I finished the wine, giving it a good five or six minutes. Then I went back to the men’s room. I was alone in it; I reached into the outside pockets of my coat and found the note, crumpled into a tight ball like something a schoolboy would put in a slingshot. I smoothed it out, read it, tore it up and flushed it away.
It told me to leave the museum at two o’clock and stroll down to the Square of Fallen Warriors, then take the tram up Nevsky Boulevard. There were detailed instructions, what to do step by step. The last sentence was, “Be careful—they are onto you.” It was signed K. Ritter.
I could only obey it or ignore it. The vague silly warning had its intended effect; I obeyed it, half in fear and half in anger because there was no need for such cryptic melodrama.
Procedures for disclosing and shaking a tail are numerous and they differ according to the purpose of the procedure. It is relatively easy to “ditch” clandestine pursuit if you don’t mind his knowing he’s being shaken. It is considerably harder to make the ditch look like an accident: that is, to put him off the scent and make him think it’s his own fault. He must not know that he has been spotted; he must not know that you have shaken him off deliberately. Yet all the same you must lose him. It isn’t easy but classic patterns have been laid down; fundamentally the choice of method must be determined by the number of shadowers who are in play.
I knew the textbook methods and Ritter’s was one of them. The instructions in his note had professional weaknesses and that was one reason for my anger. Had I obeyed his specifications methodically I wouldn’t have lost the tail. He hadn’t taken into account the possibility there would be more than two of them.
I threaded the bleak massive monuments of the Square of Fallen Warriors along a random choice of footpaths. A pale sun filtered weakly through the haze but it was not a cold afternoon; there were overcoated figures on the park benches. I kept an eye out for an approaching tram and when one came in sight I timed my stroll to meet it when it stopped at the corner of the square; I swung up onto the steps and eeled inside without looking over my shoulder but the reflection in the opposite window gave me a glimpse of two long-coated men jogging toward us from the footpaths of the square. Neither of them reached the tram; we were in motion before they reached the curb.
From my seat I saw a four-door Volga squirt across the boulevard; the two men climbed into it and it followed us.
My instructions were to leave the tram at its second stop, four blocks from the square; this would have been sufficient to lose a pursuer on foot but Ritter hadn’t counted on their having a car. They could keep up regardless of how far I chose to ride.
Better to risk missing the meeting than to let them see I was trying to lose them. Therefore I had to make it look as if I had a legitimate destination in mind; you can’t just ride a tram four blocks and then get off in the middle of nowhere.
As you follow Nevsky Boulevard across the horseshoe-shaped hillside that contains the city and harbor of Sebastopol, you enter the city’s commercial district. Here are the monolithic state-industries stores, the consumer-goods sales and services, the maritime offices and executive buildings from which the activities of the port are directed.
All right, I was on a buying expedition; what did I need that was important enough to take me away from the archives in the middle of the afternoon? I finally decided on a hat, since I wasn’t wearing one; I had one in the hotel room but I could get rid of it later and pretend I had lost it. The forecast called for snow and windy cold days ahead; obviously I needed a hat.
It was flimsy but it would have to do; in any case with luck I wouldn’t be asked.
In heavy centre ville traffic I dismounted from the tram and made my way into the crowded GUM emporium, threaded the throng, picked out a dark Russian hat with earflaps and a lining that was probably rabbit, and stood in the queue that you can’t avoid whenever you shop for anything in the USSR. With an expression contrived to combine impatience with boredom I let my glance flick from display to display and from face to face, turning on my heels with irritable restlessness; and spotted my two pursuers busily inspecting a table of yard goods where they looked as out of place as two bulls in a hen yard.
When my turn came I paid for the hat and walked through the store without hurry, ambling past counters of clothing and hardware, stopping now and then to examine something of passing interest. A pulse was battering in my throat but it was not so much fear as the excitement of challenge: the kind of thrill a small boy feels when he tries to get away with something against the rules. I was, I must confess, having fun.
It was fun only so long as I managed to disregard Ritter’s warning of danger. At the moment I was in no real and immediate danger because everything I did could be construed to have innocent plausibility; I was the only one who knew an adventure was taking place.
I had roved deep into the half-acre store and there were at least four street exits available, one on each side of the building. I knew there were two of them and a third man outside in a car, probably waiting at the curb by the door through which we had entered. The two on foot had to follow me because there were too many exits; otherwise they’d have posted themselves by the exits and simply waited for me to leave.
My purpose at this point was to get rid of that car. I did it by wandering out of the store through the back door. A stout woman was entering as I left; I held the door open for her and used that movement as my excuse to turn. Smiling in response to her “Thank you” I was able to pick up a glimpse of my two stolid watchers: one was coming idly toward me and the other was striding away purposefully toward the far end of the building, where obviously he would get in the car and come around the block.
Carrying the new hat in my hand I went up the sidewalk to the nearest corner and turned right. This put me out of their sight and I knew where all of them were: one man following me down the sidewalk, one getting into the car, one behind the wheel. I turned into the side entrance of the store and reentered it quickly, before the man on foot behind me had time to reach the corner and see me go inside.
For the first few paces I hurried; I went off at an angle from the side entrance into a crowded area of small refrigerators and television sets where citizens stood gaping at these marvels of consumer technology. As I entered the group I fitted the new hat onto my head and turned up the collar of my coat. The man following me was looking for a hatless man with his coat collar lying flat.
I pushed through the knot of gawkers and made my way through fifty yards of men’s clothing, neither idling nor hurrying; I went out the front door—the door through which I had originally entered the store—and of course by now the four-door Volga was no longer there, having gone around the block in search of me. I crossed the thoroughfare quickly and boarded the southbound tram which took me back along Nevsky Boulevard the way I’d come.
We made about two blocks and through the rear of the tram I saw the man who’d followed me afoot come out of the GUM and stand on the curb looking baffled. The car emerged from the side street and drew up before him. It was facing away from me. The second man climbed out of the car and the two of them stood there talking and gesturing disgustedly, and then we made the bend up the hill and they were out of sight.
At the next corner I left the tram and walked spiritedly uphill along a side street of cheap concrete apartment blocks; I crossed one intersection and paused to catch my breath from the climb. No car was turning into the street below me, nor was any pedestrian in sight. I went up another hundred yards to the next main boulevard which ran along parallel to Nevsky, and waited for the tram with my back to the corner of a building so that if they drove by along Nevsky and looked up along the side streets they wouldn’t see me.