Quiller Meridian

Chapter 13: WHORES

What that man Roach hadn't known when he'd told me there was a telephone booth in the building was that the cord had been cut by hooligans, and I had to drive two miles before I found a booth that didn't have the glass smashed or the cord cut. I didn't expect to find a directory, took the phone off the hook and dialled for Information, the wind fluting through the gap in the door.

'Yes?'

'Military Barracks.'

'Which department?'

'Administration.'

'Wait.'

I waited.

Arrested. Mother of God.

I could look along the street from here, both ways. I'd left the Skoda round the comer where I could see its reflection in the window of the No. 3 Dock-workers' Union of Novosibirsk Meeting Rooms.

Someone had carved some crude letters on the tarnished aluminium panel behind the telephone — WHERE IS THE FOOD?

Jabbing at the panel, slashing at it with the force of desperation.

'Here is the number,' the woman said on the line. She rang off before I could repeat it or thank her.

I hadn't any one- or two- kopek coins so I used a ten and dialled. Not at the safe-house: she hadn't been arrested at the safe-house, Tanya. She'd left there soon after I had, the peep told me, when I'd gone to meet Ferris at noon. The peep had followed her. He was surveillance, not support: he would have told us where she'd gone — that was his function, and he'd had no instructions to stop her. But she hadn't gone anywhere, hadn't arrived.

'She was crossing the street,' he'd told me, 'down by the bus station, and the militia stopped her and checked her papers — '

'A patrol on foot?'

'Yes. Then he used his walkie and called a car and they put her inside and that was it. 11:51. I got to a phone by 12:03 but the DIF didn't answer.'

Because he'd been with me in that stinking shed.

Ten rings, twenty, they were taking their bloody time.

This was so very risky.

'Military Barracks.'

'I want to speak,' I said, 'to Captain Vadim Rusakov.'

'Wait.'

So very risky because I couldn't get an introduction to Rusakov now from his sister; I'd be talking to him cold, and when I told him what had happened he could duck out and run for cover in case she broke and talked and exposed him. I wouldn't expect much chivalry from a man who'd talked a woman into spotting the target for him, bringing her right onto the scene of the shooting. Anything could have happened and he must have known that.

The wind gusted through the gap in the door, flapping at an official notice that said vandals would be arrested for damaging the property of the Intercity and International Telephone Service of Novosibirsk, that did not say that accomplices in the assassination of former Red Army generals would also be arrested and would face imprisonment for life, were they going to answer this bloody telephone or weren't they?

Steady there.

Yea, verily, but time was of the essence: once they put Tanya Rusakova under the five-hundred-watt lamp in Militia Headquarters it wouldn't be long before she told them what they wanted to know, before she blew her brother and the safe-house and Meridian.

I had to make contact with Rusakov before that happened.

'Ordnance Unit Three.'

I asked again for Captain Vadim Rusakov.

'Wait.'

It was going to be like this until at some hour in the future I would secure Meridian and keep it running and find the means of bringing it home, or leave its ashes here in this dark and frozen city and make my way out, with luck, with luck and nothing more, nothing to show them in London.

'Captain Vadim Rusakov is not present.'

I cut in fast before she could ring off — 'When will he be there? This is a matter of urgency.'

'I cannot say.'

'Do you know where he is? Is there another number I can try?'

'He is not here.'

The line went dead.

I dug another ten-kopek piece out of my pocket, dropping a glove and bending to pick it up, caught my temple on the corner of the metal shelf and felt the freezing draught against my face from the gap in the door, straightened up and pushed the coin into the slot and dialled. It was the last one I could use in a telephone; I'd have to get change as soon as I could.

'Hotel Karasevo.'

I asked for Gospodin T. K. Trencher.

'Yes?'

Ferris.

'You heard the news?' I asked him.

A brief silence, then: 'Tell me.'

He would have gone straight back to the hotel after leaving me because he was the signals centre for the field, but it could have taken him longer than I'd taken to reach the safe-house, and the peep hadn't yet made his second call.

I told Ferris what had happened.

Silence again. Then he asked questions, but all I could tell him was what the peep had told me.

A militia patrol car had turned out of the intersection half a mile away and I watched it.

'What are your plans?' Ferris asked me at last.

'I'm trying to contact her brother.'

'He could be at risk, yes, before long.'

'I'm going to use him, if I can. He's in the military. He might know where the other two generals are.'

It sounded thin, a last desperate chance. It was.

'The safe-house could also become hot,' Ferris said. He wasn't impressed with what I'd said about using Rusakov.

'Yes,'

The militia patrol car was heading in this direction, going slowly. But then all the traffic was going slowly because of the snow and the ice.

'I'll find you a new safe-house,' Ferris said. 'You'll need somewhere to stay while I make plans to fly you out under a new cover.' He was speaking in a monotone. Tanya Rusakova had been the key to the mission, and he didn't expect me to rope in her brother as an ally without her introduction. His hands were still red and he'd startle easily.

There was a man walking alone past the dock-workers' meeting rooms, head down and hurrying, and when the car was alongside it dipped on its springs and slid to a stop and a militiaman got out.

'I'm not ready,' I told Ferris, 'to fly out yet.'

'It'll take time,' he said. 'Your new papers will have to come in through the consulate. We haven't anyone here who can do that kind of thing for us.'

The militiaman was asking the civilian to show his identity. Novosibirsk was a big city but the militia had thrown a net right across it in the past twelve hours because Zymyanin had been shot dead on the train and then the train had been blown up and the man who'd been charged with Zymyanin's death had escaped custody and General Velichko had been gunned down, and a red alert had gone out to all forces: militia, police, investigative and the army. It was understandable.

'They're stopping everyone,' I told Ferris, 'on the-' and broke off because of the click on the line.

'Don't worry,' Ferris said. 'I've got sniffers out.' Line detector, bug detector.

'They're stopping everyone on the street,' I said. 'Checking identities.'

'I know. Where are you?'

'In a phone booth.'

In a moment Ferris said, 'I've already ordered your new papers. I told Control it was fully urgent.'

The civilian was walking on again, tucking his wallet away, and the patrol car had started off, was rolling nearer the phone booth.

The glass hadn't misted since I'd come in here, because of the freezing draught. I had my back turned to the street, all I could do.

'Tell London,' I said,' that I'm working on Rusakov.'

In a moment Ferris said, 'If you had the freedom of the streets I'd let you keep things running. But you haven't. You'd have to trap that man before he'd even listen to you.'

I could hear the tyres of the patrol car, the ice crackling as it broke the frozen ruts; the smell of the exhaust came into the booth through the gap in the door. The nape of my neck was flushed; I stood as if expecting a bullet there. But of course there was no danger of that. They'd simply heave the door open and ask for my papers and all I'd have time to do would be to whisper Mayday into the phone and hang up. Ferris would know what had happened: I'd just told him they were stopping everyone on the street.

Ice crackling outside.

'If I can manage to contact Rusakov,' I said into the phone, 'I'll tell him his sister's been arrested, and that I'm going to get her out. If he's got any feelings for her, that should make him listen to me.'

Ice crackling and the tyres slipping on the walls of the ruts. A shadow was moving across the scarred aluminium panel behind the telephone, not actually a shadow, the soft reflection of the patrol car as it came past the booth. I stood breathing in the exhaust gas.

'Give that to me again,' I heard Ferris on the line.

'What?'

'You said something about getting Rusakov's sister out.'

'Yes.'

The shadow moved across the aluminium panel. The reflection.

'They'll have taken her,' Ferris said, 'to Militia Headquarters.'

'Yes.'

Exhaust gas, stronger now, and sickening. 'You're going to get her out of Militia Headquarters?'

'Yes.'

Then the shadow moved on and the panel was clear again, and the crackling of the ice grew faint.

The line was quiet. He would tell me, Ferris, that he was pulling me out of the mission. He would instruct me to signal him again at thirty-minute intervals until he'd got anew safe-house for me, then he'd tell me to go there and stay there until he had my new papers and a plane lined up. He would make quite sure that I didn't go through with what he would call the death-or-glory thing and finish up chained to the wall in Militia Headquarters, a blown executive of the Bureau in London today, a prisoner facing trial in the months ahead and after five years, ten years, fifteen, a remnant of humanity breaking stones and hauling timber in the far reaches of Siberia, a creature of the permafrost living out its token life until that too was gone.

'We have to meet,' Ferris said.

'There isn't time.'

The patrol car was fifty yards away now and still rolling, and I pushed the door of the booth open a bit to let the sickening smell of the exhaust gas out.

And then with a soft shock of surprise I heard Ferris saying, 'All right, you'll have my full support."

The taxi slid to a stop with a front wheel buried in a drift.

'How far are you going?' the driver asked me through the open window.

'The nearest red-light district.'

He hawked and spat. 'You want class?'

'No. Just a country girl.'

'Get in.'

He had pointed ears like a gnome's, and shiny patches of ointment on his face, red raw fingers poking from mittens with the black wool unravelling. A watery blue eye watched me in the driving mirror. They could all be shut, for all I knew, the brothels; in the early afternoon of a day like this the libidos would be frozen right across the town.

'There's a girl I know,' the driver said. 'Peasant girl. She's half — you know — ' circling a finger against his temple — 'but with a body like — ' he tried a whistle but couldn't make it, his lips were too dry.

'I'm looking for variety,' I said. 'What's your name?'

'Mikhail. You could get her for — '

'Mikhail,' I said, and passed him fifty. 'I want you to stay with me, all right?'

'Keep the meter going?'

The front of the Trabant bounced and we slid off course, skinning a sand bin. 'Dead dog,' Mikhail said.' they got nothing to eat.'

'Keep the meter going,' I said,' that's right. Give me some change, will you? I want to make some phone calls on our way.'

'You want twos?'

'Ones, twos, fives, whatever you've got.'

He raked in his pocket, and the glint of metal came into his hand like scooped minnows. Ahead of us through the windscreen the sky leaned across the street like a fallen roof, heavy with winter. It suited me. I wanted the darkness to come down on the day. We are more used, we the brave and busy ferrets in the field, to the Stygian shades of night than the light of watchful noon.

I phoned the army barracks again at a booth on a corner, asked for Rusakov. 'He is not present.'

'There were canned goods meant to be coming in on a freighter,' Mikhail said when I got back into the car, 'did you know?'

Told him I didn't.

'Salmon,' Mikhail said, and hit the brakes as the truck in front of us slewed suddenly and wiped out a snow-covered Volkswagen, leaving it piled against a lamp-post with a door burst open and the pink plastic rattle from a baby's carrier rolling on the ice.

'They're always doing that,' Mikhail said bitterly. Truck drivers are the sons of whores.' He gunned up and span the wheels and found traction on some sand and shimmied his way round the truck, which had gone ploughing into a snow-drift. 'The Office of Foodstuffs and Domestic Supplies announced there was a shipment of salmon coming in on a freighter from Kamen-na-Obi, but there's been no sign of it. They were lying. They're always lying. They too are the sons of whores.'

I phoned the army barracks again from a sub post-office where there was a woman squatting on the steps with her onion-pale skin half-buried under shawls, handing out bones as clean as a skeleton's to a pack of dogs.

'He is not present.'

In another mile we stopped outside a square sandstone block of flats with some of the windows already showing warm pink lights behind drawn curtains. 'She is the best, this one,' Mikhail told me, and got a small round tin out of the glove pocket, touching his raddled face with ointment. 'She tells the girls to let the clients take their time, get their trousers back on properly before they go down the stairs. Her name is Yelena.' He put the little tin away.

I would have to make contact with Rusakov soon. If I couldn't warn him that Tanya was at Militia Headquarters they could drop on him at any time if she'd exposed him, and throw him in there too. I couldn't get both of them out.

You can't get her out, even. You 're mad.

Shut up.

I got out of the taxi and went up the hollowed steps of the building.

You 're out of your mind, you know that?

Bloody well shuddup.

The place smelled of wood smoke and vodka and cheap scent and human sweat; the heat washed against my face, suffocating after the numbing chill of the streets. I stayed ten minutes talking to Yelena, a woman with an auburn wig and blackheads and a cough she couldn't control, but I couldn't budge her, took it up to three hundred, four hundred, five, no dice, she'd be scared, she said, and called two of the girls as I was leaving, told them to show me their breasts. He looked surprised, Mikhail, when he saw me coming down the steps so soon.

'None I fancied,' I told him, and the rheumy blue eye in the mirror had puzzlement in it as he drove off again, he'd always thought a whore was a whore was a whore.

I phoned the barracks again from a dockside bar and asked for Captain Rusakov.

'He is not present.'

She was getting used to me, that woman in uniform at the switchboard for Ordnance Unit Three, getting tired of me, couldn't I take no for an answer or what, and as I got back into the Trabant I felt the onset of premonition and confronted for the first time the fact that it was already too late: Tanya Rusakova had been broken under the light and had told them what her brother had done last night, and they'd sent a van with metal grilles at the windows to pick him up finis, finito.

'You want another place?' Mikhail asked me.

'What? Yes. Another place.'

I would go through the motions, in the mistaken belief that it wasn't already too late; I would follow this path through the labyrinth as if it could lead me somewhere, until the knowledge came to me from the other-world source beyond the senses that I was wasting my time, performing an exercise in futility.

Running around like a chicken with your head cut off.

Shuddup.

The draught from the open window cut across my face and I sat with my gloved hands covering it as Tanya had done when she'd walked from the Hotel Vladekino to the place of execution last night.

'Can't you shut that window?' I called to Mikhail above the din of the snow chains.

'It's got to stay open,' he said over his shoulder.' there's a leak in the exhaust manifold, the gasket's gone, we'd both be found with our toes turned up if I shut the window, be a gas chamber in here.' He reached for his little tin again.

She wouldn't hear of it either, Olga, sitting in watch over her gaggle of sluttish girls in the next place we stopped at. I took it to seven hundred and she wavered then, but I didn't press her because she could chicken out when the time came to go through with it and that would be dangerous.

'For God's sake,' I told Mikhail,' they're like cows in there.'

He shifted into gear with a clashing of cogs.' You said you didn't want class. You get what you pay for, this area. Now I can take you to — '

'I need a phone,' I told him.

The sun had lodged among the black frieze of cranes along the dockside, their thorns cutting across its red swollen sac as the dark sky deepened; night would come soon now in the late Siberian afternoon, flooding in from the steppes.

There was a line of booths near a bus-stop, one of them with the cord still intact, and the two kopeks rattled into the almost empty coin-box.

Mikhail was watching me from the taxi. He'd asked for another fifty roubles to keep the meter going and I'd given it to him. He would be my companion in the coming night, providing me with wheels and shelter and a shut mouth: I'd mentioned to him that the militia seemed busy of late, and he'd said they were always sticking their snotty noses into other people's business, they also were the sons of whores.

She would be frightened, Tanya, as they worked on her at Militia Headquarters. She would be wondering how she could have ignored my warning, would have realized now that I'd meant what I said, that I knew — and should have been trusted to know — more than she did. It couldn't have been easy for her, to leave that building and make her desperate run for the nearest telephone that would work, that would bring her the voice of her brother and the comfort she hungered for.

She would be frightened now, under the blinding light. I didn't want to think about that.

'Ordnance Unit Three.'

I asked for Captain Rusakov, said it was a matter of urgency. Mikhail had left his engine running; he'd said the starter dog was worn and that it had let him down twice, he couldn't trust it.

The booth stank of vomit: there'd been a drunk here. I kept the door cracked open with my boot.

She would be frightened at the thought of what she might say, of what they might make her say, about her brother. Frightened and alone, and God knew how long it would be before I could reach her, if I could reach her at all.

Have you ever been questioned by the militia?

No.

By the KGB, then?

Yes.

What did they do to you?

They beat me up.

Then you know what I mean, Tanya. The militia are no different, even now. They'll get everything out of you, once they start, and that is why you have to stay with me.

The glass panels of the booth were filthy, and one of them had words scrawled on it by an angry finger — Gorbachev murdered the Motherland. Beyond it the sun was down, crimsoning the earth's rim as its sac burst at last and spilled its blood across the horizon.

There was so little time.

The line clicked.

'Captain Rusakov speaking.'