“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.”
“There are, of course, certain other aspects. You are the subject of a manhunt throughout northern Europe, and Parkis believes he can get you reinstated at the Bureau if — ”
“Fucking coercion. He can’t use me like a — ”
“What do you think we’re running, Quiller, a garden party? You’ve been placed in the centre of a situation in which this man has to be eliminated, for the sake of — ”
“Tell them to send out someone else.”
“They sent three people out, and they didn’t take enough care.”
“That’s their bloody lookout, if — ”
“We think you can do it for us.”
“Christ, I’ve never done it before, so how can they — ”
“It’s not technically difficult, of course.”
“You bloody directors never go near the edge, do you, you’re — ”
“It simply requires skill in making your approach, doesn’t it?”
“You’re as bad as that bastard Loman, you talk like a — ”
“I wouldn’t throw this chance away, Quiller. I really wouldn’t.”
“Tell them to get someone else.”
“If it’s a question of morality, you should — ”
“Conscience, is that what you — ”
“Not quite, after the incident in London.”
“I’ve told you before, that was personal.”
After a bit he’d said with enforced patience: “Very well, I’m obliged to put the matter into the simplest terms. We would expect you to defend yourself, if attacked.”
That one shut me up and we’d left the bus station without saying anything else. Ferris hates having to spell things out but I’d been groggy from all that exhaust gas and not cerebrating too well.
He would have signalled London.
I checked the mirror again and saw the dark green Syrena sliding about and trying to keep up, so I slowed a little. There were no more buildings now: the last thing we’d passed was some kind of processing plant with steam pluming into the grey winter sky. The caves were two miles ahead and the traffic was thinning out after the road forked, with the military stuff taking the southern route towards the border.