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firmly. ‘The Party would never allow it.’
    Big Ivan laughed: ‘On the contrary. The patriotic duty of a liquidator is, precisely, to liquidate himself, as your friend is now doing. The fewer witnesses there are to this catastrophe, then so much the better. That’s why our rulers fiddle while Chernobyl burns. Here we see the worst nuclear accident of our times, a deadly danger to millions,from Iceland to America and yet, to read our papers, you’d believe nothing has happened.’
    â€˜That is not true,’ said Soviet Malala, seizing a copy of the newspaper Pravda from a nearby table. ‘Look at this paragraph on page three: “Small mishap at Chernobyl, now under control.”’
    â€˜You are either a madman or a devil,’ Big Ivan told him. ‘The radioactive cloud from Reactor Number 4 – in the middle of which we ridiculous bio-robots worked so recently – is now wafting across the globe, poisoning whatever it touches.’
    â€˜Ah, that goes to show the immense moral gulf between the US and the USSR,’ said Soviet Malala. ‘When a nuclear reactor leaked radioactivity into the atmosphere in New York a few years ago the authorities tracked the fallout in America meticulously, but they were blind to the damage in other countries. The USSR alone develops the peaceful atom and shares it with the whole world.’
    â€˜At least the US plans to murder its enemies with its nuclear weapons,’ said Big Ivan, ‘but the Soviet Union kills its own citizens at Chernobyl and says nothing about it.’
    Then he paid for his lunch from Jagdish’s wallet, handed the waitress a large tip, put his arm around her waist and they headed upstairs.
    â€˜Where are you going?’ Soviet Malala followed him, but Ivan simply picked him up and threw him into the stairwell, saying as he did so, ‘I have a full belly, a head nicely addled with vodka, dollars in my pocket and I’m on my way to bed with a willing waitress: things I have prayed for all my life have come to me now in this ruined city.’
    â€˜Courtesy of the good Jagdish.’ Soviet Malala spoke from the bottom of the stairwell.
    â€˜He was better than good!’ Big Ivan roared. ‘He made a Russian happy! He was a saint!’ And he vanished into a bedroom with the willing waitress.
    â€˜For heaven’s sake, get me a doctor!’ Jimfish begged.
    But the joyous music of the May Day bands and the hubbub of happy children drowned his words and Jimfish passed out in the corner of the restaurant.
    There he may have died, but luckily the waiters in the restaurant had alerted the KGB to the presence of two strangers, one of whom was black and the other too many different shades of colour to be safe. The black man, they reported, had been spreading all sorts of ridiculous lies about the Soviet Union.
    When the police arrived and arrested him, Soviet protested his great love for the USSR, his reverence for Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Soviet Atoms for Peace. It was clear to everyone that this man understood nothing whatever about life in the Soviet Union and must be a foreign spy. So, indeed, was his pallid companion, except he seemed to know nothing at all about anything. The authorities decided that it made sense to shoot the black spy, since he was surely of far less importance than his paler partner. So it was that Soviet Malala was taken out into the town square, a firing party of soldiers from the May Day parade, very much the worse for vodka, was hastily assembled and, after several botched attempts, the poor philosopher was shot.
    This spectacle greatly cheered the spectators, which wasjust as well, for it was the last enjoyment they were to have. At the end of the May Day party dozens of yellow coaches – like the one that had met their plane when Jimfish, Soviet and Jagdish arrived at Kiev Airport – drew up and, under the watchful eye of armed