulder, and while the old box cannon might have been hard to clean – one reason it was superseded by the Walther – it was a reassuringly solid weapon to point and fire. Especially at night when the longish barrel made it easier to aim and the shoulder-stock made it look altogether more substantial. It wasn’t that I was expecting trouble, but it’s best to be ready for it if it shows up with a gun in its hand.

I advanced slowly through the gate of the bell tower, which was almost as high as the cupola of the church itself and occupied a corner position on the wall affording it an excellent view of at least two thirds of the church grounds. Before entering the church, I walked once around it – clockwise for good luck – just to see if anyone was waiting around the back to ambush me. Nobody was. But when I went to go inside the church I found the door was locked.

I knocked and waited without answer. I knocked again and it sounded as hollow inside the church as the beating of the heart in my own chest. It was obvious that there was no one inside. I ought to have left there and then, but working on the assumption there was possibly a different entrance I might have missed, I took another walk around the church. This time I went anti-clockwise, which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake. There wasn’t another entrance – at least not one that was open – and thinking now that the whole thing had been a wild goose chase I started down the slope toward the gate in the bell tower. I hadn’t gone very far when I stopped in my tracks, for it took only a split second to see that someone had closed the gate. It was at the same moment equally obvious that from the octagonal bell tower the same someone probably had an uninterrupted sight of me. My nose twitched: I was like a rabbit in no man’s land. It twitched again but it was much too late. I was a fool and I knew I was a fool and nothing about that could be altered now.

In the other half of that same split second a loud gunshot hit the polished oak shoulder-stock I was holding against my chest; but for that I would certainly have been killed, and as it was, the impact knocked me backwards off my feet and sent me sprawling onto the grass. But I knew better than to crawl for cover. For one thing there wasn’t any I could have reached in time, and for another whoever had shot me had worked the bolt and pushed another bullet into the breech and was probably already staring at me down his rifle sights. On a night like this one a mole with one eye could have put a bullet in my head. My best chance was to play dead – after all, the gunman had hit me dead centre, and he wasn’t to know that his bullet had actually struck a piece of hardened wood.

My chest hurt and the back of my head as well, and I wanted to groan and then to cough, but I lay as still as I could and held what was left of the breath inside my body, waiting either for the almost welcome oblivion that would be provided by another shot, or the sound of my assailant’s footsteps walking towards me as, almost inevitably, he came to see where his bullet had struck me. I’d never yet met a man who didn’t like to check on the accuracy of his marksmanship if he could. It was several minutes before I heard footsteps on some stairs, and then a door opening inside the gate, and I enjoyed a worm’s-eye view of a man coming across the churchyard in the moonlight.