'Thank you.'
'Look, I'm still a major target and they'll start spreading out from the safe-house the minute they find out I'm not there, so I want to get off the streets as soon as I can. Let Rusakov know that I'll try and meet him at the Harbour Light by nine o'clock.'
'Noted.'
'And tell the support man I'll start driving east from Borodin ulica along Iskitim in two minutes from now and I'll expect him to flash me when he intercepts.'
Ferris acknowledged and we shut down the signal and I shouldered the door of the booth open against the heavy spring and waited until a dark blue van went past with only the left headlight going; then I walked across the street to the patch of waste ground and got into the Skoda. The clock on the dash was three minutes slow and I adjusted it to read 8:02 and started the engine and moved off along Borodin, sitting with my neck forward a degree to keep it clear of my collar, not my collar in point of fact, the whole outfit belonged to the sallow-faced and brutish-looking militiaman who'd come sliding in there an hour after I'd finalized the deal with that fat stinking bitch.
She'd looked shocked at first when I'd told her what I wanted, sitting there like a great female Buddha in her rusty black satin dress, her rings glinting on her fat fingers and her mouth hanging open: 'But I couldn't ever do such a thing!' she'd get arrested and shot, so forth, hamming it up because she'd already scented money in it, perhaps quite a lot if she played hard to get.
I'd had to start from there.
'But they come in here, don't they? The militia? Just for a quickie?'
'It has happened,' she said cautiously.
'All right, I'll give you three hundred roubles for the uniform off the first militiaman my size who comes in here, the hat and the boots included, the whole kit. Three hundred.'
The huge Ottoman chair creaked as she shifted her weight in it, settling herself for the struggle. 'How could I possibly get such a thing for you?'
'Oh come on, Marina, how long have you been running a whorehouse? Tell him it's your birthday, give him two or three girls and a bottle of vodka and slip in a Mickey Finn.'
Her fleshy mouth opened in shock. 'You want me arrested?'
Rhetoric. I didn't answer.
'Can you imagine what they would charge me with? Physical assault on an officer of the law, attempted — '
'Bullshit He couldn't tell them where it had happened, you know that. Tell them he'd gone into a brothel and got drunk on duty and they'd give him a year in the brig.'
Her right foot began tapping on the stained Kazakhstan carpet. 'And how would I get him out of here? You expect me to — '
'Wrap him in a blanket and dump him into a taxi.'
She looked as if I'd gone out of my mind, and the price went up another hundred.
'And how would he ever find another uniform?'
She couldn't care less but I said, 'He'd buy one or steal one.'
The door from the street opened and a man came in, turning to look behind him before he shut the door, a gross creature with the veins on his face broken into a purple network and one eye dulled, unseeing, the other too bright by far, too hungry.
Marina jerked her head and the man parted the slit in the heavy red curtains and pushed his way through them. I have Chinese girls, this woman had told me, thirteen, fourteen years old. You should see them. They are like porcelain.
But this is a man's world, my little slant-eyed alabaster loves, and there's no hope in it for the likes of you. 'I'm waiting,' I told the woman, and though I'd said it quietly I saw a leap of fear in her eyes at something she heard in my tone.
'It's too big a risk,' she told me.
'Five hundred.'
'I would lose my licence.'
'One thousand,' I told her, 'take it or leave it.'
I'd given her cash and she'd counted it and it had been an hour before the sallow-faced militiaman had come through the door, and now I could smell the vodka on his uniform as I drove east along Iskitim, watching the mirror, a blade of freezing air cutting through a gap where the window-rubber had rotted away, the heater pushing oil fumes into the car from the engine compartment, the mirror trembling to the vibration.
Two militia patrols, both coming past from the opposite direction, two militia patrols and a bus crowded with fur hats and featureless faces behind the steamy windows, a truck lurching half across the pavement to keep out of its way, ten blocks, eleven, twelve, and support still hadn't intercepted. A dog loped into the roadway and I felt the bump and the front end of the Skoda slid across the ruts in the snow and I brought it back again, thirteen blocks, fourteen, until I could see the red lights winking at the top of the radio masts where the land rose towards the river and fell away again.
He found me at the twentieth block and flashed me and I put a hand up to steady the mirror and took a look at him and slowed and let him go past and took up station fifty yards behind him; he was in a two-door Trabant with most of the paint gone and a strip of adhesive tape slanting across the rear window and one of the tail lights flickering; nothing posh, as Ferris would have said, dear Jesus, I was beginning to realize the kind of operation London had thrown that man to direct in the field — Meridian was not your fancy West European parlour game with elite-status supports and backups and courier lines and signals facilities by courtesy of the British embassies in Berlin, Paris and Rome; this was a strictly cut-price package trip through the frozen hinterland of Siberia at a time when even the dogs were too thin to be thought worth catching for the pot.
Something came into the mirror and I held it steady and saw the front-end profile of a truck against the glare of its lights. I was checking it from habit, that was all, because the rogue agent I suspected was in the field may have been interested in me on board the Rossiya and could have closed up on my movements since I'd arrived in Novosibirsk, but when I'd taken Tanya Rusakova under my protection after the Velichko killing I'd gone through the rest of the night in a complex travel-pattern that no one could have tracked unseen, and when Roach had picked us up at the hospital in the Skoda we'd been absolutely clean, I knew that. So lights in the mirror now wouldn't mean anything, but we always check them, we the paranoid ferrets in the field, with a devotion to ritual worthy of a priest.
The Trabant turned south and east again and the mirror went dark. I found the switch for the heater and turned it off. The air inside the car was thick with oil fumes and I cracked the window open on the passenger's side. Another militia patrol car passed me, this time at right angles across an intersection. I didn't know if they'd taken the name of Shokin, Viktor off the all-points bulletin board at Militia Headquarters when I'd reported there, but it wouldn't make any difference because by now they would have taken that whole building apart where the safe-house was and set up the hunt again and put my name back on the board. It didn't worry me: at this point I was running unseen and within reach of shelter and my main concern was to get out of this bloody uniform. But I mustn't complain: it had served me well.
I'd asked that elephantine harpy for something to carry the uniform in when I'd left the brothel and she'd given me a brown paper bag, and I'd put the whole kit still unwrapped in the wardrobe of the safe-house and left it there when I'd gone to find a militia patrol and turn myself in. When I was taken back there under escort I'd told Colonel Belyak to give me fifteen minutes before he sent his troops in but it hadn't taken that long to get into the uniform, and I'd stowed my clothes under the handbasin in the bathroom and was down the stairs before the headlights of the vehicles outside came flooding through the windows and I heard a chorus of shouted commands.