"What is it?"
"It is nothing. It is predictable."
They are in the town square. A small gray car of indeterminate make stands alone beneath an orange lamp. It is very dirty despite the frost. It has a wire coat-hanger for a radio aerial. Stared at this way, it has something ominous and unprotected about it. It is a car waiting to explode.
"Is it yours?" Justin asks.
"Yes. But it is no good."
The great spy belatedly observes what Lara has already spotted. The front offside tire is flat.
"Don't worry. We'll change the wheel," Justin says boldly, forgetting for a ludicrous moment the ferocious cold, his bruised body, the late hour and any last considerations of operational security.
"It will not be sufficient," she replies with appropriate gloom.
"Of course it will. We'll turn the engine on. You can sit in the car and keep warm. You've got a spare wheel and a jack, haven't you?"
But by now they have reached the far pavement and he has seen what she has anticipated: the nearside tire is also flat. Seized by a need for action, he attempts to break free of her but she clings onto him and he understands that it is not the cold that is causing her to shiver.
"Does this happen a lot?" he asks.
"Frequently."
"Do you call a garage?"
"At night they will not come. I find a taxi home. In the morning when I return, I have a parking ticket. Maybe also a ticket regarding the unsafe condition of the car. Sometimes they are towing it away and I must collect it from an inconvenient location. Sometimes there is no taxi but tonight we are fortunate."
He follows her gaze and sees to his surprise a taxi parked in a far corner of the square with its interior lights burning and its engine running and one figure huddled at the wheel. Still holding his arm, she urges him forward. He goes along with her for a few yards, then stops, his internal alarm bells sounding.
"Do cabs normally sit around town as late as this?"
"It is not important."
"Yes, it is, actually. Very."
Releasing himself from her gaze he becomes aware of a second cab pulling up behind the first. Lara sees it too.
"You are being ridiculous. Look. Now we have two cabs. We can take one each. Maybe we take only one. Then I shall first accompany you to your hotel. We shall see. It is unimportant." And forgetting his condition, or simply losing patience with him, she tugs again at his arm, with the result that he stumbles and breaks free of her and stands in front of her, blocking her way.
"No," he says.
No meaning, I refuse. Meaning, I have seen the unlogic of this situation. If I was rash before, I shall not be rash now, and nor will you. The coincidences are too many. We are in the empty square of a godforsaken town in the middle of the tundra on a freezing March night when even the town's one horse is asleep. Your car has been deliberately disabled. One taxi stands conveniently available, a second has now joined it. Who else are the taxis waiting for but us? Is it not reasonable to assume that the people who disabled your car are the same people who would like us to ride in theirs?
But Lara is not accessible to this scientific argument. Waving her arm at the nearer driver, she is striding forward to claim him. Justin grabs her by the other arm, stops her in midstride and hauls her back. The action infuriates her as much as it hurts him. She has had enough of being pushed around.
"Leave me alone. Get away from me! Give that back!"
He has seized her Russian bag. The first cab is pulling out from the curb. The second is pulling out behind it. Speculatively? In support? In a civilized country you can never tell.
"Get back to the car," he orders her.
"What car? It is useless. You are mad."
She is pulling at her Russian bag but he is rummaging in it, shoving aside her papers, tissues and whatever else obstructs his search. "Give me the car keys, Lara, please!"
He has found her purse inside the bag and opened it. He has the keys in his hand — a whole bunch of them, enough to get into Fort Knox. Why the hell does a single woman in disgrace need so many keys? He is sidling toward her car, sorting through her keys, shouting "Which is it? Which is it?" drawing her with him, keeping the shopping bag away from her, dragging her into the lamplight where she can pick out the car key for him — which she does, vituperatively, vindictively, holding it up to him and jeering at him.
"Now you have the key to a car with flat tires! Do you feel better now? Do you feel a big man?"
Is this how she talked to Lorbeer?
The cabs are edging round the square toward them, nose to tail. Their posture is inquisitive, not yet aggressive. But there is stealth to them. There is evil purpose, Justin is convinced: an air of menace and premeditation.
"Is it central locking?" he is yelling. "Does the key open all the doors at once?"
She doesn't know or she's too furious to answer. He is on one knee, her shopping bag wedged under his arm, trying to get the key into the passenger door. He is rubbing away the ice with his fingertips and his skin is sticking to the metalwork and his muscles are howling as loud as the voices in his head. She is tugging at the Russian shopping bag and yelling at him. The car door opens and he seizes hold of her.
"Lara. For the love of heaven. Will you please be so kind as to shut up and get into the car now!"
The use of courteous emphasis is well judged. She stares at him in disbelief. He has her bag in his hand. He hurls it into the car. She darts after it like a dog after a ball, lands on the passenger seat as he slams the door. Justin steps back into the road and heads round the car. As he does so the second cab overtakes the first and accelerates at him, sending him leaping for the curb. The cab's front wing snaps vainly at his flying coat as it passes him. Lara pushes open the driver's door from inside. Both cabs come to a halt in the middle of the road forty yards behind them. Justin turns the key in the ignition. The windscreen wipers are thick with frost but the rear window is fairly clear. The engine coughs like an old donkey. At this time of night? it is saying. In this temperature? Me? He turns the key again.
"Have you got petrol in this thing?"
In the driving mirror he makes out two men climbing out of each cab. The second pair must have been hiding in the back below the window line. One man carries a baseball bat, another an object that Justin concludes successively to be a bottle, a hand grenade or a life preserver. All four men are walking deliberately toward the car. By God's will the engine catches. Justin revs and releases the handbrake. But the car is automatic and Justin for the life of him can't remember how automatic cars work. So having put the car into drive he restrains it with the foot brake until sanity prevails. The car finally lurches forward, shaking and protesting. The steering wheel is as stiff as iron in his grasp. In the mirror, the men break into a trot. Justin cautiously accelerates, the front wheels shriek and bump but somehow the car is going along despite itself, it is actually gathering speed to the alarm of their pursuers who no longer trot but run. They are dressed for the occasion, Justin notices, in bulky tracksuits and soft boots. One wears a sailor's woolen hat with a bobble on it, and he's the one with the baseball bat. The rest wear fur hats. Justin glances at Lara. She has one hand to her face, the fingers crammed between her teeth. Her other hand clutches the console in front of her. Her eyes have closed and she is whispering, perhaps praying, a thing that Justin finds puzzling since until now he has regarded her as godless, in contrast to her lover, Lorbeer. They are leaving the little square and bumping and farting down a poorly lit street of terraced cottages fallen on hard times.