The basement was exceedingly dusty, and ill-lit and hideous. Hundreds of thousands of papers were there, in spring-lock boxes: lectures, reports, lab books, all mixed in with the correspondence. These days she kept an index of everything, but the only index for this heap of archive was what was on the box labels — dates and subject categories. That was what he had wanted when she had joined him fifteen years ago.
At that time his wife (his former secretary) had just died, and he had had the institute for only a year. And in the very earliest box Miss Sonntag had come, with a pang, on condolences from foreign colleagues. They had been written to the institute — he had not encouraged correspondence to his home, always a private man. With the years he had become, if anything, even more private — detached, sardonic. But never with her. With her he had always been warm, playful. In the early years indeed she had wondered … she had still been in her forties, he was not a young man, quite bald even then … But that was all nonsense. It was nonsense but yet she thought with a pang of this also.
And meanwhile read on, very diligently, abstracting a paper here, a paper there. These she read out to Lazenby every night at his hotel on the River Spey. She had read out twenty-four by the end.
‘I have gone through two years more, Professor, after the last,’ she told him, ‘and found nothing. Do you wish me to continue?’
‘No. That will be the lot. That fellow can have them now — the personal ones included. Tell him to send a courier. I suppose nothing of the — of the other kind has turned up in the post, has it?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Hmm. You are going off when?’
‘In two days. Unless you want me,’ she said, with extreme caution, ‘to wait on until you come back?’
‘No, no. I’m coming now. Nothing doing here. No fish. But you’ve done a grand job, Dora. Really very good of you. Many, many thanks indeed, Dora.’
Dora, Dora! She put the phone down, with mild rejoicing, and forgave him the four days in the basement.
Then she took off to pack her sandals and other sensible Shoes; and for the rest of July walked about Florence with Sonya.
Nothing happened while they were away. No messages turned up in the post. Nothing of value had come from the basement.
By the end of July plenty of answers had turned up at Langley, and they were bad answers.
No vessel at Dudinka had been boarded by anyone but port workers. No special handling was needed for nickel-alloy parts. No fingerprints supplied by the station chiefs in Holland and Germany matched the ones on the envelope. And no name resembling ‘dark waters’ was known for the two lakes near Norilsk; which furthermore were bituminous and of no use as a water supply.
All this was discouraging and something obviously wasn’t right.
In England, Lazenby had come early to the conclusion that things were not right. He had come to it actually in Scotland, listening to Miss Sonntag on the phone. He had let her read everything out, but even after the first few boxes he had known that something was wrong. There wasn’t anything from Rogachev. Rogachev had been one of his earliest correspondents, and should have turned up early. But he hadn’t. And as the boxes continued he had not turned up at all.
Lazenby had only the sketchiest recollection of the man: a red-haired fellow, jokey, rather too personal, and a drinker. Most of the Russians were drinkers, and Lazenby was not — a small Scotch occasionally, a glass of sherry. And they had got him drunk. At a conference somewhere. At night. He had a confused recollection of lurching down a street with a number of them, Rogachev making jokes. There was something else in the scene that was disreputable, but he couldn’t place it.
This he did not manage to do until weeks later, back in Oxford, when he had to get up in the middle of the night. Advancing age made it necessary for him to get up in the night sometimes now. He was urinating away, half asleep, when the impression came back. Urinating against a wall. With Russians. All jabbering in Russian. Rogachev on one side of him and a young Asiatic on the other. The young Asiatic, when not talking Russian, had been talking a transatlantic kind of English. He had been talking about Siberia.
Lazenby knew this was important. A number of things seemed to come together here — of relevance both to the message and to the murky episode itself. He couldn’t recollect more of the episode, and in the morning still couldn’t. But it still seemed important, so he wrote it down. He didn’t write anything about urinating against walls. That was personal and of no importance to anybody. But Rogachev obviously was. And the young Asiatic might be.
This happened in September, when it was known that no further communication was possible, but he completed his statement and passed it on anyway.
5
By September, the inquiry had ground down at Langley. It didn’t stop but it settled where it had started: the biographical department.
In charge of it was a man called W. Murray Hendricks. He was an elderly lawyer who had been with the department since the mid-1960s when a series of chaotic upsets to do with faulty cross-referencing (which had cost the country some billions in an unnecessary arms race) had brought about his rapid transfer from the Library of Congress. There he had been in charge of Copyrights. Here he was in charge of Lives. He was an orderly man with a mild manner.
W. Murray Hendricks, now able to examine all the papers calmly and without pressure, had come to three conclusions.
The first was that the relationship between the unknown correspondent and Lazenby was likely to have been social rather than professional. His assessment of Lazenby was that he was a remote sort of fish: professional matters he might remember, social ones not. This one he didn’t remember. It was probably social.
To be social with Lazenby called for qualities of warmth and gregariousness in the other party. Hendricks looked through the candidates on the list and found three warm and gregarious ones. Two of them, he saw, had sent Lazenby condolence notes on his wife’s death — they had appeared in the twenty-four letters sent from London — but one of them had not. He looked this one up.
It was a Professor Rogachev — Professor Efraim Moisevich Rogachev — and the department held a useful file on him. It stopped abruptly. In examining where it stopped he saw why no condolences had been received; why there were, in fact, no letters at all from him. Lazenby’s archive covered a period of sixteen years. This man had gone missing seventeen years ago. He had had a motoring accident at Pitsunda on the Black Sea. His wife had been killed and he himself injured. He had returned to work briefly but had then had something resembling a nervous breakdown, after which — nothing.
Hendricks looked up the man’s activities before the accident. He found that the week before he had been at a conference in England, at Oxford. The department kept records of conferences, and Hendricks sent for this one. It contained a full delegate list and also reports on the conference activities. Leafing through, he saw that Lazenby and Rogachev had met there on at least three occasions: at a welcoming reception for the delegates; as fellow panellists on a seminar; and as members of a sub-committee.
Before this they hadn’t met for three years — far too long ago to be relevant now; which brought him to a second conclusion.
Efraim Moisevich Rogachev was the likeliest man to have sent the message to Lazenby, and he had done so as a result of the meeting at Oxford.
The relevant meeting was probably the social one, the reception. Something had happened at it. Whatever it was, another person had also been involved. The message asked for another person. The person might merely have been mentioned, but it was more likely that he was there. He would be a Russian-speaker; and most probably a Russian. He was being asked to go to Russia. Without a fair knowledge of the place he wouldn’t get far in it.