“Pavel quickly put his hand into the pocket of his breeches and, out of habit, accurately hit his fingers into the smooth rings of the captured German brass knuckles. The hand knew all the smallest details of the cruel instrument. My heart skipped a beat from the bestial power of death hidden in the brass knuckles and from the ardent premonition of a terrible misfortune. The fist instinctively clenched, and the streamlined stop of the elegant stand of the brass knuckles dug heavily and invitingly into the dry pads of the palm. The MGB major, tightly squeezing his shoulder and thereby holding him, quickly turned away and pulled his hand towards the tap, from which water ran in a ringing trickle. He wrapped his thin fingers around the white ceramic valve and deftly twisted it. At that moment when the major jerked his head back to Pavel and when a painfully familiar dark blue birthmark the size of a pea, tenderly and trustingly, like a sleeping velvet fly, darkened very close to his pale temple, Pavel with an exhalation pulled his hand out of his pocket and Briefly, accurately, he hit the same front sight with brass knuckles that he had seen many times in a dream...”