The Porcupine by Julian Barnes

them, the men in the Square of St Vassily the Martyr? They’re queuing for the US Consulate.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘They don’t want to stand in the street, outside the building. They’re ashamed, or afraid people will disapprove, or they’ll get into trouble. Something like that. So they organisetheir own queue in the public gardens, by the western gates. Kovachev runs it. You’re given a number, and every morning you turn up to see if you’ve reached the head of the queue. If you haven’t, you come back the next day. No-one cheats. Everyone obeys him. He’s quite an organiser.’
    ‘We need him on our side.’
    ‘He won’t come. I’ve tried. He sent me a postcard when I got these.’ Ganin automatically touched his shoulder, as if his wife had sewn two golden pips on his civilian suit. ‘It said: GIVE US GENERALS, NOT BREAD.’
    Peter Solinsky smiled. This Kovachev sounded quite a character. Unlike his stodgy general. ‘So where were we?’
    Ganin resumed his stiffness. ‘It seemed that you would be interested in our summary of the research conducted in Reskov Street as it pertained to the effects achieved in the area of the inducement of simulated illness.’
    ‘Specifically?’
    ‘Specifically, inducement of the symptoms of cardiac arrest by oral or intravenous drug.’
    ‘Anything more?’
    ‘Anything more?’
    ‘Any evidence of specific use in individual cases of this research work?’
    ‘No, sir. Not in this file.’
    ‘Well, thank you, General.’
    ‘Thank you, Mr Prosecutor, sir.’

    They had spent another long afternoon getting nowhere. It was like squeezing a sponge: mostly the sponge was dry, but on the rare occasions when it wasn’t, the waterran straight through your fingers. Perfectly well-attested examples of the former President’s colossal greed, his brazen acquisitiveness, his kleptomania and furious embezzling, just seemed to vanish in open court before the eyes of several million witnesses. That farm in the north-west province? A birthday present from the grateful nation on the twentieth anniversary of his appointment as Head of State, but in any case a gift only for his lifetime, and he rarely went there, and if he did it was only in order to entertain foreign dignitaries and thus advance the cause of Socialism and Communism. That house on the Black Sea? Offered him by the Writers’ Union and the Lenin Publishing House in acknowledgement of his services to literature and in return for his waiving of half the royalties on his Collected Speeches, Writings and Documents (32 volumes, 1982). That hunting lodge in the western hills? The Communist Party, in recognition of the fortieth anniversary of the President’s successful application for a party card, had generously voted … and so on, and so on.
    As the case proceeded, Petkanov seemed to get more unpredictable, not less. The Prosecutor General never knew, at the start of a session, if the defendant was going to respond to him with flagrant aggression, joviality, banal philosophy, sentimentality or stubborn muteness, let alone when or why he might switch from one mode to another. Was it some bizarre strategic ploy, or a true indication of a deeply vacillating personality? In his car on the way to the Ministry of Justice, bearing a folder of superficially incriminating affidavits, Peter Solinsky reflected that his plan of getting to know Petkanov, the better to predict his moves, had so far made little progress. Would he ever come to grasp the man’s character?
    When he reached the sixth floor he found the former President, as if choosing his mood deliberately to annoy, at his most buoyant. What, after all, was Stoyo Petkanov but a normal person with a normal character who had lived a normal life? And why should this not make him the very spirit of cheerfulness?
    ‘Peter, you know, I was just remembering. When I was a boy, I used to go on outings with the Union of Communist Youth. I remember the first time we