‘Hello Vladimir.’ Yelena turned to the balding man.
‘Can’t wean you off the moderns, can we, Yelena? All that bourgeois decadence.’
With any encouragement he might have stopped and talked. But she looked at him quickly, a finger to her lips, gesturing over her shoulder at Alexei. The deputy curator moved away.
‘How many will there be?’ Alexei asked when they had gone.
‘Two porters and an assistant curator from the museum and a fourth man, one of our security staff. You’ll be the fifth in the party — the additional KGB security officer, as we arranged. Loading starts first thing Thursday; I’ll phone down, let yourself out and come up to the packing-room. Introduce yourself, hang around. The flight leaves at midday. There’ll be some of our Embassy staff in London to meet it. But you should get clear away at the cargo terminal before they know who you are. The cargo manifest which they’ll have beforehand only names the four museum staff as accompanying personnel. They won’t know anything about you. Come on.’ She pushed all the Ms — the Modiglianis and Matisses — gently back into position.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as they moved towards the entrance of the sweetly humming chamber.
‘No, I’m not surprised. Once we started on this, put so much work into it, I was sure that one day you’d have to use it. The sorry was there from the beginning. Will it be all right in London?’ she went on in the same matter-of-fact voice. ‘You’ll have someone there?’
‘Yes, I’ll be contacting a colleague. A close friend. I’ll be all right.’
They looked at each other once, walking slowly up the aisle, but said nothing more.
Book Two
1
McCoy had never hunted someone down before, least of all an Englishman, a major Soviet agent. Yet now, in these last moments, he found he hadn’t much taste for the job. He surprised himself. After years of unrequited bullying, at school and from behind various desks in the Mid-East section, this should have been a crowning day, a day when he could lay the many ghosts that had possessed him since youth, to Port Said in 1944, through Suez twelve years later, and beyond: a time at last when he could take the men — or man, at least — who would stand for all the others who had betrayed him.
Before, in his professional life, they had just vanished — from apartments in Beirut, or top-security prisons in England — just as the day-boys whom he had caught cheating and beaten before lunch found sanctuary every afternoon at half-past three from the school where he had been a boarder. His life seemed to have been cruelly dictated by such people — boys who had known the exam questions beforehand, men who were far better up on borders, check-points and night ferries than he was — men who, like the children in his junior school, playing tag, not only made base before he did but when they got there would turn on their pinnacles and, pointing him out from all the rest, would mock him with a special and happy impudence. The child was always father to the man, it seemed, in every case but his. And McCoy felt this loss bitterly, as though he was an orphan.
Nor had it been sufficient excuse that his had always been a desk job in British Intelligence, that he had never been more than a fonctionnaire in espionage, even though he headed the Mid-East section in Holborn now. Before this promotion he had been Control to a field section centred on Cairo. He processed their reports and had no business with timetables and guns. In any case, a chronic shortsightedness made variations in his physical routine a matter for careful thought, so that years before he had accepted certain limits of action. But in his heart he had always longed to play the puppet, not the master. For only there, he thought, among the men, might he find the nursery where these instabilities bloomed — might learn what it was that led these men astray, took them in giant strides clean out of one life, over a border, and into another. If he could be part of them for once, and not their master, he might as last make fair copy, among so many botched post-mortems, of the original sin, trace it far back to some source which he knew lay beyond the political simplicities of a Cambridge student rally in the thirties.
After so many betrayals McCoy had a psychiatrist’s hunger to lay bare the initial fault. He knew that the mechanics of frailty could be displayed, as under a surgeon’s knife; that a dissembling nature could be opened up and the parts named like a chapter in Gray’s Anatomy. And he nurtured this hope obsessively, like a longed-for doctorate, for only then, he thought, in this sure delineation of another’s treachery, could his own sorrow and incomprehension be lifted.
Until now he had never had a specimen to work on. And now of all times — now that the net was closing at last, he felt the cowardice of first love come over him, as if in this longed-for, imminent penetration he would lose the puritanical strengths and flavours which had nurtured his obsession in the years of waiting. He had come so to expect unsuccess in his work that the scent of victory made him shudder. He had come now to the border for the first time himself — close to the wire that divided certainty from confusion, the sure from the frail, loyalty from dishonour.
Quite soon he would look into another country, poisoned lands that he had heard much of. In an hour or less he would face the reality of eviclass="underline" a figure that would sum up dissolution. Their eyes would meet and he would be responsible for the future. A time had come when he could at last fall upon the object of his passion, and yet he could find no virtue in the day.
The day was late in April, the sky above Marylebone faintly blue, the colour scrubbed out of it by a long and vigorous winter. Clouds ran in from the west, pushed fiercely by a damp wind that had already brought two downpours before lunchtime. The last of these had driven McCoy and Croxley into Henekey’s pub in the High Street next to the Greek restaurant.
McCoy had always missed the flat white lands of the Middle East, the certain weather of scorching light under a lead-blue dome. Years before — it had been a Saturday at midday, going back to Cairo for the weekend from Alexandria along the desert road — he had suddenly taken off his glasses and driven wildly along the shoulder of the road for half a minute before careering off down a gully and into a dune. And that moment had been so long — floating like liquid into the unfocused landscape, misty yellow and without margins, released by a sand-happy sun-madness before the darkness of the crash. He remembered the incident without qualms amongst so much doubt.
‘What will you have?’ He turned to Croxley, head of the Special Branch team that lay all about them in the streets, waiting for the man.
‘White Shield, if I may, sir.’
The girl started to decant the beer slowly, tipping glass and bottle into gentle diagonals, so that a small froth bloomed and the sediment remained undisturbed. She knew her business. McCoy doubled the order.
‘You’ve been here before then, Croxley? You know the beer.’
They were in the corner of the room at the far end of the bar, drinking comfortably like good men, between one of the old mahogany arches. Two cut-glass decanters, one of port, the other of claret, stood in front of them, undisturbed, while young lunchtimers pushed and shouted all over the rest of the room, anxious for runny shepherd’s pie and thin sandwiches, and draught beer that was so weak everywhere now that it was nothing more than a gesture. People didn’t come to pubs just to drink at lunchtime in England any more. Both men, though so genuinely formal, felt awkward, even dissolute.
‘Yes, indeed. We had a long surveillance up here once. Guy Burgess had a flat round the corner. Course we didn’t know about him then. It was one of his friends we were after. Lived with him. That was during the war. We used to drop in here, changing shifts. Funny thing, you know — one night I was as near to Burgess as I am to you; just where you’re standing. By himself, wasn’t drinking. But he was drunk. There’d been a party at his flat, going on for two days, and he’d come out for a breather. Cornered me, he did, and of course you couldn’t help liking him. I mean, he really was very funny; very good company. Witty.’