Northlight

'What kind of bullshit is he giving you?' the girl asked.

'There's a curfew. The only thing you can do about it is calm down and come and have a drink.'

'D'you always let these bastards have their own way?'

'It's more comfortable.'

'Whose side are you on, for Christ's sake?'

'Come and have a drink.'

She stared at me with her head flung back and her eyes still hot. 'Did you know about this curfew?'

'No.'

'Then why are you taking it lying down?'

'Because this isn't my first time out here.'

'How d'you know it's mine?'

'It shows.'

'Christ, I don't know which one of you bastards I hate most.'

'You'd better choose, because I'm the one who's going to buy you a drink.'

'Shit.' She turned and walked off, then swung back to look at me. 'I guess that's not very polite.'

'It'll do.' I nodded to the KGB man and put an arm around the girl and took her into the bar. It was almost deserted. 'What would you like?'

'A iManhattan.'

She was young, though I couldn't tell which side of thirty: I'm no good at people's ages. In her blue parka and gloves she looked more like one of the jet set just off the ski slopes.

'But why are they suddenly having a curfew?'

I'd chosen a corner table with a view of the doorway. The three men at the bar were speaking English, but one was French; I could hear the accent.

'The whole place is jumpy. You should know that.'

'Why should I?'

'You're a journalist.'

'Jesus, I wish-' then she took her drink and looked down and said, 'I guess I need this.'

'Cheers.'

'What? Cheers.'

The other two were German. The Frenchman was getting tight.

'Where are you from?' I asked her. It was going to be fifteen minutes of small talk and then I was going up to my room because I wanted to do some thinking: I wanted to find out why they were giving me rope. It was like being on a pond in winter: I could hear the ice cracking.

'Boston. What about you?'

'London. My name's Clive Gage.'

'Hi. I'm Liz Benedixsen.' She put out a cold hand. 'I don't normally blow my top that way. I just got fired.'

'From your paper?'

'Right. They called me home, but I'm not going.'

'You like Murmansk in winter?'

'You mean the cold? I don't mind that. Why did you order tomato-juice?'

'I like it.'

'Oh. Ex-boozer?'

That's right.'

'You don't look like a journalist, Clive.'

'This is a disguise.'

She had an interesting smile, it was private, confiding.

'What's your paper?'

'The Monitor.'

'Class.'

'A little conservative. Though not in your meaning of the word.'

'Redneck?'

'Quite. More blue-blooded.'

She laughed again.

A man had come in and was sitting at the far end of the bar and I watched him now and then but he was all right: he could have used the gold-framed mirrors to cover this corner of the room but he was sitting too far at an angle.

'Your editor hasn't called you back?' the girl asked me.

'No.'

'Most of them have gone. Didn't you notice?'

'Yes.' I hadn't. I'd thought they were out with a guide trying to rake up some local colour.

'You know why they've gone?'

'No.'

She looked around at the three men sitting at the bar and the man at the end, then back to me, her eyes concentrating, weighing me up. 'I haven't seen you around much.'

'I've been working in my room.'

She considered this. 'You know we're about the last ones left? You, me, and these guys in here? That doesn't tell you anything?'

'There's no story.'

'Well sure, that puts it simply enough. But I mean why not? The summit meeting in Vienna's in jeopardy and there has to be the most tremendous amount of secret diplomacy passing between the Kremlin and the White House over the submarine sinking and we're sitting right here in Murmansk where it happened — and there's no story?'

'But we're only here to make a gesture.'

'A what?'

'Secret diplomacy isn't for publication. All we can hope to get out of the Soviet Ministry of Information is continued denial.'

I was wrong. He was using a mirror.

'So what are we doing here?' Liz asked me.

'We're here to report that the city housing the Soviet Union's major naval base is full of tension tonight, that a curfew has been ordered for the protection of foreign journalists because the good citizens here resent the United States sending a submarine to spy on their most secret defence installations, and that they've been queueing up for clogs all day in a temperature of 25 degrees below.'

He was using the long narrow mirror between the end of the bar and the heavy plush curtains. He was watching me now.

'That doesn't sound like the Monitor.'

'The Monitor does what every other paper does when it has to. It prints whatever news it can get, and what it can't get it makes up.'

She looked down at her drink for a minute while I turned slightly and worked out the angles and found that I could watch him in the other mirrors while he was using the narrow one, and tell by the angle of his head when he was watching me. Or maybe I was being paranoid just because of the room search: he could be sitting there trying to make up his mind what the chances were of getting rid of me and moving in on Liz Benedixsen, who was quite attractive and the only woman remaining among the press contingent.

'You know something, Clive?' She'd lowered her voice and was looking at me with her green eyes totally engaged. 'I believe I know why there's no story. I believe I know why most of the gang has gone home. I believe there's a major cover-up going on over the sinking of that submarine. I mean major. Like I say, involving the Kremlin and the White House, on a hotline level.'

I drank the last of the tomato-juice. It tasted of brine.

'Possibly.'

She leaned nearer me across the low table. 'You remember what Claire Sterling did with the attempt on the Pope?'

'Yes.'

'She exposed a major cover-up, right? And they still wouldn't listen. Even the CIA. Even the New York Times. She said that even though there was actual evidence pointing directly to Andropov there was just no way the West could come out with a public accusation, because if it did, there was no way the West could go on maintaining diplomatic relations with people who had tried to murder the Pope. And if we couldn't go on maintaining diplomatic relations with the Soviets, it would be the end of our chances for peace.' She moved her glass round and round on the black marble table, the reflection of her drink playing across her eyes. Then she looked up again. 'Are you seeing any connection, Clive?'

'You might not be far from the mark.'

He wasn't lip-reading: he looked up at the mirror only at intervals. He wasn't KGB: his suit had been made in London and he was showing a tan. For the first time the idea occurred to me that Captain Bratchenko had been speaking the truth: it hadn't been his people who'd searched my room.

'Okay,' Liz said quietly, 'the sinking of a submarine isn't so horrendous as the idea of a pope getting shot to death — which was their intention. Tragic as hell, with all those lives lost, sure, but nothing like as far-reaching diplomatically — until you consider how vital that summit meeting is for us all. And then we get the parallel, right? There's no way the American public would allow the president to talk to any country that has just wiped out all those lives without any attempt to warn them first. These bastards shot from the hip, and before they woke up to the fact they were also shooting the summit conference right out of the water.'

I had begun listening.

'That's quite interesting.'

'I hope that's a good old British understatement, Clive, because I find the idea so goddamned interesting myself that when my editor cabled saying I had to go home like all the others I told him he could go screw himself.' She finished her drink.