What did Tchitcherine have to say? Was Tchitcherine there at all? sitting back in the dingy room while the lift cables slapped and creaked through the walls, and down in the street, rarely enough to matter, a droshky rattled whip-snapping over these black old cobbles? Or while snow beat at the grimy windows? How far, in the eyes of those who would send him to Central Asia, was too far: would his simple presence in these rooms have gotten him death automatically… or was there still, even at this stage of things, enough slack to let him reply?

“But once the pain has been taken care of… the simple pain… beyond… below that zero level of feeling… I have heard…” He has heard. Not the subtlest way to get into it, and Wimpe must have known every standard opener there is. Some military men are only blunt, while others are of such reckless blood there is never a question of “holding back”—it’s a positive insanity, they not only will commit horse against cannon, they will lead the charge themselves. It’s magnificent, but it’s not war. Wait until the Eastern Front. By his first action, Tchitcherine will have gained his reputation as a suicidal maniac. German field commanders from Finland to the Black Sea will develop for him a gentlemanly distaste. It will be seriously wondered if the man has any sense of military decency at all. They will capture him and lose him, wound him, take him for killed in action, and he will go on, headlong, a raving snowman over the winter marshes—there’ll be no wind adjustment, no field-change to the bottleneck fairing or deadly ogive of their Parabellum rounds that can ever bring him down. He is fond, as was Lenin, of Napoleon’s on s’engage, et puis, on voit, and as for plunging ahead, well, that IG man’s hotel room may have been one of his earlier rehearsals. Tchitcherine has a way of getting together with undesirables, sub rosa enemies of order, counterrevolutionary odds and ends of humanity: he doesn’t plan it, it just happens, he is a giant supermolecule with so many open bonds available at any given time, and in the drift of things… in the dance of things… howsoever… others latch on, and the pharmacology of the Tchitcherine thus modified, its onwardly revealed side-effects, can’t necessarily be calculated ahead of time. Chu Piang, the Chinese factotum in the red džurt, knows something of this. The first day Tchitcherine came to report in to the place, Chu Piang knew—and tripped over his mop, not so much to divert attention as to celebrate the meeting. Chu Piang has a bond or two available himself. He is a living monument to the success of British trade policy back during the last century. This classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China—howdy Fong, this here’s opium, opium, this is Fong—ah, so, me eatee!—no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee, smokee, see? pretty soon Fong’s coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for the shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred. You win, China loses. Fantastic. Chu Piang being a monument to all this, nowadays whole tourist caravans come through to look at him, usually while he’s Under The Influence… “Here ladies and gentlemen, as you may have observed, the characteristic sooty-gray complexion… .” They all stand peering into his dreamstruck facies, attentive men with mutton-chop sideburns, holding pearl-gray morning hats in their hands, the women lifting their skirts away from where horrid Asian critters are seething microscopically across the old floorboards, while their tour leader indicates items of interest with his metal pointer, an instrument remarkably thin, thinner than a rapier in fact, often flashing along much faster than eyes can really follow—“His Need, you will notice, retains its shape under all manner of stresses.