Across the street, the lights of the Moskva Hotel reached into the darkening sky. He put the gun away. It was as if he had donned a disguise. Now, only the fact that he lurched against people unsteadily attracted their notice. Forty yards from the entrance to the Metro, he was anonymous again.
Even when the siren of the police car seemed to point him out as it wailed past, heading for the scene of the incident. Somewhere in him, he felt a part of him sliding into emptiness, as if he had received a physical blow to the head, and his consciousness lurched sickeningly; but more insistent was the pain in his calf, and the icy wetness in his shoe — the strange sensation of the trouser leg clinging wetly — and more imperative was the lighted bulk of the Historical Museum across the square from him.
It was five-twenty. He was too late, they would already have closed the entrance and be shunting out the last visitors — perhaps another five minutes for a respected academician or historian. But no one would be going in now.
At the traffic-lights of the pedestrian crossing from the Lenin Museum corner to the History Museum, he felt chilled and weak and purposeless. And then he remembered it was a Wednesday. The museum closed at seven, Wednesdays and Fridays. He leaned gratefully against someone's back as relief flooded him. The woman turned her head, and he touched his fur hat in apology, trying to smile and realising how unwell he looked; as if his face had been mirrored in hers.
A green silhouette on the pedestrian lights, fuzzily unclear to his eyes. He stepped out, then was bundled back again as another siren screamed up the scale and a police Zil tore past them, round into Revolution Square. Then the crowd moved forward again, warily watching the stationary traffic.
He leant against the wall of the museum for a moment, as if recovering his breath. He inspected his shoe and ankle. A tiny pool of darkness seemed to well round the sole of his shoe as he watched, and he looked stupidly back to the gutter and the pedestrian crossing, convinced he could see the betraying spots. He shook his head. No, nothing. Moving the injured leg with both hands, as if it were a wooden limb, he smeared the little pool, and stepped forward. No one seemed to notice him. Probably they would think him drunk, or ill, if they did.
He moved swiftly — at least the pain seemed to come in quick gouts now, suggesting speed of movement — his limp comically exaggerated. The main facade of the museum overlooked Red Square, a long flight of grandiose steps up to the pillared entrance. A mock-Russian style, designed by an Englishman. He saw the steps before him with pain rather than relief. They were almost bare of people — one or two loungers, near the bottom, a few students passing in or out of the doors, some figures bent with study and the very weight of history. And the glass, revolving doors in the shadows under the pillars of the porch.
Slowly, careful of the treacherous early frost, looking back every few seconds, he mounted the steps. He was leaving only the occasional blood-spot. He had left two or three footprints clear in his blood after he had paused in the street, but not now. His leg ached more familiarly, as if with cold — except when he placed his weight on it. He kept close to the balustrade, using the handrail to assist him, swinging the wounded leg before him. He concentrated on the immediate task, narrowing his awareness; that way, he did not think of Alevtina, dead like Ilya and Maxim, but killed by her own superior. Yet he did have a vague sense of living beyond the immediate future, living beyond a new expansion of consciousness in which he would perceive, in a pitiless clear light, the moral nature of what he had done, what he was doing. The puritan in him was poised to reassert itself.
It would have to wait, he told himself, gritting his teeth — I have to get to the fucking toilet and bandage my bloody leg!
The coarse, blunt language, the simple demands from the time and place, eased aside the looming shadows at the back of his mind. He straightened up, walking slowly so that his gait might have a little normality, he pushed through the revolving doors, seeing a man's wizened, clever face moving past him on the other side, nodding in greeting. Vorontsyev did not know him. It was a gesture without suspicion. He stepped away from the doors, heading swiftly through the turnstile, hardly pausing to pick up his twenty-five kopeck ticket. The door of the male lavatory was near the entrance to the museum, he remembered.
At the door of the lavatory, he turned his head. The chequered pattern of the floor seemed unstained, but if he looked carefully he could see one or two faint smears, perhaps a spot or two. Even as he looked, he saw the shoe of an attendant smear one spot out of recognition, and nodded in satisfaction. He dosed the door of the washroom behind him, then locked himself in one of the three cubicles. He slumped wearily on the seat, his strength seemingly drained entirely.
The thought kept hammering in his head like a migraine. He had killed Alevtina — killed her. He hardly envisaged the flung corpse, arms wide, or felt the initial pain in his leg. Merely the moral position, a whirl of abstracts in his mind. Killed Alevtina, a member of my team.
He was dizzy, too, with the lost blood. Carefully, he bent over, his awareness spinning like a drunk's, and rolled up the sodden trouser leg. The bullet from the Makarov had passed through the flesh and muscle of the calf, a neat hole at one side, a darker, cratered wound on the other. His sock was soaked with blood, and he decided not to remove his shoe.
Clumsily, he fished the leather-bound flask of vodka from his hip pocket, and wetted his handkerchief with the spirit. Then he washed around the area of the wound, which seemed to have eased its bleeding since he had begun to rest it. Then he welted the handkerchief until it was soaked, and dabbed it against the wound.
He cried out once, then clenched his teeth in quivering weakness to still the further cries the pain prompted. Then he pulled his shirt from his waistband, and tore off a strip of it. This he knotted over the wound, waiting without breathing to see if the material became dyed. A spot bloomed, but did not spread far. He leaned back against the cistern, grateful, his trouser leg still rolled above his knee, his fur hat askew on his head.
Almost at once, inattentive to the world beyond the cubicle as he was, the mental landscape asserted itself. The brief future — where was Gorochenko? Had he made a mistake in coming? If he was locked in, and the old man wasn't there, hadn't he wasted the last night before the coup? Where would he hide until the museum closed?
And the past — the dead sprawled overcoat on the frosty path near the flats; the dead Alevtina with her face twisted into the dust coating the tiles of the Revolution Square Metro station. The man, whose face he barely knew, did not figure in the flash of images.
And his own death; inescapable, boiling certitude of ideas, raging as soon as he touched on them, an opened box of his world's ills. For he was committed now, irrevocably. Not in the eyes of others, of the organisation or the state he would be judged to have betrayed, but in his own eyes. The death of Alevtina had revoked all extenuation in his own severe judgement.
He had to be strong — he looked at the gloved hands before his face, and he could see them quivering — if he was to finish it now. Nothing definite formed in his mind concerning the final encounter, but he believed that there had to be one. He needed safe darkness for a while. He could not let the whirl of imagery, its mad dance, control him.
He longed for unconsciousness as he might have longed for sleep before a difficult task.
He stood on the leg, rolling down the damp trouser leg, testing his weight. Pain shot through his thigh and side. He sagged against the wall of the cubicle, then unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out. He limped to the single washbasin, and cleaned his hands.