Trial Run

4

I lay in bed with the lamp on and looked at the ceiling, and wondered why I should feel so disturbed. I was not one of those spies in or out of the cold who was entirely at home with people ferreting through their belongings, and probably felt deprived if they didn’t. I had read and enjoyed all the books, and had hoisted in some of the jargon: mole, sleeper, spook, et al. But as for that world affecting me personally: that was as unexpected as a scorpion on the breakfast toast.

Yet I was in Moscow to ask questions. Perhaps that made me a legitimate target for irregular attention. And of course the most immediate questions remained unanswered, and so far unanswerable.

Who, exactly, had done the searching? And why?

There had been nothing of significance for anyone to find. The paper with potentially useful names and addresses had been in my pocket. I had concealed in my luggage no guns, no codes, no tiny technology, no anti-Soviet propaganda. I had been told it was illegal to import bibles and crucifixes into Russia, and had not done so. I had brought no forbidden books, no pornography, and no newspapers. No drugs...

Drugs...

I fairly bounded out of bed and yanked open the drawer in which I’d stored my box of assorted air freight. Heaved a considerable sigh of relief, once the lid was open, to see the pills and inhalers and syringe and adrenalin ampoules all more or less in the positions Emma had given them. I couldn’t for certain tell whether or not they had been inspected, but at least nothing was missing. A hypochondriac Emma might well call me, but the sad fact remained that at certain dire times the contents of that box were all that held off the Hereafter. The fates that had given me wealth had been niggardly on health: a silver spoon that bent easily. Even at my age, if one was prone to chest troubles, insurance premiums were loaded. If one’s father and grandfather had both died young for lack of salbutamol or beclo-methasone dipropionate, or sundry other later miracles, one discovered that actuaries’ hearts were as hard as flint.

In between times, and to be fair there were far more in between times than troubles, I was as bursting with health and vigour as any other poor slob living in the damp, cold, misty, bronchitic climate of the British Isles.

I shut the box and replaced it in the drawer: climbed back into bed, switched out the light, and took off my glasses, folding them neatly to hand for the morning. How soon, I wondered, could I decently make use of my return ticket?

Red Square looked greyish brown, with snowflakes blowing energetically across it in a fiendish wind. I stood in front of St Basil’s Cathedral taking photographs in light dim enough to develop them by, wondering if even the deep intense red of the huge brick walls of the Kremlin would make a mark on the emulsion. The vast slush-covered expanse, where sometimes the self-aggrandising parades beat hell out of the road surface for newsreels, was on that day trodden only by miserable-looking groups of tourists, shepherded in straggling crocodiles to and from a group of buses parked nearby.

The Cathedral itself was small, a cluster of brilliantly coloured and encrusted onion-shaped domes on stalks of different height, like a fantasy castle out of Disney. Snow lay on the onions now, dimming the blues and greens and golds that sparkled on the picture postcards, but I stood there wondering how a nation which had produced a building of such joyous, magnificent imagination could have come to its latter-day greyness.

‘Ivan the Great commissioned that cathedral,’ said a voice behind my right shoulder. ‘When it was finished he was overwhelmed with its beauty; and he put out the eyes of his architect, so that he should not design anything more splendid for anyone else.’

I turned slowly round. A shortish young man stood there, wearing a dark blue overcoat, a black fur hat, and an unexpectant expression on a round face.

Round brown eyes full of bright intelligence, alive in a way that Russian faces were not. A person, I judged, whose still soft outlines of youth hid a mind already sharply adult. I’d had a bit of the same trouble myself at the same age, ten years or so ago.

‘Are you Stephen Luce?’ I said.

A smile flickered and disappeared. ‘That’s right.’

‘I would rather not have known about the architect.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t like horror movies.’

‘Life is a horror movie,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see Lenin’s tomb?’ He half turned away and pointed an arm to the middle distance, where a queue were waiting outside a large box-like building halfway along the Kremlin wall. ‘The Cathedral isn’t a church now, it’s some sort of store. You can go into the Tomb, though.’

‘No, thank you.’

He moved off, however, in that direction, and I went with him.

‘Over there,’ he said, pointing to one side of the Tomb, ‘is a small bust of Stalin, on a short pillar. It has recently appeared there, without any ceremony. You may think this is of no great note, but in point of fact it is very interesting. At one time Stalin was with Lenin in the Tomb. Revered, and all that. Then there was a spot of revisionism, and Stalin was the ultra persona non grata, so they took him out of the Tomb and put up a small statue outside, instead. Then they did a spot more revisionism, and removed even the statue, leaving nothing but a curt plaque in the ground where it had been. But now we have a new statue, back on the same spot. This one is not the old proud glare of world domination, but a downward-looking, pensive, low-profile sort of thing. Fascinating, don’t you think?’

‘What are you reading at the University?’ I said.

‘Russian history.’

I looked from the rebirth of Stalin to the dead cathedral. ‘Tyrants come and go,’ I said. ‘Tyranny is constant.’

‘Some things are best said in the open air.’

I looked at him straightly. ‘How much will you help me?’ I asked.

‘Why don’t you take some photographs?’ he said. ‘Behave like a tourist.’

‘No one thinks I’m a tourist, unless having one’s room searched is par for the packages.’

‘Oh gee,’ he said quaintly. ‘In that case, let’s just walk.’

At tourist pace we left Red Square and went towards the river. I huddled inside my coat and pulled my scarf up over my ears to meet the fur hat I had bought that morning, following Natasha’s instructions.

‘Why don’t you untie the ear-flaps?’ Stephen Luce said, untying a black tape bow on top of his own head. ‘Much warmer.’ He pulled the formerly folded-up flaps down over his ears, and let the black tape ties dangle free. ‘Don’t tie the tapes under your chin,’ he said, ‘or they’ll think you’re a pouff.’

I pulled the flaps down and let the tapes flutter in the wind, as he did.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.

‘Come with me to see some men about some horses.’

‘When?’

‘Mornings are best, for horse people.’

He took a minute over replying, then said doubtfully, ‘I suppose I could cut tomorrow’s lecture, just for once.’

How like Hughes-Beckett, I thought sardonically, to equip me with an interpreter whose time was measured in lunch hours and missed lectures. I glanced at the round, troubled face in its frame of black fur, and more or less decided then and there that my whole mission was impossible.

‘Do you know Rupert Hughes-Beckett?’ I said.

‘Never heard of him.’

I sighed. ‘Who was it who wrote to you, asking you to help me?’

‘The Foreign Office. A man called Spencer. I know him. They are sponsoring me, sort of, you see. Through college. The idea being that eventually I’ll work for them. Though I might not, in the end. It’s all a bit suffocating, that diplomatic waxworks.’

We reached the approach to the bridge over the river, and Stephen threw out an arm in another of his generous gestures.

‘Over there is the British Embassy,’ he said, pointing.

I couldn’t see much for snow. I took off my glasses, dried them as best I could on a handkerchief, and enjoyed for a minute or two a clearer look at the world.

‘Turn off right at the far side of the bridge,’ Stephen said. ‘Go down the steps to the other road running beneath it, along beside the river, and the Embassy’s that pale yellow building along there, giving a good imitation of Buckingham Palace.’

I told him I was going for a drink with the cultural attachés and he said the best of British luck, and not to miss seeing the Ambassador’s loo, it had the best view of the Kremlin in the whole of Moscow.

‘I say,’ he said, as we went on over the bridge, ‘do you mind telling me what you’re actually here for?’

‘Didn’t they say?’

‘No. Only to interpret, if necessary.’

I shook my head in frustration. ‘Chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. Looking for a rumour called Alyosha. Some say he doesn’t exist and others that he doesn’t want to be found. All I have to do is find him, see who he is and what he is, and decide whether he poses any sort of threat to a chap who wants to ride in the Olympics. And since you asked, I will now bore your ears off by telling you the whole story.’

He listened with concentration and his ears remained in place. When I’d finished he was walking with a springier step.

‘Count me in, then,’ he said. ‘And hang the lectures. I’ll borrow someone else’s notes.’ We turned at the end of the bridge to go back, and between the snowflakes I saw his dark brown eyes shining with humorous life. ‘I thought you were here just fact-finding for the Games. In a general way, and semi-official. This is more fun.’

‘I haven’t thought so,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Ve have vays of making you sit up and enjoy yourself.’

‘Ve had better have vays of keeping it all very discreet.’

‘Oh sure. Do you want the benefit of the immense experience of a lifetime of living in Moscow?’

‘Whose?’ I said.

‘Mine, of course. I’ve been here eleven weeks. Lifetimes are comparative.’

‘Fire away,’ I said.

‘Never do anything unusual. Never turn up when you’re not expected, and always turn up if you are.’

I said, ‘That doesn’t sound very extraordinary.’

I received a bright amused shot from the brown eyes. ‘Some English people touring here by car decided to go to a different town for a night from the one they had originally booked. Just an impulse. They were fined for it.’

‘Fined?’ I was amazed.

‘Yes. Can you imagine a foreign tourist being fined in England because he went to Manchester instead of Birmingham? Can you imagine an English hotel doing anything but shrug if he didn’t turn up? But everything here is regulated. There are masses of people just standing around watching other people, and they all report what they see, because that’s their job. They are employed to watch. There’s no unemployment here. Instead of handing a bloke dole money and letting him spend it in civilised ways like soccer and gambling and pubs, they give him a job watching. Two birds with one stone, and all that.’

‘Standing in groups at airports and in bus shelters, and dotted around outside hotels?’

He grinned. ‘So right. Those guys in bus stops are there to stop all foreign-registered cars going out of Moscow, to check their destinations and visas, because all foreigners need a visa to go more than thirty kilometres from the centre. Sometimes they stop Russian cars, but not often. Anyway, there’s a joke here that you always see at least three Russians together when they’ve any regular contact with foreigners. One alone might be tempted, two might conspire, but if there are three, one will always inform.’

‘Cynical.’

‘And practical. What did you say you’d do today? I take it you have Intourist girls looking after you?’

‘Natasha and Anna,’ I said. ‘I told them I’d be in the hotel to lunch and go on a bus tour of the city afterwards.’

‘Then you’d better do it,’ he said judiciously. ‘I’m not sure they don’t get into trouble if they lose their charge, so to speak.’

I paused at the centre of the bridge to look over the parapet at the iron grey water. Snow speckled everything and filled the air like torn tissue-paper. To the right along the river bank stretched the long red beautiful walls of the Kremlin, with golden towers at intervals and vistas of golden onion domes inside. A walled city, a fortress, with defunct churches and active government offices and the daily tread of millions of tourists. To the left, on the opposite bank, the British Embassy.

‘Better move on,’ Stephen said. ‘Two men standing still on a bridge in the snow... that’s suspicious.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

We walked on, however, and went back up the incline to Red Square.

‘Job number one,’ I said. ‘Will you make a call for me?’

I showed him the Olympic team trainer’s name and number, and we stopped at a glass-walled telephone box. Telephone calls, it appeared, were cheap. Stephen brushed away my offered rouble and produced a two kopek coin.

‘What shall I say?’ he asked.

‘Say I’d like to see him tomorrow morning. Say I was very impressed with the Russian team at the International Horse Trials and would like to congratulate him and ask his advice. Say I’m frightfully important in the horse world. Lay it on a bit. He doesn’t know me.’ I gave him some well-known Eventing names. ‘Say I’m a colleague of theirs.’

‘Are you?’ he said, dialling the number.

‘I know them,’ I said. ‘That’s why I was sent. Because I know the horse people.’

Someone answered at the other end, and Stephen launched into what was to me a vague jumble of noises. A softer-sounding language than I had for some reason expected. Pleasing.

He talked for quite some time, and listened, and talked, and listened, and talked, and finally rang off.

‘Success,’ he said. ‘Eleven o’clock. Outside the stables, round the far side of the racecourse.’

‘The Hippodrome,’ I said.

‘That’s right.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘The Olympic horses exercise there on the track.’

‘Fantastic,’ I said, astounded. ‘Bloody incredible.’

‘And you were wrong about one thing,’ Stephen said. ‘He did know who you are. He said you went to ride in a race called the Pardubice in Czechoslovakia, and he saw you finish third. He seemed in point of fact to be quite pleased to be going to meet you.’

‘Nice of him,’ I said modestly.

Stephen spoilt it. ‘Russians love a chance of talking to people from the outside. They see so few, that they love it.’

We agreed that he should meet me outside the hotel the following morning, and his cheerfulness was catching.

‘When you go on that bus tour,’ he said as we parted, ‘you’ll stop in Derzhinsky Square. With a statue of Derzhinsky on a tall column. There’s a big store for children there. What the guide won’t tell you, though, is that the building next to it, across the street, is the Lubianka.’

There were taxis waiting outside the hotel but none of the drivers spoke English, and either they didn’t understand the words ‘British Embassy’, or the address written in English script, or they understood but refused to take me there. In any case, I got a chorus of shaken heads, so in the end I walked. It was still snowing, but wetly, and what lay on the ground was slush. After a mile and a half of it my feet were soaking and icy and my mood deepening from cross to vile.

Following Stephen’s instructions, I found the steps at the far side of the bridge and descended to the lower level, walking along there with dark heavy buildings on my left and the chest-high river wall on the right. When I at length reached the gateway of the Embassy a Russian soldier stepped out of a sentry box and barred my way.

An odd argument then took place in which neither protagonist could understand a word the other said. I pointed vigorously at my watch, and to the Embassy door, and said, ‘I am English,’ several times very loudly, and got even crosser. The Russian finally, dubiously, stood back a pace and let me through into the short driveway. The huge front door of the Embassy itself was opened, with a lot less fuss, by a dark blue uniform with gilt buttons and braids.

Inside, the hall and stairs and visible doorways were rich with the glossy wood and glass and plaster mouldings of more elegant ages. There was also a large leather-topped desk behind which sat a one-man reception committee, and, standing near him, a tall languid man with noble bones and greying hair combed carefully backwards.

The dark blue uniform offered to relieve me of my coat and hat, and the man at the desk asked if he could help me.

‘The cultural attaché?’ I said. ‘I’ve an appointment.’

The grey-haired man moved gently like a lily in the wind and said that the cultural attaché happened to be himself. He extended a limp hand and a medium smile, and I responded with the merest shade more warmth to both. He murmured platitudes about the weather and air travel while he made some internal judgements about me, but it appeared that I had passed his private tests, because he suddenly changed mental gears and asked with some charm whether I would care to see over the Embassy itself before we went to his office for a drink. His office, he explained, was in a separate building.

We climbed the stairs and made a tour of the reception rooms, and duly inspected the loo with the best view of the Kremlin. The cultural attaché, who had identified himself as Oliver Waterman, kept up a genial informed chatter as if he showed visitors round this route every day of the week: which, on reflection, perhaps he did. We ended, after a short windy outside walk, in a more modern-looking first-floor suite of carpeted book-lined offices, where he wasted no time in pouring hefty drinks.

‘Don’t know what we can do for you,’ he said, settling deep into a leather armchair, and waving me to one similar. ‘This Farringford business seems to be a fuss over nothing.’

‘You hope,’ I said.

He smiled thinly. ‘True. But there’s no fire without smoke, and we haven’t had even a whiff.’

‘Did you yourself interview the three Russian observers?’ I asked.

‘Er,’ he said, clearing his throat and looking concerned. ‘Which observers would those be?’

Resignedly I explained. His expression cleared gradually as if a responsibility had been taken from him.

‘But, you see,’ he said pleasantly, ‘we in the Embassy would not speak to them ourselves. We approached our opposite numbers for relevant information, and were informed that no one knew anything of any significance.’

‘You couldn’t have spoken to those men face to face in their own homes?’

He shook his head. ‘It is actively discouraged, if not positively forbidden, for private contacts to take place.’

‘Forbidden by them, or by us?’

‘Bit of both. But by us, definitely.’

‘So you never really get to know the Russian people, even though you live here?’

He shook his head without any visible regret. ‘There is always a risk, in unofficial contacts.’

‘So xenophobia works both ways?’ I said.

He uncrossed his legs and recrossed them left over right. ‘Fear of foreigners is older than the conscious mind,’ he said, smiling as if he had said it often before. ‘But, now, about your enquiries...’

The telephone at his elbow interrupted him. He picked up the receiver in a leisurely fashion after the third ring, and said merely, ‘Yes?’

A slight frown creased his high smooth forehead. ‘Very well, bring him round.’ He replaced the receiver and continued with his former sentence. ‘About your enquiries, we can offer you telex facilities, if you need them, and if you’ll give me your room’s telephone number I can ring you if any messages arrive for you.’

‘I gave you the number,’ I said.

‘Oh, did you?’ He looked vague. ‘I’d better take it again, my dear chap.’

I repeated the number from memory, and he wrote it on a notepad.

‘Let me see to your glass,’ he said, splashing away with a lavish hand. ‘And then perhaps you might meet one or two of my colleagues.’

There were the noises of people arriving downstairs. Oliver Waterman stood up and brushed his smooth hair back with the insides of both wrists; a gesture of preparing himself, I reckoned, more than any need for grooming.

There was one loud intrusive voice rising above a chorus of two others, one male, one female, and as they came up the stairs I found myself putting a name to it. With no sense of surprise I watched Malcolm Herrick advance through the doorway.

‘Evening, Oliver,’ he said confidently, and then, seeing me. ‘Well, sport, if it isn’t our sleuth. Made any progress?’

From a fleeting glance at Oliver Waterman’s face I gathered that his reaction to Malcolm Herrick was much like mine. It was impossible not to attend to what Herrick said because of the physical force of his speech, the result no doubt of years of journalistic necessity; but there was no visible warmth behind the sociable words, and possibly even a little malice.

‘Drink, Malcolm?’ Oliver suggested, with true diplomatic civility.

‘Couldn’t be better.’

Oliver Waterman, bottle and glass in hand, made introducing motions between me and the other newcomers. ‘Randall Drew... Polly Paget, Ian Young. They work here with me in this department.’

Polly Paget was a sensible-looking lady in flat shoes, past girlhood but not quite middle-aged, wearing her hair short and her cardigan long. She gave Oliver Waterman a small straightforward smile and accepted her drink before Herrick, as of right. He himself looked as if he thought attache’s assistants should be served after him.

If I hadn’t been told Ian Young’s name or heard him speak, I would have taken him for a Russian. I looked at him curiously, realising how familiar I had already become with the skin texture and stillness of expression of the Moscow population. Ian Young had the same white heavyish face in which nothing discernable was going on. His voice, when he spoke, which at that time was very little, was unremarkably English.

Malcolm Herrick effortlessly dominated what conversation there was, telling Oliver Waterman, it seemed to me, just what he should do about a particularly boring row which had just broken out over a forthcoming visit of a prestigious orchestra.

When Polly Paget offered a suggestion, Herrick interrupted without listening and squashed her. Oliver Waterman said, ‘Well, perhaps, yes, you may be right,’ at intervals, while not looking Herrick in the eye except in the briefest of flashes, a sure sign of boredom or dislike. Ian Young sat looking at Herrick with an unnerving lack of response, by which Herrick was not in the least unnerved: and I drank my drink and thought of the wet walk back.

All possible juice extracted from the music scandal, Herrick switched his attention back to me.

‘Well, then, sport, how’s it going?’

‘Slow to stop,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Told you so. Too bad. That whole ground’s been raked fine and there’s not a pebble to be found. Wish there was. I need a decent story.’

‘Or indecent, for preference,’ Polly Paget said. Herrick ignored her.

‘Did you talk to the chef d’équipe?’ I said.

‘Who?’ said Oliver Waterman. I saw from Herrick’s face that he hadn’t, but also that he wasn’t going to admit it unless forced to: and even then, I guessed, he would pooh-pooh the necessity.

I said to Oliver Waterman, ‘Mr Kropotkin. The man who oversees the training of the horses and riders for the horse trials. The non-playing captain, so to speak. I was given his name by Rupert Hughes-Beckett.’

‘So you’ll be seeing him?’ Waterman said.

‘Yes, tomorrow morning. He seems to be all that’s left.’

Ian Young stirred. ‘I talked with him,’ he said.

Every head turned his way. Thirty-five or so, I thought. Thick-set, brown-haired, wearing a crumpled grey suit and a blue and white striped shirt with the points of the collar curling up like a dried sandwich. He raised his eyebrows and pursed his mouth, which for him was an excessive change of expression.

‘In the course of the discreet preliminary enquiries required by the Foreign Office, I too was given his name. I talked with him pretty exhaustively. He knows nothing about any scandal to do with Farringford. A complete dead end.’

‘There you are then,’ Waterman said, shrugging. ‘As I said before, there’s no fire. Not a spark.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘It would be best that way. But there is a spark. Or there was, in England.’ And I told them about Johnny Farringford being beaten up by two men who warned him to stay away from Alyosha.

Their faces showed differing levels of dismay and disbelief.

‘But my dear chap,’ said Oliver Waterman, recovering his former certainty, ‘surely that means that this Alyosha, whoever he is, is absolutely determined not to be dropped into any sort of mess? So surely that makes it all the safer for Farringford to come to the Olympics?’

‘Except,’ I said apologetically, ‘that of course Farringford was also told in the summer that if he came to Moscow, Alyosha would be waiting to extract revenge for the stresses which gave Hans Kramer a heart attack.’

There was a short thoughtful silence.

‘People change their minds,’ said Polly Paget at length, judiciously. ‘Maybe in the summer, when Kramer died, this Alyosha sounded off a bit hysterically, and now, on reflection, the last thing he wants is to be involved.’

Herrick shook his head impatiently, but it seemed to me the most sensible solution yet advanced.

‘I really hope you’re right,’ I said. ‘The only trouble will be proving it. And the only way to prove it, as it always has been, is for me to find Alyosha, and talk to him, and get from him his own positive assurance that he means Farringford no harm.’

Polly Paget nodded. Oliver Waterman looked mildly despairing, and Malcolm Herrick unmirthfully laughed.

‘Good luck to you, then, sport,’ he said. ‘You’ll be here till Doomsday. I tell you, I’ve looked for this bloody Alyosha, and he doesn’t exist.’

I sighed a little and looked at Ian Young. ‘And you?’ I said.

‘I’ve looked too,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a trace.’

There seemed little else to say. The party broke up, and I asked Waterman if he could telephone for a taxi.

‘My dear chap,’ he said regretfully. ‘They won’t come here. They don’t like to be contaminated by stopping outside the British Embassy. You can probably catch an empty one on the main road, if you walk along to the bridge.’

We shook hands at his outer door, and, again swathed in overcoat and fur hat, I set off towards the guarded gate. It had stopped snowing at last, which improved the prospects slightly. Ian Young, however, called out after me and offered a lift in his car, which I gratefully agreed to. He sat stolidly behind his steering-wheel, dealing with darkness, falling snow and road-obscuring slush as if emotion had never been invented.

‘Malcolm Herrick,’ he said, still dead-pan, ‘is a pain in the arse.’

He turned left out of the gate, and drove along beside the river.

‘And you’re stuck with him,’ I said.

His silence was assent. ‘He’s a persistent burrower,’ he said. ‘Gets a story if it’s there.’

‘You’re telling me to go home and forget it?’

‘No,’ he said, turning more corners. ‘But don’t stir up the Russians. They take fright very easily. When they’re frightened they attack. People of great endurance, full of courage. But easily alarmed. Don’t forget.’

‘Very well,’ I said.

‘You have a man called Frank Jones sitting at your table at the hotel,’ he said.

I glanced at him. His face was dead calm.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Did you know he was in the K.G.B.?’

I copied his impassiveness. I said, ‘Did you know that you are going a very long way round to my hotel?’

He actually reacted: even went so far as to smile. ‘How did you know?’

‘Went on a bus tour. Studied the maps.’

‘And does Frank Jones sit with you always?’

‘So far,’ I said, nodding. ‘And a middle-aged couple from Lancashire. We sat together by chance at dinner yesterday, our first night here, and you know how it is, people tend to return to the same table. So yes, the same four of us have sat together today at breakfast and lunch. What makes you think he is in the K.G.B.? He’s as English as they come, and he was thoroughly searched at the airport on the way in.’

‘Searched so that you could see, I suppose?’

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking. ‘Everyone on the plane could see.’

‘Cover,’ he said. ‘There’s no mistake. He’s not sitting at your table by accident. He came with you from England and he’ll no doubt go back with you. Has he searched your room yet?’

I said nothing. Ian Young very faintly smiled again.

‘I see he has,’ he said. ‘What did he find?’

‘Clothes and cough mixture.’

‘No Russian addresses or phone numbers?’

‘I had them in my pocket,’ I said. ‘Such as they are.’

‘Frank Jones,’ he said, driving round back streets, ‘has a Russian grandmother, who has spoken the language to him all his life. She married a British sailor, but her sympathies were all with the October revolution. She recruited Frank in the cradle.’

‘But if he is K.G.B.,’ I said, ‘why do you let him... operate?’

‘Better the devil you know.’ We swung into yet another deserted street. ‘Every time he comes back we are alerted by our passport control people back home. They send a complete passenger list of the flight he comes on, because he always travels with his business. So we scan it. We get someone out pronto to the airport to see where he goes. We follow. Tut tut. We see him book into the Intourist. We drift into the dining-room. If it’s safe, he also sits with his business. We see he’s with you. We know all about you. We relax. We wish Frank well. We certainly don’t want to disturb him. If his masters discovered we knew all about him, next time they’d send someone else. And then where would we be? When Frank comes, we know to pay attention. Worth his weight in roubles, Frank is, to us.’

We went slowly and quietly down a dark road. Snow fell and melted wetly as it touched the ground.

‘What is he likely to do?’ I said.

‘About you? Report where you go, who you see, what you eat and how many times you crap before breakfast.’

‘Sod,’ I said.

‘And don’t ditch him unless you have to, and if you have to, for God’s sake make it look accidental.’

I said doubtfully, ‘I’ve had no practice at this sort of thing.’

‘Obvious. You didn’t notice him follow you from your hotel.’

‘Did he?’ I said, alarmed.

‘He was walking up and down the Naberezhnaya waiting for you to come out. He saw you drive out with me. He’ll go back to the Intourist and wait for you there.’

The lights from the dashboard shone dimly on his big impassive face. The economy of muscle movement extended, I had noticed, throughout his body. His head turned little upon his neck: his hands remained in one position on the steering-wheel. He didn’t shift in his seat, or drum with his fingers. In his heavy raincoat, thick leather gloves, and fur hat with the earflaps up, he looked every inch a Russian.

‘What is your job here?’ I said.

‘Cultural assistant.’ His voice gave away as little as his face. Ask silly questions, I thought.

He slowed the car still further and switched off the headlights, and, with the engine barely audible, swung into a cobbled courtyard, and stopped. Put on the handbrake. Half turned in his seat to face me.

‘You’ll be a few minutes late for dinner,’ he said.