The Russia House (44 page)

She was standing sideways to him, gazing keenly through the swing doors. Had she seen something bad? Had she heard something? Or was her mind already far away with Yakov?

It’s how she stands when she’s waiting for him, he thought – like someone who is prepared to wait all day.

The telephone rang hoarsely, as if it had dust in its larynx. A sixth sense had already guided her towards it, so it had no chance to give a second squawk before she had it in her hand. Barley was only a few feet from her but he was hard put to it to hear her voice above the background clatter of the hospital. She had turned away from him, presumably for privacy, and she had boxed her hand over her free ear so that she could hear her lover in the earpiece. Barley could just hear her say ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ again, submissively.

Leave her alone! he thought angrily. I’ve told you before and I’m going to tell you again at the weekend. Leave her alone, keep her out of this. Deal with the grey men or me!

The notebook lay open on a rickety shelf attached to the pillar, the pen on top of it, but she hadn’t touched either one of them.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
I did that on the island.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
He saw her shoulders rise into her neck and stay there and her back stretch as if she had taken a deep breath or enjoyed some pleasurable moment within herself. Her elbow rose from her side to cram the earpiece more firmly into her head.
Yes. Yes.
What about
no
for once?
No, I won’t lie down for you!

Her spare hand had found the pillar and he could see the fingers part and brace themselves as the tips pressed into the dark plaster. He saw the back of her hand whiten as it stiffened, but it didn’t move, and suddenly her hand alarmed him. It had found a climbing hold and was clinging to it for grim life. She was on the cliff face and the fingerhold was all she had between her lover and the abyss.

She turned, the receiver still pressed to her ear, and he saw her face. Who was she? What had she become? For the first time since he had met her she was without expression, and the telephone jammed against her temple was the gun that somebody was holding there.

She had the hostage stare.

Then her body began sliding down the pillar as if she couldn’t be bothered any more to hold it upright. At first it was only her knees that gave way, then she crumpled at the waist as well, but Barley was there to hold her. He flung one arm round her waist and with the other he snatched the phone from her. He held it to his ear and shouted, ‘Goethe!’ but all he got was a dialling tone so he rang off.

It was an odd thing, but Barley had forgotten until now that he was strong. They started to move but as they did so she was seized with a violent revulsion against him and lashed out silently with her clenched fist, cracking him so hard over the cheekbone that for a moment he saw nothing but a dazzling light. He grappled her hands to her sides and held them there while he pulled her under the counter and frogmarched her through the hospital and across the carpark. ‘She’s a disturbed patient,’ he was explaining in his mind. ‘A disturbed patient in a doctor’s care.’

Still holding her, he tipped her handbag on to the roof of the car, found the key, unlocked the passenger door and bundled her inside. Then he ran round to the driver’s side in case she had ideas of taking over after all.

‘I shall go home,’ she said.

‘I don’t know the way.’

‘Take me home,’ she repeated.

‘I don’t know the way, Katya! You’ll have to tell me right and left, do you hear?’ He grabbed her shoulders. ‘Sit up. Look out of the window. Where’s reverse on this bloody thing?’

He fiddled with the gears. She grabbed the lever and slammed it in reverse, making the gearbox scream.

‘Lights,’ he said.

He had already found them, but he made her turn them on for him, willing her by his anger to respond. As he bumped across the carpark he had to swerve to avoid an ambulance entering at speed. Mud and water blacked out the windscreen, but there were no wipers because it wasn’t raining. Stopping the car again, he sprang out and smeared the windscreen halfway clean with his handkerchief, then back into the car.

‘Go left,’ she ordered. ‘Be quick, please.’

‘We came the other way before.’

‘It’s one way. Be quick.’

Her voice was dead and he couldn’t rouse it. He offered her his flask. She pushed it aside. He drove slowly, ignoring her instruction to be quick. Headlights in the driving mirror, not gaining or losing. It’s Wicklow, he thought. It’s Paddy, Cy, Henziger, Zapadny, the whole Guards Armoured of them. Her face lit and went out again under the sodium streetlamps but it was lifeless. She was staring into her own head at whatever frightful things she saw in her imagination. Her clenched fist was in her mouth. Its knuckles were wedged between her teeth.

‘Do I turn here?’ he asked her roughly. And again he shouted at her, ‘Tell me where to turn, will you?’

She spoke first in Russian, then in English. ‘Now. Right. Go faster.’

Nothing was familiar to him. Every empty street was like the next one and the last one.

‘Turn now.’

‘Left or right?’

‘Left!’

She screamed the word at the top of her voice, then screamed it again. After the scream came her tears and they went on coming between choking hopeless sobs. Then gradually the sobs began to falter and by the time he drew up at her apartment block they had ceased. He pulled the handbrake but it was broken. The car was still rolling as she shoved her door open. He reached for her but she was too quick. Somehow she had scrambled on to the pavement and was running across the forecourt with her handbag open, foraging for her keys. A boy in a leather jacket was lounging in the doorway and he appeared to want to block her. But by then Barley was level with her so the boy leapt aside for them to pass. She wouldn’t wait for the lift or perhaps she’d forgotten that there was one. She ran up the stairs and Barley ran after her, past a couple embracing. On the first landing an old man sat drunk in the corner. They climbed and kept climbing. Now it was an old woman who was drunk. Now it was a boy. They climbed so many flights that Barley began to fear she had forgotten which floor she was supposed to live on. Then suddenly she was turning the locks and they were inside her apartment again, and Katya was in the twins’ room, kneeling on their bed with her head struck forward and panting like a desperate swimmer, one arm flung across the body of each sleeping child.

Once more there was only her bedroom. He led her to it because even in that tiny space she no longer knew the way. She sat on the bed unsurely, seeming not to know how high it was. He sat beside her, staring into her dull face, watching her eyes close, half open and close again, not venturing to touch her because she was rigid and appalled and apart from him. She was clasping her wrist as if it were broken. She gave a deep sigh. He said her name but she didn’t seem to hear him. He peered round the room, searching. A minuscule worktop was fixed along one wall, a make-up table and writing desk combined. Tossed among old letters lay a ring-backed writing block similar to the sort that Goethe used. A framed Renoir reproduction hung above the bed. He unhooked it and set it on his lap. The trained spy ripped a page out of the notebook, laid it on the picture glass, took a pen from his pocket and wrote:

Tell me.

He put the paper before her and she read it with indifference without relinquishing her wrist. She gave a faint shrug. Her shoulder was leaning against his, but she was unaware of it. Her blouse was open and her rich black hair was tousled from the running. He wrote again
Tell me
, then he grabbed her by the shoulders while his eyes implored her with a desperate love. Then he stabbed his forefinger at the sheet of paper. He picked up the picture and rammed it into her lap for her to press on. She stared at the paper and at
Tell me
, then she gave a long heartbreaking choke and put her head down until he lost sight of her behind the chaotic curtain of her hair.

They have taken Yakov
, she wrote.

He took back the pen.

Who told you?

Yakov
, she replied.

What did he say?

He will come to Moscow on Friday. He will meet you at Igor’s apartment at eleven o’clock on Friday night. He will bring you more material and answer your questions. Please have a precise list ready. It will be the last time. You should bring him news of publication, dates, details. You should bring good whisky. He loves me.

He grabbed back the pen.

Was it Yakov talking?

She nodded.

Why do you say they’ve taken him?

He used the wrong name.

What name?

Daniil. It was our rule. Pyotr if he is safe, Daniil if he is taken.

The pen had been passing urgently between them. Now Barley held on to it as he wrote question after question.
He made a mistake?
he wrote.

She shook her head.

He has been ill. He has forgotten your code
, he wrote.

She shook her head again.

Has he never got it wrong before?
he wrote.

At this she shook her head, took back the pen and wrote in an angry hand,
He called me Mariya. He said, Is that Mariya? Mariya is how I should call myself if there was danger. If I am safe, Alina
.

Write his words.

This is Daniil. Is that Mariya speaking? My lecture was the greatest success of my career. That was a lie.

Why?

He says always, in Russia the only success is not to win. It is a joke we have. He spoke deliberately against our joke. He was telling me we are dead.

Barley went to the window and looked steeply down at the concourse and the street. The whole dark world inside him had fallen into silence. Nothing moved, nothing breathed. But he was prepared. He had been prepared all his life, and never known it. She is Goethe’s woman, therefore she is as dead as he is. Not yet, because this far Goethe has protected her with the last bit of courage left in him. But dead as dead can be, any time they care to reach out their long arm and pick her off the tree.

For perhaps an hour he remained there at the window before returning to the bed. She was lying on her side with her eyes open and her knees drawn up. He put his arm round her and drew her into him and he felt her cold body break inside his grasp as she began sobbing with convulsive, soundless heaves, as if she was afraid even to weep within the hearing of the microphones.

He began writing to her again, in bold clear capitals: PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

The screens were rolling every few minutes. Barley has left the Mezh. More. They have arrived at the metro station. More. Have exited (
sic
) the hospital, Katya on Barley’s arm. More. Men lie but the computer is infallible. More.

‘Why on earth’s he driving?’ Ned asked sharply as he read this.

Sheriton was too absorbed to reply but Bob was standing behind him and Bob picked up the question.

‘Men like to drive women, Ned. The chauvinist age is still upon us.’

‘Thank you,’ said Ned politely.

Clive was smiling in approval.

Intermission. The screens slip out of sequence as Anastasia takes back the story. Anastasia is an angry old Latvian of sixty who has been on the Russia House books for twenty years. Anastasia alone has been allowed to cover the vestibule.

The legend speaks:

She made two passes, first to the lavatory, then back to the waiting room.

On her first pass, Barley and Katya were sitting on a bench waiting.

On her second, Barley and Katya were standing beside the telephone and appeared to be embracing. Barley had a hand to her face, Katya also had a hand up, the other hung at her side.

Had Bluebird’s call come through by then?

Anastasia didn’t know. Though she had stood in her lavatory cubicle listening as hard as she could, she hadn’t heard the phone ring. So either the call had failed to come through or it was over by the time she made her second pass.

‘Why on earth should he be embracing her?’ said Ned.

‘Maybe she had a fly in her eye,’ Sheriton said sourly, still watching the screen.

‘He drove,’ Ned insisted. ‘He’s not allowed to drive over there, but he drove. He let her drive all the way out to the country and back. She drove him to the hospital. Then all of a sudden he takes over the wheel. Why?’

Sheriton put down his pencil and ran his forefinger round the inside of his collar. ‘So what’s the betting, Ned? Did Bluebird make his call or didn’t he? Come on.’

Ned still had the decency to give the question honest thought. ‘Presumably he made it. Otherwise they would have gone on waiting.’

‘Maybe she heard something she didn’t like. Some bad news or something,’ Sheriton suggested.

The screens had gone out, leaving the room sallow.

Sheriton had a separate office done in rosewood and instant art. We decamped to it, poured ourselves coffee, stood about.

‘Hell’s he doing in her flat for so long?’ Ned asked me aside. ‘All he has to do is get the time and place of the meeting out of her. He could have done that two hours ago.’

‘Maybe they’re having a tender moment,’ I said.

‘I’d feel better if I thought they were.’

‘Maybe he’s buying another hat,’ said Johnny unpleasantly, overhearing us.

‘Geronimo,’ said Sheriton as the bell rang, and we trooped back to the situation room.

An illuminated street map of the city showed us Katya’s apartment marked by a red pinlight. The pick-up point lay three hundred metres east of it, at the south-east corner of two main streets marked green. Barley must now be heading along the south pavement, keeping close to the curb. As he reached the pick-up point, he should affect to slow down as if hunting for a car. The safe car would pull alongside him. Barley had been instructed to give the driver the name of his hotel in a loud voice and negotiate a price with his hands.