Leo felt tremendous fury at these words. His daughter had been exploited because she was a dreamer, a young girl who’d fallen in love. Hearing Yates mock her, the desire to kill him was so strong he was forced to shut his eyes briefly, controlling his anger, allowing Yates to speak without interruption.

—They needed someone like her to force Austin into the open. He was practically a hermit, never going out. That girl turns up, talks about changing the world, and he can’t say no. The only person who could’ve convinced Jesse Austin was someone like her.

Finally Leo understood that Elena’s naivety hadn’t merely made it easy for her to be manipulated, it was the key to unlocking Austin’s scepticism, the only way to make sure he turned up to the concert.

Yates toyed with the gun throughout the translation. Once Nara was finished, he carried on.

—I’m not surprised you couldn’t figure out what the point of the assassination was. It’s hard to imagine a scheme more twisted than the one they cooked up. The Kremlin had decided that Austin was no longer an asset. He wasn’t on the radio, no one knew who he was and no one was buying his records. He couldn’t get a gig in a bar, let alone a concert hall. I’d done my job well. I’d made the old man irrelevant. The Soviets took a long cold look at their biggest supporter and decided that he was more useful dead than alive. Your government was fixated on the idea that the Negro community was the most likely way to start a revolution in America. I suppose since they were downtrodden, the idea was that they’d rise up, rip off their chains and rebuild the State according to a Socialist model. All it needed was a spark and the whole racial tinderbox would go up in flames, bringing down the capitalist regime and turning the United States red. That was the plan.

Yates chuckled at the notion.