She smiled at him. Somehow reassured, he knocked.
When Letsukov answered he saw them both at once. He had no idea who the fat man might be. Even in his confusion she thought he seemed pleased she was there.
Fat Sasha was more confused then either Letsukov or herself. He leaned forward in a squeaky stage whisper and said something in Letsukov’s ear. She heard “an errand, the Estonian…” perhaps other things she afterward forgot.
He had been pleased; he was now furiously angry. He stood in this doorway, white-faced, hesitant…
“Go inside, Carole,” his voice was sharp. “I have some business with this man.”
She walked past them both into the apartment. Letsukov stepped out onto the landing and pulled the door shut behind him. It was a few moments before he returned.
“Obviously I should not have come,” she said.
“It would have been better if you hadn’t. Why did you?”
“I think,” she said carefully, “I wasn’t satisfied that you really didn’t want to see me anymore.”
He was silent.
“A mistake,” she said. “Yet another.”
He walked toward the kitchen. “I still have some of the coffee you brought. Would you like some?”
“Yes,” she called through to him. What frightened her was just how desolate she would have felt if he’d asked her to go.
Fat Sasha left the apartment building and hurried across the street. A few yards to his right a lane, corresponding to the lane on the other side where Carole had parked the Jaguar, led between wooden warehouses. Sasha turned quickly into the darkness and stopped. He had made a bad mistake with the merchant seaman, he knew that. Even now he could be badly beaten up in this ill-lit lane and lose his hundred rubles.
That iron hand gripped his neck. Involuntarily Sasha squealed.
“Quiet, you fat pig. Did you get it?”
Sasha pulled from his pocket the piece of paper. The Estonian dragged him across the lane to a hanging lamp. Taking the paper, he read it, screwing up his eyes.
“Just three,” he said to himself. “It’s possible. Yes, it’s possible.”
He released his grip on Sasha’s neck. “On your way, Fat Sasha. And be careful in the future who you talk to in Red Square.”
Sasha waddled in a fast trot down the lane. In the street a militia car braked when the driver saw his running figure.
The driver hung his head out of the window. “Sasha,” he called. “Over here.”
The militiaman’s eyes caught the dark figure of the Estonian hesitating in the entrance to the lane. “And you,” he roared.
The back door of the car flew open. A young militiaman came out ready to give chase. The Estonian strolled casually forward. He could see the second man relax, his hand moving away from his pistol holster.
“So what’s on tonight, Sasha?” the driver said, one elbow across the sill. “And let’s have a look at your friend’s papers for a start.”
“No friend of mine,” Sasha said.
The Estonian fumbled in his inside pocket. The militiaman stood impatiently, legs slightly apart.
“What were you two up to then down the lane?”
“Even duchesses have to piss sometimes,” Sasha said.
“And you?”
“Even duchesses,” the Estonian said.
His hand left his pocket to pass an internal passport to the young militiaman. His knee came up at the same time into the gap between the parted legs.
In the apartment they both heard the militiaman’s cry of pain. Letsukov, emerging from the kitchen, saw Carole looking down into the street below.
“What is it?”
“The police are holding the man who came to see you,” she said as evenly as she could. “There was another man who ran across the street somewhere. I think he must have broken away from them.”
Letsukov took her by the arm. “Carole, you’ve got to go.”
“You’re in trouble, Alex.”
“If that fat man tells the militia he was here, I’m in a lot of trouble. So go Carole, now.”
“Wait a minute,” she was looking down at the scene below. “They’re letting your fat man go. It’s the other one they’re interested in, the one that got away.”
The young militiaman had hauled himself back into the car. As it pulled away on squealing tires, Fat Sasha hurried off in the opposite direction.
She turned back to Letsukov. “I’ll go now,” she said, “if you’ll answer one more question.”
He was handing her her coat.
She took it and picked up her purse. “In some ordinary place,” she said, “like Boston, Massachusetts, would you still be asking me to go?”
He took her and kissed her lips. “Good-bye, Carole,” he said. “It’s got to be good-bye.”
With a roar like an avalanche the whole side section of the office block on Razina Street tore away and hurtled down into the car park below. Within minutes the flames, which had been contained in one floor of offices, had swept up to the three floors above. While the gathering crowds watched in amazement further sections of the concrete walls sagged like melting snow and fell, revealing burning rooms and smoke-filled corridors like the dollhouse of some pyromaniac child.
Zelmetsky, Letsukov’s department head, was informed at 8:20 P.M. He immediately telephoned Letsukov to come down to Razina Street. “The militia says it’s chaos there, papers flying all over the street,” he said.
With mounting hope, Letsukov raced in a taxi toward the office building. Militia cleared the way through the huge crowd when they discovered who he was.
Zelmetsky was talking to the fire brigade officer when Letsukov joined them. The fire was under control now, in fact had burned itself out. But above the fifth floor, the firemen dared not go.
“Expose it to heat and the concrete they use these days just turns to dust,” the fire officer said. “You can’t hold up a nine-story building with dust.”
“We have to get closer,” Zelmetsky told him. “The whole of that sixth floor carried the confidential papers of my department.”
“Comrade, there’s going to be a risk when you approach any shell as cracked as this one. But I think we’ve seen the worst now. Find yourself some helmets and I’ll see what we can do.”
When the first section of wall had collapsed it had carried with it the whole platform floor of the offices on that side of the building. Letsukov’s office no longer existed. Clambering over the wreckage he began to feel a new optimism. Among great jagged pieces of concrete, a chair would be smashed like matchwood, a filing cabinet caved in with locks burst open and charred papers fluttering across the ruins.
For two hours he and Zelmetsky climbed across the debris collecting documents. Letsukov could see no sign of the Estonian cabinet but from those others he saw, he felt confident that no one would waste a second look at a broken lock. Even better, the fire officer told them it would be virtually impossible to locate the precise office where the fire started. His own theory was an electrical fault. It was the cause of over half the major fires in Moscow these days.
In all, the fire officer said they were lucky, especially with casualties. When the wall section collapsed there was only the 14-man guard unit in the building.
Letsukov stood among the rubble, like the others dust-covered, his face smudged with the soot. “Were any of the guards killed?” he asked slowly.
Most escaped without injury the fire officer told him. But two guards on the sixth and seventh floors fell with that corner. Killed outright. A third, he said, had been trapped among smoke and fumes. He was bronchitic and the doctors had apparently said he was unlikely to last the night.