He heard the escape of the wind, and smelled it — like poison gas out of a sewer. The colour was seeping back into his friend’s face. Yashkin said, ‘You’d eaten too much too fast. Then you sat. Your belt was too tight and constricted the passage of the food. The pain was from the build of acid inside your oesophagus. Can we move on now?’
Shamefaced, Molenkov sat in the car and pulled the door shut. Yashkin eased away from the hard shoulder and nudged into place among the lorries and trucks.
Molenkov asked him, ‘How did you know it wasn’t a heart attack?’
‘Your hands were in the wrong place.’
‘My hands were over my heart.’
‘No — the heart is higher and to the side. Your hands were not on your heart. You were suffering, Molenkov, from gastric indigestion made acute by eating bread and cheese like a pig swallows acorns.’
More wind filled the car, and Molenkov’s belt hung loose. Then he belched. ‘I feel better but I thought I was dead.’
‘Look for the turning, please.’
‘What would you have done if it had been a heart-attack? We have a schedule.’ Molenkov pointed. ‘There, the sign for Dobrus and Vetka.’
Yashkin knew what he would have done, and was glad to have the excuse not to answer the question.
The young man wanted a fight. Well, he would have it. Lawson thought Luke Davies was a young colt out in a field, pawing the grass with a hoof.
They were all at the minibus except Adrian and Dennis. Deadeye was Control and had the street map on his knee in the back; Lawson liked Deadeye, respecting the man’s quiet. He only spoke when necessary. Bugsy had said again that they needed to get a harness beacon on their man; agreed and no further discussion required. Lawson respected Bugsy too. Shrinks had been near the cathedral when the agent and the target had gone by, a full two hundred metres away, and would have had a view of them for no more than fifteen seconds but with the magnification of pocket binoculars; probably had had nothing to add that had not already been said. And Charlie, the girl, had done well when she’d been called forward, and most likely hadn’t needed Davies with her but he’d horned in. Lawson thought her adequate, not a passenger. Luke Davies was the one who would confront him, and maybe it was time for a clearing of the air.
He’d get it over with. Lawson stepped out of the minibus, and knew Davies would follow him. He walked a few paces towards the walls of the Royal Palace — quite well restored — and heard another door shoved open, then slammed.
‘Have you a minute, Mr Lawson?’
‘Always have time for anything of importance.’
Davies came round in front of him, blocked his walk and his view of the palace, home once of King Stanislaw August, and he was near to the fine statue of a rampant King Sigismund III. He had been here with Clipper Reade.
‘I want, Mr Lawson, to lodge my protest at the way this business is being conducted.’
‘Do you now? How fascinating.’
He and Clipper Reade, the tractor spare-parts salesman, had been in this square on a July evening thirty-something years before, lost in a great crowd that gazed up at the clock face in the Sigismund tower.
The complaint exploded out at him: ‘I saw him: he walked right by me. He looked pathetic. He’s crushed and bowed. God knows what level, should he survive this, of post-traumatic stress he’ll be subject to. He’s down there on the floor.’
‘Is that right?’
The clock in the Sigismund tower had been stopped at the exact moment that the first bomb from a Luftwaffe Stuka, in response to the uprising of 1944, had hit the tower and wrecked the clock’s workings. The crowd had gathered to hear it start to click again, and see the hands move … He’d been in a good mood that evening, as Clipper Reade had, because they had come from a clandestine meeting, the initial contact, with an engineer of the central telephone exchange who had taken the Queen’s shilling and the President’s silver dollar, and had accepted recruitment.
‘You’ve hung him out to dry. What you’ve done to that man is shameful, disgraceful. I suppose you wouldn’t recognize that. Some sort of sacrificial lamb and you playing God with his welfare, his life. You just don’t care, do you?’
‘I’ve come to expect the dull and mediocre from you, Davies, and expectations are seldom unfulfilled.’
‘And the way this business is being conducted is just so unprofessional. We’re barging around, bumbling and stumbling, without local co-operation. I suppose, in your warped world, the Polish intelligence community are unreconstructed Communists, the same people as in the blissful Good Old Days. I know that when I’ve been in Lithuania, our station chief has said—’
‘You were irksome when you started. Now you are merely tedious.’
‘You don’t care, do you? You’re devoid of decency and humanity.’
In his mind, Lawson had been back in ‘84, after Clipper Reade had left Europe, and he’d done a tour of the palace, had seen King Stanislaw August’s apartments, and the Canaletto Room, and the chapel that held the urn where the heart of Kosciuszko, the leader of an eighteenth-century revolt, was laid. And seen the Study Room where Napoleon, on his way to Moscow, had slept, and the Ballroom where the nation’s finest ladies were on display for him that he might more quickly choose a mistress.
Davies’s voice spat. His features were contorted. ‘You won’t survive this. Believe me, you will not. I’ll make it my business to see that you’re hauled before an ethics committee, trampled on and shown the door. Not only are you old-fashioned, a dinosaur, you’re also, Mr Lawson, an individual of quite extraordinary self-regard. You play God with people and think it acceptable. You don’t care.’
The weariness was back in him, and his view of the palace blurred. Lawson said, and kept his voice even, ‘You know nothing. You’re a wet-behind-the-ears boy — probably should’ve found a niche at Work and Pensions. Go away, lose yourself.’
‘I’ll see you damned because you have no care for an agent’s welfare. Lose an agent through negligence and bad practice and say, “Let’s go get a beer.” Your callousness has no place in a modern world.’
His name was called softly. Lawson turned, looked back, and Deadeye was half out of the minibus, pointing towards the steps leading down from the square to the Vistula river. Didn’t know, did he, whether a trap was sprung or whether an agent walked free? Would find out soon, and age crawled through Lawson’s body as he walked to the low wall above the long flight of steps.
He stood in shadow, where he had been led to. Beside Carrick was Viktor. There were street-lamps that glowed dimly but they were far separated. Their light didn’t enter the shadow, but a little of their power reached the dark flow of the river. Mikhail whispered in Reuven Weissberg’s ear.
He had no table-lamp to throw through a window. He didn’t know, now, how far away back-up was. Right and left, the walkway was empty, and the rain had come on heavier. Carrick saw the motion of the water, and its strength, seemed to feel its cold. He stood stock still, and knew his life depended on what Reuven Weissberg was told and how he reacted. All others were beyond reach. They might throw him in alive, might stab a knife into his back, then heave him on to the low parapet. Mikhail backed away, and there was not enough light for Carrick to read his face.
Reuven Weissberg came towards him, took the back of Carrick’s head tight in his fingers. He kissed him, first on the left cheek, then on the right. Carrick heard, guttural and accented, ‘I do not apologize to you.’