'It's a revelation,' I said.
'A what?' She leaned away and watched me again, her eyes liquid in the glow from the street, the colour of green chartreuse.
'I'm not often close to anyone who lets their feelings go.'
'I know. You're a lone wolf type. But that's what you want. Right?'
'It's what I've got." She was beginning to stir questions in me that I'd spent all my life refusing to ask, since the day I had looked down from the window at the broken body of the schoolboy on the flagstones a long way below, while a master hurried from the cloisters with his black gown flapping in the winter wind, to see what had happened: the day when I was suddenly old enough to understand that I had a choice. I could either do what that other boy had done, or I could spend the rest of my life outside society, where it was safe.
'The kind of loneliness I feel,' she said, 'is different.'
I hadn't thrown him, of course. But I knew why he'd done it.
'What kind is that?'
'I get so involved in this idealistic crusade of mine that I don't notice anything else going on. It's like, you know, you're acting on a stage someplace and pulling out all the stops, giving a performance that's going to go down in history, and suddenly you look up and see there's nobody out there, all the seats are empty and the whole place is dark.'
'Yes, that must be lonely.'
'But that's about me again. What about you, Clive? You really enjoy the lone wolf bit?'
I could see, beyond the curve of her naked shoulder, white flakes drifting across the aureole of a street lamp, whirling slowly in the wind.
'I expect I do.'
If there were more snow, the courier might not get the car through to Kandalaksha. It might even hold up the train.
'You expect you do?' She was watching me again. I'd put my wrist watch on the heavy darkwood table by the bed, and could see its figures. It was gone midnight, and I would need to leave here at three, in case of snow on the road to the station.
'Yes,' I told her, and pulled her gently down against me my hands moving along her body from the warmth of her hi — to her long swimmer's thighs, the thought in my mind, as.. comes always to us when we've just received briefing in the field, that Liz Benedixsen might be the last woman I would ever have known. 'I'm going to let you get some sleep,' I told her.
'You don't have to go.'
It wasn't easy to leave her. With the slow drifting down of the snow from the dark sky there was a sense of foreboding.
Post coitus, so forth.
I got into my clothes and took my watch from the table, leaning down to kiss her for the last time. When I reached the door she was sitting up in the bed with her arms round her knees, watching me, her eyes the only colour in the shadows.
'Take care,' she said.
13 MIRRORS
The conditions were unpropitious. Snow was still falling but less heavily, and on the northern horizon a crack of light shimmered, thrust between the dark earth and the dark sky like a bright sword blade.
The conditions were unpropitious for detecting surveillance.
The light was blinding if you looked at it directly. It was the edge of the sun's reflection on distant cloud banks, flooding across the polar ice cap. If you looked away it vanished. It was too distant to reach into the darkness here, where only the gooseneck lamps of the railway station kept back the night. Dawn would be hours yet.
The conditions mere unpropitious for detecting surveillance, it would be reported, if anything of this would ever be reported in the file on Northlight.
It's one of those stuffy phrases coined by the bureaucrats upstairs, hunched at their desks with a drip on their nose and frayed cuffs and patched elbows, their chilblained feet squeezed into their cracked patent-leather shoes and a mug of cold tea beside them as they scratch the epitaph across the file in longhand, like vultures picking at the bones of a dead mission.
They thumb through their mildewed copies of Roget's Thesaurus for euphemisms designed to give stark truths a burial more decent than the facts will allow. By reporting that the conditions were unpropitious for detecting surveillance they mean that the executive in the field checked and rechecked and couldn't see anyone but there must have been someone there because they got to him just the same and tripped his run and slammed him into an interrogation cell or waited until he was right in the middle of the piazza and then put him in the crosshairs and dropped him like a dead duck or set up the road-block on the far side of a blind curve and pulled him out of the wreckage while it was still burning.
There are other phrases.
He endeavoured to evade termination. That one's easy enough: the poor bastard broke a door down and took the stairs and got to the top floor but they'd been waiting for that and he went through the window because they'd opened fire and there was nothing he could lose but this time he wasn't lucky because there was only a glass canopy below to break the fall and it wasn't enough, finis.
They are the phrases we sometimes find in our minds, like official notices pasted on a wall, when a wheel comes off and we're suddenly on the brink. It would be amusing, I suppose, if we weren't so bloody frightened at the time.
The reason why the conditions were unpropitious this morning was mainly the snow. I'd got out of the hotel through the kitchens and the rear service door to avoid the KGB men in the lobby: the curfew was still on for foreigners and in any case I wanted to gain time and get as far as I could on the way to Kandalaksha before the chambermaids reported the man in 203 was missing. I'd gone clandestine now and there shouldn't be anything to connect the English journalist from the Leningrad Hotel and the Soviet engineer in the train except facial characteristics, which didn't amount to much considering the photographs. But you don't take chances.
The car started all right but the snowfall had piled up around it and I had to put it into gear and get the wheels spinning and then climb out and heave it across the ruts and get in again before it took off on its own. The main streets were still under ploughing and they'd thrown sand down but the traffic was chaotic: the early shift at the dockyards was at five o'clock and buses were taking to the side streets as an alternative to jamming up in lines at the main intersections and sometimes backing into the ploughed streets again because they couldn't get through the drifts.
In the three miles to the station I saw one car three or four times and a KGB van had followed me half the distance before peeling off, but it wasn't possible to detect any consistent surveillance operation going on: quite a few private cars were making detours and coming back again like the buses because they couldn't get through. A man — a dozen men — could have followed me on foot over the whole distance, and I wouldn't have been able to pick them out among the others along the pavements. The conditions, so forth.
It wasn't much easier on the platform here. There was too much cover: corners, doorways, shadows. Sailors were tramping along the edge of the platform, some of them dropping onto the rails and hopping from sleeper to sleeper, making a game of it to keep warm until an official waved a flag and yelled at them. There were two KGB men on routine observation duty near the booking office, keeping to the small area that gave them a good panoramic view of the platform. Two others were across the lines, watching their own territory; I didn't know whether this was the normal scene for Murmansk, but there would have been more of them in the streets and public places since Karasov had been posted as missing.