Northlight

'You'll never do it that way, Pussy, don't be such a bloody twit.' I went over and smashed my boot down across the fish crates, breaking a wire, smashing it down again and bringing splinters away while the cat shrank back with its ears flattened and its eyes huge in the gloom and that low wail in its throat as I brought my boot down again — 'Don't you swear at me, you old bastard, or I won't get your supper-' down again and ripping the whole side of the crate away as the fish came tumbling out — 'Go on then, bon appetit and all that.'

I swung around to face Fane — 'So what the hell was that rendezvous all about, the one in the freight-yards, what was the KGB doing there right on time if we were both meant to be hanging from the roof of that fucking barn with our guts hanging out — come on Fane I want to know.'

He drew in some smoke. 'That was just window-dressing. We told them you'd be there to meet the courier.'

'What do you mean, for Christ's sake?'

'It was to cover the contingency of your getting caught and interrogated. You would have admitted the rendezvous, even though you weren't going to keep it.'

Only Croder could be so meticulous.

'What about Tanya?'

'The KGB wanted you monitored. We agreed.'

'She was KGB?'

'Yes.'

'What if I'd shown my hand?'

He shrugged. 'I asked them about that. They said you were too experienced.'

'Why didn't you tell me who she was?'

'We couldn't. We would have had to tell you the whole set-up.'

'What was she for, then?'

'The Soviets assumed that when you found Karasov you'd let her know, and let her know where he was. Then they could have gone in for him.'

'I called her, Fane.' I went close to him. 'I told her we'd found him.'

He watched me carefully. 'We thought you'd do that, yes. But we knew you wouldn't say where.'

'How can Croder take that kind of risk?'

'There was no risk. You wouldn't have given away the objective. I asked you, on the phone, remember? And that's what you said.'

'One day Croder's going to go so close to the fire that he'll blow the whole of the Bureau through the roof." 'I doubt that.' He shrugged as I turned away. 'And it's a compliment to you, after all. He was relying on your experience. On your… dependability.'

'A compliment? From Croder?'

'He thinks rather highly of you, Quiller.'

'He ordered my death. But that wasn't what I hated him for. I hated him for his diabolical cold-blooded cunning, his ability to sit inside my brain as I went through the mission he'd set up for me, to know precisely the things I would do, could be relied upon to do, and the things I would not do, could be relied upon not to do, until finally he manoeuvred me into the position When I would complete the mission for him and turn on the ignition of that truck and ensure his success.

He is the only man I can loathe for his excellence.

'Put that behind you now,' Fane said, and lit another cigarette. The cat jerked his head up at the flash of the lighter, then went on gorging himself. 'It's turned out well for you: your death is no longer necessary.'

'Well that's a bit of luck.'

'Yes, as a matter of fact. We flushed the objective, as we agreed to do, and he is now dead, and by accident. And since they caused it themselves they can hardly say we arranged it, can they?'

I turned again and walked through the pale blue light, and my shadow flowed like a shroud across the earthen floor. The rage was over now and I felt the chill of stale sweat on me and the iron cold of this place, its metal buried under the new snows. 'So Northlight was a success.'

'Not quite,' he said.

I turned to face him. 'You've just said so. The mission was to flush Karasov and get him killed before they could put him under a light, and that's what happened.'

He was standing very still, the smoke from his cigarette drifting to the edge of the light and then forming tendrils that climbed in the updraught towards the roof. I waited for him to answer, but he was silent.

'You mean you still have to get me out?'

'It's not quite that, either.'

I didn't move.

'Then why-' but I stopped short. There are questions you should never ask, and perhaps this was one of them. But it circled inside my head.

Why had he brought me here?

He watched me steadily. The distance between us was ten or twelve feet, and I noted this subconsciously before I knew why it might suddenly have become important.

'Have you got an escape route for me?'

My voice sent an echo from the high metal roof.

'No.'

The cat dragged another fish from the smashed crate and crouched over it, tearing at it.

'Why not?'

'There hasn't been time.'

Ten or twelve feet was too far. He'd whipped that gun out very fast indeed when the cat had scared him just now. I could never reach him across this distance if he wanted to do it again.

Is that what he'd brought me here for?

What other reason could he have?

I was still expendable. My freedom, my welfare and my life could still be forfeit, if it would pay Croder, if it would in some way follow the convolutions of this mission to an effective goal.

But these were logical arguments and they didn't have a lot to do with my thinking, with my being suddenly afraid: it was the cold in this place, the deathly cold, and the pale unearthly light and the silhouette of the gantry with its gallows shape and the way Fane was standing there so still and so silent and above all the terrible understanding that since they'd already written me off in their minds it might be convenient, less expensive, less complicated for them to leave me here in this dead city under the snow.

Skin crawling at the nape of my neck.

'So why did you bring me here?'

23 TEAPARTY

'The circus, yes. I remember the circus. The clowns. The hot coals shimmered between us.'

'When was that?' I asked her.

The ancient face was so lined that her smile was almost lost in it, but it touched her rheumy eyes, lighting them. 'Oh, a long time ago, comrade. A. very long time ago.'

I took another chestnut and bit into it, feeling the urge to eat as the cat had eaten, the urge to survive. I suppose, if I'd wanted to go totally mad, I could have somehow got old Pussy across the frontier to London and put him in front of the fire, and fed him, and fattened him, and given him the right shots for distemper, turning him into a pet, a Kensington kitty, just for sentiment's sake because we'd once soldiered together in the winter of Murmansk. But that would only be a way of killing him, of bringing him a slow death among the bowls of warm gold top milk and the cushions and the hearthrugs, never again to know the fierce demented joy of seeing those fish come bursting out of that smashed crate and ravaging them, heady with rapture, scattering tails, scales and bones in that frenzied celebration of life renewed.

'You are from Moscow, comrade?'

'Yes.'

'The clowns were the best of all.' She took the poker in her withered hand and stirred the coals, and I tried to see her as she'd been then, wriggling on a board bench under the big spread of canvas, shrill with laughter as the men in their baggy trousers tumbled across the sawdust sixty years ago, seventy. 'I married one of them. One of the clowns.' Her head was going down, until I could only see the bone-yellow forehead below the black shawl. 'It is true what they say. Behind the make-up there is always sadness. And they do not live long.'

'But they live longer than others, old mother, in our memories. To bring laughter is to light the soul.'

She wasn't listening. She could span time more easily than I could, and she wasn't with me any more. I left her like that, crouched over her brazier in the midst of the new snows.