Northlight

'And the address, sir?'

'Hotel Les Jardins, Paris.'

She wrote it down. 'And they are for Miss Moira Cavendish, is that right?'

'Yes. But not fifty. Not fifty roses.'

'Not fifty?' She began staring at me again.

'No. One rose.'

But of course she wouldn't understand. I'd long ago worked it out that fifty roses would be too many. Too vulgar.

'Keep still,' she said.

I always got them to write it down very carefully when I was being cleared. All my savings to the abused wives thing, and a rose for Moira.

'He's coming round,' she said. For some reason she was speaking in Russian.

'Only one rose, sir?'

'Oh Christ, you'll never understand.'

Pain burned through me like a lava tide.

'Get Dr Novikova.'

But what about the roses? 'Aren't I dead, then?'

Her pale face looked more surprised than ever.

'What did you say?'

Watch it. I'd spoken in English.

In Russian I asked her: 'What kind of condition am I in?'

I didn't ask her where I was. By the smell of the ether this wasn't a bloody flower shop.

Another woman was standing over me now, dark and greasy-looking with her stained linen coat bursting at the buttons, a stethoscope round her neck.

'How do you feel?' she asked me with monumental disinterest.

'Fucking awful.'

She gave a bellowing laugh, full of silver teeth, and poked me in the ribs. It was enough to make me pass right out, and things looked different when I came to again. They'd moved me into a ward that smelled of stewed cabbage and human sweat. The ether had been more pleasant.

'What time is it?'

'Can't you see the clock?'

I craned my neck and noticed the pain was quite a bit less than before. I felt better in terms of morale, too, and decided that if the good Dr Novikova came along and tried to poke me in the ribs again I'd have her finger off.

A lot of questions were clamouring for answers inside the skull, rolling around like dice. Then it was light again and they brought me soup. I bent the handle of the aluminium spoon more or less straight and thought: Who blew the rendezvous!

Nobody here could tell me that, but I kept watching the doors at each end of the ward because at any given time a couple of men in plain clothes could walk in here and they would be able to tell me who blew the rendezvous, if they wanted to.

Karasov?

It would explain the aura of doom about him: he'd looked like a man on his way to the guillotine. But he hadn't known they'd shoot him. He hadn't known I would throw the toy.

And he'd tried to run clear: he hadn't just picked himself up and let them take him.

Not Karasov.

'You want some more?'

A slut with the eyes of an angel, pulling a lock of hair as wet as seaweed away from her brow.

'No thank you.'

I let her take the bowl away. There wasn't anything else I had to ask them: I'd wanted to know the usual things, which town was this, where had they found me, what day was it, so forth. They'd found me between the railway lines in Murmansk station early yesterday morning, unconscious from exposure: the train had pulled in late the previous evening. So I must have grabbed something when I'd started falling and saved myself, though I didn't remember anything about it. The organism, when left alone, when left to invoke the powers of zen, can do surprising things.

Volodarskiy?

No. Without any question: no. I knew that man. I'd known him in the first five minutes. Deadly, yes, but not to his friends, not to his guests.

'Do you know what they've done? They've taken my bloody leg off!'

He leaned over and spat on the floor.

'Are you sure?'

He turned his head and looked at me with that slow stare of appraisal we save for the mad. 'Don't you know,' he said with a throat filled with rage, 'when you've got one leg or two? Can't you count?'

'Sometimes we get strange ideas,' I said, 'in hospitals.' But in this region he was probably right: frostbite or gangrene set in quickly.

Phantom limb. My breath blocked in my throat and the ward rocked until I shut my eyes, one hand going down under the sheet, reaching down lower and lower and then at last from side to side until I was sitting up, feeling my feet. Then I began breathing again. That poor bastard was wrong: you can't always tell. You've got to count.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling, where the husks of last summer's flies still dangled from deserted webs. It could only have been the courier, the one who came in on the train from Murmansk with the papers for Karasov. He'd been a double operator and Fane hadn't known.

He would have to know. He would also have to know that he could go home now and tell them the show was over. I'd have to get out too: he would see to that. But it wasn't urgent: I was in no hurry to present myself for debriefing at Grader's desk.

'I want to use a phone,' I told the angel-eyed slut when she came past my bed.

'There isn't one. Not for patients.'

'Where are my things?'

'Things?'

'Possessions.'

She got the point and brought the stout cardboard box with the metal fastener and waited while I fished inside it and found a ten-ruble note.

'You'll have to wait,' she said, 'till the coast's clear.'

'Soon as you can.'

The ward started rocking again half an hour later, but not as badly as it had before when I'd gone along to the loo. The girl went with me, running a gauntlet of whistles from those patients whose libido had survived gross injury, amputation, concussion and the stink of Lysol and cabbage stew.

As we reached the telephone against the wall she said, 'Are you a Party member?''

'No.'

'If anyone asks what you're doing at the phone, tell them you're a Party member.' She draped her lock of seaweed higher across her brow and pouted her little egg-sized breasts at me under her soiled white coat, turning away with her eyes lingering seductively. You don't earn much in Murmansk, nursing.

I took the phone off its hook and asked for the number.

A man was leaning against the wall between the telephone and the door of the ward, thin as a skeleton and bearded like the Ancient Mariner, his bones shaking so hard that I could hear the brushing of his hospital gown against his legs. In the yellow light from the one bulb hanging from a hook in the ceiling his eyes glinted as he stared at me, and I looked away.

The number began ringing.

Good form, I supposed, should be observed when I spoke to Fane and told him what had happened. He was my local control and in a way this would constitute an interim debriefing.

The rendezvous was blown. The mission is now shut down. The objective is dead.

He would light a cigarette, slowly, before he answered. Then he would ask, because London would ask him, who blew the rendezvous and how did the objective meet his death.

It could only have been the courier. The objective was shot down by the KGB, in error, as he was trying to run clear.

The phone went on ringing.

I began counting.

He would ask me where I was now.

I'm in No. 2 General Maritime Hospital in Murmansk.

He would ask. Twelve rings. Thirteen.

He would ask me what I needed, and if I were in good enough shape for him to get me through the frontier.

I need a safe house first. They'll be discharging me any time now.

Sixteen. Seventeen.

The hairs were lifting at the nape of my neck. The number I was calling was the number where Fane had said I would always find him in this city. Always. For the executive in the field, sometimes hard pressed, sometimes hunted, sometimes dying, the telephone number of his local control is his lifeline. For as long as I remained in the field, Fane would man that line or leave someone with total trust to take over from him in shifts.