'Does he always do that?'
She laughed. 'I told you. It is not even normal that he writes to me, and it is many months, I would say years, since he spoke of our love, which is now entirely spiritual. I think the illness has made him a little sentimental, so we shall forgive him.' She turned the page in h is hand, and again their hands met, but Barley's was as cold as winter and he was secretly- surprised that she did not comment on it. 'Now we come to Mr. Barley. You. He'is extremely cautious. He does not mention you by name. At least the illness has not affected his discretion. "Please tell our good friend that I shall try my best to see him during his visit, provided that my recovery continues. He should bring his materials and I shall try to do the same. I have to deliver a lecture in Saratov that week" - Igor says that is the military academy, Yakov always gives a lecture there in September, so many things one learns when somebody is ill - "and I shall come to Moscow as soon as possible from there. If you speak to him before I do, please tell him the following. Tell him to bring all further questions because after this I do not wish to answer any more questions for the grey men. Tell him his list should be final and exhaustive."'
Barley listened in silence to Goethe's further instructions which were as emphatic as they had been in Leningrad. And as he listened, the black clouds of his disbelief swept together to make a secret dread inside him, and his nausea returned.
A sample page of translation, but in print, please, print is so much more revealing, she was saying on Goethe's behalf.
I wish for an introduction by Professor Killian of Stockholm, please approach him as soon as possible, she was reading.
Have you had further reactions from your intelligentsia? Kindly advise me.
Publishing dates. Goethe had heard that autumn was the best market, but must one really wait a whole year? she asked, for her lover.
The title again. How about The Biggest Lie in the World? The blurb, please let me see a draft. And please send an early copy to Dr. Dagmar Somebody at Stanford and Professor Herman Somebody-else at MIT…
Barley painstakingly wrote all this down in his notebook on a page he headed BOOK FAIR.
'What's in the rest of the letter?' he asked.
She was returning it to its envelope. 'I told you. It is love talk. He is at peace with himself and he wishes to resume a full relationship.'
'With you.'
A pause while her eyes considered him. 'Barley, I think you are being a little childish.'
'Lovers then?' Barley insisted. 'Live happily ever after. Is that, it?'
'In the past he was scared of the responsibility. Now he is not. That is what he writes and naturally it is out of the question. What has been has been. It cannot be restored.'
'Then why does he write it?' said Barley stubbornly.
'I don't know.'
'Do you believe him?'
She was about to be seriously angry with him when she caught something in his expression that was not envy and not hostility but an intense, almost frightening concern for her safety.
'Why should he spin you the talk just because he's ill? He. doesn't usually fool around with people's emotions, does he? He prides himself on speaking the truth.'
And still his penetrating gaze would not relinquish her or the letter.
'He is lonely', she replied protectively. 'He is missing me so he exaggerates. It is normal. Barley, I think you are being a little bit – '
Either she could not find the word, or on second thoughts she decided against using it, so Barley supplied it for her. 'Jealous,' he said.
And he managed what he knew she was waiting for. He smiled. He composed a good, sincere smile of disinterested friendship and squeezed her hand and clambered to his feet. 'He sounds fantastic,' he said. 'I'm very happy for him. For his recovery.'
And he meant it. Every word. He could hear the true note of conviction in his voice as his eye moved quickly to the parked red car on the other side of the birch grove.
Then to the common delight Barley hurls himself upon the business of becoming a weekend father, a r6le for which his torn life has amply prepared him. Sergey wants him to try his hand at fishing. Anna wants to know why he hasn't brought his swim suit. Matvey has gone to sleep, smiling from the whisky and his memories. Katya stands in the water in her shorts. She looks more beautiful to him than ever before, and more remote. Even collecting rocks to build a dam, she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
Yet nobody ever worked harder on a dam than Barley that afternoon, nobody had a clearer vision of how the waters should be held at bay. He rolls up his stupid grey flannel trousers and soaks himself to the crotch. He heaves sticks and stones till he is half dead, while Anna sits astride his shoulders directing operations. He pleases Sergey with his businesslike approach, and Katya with his romantic flourish. A white car has replaced the red one. A couple sit in it with the doors open, eating whatever they are eating, and at Barley's suggestion the children stand on the hilltop and wave to them, but the couple in the white car don't wave back.
Evening falls and a tang of autumn fires drifts through the dying birch leaves. Moscow is made of wood again, and burning. As they load the car, a pair of wild geese fly over them and they are the last two geese in the world.
On the journey back to the hotel, Anna sleeps on Barley's lap while Matvey chatters and Sergey frowns at the pages of Squirrel Nutkin as if they are the Party Manifesto.
'When do you speak to him again?' Barley asks.
'It is arranged,' she says enigmatically.
'Did Igor arrange it?'
'Igor arranges nothing. Igor is the messenger.'
'The new messenger,' he corrects her.
'Igor is an old acquaintance and a new messenger. Why not?'
She glances at him and reads his intention. 'You cannot come to the hospital, Barley. It is not safe for you.'
'It's not exactly a holiday for you either,' he replies.
She knows, he thought. She knows but does not know she knows. She has the symptoms, a part of her has made the diagnosis. But the rest of her refuses to admit there's anything amiss.
The Anglo-American situation room was no longer a shabby basement in Victoria but the radiant penthouse of a smart new baby skyscraper off Grosvenor Square. It styled itself the Inter-Allied Conciliation Group and was. guarded by shifts of conciliatory American Marines in military plainclothes. An air of thrilled purpose pervaded it as the expanded team of trim young men and women flitted between clean desks, answered winking telephones, spoke to Langley on secure lines, passed papers, typed at silent keyboards or lounged in attitudes of eager relaxation before the rows of television monitors that-had replaced the twin clocks of the old Russia House.
It was a deck on two levels, and Ned and Sheriton were seated side by side on the closed bridge, while below them on the other side of the sound-proofed glass their unequal crews went about their duties. Brock and Emma had one wall, Bob, Johnny and their cohorts the other wall and centre aisle. But all were travelling in the same direction. All wore the same obediently purposeful expressions, faced the same banks of screens that rolled and flickered like stock exchange quotations as the automatic decodes came in.
'Truck's safely back in dock,' said Sheriton as the screens abruptly cleared and flashed the codeword BLACKJACK.
The truck itself was a miracle of penetration.
Our own truck! In Moscow! Us! In English it would have been a lorry but here it was a truck in deference to the American proprietorship. An enormous separate operation lay behind its acquisition and deployment. It was a Kamaz, dirty grey and very big, one of a fleet of trucks belonging to SOVTRANSAV-rO, hence the acronym daubed in Roman letters across its filthy flank. It had been recruited, together with its driver, by the Agency's enormous Munich station during one of the truck's many forays to West Germany to collect luxury commodities for Moscow's privileged few with access to a special distribution store. Everything from Western shoes to Western tampons to spare parts for Western cars had been shuttled back and forth inside the truck's bowels. As to the driver. he was one of the Long Distance Gunners, as these luckless creatures are known in the Soviet Union - State employees, miserably underpaid, with neither medical nor accident insurance to protect them against misfortune in the West, who even in deepest winter huddle stoically in the lee of their great charges, munching sausage before sharing another night's sleep in their comfortless cabins - but making for themselves, in Russia nevertheless, vast fortunes out of their opportunities in the West.
And now, for yet more immense rewards, this particular Long Distance Gunner had agreed to 'lend' his truck to a 'Western dealer' here in the very heart of Moscow. And this same dealer, who was one of Cy's own army of toptuny, lent it to Cy. who in turn stuffed inside it all kinds of ingeniously portable surveillance and audio equipment. which was then swept away again before the truck was returned through intermediaries to its legal driver.
Nothing of the sort had ever happened before. Our own mobile safe room, in Moscow!
Ned alone found the whole idea unsettling. The Long Distance Gunners worked in pairs, as Ned knew better than anyone. By KGB edict, these pairs were deliberately incompatible, and in many cases each man had a responsi- bility to report upon the other. But when Ned asked if he could read the operational file, it was denied him under the very laws of security he himself held dear.
But the most impressive piece of Langley's new armoury had still to be unveiled, and once again Ned had not been able to hold out against it. From now onwards, sound tapes in Moscow would. be encrypted into random codes and transmitted in digital pulses in one-thousandth of the time that the tapes would take to run if you were listening to them in your drawing room. Yet when the pulses were restored to sound by the receiving station, the Langley wizards insisted, you could never tell the tapes had had such a rough time.