He tossed the sheet over her knees to cover the disturbing sight. ‘Some other time. Now I must get a move on. Make yourself some coffee if you want. There’s stuff for breakfast. Cereal, toast, anything you find.’ He went to the bathroom to shower and shave and clean his teeth, trying, and failing, to rid himself of the thought of her. When he came back she was in the kitchen, laying out breakfast things, pouring coffee. She was wearing her shirt from yesterday and nothing else: bare legs, faintly dusted with golden hair, bare feet and, as he discovered as she reached up for something from a top shelf, bare arse. She’d made toast. There was butter in a dish and she had discovered a pot of Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. ‘This is very English breakfast, isn’t it? But I cannot find sugar.’
‘The maid hides it. She thinks there may be shortages and we should keep it hidden.’ He opened the cupboard under the sink and took out a carton of sugar.
Lenka had stopped what she was doing. Her expression was transformed to that of angry primary school teacher – a frown, lips pursed. ‘You have maid?’
‘Goes with the job. Like the flat itself. She only comes one day a week. To clean the flat and take my laundry. ’
‘That is very bourgeois.’
‘We are pretty bourgeois in the Foreign Office.’
‘I’ll bet this služka she works for StB.’
‘She probably does. It’s better always to keep your enemy close, where you can see him.’
‘Close? Do you fuck her? Once a week?’
‘Certainly not. They tried an attractive one but I had to send her packing. She didn’t know how to iron shirts.’
‘So what is this ugly one’s name?’
‘Svetlana.’
‘There!’ Her tone was triumphant, as though the matter was certain. ‘You cannot get any more Russian than that. She is maybe KGB.’
Half an hour later he let her out of the flat, making her take the back way, out through the courtyard and the abandoned garden at the back of the building, where there was an ancient wall twelve feet high with an anonymous door that gave on to one of the alleys running down to the river. Once she had slipped away, Sam strolled through the Malá Strana to the palace that crouched warily beneath the Castle and housed the British embassy.
8
In the secure room deep within the embassy, an exclusive little group took its seats at the conference table. The secure room was not a cheery place. Windowless bare white walls, bleak fluorescent lighting, metal and plastic furniture. It was known as the mortuary.
‘Heard from the lovely Stephanie?’ the Head of Chancery asked Sam. Eric Whittaker had that knack, bestowed on high-flying diplomats, of being able to talk trivia while preparing for matters that matter. ‘So sorry to see her go.’
‘I had a card from her – Greetings from Cologne, wish you were here sort of thing. She was staying with friends at Rheindahlen but she should be crossing to England by now.’
‘We’ll miss her. Easy on the eye. You two still’ – a moment’s hesitation – ‘together? Madeleine always said you were perfect for each other.’
‘I used to think so too. Steffie has always had doubts.’
‘Frightened of becoming an embassy wife?’
‘Enough to put anyone off.’
Whittaker laughed, glancing round the meeting. There was a distinct feeling of Saturday morning. One member of the group was even without a tie. Whittaker coughed in that apologetic manner of his, to bring the meeting to order. ‘I’m afraid,’ he announced, ‘that H.E. cannot be here this morning – hobnobbing with the Yanks, I believe – so I’m in the hot seat. And’ – he glanced at the papers before him – ‘hot it certainly is.’ He tapped the paper. ‘So, what is this place, Čierna? Never heard of it myself.’
‘Čierna nad Tisou,’ someone said. ‘Eastern Slovakia, right on the Soviet border.’
‘Anyone been there?’
The fluorescent lighting of the secure room hummed thoughtfully. People waited for someone to contribute. Rather diffidently, Sam offered his own experience. ‘I have, as a matter of fact, Eric. Back of beyond, really. Little more than a rail terminus.’
‘Rail terminus? What on earth were you doing there, old chap? Trainspotting?’
There was a stir of amusement at the table.
‘If you remember, Eric, you sent me on a fact-finding tour of Slovakia when I first got here.’
‘Good God, I’d quite forgotten. What on earth had you done wrong?’
Laughter. Sam inclined his head, as though acknowledging applause. ‘But the rail terminus is actually rather interesting. It’s one of those forgotten corners of Europe, close to the point where Ukraine and Hungary meet with Slovakia – I believe geographers call it a tripoint – and there’s this enormous railway terminus with over nine hundred sidings. Makes Clapham Junction look like Adlestrop.’ He looked round at his audience. ‘I’m sorry, am I boring you?’
‘Not yet,’ Whittaker said, ‘but I bet you’re going to.’
There was further laughter. ‘I fear I already am. The problem is, Russian railways have a broader gauge than the rest of Europe, which means that every single trainload that crosses from East to West or West to East – goods, passengers, even politicians – has to trans-ship from one gauge to the other at Čierna. It makes for the most fantastic bottleneck, so much so that a few years ago they even built a broad-gauge spur over a hundred miles into Slovakia, just to bypass Čierna and ferry Ukrainian iron ore to the steelworks at Košice.’
The military attaché felt the need to contribute. He was a major in his final posting before retirement and was always conscious of being out of place amongst the diplomats. Perhaps he thought that Sam was trespassing on his territory. ‘It is worth pointing out that Russian armed forces have to do exactly the same thing when moving westwards – tanks, armoured cars, all materiel, in fact, has to be brought to Čierna nad Tisou, offloaded and either transferred to road or to another train. Wipe out Čierna and you block the way to the West for the Red Army.’
Eric raised his eyebrows in that infuriating manner he had when spotting a red herring swimming through the pond of his meeting. ‘But we’re not talking about war, are we David? At least, I hope we’re not. We’re talking about Dubček and his partners in crime being summoned to a meeting with the entire Soviet Politburo at this godforsaken railway station. Why on earth, one wonders, choose this place?’
Sam said, ‘I think the Czechoslovaks are most reluctant to meet outside their own borders at the moment. If you’re riding a tiger you don’t want to ride it into the tiger’s own den.’
‘To stretch a metaphor.’
‘Beyond its breaking point, I fear.’ More amusement at the table. He and Eric were good together, Chancery putting on a show of irony and self-deprecation, qualities that had once been a stand-by of such people through centuries of empire and now seemed equally well adapted to Britain’s lowered status in the post-war world. ‘At the same time, Comrade Brezhnev appears a little nervous about being seen in Czechoslovakia. I understand the Russian train is due to be shunted across the border to Čierna in the morning for talks, and then, in the evening when the discussions are over and they’ve had a jolly dinner with the fraternal comrades, they’ll be shunted back to Russia for the night. That’s what we gather.’
‘You’re not serious? They’re frightened of spending the night in Czechoslovakia?’
‘Something like that.’
They digested this piece of news in silence before Whittaker spoke again. ‘We can only await developments, I suppose. And hope that common sense prevails. In the meantime, I would like to draw your attention to a report that comes, unattributed and unattributable, of course, from the Friends.’