Northlight

'I'm worried about a friend of mine. He hasn't phoned to ask about me, and he knows I'm here.'

She stood over the bed, her eyes aswim with avarice. 'Perhaps you're less popular than you imagined, citizen. Perhaps she knows you're in no condition to get it up any more.' A faint wheezing came from the little fleshy mouth and the eyes narrowed to slits. She was laughing at my attempt to deceive her: a «friend» could only be a woman, and a woman wanted only one thing.

I put a second ten-ruble note with the first. 'Actually it's a male friend. He's a Party member, and it's his duty to find out if I need any assistance.'

Her eyes changed instantly, darkening. She had a problem now: if she took the twenty rubles, I might report it. This could be a trap I was setting for her — it was being done all the time.

'It's just that I don't want to get into trouble, citizen. You're not meant to use the telephone, you know that.'

'Of course. That's why I need your help. You have the authority to assist me in the interests of the state. Look at it that way, comrade.'

Her bright eyes were drawn to my closed hand for an instant. 'If I let you use the telephone, then, that will be my reason. I'll be assisting the business of the state, as any good citizen is expected to do. Is that what you mean?'

'Yes. That should be its own reward. But I'm of the old school, comrade, and I've always thought there's only one reward that's really worth anything.' I opened my hand.

It was another half an hour before she reported the coast was clear. A new matron had taken over the night shift, and I assumed that five of the twenty rubles would have been sacrificed to oil the wheels.

I unhooked the black bakelite receiver and asked for the number and waited.

Two rings.

An orderly came past with a trolley, swerving every now and then because the woman shuffling beside it was holding the man who lay there, his face moon-white and his eyes clenched shut, a blue-veined hand exposed at the edge of the sheet, clutching a small ikon. Tears trickled on the frail parchment face, but they were not his — they were the woman's, falling on him as she leaned over the trolley. I didn't think he would cry again; she had to have tears enough for both.

'I can't push on, citizen,' the orderly said irritably, 'if you won't get out of the way.'

Four rings.

I was counting from habit. There were a lot of reasons why the embassy might not have been able to raise Fane — the lines could be down between here and Moscow under the weight of the snow; Fane could be on his way to Leningrad by now to catch a plane for London; Croder could have signalled him with a change of plan.

Six rings.

The trolley banged through the doors of the ward, leaving the sickly smell of gangrene in the corridor.

'Hello?'

Flicker along the nerves. Fane's voice.

'This is Boris Antonov.'

Short silence. 'I see. I didn't quite know what to make of his tone but I didn't care. Contact had been re-established and my lifeline held strong again. Then relief brought its natural reaction: anger.

'Where the hell were you?'

In a moment he said: 'I received bad news.'

I thought vaguely that it was civil of him to put it like that. He was the type of director who considered any executive expendable, and on the slightest excuse.

Or did he mean some other kind of bad news? 'What did they tell you?'

'That you'd been killed.'

'I'm not surprised. The rendezvous was a trap.'

A longer pause. 'Where are you now?'

I told him. I also told him that a hostile agency — probably directed from Peking — had put a bomb on the truck. I told him the rendezvous in the freight-yards had been blown. I told him that the objective was dead.

Then I waited.

He would be reaching for his sharkskin cigarette-case now and pulling out a flat Egyptian cigarette, lighting it with care, his poker player's eyes gazing quietly at nothing while he absorbed my information.

A Chukchi woman, slant-eyed, blubbery, with skin like candlewax, came heavy-footed from the ward and pulled a pair of crutches from the pile leaning in the corner, dropping one of them with a noise that brought a cry from someone along the line of beds.

'Peking?'

'According to the objective. He was selling product to them too.'

'I see.' A cool man, Fane: he could absorb entire horror stories without even flinching. 'How was he killed?'

'They shot him down in error, while he was trying to get clear.'

'Are you sure?'

'I was there.'

'He didn't have anything on him?'

'No. I'd already burned the papers he was carrying.'

There was a question he hadn't asked yet.

'You clumsy bitch? a man was shouting from just inside the ward. The Chukchi girl was having trouble with the crutches: every time she stacked them back against the wall they fell down again with a noise like the roof coming in.

'What is that?' Fane asked.

'Someone dropping crutches. Have you got a safehouse lined up for me?'

In a moment he said slowly, 'There's a place you can try.'

'They'll be throwing me out of here any time now. I want to hole up for a day or two before I start the trip home.'

'I see. What sort of condition are you in?'

'I'm not ready for any games yet. I'll need a day or two.' «Games» was our word for anything demanding, like running a frontier under gunfire or wrecking a checkpoint. He still hadn't asked how the rendezvous had been blown. It worried me.

After a while he said: 'All right. I don't know yet how I'm going to get you across, but we'll work something out.'

'You didn't expect you'd have to, did you?'

A very long pause.

'No.' I thought he wasn't going to say anything more, but his voice came back on the line. 'You can go to Apartment 12 in the Old Harbour complex. It's on the north-east corner of Lenin Prospekt and Vernadskogo Street. Are your papers intact?'

'Yes.'

'Knock at the door and you'll be let in. Do you want that again?'

'No.' I repeated the address and instructions. 'Then I want a meeting with you.'

'Of course. That too will be arranged in good time.'

I wished he didn't sound quite so unshakably cool about all this. I'd called him up and told him the objective was dead and Northlight shut down and it should have rattled him badly: he wasn't going to get an awful lot of bouquets from Chief of Control for letting- it happen. This too worried me.

Nerves, that was all. Did I want a local director hi the field who panicked every time a wheel came off?

The last thing I said to him was: 'If I phone your number again I'll expect an answer. I want to go home. You're not going to leave me to the in this bloody country.'

'Of course not.'

It went on snowing all night and by morning the ploughs were rumbling past the hospital and traffic had come to a standstill.

She gave me her address, little Pleshakovna, as I walked out of the ward, writing it on a dirty scrap of paper and thrusting it into my hand. 'I'm always home in the evening, after I get off here.' Her starved face creased into a seductive smile, leaving the desperation staring naked from her eyes as a guffaw sounded from one of the men in the row of beds.

I put the scrap of paper into my pocket and slipped her a fifty-ruble note, more than she'd earn under the brutish loins of a dozen visitors. What would I put it down as on my expense sheet for those arthritic hell-hags in Accounts to quibble over? Child maintenance? They'd go straight into terminal palsy.

I walked out onto the pavement, picking my way across greying drifts of snow and through patches of sand and clinker, feeling — as I had felt before — like a soldier groping his way home from a battlefield where the cries of the dying had faded, leaving only the scratching of a pen across the documents of surrender. I wasn't quite sure if I could ever pick up the step again, or even hear the drummer.