When they were in the flat she switched the electric fire on and Shaw sat by it, coding up a message for Latymer telling of all he had seen and indicating the N.C.O.’s words about completion. He transmitted this at once and then warmed himself right through by the fire while Triska made him a hot drink. After that — bed; and Shaw slept like a log, flat out and dreamless, until the broad daylight coming through into the bedroom brought him wide awake and he found himself warm and comfortable in Triska’s arms. She was stroking his forehead and there was a strange expression in her face, a look of loneliness and longing.
Shaw took her wrist in his hand and asked quizzically, “Well? Why are you looking at me like that?”
She coloured. “Oh… no special reason, Peter. Except perhaps that I am fearful of what may happen to you.”
“Don’t start thinking like that,” he told her. “I’m used to this sort of thing, remember? I’ll get by.”
“I do not think you take enough care. You have never thought of giving it up, this life of yours?”
“Often!” He laughed. “I’ve got a chief who doesn’t think I should, though.” He sat up. “It’s getting late, Triska. I must go.”
“No. It is early still, you did not sleep for long.” The odd look was still there, tender and sad, and her colour was high, her lips slightly parted. “You need not go yet.”
He said uncomfortably, “I’ve got some thinking to do, and I want to show myself at the Nikolai—”
“Back on the road, Peter, you said you could do nothing more until eleven o’clock tonight. A few more minutes will make no difference to your thoughts, Peter, or to the hotel. Then I shall get breakfast while you bath and dress and after that the day is yours, yes?”
He looked down at her as she lay beside him and then suddenly his hands were on her body, pulling urgently at her nightdress, and she helped him, lifting her arms so that he could pull it over her head. He felt her small cup-like breasts straining against him and he took her in his arms and crushed her to him. His lips came down on hers, hungrily, and he felt the surging warmth of her body against his own. Then she gave a small cry and he felt a shiver run through her, a shiver of eager surrender, and her thighs moved a little beneath him.
They were just finishing breakfast and it was still barely nine o’clock when the doorbell pealed and went on pealing. Triska started and went very white, then left the room and answered the door. Shaw jumped up in consternation when he heard her say, “Igor! Why, you are—”
The reply was thick with drink in spite of the early hour. “There has been trouble. I am sent into Moltsk to talk to some of the families of the civilian workers.”
Then the door of the sitting-room, which had been ajar, was jerked violently back by the resounding kick of a heavy boot. Major Igor Bronsky lurched into the room, his eyes bloodshot and, as they took in Shaw, angry.
Bronsky walked up to him slowly. He demanded, his voice harsh and his heavy white face twitching, “Who is this?” He slewed round on Triska as she came in behind him, nearly losing his balance as he did so. “Who is this man?”
She shut the door and said quietly, “Mr Peter Alison of the Workers’ International Organization for Cultural Advancement. From Moscow. Peter, this is my cousin—”
“When, from Moscow?”
Shaw said, “Some days ago.”
“What do you do?”
Shaw told him and he made a crudely anatomical remark. “A genius, yes? Ah, me! Why is your hair not long, genius?” He belched, and walked round and round Shaw, looking at him in wonderment and speaking in an irritatingly high-pitched voice which he seemed to find amusing. Shaw put him down as a buffoon, though a sinister one. “Poets, painters, pimps. I spit on them.” For one moment Shaw thought the man was really about to spit, but he refrained. “The poet has spent the night in your bed — are you going to tell me that, Triska?”
She faced him, eyes flashing. “And what if I did tell you that, Igor?”
He shrugged heavy shoulders and lowered himself into a chair. “I would say this: that I do not admire your choice, that if I were you I would prefer to bed with a man rather than a poet, but that your morals are not my concern, Triska. You are my cousin, not my wife or my mistress, and your particular style of beauty makes no appeal to me or I would have put you to bed myself before now.” He looked her up and down. “There is not enough flesh… me, I like something to get hold of.”
She said disdainfully, “You are drunk.”
Bronsky gave a cynical laugh. “Drunk! Dear Triska, I have not yet had time to get drunk. When I am drunk, I can no longer move. Until that happens, I am sober. But enough of this. You now, poet,” he said truculently. “What do you know of death?”
“Death?” Shaw raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Not very much, I’m afraid, Major. And you?”
Bronsky pulled a flask from his hip-pocket and drank, wiping the cuff of his uniform across his lips afterwards. “Plenty. Death is my trade. I kill, I am trained to kill, because I am a soldier, poet, a soldier of the Red Army.” His words were slurring badly and his head had begun to weave from side to side. “Last night a man was killed in… my place of duty, you understand, and now I have to question the relatives of his comrades to see who the murderer may have been. I investigate the enmities among these people. I shall investigate very thoroughly. Perhaps I investigate some of the women first.” His glance was on Triska’s breasts, suggestively, roving down her body; then his red-flecked eyes swung back towards Shaw, glittering, and he veered off on to another subject. “You English. I feel sick to the stomach to look at you. So smug. Oh, so damn smug!” Unsteadily he leaned forward and waved a finger in Shaw’s face. “You believe, I am told, that the sun shines from your collective fundamental orifice. You… are going to get the damn biggest shock of your life, poet.”
Shaw smiled acidly. This man was well worth encouraging a little further. He asked, “Really?”
“Really!” Bronsky mimicked him. “Triska, how you can bear to sleep with a poet… it revolts me, it is almost an unnatural practice. Poet, it will not be long now.”
“Oh? What won’t, Major?”
“Aha, you would so much like to know!” The mouth sagged stupidly but the eyes were hard and glittering still, like black diamonds in the pasty face. “You would like to know… and damn me, poet, if I do not tell you! It cannot matter now… you cannot leave Russia now that strong men are in the Kremlin. What does it matter now, poet, tell me that?”
“I don’t suppose it does, if you say so.”
Bronsky made a contemptuous gesture. “Of course it does not. Now I will tell you. One of our ministers arrives today, here in Moltsk. The Minister of Defence. And do you know who he will have with him, poet? Do you?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Lawrence Carew. Now do you see?” Bronsky sat back complacently, triumphantly, watching the effect of his words.
The effect was there, right enough.
Shaw’s hands had clenched behind his back and his lips had gone very dry. Carew — of all people! Shaw knew that name only too well, as indeed the whole of England knew it. Carew had been a nuclear physicist, a brilliant man, and thirteen years ago he had flitted to the East. There was said to be nothing Lawrence Carew didn’t know about nuclear matters, and his loss had sent Whitehall and Washington as well into the biggest panic for years — and, in due course when it all came out, Moscow had been openly exultant about his defection, as exultant as the West had been dazed. Carew had for some years now been a full citizen of the Soviet Union. And, ironically enough, as Shaw now remembered reading in the papers, it had been WIOCA that had given Lawrence Carew his start in life, put him on the road to his studies and laid the foundations of his reputation.