'You're seeing ghosts, Ned,' I told him with little of Sheriton's conviction. 'You've gone far beyond whatever anybody else is thinking. All right, it's not your case any more. That doesn't mean it's a shipwreck. And your credibility is, well, ebbing.'
'A final and exhaustive list,' Ned said again, as if the phrase had been dinned into him by a hypnotist. 'Why final? Why exhaustive? Answer me that. When Barley saw him in Leningrad, he wouldn't even accept our preliminary questionnaire. He threw it back in Barley's face. Now he's asking for the whole shopping list in one go. Asking for it. The final list. The Grand Slam. We're to get it all together for the weekend. After that the Bluebird will answer no more questions from the grey men. "This is your last chance," he's saying. Why?'
'Look at it the other way round a minute,' I urged him in a desperate murmur, when the wine waiter had brought us a second decanter of priceless claret. 'All right. The Bluebird has been turned by the Sovs. He's bad. The Sovs are running him. So why do they close it down? Why not sit back and play us along? You wouldn't close it down if you were in their shoes. You wouldn't hand us an ultimatum, create deadlines. Would you?'
His reply put paid- to the best and most expensive meal I had ever given a fellow officer in my life.
'I might have to,' he said. 'If I were Russian.'
'Why?'
His words were the more chilling for being spoken with a leaden dispassion.
'Because he might not be presentable any more. He might not be able to speak. Or pick up his knife and fork. Or pour salt on his grouse. He might have made a couple of voluntary statements about his charming mistress in Moscow who had no idea, but really no idea, what she was doing. He might have – '
We walked back to Grosvenor Square. Barley had left Katya's apartment at midnight Moscow time and returned to the Mezh, where Henziger had sat up for him in the lobby, ostensibly reading a manuscript.
Barley was in high spirits but had nothing new to report, just a family evening, he had told Henziger, but good fun all the same. And the hospital visit still on, he added.
The whole of the next day nothing. A space. Spying is waiting. Spying is worrying yourself sick while you watch Ned sink into a decline. Spying is taking Hannah to y6ur flat in Pimlico between the hours of four and six when she is supposed to be having a German lesson, God knows why. Spying is imitating love, and making sure she's home in time to give dear Derek his dinner.
CHAPTER 15
They went in Volodya's car, She had borrowed it for the evening. He was to wait for her outside the Acroport metro station at nine, and at nine exactly the Lada pulled up precariously beside him.
'You should not have insisted,' she said.
The tower blocks glowed above them but in the streets there was already the menacing -atmosphere of curfew. Scents of autumn filled the damp night air. A half-moon, draped in shrouds of mist, hung ahead of them. Occasionally their hands brushed. Occasionally their hands grasped each other in a strong embrace. Barley was watching the wing mirror. It was smashed and some of the bits were missing but he could see enough in it to watch the cars that followed without overtaking. Katya turned left but still nothing passed them.
She wasn't speaking so he wasn't either. He wondered how they learned it, where is safe to speak, where isn't. At school? From older girls as they grew up? Or was it your earnest little lecture from the family doctor somewhere round the second year of puberty? 'It's time you learned that cars and walls have cars just like people…'
They were bumping over a pitted sliproad into a halffinished carpark.
'Imagine you are a doctor,' she warned him as they faced each other across the roof of the car. 'You must look very strict.'
'I'm a doctor,' Barley said. Neither of them was joking.
They picked their way between a maze of moonlit puddles to a pathway covered in asbestos awning, leading to double doors and an empty reception desk. He caught the first alarming smells of hospitaclass="underline" disinfectant, floor polish, surgical spirit. At a crisp pace she marched him across a circular hallway of mottled concrete, down a linoleum corridor and past a marble counter staffed by sullen women. A clock said ten-twenty-five. Making a consciously officious gesture, Barley compared it with his watch. The clock was ten minutes slow. The next corridor was lined with figures slumped on kitchen chairs.
The waiting-room was a gloomy catacomb supported by immense pillars with a raised platform at one end. At the other, swing doors gave on to the lavatories. Somebody had rigged a temporary light to show the way. By its pate light, Barley could make ou ' t empty coat racks behind a wooden counter, parked stretcher trolleys and, fixed to the nearest pillar, an ancient telephone. A bench stood against the wall., Katya sat on it, so Barley sat beside her.
'He tries always to be punctual. Sometimes he is delayed by the connection, ' she said.
'Can I speak to him?'
'He would be angry.'
'Why?'
'If they hear English on a long-distance line they will immediately pay attention. It is normal.'
From the swing doors a man in a head-bandage looking like a blinded soldier from the front wandered into the women's lavatory as two women emerged. They grabbed hold of him and redirected him. Katya unclipped her handbag and took out a notebook and a pen.
He will try at ten-forty, she had said. At ten-forty he will attempt the first connection. He will not speak for long, she had said. To speak too long even between safe telephones is unwise.
She stood up and walked to the telephone, ducking like a regular under the cloakroom counter.
Will he tell her he loves her? Barley wondered - 'I love you enough to risk your life for me'? Will he give her the love talk he gave her in his letter? Or will he tell her that she is an acceptable price for the cleansing of his uneasy soul?
She was standing sideways to him, gazing keenly through the swing doors. Had she seen something bad? Had she heard something? Or was her mind already far away with Yakov?
It's how she stands when she's waiting for him, he thought - like someone who is prepared to wait all day.
The telephone rang hoarsely, as if it had dust in its larynx. A sixth sense had already guided her towards it, so it ' had no chance to give a second squawk before she had it in her hand. Barley was only a few feet from her but he was hard put to it to hear her voice above the background clatter of the hospital. She had turned away from him, presumably for privacy, and she had boxed her hand over her free ear so that she could hear her lover in the earpiece. Barley could just hear her say 'yes' and 'yes' again, submissively.
Leave her alone! he thought angrily. I've told you before and I'm going to tell you again at the weekend. Leave her alone, keep her out of this. Deal with the grey men or me!
The notebook lay open on a rickety shelf attached to the pillar, the pen on top of it, but she hadn't touched either one of them. Yes. Yes. Yes. I did that on the island. Yes. Yes. Yes. He saw her shoulders rise into her neck and stay there and her back stretch as if she had taken a deep breath or enjoyed some pleasurable moment within herself. Her elbow rose from her side to cram the earpiece more firmly into her head. Yes. Yes. What about no for once? No, I won't lie down for you!
Her spare hand had found the pillar and he could see the fingers part and brace themselves as the tips pressed into the dark plaster. He saw the back of her hand whiten as it stiffened, but it didn't move, and suddenly her hand alarmed him. It had found a climbing hold and was clinging to it for grim life. She was on the cliff face and the fingerhold was all she had between her lover and the abyss.
She turned, the receiver still pressed to her ear, and he saw her face. Who was she? What had she become? For the first time since he had met her she was without expression, and the telephone jammed against her temple was the gun that somebody was holding there.
She had the hostage stare.
Then her body began sliding down the pillar as if she couldn't be bothered any more to hold it upright. Atfirst it was only her knees that gave way, then she crumpled at the waist as well, but Barley was there to hold her. He flung one arm round her waist and with the other he snatched the phone from her. He held it to his car and shouted, 'Goethe!', but all he got was a dialling tone so he rang off.
It was an odd thing, but Barley had forgotten until now that he was strong. They started to move but as they did so she was seized with a violent revulsion against him and lashed out silently with her clenched fist, cracking him so hard over the cheekbone that for a moment he saw nothing but a dazzling light. He grappled her hands to her sides and held them there while he pulled her under the counter and frogmarched her through the hospital and across the carpark. 'She's a disturbed patient,' he was explaining in his mind. 'A disturbed patient in a doctor's care.'
Still holding her, he tipped her handbag on to the roof of the car, found the key, unlocked the passenger door and bundled her inside. Then he ran round to the driver's side in case she had ideas of taking over after all.
'I shall go home,' she said.
'I don't know the way.'
'Take me home,' she repeated.
'I don't know the way, Katya! You'll have to tell me right and left, do you hear?' He grabbed her shoulders. 'Sit up. Look out of the window. Where's reverse on this bloody thing?'