‘I’d honestly rather not. I’m not a great one for museums and so on.’
She looked disapproving, but after another fruitless try, she told me that my lunch would be ready at one-thirty, when the Kremlin party returned. ‘Then at two-thirty there is the bus tour of the city.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That will be fine.’
I saw as well as sensed the release of tension within her. Visitors who went their own way were clearly a problem, though I did not yet understand why. My semi-compliance, anyway, had temporarily earned me qualified good marks, and she said, as if promising sweeties to a child, that Bolshoi tickets for the opera were almost a certainty.
The tables, each set for four, began to fill up. A middle-aged couple from Lancashire joined me with enquiring smiles, closely followed by the man who had been picked clean by the customs officers. We all exchanged the sort of platitudes that strangers thrust together by chance use to demonstrate non-aggression, and the Lancashire lady commented on the extent of the airport search.
‘We had to wait ever such a long time on the bus before you came out,’ she said.
The unasked question floated in the air. The object of her curiosity, who was uniformed in jeans, jersey and longish hair, spooned sour cream into his borsch and took his time over replying.
‘They took me off and searched me down to my skin,’ he said finally, enjoying the sensationalism.
The Lancashire lady said ‘ooh’ in mock terror and was flatteringly impressed. ‘What were they looking for?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. There was nothing to find. I just let them get on with it, and in the end they said I could go.’
His name, he said, was Frank Jones. He taught in a school in Essex and it was his third trip to Russia. A great country, he said. The Lancashire couple regarded him doubtfully, and we all shaped up to some greyish meat of undiscernible origin. The ice-cream coming later was better, but one would not, I thought, have made the journey for the gastronomic delights.
Duty done, I set off to the National Hotel in overcoat and woolly scarf, with sleet stinging my face and wetting my hair and a sharp wind invading every crevice. Pavements and roadway glistened with a wetness that was not yet ice, but the quality of the cold was all the same piercing, and I could feel it deep down inside my lungs. All it would take to abort the whole mission, I thought, would be a conclusive bout of bronchitis, and for a tempting minute I felt like opening my arms to the chilclass="underline" but anything on the whole was probably better than coughing and spitting and looking at hotel bedroom walls.
The bar of the National Hotel was a matter of shady opulence, like an unmodernised Edwardian pub or a small London club gone slightly to seed. There were rugs on the floor, three long tables with eight or ten chairs round each, and a few separate small tables for three or four. Most of the chairs were occupied and there was a two-deep row in front of the bar which stretched across one end of the room. The voices around me spoke English, German, French and a lot of other tongues, but there was no one enquiring of every newcomer whether he was Randall Drew, newly-arrived from England.
After an unaccosted few minutes I turned to the bar and in due course got myself a whisky. It was by then nine-fifteen. I drank for a while standing up, and then, when one of the small tables became free, sitting down; but I drank altogether alone. At nine thirty-five I bought a second drink, and at nine-fifty I reckoned that if all my investigating were to be as successful I wouldn’t need bronchitis.
At two minutes to ten I looked at my watch and drained my glass, and a man detached himself from the row of drinkers at the bar and put two fresh tumblers on the table.
‘Randall Drew?’ he said, pulling up an empty chair and sitting down. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, sport.’
He had been there, I remembered, as long as I had; standing by the bar, exchanging words now and then with his neighbours and the barman, or looking down into his glass in the way of habitual pubbers, as if expecting to see the wisdom of the ages written in alcohol and water.
‘Why did you?’ I asked. ‘Keep me waiting?’
The only reply I got was a grunt and an expressionless look from a pair of hard grey eyes. He pushed one of the tumblers my way and said it was my tipple, he thought. He was solid and in his forties, and wore his dark double-breasted jacket open, so that it flapped about him and hung forward when he moved. He had flatly-combed black hair going a little thin on top, and a neck like a vigorous tree trunk.
‘You want to be careful in Moscow,’ he said.
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Do you have a name?’
‘Herrick. Malcolm Herrick.’ He paused, but I’d never heard of him. ‘Moscow correspondent of The Watch.’
‘How do you do,’ I said politely, but neither of us offered a hand.
‘This is no kid’s playground, sport,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you for your own good.’
‘Kind,’ I murmured.
‘You’re here to ask damnfool questions about that four-letter Farringford.’
‘Why four-letter?’ I asked.
‘I don’t like him,’ he said flatly. ‘But that’s neither here nor there. I’ve asked all the questions there are to ask about that shit, and there’s damn all to find out. And if there’d been a smell there, I’d’ve found it. There’s no one like an old newshound, sport, if there’s any dirt to be dug up about noble earls.’
Even his voice gave an impression of hard muscle. I wouldn’t have liked to have him knock on my door, I thought, if I were caught in a newsworthy tragedy: he would be about as compassionate as a tornado.
‘How come you’ve been looking?’ I asked. ‘And how did you know I was here, and on what errand, and staying at the In-tourist? And how did you manage to telephone me within an hour of my arrival?’
He gave me another flat, hard, expressionless stare.
‘We do want to know a lot, don’t we, sport?’ He took a mouthful of his drink. ‘Little birds round at the Embassy. What else?’
‘Go on,’ I said, as he seemed to have stopped.
‘Can’t reveal sources,’ he said automatically. ‘But I’ll tell you, sport, this is no new story. It’s weeks since I did my bloodhound bit, and the Embassy staff have also put out their own feelers, and if you ask me they even set one of their Intelligence bods on to it on the quiet, on account of the queries that were popping up everywhere. It all turned out to be one big yawn. It’s bloody silly sending you out here as well. Some fanatic in London doesn’t seem to want to take “no story” for an answer, and “no story” is all the story there is.’
I took off my glasses and squinted at them against the light, and after a while put them on again.
‘Well,’ I said mildly, ‘it’s nice of you to bother to tell me all that, but I can’t really go home straight away without trying, can I? I mean, they are paying my fare and expenses, and so on. But I wonder,’ I went on tentatively, ‘if perhaps you could tell me who you saw, so that I wouldn’t duplicate a whole lot of wasteful legwork.’
‘Christ, sport,’ he exploded, ‘you really do want your hand held, don’t you?’ He narrowed his eyes and compressed a firm mouth, and considered it. ‘All right. There were three Russian observers in England last summer going round these damnfool horse trials. Officials from some minor committee set up here to arrange details of the equestrian events at the Games. I spoke to all three of them along at that vast Olympic committee centre they’ve got on Gorky Street, opposite the Red Army Museum. They had all seen Farringford riding at all the horse trials they had been to, but there was absolutely no link at all between Farringford and anything to do with Russia. Niet, niet and niet. Unanimous opinion.’