I could see the archway of Spassky Gate at one end of the driving-mirror. The lights on each side of it had gone from red to green as three cars and a plain van had driven into the Kremlin during the past ten minutes. I was waiting for a car to come through from the other direction: the mud-brown Syrena. She'd said he would come soon after five o'clock and it was now three minutes to the hour.
'Did you tell him my name?' I had asked her.
At one stage she'd broken down and cried. That was last night. 'I've told you, I haven't seen him, I haven't seen him!' Shaking against the railings of the apartment block, her face wet and her thin shoulders hunched forward, her small gloved hands gripping the ironwork.
'It's all right,' I told her, 'but I thought you were lying.'
'Why should I lie?' She swung round to face me, furious. 'I want you to find him, don't you understand?' She meant Helmut Schrenk. He was all she could think about, and that was what I had to work on. There was no point in telling her I thought he was dead.
Syrena, Spassky Gate. Not brown. Not D.12-145. There were thousands of them all over the city.
The clock in the tower began chiming.
'Why should I give you away to Ignatov?' Blowing into her handkerchief, shaking her hair back, soot on her gloves from the railings.
'Somebody did.'
It got her attention and she stared at me in the acid light of the lamps. 'What happened?'
'He tried to get me arrested.'
'But he's not in the police!'
'No?'
'He's in the transport division, one of the chauffeurs for the Politburo.'
'Are you sure?'
'Of course.' She wiped her face, half turned away from me. 'You didn't tell me much, you see, the first time we met. All I'm trying to do is find Helmut.'
'I didn't trust you, before.'
'What makes you trust me now?'
She leaned back against the railings and closed her eyes, exhausted from the anger and hope and uncertainty. After these last months I'd started her thinking about him again and it had disrupted her life.
'I trust you now because I want to. Because I have to.'
'They're good enough reasons. Listen, Natalya, I want to find Ignatov. Do you know where he lives?'
'No. We always met at the cafe, or the skating rink, places like that. But I can find out exactly where he works.' Another Syrena. Mud brown. Not D.12-145. The clock in the tower had stopped chiming. I watched the mirror. 'Can you find out tonight?'
'No. I don't have the keys of the office.'
'Is there anyone you can contact, whoever has the keys? Tell them you want to catch up on some work?'
She thought for a moment and then said, 'I could ask the security men to let me in with — '
'No, don't do that.' I stood closer to her. 'Listen, the KGB wants to find Helmut too. Think of it as a race — they get to him first, or I do. It's partly up to you who wins. Keep away from Ignatov and don't change your daily routine. Don't tell anyone about me and don't tell anyone there's a hope of finding Helmut. Try to forget him as much as you can, otherwise you might give yourself away. And him. All understood?'
'Yes.' Her mouth was trembling: she was going to cry again but not out of anger this time, but just because she was out of her depth and didn't know what to do, didn't know whom to trust, didn't know if she'd ever see Helmut again. This girl wasn't a swallow, she was just another young Muscovite with a mother and father and friends and a job, and the most clandestine thing she knew how to do was to march with the cafe crusaders through dreams of freedom in the long night where freedom was dead.
'Ivan was arrested,' she'd told me before I left her.
'What for?'
'Handing out leaflets, outside the courtroom.'
'Three days. You'll see him again. But keep away from the cafe, and don't hand out any leaflets yourself. I may need to see you again if I don't find Ignatov.'
D.12-145.
Turning to the right as it came through Spassky Gate. I started the engine and moved away from the kerb. She'd said he normally took Razina ulica and I turned right and slowed and saw him go across the intersection and turned left when the lights changed and took up the tag with two cars and a taxi in the space between us. The Mercedes 220 was four cars behind.
I knew how good Ignatov was in the street: he'd used his mirror when I'd tagged him before and it had got me into Lubyanka so this was strictly a red sector I was in. I'd be secure all the time we were on the move but if he stopped anywhere in an open street I'd have to make sure he didn't speak to a militia man, and if he went to a telephone box I'd have to leave him there and get the Pobeda into some kind of cover. There was no reason why he should suspect the tag: this was a different car with a different number and he'd never seen me closer than a street's width away and this was the rush hour and there were a dozen Pobedas in sight of him at any given minute. But he'd blown me the last time and he could do it again if I gave him the ghost of a chance.
I didn't think he had a transmitter with a concealed antenna because this was the same Syrena he was driving and two days ago he'd had to get out and telephone to trigger the action.
Mirror. The Mercedes was now three spaces behind me and in front of a truck with a high profile and after that I couldn't see anything but if a police patrol wanted to come up on me for any reason he'd overtake the rest and dose me in. I could only relax when there was a right-hand street within sight for use as an escape road but this was oversensitive because my image was dean and I didn't think Ignatov had a transmitter. After Lubyanka, Bracken had said, you'll feel a bit paranoid for a while.
We crossed the first ring road at 5.14 and the second one five minutes later and followed Kazakov ulica eastwards with no significant change in the pattern except for some shunting when Ignatov went through the lights at yellow and I had to get the spacer vehicles behind me and close the distance and then hang back and wait for some new ones to cover me in his mirror. He'd seen me once or twice but he'd seen a lot of cars behind him as we all headed for the suburbs, and the rake of my windscreen was reflecting the street lamps and he couldn't see my face. I don't think he was going through on the yellow because he'd discovered the tag: Natalya had said he was a chauffeur for the Politburo so he'd be used to storming along the Chaika lane at the wheel of a government Zil and going through on the red with the policeman stopping the cross traffic, and he must feel frustrated on his off-duty runs in the Syrena.
5.22 and a right turn to take us across the river at the Radio ulica bridge two minutes later. Three spacers, two taxis and a small van, with the Mercedes keeping station behind me. The road surface was fair, with sand across the snow and not too many ruts forming as yet.
This astrakhan coat smelt bloody awfuclass="underline" God knew where Bracken's people had got it from. It reeked of black tobacco and borsht and camphor balls, this week's unrepeatable bargain out of the railway workers' union second-hand store, I'd put it at fifteen roubles. I wound down the window and let the freezing air come in.
Slowing.
He was slowing and peeling off to the right at the fork opposite the park and I saw the pumps of a filling-station and slowed with him and took the same turn, because if I went straight on and took two rights I'd come back on him from the opposite direction and he'd get a close look at my face when I passed him; at that point he'd be on my left and the cheek wound would be on the other side but my image was an eighty-eight per cent security risk on an inverted scale: I'd made a count while I was waiting for him to come through Spassky Gate and one out of eight men on the pavement had been wearing his scarf as I was, to cover each side of his face against the cold. Ignatov was observant and he'd recognize me if he saw me twice.