The main corridor of Level Two was under constant patrol during the day, and all doors had to be kept open: this was to prevent smoking in the service rooms, and also drinking, for illicit drink had been known to turn up in the stores. At night the patrols were reduced to two an hour, and although all doors were now bolted each one was methodically checked. An ingenious Evenk had once hidden in a workshop and had managed to introduce industrial alcohol into the dormitory.
At 10.55 Kolya Khodyan slipped out of his bunk in the locked dormitory. He was fully dressed, even to his deerskin hat. The room was faintly aglow with the blue lighting that burned all night — a convenience for the guards checking the spy hole. He quickly pulled on the felt boots worn in the dormitory, and padded softly to the washroom; and before closing the door looked round once to the watching Evenks and raised a hand.
The washroom had an exterior door to the corridor, for the use of the Evenks during the day. The guards had already passed — they had heard them try the door — but he did nothing, waiting as instructed, listening for the scrape of the bolt. He counted out the full five minutes on his watch, but there was no sound from the bolt. Had the job already been done? He tried the handle and gently pulled the door. It opened easily.
He took a look out, up and down the long length of the corridor; brightly lit, totally empty. The ceiling was studded with smoke alarms, and the walls with bulkhead lighting. At the far end he could see the barrier with an illuminated sign of some kind over it. Just round the corner there, at the locked entrance to Level Three, was a guard post, and he could hear a faint rumble of laughter from the sentry detail. The shorter length of corridor, to the right, contained only the laundry, and ended in a blank wall with a bulkhead light in it.
He waited a few seconds more, watching the guards’ end. Nothing, no movement, not even a shadow. He stepped out into the corridor, closed the door behind him, quietly bolted it top and bottom, and turned to the right. This was what the note had told him to do. It was all it had told him. Obviously it had to be the laundry, there was nothing else there. The laundry had big double doors but no bolts, only a keyhole; locked. He ran his hands over both doors, and lightly tapped, not knowing what else to do, before noticing that the end wall of the corridor had suddenly opened. The thing had swung inwards, about a foot, and he hurried swiftly to it and slid himself inside.
As soon as he was in, in darkness, the wall closed again and a torchlight came on. Stepanka was standing there. Stepanka wasn’t looking at him, but at a periscope. The periscope was looking along the corridor, evidently through the bulkhead lamp on the other side of the wall. Kolya looked himself, and saw the whole well-lighted length of it, deserted, everything securely locked. Stepanka was looking frightened when he turned to him, and he had a hand to his lips. He fiddled with the knob of a combination lock, checking it with a piece of paper in his hand, and then beckoned him to follow, waving the torch.
They were in a small room, a cement room — walls, floor, ceiling, all of cement; bare, windowless.
Stepanka opened a door and they stepped on to a landing — also cement, unfinished, very stark and cold, with a descending flight of stairs ahead; and he closed the door behind them and let out a breath.
‘By God!’ he said. ‘I never was here before! I never saw this.’ He was holding his heart. ‘Come, Kolya.’
He kept the light pointing downwards at the stairs, two steep flights of them, and they came to the bottom and a short corridor ending in a blank wall. A rail was set in the wall, and Stepanka pressed it and pushed the wall in, and a slant of light came out. He hurried Kolya inside, immediately pushing the wall to. The combination knob inside was hidden in a decorative grille, and he hastily reset it, studying the paper.
Kolya was studying the room.
It was a most spectacular room.
It was at least seventy feet long, at least twenty high; chandeliered, galleried, and with a library set all round the gallery. It was full of works of art. There were paintings on the walls − magnificent paintings, of all periods: Gauguin, Picasso, Rembrandt, Mondrian. The room was full of colour. And sculptures. And flowering shrubs and trees — trees in great tubs on castors, evidently for moving in and out. The chandeliers were not lit but they sparkled softly in the light of lamps spaced out on small tables along the walls. There was a long coffee table — a great slab of black basalt — with comfortable couches around it, and club chairs.
Stepanka saw him staring all about and at the ceiling.
‘It’s two levels high here,’ he said. ‘Level Three and Four, both. This is his library, he sleeps the night sometimes … I find him here. Now Kolya!’ He was holding his heart again. ‘You stay here. I have to go and tell him. He will get the father for you. I can’t do it myself.’
He went through a door, leaving it very slightly ajar. And presently there was the sound of tapping on another door and Stepanka’s voice speaking softly in Russian. And then silence; and Kolya waited in it, looking about the room.
At each end was a spiral staircase to the gallery; and in a shadowy corner a huge television set and a globe and a drinks trolley. Also a cage. Something moved in the cage, and he walked slowly towards it; but the cage was only a lift, and it was his own image moving there in the mirror that backed it, and he turned sharply round to the door again listening.
Another door had closed somewhere and he heard a click as it was locked. And then an odd whining sound, and the door nudged open and a wheelchair drove smoothly in.
‘Well!’ Rogachev said. His hand was outstretched, a great smile on his face. ‘I have waited for you, my friend. I have waited so eagerly.’
Six
THE RING AND THE BOOK
41
And now what am I to say to you? It was a lifetime ago we met. And now I am an old man, and will not get much older. I will show you what I have to show, and you will take back what I have to give. It’s all done now, everything complete.
That you are here, I know, and you will tell me how it happened. That you would come I never doubted. It was not light-hearted, that discussion of ours those years ago. My own part I kept immediately and I know you took advantage of it — although I saw no result. As you see, I have followed your career …
As to my own …
My own is so bound up with the events of this land, it cannot be separated. Over seventy years the Soviet Union lasted — a mighty structure, solid as rock. Now, like an optical illusion, all gone.
Only two things of value, I believe, ever came out of it, and of these one would have happened elsewhere. The other could only have happened here.
‘I will have two things to show you,’ Rogachev said.
They had spoken for a few minutes but Porter still stared at him, trying to recollect the man. The red hair had gone. All the hair had gone. The skin had gone, too — just great blotches left on scalp, face, hands. And the big body, once so robust, was shrunken away, wrapped in a shawl.
‘What the hell happened to you — the explosion?’ he said.
‘The satellite saw the ruins, did it?’
Porter told him what it had seen, what both satellites had seen, and the scarred forehead wrinkled.
‘The rollcall, eh? And the bandages. Not bad. Still, it’s nothing, nothing at all, the earliest subjects. But now we have to move. There’s a lot to do.’