The Watcher gave her a shocked look, then quickly averted his eyes again.
‘This is not quite proper!’ he said. ‘Especially after that show you put on out there. I should call you a car, Mrs Moore. It is already late.’
Rachel sighed. Even if she could hypothetically bring herself to attempt seducing Kulagin, she was hardly Mata Hari with her wet witch-hair, sensible undergarments and thick ankle-length bathrobe that exposed no skin whatsoever.
‘Major, any impropriety here is in your filthy imagination. I am sure you have done things in Her Majesty’s service that are less proper than leaving a perfectly honourable man and a married woman alone in a room for an hour.’
‘Please,’ Kulagin said in Russian, with a pained smile. ‘I am trying to keep from laughing at this oaf, but it hurts.’
Rachel returned the smile. They should have tried to get the Russian drunk sooner. She had hoped to impress Kulagin with professionalism when the opposite might have been more successful.
‘What did he say?’ the major asked.
‘Yakov Mikhailovich is simply expressing his gratitude for your assistance and discretion,’ Rachel said. ‘Come now, Major, we are all professionals here. I am simply going to see to his wounds and then we will continue our interview. Nothing improper whatsoever.’ She lowered her voice. ‘If it makes you feel better, you can leave your sapgun with me.’
‘Very well.’ The major puffed out his chest. ‘But any monkey business will go into my report.’
He took out his sapgun, a small shotgun-bore revolver with four rubber bullets. It was the Service’s non-lethal weapon of choice. Rachel had fired one a few times but only in training. It had a terrific kick.
Rachel pocketed the weapon and narrowed her eyes. ‘Thank you. Naturally, it is your duty to include every detail. But so is mine. My report may mention your failure to stop Mr Kulagin from insulting and assaulting a young man of high station. I would much rather focus on how you arrived too late to stop the incident, and then immediately contacted me. I wonder which set of details Vee-Vee would discover the devil in?’
Allen rubbed his moustache.
‘I bid you both goodnight,’ he said finally.
His back was ramrod-straight as he left the room. The moment the door closed, Kulagin started laughing.
* * *
She cleaned Kulagin’s wound with alcohol, half-kneeling in front of him.
‘I may have misjudged you, Mrs Moore,’ Kulagin said in English. ‘You are a spirited woman, ambitious. I see it now. It must be difficult in this country, especially in your Service, being surrounded by all these Etonian boy-children who—how do you say—like each other’s bums?’
She pressed an alcohol-dampened cotton pad into the wound. Kulagin flinched.
‘There is no need to be crude, Yakov Mikhailovich.’
‘Ours is a crude profession, all shit and flies and sex, don’t let the bum-boys tell you otherwise! It would have been easier for you in the Soviet Union, Mrs Moore. There we are all comrades together, men and women, in the same shit. But here? Very difficult.’
‘I like difficult things. Otherwise why would I be patching up a foul-mouthed Russian who tried to get himself killed?’
‘Ha!’ Kulagin raised a hand. ‘I did not try to get killed.’ He ran his fingers along the wound. They came away covered with a thin film of blood. ‘I was trying to feel alive!’
‘You will not be alive much longer unless you let me clean it properly,’ Rachel said dourly.
This time, she poured the alcohol directly onto the wound and Kulagin shuddered from head to toe.
‘What a waste,’ he said. ‘We must drink together, you and I. To men and women, and being alive.’
‘No, Yakov Mikhailovich, we will not drink together.’
‘What?’
Kulagin’s face turned dark red with fury. He struggled to get up.
Rachel grabbed his shoulders and pushed. He fell back onto the couch heavily, overcome by surprise and gravity. She doubted she could have moved the Russian’s wrestler-like bulk otherwise.
‘We had an agreement,’ Rachel said. ‘In exchange for information deemed to be of value by the Service, we will arrange new papers for you, comfortable accommodation and subsistence, or, if you prefer, a Ticket and a painless transition to Summerland. Was there anything unclear about that?’
‘I was bored,’ he growled. ‘The young fool offended me. I acted. Nothing to do with our deal.’
‘It had everything to do with our deal. The deal was with us, not with our colleagues on the Other Side. There is a reason why you have not been given a Ticket yet. If you had been shot, you would have been lost like any Ticketless ghost, Faded in a day. Is that what you wanted? Or did you have such confidence in your aim?’
She got up, poured Kulagin a brandy from the room’s drinks cabinet and handed him the glass. His hand shook so badly he spilled some of the amber liquid in his lap. Then he downed the remainder in one gulp.
‘See?’ Rachel said. ‘I cannot imagine how you expected to hit anything.’
Kulagin let out a bark-like laugh. ‘Hit, miss—no difference! You just need to be the last man standing.’
Rachel returned to the drinks cabinet and refilled his glass, then took out a needle and a length of catgut thread from the first-aid kit. ‘Well, right now I need you to sit still. This will hurt.’
She pinched the white folds of his skin together and started stitching the wound. Before joining the Winter Court, she had worked as a volunteer nurse and her fingers remembered the movements. Kulagin twitched and drank more, grimacing.
‘You are a cruel woman, Mrs Moore,’ he said between sips.
‘If you say so, Yakov Mikhailovich.’ Rachel knotted the last stitch, yanked the thread tight and cut it with the kit’s tiny scissors. Then she put the first-aid supplies to one side and pulled out one of the desk drawers.
The recording equipment was in a false compartment installed by the Service before Kulagin moved in: an old-fashioned magnetophone in a heavy metal case. They had more modern equipment with Zöllner crystals that broadcast directly to the spirit Watchers, but the quartermaster was paranoid about using them on operations the brass did not want the Summer Court to know about.
Rachel clicked the case open and yanked out the tape. Then she sat in the leather armchair opposite Kulagin, folded her hands on top of one knee and looked at him calmly.
‘Now it is just the two of us, Yakov Mikhailovich,’ she said. ‘No notes, no recordings, no ghosts. Just a living man and a woman, bleeding and drinking.’
Kulagin did not look drunk anymore. His dark eyes burned with a cold fire.
‘You have been testing us,’ Rachel said, ‘measuring how badly we want what you have to offer. But you have gone too far. My superiors are going to put you on a boat to America. Is that what you want? We can protect you from your former colleagues better than the Yanks can, you know that. It is why you came to us in the first place. I can help you, Yakov Mikhailovich, but only if you help me.’
Kulagin leaned forwards, hands on his knees.
‘You think I am here because I am afraid, Mrs Moore? Scared that the big, bad NKVD will spank me if they catch me? I think we need to get to know each other better before we can talk. Much better.’
There it was. Rachel rolled her eyes.
‘I am a married woman, Yakov Mikhailovich.’
‘Aha! You are thinking of sex! Again, you misunderstand. Sex is a tool. Our Lenin School has a section, in the countryside, where women and men learn to use it. But it does not bring understanding. And I want to understand you, Mrs Moore. This thing we do, telling secrets we trained a lifetime to keep, it takes trust—on both sides.’