6

London

The surprise Martin Burr had mentioned turned out to be depressing and sickening. Frank Pagan stood motionless in the doorway of Kiviranna’s cell while the Commissioner hobbled around inside the small chamber, his cane making quiet ticking sounds on the floor.

Burr said, “Have to hand it to him. He was an ingenious bugger.”

Pagan crossed the threshold, thinking how the cell was too small to contain three men, even if one of them was dead. Jacob Kiviranna lay across his bunk. The mattress had been removed and was propped up against the wall. A long length of wire, one end of which lay close to Kiviranna’s lips, was attached to the light-fixture in the ceiling. The bulb had been unscrewed and lay on the floor. Kiviranna’s eyes were closed and there were black burn marks around his lips and nostrils. Urine soaked the blanket he’d wrapped himself in. The cell, poorly-ventilated, smelled of scorched flesh.

“He unhooked the bedsprings from the frame, patiently straightened out a length of wire, stuck one end into his mouth then the other into the electric socket,” Burr said, and peered up at the wire that dangled from the ceiling.

Pagan looked down at the corpse, then turned away, went out into the corridor. Martin Burr followed. Pagan peered the length of the corridor for a time, saying nothing, trying to imagine Jake placing the wire between his lips, laying it over his moist tongue, then standing up on the bed-frame to unscrew the lightbulb and twist the free end of the wire into the socket. He felt a fleeting nausea. Suicide always struck him the same way – a sheer bloody waste. What had prompted it, what madness, what fears had come to Jake in the darkness of the cell and driven him to such an act?

Both men were quiet for a moment before Burr said, “Let’s go back up to my office. We’ll have a glass of something, then look at what young Oates has produced.”

Frank Pagan hesitated a second before he followed Martin Burr in the direction of the lifts. He was thinking how tidy it all seemed now. Too tidy. Both assassin and victim were dead, which – if Jake had been telling the truth – left only an enigmatic accomplice in the United States, somebody who might already have disappeared into the shadows from which he’d first namelessly emerged. Somebody who, if Ted Gunther failed to turn anything up, might always remain an anonymous mystery.

Pagan stepped inside the lift, beset by an unexpected sense of anger at Jacob Kiviranna. He closed his eyes as the cage climbed in the shaft. Whatever answers Jake might personally have been able to provide were forever lost now.

It seemed more stuffy than usual in Burr’s uncluttered office. Pagan picked up the sheet of paper the Commissioner had laid on the desk. For a second all he saw as he stared at it was the sight of Kiviranna, an after-image dishearteningly impressed upon his retina. He drained the shot of Drambuie Burr had poured for him, then set the glass down. He knew you were supposed to savour the stuff, but he wasn’t exactly in a sipping frame of mind.

“Poetry, Frank. Why would Romanenko carry around a piece of poetry inside a sealed envelope? I can understand a man travelling with a volume of poems, let’s say, if he wants to while away some boring hours on a trip or if he needs to read himself to sleep. But what I don’t understand is sealing a few lines of the stuff inside an envelope.”

Pagan studied the sheet of paper that was covered with Danus Oates’s cramped, scholarly handwriting. Here and there words had been crossed out and alternatives written carefully in the margin, indicating how Oates must have struggled over an exact translation. He’d also provided alternative words in parentheses.

But the day will (tomorrow?) soon be breaking/When all the torches will be burning/Throwing flames in widening circles/Which will free (untie? lit: cut the cord of) the arm embedded/In the mighty chains of rock./Kalev will be coming home/To bring happiness (contentment/freedom?) to the people/Of a new Estonia.

He placed the sheet on the Commissioner’s desk. He didn’t consider himself a judge of poetry, but he thought he knew enough to recognise bad verse when he saw it. “I assume something’s been lost in the translation,” he said.

“I agree it’s somewhat overstated, but it sounds to me like a patriotic poem, and that kind of thing has a tendency to be bloated,” the Commissioner said, plucking at the edge of his eyepatch. “The point is, who the hell is Kalev? And why was Romanenko carrying this particular poem around, Frank? It looks as if he’d had it in his case for half a bloody century too. The paper’s practically falling to pieces. And here’s another odd thing – Oates tells me it was written in a language I’d never heard of before, something called Livonian, which is almost extinct. According to Oates, it’s related to modern Estonian, and to some elements of Latvian.”

Pagan looked at the poem again. He had difficulty concentrating. “It could be a message Romanenko intended to deliver before he was killed. Maybe he was supposed to make contact with somebody in Edinburgh, somebody who’d understand the significance of those lines. Why carry something around in an envelope if you don’t mean to deliver it?”

“A possibility,” the Commissioner remarked.

“It could also be a code of some kind.”

“I thought about that. If it’s a code, where does one start? Codes are a bit out of our province.”

Frank Pagan had a moment in which he felt sleep flutter somewhere at the back of his head. “What else did Danus Oates translate?” he asked.

The Commissioner indicated a small stack of papers at the side of the desk. “That poem’s the only unusual thing. There’s some technical stuff as well as correspondence between Romanenko and a man called George Newby, the director of a microchip company in Basingstoke that was apparently tendering a bid for Romanenko’s business.”

Pagan said, “If Romanenko was supposed to meet somebody in Edinburgh, who was he? And what exactly did this individual do when Romanenko didn’t show up? Did he just shrug his shoulders and walk away? The more I think about Aleksis, the more he slips between my fingers.”

He set the poem down on the desk, although he continued to stare at it. Kalev, he thought. It was the kind of name given to extraterrestrial characters in the comic books of his youth. Kalev! Emperor of Saturn! Master of Cosmic Wisdom! Pagan could have used a little of that cosmic wisdom himself right then. He took his eyes away from the poem because staring wasn’t bringing him any answers.

The Commissioner rolled his walnut cane back and forth on the surface of his desk. “To make matters somewhat more intricate, there’s an impatient little sod called Malik from the Soviet Embassy waiting downstairs for me. He’s come to collect the briefcase. According to the Foreign Office, the case and its contents go back to the Russians. Immediately. I’ve been stalling Malik as best I could until I talked to you about this enigmatic poem. But if I don’t return the material sharply, Malik’s going to lodge an official protest with the Foreign Secretary, which would be a bore.”

Pagan stood up and walked around the windowless room. “Do you intend to return the poem?” he asked.

The Commissioner smiled. It was the expression of a man who was no stranger to mischief. “My feeling is that the Russians have got enough on their plate without having to worry about a bit of bad verse. And if anybody ever asks, we’ve never even heard of the bloody poem.”

Pagan saw something enjoyably conspiratorial in his superior’s face. It was an aspect of the Commissioner’s personality he liked – this sneaky way he had of taking risks, of defying authorities even higher than himself.

Pagan carefully placed Oates’s translation of the poem, and the brittle original, back in the envelope, and stuck it in the inside pocket of his jacket. The Commissioner swept Danus Oates’s other translations into a drawer, picked up a telephone, said something to whoever was on the other end of the line.

After a minute, Malik entered the room. He was a short man with enormous eyebrows and a face that suggested a rocky promontory. Pagan observed that the Russian, who wore a lightweight Aquascutum overcoat of a decidedly bourgeois nature, had a certain self-righteous expression on his face. He was the offended party, the victim of the tactics of capitalist law-enforcement officers, and consequently of monstrous capitalism itself, and nothing was going to change that. If need be, he’d play this injured role to the hilt. His eyebrows quivered as he spotted the briefcase.

“Are you ready to hand it over?” he demanded. His English was excellent.

“We’ve come to our senses at long last,” Pagan said.

Malik stared at Frank Pagan, obviously unsure of Pagan’s tone, which was sarcastic. The Commissioner said, “What Frank Pagan means is that you can take the briefcase. It’s all yours, Mr Malik.”

Unceremoniously, Malik grabbed the case and held it against his chest. “Your methods leave much to be desired, gentlemen,” he said. “It’s not enough that you fail to protect the life of a high Soviet official – you then confiscate the property of the Soviet Union, which you keep in your possession, without good reason, for twelve hours.”

The Commissioner made a soothing noise, although it was clear to Pagan that his heart wasn’t in it. He was going through the motions of commiseration. Pagan leaned against the wall and folded his arms.

Malik patted the case. “We are also going to make an official request to interrogate the killer of Romanenko. This will be done through the proper channels, of course.”

Both Pagan and Martin Burr were silent. Then Burr said, “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

“You’re going to refuse the request?”

“I don’t have a choice,” the Commissioner replied.

“And why is that?”

Martin Burr explained. Malik shook his head in disbelief. He said, “First you allow Romanenko to be assassinated. Then you make it possible for the criminal to escape justice by committing suicide. What kind of organisation are you running?”

“I resent your tone,” Burr said. “We hardly made it possible, as you put it, for Kiviranna to take his own life.”

“A suicide,” Malik remarked. “How utterly convenient for you. Now the killer is no longer around to answer questions that might be embarrassing to you. Are you certain he took his own life?”

“What are you suggesting?” Burr asked. His face had turned the colour of a plum.

“His death spares you the need for a public trial, Commissioner. It spares you the awkwardness of putting the man in the witness-box, where he becomes the perfect symbol of your inadequacy to secure the life of a Soviet official. Who knows? Perhaps you even encouraged the unfortunate man’s demise.”

“You’re an outrageous twit,” Burr said, and thrust the tip of his cane into the rug, a wonderful little gesture of restrained savagery. His sense of fair play had been insulted but what else could he have expected from a Bolshevik anyway? They had their own rules and sometimes they defied the understanding of a decent men.

Malik moved toward the door. He clutched the briefcase at his side. “Goodnight, Commissioner.”

The Commissioner harumphed. If the Russian was going to flaunt good sense, then he, Martin Burr, was most assuredly not going to observe good manners. So far as he was concerned, the Bolshevik didn’t deserve common courtesies.

The door closed behind Malik.

“Little shit,” Burr said. “Have you ever heard such balderdash in your life? The sheer gall of the man is appalling.”

The Commissioner sat down and sighed. He looked rather depressed all at once. “What have we really got, Frank, when all is said and done?”

“We’ve still got Kalev.”

“Whoever he is,” Martin Burr remarked dismally.

Pagan was thinking of Kristina Vaska. He was thinking how he wanted to hear the rest of her narrative.

“I may have a way of finding out,” he said.

The Commissioner stared at his desk lamp. “Let’s hope so, Frank. I hate being in the dark.”

Frank Pagan agreed. The dark, with all its secrets, all its inaccessible corners, was not his place of choice. He thought about Aleksis–drunk, laughing, joking, dancing with a reluctant partner, an embarrassed English rose, in the subdued bar of the Savoy, a man of mirth and boundless energies. But it was clear now that there had been other sides to the man as well – secretive, submerged, hidden from view. And whatever they were they’d led to his own murder, a suicide, and the arrival of a woman, with an unfinished story, in Pagan’s apartment.

Aleksis, Pagan thought, you may have been an insignificant Communist Party leader in some minor Soviet colony – but what were you really up to?

Zavidovo, the Soviet Union

Vladimir Greshko heard the sound of a car and turned his face to the window of his bedroom, seeing the first yellow light of dawn press upon the glass. He was always a little surprised to have lived through another night. Death, with all its dark finality, had been much on his mind during the last couple of weeks. He didn’t believe in an afterlife. What would a man do with eternity anyhow, except scheme against his fellows? To form Marxist action committees and provoke Revolution in heaven? To convert angels to Engels and replace God with Communism?

He raised his face, rearranged his pillows, covered the plastic tube with the edge of his bedsheet. The obscene sucking sound of the device filled him with disgust.

He saw the bedroom door open. The Yakut nurse stepped in, nervously wiping her tiny hands in the folds of her white uniform. Behind her stood General Olsky. Olsky – of all people! The sight of the new Chairman of the KGB quickened Greshko’s tired blood. He wondered what had brought Stefan Olsky all the way from Moscow to this godforsaken place.

Olsky wore a dark pinstriped suit. Greshko considered him a pencil-pusher, a clerk, a man without an ounce of flair in his soul, a colourless bureaucrat so typical of the new breed. He was Birthmark Billy’s protégé and therefore a member of the Politburo’s inner sanctum. When Greshko had run the organs of State Security, Olsky had been a mere Deputy in the Third Directorate. His rise, engineered by the General Secretary, had been spectacular. At the age of forty-one he was the youngest man in Soviet history to be Chairman of the KGB, which was another source of resentment for Greshko, who hadn’t assumed control himself until his sixty-first birthday.

“You look well,” Stefan Olsky said.

Greshko said nothing for a moment. He seethed whenever he imagined Olsky occupying his office, sitting in his chair. He knew Olsky had had the office redecorated, that all the old paintings had been returned to storage and replaced by charts – charts, sweet Christ! – that the old phone system had been renovated and the six phones Greshko had enjoyed supplanted by a single device that allowed Olsky to hold what were known as ‘conference’ calls. Every day new changes. Every day something else swept away.

“I look as well as a dying man can,” Greshko said. “You’re trying to be kind, Stefan.”

Stefan Olsky approached the bed. This was his first visit to Greshko’s cottage, and he’d heard about the old man’s condition, but he hadn’t been prepared for the smell that hung in this room – this commingling of human waste and disinfectant, this deathly odour.

Olsky stepped to the window, looked out. He had recently taken to shaving his head, as if to make himself look older, more experienced. He ran a palm self-consciously over his skull. His wife had pleaded with him to let the hair grow back. She said she didn’t want to wake each morning and find an egg on the pillow next to her.

“It’s pleasant here,” Olsky said. “Greenery. Fresh air. Very nice.”

What had Olsky really come here for? And why so early in the day? Greshko surveyed the Chairman’s face. Unmarked by experience, the old man thought. How could such a face frighten anybody? To run the organs you needed presence, you needed to be able to instil awe in other men. If Olsky had presence, if he had charisma, it was of a kind Greshko couldn’t possibly understand. He was even a teetotaller, for God’s sake, which fitted very nicely with Birthmark Billy’s anti-vodka crusade. But what the General Secretary didn’t realise was that vodka was the fuel of Mother Russia. To take vodka away, to reduce its production and price it beyond the means of a worker, was a natural disgrace, like yanking an infant from its mother’s tit. But none of the new gang had any affinity for the heart of the country, at least not the way Vladimir Greshko, a poor peasant boy from the Stavropol Territory, perceived it. What did they know about the unending struggle against the bitter climate and a countryside racked by famine in the 1930s? They were all college boys, chicken-hearted, cologne in their armpits, educated by the benefits of a Revolution they were now attempting to dismantle. Ingrates!

Thoughts of Olsky provoked rage. What made things worse was that Greshko, at the time of his abrupt removal from office, had come into possession of information which alleged that Olsky had investments in Western European money-markets held, of course, in fictional names, dummy corporations and the like – but if the allegations were true, what kind of Communist did that make Stefan Olsky?

Greshko wished he’d been able to present this information to the Politburo, which would have been distressed by the furtive capitalism of Comrade Stefan, but by the time he decided to do so it was too damned late. All the doors had been slammed shut in his face with a finality that even now sounded through his brain. Too slow, old man, he thought. And perhaps just a little too complacent. But he still had the information, and a time might come when it would prove useful. One of the lessons of his long life was that you never threw anything away.

Olsky turned from the window and smiled. He had dark eyes and high cheekbones and a wide mouth that was rather pleasant and generous. “I imagine it could get lonely here,” he said. “You’re lucky to have a great many friends, Vladimir.”

“I’ve been blessed,” Greshko remarked. What was Olsky driving at? “I’m not completely forgotten by my old comrades.”

“Some of whom are very dedicated to you. Some of whom travel considerable distances to visit you,” Olsky said.

“Only to pay their last respects, Stefan.”

Olsky had always found Greshko to be slippery and devious. There was a certain charm about the old fart, which Olsky acknowledged rather grudgingly, although he’d never been a fan of Greshko’s way of running the organs – autocratic, secretive, possessive. Olsky had heard Greshko referred to within the Politburo as King Vladimir, and not always jokingly.

Like a monarch, Greshko had ruled the KGB as if it were a court, with courtiers who curried favours and engineered palace intrigues in an atmosphere of distrust and malice. What underlay this regal technique of management was paranoia and fear – which had also forged durable loyalties between Greshko and many of his former subordinates, a fact that troubled Stefan Olsky. He didn’t intend to run the organs the way Greshko had done. He believed in inter-departmental cooperation and an open-door policy – concepts that were not readily grasped by the old guard, who grumbled and complained at every little change and sometimes even reminisced openly, brazenly, about how things had been different under the control of General Greshko. It was going to be difficult and slow, and very demanding, to change the KGB.

“Is that why you’ve come, Stefan?” Greshko asked. “To pay your last respects?”

“Not entirely. The fact is, some of your visitors … disturb me, Vladimir.”

Greshko smiled. “Don’t tell me you spy on me?” he asked in mock horror. He knew that some of the foresters who worked around Zavidovo sent information back to Moscow about who had been seen in the vicinity, what they’d done, where they’d gone. During his own tenure he’d received information from the same men who nowadays provided the service for Olsky.

“Reports have a way of reaching me,” Olsky said. “Rumours are like homing pigeons.”

“And what do you hear, General?”

“Some of your friends have nostalgic longings. Some of them belong to certain organisations, Vladimir, that call themselves by such names as ‘Memories’ or ‘Yesteryear’ – consisting of men who have a dangerous yearning for the way things were. War veterans. Factory managers. Party members. And they have some sympathetic ears inside the Central Committee. Obstructionists, Vladimir. People who cling to the past.”

“I can’t be held responsible for the sympathies of my friends,” Greshko said. “People are slow to change their ways, Stefan. Give them time. Sooner or later, they’ll get used to this new Russia you’re building.” This new Russia. Greshko had uttered these words in a way that was almost sarcastic.

“What about you?” Olsky asked. “Are you getting used to it?”

“I’m dying,” Greshko answered. “I don’t have time to get used to anything.”

Olsky was quiet a moment. The old boy could put on a good act, he could smile and look altogether innocent, but Olsky was wary. “There’s talk of a conspiracy, Vladimir. I hear rumours in Moscow. I hear them too often.”

“Conspiracy!” Greshko laughed, a rich, hearty sound. “Listen to me, Stefan. A few old friends get together here and there. They talk about the old days. They drink vodka, get sentimental, they weep a little. Where’s the conspiracy in that? One of the first lessons you must learn is that Moscow has a hidden rumour factory. My advice to you, comrade, is not to listen. Or if you must listen, be selective.”

Olsky walked back to the window. He had been Chairman for only five months now and the last thing he needed as he reorganised State Security was a conspiracy of hard-liners, diehards, old reactionaries whose imaginations could carry them no further than the idea that the greatest of all Russian leaders had been the murderer Stalin. Rumours, whispers, shadows – sometimes Olsky had the feeling he was listening to voices inside a dosed room, voices that fell silent as he approached the door. He turned his face once more to Greshko. Even sick and dying, the old man managed to give off a glow that suggested residual power. What you had to remember about Greshko was that he still had friends in high places, that when you approached him you did so cautiously.

“Is that why you came here?” Greshko asked. “To warn me about the company I keep?”

The atmosphere in this room was cloying. Olsky was anxious to go, to get inside the car and have his driver return him to Moscow. That night he’d promised to take his wife, an amorous woman called Sabina, to a new drama at the Sovremennik Theatre. For some reason, perhaps because of their air of freedom and licence, experimental plays always excited her, an excitement she brought back home to the bedroom. Olsky never tired of his wife’s advances.

“There’s one other thing,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve been conducting an inventory, Vladimir. Of files. Computer data. Current cases.”

An inventory. Greshko thought how sadly typical it was of Olsky to make the organs sound like a damned haberdashery. “And?”

“A certain file is unaccounted for, Vladimir. I don’t have to remind you of how serious that is.”

“You don’t have to remind me of anything.” Greshko thought of the documentation he’d removed and he felt a quick little shiver of tension. “Clerks and computer operators are notoriously slipshod. They’ve probably made some kind of idiotic mistake.”

Olsky was silent a moment. “We were able to establish that the missing file was that of somebody called Aleksis Romanenko, First Party Secretary in Tallinn. Whoever removed the file forgot to delete the name and number from the central directory.”

Damned computers, Greshko thought. He’d never really grasped all this new technology. He wondered if this was something that should worry him. Did it matter that Olsky knew Romanenko’s file had been removed? Probably not. So long as he didn’t know what was in the file, then it wasn’t worth bothering about.

“What makes you so sure that the file was removed, Stefan? Sometimes there are glitches, and computers destroy their own data. Or so I’ve heard.”

“True,” Olsky said. “But in this particular instance there was a date when the file disappeared. The computer recorded the date automatically, which it would not have done if the program were malfunctioning. So I’m led to believe the material was deliberately taken.”

“By whom?” Greshko asked.

Olsky shook his head. “I have no idea. I thought perhaps you might be able to throw a little light on the matter. You had charge of the files at the time when this particular data was taken.”

“One file among hundreds of thousands? Are you serious? I’ve never even heard of this fellow – what did you say his name was?”

“Romanenko.”

Greshko looked incredulous. “Really, Stefan. What’s so damned important about one missing file in any case? What’s such a big deal that the Chairman himself has to worry about a trifle like this?”

Olsky went to the door, which he opened. He looked across the kitchen at the Yakut woman, who was stirring food in a saucepan over the wood stove. She turned her face, regarded him briefly, then looked away again.

Olsky said, “Normally, it might mean nothing. But Romanenko was assassinated yesterday.”

“Assassinated?”

“In the circumstances, the missing file struck me as an odd coincidence.”

Greshko placed his hands together on the surface of his quilt. “Ah, now I understand your puzzlement.” He tapped the side of his skull. “The name means nothing to me, but if I remember anything, I’ll be sure to get in touch with you. The trouble is, my memory’s like some damned dog that won’t come when I call it. I’ll try, though. I promise you. I’ll try.”

“I’d be grateful,” Olsky said. There was a long pause before Olsky looked at his watch. “I have to return to Moscow.”

“Of course,” Greshko said.

“Goodbye, Vladimir.”

As he stepped out, Olsky watched Greshko’s face, which in shadow appeared enigmatic. But perhaps not. Perhaps there was some other expression barely apparent in the shadows, a hint of amusement, of pleasure, like that of a man enjoying some hugely private joke.

Olsky had no illusions about the way Greshko despised him. He left the house and stood for a moment under a large oak, which shielded him from the morning sun. He listened to the drone of flies, the cawing of rooks, the sound of a horse whinnying in the distance. Then he looked in the direction of his car, wondering if it had been a mistake to come here in the first place. Simple vanity – was that it? Had he wanted the old man to see that the organs of State Security were at last in strong young hands? That the dried-out old ways were inevitably passing and a new generation was changing things? To impress and perhaps worry a sick old man – was that why he’d mentioned conspiracy and his knowledge of Greshko’s friendships? If so, he’d underestimated the former Chairman, who wasn’t likely to be in the least concerned by references to intrigues and acquaintances of dubious loyalties. A dying man was beyond ordinary fears.

Olsky moved out from under the tree. When he reached his car, he looked back at the cottage. No, he thought. It was the missing file that had really brought him here from Moscow, a file whose removal could have been achieved only by Vladimir Greshko himself or by somebody who’d been given that authority by the old man.

It was strange, he thought, how the old man hadn’t asked a single question about Romanenko’s assassination – no interest in place and time, no interest in detail, the means the assassin had used or if he’d been apprehended. Absolutely nothing.

Either Greshko didn’t give a damn about the killing or else he’d already learned the details of Romanenko’s murder from another source. If the latter was true, then he’d been lying when he’d denied ever having heard of Romanenko.

Olsky got inside the car, settled back in his seat and closed his eyes, unable to shake the feeling that Greshko, in his wily way, had been playing a game with him for the past thirty minutes, a game based on subterfuge and concealment. And Olsky felt the frustration of a man trying to introduce new rules when certain players stubbornly prefer sticking, no matter what, to the old ones.

Ten minutes after Olsky’s departure, Greshko spoke into the telephone. “Has Epishev gone?”

“He left five hours ago, General,” Volovich replied. “On the first available flight.”

Greshko set the receiver down. He looked at the calendar on the wall. There were now four days left. Sighing, longing to smoke one of the cigars his physician had denied him, he tried to content himself with squeezing a small rubber ball he kept in the bedside table. It was a poor substitute for drawing rich tobacco smoke deep into one’s lungs. By God, how he would have loved to light one! He tossed the stupid ball aside in a gesture of contempt, then he opened the flask that contained the special mixture.

He sipped, thought of Olsky, smiled. It was fascinating to watch the new Chairman fish in waters too deep for him ever to penetrate. You’re keeping the wrong kind of company, General Greshko. A certain file is missing, General Greshko. Wipe my arse for me, General Greshko.

Greshko laughed aloud. He would love to nail Olsky, to crucify that shaven-headed upstart, to see him hung out to dry like a bundle of wet kindling.

Four days. He corked his flask, knowing he could live that long.