Clipper Reade had said, in the dry drawl of a broad Texan accent, ‘Things that matter don’t hang about and wait for you, Christopher. Sort of float by you, maybe gossamer, like a butterfly on the wing. You have to snatch or the moment’s gone and it does not — believe me — return. Snatch and hold hard.’
Twenty-six years of Christopher Lawson’s career had slid by since he had last been with the American, learning and listening. Special Branch came back to Lucy before the Security Service liaison. She scribbled a list of names and he grabbed it from her. He read the names of Joseph Shlomo Goldmann, Esther Goldmann and her children, then the retinue, Viktor and Grigori, a woman whose occupation was given as ‘housekeeper’, Simon Rawlings and Jonathan Carrick. He told her he wanted more on all of them, and that he was off to the upper-floor suite of the director general.
She would have known he had no appointment, but on that afternoon of the week the director general always hosted a meeting of political figures who concerned themselves with the intricacies of intelligence-gathering and were allies.
Clipper Reade had said, ‘At first sight, Christopher, the skeins don’t seem to have a shape and make patterns. But it’s the art of our trade to give them shape. Men and women now are coming into view, and some don’t know each other and some do. Some are connected and some have never met. You watch those skeins and the tangle they make until the patterns unravel the chaos. Then you have success. You have an open mind but you go where the skeins take you, however dense that chaos.’
On the upper floor, in an outer office of the suite — politicians left to sip coffee and nibble biscuits — he clattered through the situation to the director general at machine-gun speed. ‘It’s because of Sarov, Francis. I cannot ignore anything involving that place. Ask me where I’m currently heading and I’ll respond that I haven’t the faintest idea, but Sarov is not something I ignore. I don’t know yet who I’m dealing with, but I expect to very soon, by the end of the day. I have the feeling that once the chatter starts there may not be much time. Trust me, anything to do with Sarov means the involvement of serious people.’
From far back in the trees he watched the house. He waited for a man to show himself. But for a dog, the house was empty.
Darkness had gathered around him and the canopies of the pines were inadequate as cover in the heavy rain. Incessantly, water dripped from on high on to Reuven Weissberg’s hair and shoulders, protected by his thick leather jacket. Only rarely did he wipe the rainwater from his face. More often he reached inside his coat and under his shirt to scratch a small indent in his upper arm where there was dark scar tissue.
He knew the man was named Tadeuz Komiski, knew that he was now seventy-one, knew that he had been born in that house. A priest, a schoolteacher and a social worker had given him that information. He knew the story because his grandmother had told it to him, and he had hoped that evening to be told what he wished to know … He doubted that information would be gained by conversation — more likely in the aftermath of a beating or the extraction of fingernails or the placing of a lit cheroot cigar on the testicles. But the house was empty.
Behind him, Mikhail would be waiting, arms folded, never impatient. Reuven Weissberg stared at the house and his eyes were long accustomed to the gloom. If it had not been built in a clearing, with a patch for vegetables at the front, if it had been surrounded by pines and birches, he would not have been able to see it. He could, just, make out its silhouette. There was no lamp lit inside. Light, had it been there, would have peeped from cracks round the door or windows. No fire had been started or he would have seen the smoke spill from the brick chimney-stack. He looked past a small flat-top lorry from whose body the engine had been removed, and past a stable block where the doors hung off their hinges. It was a place, he thought, that had once been cared for but now decayed. He sensed already that he had stayed too long.
The dog inside knew he was there.
How it knew, Reuven Weissberg could not have said.
From the the pitch of the barking, he had identified it as a big dog, and reckoned it would have to be slaughtered if he were to get past and ask the question he wished to put to Tadeuz Komiski. He would think nothing of shooting a dog. Neither would Mikhail. It was the fourth time he had come for Komiski and he had never found him — but he would.
Reuven Weissberg had come to the forest to locate a grave. There was a monument half a kilometre away through the trees, along a track made by the woodmen’s lorries, a circular and precise mound of ashes. It could have been said to be a grave. In the trees there were the mass graves that might hold a thousand skeletons or a hundred; they were buried deep under layers of pine needles and composted birch leaves. No stone or indentation marked their resting-place. He had come, again as on those times before, to learn of the place where one corpse was buried, and Tadeuz Komiski would tell him. But the man did not come.
An owl called, as it would have done on the night that a grave was filled.
He was far away but Tadeuz Komiski’s sight was as keen as it had been during his childhood.
There were deer in the forest and wild boar, and sometimes the small and protected pack of wolves strayed over from the national park that straddled the marshes west of the Lublin road. He heard the cry of the short-eared owl that hunted close to his home. The deer, the boar, the wolf and the owl had no better sight than Tadeuz Komiski, nor the lesser-spotted eagle that would now be perched close to its high nest in a pine.
All through that day and that evening, he had watched the man in the heavy leather jacket. All of his life, from the age of six, he had known that a man would come, sit and watch … It was because of what his father had done that he knew a man would come. He did not dare go back to his house in the clearing where his dog had not been fed. The dog had told him that the man had moved in the late afternoon from a place close to the monument and had taken a new position, seated, close to the house. Throughout his life he had carried the burden of knowing that a man would come — the thought had been easier to bear when he was younger. He could not remember now whether it was the third or fourth time that he had seen the man, sitting in the forest, so patient, and whether it was three or four years since he had first seen him.
Every summer visitors came. They walked on the weed-free raked path from the parking area, past where the foundations of the tower were to the mound of ashes. They circled it, paused by the monument and sometimes laid sprigs of flowers there. A few walked a little way into the forest, on the woodsmen’s tracks, and paused, heard the birdsong and gazed round, seeming frightened at the density of the trees. Then they hurried away.
He was now seventy-one. His father, who had made the burden for his life, had been dead more than forty years, and his mother a year longer; both had breathed a last gasping cry in the wooden house that the man watched. Perhaps he should have burned it to the ground, put petrol in it and razed it. It was cursed. He had married Maria in 1964, and she had died eleven months later in childbirth, in the same bed in which his father and mother had died. His wife was buried, the stillborn baby with her, in a crudely cut pine coffin in the churchyard at Orchowek. If he stood beside the stone he could see over a low wall to the trees that lined the banks of the Bug river and the cemetary but it was many years since he had been there. Because of what his father had done, the house was cursed. The curse had killed his mother, his wife and the girl-child who had never lived. The curse had remained alive.