Then I understood. His rage wasn't against me. It was against that jackbooted crowd of thugs in Lubyanka, and the regime in which they operated, and the order of command that structured it from the omnipotent Politburo down to the cocky little militia men in the streets. Dr Steinberg had been surprised that I hadn't grasped that most obvious of facts: that when you damage a man as they had damaged Schrenk, with your bare hands and with special implements and with humiliation, you will engender in what remains of him the most murderous hate. It does, after all, become personal.
I could believe him now. Schrenk wasn't a defector.
Misha had got him to sit down again on the settee, and for a moment sat with him, her head against his shoulder and her hand cupping his cheek. She looked at me with her face questioning, then withdrew into herself as she remembered what I had done to Ignatov.
'Work for them?' Schrenk said bitterly. He shook off the girl and stared at me.
'What does he say?' she pleaded to Ignatov. 'What is it about, this Lubyanka and this Detsky Mir?'
'I don't know,' he said broodingly.
'Why did the man hit you like that? Should I get the police?'
'You know better,' he said, 'than to get the police.'
Schrenk patted the girl's hand. 'There's nothing to worry about, sweetheart. But your Viktor would like some tea. Would you make some tea for us?'
'There's some in the samovar,' she said eagerly, sensing a return to normal.
'That would be very nice.'
She hugged him in relief and I saw pain flicker across his face; then she bounced off the settee and ran across to the urn, leaving him staring at me.
'We've got a mission on the board,' I said, 'and I'm the executive in the field. Guess what they want me to do.'
He brushed ash off his knees. 'Tell them I'll make my report when I'm ready. I'm not ready yet.'
'The objective,' I said patiently, 'is to get you out of Russia.'
'Sorry I can't help you.' He drained his glass of vodka and put it on to the rickety little stool at the end of the settee, getting it wrong and letting it fall to the carpet. Ignatov ambled forward to pick it up for him.
'Leave it there.'
'Of course, Viktor.'
'I can pick things up for myself, don't you know that?'
'I was forgetting.'
We watched Schrenk double over and feel for the glass, his hand swinging like a hook till his fingers connected with the rim; then he put the glass back on to the stool with ostentatious care, though it rattled to the trembling of his hand before he could stop it.
'You mean,' I asked him, 'you're staying in Moscow?'
'I've got friends here.'
'If they're anything like this son of a bitch here then you're welcome to them.'
He laughed and said: 'He's not too fond of you either. Why do they want me out of Russia?'
'They want to debrief you on the interrogation.' I could tell him so much and no more. He was going to lie when it suited him and he was going to do it convincingly, and if I shot questions at him I was going to get as much out of him as they'd got out of him in Lubyanka. All I could do was feel my way softly into the rage, into the silently roaring battlefield they'd made of his mind, and hope to intercept a few signals when he was off his guard, and try to come out alive and get the message to Bracken. 'They want to give you some leave. You've earned that, God knows.'
'I'll pay my own way,' he said, and fumbled in the black and yellow packet for another cigarette.
It meant nothing at all. It was just a spark coming out of the volcano. I had to find a way of reaching him. 'Natalya hopes to see you again.' At the edge of my vision field I saw Misha turn her head to listen.
'Natalya's dangerous,' Schrenk said at once. 'Don't forget that.' He didn't ask me how I'd got on to her: he knew that when I'd come into the field I would have started by contacting his friends.
'Noted,' I said. 'But she's got her heart in the right place. They're all worried about Borodinski.' It was an oblique shot and I got a hit though he kept most of his control.
'Certainly they're worried about Borodinski.'
'D'you think he'll get off?'
'Get off?' No control now. 'He'll get life, you know that.'
I took it further. 'There's a lot of protests going on.'
'Protests? They're not protests, for God's sake! There's only one thing those bastards'll listen to.' Then he angled his head and watched me steadily. 'You're not interested in Borodinski.'
No go.
Ignatov moved and I whipped a glance at him, but he was only helping the girl with the tray of tea. The room was full of comfortable sounds: the clinking of cups on saucers and the slow tick of the clock. But the company was wrong. Give Schrenk a few more days in here and he'd wire himself to that clock and blow the whole building apart.
'Thank you, sweetheart,' he said, and took his cup from her. 'The thing is,' his head turning to me, 'I want to be left alone for a bit. I've done enough for London, for the moment, you've said that yourself. I applied for a job here as an a-i-p but you know what happens to an application in that bloody place, it's like a snake trying to scratch its arse, can never quite find it.' He sipped some tea. 'So you see I don't want anyone coming here, you or Bracken or anyone else. And that makes it difficult, doesn't it?' He didn't look at me when he said that. He wasn't going to enjoy this, and neither was I, but it was something we had to do, had to work out.
Misha brought some tea for me, standing directly between Schrenk and me with her plump country-girl's body and whispering, 'Who is Natalya?'
'Only an acquaintance,' I whispered back, but of course she didn't believe me.
'It makes it difficult,' Schrenk said, 'because when you leave here you're going to signal Bracken and tell him where to find me. And I don't want that.' I noticed the colour was leaving his face as he sat squinting through the smoke, and his voice took on a forced quality as he made himself tell me the rest. 'The KGB must be hunting you pretty hard if you gave them the slip in Lubyanka. So when you leave here I'm going to blow you as I did before, and there's no way you can stop me.' Then his head went down. 'Sorry.'
15: PENDULUM
The clock ticked.
We listened to it. No one spoke.
He liked clocks. He liked the measured inevitability of time and the events it would bring. He liked watching fuses burn: I'd seen him do that. He liked mechanics-automatic relays, timed release units, delayed detonation devices. Even to bridge the philosophical gap between Lubyanka and Children's World he'd had to invent a mechanical toy.
It might be logical, though dangerously mistaken, to think he was therefore predictable, so that one knew what he was going to do next.
Where was the telephone?
He dragged on his cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs: he needed it more than food; he needed it more than life, because he was dying of it. But he'd got things to do first, and I was in his way.
He'd need a telephone.
Ignatov and Misha were absolutely quiet. They hadn't understood what Schrenk had said to me, but they had seen what an effort it had cost him to say it, and they had seen his head go down like that as he had quietly offered the executioner's apology. Sorry.
'There is a way,' I said, 'I could stop you.'
I could leave them both dead and the girl in shock when I left here.
'No,' he said, 'there isn't. But we don't have to go into that.'
Would he need a telephone, though? Ignatov might not be his only contact: he might have a dozen of them, one in the next apartment, one in the apartment opposite, any number of them. There was something he had to do and he might have got a whole cell established to help him do it.