‘Be my guest,’ Craig proposed. ‘Take one of the girls. I’ve got a spare. No charge. I know you can’t be gay, since the KGB wouldn’t have sent a faggot alone on a foreign mission. What do you say? You think they’re working for me? I should be so lucky! The Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior pays them and our every loving embrace is on tape, isn’t it, my doves? I can’t speak for social diseases, but security-wise, Peter, they’re as safe as they come.’ He tweaked the breast of the blonde. She glanced quickly at all the people who were not looking and then her face smiled a smile while her eyes looked dully at Kirov. Craig announced, ‘I’ve got to take a leak.’
‘I’ll join you.’
‘Well, what do you know?’
They adjourned to the toilet and urinated from adjacent stalls. Craig pissed like a horse with a vigorous animal grunt and talked the while. ‘What’s wrong with you? Frightened of leaving me alone? Thought I’d go to the police?’
‘Why should that worry me?’
Craig fastened his flies and took in the fancy appointments of the room. ‘What are you really up to?’ he asked. ‘Who the hell are you? Is this an off-the-record visit so that I can’t even go to the john without you follow me?’
‘That worries you?’
Craig turned. He smiled. ‘No, it doesn’t worry me.’ He had finished at the washbasin, grunted again and patted his hair at the mirror. ‘I think you’re the one who’s worried. I get the feeling that this visit of yours is strictly below-the-line.’
‘You know about these things?’
‘Go screw yourself.’ Craig charmed his own image with a smile and checked his teeth for stray food. When he turned it was as if he didn’t expect Kirov to be there.
‘Look, I’ll buy you a last drink and then you’re finished. I pay my dues and for that I get people to throw out the riff-raff. No offence, it’s been nice talking to you, but I’m tired.’
They returned to the restaurant. ‘Peter’s leaving,’ Craig told the two women. He was ill-tempered now and called for the bill without taking coffee. Kirov bade him goodnight and left the hotel for the square and the mild evening.
He walked a while, feeling the contradictions of the febrile night which clothed the sky in purple and the streets with easy passers-by who were busily not spying on each other. He thought of Moscow, where you couldn’t believe in Craig and his seraglio, nor Viktor Gusev and his, which was perhaps why the Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring remained an enigma since its main actor was an implausible creation, out of time and place; maybe Viktor had created himself out of the books he struggled to read. Kirov passed a mosque. It was shuttered and in shadow. A few men with black hair and black moustaches sat in the shadows watched by the police and watching in turn with empty eyes the warm quiet night walk past them in its shirtsleeves.
There was one part of his plan that he hadn’t explained to Grishin or even to Bogdanov. It was necessary that he be arrested. It was the surest way of finding out who was interested in his case and in the plant at Botevgrad. Logic said that the risks weren’t serious, but now in this strange place where the warm breeze stroked his face like balm he felt that he had escaped something. A pedestrian stopped him and asked for a light for his cigarette. He had wandered back to the Sheraton, which was brashly bathed in floodlights and whispered America across the square to him and anyone else who wanted to hear. He toyed with the idea of returning to the Moscow Park where the Bulgarian police were impatiently waiting in his bedroom following the call which Craig must by now have made. But even if he wasn’t afraid of arrest, a few more tired and unprofitable hours of release still appeared desirable. ‘Traveller’s melancholia,’ said Jack Melchior, who knew. ‘Have a drink.’ So Kirov did. He returned to the Vitosha and braved the sloppy surveillance of the lobby security staff who knew by now that he was at the Moscow Park. He descended past the envious Africans, the diligent Japanese and the lavatory lady (ten stotinki in her saucer) to the nightclub.
In the nightclub the floorshow was half-way through. A chorus line, in spurious peasant dress that trailed braids and ribbon over a boned and body-hugging costume, posed and kicked to the accompaniment of a florid male singer who was delivering a bland number in Spanish. Kirov took a seat and ordered a drink while he watched the bored crowd and thought of the traitor, Neville Lucas. ‘Why is it, Peter, that there’s so much to do in life and so little to do on Sundays?’ Lucas was an expert on foreigner travellers. ‘Lonely — lonely. Never — listen to your uncle Neville — never get drunk in a crowd. You’ll hate them or feel compassion for them. Or worse still, you’ll talk to them. I used to talk to strangers. I used to be the weird bloke who sat next to people on trains and spoke in a loud voice. That was before I came to Russia and got respectable.’ Lucas smiled innocently. You could know a spy for a lifetime, and in his will he would bequeath you another person as his legacy. What did Neville mean about Sundays? Am I drunk?
Kirov finished his drink and ordered another. He watched the foreign businessmen in their twos and threes, the Party stars with their smart middle-aged wives, who walked belly-out like the prow of a ship as they crossed the floor, and, in the corners, the policemen and the gangsters with their girlfriends, whom they kept as close to themselves as their sins.
How long? How long? Kirov checked his watch and cast an eye over a table near the floor where two girls sat together. The cabaret had finished. He got to his feet and asked one of the girls to dance. She was blonde and lively, plump, cynical, badly dressed and made-up and wholly attractive. Her name was Louise, French-style, she said. They danced a while, laughed a lot and she suggested that he take her home with her friend Jacqueline and her companion, an inebriate Dutchman. Kirov agreed.
They left the hotel by the lobby. By now the security guards were twitchy. Kirov halted and gave his partner a kiss and laughing together they caught a taxi outside the door and the girl gave directions.
‘You’re nervous,’ she said with mechanical coyness.
‘No.’ He looked from the windows of the car into the black and starry night. She cuddled into him, eyes closed and alert. He felt her against him, soft as a baby asleep and yet tensely awake. The car pulled up after a mile or so outside an apartment block. The girl got out, invited Kirov to join her and then gave directions for her friend and the drunken Dutchman. Kirov waited on the step and breathed in the air. He was abroad, on a warm night, with a fat whore. He was oddly happy and wondered if this were freedom.
At four in the morning he was arrested.
The police broke down the door, dragged the girl naked from bed and hit her around the face a couple of times for form’s sake then politely asked Kirov to get dressed while telling the girl to quieten the baby who was screaming in her cot. The girl huddled in a corner among the washing and the un-ironed clothes, sobbing. Kirov lifted her to her feet, comforted her, head against his shoulder with her tears burning his face, and gave her some money and a final kiss on the cheek. Then he went with his captors, clip-clip, their shoes echoing on the bare silent stairs past silent doors with ears glued behind them and out into the street where a car waited by the pavement.
They drove without speaking. The streets were empty, the sky pale with a bright moon and the skyline a soft silhouette of trees. Sofia was a city of trees and pleasant parks; in other days and other times you could fall in love with it. And now they were in Nezabravka near the junction with the main highway and faced by the long bone-white shape of the Soviet embassy behind its fence and floodlit garden, where they were expected at the gate and admitted almost without interruption.