Charlie said: “Hello?”
There was no response.
“I have this number to call.”
“You’re late.”
The relief surged through Charlie at the recognizable hoarseness. “A man answered when I called before, right on time.”
“I saw him.”
“Then you know I kept my word.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Do you now trust me?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a decision you’ve got to make.”
“Yes.”
“I promised to be alone at the Arbat. And I was. And I’m alone now: no one with me.”
“I know.”
“How can you know?” demanded Charlie.
“I can see you.”
Again Charlie avoided any startled reaction. Confident that he’d lost any pursuit, he hadn’t bothered to check out the streets directly around Hlebnyj pereulok, the street from which he was speaking. “Then you must know you’re safe.”
“It’s not true what they’re saying: about gangs and drug running and whores. They haven’t even got the name right!”
He had to put pressure on her, Charlie decided: imperceptibly, to prevent her panicking but sufficient to get out of this conversational cul-de-sac. “We have to meet; start talking differently from this. You know you’re not in any danger.”
“I don’t know that at all!”
At last Charlie looked around him, casually. There was what could be another public facility in the shadow of a building about thirty meters to his right. It was too dark for him to be sure, certainly to distinguish anyone inside. Good tradecraft again. “What do you want? If you want the proper retribution against the people who killed Ivan, I’m the man who can get it for you: the only one.”
“I don’t know that at all,” the woman repeated.
“You’re running away!” Charlie openly accused, conscious of the risk he was taking. “You keep running away from me you’re going to let those who killed Ivan escape. Is that what you want, for them to get away, never be punished?”
“No!”
“Then you’ve got to meet me. Talk to me. Tell me as much as you do know and let me take it on from there.”
“They’re too powerful; too influential.” She broke into a coughing fit.
“You don’t have anyone else. Can’t trust anyone else.” There was loud knocking from outside the telephone kiosk that made Charlie jump. He ignored it.
There was silence from the other end but another rap against the glass.
“Tell me how to meet you. Where to meet you.”
There was a sound that didn’t form into a word, something like a sigh that grew into a groan.
“What was that? What did you say?”
“Where the road joins Rizskij pereulok, on the left. The cafe there. Tonight. Seven. Wait for me to come up to you.”
“I need. .” started Charlie, but the line went dead. His clandestine meeting with Sergei Pavel had been in a workers cafe, arranged over public telephone lines. And now Pavel was dead, Charlie thought.
The cafe was not quite a step but at least a ledge above that in which he’d met Pavel, but thicker with cigarette smoke. The concentration of virtually everyone was on an ice hockey match showing on the screen behind the counter, one group of men enthusiastic enough to shout at goal attempts and the more violent clashes. There were three women already there when Charlie arrived, two gossiping at one table and immediately behind at another, a babushka heavily muffled in a coat and scarf and woolen hat, despite the warmth. All three ignored him. As he had for his meeting with Pavel, Charlie chose a pole-supported stand-up table closest to the wall farthest from the door, where he was able to see everything and everyone inside. He decided the coffee was better than in McDonald’s but the baklava was stale. He still nibbled at it, hungry after ignoring his McMuffin. He wasn’t convinced she would come. He’d decided the unintelligible sound at the end of their conversation had been a sob of fear at edging closer to a decision she was terrified of making, cutting off the words she couldn’t at first utter, a refusal maybe. Charlie didn’t know what to do if she didn’t come now. She’d cut him off before he’d been able to suggest a fail-safe, which he’d anyway been reluctant to do because it would have given her an escape. Now he wished she’d given him the chance. He supposed he could again try the public telephone kiosk for which he had a number, promptly at five: she seemed to need the regularity of time. Or hope she would call the embassy again.
Would Mikhail Guzov have tried to reply to his early morning call? They’d surely make some attempt to restage the press conference; not to do so would give Stepan Lvov another victory. Charlie reasoned there was the danger of a further hijack by the world media ignoring the declared purpose of the conference and instead demanding from Guzov and Interior Ministry officials answers about the arrest and detention of Svetlana Modin. Would she have expected calls from him, even though it was a Saturday? Charlie thought she probably would. Automatically he looked at his watch, realizing the ORT main news was in thirty minutes, and just as automatically glanced toward the television, guessing it unlikely the channel would be changed from the ice hockey coverage.
So engrossed in the match was virtually everyone in the cafe-and so unobtrusive her entry-that Charlie thought he was probably the only person there to register the arrival of the woman he instantly and intuitively was sure to be his caller: it took several moments for the man behind the counter to become aware of her standing, waiting, and Charlie thought there was a professionalism about her nonentity cultivation. She was slight and very thin, anonymously dressed in a buttoned-to-the-neck gray linen coat and gray woolen hat pulled too low to give any indication of her hair shade. Her only distinctive feature when she turned away from the counter was her facial coloring. Charlie didn’t think there was any makeup and was surprised, if anonymity were what she wanted, because it could have reduced the strange mottled brownness to the left of her face. If she were who he believed her to be, he accepted that some of the coloring could have been apprehension but her appearance was that of someone who had spent the majority of her life in perpetual sunshine from which she’d made little effort to protect or shield herself.
She hadn’t appeared to look for him as she’d entered and continued to concentrate, head bent forward, over her cup as she came farther into the cafe, not bringing her head up until she sat at the table directly beside him, nodding then as if in permission for him to join her. As close as she now was, Charlie could see nervousness was trembling through her, the cup she’d carried from the counter puddled in a moat of spilled coffee.
Charlie said: “Relax. Nothing can happen to you.”
“I’ll be all right in a minute.” It didn’t seem possible for her to look directly at him. She coughed, clearing her throat.
“You know who I am. Can I know your name?” It was going to take a long time, Charlie guessed. He would have to be very gentle, not rush anything.
The woman hesitated. “Irena.”
“Irena. .?” encouraged Charlie.
There was another hesitation. “Irena Yakulova Novikov.”
“And Ivan. .?”
Her hands were clenched, to control the shaking. “Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin.”
She wasn’t wearing a wedding band, Charlie saw. “Tell me about Ivan Nikolaevich.”
She jumped at the sudden roar from people watching television. A man’s voice from the crowd said, “Giving the fucking game away!”
Irena coughed again and said, “We were together. Had been, for a long time. Before Afghanistan even.”
“He fought in the Afghanistan war?” The missing arm, Charlie thought at once.
“He was there.” She fumbled for cigarettes from her bag, the cheapest that minimized the tobacco with a hollow tube half its length, and had to steady the match with both hands.