The Russian Interpreter

22

Proctor-Gould was right; Raya didn’t go to the trouble of forcing the locks. She took one of the suitcases and sold it as it stood, locked.

Then she came back to the hotel for the other one. Proctor-Gould met her, and the porter carrying the second suitcase, as they stepped out of the lift in the lobby.

‘I didn’t think I could manage them both at once,’ she explained to Manning when he arrived. ‘It didn’t occur to me to get the porter the first time. Stupid of me – we might have avoided all this mess.’

She indicated the heap of books which Proctor-Gould had taken out of the case and spread over the floor, and which he was now desperately sorting through. He was in a terrible state. He had only just discovered that the suitcase he had saved was the second one, and that the other had gone already. He kept picking books up and dropping them, trying to work out which ones he had lost, biting his lower lip so that it bulged out first to the left and then to the right. He looked as if he was going to be sick.

‘Has she really sold the case?’ he asked Manning.

‘So she says.’

‘Who to?’

‘She says a friend.’

‘Tell her I’m going to the police this time.’

Manning told her.

‘She says shall she phone room service for a policeman?’ he reported.

At these words Proctor-Gould jumped to his feet and stared at Raya, his eyes very wide, leaning forward ridiculously as if to inspect her more closely. His face was unnaturally white. The joke had turned all his anxiety to rage.

‘I’ll shake you!’ he said in a level, frightening voice. ‘I’m going to have those books back. You treat me like … as if I didn’t exist…. You think … Well! I’ll shake you!’

His voice trembled, and went very high. Manning was too taken aback to translate. But Proctor-Gould’s tone and appearance had a remarkable enough effect on Raya by themselves. For a moment a slight smile appeared on her face – a silly smile of astonishment and fear. It was the first sign Manning had seen that she was not impregnable. Then she put her hand on Proctor-Gould’s arm very softly.

‘Gordon, Gordon,’ she said quietly. ‘Something can be arranged. Hush, Gordon, we’ll arrange something. Nothing’s so positive, nothing’s so final.’

‘I’m going to have those books back,’ repeated Proctor-Gould shakily.

Raya took his hand and patted it, then put it to her lips and kissed the back of his fingers. She was like a mother soothing her child.

‘Let’s put all these books away in the case again,’ she said coaxingly, as if Proctor-Gould had thrown his toys about in a tantrum.

‘Don’t touch those books!’ shouted Proctor-Gould, unable to understand what she had said, and even at this moment of revelation misunderstanding her intentions. For an instant they became locked in a clumsy scuffling. Then Raya had given up, and sat down with her hands folded in her lap, while Proctor-Gould scrabbled the books up from the floor and dumped them in the case all anyhow, with jackets coming off and pages doubling up. He crammed down the lid, relocked it, and put the case back in the wardrobe.

‘Now, the other suitcase,’ he said. The hot flush of adrenalin through his arteries had evidently passed. He sounded merely surly, and he avoided looking at either Raya or Manning.

Manning translated. Raya raised her eyes and looked at Proctor-Gould without saying anything. She seemed to be studying him, and she looked as if she were troubled by some thought remote from either of them.

‘I want the suitcase,’ repeated Proctor-Gould, still not looking at her.

She sighed and got to her feet.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

They went downstairs. Proctor-Gould’s black Chaika was waiting at the kerb, and they got in. Raya gave an address to the driver, and the car moved off in a northerly direction, through Okhotniy Ryad into Sverdlov Square. Proctor-Gould stared out of the window expressionlessly. Raya sat on the jump-seat opposite him, watching his face, her forehead a little puckered as if she were puzzled by something.