Quiller Meridian

Chapter 11: SLEEP

'We're waiting for Dr Kalugin,' I said.

I'd passed a door with his name on it.

'He'll be another hour,' the nurse said, 'at least another hour, with all these accidents coming in.' Her hair had come loose from her white cap and her eyes were red-rimmed from fatigue.

'Never mind,' I said, 'we'll wait.'

'Olga!' a voice called, and she left us, saying we could go into the examination room if we liked.

There was no one in there. I left the door open, needing to hear distant voices, catch what they were saying, learn who they were and if they were coming closer, get out of here if there were time.

'What were they doing in there?' I asked Tanya. The militia.

She leaned her haunches against the examination table, folding her arms, hugging herself, locked in with other thoughts. 'I'm not sure,' she said. 'I didn't stay long enough to hear; but I think there'd been a bus accident and they'd followed the injured in there to take statements.'

'Don't worry, then.' I'd unnerved her, telling her they'd force her to expose her brother if she were arrested; but I'd had to do it because it was true, and if the worst happened she'd never forgive herself. It had also given her a healthy fear of a militia uniform: she'd followed the instructions I'd given her earlier out there in the waiting-room: If even one of them comes in here, go down that corridor and wait for me at the other end. Get out of his sight.

There'd been five or six of them when I'd come back into the waiting-room, peaked caps, greatcoats and black polished boots, belts, night sticks, holsters and guns, five or six of them in the waiting-room and hundreds more outside in the streets, right across the city, a minefield on the move.

I switched off the tubular lights to lower the stress on our nerves by a degree. 'It wouldn't hurt,' I told Tanya,' to lie down for a while.'

'No. Anything can happen.' she was watching my face, listening to the voices of the militiamen at the far end of the corridor, to the unmistakable tone of their authority. Then she surprised me: 'Wasn't it terrible, about the baby?'

'What? Yes. Terrible.'

I went to look for a telephone and found one near the emergency rooms and got out my two kopeks again and dialled and stood waiting, the sharpness of ether on the air and the ring of a scalpel in a metal dish, the moaning of someone in pain and then the click on the line and a woman's voice and I asked to speak to T. K. Trencher.

In a moment, 'Yes?'

'Executive.'

'What can I do for you?'

'Get me off the streets.'

His name was Roach and he was a small man with a round pink face and baby-blue eyes that never looked at you or at anything for more than a second or two, his attention constantly on the move and his hands never still, their short pink fingers playing with each other, the nails ragged and bitten, a mass of nerves, I would have thought, and not therefore reliable, but Ferris had told me he was first class — he'd worked with him before, in Moscow.

'More blankets in the cupboard there,' he said,' if you need them. The usual toilet things but not much soap — I didn't know you were coming,' his eyes taking Tanya in again but fleetingly, just a quick snapshot, nothing personal, 'lots of tinned stuff in the kitchen, though, you'll be all right for grub. There's no heating or light because of the storm, no hot water, but if you feel like braving the shower turn it on slow or it'll blow you out of the bathroom. Anything else?'

'I don't think so.'

'I'll be on my way.'

I went into the passage with him and saw the door to the fire-escape near the stair head and tried the handle to make sure it wasn't locked; then I went down the stairs with him and asked him where the nearest telephone was.

'It's in the building, the end of that corridor. You got enough coins?'

'Let me have what you can.'

'I'm being picked up,' Roach said, 'so you can use my car, dark green Skoda out there.' He gave me the number and dropped the keys into my hand. 'You want to debrief?'

'Yes.'

'He said you probably would. Make a rendezvous?'

A woman in a bright red headscarf came out of one of the apartments and went through the main entrance, shouldering the spring door open.

'Yes,' I told Roach. 'For 12:00.' I needed sleep.

'That's in, what — 'he checked his watch — 'six hours' time, okay. How far d'you want it from here?'

'Give it a couple of miles.'

He stood bouncing gently on his toes, tapping the tips of his middle fingers together as he stared through a window. 'Okay, make it at Perovski Street and Volnaja, south-west corner — there's a pull-in for deliveries. You got a map?'

'Yes.'

'He'll be in a black Peugeot, front offside wing bent in a bit — he'll lead the way, all right? 12:00.'

We synchronized watches and I went back upstairs and heard Tanya in the bathroom, the water running, and got out the map and checked the rendezvous point and folded the map again and put it away as Tanya came into the room. She'd taken off her coat and boots and looked slender in her sweater and black leather skirt, would have seemed younger if it hadn't been for the fatigue in her face, the ravages of the long night's ordeal.

'Sleep,' I said.

She didn't move, stood watching me. There was a narrow vinyl-covered settee with a soiled cushion on it against the wall, and I got the spare blankets from the cupboard and caught a whiff of camphor and thought briefly of Jane in Moscow and dropped them onto the settee, going over to the window and pulling the heavy velour curtains across to shut out the leaden sky.

'Turn off the light when you want to,' I told Tanya. 'I shan't need it'

I went into the bathroom and picked over the toilet things. The toothbrush had a wooden handle and real bristles and the plastic cups were in a bag from the Hotel Mokba and the soap was a dirty yellow, the same colour as the stuff I'd seen the women washing the floor with on the Rossiya. The water was numbing and the copper shower head, rimed white with calcium, gave a kick when I turned on the tap, as Roach had warned; the blood from my leg pooled rust- red, diluted, on the chipped ceramic tiles.

The light was off when I came back into the room and in the gloom I saw that Tanya was lying on the bed with her legs drawn up in the foetal position, hadn't felt able to get between the sheets with a stranger here, so I took the spare blankets off the settee and laid them over her.

Her head moved. 'You'll be cold,' she said.

'I'll be all right.'

'No. You must share the blankets with me.'

So I lay down with her back curved against me and eased my arms around her and felt her shivering; then after a while the warmth came into us and the shivering stopped, but later I felt her hands giving sudden little jerks as sleep came to her at last and she was dragged out of my reach and beyond my help into the first of the nightmares that would be lying in wait for her in the years to come.