It was hopeless, utterly hopeless. He would gladly have given the whole do a miss and walked the three miles to Julia’s hotel. But duty called, as it always fucking did.
As he stepped from the Rolls, Harry smiled and waved to the small band of press photographers, using the opportunity to scan the crowd.
“Harry! Harry! We love your movie! We can’t wait to see it!”
He waved at the two young women, not nearly as drunk as the Harvard girl, but still a few sheets into the wind. A long time ago, in an alternate universe far, far away, he might’ve wandered over to make their acquaintance. Here he simply mouthed Thank you and gave them a thumbs-up before heading into the restaurant.
Babington’s entrance was crowded. There appeared to be about eight guests, all of them formally dressed like him, held up at the security desk. Harry heard the first snatches of angry Russian as he reached the back of the small knot of pissed-off Smedlovs.
“This is intolerable,” someone growled in heavily accented English. “We have invitations right here. I can see our names there, on your list …”
Then Harry did a double take. No, not at the Russians piled up in front of two large airport-style metal detectors-they were almost certainly NKVD-but at David Gower, the former English cricket captain. Or unborn English cricket capt … Whatever the actual fuck, he shook his head at the sight of a young man who, at first glance, was Gower’s double. Perhaps an uncle or some more distant relative.
“Your Highness, so glad to see you-please step this way,” said the young man, with the polished tones of an Oxford graduate, and the smooth, gliding walk redolent of another, more exclusive place of learning; the Secret Intelligence Service’s close-combat finishing course at Albany Street barracks. Of slender build, with blue-green eyes, and curly blond hair that was somewhat longer than the regulation military length, he had the polished manners of a diplomat and the hard, callused hands of someone who had spent years being trained to kill with them. A mid-to-late-twenties version of Colonel Harry Windsor, in other words.
And this fellow did look remarkably like the left-handed batsman.
“Is there some problem here with our Russian friends?” asked Harry, shaking off his surprise and getting into character.
“Nothing for you to concern yourself with, Your Highness,” his greeter assured him. “Just a little misunderstanding over the guest list.”
The Smedlovs broke off from arguing with the two hard-faced door bitches (almost certainly Carstairs’s people) who had refused them entry. As soon as they recognized the man they thought of as the heir to the British throne, the Russians turned their anger on him.
“Is this how your government demonstrates bonds of friendship and trust, sir?” said one, obviously the leader of the group. “We have been invited here tonight, then told invitations no good. This is deliberate insult to the Soviet peoples.” At this, the man drew himself up and puffed out his chest.
“And which of the Soviet peoples are you?” Harry asked pleasantly.
“Viktor Kuryakin, second assistant secretary, Cultural Division. And you, as senior representative of Her Majesty’s government, Prince Harry, must make these amends. Otherwise, there will be international incident.”
Harry’s eyes twinkled as he grinned and patted the Russian on the back-copping a feel of the butt of his handgun in its shoulder holster as he did so.
“Oh, I’m sure there’ll be an incident, Viktor,” he winked, before moving into the hallway and leaving them behind.
9
North Rome (Soviet sector)
The market square was small, but crowded with busy huddles of stallholders, farmers in from the countryside, and women of various ages. All of this last group, despite the late hour, were trailing bands of squalling children as they haggled for the best price on strings of garlic, vine-ripened tomatoes, or a small, straggly bunch of carrots. There were few men of working or fighting age to be seen, but here and there, knots of elder males sat in groups smoking their rough, hand-rolled cigarettes and staring straight through the passing foot patrols of the People’s Polizia and their Red Army escorts. Ivanov and Franco hung back in the entrance to a dogleg alley running off the rear of the piazza, obscured from view by a curtain of bedsheets hung out to dry from the lowest landing of an external staircase. It reminded Ivanov of the fire escapes you found clinging to the sides of apartment buildings in places like New York, except this one was made of wood. A fire hazard, not a fire escape.
“She will return soon,” said Franco, anticipating his next question. “She is a good girl, my cousin Carlo’s daughter. She will bring us what we need.”
The Russian did not reply. He merely nodded as he watched the crowd in the marketplace through a gap in the bedclothes, while weighing the heft of the new weapon in his right hand. He’d had to improvise: a heavy cobblestone, ripped up from the road surface and dropped into a gray, tattered pillowcase. A few twirls of the cotton sack and he had a workable cosh. A good weapon for killing without bloodshed. Well, without too much bloodshed.
Ivanov had not spent a great deal of time on the streets of Soviet-controlled Rome. He took in as much detail as he could now, trying not to compare what he saw with what he knew of Free Rome. He needed to understand this part of the city on its own merits, not as a comparison with the Allied sector. It was not easy because the differences were striking. The Italians, as always, were noisy-they haggled and bickered, loudly talking over each other, gesticulating with their hands-but their efforts were less theatrical here than in the south; more earnest, or even desperate. The children were not starving, exactly, but they had the look of hungry animals about them, a pinched intensity that Ivanov was familiar with from his travels through the outer wastes of Stalin’s empire. The eyes of their mothers and grandmothers were hollow and dark, and sunken deep in their faces. They too looked malnourished, but worse than that, they looked ashamed of their inability to feed and properly clothe their half-feral children.
Despite the palpable air of anger and despair, the city’s Communist overlords had it locked down. Ivanov, with long experience in fomenting dissent and insurrection among people like this, felt none of the dry, explosive tension in the air that preceded an outburst of mass violence. The menacing presence of heavily armed security patrols saw to that. Their reputation for swift and terrible violence guaranteed it.
He edged back into the darkness as a couple of machine-gun-toting polizia, escorted by four soldiers-paratroopers, by the look of their bloused pants and jump boots-stomped by the entrance to their alleyway. They showed no interest in this hiding place, and Furedi had assured him they would not. “They will not come down here,” he’d said. “The snout of a pig, it can always be drawn to a sweeter-smelling treat.”
This would have been so much easier on the other side of the Wall. Free Rome was a shambles. A mad, anarchic tangle of locals and foreigners, refugees, migrants, and the soldiers of six NATO divisions all tumbled in on top of each other. Bands of gypsies ran wild there, often battling with Jewish street gangs and Roman sgherri, all of them looking not to get stomped into the pavement by the police or neighborhood mafia enforcers like Franco Furedi. A freak show like that was always easy to hide in. Once you emerged aboveground in North Rome, on the other hand, you were in a great open-air prison camp with guards and patrols everywhere. It was a bleak still life, painted in ashen gray, compared to the riot of color and noise across the Wall.