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he’s the first on the Mohican’s list.’
    ‘You should wait here until the morning,’ said Balashov.‘There are Czech soldiers on the edge of town at night. There’s a curfew. You don’t have a pass.’
    ‘Give me the bottle,’ said Samarin.
    ‘It’s not good for drinking, Kyrill Ivanovich.’
    ‘I told you to give it to me.’ Samarin’s voice had altered. It sounded more as it had in the darkness of the tunnel, an older voice quite shorn of anything of a passionate man’s highs and lows.
    ‘I – I don’t feel inclined to give you the bottle, Kyrill Ivanovich.’
    ‘You’re not a fighter.’
    ‘No, but you should not take the bottle if I don’t want to give it to you. You said you were not a criminal.’
    Samarin’s hand darted inside his coat and pulled out his knife. He pressed it against Balashov’s cheek. ‘Give me the bottle before I finish what you started.’
    Balashov put the bag on the ground, bending away from the knifeblade carefully, brought out the bottle and gave it to Samarin.
    ‘Now I’ve got no good reason to kill you,’ said Samarin. ‘You’ll say nothing about meeting me tonight, as if it didn’t happen. I’ll say nothing about what you were up to in Verkhny Luk. We never met. I hope that’s understood. What’s on the other side of those trees?’
    ‘A meadow.’
    Samarin kicked away, ran through the trees and disappeared into the dark meadow, with Balashov calling after him to wait, and not to hurt Anna Petrovna. He heard Samarin’s voice calling once, his younger voice: ‘Comedian!’

MUTZ
    L ieutenant Josef Mutz, of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia, sat at a table in his room, engraving with a skew chisel on a piece of cherry wood by the light of a kerosene lamp. Every minute or so he brought his nose close to the wood before consulting a smudged newspaper clipping with a photograph of Thomas Masaryk. He blew on the engraving and pressed it against an ink stamp. He took a small, rectangular piece of blue paper from a pile in front of him. On the paper, in Russian, Czech and Latin, were printed the words ‘First Slav–Socialist–Siberian Bank of Yazyk: One Billion Crowns’, and the number in figures. Mutz breathed on the woodcut and pressed it onto a blank area of the paper. An image of the first president of Czechoslovakia dried into the note. Masaryk’s glasses came out smudged but the fine detail on the wrinkles round his eyes was there, and under the beard, Mutz had caught the faraway smile with which, for decades, the president had listened while fools talked. Mutz took a fine-pointed gouge and worked over the spectacles again. It was important that Masaryk didn’t look as if he was wearing dark glasses. In Mutz’s mint the eyes of good men would always be seen.
    The lieutenant’s mint was made of a large printer’s tray set on its side to form pigeonholes, with a backgammon board nailed horizontally to the bottom, stained with the indelible brains of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Chupkin, whose headhad been punctured by a sniper just when Mutz had been about to beat him, as he always did, although Chupkin refused to recognise any previous defeat, a stubbornness which had permeated his nerve cells and made scrubbing at the mess with sand and water as futile as trying to change his mind about the role of the bourgeoisie in the class struggle when he was still alive. The board held Mutz’s chisels and gouges. The pigeonholes contained the short history of inflation in Yazyk under Czechoslovakian martial law, notes from one to 100 million crowns and the wooden plates to go with them. There were not many one-crown notes left. They had lasted a whole two months, while Mutz had been able to hold Matula to a standard, tying the value of money printed to the amount of food in the district. They were worn to limp softness and had lost all worth. Mutz took out the one-crown plate and ran his fingertips over the grooves. It was so long since it had been used