‘Oh, Christ!’
‘Before you ask, Alexei, you’ve been asleep for less than five minutes,’ he heard Dmitri announce. ‘Sonya’s brought coffee.
There’ll be sandwiches …’
They helped him into a sitting position.
The room was cheaply opulent, an image from a collection of titillating studies of brothels of the last century. Sonya’s idea of style, taste, sophistication. But it was warm, clean, subtly lit and the scents were pleasant. Mirrors heavily gilded, the bed a four-poster, the carpet imitating Persian or Afghan rugs. Red flock wallpaper, of course. Dmitri’s daughter’s rabbit was chewing on green leaves, hunched in its cage on a nineteenth-century German sideboard with a bulbous, serpentine front. He felt safe, strangely.
He looked at each of them in turn.
‘Where’s Goludin?’
‘Dead, Alexei — that’s why I warned you to get out of the hospital.’
‘Oh my God — tell me the rest of it/ he said, feeling utterly weary; no longer safe.
‘Yes, be ready to move them when I give the order,’ Turgenev repeated, wrinkling his features into an expression of distaste that mocked him from the bedroom mirror. Panshin in his damned jazz club was the personification of corruption in miniature; he was sleazy, squalid. ‘Yes, check for surveillance, if you have any sense. And try not to sound too relieved — you should have no trouble from the police.’ He paused, then pressed the console beside the bed, accepting the incoming call he had kepi waiting. ‘Yes?’
He stared at the ceiling as he resumed his position against the pillows, avoiding the mirror.
‘Bakunin ‘
‘Yes? Is it over?’
‘Gorov and the American — got away.’ The voice was an abashed, anxious murmur.
‘You incompetent bloody fool, Bakunin,’ Turgenev’s voice strained for control. His hand, truer to his mood, clenched and unclenched on the counterpane. ‘What happened?’ He listened.
‘Then find them. What of Vorontsyev — you what?’ Perspiration sprang from his hairline. The pillows enveloped rather than embraced. The armpits of his silk pyjamas seemed clammy.
Events in Novyy Urengoy could not possess such self-volition, could not possibly orbit beyond his control. He was quivering with rage. It was as if everything was denying his authority.
‘Yes?’ he snapped, every emotion concealed by the fiction of busy irritation. Finally: ‘Then they are hiding somewhere — they are together. Find them and finish them. Make sure you’re successful this time.’
He put down the receiver and rubbed his temples as soothingly as a masseuse might have done. His head ached, as if he had entered a cold place from a warm room. The blizzard murmured beyond the double-glazing and the heavy drapes. He was deeply enraged. Challenged by a handful of petty, ignorant men who had decided upon self-destruction, on useless heroics. Nevertheless, successfully defied, every moment they remained alive. He inspected his fingers as if they had dabbled in dirt. Inferior, weak, unreliable individuals — Panshin, Bakunin, Vorontsyev and his crew … all no more than dogshit on one of his shoes, but now walked into the house, onto priceless rugs, offensive and unignorable.
Angrily, he got up from the bed and crossed to the bathroom in search of aspirin.
‘I know there are five of us. Lock, I know that-‘ Vorontsyev’s exasperation made his voice high, strained. ‘I know Turgenev as well as you do, only not under such elegant and sophisticated circumstances! I understand better than you do how easily he could rid himself of us.’ His anger faded and he lay back against the pillows. But Lock would not let him rest.
Then what exactly can we do to even things up a little? You know the town, the quality of the opposition. What do we do?
We can’t stay here forever.’
‘I know that, too,’ Vorontsyev sighed, waving his good hand feebly. The painkillers made him feel tired, made clear thinking difficult. ‘It’s still a question of survival, not revenge, Lock however much you want it to be the other way around.’ He paused. Lock’s intent gaze disconcerted him; he could see the American had little interest in survival, none in escape.
Lock had come for Turgenev and his new and untrusted companions were mechanisms whose only purpose was to place him in a position from which he could destroy his enemy.
‘It can’t be done,’ he said, ‘what you want. We can’t help you with it, no one can. There’s no way you can get close to Turgenev.’
Lock glowered at him, and said: ‘Then I’ll find the way for myself. Thanks for your help.’ He looked meaningfully at Dmitri, then stood up.
‘Sit down, Lock … there is one way. It won’t come out neatly, you killing Turgenev at high noon on the main street—’ He grinned and the mocking laughter in his chest was punished by the searing pain of his ribs. He coughed. ‘Forget the drugs for the moment.’ Dmitri appeared betrayed, let down. ‘It’s the scientists we should concentrate on.’
‘Why?’ Lock asked bluntly.
Vorontsyev gestured at the scattered papers on the bed and the other furniture, at Lubin and Marfa crouched on the floor, sorting the files Lubin had snatched from headquarters on Dmitri’s orders.
‘There’s everything in those files we have on the heroin. Even on Turgenev — our suspicions, all suspicions, are in the heads in this room. But there’s no proof and there never will be. He kills people, remember, to keep his secrets.’ He shivered. ‘You were once CIA, you claim … OK. There are CIA people in Georgia, protecting Shevardnadze, in Moscow around Yeltsin, the FBI is all over Moscow and Petersburg advising the local militia, gathering material on the mafia to help clean them up in America, let alone in Russia ‘
‘I know all that!’ Lock protested.
‘Then use what you know!’ Vorontsyev snarled. ‘Instead of imagining you’re in a cowboy movie, thinkV He coughed again.
Marfa’s empathetic wince made him angrier. ‘If we can nail down some proof, some actual evidence, regarding the trade in nuclear physicists and technicians with Iran or any other Moslem country, the CIA and the FBI will crawl all over Novyy Urengoy! Can’t you bloody well see that. Lock? That it’s not a one-man crusade against the forces of darkness? We need to find one of those very valuable human commodities, just one, and get him away from here.’
‘To Moscow?’ Dmitri asked in surprise.
‘Anywhere, now we’ve got Lock to help us. He speaks American, he’s State Department’
‘ ‘I’m wanted for murder,’ Lock said quietly.
‘A little local difficulty. Give them this and you’ll give them Turgenev. You’ll get a citation! shake hands with your President.
Be on the front cover of Time, I shouldn’t wonder!’
He waved his good arm and lay back once more, exhausted.
Lock continued to study his face, even when the Russian closed his eyes. Unexpectedly, he felt less alienated and alone in the room, less aware of four pairs of strangers’ eyes watching him. He rubbed his hands through his hair, aware, in an unwelcoming way, of the worm of survival wriggling in the pit of his stomach. And of Turgenev, remote and enfortressed and secure, and the smallness of their numbers, their utter powerlessness.
The shuffling of papers from the two younger ones kneeling on the carpet, the quiet scrape of pencils and of Dmitri scratching himself. Vorontsyev’s breathing and the ticking of an ornate, last-century clock on the marble mantelpiece …
‘OK — all right,’ he announced eventually. ‘I agree with your analysis. Washington — and maybe Moscow — would move heaven and earth to stop top Russian scientists being smuggled out. Drugs-‘ He swallowed angrily. ‘Drugs are passe, yesterday’s problem. Too ordinary to get excited about.’
‘You really agree the Yankees will want to know?’ Dmitri interjected, rubbing his loose jowls, looking tired, almost drunk.