“Yeah, this is the commandant. Pass the phone to Lanky, will you?”

As Lanky was being summoned, he cradled the phone with his neck and scribbled on a piece of paper.

He looked up: “What was that you said? Dimedrol?”

“Dimedrol and Diazolin.”

The commandant nodded and spoke into the phone.

“Yeah, Lanky, what’s with our Red Cross there? Ah-ha. Got it. Well, you ask around then. Meanwhile, I’m sending you another doctor.” He hung up. “Fox, take him down to the basement, hand him to Lanky.”

“And?”

“And what?”

Fox muttered something inaudible under his breath.

“What was that?” the commandant asked.

“Nothing.”

He jabbed K. in his side and they left the office. The group retraced their steps. The soldiers in the corridor had managed to smash in another door. They led K. down the stairs into the main hall and then onward through the vacant cloakroom through a service door. They descended along narrow, bare stone steps. Heating pipes ran overhead. It was hot and dark.

The soldiers chatted behind him.

“So I say to him: ‘What can you do?’ And he says: ‘I’m a professor, I have a doctorate!’ So I say: ‘What are you, deaf? What can you do? If you want people to listen to you, don’t say more than you’ve been asked. Did you serve?’ And he’s like: ‘Nope.’ So I tell him: ‘Well then it looks like you’ll be digging trenches.’”

“Hahaha.”

“Will you two shut up?” Fox bellowed.

“Hey Fox, I heard you’re a professor too.”

“Agronomist,” he said. “And whose idea was it to take him to the commandant anyway?”

“Yours. I told you we should have fucking ended him on the spot.”

“Odessa, it’s all about fucking for you, isn’t it?”

Fox waited for the snickering to subside.

“So what are we doing here, building a Russian world or fucking about? Can we just be a little civilised?”

Fox civilly jabbed his rifle into K.’s shoulder and they descended further into the basement.

The low, narrow, ill-lit corridor led them into a row of high-ceilinged rooms propped up by square concrete columns. They were either bomb shelters or an underground warehouse. Grubby, opaque plastic sheets were strung between the columns. In one aisle there was a bust of Lenin caked in cracked white paint. The group came to a halt. K. heard a dull rhythmic thud, laboured panting, and a stifled groan. His brain stopped him from registering what he was hearing, from realising it was a person that was making the noise. An outline heaved up and down behind the sheet. Up and down.

K. closed his eyes and blocked out his thoughts. The blows kept coming.

“Lanky!” Fox shouted. “Is that you?”

Silence. But the panting persisted. A tall, thin young man wearing a T-shirt and camo trousers materialised from behind the plastic sheet. He stood limply, a rifle in his long, skinny arms, his pupils dilated, a smile straying across his face.

“What are you doing?” asked Fox, pushing him aside and pulling back the screen. A man dressed in a red jacket emblazoned with a white cross lay face down in a pool of blood. His arms and legs twitched lightly. Cartridges were scattered around him.