“What others?” I asked her, but of course she meant the KGB.
She put her bowl down on to the counter and I noticed she’d stopped shivering. I didn’t know her well enough to know whether it had been her nerves or the intense cold or both. When I’d called the apartment an hour ago she’d said Kirinski was there, but I’d wanted to talk to her, not him: if he’d answered I would have hung up without speaking. She said she’d meet me here.
“I mean the KGB,” she said.
“You weren’t afraid of them when you called them up and put them on to me, the first time we met.”
She closed her eyes and for a moment looked younger, a child asleep.
“Yes,” she said, “I was.”
It could be true but I didn’t rely on that. I didn’t rely on anything now, even Chechevitsin, even Ferris, even London. They’d got me to the point of the wedge again where the risk factor was a hundred per cent and I’d have to get out alone if I could get out at all. This girl and I had made love yesterday and today she could pull her gun and blast me off this stool and show her KGB card to the proprietor and walk out of here without even paying for the soup or she could make a signal and any number of agents could close in on this place before I had time to see them coming, but there’d been no way of diminishing the risks without diminishing my last few chances of getting out of Slingshot alive, and even those were thinning out the longer I sat here drinking this bloody stuff.
But there was no other way because time was too short now to plan anything foolproof.
“Do you belong,” I asked Liova, ‘to the KGB?”
She looked up. “No. They asked me to watch Alexei for them.”
“When?”
“A month ago.”
Why?”
“I don’t know. They just came to me. They asked me to report on his close friends, and anyone I saw him talking to.”
“And any visitors.”
“Yes.”
I stirred the soup with my aluminium spoon, and found some more meat at the bottom. “Why are you afraid of him?”
“Because of what he’s doing. I don’t understand it.” She spread out her hands suddenly: “Listen to me, I am a doctor’s daughter and I work in an office for the agricultural department, and I’m not used to the kind of things Alexei is doing. He’s suffering under an enormous strain, and that’s why he’s on this — ”
I waited.
She looked away and picked up her bowl, shrugging with her head. “He frightens me.”
“What is he on? Heroin?”
She looked startled. “No. How did you — ”
“Cocaine?” I’d heard there was traffic across the border.
Hesitation. “Yes.”
“Is he mainlining?”
She looked puzzled, I suppose because I’d used the Moscow argot. “Does he inject himself?”
“I think so.”
“How often does he get high?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He’d been high in the car, in the Trabant. It had been like struggling with a tiger. He’d probably been high when he’d killed the three people London had sent out here.
“Are you on it too, Liova?”
Her dark hair swung and her eyes were wide. “It’s killing him! You think I want to die too? Like that?” In a moment she said quietly: “There hasn’t been any sex for almost a year. It takes that away first. First sex, then life. I know about it.”
A man came in and sat down at one of the little tables, where the food cost ten per cent more. He looked all right but I went on checking him.
“Is he jealous?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said bitterly. “He doesn’t want other men to do the things he can’t do.” She pushed her bowl away and turned on the stool to face me, sweeping her hair from her eyes. “I want to see you again, Andreyev. Not at the apartment.”
I was getting out some money, to pay for our soup.
“I would’ve liked that,” I said.
She was watching me. “Isn’t that why you asked me to come here? So that we could talk?”
“Yes. So that we could talk.”
I put down a ruble and five kopeks.
“We haven’t said anything, Andreyev.”
“I’m going away.”
She slipped off the stool and we went to the door together.
“When?”
“Soon.”
We walked with her hand in my arm; the pavement was slippery. It was three or four minutes before she spoke again.
“When will you be coming back?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Chechevitsin had got me a Wolga, the medium-sized model, and I’d picked it up from the car park outside the football stadium last night after Ferris had gone. It was waiting for me half-way down the street that ran at right-angles from this one, at the next corner.
“When you come back,” Liova said, “will you let me know?”
“Of course.”
We turned the corner and I looked along the street and saw the Wolga standing where I’d left it. It was in the open, with no cover anywhere near; there was good cover farther along, where two trucks were still unloading into a warehouse, but I hadn’t used it.
“Where are you going?” she asked me.
“I’m never quite sure.”
Bitterly she said: “You’re like him. Why can’t you stop?”
“We don’t know how.” We were nearing the Wolga. “And we don’t want to know.”
There were five other cars standing against the kerb in this area and the dark green Syrena was the farthest away; but even from this distance I could see that he was still sitting there behind the wheel.
When we reached the first corner I said: “I’m going this way.”
She stopped and I kissed her cold mouth and felt her gloved hands tighten in my own. She said nothing, and I let her go, watching her into the distance. She walked with her head down, taking care on the treacherous surface, a lock of dark hair lying across one shoulder, Liova, a Russian girl, last seen in the street of a city under snow.
I turned and went back and got into the Wolga and started up and waited for the tyres to find a grip on the ruts, checking the mirror when I crossed the first intersection to make sure he was behind me.
He needn’t have come: I hadn’t counted on it. There’d been two alternative procedures I could have used if this one hadn’t worked, but they were now academic: he was here. I turned west, soon after the park where the Lenin Monument stood, and took the major road out of the city so that he could follow without any trouble. There was sand along most of the route and we drove at thirty miles an hour, keeping up with traffic. This was the way I’d come into the city after the woman at the farm had cleaned my injuries; the farm was below the caves, six or seven miles into the foothills of the Khrebet Tarbagatay range, where I’d sheltered for a time, coming down from the mountain.
Of course I’d told Ferris to go to hell. He’d expected that.
“I don’t think you’ve got any option,” he’d told me sharply.
“You know bloody well I’ve never done an execution.”
“Things have changed, you see. The man in the train.”
“I killed him for my own reasons and I’m damned if I’m going — ”
“The position taken by the Bureau is that you are expected to do for them what you readily did for yourself.”
“I won’t kill a man in cold blood. I never have.”
“Novikov was — ”
“I was in a rage when I did that!”
“You can’t be particularly fond of Kirinski. He destroyed one of our major operations down here and he killed three — ”
“I don’t give a damn what he did. He didn’t do anything to me.”