‘The GRU are there.’
‘Teplov?’
‘No, he wouldn’t. Just bad luck’
‘What about Marfa?’ Lubin all but wailed.
‘She told us not to go back there!’ Vorontsyev warned as Lubin turned the key and the engine coughed.
Lock remained silent as he watched the snowplough disappear and the huddled lump of the man retreat up L Street. The girl was none of his affair, however her vulnerability nagged at him.
If they caught her, she’d talk, as would any of them in time, but there was little or nothing to tell. Only the location of the ZiL.
Lubin and Vorontsyev were staring at each other in challenge.
Then the young man in the driving seat turned away, swallowing loudly. Dmitri’s large hands rested on the back of his seat.
Then he flapped his fingers in acquiescence and shrugged his shoulders. Lubin’s breathing was the sole noise of dissent.
‘We hang on?’ Lock asked.
Vorontsyev nodded. ‘We hang on-‘ he began gloomily.
‘Hello, what’s that?’ Dmitri was looking past Vorontsyev. Then he opened the door and began clambering out of the car. ‘There’s a car on 9th — parked. I’ll just go and have a look.’ He shut the door quickly on any reply.
The wind cut through his bulky clothing and the snow blinded him for a moment, until he read the direction of the wind and turned his gaze aside. He staggered like the drunk against the wall of wind and snow, as if feeling his way blindly along its solidity. Heard his teeth chattering and pulled his scarf across his mouth. His boots floundered through the drifted snow against shop fronts, grilles, steel doors. Signs in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, pigeon-English, Russian, Ukrainian. Smells, even in that temperature and force of wind, mostly the scent of the poor and the crowd, what they ate and drank.
He realised his mistake even as he imitated the figure who had faltered against the car. Lurching against the black, snow roofed car, he identified it as German. BMW. The thin, pale face of the driver stared into his and he recognized Dom Kasyan, Val Panshin’s hit man; small and neat as ever in a dark overcoat and black driving gloves. The face twitched with recognition and the decision to act. The door of the car began to open. Dmitri pulled himself away as if from a magnetic field, stumbling back across the pavement and against a darkened shop window protected by an ice-cold metal grille. Kasyan’s face was alert, threatening, even as his lips moved close to the mouthpiece of the earphone. A white wrist rested on the steering wheel. Something gleamed as it was held in the black driving glove.
Dmitri struggled with his clothes, opening his overcoat and reaching for the pistol in the shoulder holster. Kasyan put down the phone. It was only seconds since — the BMW’s engine fired, the door slammed, and the car screeched and ripped its way on snow tyres across the ruts and into the middle of 9th Street. Dmitri’s gun wavered in front of him, as if heid by someone else. His heart was pounding.
‘Oh — bugger it, buggerV he bellowed at the flying snow, way ing his arms as if he had been stranded in the storm by the accelerating BMW.
He turned and blundered back towards the ZiL, the wind behind him pushing him like a rock down a mountainside. Lubin and Lock were already standing beside the car, guns drawn. He looked back, stumbling, and saw the BMW turn out of sight.
‘What is it?’ Lock shouted.
Ignoring him, Dmitri reached the car and leaned into it, his breath coming in great sobs.
‘Kasyan — that little shit Kasyan!’ he shouted. ‘I recognized him and he recognized me\ Oh, shit, Alexei, it’s all cocked up —!’
‘What’s the matter?’ Lock demanded.
Vorontsyev snapped: ‘Panshin’s right hand. Panshin’s got the scientists all right, Kasyan must have been scouting the place they won’t bloody well come now!’
‘Lubin, let’s move it, uh?’ Lock ordered. ‘They know where we are now. Come on, fella, move it!’ He bundled Lubin back into the driver’s seat and climbed in beside Vorontsyev. ‘How far is this guy Panshin from here?’
‘What?’
Speed, man, speed. Did the guy use a phone?’ Dmitri, slamming his door, grunted in the affirmative. ‘OK, so Panshin knows. But he has to talk to Turgenev now. There have to be new arrangements, another safe house. Panshin must have them at his place — jazz club, you said?’ Vorontsyev nodded. ‘Then let’s hit it before they can get those people out of there. Hit it now— or forget it!’
‘Four of us—?’ Dmitri began.
‘What about Marfa?’ Lubin asked urgently. ‘She’ll expect us to be here.’
Marfa had obviously escaped; had necessarily escaped, for Lubin’s equanimity, his ability to function. Perhaps each of them assumed the same, Lock realised, even himself. The reminder of their numbers jolted him. He shook his head.
‘Hit it now, or forget it,’ he repeated. His hands were clenched into fists in his gloves, resting on the thighs of his denims. Come on, Vorontsyev, he thought, willing the policeman to agree. He looked at the Russians in turn. ‘We need one guy, just one. It was your idea — one guy to show to Moscow, to the CIA or the FBI. Only one.’
‘Lubin — take us to Panshin’s …’ He smiled, though he was leaning back in the rear seat to ease his ribs and arm. ‘I feel like some late jazz.’
‘What about Marfa?’
‘I can’t call her — it might kill her!’ Vorontsyev snapped.
The scullery door of the old house was slammed shut behind her. She stood shivering in the wind, her scarf flying away from her face so that she had to release her shaking body and grab at it. The cold she blamed as much on the ridiculous, humiliating housecoat — her throat and cheeks still reeked of the cheap scent — as on her fear or the storm. The door being banged shut was Sonya’s final ejaculation of angry relief.
She looked at her watch. Almost two-thirty in the morning.
The blizzard and the darkness oppressed her. Her own escape sharpened her sense of Goludin’s death. He’d been casually, finally erased, like some mistake. She saw his earnest, affably willing features and experienced a lurching sense of loss that momentarily dizzied her.
She shook her head to clear it and sniffed loudly; then reached into her pocket and removed Dmitri’s phone, at once dialling Vorontsyev with clumsy, gloved fingers. Then she waited, hearing nothing but the wind. The looming church was the only other building she could distinguish. Come on, come on, she muttered in her thoughts, stamping her feet.
‘Alexei — I’m all right!’ she blurted, at once embarrassed at her released nerves.
‘What happened?’ she heard in a voice from which all emotion was excluded, to her disappointment.
She told him in a babble of disconnected sentences, concluding:
‘They didn’t fancy me!’ And giggled with tension.
‘Where are you now?’
‘Outside the brothel. You?’
‘We’re—’ It was as if he had paused to consult the others, then he added: ‘We’re on our way to Val Panshin’s club. We think the people we want are hidden on the premises.’
‘I’ll join you,’ she said quickly. ‘Be there in fifteen minutes at most.’ She switched off the phone at once and thrust it decisively back into the pocket of her coat. In the other pocket, she gripped the pistol. The file of papers was held under her arm.
She stepped out into the full force of the wind and the hurled snow, which stung hard against her face. Her boots plunged into heaped snow as she’walked lumberingly towards the church’s dark, empty, decayed bulk and the lane where the car had been parked — aware that someone might have been left to keep the car under surveillance. It had a police numberplate, even if it was caked and hidden with frozen, dirty snow. She gripped the gun more lightly as she reached the broken fence that bordered the lane alongside the church. The deep impressions of the ZiL’s tyres were all but hidden. Maybe they hadn’t noticed the smaller car, her car …?