'Biscuits?' Mrs Peterson was asking at the doorway.
'No, thanks. Are you sure you don't want some help?' Mrs Peterson shook her head and left.
'So…' Peterson said, waiting for Findhorn.
'They were found last week, in the wreckage of a Soviet light aircraft near Greenland. I'm a polar meteorologist.'
Petrosian, alias Peterson, sighed. 'After fifty years. I'm supposed to have died in that crash. How did you find me?'
'A survivor called Victor led us to Sachs, and Sachs led us to you.'
'I suppose it was a bit of an obsession, all this diary writing. You know I keep a diary even to this day. I have a cupboard full of them. Of course I have nothing of consequence to write about these days. Not like Los Alamos, or Germany in the thirties. And I'm glad of the fact, if only because I find it hard to hold a pen. And who will be interested enough to read them after Lisa and I are gone?'
'You have two customers right here,' Romella said quietly.
'Coffee won't be a minute,' said Mrs Peterson, putting a tray on the table. It had milk, cups and sugar neatly laid out, and she had given them biscuits anyway.
Petrosian waited until she had left the room and said, 'This will be a terrible shock to my wife. Partly because it revives a past which she prefers not to remember. Different survivors handled their pain in different ways. Lisa's way was to put the past firmly behind her. To blot it out if you like. Her only contact with those days is an old friend in… ah, you say that is how you found us?'
Romella said, 'It wasn't Herr Sachs's fault. I tricked him. I got him to phone Lisa and recorded the number electronically. It was probably an illegal act.'
'And of course, there is the destruction of our life together. Do you think they will send me to prison at my age?'
Findhorn was shocked. 'That is not our intention. We're not here in any sort of official capacity.'
Romella added, 'We intend no harm to your wife and yourself.'
'We're the only people alive who know your identity. And we intend to keep it that way.' As soon as he had spoken, Findhorn remembered Petrosian's brother Anastas. He hoped Lev wouldn't ask about him.
'What then?'
Findhorn did not feel ready to ask the question. 'There is something which puzzles me, sir.' As a rule he didn't 'sir' anybody, but in the presence of this man it came naturally. 'It's about your escape from Lake Michigan. You weren't on that Russian plane, but of course the diaries we have don't cover that event. What happened, that night?'
Petrosian leaned back in his chair. The smell of coffee was drifting through. 'Well now. That too was some day. Or rather, some night.'
Petrosian was wakened by the rhythmic slap of water on the side of the yacht. Grey light was streaming through the little portholes. Suddenly afraid that the boat owner might appear, he rolled out of the bunk and climbed up the steps to the galley door. It had frozen in place. He put his shoulder to it without success, then retrieved a bread knife and finally managed to prise the door open with a loud crack.
The yacht was six inches deep in overnight snow. The lake, however, had not yet frozen, although the surface was dotted with thin floes and the little waves had a turgid, almost treacly look about them.
The holiday cottage, where he assumed the pickup would take place, was on the opposite coast of the lake, about a hundred miles over the horizon to the west.
The abandoned car might or might not be reported within hours.
They might or might not think to search a boat.
The owner might or might not turn up.
His appearance on a public highway, conspicuously lugging his suitcase, would seal his fate. Unless they hadn't yet started looking hereabouts.
He could sail the boat across the water. He'd never sailed a small boat in his life. Its loss might go unnoticed for days, or the owner might live in one of the houses a hundred yards away.
All imponderables, on which his life came or went.
By about three a.m. it had become clear that the spy, if he was indeed heading for one of the Great Lakes, had slipped off the main highways. There was nothing to be done until daylight.
Dawn was a somewhat nominal concept as it brought little more than a grey gloom to the landscape. However, as the day progressed, police patrols in a score of little towns bordering the Great Lakes reported no sightings of the black Pierce-Arrow car. It began to look as if the lake referred to had been a minor one, like Mooselookmeguntic or the Richardson Lakes, or Moosehead or First Connecticut. They all skirted the Canadian border. They were all in remote and inaccessible places. Or maybe they were fooling themselves and the spy's rendezvous was further south, say Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Despair began to settle round the FBI team like a descending mist.
The team's musings were interrupted by excellent news around mid-morning. Forestry workers had reported an abandoned car to the local police. It had been driven off a narrow track deep into the woods. It was a Pierce-Arrow with whitewall tyres. Its number plate told them that Tom Clay was the legally registered owner. A place called Ludington, a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan, was within sight of the car.
They as good as had him.
The early afternoon, however, brought no reports from hotels, boarding houses, restaurants or cafes. This was odd because firstly the guy had to eat, and secondly, if he'd stayed out overnight he would now be as stiff as a board. It was known that he had money; he had emptied his account of nearly a thousand dollars a few days previously, and Tom Clay had reported that the spy paid for the car out of a fat wad of notes.
A boarding house enquiry produced one sighting. The proprietor had seen nothing, but one of his resident ladies had mentioned, over breakfast, a man behaving oddly. At around ten o'clock the previous night she had just happened to be looking out of her upstairs window. She had seen a man with a briefcase climb over the railing directly opposite the house, and disappear out of sight below the embankment wall. There was a perfectly good sidewalk, and if he was taking a stroll, why carry a briefcase? She had kept looking and thought she had seen movement on the pier a few minutes later. It was sufficiently odd that she mentioned it to her other friends over breakfast. Was he a spy or something, she asked the FBI agent, her eyes gleaming, and the proprietor had tut-tutted politely.
God bless old ladies and net curtains everywhere. He was either heading north to Manistee, or he had found a boat. Any attempt to hitch a ride on that quiet road at that time of night, at twenty below, would have saved the state the cost of the high voltage electricity. Therefore he must be in one of the boats, not a hundred yards away from them.
He wasn't, but he had been. His footprints were still on the deck and the owner was a New York construction worker who hadn't been near the place for three months. Unfortunately the footprints went back into town and soon merged with those of the pedestrian populace at large. And by the time they found that the early morning ferry to Kewaunee was still sailing, it had already crossed the Lake and disgorged its passengers.
Petrosian was shivering violently and glad of the fact.
Somewhere, maybe in a Reader's Digest article in some waiting room, he'd read that you're in trouble when you stop shivering. It meant the body had run out of the energy it needed to shiver.