Misha smelt of stewed cabbage, and so did the room; she hurried across to the corner and clanked the lid of a black iron pot on the stove, letting out steam.
'What'll it be?' Schrenk asked me. He always spoke to me in English, and to the others in Russian. I don't think he was deliberately ignoring security; I think he felt that security wasn't necessary, because one of us was totally in the other's power and was therefore harmless. It was probably true, though neither of us knew which one would be the survivor, because this was what we were going to have to work out.
'I'll have some beet juice,' I told him, and he asked Misha to pour me a glass while he hobbled across to the plywood table under the window and got himself some vodka, waving the bottle to Ignatov, who said he would like a small one, yes. It was all very sociable, though I knew I was in much greater danger here in this room than I'd been inside Lubyanka.
'Cheers,' said Schrenk, and tilted his glass. He was having to use so much control that he looked like a half-broken robot going through its mechanical gestures: I couldn't tell whether the slight trembling of his limbs was due to his injuries under torture or to the rage that was in him. The only human thing about him was the brightness of his eyes, but even that was feverish. I thought he wasn't far from the edge of a breakdown.
'Cheers,' I said, and we drank together. Ignatov moved half a pace and I got annoyed because he'd had quite enough warning. I went across to the door and turned my back to it and looked at him until he looked down, sipping his drink. I didn't want to put a spark to the tension here by saying anything to him directly, but the fact was that if he tried to get out of this room I'd kill him. I couldn't afford to let him into the streets again: the only hope I had of doing anything for Bracken without losing my life was to take other lives if I had to. They ought to know that; I shouldn't have to keep telling them.
'Like to sit down?' Schrenk asked me.
There was only one small settee, hardly big enough for two people; there was a chair near the window but it was piled with books and magazines and some knitting I supposed the girl was doing — a nice warm scarf for Viktor, perhaps, in the name of adoration.
'I'm all right here,' I told him.
He sat down on the settee with a slight twisting motion that he'd become unaware of and no longer tried to cover. Misha moved nearer to him and was going to sit down too but he motioned her away with a little jerk of his head that she understood, even though he didn't actually look at her. She went back to the stove.
'Likes to mother me,' he said with a twist of his thin mouth. 'I'm a crashed pilot, you understand. Suitable cover for the state those bastards left me in.' He drank some vodka.
Lights swept across the window from the car park. It had been from this window that he must have seen me two days ago, checking out the environment.
'She seems a nice girl,' I said, 'and she obviously looks after you well.' I was aware of the clock ticking: it was a small grandfather type, tilted with one side resting on a wad of folded paper to keep the pendulum going. Schrenk had always liked clocks, and of course had used quite a few of them in his work. 'Did you tell this man to blow me?' I asked him.
Schrenk's small head jerked slightly: he hadn't been ready to talk business quite so soon, and I suppose at the back of his mind he'd been hoping we'd never have to. He got off the settee with a sudden lopsided movement and stood looking away from me for a moment while he fought for control.
'I had to, don't you know that?' I saw Misha at the stove swing her head to look at him. 'Snooping round here like that. I want people to leave me alone.' He stood shaking, unable to face me, hating me for making him put up some kind of defence against the indefensible. 'I knew you'd be able to look after yourself, wherever they put you. I think you've proved that.'
Misha came across the room and took a cigarette from the black and yellow packet and lit it and gave it to him, as she must have done so many times: there was habit in her movements.
'Did you tell him who I was?' I asked him.
'No.' He drew the smoke in deeply. 'No.'
'What instructions did you give him? What did he tell the police when he phoned them?'
He couldn't answer right away, though I saw he was trying. He'd wanted me to call him all the bastards under the sun for doing a thing like that, for blasting me off the street as if we'd never worked together or been close to death together, as if we'd never learned to trust each other. I would have made it easier for him if I'd gone across to him and smashed him against the wall, and I think he was still waiting for me to do that.
'He told them,' he said at last, 'that you were Helmut Schrenk.' He tried to laugh but it turned into a coughing fit and he bent over, drawing in smoke with the air and making it worse until the girl went over to him and held his thin shaking body.
I should have thought of that. I should have realized why they'd come at me so fast and with so many men, and why Colonel Vader had been so annoyed when he'd realized I wasn't Schrenk.
'I had to get you out of the way,' he said between the spasms of coughing. 'I had to get you locked up, so that you couldn't — ' he broke off, interrupted by a fresh paroxysm, and lost his train of thought. 'But it obviously didn't work.'
'Yes,' I said, 'it worked.'
He turned to face me at last, his eyes bloodshot and the cigarette trembling in his hand and his body twisted with the effort of keeping upright.
`What happened?'
`They took me into Lubyanka.'
He went on staring at me. 'You were lucky. Is that all they did to you?' He meant my face.
Ignatov was moving.
'What is it you've got to do,' I asked Schrenk, 'that needs me out of the way? And how much is the KGB going to pay you?'
The colour was leaving his face. In something like a whisper he said, 'You think I'd work for them?'
'If you could do what you did to me, you could do anything.'
He crumpled as if I'd hit him. His head went down and his eyes clenched shut and he stood there sagging like a puppet under invisible wires and for a moment I felt the sweetness of revenge coming into me and warming me, and then, when it was over, I was able to think more clearly and remember that this wasn't Schrenk at all; it was the remains of the man they had worked on in Lubyanka.
'Help him to sit down,' I said in Russian to the girl.
Ignatov moved again.
It seemed a long time before Schrenk was on the settee, looking up at me, dragging on the new cigarette Misha had lit for him. 'You think I'd work for them?'
`You don't seem to be working for us any more.'
'I suppose,' he said and dragged more smoke in, hungry for it, 'I suppose you think I blew Leningrad, do you?'
'No. It's still intact.'
`That doesn't tell you anything?'
Ignatov moved again and this time vanished behind my field of vision. He was working his way towards the door, behind me. I got very annoyed and swung round with a face-high back-hammer fist and he hit the door with a crash and bounced off and brought down a stack of shelves with cheap ornaments on them and I watched them disintegrating on the threadbare carpet while the girl screamed. Ignatov was staring up at me, blood trickling on his temple.
`Don't you ever listen?' I asked him.
It was very quiet. There didn't seem to be any noise in the whole of the building. Bad security: I hadn't got any more control than Schrenk.
Misha was hurrying across to help Ignatov, her face shocked as she passed me. One of those coy little Hummel figurines with gold paint on it and its toes turned in toppled off the remains of the shelves and broke on the floor, so I hadn't chalked up a total failure.