After the third time she let go and went limp against the floorboards with her arms flung out and her hands open, and I watched her face, bright with sweat and as if sleeping, the dark lashes throwing soft crescent shadows in the light of the stove’s embers, her hair spread like a wing across the edge of the rug, her mouth quiet and her breath inaudible.
I wondered what her fantasy had been. I didn’t think it was Kirinski.
The swing of headlights passed across the ceiling, faint in the room’s illumination, and I came away from her.
“Stay with me,” she said. Her eyes were open, watching me.
I said: “You don’t know who I am.”
My body was too relaxed, the nerves too quiet.
“Don’t go,” she said.
I went over and put the phone back on the hook.
“Why do you carry that thing?” I asked her.
“What thing?” She got up from the floor, tousled and drowsy.
“The gun.”
“He makes me.”
“Why?”
“To protect myself.”
“Against what?”
“I don’t know,” and she was suddenly angry, either because I wouldn’t stay or because I’d reminded her of something. “How should I know?”
“You know him, don’t you?”
“Nobody does.” Her face was white, some kind of reaction, the shock of the gun going off and then the animal need and now the real world still going on, something like that or of course I could be wrong, she could be the head of the local KGB for all I knew.
“When is he coming back?”
“Tomorrow.”
I didn’t think she meant to answer: she did it without thinking, her head swinging to look at me, as if caught out.
“Who did you call, when I left here this morning?”
Her eyes went down. No, she wasn’t working for anyone: she was unsuited and untrained. “I didn’t call anyone,” she said.
“Don’t call them again, when I leave here.” I went up to her and waited until she looked at me. “Kirinski wouldn’t like it.” That was a direct hit: she looked frightened.
“Who are you?”
“Andreyev Rashidov.” I turned away. “The telephone rang about an hour ago. Would that have been Kirinski?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who were you going to call just now, when you came in?”
She hesitated. She couldn’t get anything right.
“The police.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid of you. I didn’t know how you’d got in.”
“It’s not important.” She was an amateur and they’re unpredictable and therefore dangerous and I didn’t want to know any more, not from her. “What time do you expect him here? Kirinski?”
She hesitated again and I said, “Come on, what time?”
I saw her flinch: the tensions were coming back in her faster than in me. I went up to her again and said: “You’re in too deep, Liova. For God’s sake get out while there’s time. Go away, where he can’t find you. There’s no future in this game, even for the professionals.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know whether to trust me, and I knew I couldn’t trust her. Living things only bite when they’re frightened and she was frightened sick.
“What time,” I asked her quietly, ‘is he coming back?”
In a moment she said: “In the morning.”
“All right.” I went across to the kitchen and picked up the gun and snapped the magazine back into it and gave it to her. “Tell him to meet me on the north side of the Lenin Memorial tomorrow at noon.”
She looked down at the gun as if she’d never seen it before, then dropped it on to the settee.
“Tell him to be there alone.” I picked up the telephone and tore the cable away. Tell him I can get him a life sentence at a forced-labour camp if he makes a mistake.” I went out and down the stairs and into the snow.
His name was Gorodok.
This must be one of the military roads: it had been cleared after the last snow and I’d only seen three private cars and a produce truck: the rest of the stuff had the Red Star on it — jeeps, transports, armoured cars, a mobile gun with a full crew muffled up to their ears in their greatcoats. There was a camp somewhere: these weren’t convoys.
I drove steadily, not too fast. I didn’t want any attention.
It was 09:32.
Of course he could be from London — some bright spark from the reserve pool on his first Russian assignment or one of the agents-in-place working the area south of the Omsk-Novosibirsk line, it could be anyone, cover name Gorodok, it didn’t mean anything.
I wanted to drive fast because my mind was racing but this had to be done with care and there was quite a bit of traffic on this stretch and if I hit anything I’d have to argue the point with the military and that could screw the whole thing up if someone hadn’t done that already. It was freezing cold in the Trabant but I was sweating because Chechevitsin had only given me the action signal and nothing else, no explanation.
He’d got pretty desperate because there were three messages for me at the hotel when I’d got back there and all of them were for me to call him. I did it from the pay phone round the corner at the household store because this one obviously wasn’t for the hotel connection.
Three military trucks in a line and I felt their wind-blast as they went by and left the night black again after the glare of their lights. The road was tricky along this bit because there were hedgerows and the traffic had blown the loose snow across the surface and it had got packed down over the sand.
I wished to Christ I knew what had happened. All Chechevitsin had said was that I had to stop the 10:25 express from Tashkent twelve miles north-west of Yelingrad and rendezvous with Gorodok at the south end of the Litsky Bridge. I had to fill in the gaps for myself and that wasn’t difficult but I didn’t like the message because if I had to get the courier off the train in open country it meant he’d already been blown at this end and if he got off at Yelingrad Central they’d snatch him cold.
So I’d been moving into a trap before I’d got the signal from Chechevitsin and I hadn’t known it, but London had. It’s not my favourite feeling: it’s like when you’re going across on the green and someone takes it on the red and it’s a question of inches and you think Jesus, what if. The labour camps were there in Murmansk and Chita Province for me too, as well as Kirinski.
09:41 and two miles to go and I took the left fork and found the dirt road that ran alongside the railway. There were clinkers and broken asphalt and bits of timber the whole way along it because it was a service road for the maintenance crews when they had a problem on the line: I’d talked to a switchman for half an hour at the station when I’d gone there to pick up the films.
The moon was in the south-east and I tried shutting the headlights down at intervals and found I could keep up the speed if I watched the left-hand side below the embankment. The switchman had said the signal-box was a mile this side of the bridge and the express was due at the bridge at 10.09 unless the snow had delayed it. He’d asked me why my department was surveying the line in midwinter and I’d said there were some embankment faults showing up on the far side of the bridge and he didn’t seem inclined to argue.
I passed the signal-box at 09:45 with my lights full on and kept going for two minutes and then slowed and doused them and turned round and stopped and waited. The timing had to be cut fine because the man in the box would put a call out for emergency crews and I would only have as long as they took to get here.
The snowscape was bluish-white under the three-quarter moon and the stars were huge; the line of telegraph poles alongside the railway cut the dome of night in half, their stark outlines diminishing to a vanishing-point where the squat black rectangle of the signal-box made a blot against the snow. Over to my right, to the east, a small cluster of lights drifted, red and green and white, as an aircraft went into the circuit above the field six miles away: the maps had it down as a civilian aerodrome. With the window down I listened in the silence, and picked up the sound of its engines: it was a turbo-prop. Nearer and much louder a night bird called across the desolate countryside.