The Scorpion Signal

5: NATALYA

'Good evening, little mother.'

Her head came up sharply. She was sitting with her back to the wall of the hallway, her cracked black shoes resting on the edge of a slow-combustion stove, the naked bulb throwing light on her white hair. Some mauve knitting was on her lap, and she had been nibbling at a sausage when I'd come in.

'What do you want, comrade?' Her small eyes were narrowed, focusing on my face.

'I want to see the upravdom. Is he here?'

She eyed me up and down again, noting my clothes, needing to find a pigeonhole for me in the infinitely-varied strata of Moscow society. 'I will see,' she said, and took another small bite of sausage.

I waited while she reached and took a brass bell from the shelf of her vestibule, and swung it three times. I was standing halfway between the stairs and the entrance doors, with the street exposed to my peripheral vision. This was just routine: I'd left Bracken at a taxi rank along Narodnaja ulica ten minutes ago and got here clean. The second militia patrol had gone hounding straight past us and I'd used the back streets towards the ring road, working my way out of the search area. 'Reach me through the Embassy,' he'd told me. 'I shall be in signals with London direct. We're on the board as «Scorpion» and you'll use that in paroles and countersigns.' I'd had to ask him for my East German papers back: he hadn't thought of it first. Not a good sign: he was here to direct me in the field and the field was dangerous and already he'd missed a trick because the brush with the militia patrols had unnerved him.

I felt vulnerable and exposed.

Footsteps sounded on the stone stairway. 'I am Yuri Gorsky.' A fleshy man with watchful eyes and a shock of stiff graying hair, his worn suit smelling of black tobacco. His hand was steady and strong.

'Kirov,' I said.

He led me upstairs to a room at the end of the passage on the third floor and showed me in. It was small, cluttered and stifling, with the fumes of a charcoal heater sharp on the air. One door, one window, one light bulb and one narrow bed. No telephone.

'I have been expecting you,' Gorsky said in a low voice. He stood waiting.

I was looking for signs everywhere, signs of something wrong, of a hundred things wrong. He understood this, and I could feel his understanding as we waited the time out, unsure of each other. That was on the air, too, as strong as the charcoal fumes: the scent of creatures met by night, their hairs lifted and their eyes watching at the edge of vision, their breath held and their muscles tensed by the knowledge of where they stood on dangerous ground.

Bracken had said he was totally reliable, but I didn't trust that. I trusted my own feelings. 'Is this the top floor?' I asked him.

`Yes.' He closed the door quietly and went to the window, lifting the lower sash so easily that I knew the wooden frame must have been soaped. He beckoned to me.

The freezing air came into my lungs as I leaned and looked down, tracing the skeletonic pattern of the fire escape downwards to the ground, where a street lamp stood. There was nothing running upwards, against the wall; the guttering passed across the top of the window, two feet higher; it looked strong but that meant nothing.

'It's the best room,' Gorsky said, and I believed him. People from the other rooms on this floor would have to run the length of the iron balcony before they reached the fire escape. The lower floors were more dangerous: they would be searched first, if anyone came. 'Don't worry,' he said in his low voice, 'about the little dezhurnaya in the hallway. She has a grandson in the labour camps. But give her money if you want to. Not too much.'

'How long has she been in this building?'

'Nearly seven years. As long as I have.'

I slid the window shut. 'Was Schrenk here?'

'Yes.' He offered me a black and yellow packet and I shook my head.

'When?'

'Before they arrested him.' He took a cigarette and lit it, throwing the match into the charcoal heater. I went absolutely still, and he sensed it. 'Don't worry,' he said, `they arrested him in the street, nowhere near here. They wouldn't have been interested in where he came from; they would have been interested in what he was doing. If they had wanted to know where he came from, they would have asked him, and if he had told them, they would have come here.' He drew the cigarette to a bright red glow, and then blew the smoke out in a slow cloud, watching me through it. 'So don't worry. You will be safe here.'

I looked at the bed, and the cracked handbasin, and the flimsy bookshelves, one end wired to the wall where a calendar was pinned, two years out of date and with a portrait of Lenin on the yellowed paper.

`Was he here in this actual room?'

`Yes,' said Gorsky. 'He was comfortable.' Gorsky was responsible for the safe-house, not for people who got arrested in the street.

`Telephone?' I said.

`You must not use the one in the building. I cannot send messages, either. You must use the telephone box in the street, at the first corner. The light in it doesn't work, but if you need it, screw the bulb in tighter.' He drew deeply on the black tobacco. 'Will you have visitors?'

'No.'

`That is better. I won't write your name on the residence record, of course. We shall agree, if it is ever necessary, that I forgot.' He gave a faint smile. 'Though it would be too late for excuses, by then. Tell me,' he said as he moved to the door, 'if there is anything you need. There is an alleyway, quite narrow, not far from the building; you go past the telephone box and turn right, and you will see it. It is useful.'

When he'd gone I looked round the room again, at the armchair with the stuffing out and the cracked mirror askew over the handbasin and the pile of dog-eared magazines on the floor by the window. Schrenk had been here, then, before they'd arrested him. I was that close. And that far.

I had the new cover by heart in thirty minutes: Kapista Mikhail Kirov, Moscow representative for the state factory complex in the Ukraine, plastics and allied products. Current Moscow visa for three months, schedule of meetings at the Ministry of Labour; references, employment card, food and lodging vouchers, transport allowance rates per day; members of family and next-of-kin; Party membership card, Izmajlovo chapter.

There were voices and I listened. They were a man's and a woman's, nearing along the corridor. A door opened and closed and the voices went on, muffled now. I would have to get to know the voices here, so that one day if strangers came I'd be warned. I trusted Gorsky, but he was human and therefore fallible. A safe-house is a safe-house until it's blown.

There was a dossier on Helmut Schrenk, with photographs and a description; I didn't think he'd look much like that now. He was described in his cover as a demolition worker, which was typically close to reality: he'd been trained at Norfolk in explosives. It said that four months ago when he'd been doing a low-key penetration job in Moscow he'd applied for a post as agent-in-place. Why had he done that? I went over the material again: in the last three years he'd completed seven successful missions, apart from his 'liaison work in the north' — Leningrad. At the age of thirty-five he had a lot of steam left and he wasn't the type to sit at a desk and play about with microdots: there was a tremendous amount of latent aggression in the man and he used his executive work as a safety-valve; I'd seen him in action.

I'd have to ask Bracken. It was the second thing that didn't fit Schrenk's character; the first had been Dr Steinberg's reference to his bearing a grudge against his interrogators in Lubyanka.

I laid the destruct material on top of the charcoal until it caught fire and then held it at the mouth of the galvanized chimney so that all the smoke would go out. Then I put the East German cover and car papers inside the third magazine from the bottom of the left-hand pile and went down to talk to Gorsky again. It was then he told me about Natalya.

'She's over there.'

The cafe was crowded.

They were mostly young people, perched along the benches with newspapers opened on the tables among the dark bread and bowls of soup — Komsomolskaya Pravda, Sovetsky Sport, Literturnaya Gazeta. At one table they were arguing loudly, and passing separate sheets from their newspapers for the others to read. They were talking about the Borodinski trial. I looked across the room.

'Which one?'

'With the fair hair, next to the man with the beard.'

I pushed my way between the tables; some of the men looked up at me, noting my clothes and looking away again. I assumed they'd seen the man sitting alone near the doors and talking to no one. They must have.

'Natalya?'

She looked up at me through the tobacco smoke. So did the bearded man.

'Which Natalya?' he asked me, straightening. 'Natalya Fyodorova.'

She went on staring at me without answering, her ice-blue eyes showing nothing at all.

'Who are you?' the bearded man asked me. I went on watching the girl. The man said: 'She doesn't want to talk to you.'

I leaned over the table and spoke close to the girl, on the other side from the man. 'I'm a friend of Helmut's.'

Her hands were on the table in front of her, and I saw them move slightly, coming together. As I straightened up she looked at the man. I thought she was wondering if he'd heard what I'd said.

'She doesn't want to talk to you,' he told me. 'Are you deaf or something?' He pushed his bowl of soup farther away from him, as if to give himself room.

The girl looked up at me. 'Who are you?' Her eyes were still cool, but she was watchful now, involved.

'A friend of his. I'm trying to find him.'

The sound level around me went down suddenly as some of the people stopped talking. I looked into the mirror above the brass samovar and saw two men coming in. They didn't greet anyone, but took up a position on the far side of the room, talking to each other but looking around them. In a minute the sound level went up again, but it wasn't as loud as before.

I looked down from the mirror.

'Whose friend?' the bearded man asked me. He was leaning back, ready to get up if he had to. The girl was quite pretty, and I understood his reactions. I wondered if she'd noticed that he hadn't heard the first thing I'd said to her. It could be important.

'The trial's fixed,' said a young Jew at the same table. 'They're all fixed, we know that. All of them!'

'Shhhh!' a girl said, gripping his arm.

'To hell with them,' he said loudly, and looked across at the two men who'd just come in. The noise level dipped again and recovered. A woman laughed about something, to show that she didn't care. In the mirror I saw the two men watching her.

Natalya stood up suddenly, taking her sealskin hat from the table, knocking against a bowl of soup; the man caught it in time. 'I remember him now,' she told him, 'he's in my office. This is work.' She came round the table, shaking her hair back and putting her fur hat on, glancing into the mirror through the haze of smoke.

'This isn't the time to work!' the man said, and got to his feet.

'Stay here, Ivan. I'm coming back. And get me some more solyanka.' As we moved away she asked me, 'What's your name?'

'We'll talk outside.' The two security men weren't watching us specifically but I didn't want to give them time to take an interest; in this city the faceless live longest.

The militia men were still at the junction of the two streets when we went outside, stamping their feet in the cold; their breath clouded in front of them as they turned to watch us leaving the cafe. A black Volga was parked halfway along the block with its lights out. It hadn't been there before.

The girl asked my name again but I said, 'It wouldn't mean anything to you.' She wanted to stop, but I kept going and she had to come with me; men on surveillance get bored and they'll question anyone in sight. We turned the corner and kept on walking; this street was clean and the Pobeda was parked in shadow between two of the lamps.

'How did you find me?' She kept swinging her head to look at me, frightened because I knew her and she didn't know me. I took her arm so that she'd keep walking; the two militia men would be watching us, simply because we were something that moved in a static environment.

'Gorsky told me where to look.'

'I don't know any Gorsky.' She tried to hold back and I tightened her arm in mine.

'Do you want to see Helmut again?'

'Yes,' she said on a breath. 'But they — '

'Then trust me, and do as I tell you. We've got to keep walking.' She quickened her step. 'You do know Gorsky. He's the upravdom at the building in Vojtovica ulica.'

She was beside herself, Gorsky had told me, when she heard he'd been arrested. She kept coming back every day, asking if I had any more news. This was another thing right out of character with Schrenk: when you're in the field you do not take a girl to the safe-house; you don't take anyone. I'd been worried about his state of mind after they'd interrogated him but now I was worried about the things he'd been doing before his arrest. It was as if there were two people: Schrenk and this other man who'd been breaking all the rules.

'Do they always watch that cafe?' I asked the girl. She was keeping up with me now, and I could feel the tension in her, because I'd talked about Helmut.

'Not always. Tonight it's because of the trial; they think we might demonstrate, or make trouble. Most of the people who go there are Jews, and they want Borodinski released. It would be symbolic.'

'Of what?'

'Of the power of the dissidents. There've been many demonstrations all over the city. Don't you know that?' I felt a slight tug on my arm as she held back again, not trusting me, not knowing who I was, and not wanting to cause any harm to Helmut.

She wasn't his type. His women had been dark, simmering, sensual. Corinne, Rebecca, Toni Alvirez. I couldn't see him with this fair-haired girl full of her fears and her extrovert dreams, the symbolic power of the dissidents, the effectiveness of demonstrations. Not his type: it was inconsistent again.

'What's your job?' I asked her.

'I'm a senior clerk, in the Kremlin.'

Connection.

'Who's the man you were talking to?'

'Ivan? He's an engineer.'

'Did he know Helmut?'

'No. I don't understand,' she said tightly, 'you said you were looking for him. But he was arrested, didn't you know that?'

'He escaped.'

'Escaped?' Life came into her and her hand dug into my arm. 'You mean he's free?'

'I don't know.'

Two more.

'I don't understand,' she said anxiously. 'If he escaped then he must be — '

'He managed to reach West Germany. Then they found him again. I think he's in Moscow.'

Two more militia men.

'You mean in prison?'

'I don't know.' I began slowing our pace a fraction. 'If he is, there are certain friends who'll be trying to get him out.'

'By demonstrating?'

It was all they could think about. They thought they could get Borodinski off a life sentence or a death sentence, just as they'd thought they could get Ginzburg off, and Pektus, and Shcharansky; but all they could ever get by demonstrating was a night in the cells and a roughing up and a new entry on their records in the KGB files.

'No,' I said. 'Not by demonstrating.'

They were coming towards us from the other end of the street on this side. The Pobeda was on the opposite side and the distance at the moment was about the same. I could turn round now and take the girl with me and get her into the car and drive off but I didn't think I could do it without hurrying, without being seen to hurry. I might have done it alone, measuring my steps, walking indiscernibly faster and with a longer stride, getting my keys ready; but I couldn't do it with the girl: she was still frightened of me, frightened for him, because whatever I said to her it wouldn't convince her that I wasn't in the police and hunting for Schrenk and hoping she could lead me to him.

'Who was his best friend?' I asked her. 'You?'

'I love him.' Her voice faltered on it. It was over three months since she'd last seen him and she'd been starting to get over it and now I'd brought it all back. 'I'd do anything to see him again.'

'Then keep hoping. And trust me.'

The two militia men were close now. There was no reason why they should stop us but there was always a risk and it worried me because yesterday I'd been hang-gliding over the Sussex cliffs trying to shake off the tensions of the last operation and then Croder had thrown me out here and this was alien soil, hostile and dangerous and unpredictable, and I didn't feel ready to take the risks and beat the odds and stay this side of survival. I wasn't sure of my cover or my accent: to be word perfect in the safe-house was different from being put to the test in the street. Above all I wasn't sure of the essential steadiness of nerve I was going to need if they lifted a hand and said Propusk. Papers.

'What other friends did he have?' I asked her. There wasn't much time now; we might get separated.

'He didn't have many friends.'

'Give me one of them. Two of them. Trust me.'

They carried walkie-talkies. So if I turned round and took the girl with me and began hurrying they didn't even have to shout to us to stop: they just had to press a button and tell the other two to stop that car when it reaches you, and check it out. And there'd be no hope this time of keeping enough distance between them and the number plate: they'd see it and alert the Volga and bring in the radio networks and it wouldn't matter how fast I drove or how far.

I could feel the blood leaving my face and going to the muscles, and the quickening of the pulse as the adrenalin started to flow. I was that bad, to that degree unready even for a routine encounter with a couple of flat-footed young militia men: an exercise the training directors put the novices through on their first trip behind the Curtain. So what was it going to be like when Bracken called me and said yes, he's inside Lubyanka after all, we want you to go and get him out?

'Ignatov,' the girl said.

'Other name?'

She hesitated again because she didn't know that she wasn't putting Ignatov in danger. Or Helmut.

I watched the militia men coming.

'Pyotr,' she said, half holding it back.

'Who else?'

'I don't remember anyone else.'

She thought she'd gone too far. 'Natalya,' I said, 'is your identity card in order?'

She swung her head. 'Yes. Why?'

'These two here,' I said. 'If they question us, don't mention Helmut, or Pyotr Ignatov. We're just recent acquaintances, you understand?'

'Yes.'

They were watching us now. Peaked caps, batons, side-arms, radio sets. They were walking in step.

'You don't know anything about me,' I told her. 'Just my name. My name is Kapista Kirov. But we both like music. Classical music.'

Close now. Briskly in step. They were young men, conscious of their uniforms and their heady power. They might stop us simply because they decided they'd like to talk to a pretty girl, watching her ice-blue eyes while they went through the routine questions.

'I'll step off the pavement,' I told her. 'We'll make room for them. The whole problem with Prokofiev, it seems to me, isn't in his music at all. It's simply that he's overrated by the critics. The result is that a lot of his work sounds disappointing, after all the eulogies and the acclaim.' Their eyes in the shadow of their peaked caps, watching us. 'His music is just as good as it always was, and we should listen to it as if we've never heard of him before. Otherwise we shall miss a lot of what he was trying to convey.' Briskly in step. 'Nikolai doesn't agree with me, I know, but — '

'Propusk,' one of them said as they stopped.