Two girls came into the park from the opposite end and walked arm in arm along the curving path with their heads down and their hands tucked into their sleeves. As they came along the railings I could hear their voices in the still winter air: one of them had been reprimanded by the factory manager for not reporting a jammed lathe a week ago … the same as Misha when she… but a serious matter if… her father to intercede… managers take them… fading away and I checked the man feeding the birds and then went a short distance along the fence and used a crack in the boards and saw them crossing the street and going into a cafe just past the first corner, fair enough, the park was a short cut for them.
When I came back I saw that he’d crumpled the paper bag into a ball and dropped it into the wire basket that sagged from its rusted support near the monument. Some of the birds flew up as he passed close to them, then settled again to squabble murderously over the crumbs. He was walking quickly round the frozen surface of the pond with that odd backward-leaning gait of his, and soon he passed the monument again and came towards the hut, keeping to the path between the wire hoops and for the first time looking at his watch. His face was raw with the cold and his eyes were watering as they glanced restlessly across the hedgerow and the open gates. His thin jutting nose moved like a pointer, and several times he seemed about to leave the park, but each time decided to stay.
Even his smallest movements had an intensity that gave them a false significance: when he pulled his raw red hand from its pocket to blow his nose I could have believed he was bringing out a gun instead of a handkerchief. He was so close now that I went into deeper cover, losing sight of him; but I could hear him moving, his boots kicking at the snow and his breath coming sharply as if the cold air was painful to inhale. He had stopped now, and there was a short silence until he began stamping his feet and letting out his breath in brief little puffs, until I had the feeling I was listening to an animal in the wilds of the countryside. I thought I heard a sound coming from his throat, a kind of low tuneless humming, but wasn’t sure; it could have been just that he found breathing painful at this temperature. The first clock chimed the quarter and he moved off again at once, his boots thudding along the path; and I went back to the gap in the hedge to watch him. He was impatient now, but stayed close to the monument, standing for a time underneath it and moving away to a distant point and looking back at it. It was nearly an hour before he gave up and left the park.
By this time my feet were numb and I slipped twice on the snow as I left cover and took up the tag at long distance. He walked quickly, passing two bars where he could have used a phone. Five people passed him and he spoke to none of them. Soon after leaving the park he crossed the street and made north for one block, walking past the Trabant that I’d left parked between an army staff car and a van with plain sides. A minute later he turned suddenly and went into a small restaurant with steamy windows and a chipped sign picturing a pig hanging above the doorway.
The heat hit me as I followed him in and took the stool next to him at the counter.
“A bowl of solyanka,” he told the woman.
“The same for me,” I said, and waited until she’d gone to the hatchway before I spoke again. “I suppose you thought I wasn’t coming.”
His whole body jerked as he swung his head to look at me.
“She told you I’d be alone,” he said softly and fiercely, his boot scraping on the rung of the stool as he twisted farther round to study me. His teeth were chattering as he blew into his hands but his eyes locked their gaze on me, angry and apprehensive.
“No,” I said, “she didn’t. And if she had, d’you think I’d believe her?”
He took a long breath and sagged suddenly, as if the anxiety of the past hour had been too much. But even now the tension in him remained, an inner shaking of nerves that he couldn’t stop.
Tell me your name,” he said suddenly, looking down. God knows why he asked me that; perhaps it occurred to him that this was just a crazy coincidence and I wasn’t the man he was meant to meet.
“Rashidov,” I told him.
Another breath went out of him. “Kirinski.”
“Turned out rather cold today,” I said because the fat woman was back with our bowls of soup, putting them down and brushing her wispy hair away from her face where it was sticking to the sweat: this place was more like a sauna bath than an eating-house.
We spooned our soup without talking. There was a phone at the end of the counter and I pushed my bowl away before he did and excused myself and went through the curtains at the rear and into the first cubicle, standing on the seat and finding a gap between the curtain rail and the bedraggled Christmas decorations that gave me a narrow field of vision that took in the top of his head. I let him have three minutes but he didn’t leave the stool so I went back and got some money out and put it on to the counter and said we were going.
After the heat of the restaurant the air was like cold water thrown in our faces and his teeth began chattering again as I took him half-way down the block and opened up the Trabant and got started, driving north and parallel with the Gromyko Prospekt for half a mile and turning across the waste ground alongside the railway lines with the mirror perfectly clear the whole way. There was a rubbish dump in the far corner and I turned the car and backed up and stopped with the rear against the fence and a good view through the windscreen.
“This stuff,” I said and reached under the seat, ‘ought to be kept somewhere safe. Where the hell did they train you?”
He swung his sharp head at me. “Who do you work for?”
“That’s none of your bloody business.” I was sorting it out, putting some of it back into the envelope: I was going to hang on to the gammas and the Monome-Dinome tables because I might conceivably pick up some kind of signal in somebody else’s hands before he could warn his base. The cypher drafts were no use but everything else looked interesting, even some of the airfield dispositions with the Chinese hieroglyphs because those bastards in London weren’t going to spring me and I’d have to try anything that came along.
“Have you got a pencil?” I asked him and he felt for one in his jacket and I hit the end of the barrel so fast that it almost broke his wrist because he cried out and went dead white and had to double up so as not to be sick while I opened the Walther and dropped the magazine out and threw it under the seat and lobbed the gun into the back of the car and spread out the top map in the Russian material and got out my felt pen.
“These airfields,” I said. “What’s their strength?”
He was trying to sit up straight but his wrist was still painful and all he wanted to do was nurse it and I got fed up because he was wasting time.
“It’s your own fault,” I said, “you shouldn’t be so bloody uncivilized. These are the only three airfields in the whole of this area without squadron designation and combat strength and I want to know about them, come on.”