It welled in his throat, and Molenkov shouted, ‘Stop the car! Turn it round! We should go back.’
Yashkin said, without anger, ‘If you want to go back, then do so. I go on. Without you, Molenkov, I go on.’
‘You couldn’t. You haven’t the strength, not on your own.’
‘I go on, with or without you.’
‘Think of your wife. Come back with me.’
Now the hand moved fast. From the wheel to the gear lever. The Polonez lurched and slowed. Molenkov saw the foot stamp on the pedal. Yashkin reached across him, opened the passenger door, thrust it wide, then jerked round, caught a strap of Molenkov’s bag and dumped it in his lap. He reached for the uniform on the hanger and threw that, too, on to Molenkov’s knees.
Molenkov climbed out. His feet went down into a water-filled pothole. He felt the damp settle in his shoes and saturate his socks. Rain hit his face, and within the first few seconds his uniform was spattered. He looked right and saw only trees on the near side and a lake on the other. He looked left and saw a wood-plank home, but no smoke came from the chimney and no washing was out.
The door was slammed after him. The car started slowly to pull away.
He had no food. He had little money in his wallet. He told himself then that he was a man of principle, not a criminal. Told himself, also, that Yashkin would go a hundred metres, find the entrance to a field, turn and come back for him. Told himself as well that he and Yashkin were joined at the fucking hip. The car had disappeared round a bend. He thought of the cold that would now have settled on his small home, and the damp because a fire had not been lit, and he thought of going back to the bed and the musty sheets, and of setting off for the street market of Sarov, spending a day searching for scrag meat and old vegetables that he could afford, and the previous day’s milk, which would be sold off cheap. He thought of the great gate and the sentries, and of the men behind it who despised him because he was a zampolit and a former political officer of the old regime. He had no other friend.
He started to walk. He didn’t go in the direction of Sarov, twelve hundred kilometres back. He followed the road the Polonez had taken.
The Polonez was, of course, round the first corner, parked at the side of the road. When he reached the car, the door was opened for him.
He threw his bag and uniform into the back, on to the tarpaulin, and dropped down into the seat. ‘Fuck you, Yashkin.’
‘And fuck you, Molenkov.’
They hugged … All around was the desolate land of the marshes and swamps where the poison of Chernobyl had fallen, but Molenkov no longer thought of it.
Adrian called, reported he had lost the target. Dennis spoke on the net, said they had lost the target and the agent, code November. Adrian then made the confession: they were both so damn tired. Dennis added that exhaustion was killing them.
Katie Jennings grimaced at Luke Davies. He grinned.
She said, with a hint of smugness, that in the minibus they had an eyeball, and Davies touched her arm, as if the success over the professionals — however sleep-deprived they might be — was cause for congratulation. Lawson said nothing, but Bugsy contributed that it was well past the time that the agent, November, should be wearing a beacon harness. Deadeye said that when the circumstances were right he’d go forward and hand over the gear. Shrinks said that exhaustion was a killer and could wreck them.
From a distance, they sat in the minibus and watched, kept the eyeball. Katie Jennings heard a rasped snore, turned sharply. Lawson was behind her, flopped back on the seat. His mouth was wide and the snore a growl. She leaned her shoulder hard against Luke Davies, then buried her face in his coat to stifle her giggles.
Davies did not acknowledge it, had the binoculars up, saw them.
They stood in the rain, back and by the gate.
Mikhail said, ‘He’s like a kid who’s been given a new toy.’
Viktor said, ‘I see him as an old man with a young whore sitting on his knee.’
Josef Goldmann said nothing but he watched Reuven Weissberg move among the stones and with him was Johnny Carrick, whom he had thought special, loyal, and now did not know him.
‘And all other toys, us, are dumped.’
‘The young whore will turn the old man away from his family, us, who have cared for him.’
Josef Goldmann hated the world, everything about it. He was forbidden to make a mobile call to his wife for fear it could be tracked. His stomach for the trading, as he stood in the tipping rain under trees without leaves at the gate, ebbed.
‘We have looked after him, helped him, worked with him, are rejected.’
‘And the Jew woman, his grandmother, the witch who has never laughed. We looked after him and her, but are ignored.’
Josef Goldmann, watching them, felt his influence slipping.
Mikhail said, ‘I don’t need to work as a servant for a kid with a new toy and that woman. I have enough. I haven’t been there but I hear Cyprus is good.’
Josef Goldmann thought of what he craved beyond all else. He thought of a life without deception, without fraud, a career of legitimacy. He was in the rain under a bare-branched tree beside a rusted gate that hung askew. He thought of the parents he met at school evenings, their legitimacy, and he thought of meetings in the City to which his deceit gave him access. He thought of staring down at the street from the first-floor window of his salon, and seeing it filled with police cars.
‘We’re all trapped men. You are, I am. Whether Johnny Carrick is the new toy or the young whore, he’s trapped too. So, I hear you both. Now answer me. Will you go to him, Mikhail, and say you wish to leave and go to Cyprus? Will you do it, Viktor? Will I? Does it only rain in this fucking country?’
They shuffled, fidgeted, smoked, and they waited as they had been told to, and the two men moved among the stones, tortoise fast, in front of them.
Carrick was led. He sensed that, long ago, all of the stones in the Jews’ cemetery at Chelm had been toppled and that some were replacements for those broken an age ago. A month after the invasion of Iraq and a few weeks before the roadside bomb had exploded, he had been to another cemetery, on the outskirts of Basra. He had held his rifle warily and had walked with others in the patrol among flattened headstones and fractured ones, had trampled in the weeds that grew there and had paused several times to read the faint, wind-scoured, sun-bleached words carved, and he had learned of young men who had died far from home and had served in regiments that had been disbanded after the Great War of which they were casualties: We shall remember them … Yes, an effort had been made here to right an old wrong and to give a trifle of dignity to the graves of the Jews of Chelm. No, the cemetery outside Basra would not have been repaired and the dead there would not be honoured.
Their feet squashed down layers of wet leaves.
They did a circuit of the graveyard.
Turning, facing the gate where Josef Goldmann, Mikhail and Viktor waited, Reuven Weissberg said, ‘You ask little, Johnny.’
‘If I talk I don’t concentrate, sir. If I don’t concentrate I can’t do my job.’
‘And you don’t ask about what I involve you in.’
‘In its own good time, sir.’
‘As yet I have shown you nothing, Johnny. But I will. I will show you what governs me.’
‘Yes, sir.’
They reached the gate. Carrick ignored the hatred shown him in the eyes of Viktor and Mikhail, did not need to note it because he had his own, supreme, protector.