‘Oh well,’ I said resignedly, ‘what about the Russian team which went to the International trials that were held at Burghley?’
‘Those riders are unavailable, sport. You try interviewing a brick wall. The official reply that was given to the Embassy was that the Russian team had no contact with Farringford, minimum contact with any British civilians, and in any case did not speak English.’
I thought it over. ‘And did you come across anything to do with a girl called Alyosha?’
He choked over his drink at the name, but it was apparently mirth, and his laugh held a definite hint of sneer.
‘Alyosha, sport, is not a girl, for a start. Alyosha is a man’s name. A diminutive. Like Dickie for Richard. Alyosha is a familiar version of Alexei.’
‘Oh...’
‘And if you fell for all that guff about the German who died having a boy friend from Moscow, you can forget it. Over here they still throw you in jug for it. There are as many homosexuals here as warts on a billiard ball.’
‘And the rest of the German team? Did you reach them too, to ask questions?’
‘The diplomats did. None of the Krauts knew a thing.’
‘How many Alyoshas in Moscow?’ I said.
‘How many Dickies in London? The two cities are roughly the same size.’
‘Have another drink?’ I said.
He rose to his feet with the nearest he’d come to a smile, but the brief show of teeth raised no echoing glimmer in the eyes.
‘I’ll get them,’ he said. ‘You give me the cash.’
I gave him a fiver, which did the trick nicely with change to spare. Only Western foreign currency, the barman had told me, was acceptable in that bar. Roubles and Eastern bloc equivalents were no good. The bar was for non-Curtain visitors, who were to hand over as big a contribution to the tourist trade as possible, all in francs, marks, dollars and yen. The change came back meticulously, and correctly, in the currency in which one had paid.
Malcolm Herrick loosened up a little over the second drink and told me a bit about working in Moscow.
‘There used to be dozens of British correspondents here, but most of the papers have called them back. Only five or six of us left now, except for the news agency guys. Reuters, and so on. The fact is, if anything big breaks in Moscow it’s the outside world that hears about it first, and we get it fed back to us on the world news service on the radio. We might as well not be here for all the inside info we get for ourselves.’
‘Do you yourself speak Russian?’ I said.
‘I do not. The Russians don’t like Russian speakers working here.’
‘Why ever not?’ I said, surprised.
He looked at me pityingly. ‘The system over here is to keep foreigners away from the Russians and Russians away from foreigners. Foreigners who work here full time have to live in compounds, with Russian guards on the gates. All the journalists, diplomats and news agency people live in compounds. We even have our offices there. No need to go out, sport. The news comes in, courtesy of telex.’
He seemed to be more cynical than bitter. I wondered what sort of stories he wrote for The Watch, which was a newspaper more famous for its emotional crusades than its accuracy. It was also a paper I seldom read, as its racing columnist knew more about orchids than good things for Ascot.
We finished the drinks and stood up to depart.
‘Thank you for your help.’ I said. ‘If I think of anything else, can I give you a ring? Are you in the phone book?’
He gave me a final flat grey stare in which there was a quality of dour triumph. I was not going to succeed where he had failed, his manner said, so I might as well retire at once.
‘There’s no telephone directory in Moscow,’ he said.
My turn to stare.
‘If you want to know a number,’ he said, ‘you have to ask Directory Enquiries. You probably have to tell them why you want the number, and if they don’t approve of you knowing it, they won’t give it to you.’
He pulled a spiral-bound reporters’ notebook out of his pocket and wrote down his number, ripping off the page and handing it to me.
‘And use a public telephone, sport. Not the one in your room.’
I scurried the two hundred yards back to the Intourist in heavier sleet which was turning to snow. I collected my keys, went up in the lift, and said ‘good evening’ in English to the plump lady who sat at a desk from which she could keep an eye on the corridor to the bedrooms. Anyone coming from the lifts to the rooms had to pass her. She gave me a stolid inspection and said what I supposed to be ‘goodnight’ in Russian.
My room was on the eighth floor, looking from the front of the hotel down to Gorky Street. I drew the curtains and switched on the reading lamp.
There was something indefinably different in the way my belongings lay tidily around it. I pulled open a drawer or two, and felt my skin contract in a primaeval ripple down my back and legs. While I had been out, someone had searched my room.
4
I lay in bed with the lamp on and looked at the ceiling, and wondered why I should feel so disturbed. I was not one of those spies in or out of the cold who was entirely at home with people ferreting through their belongings, and probably felt deprived if they didn’t. I had read and enjoyed all the books, and had hoisted in some of the jargon: mole, sleeper, spook, et al. But as for that world affecting me personally: that was as unexpected as a scorpion on the breakfast toast.
Yet I was in Moscow to ask questions. Perhaps that made me a legitimate target for irregular attention. And of course the most immediate questions remained unanswered, and so far unanswerable.
Who, exactly, had done the searching? And why?
There had been nothing of significance for anyone to find. The paper with potentially useful names and addresses had been in my pocket. I had concealed in my luggage no guns, no codes, no tiny technology, no anti-Soviet propaganda. I had been told it was illegal to import bibles and crucifixes into Russia, and had not done so. I had brought no forbidden books, no pornography, and no newspapers. No drugs...
Drugs...
I fairly bounded out of bed and yanked open the drawer in which I’d stored my box of assorted air freight. Heaved a considerable sigh of relief, once the lid was open, to see the pills and inhalers and syringe and adrenalin ampoules all more or less in the positions Emma had given them. I couldn’t for certain tell whether or not they had been inspected, but at least nothing was missing. A hypochondriac Emma might well call me, but the sad fact remained that at certain dire times the contents of that box were all that held off the Hereafter. The fates that had given me wealth had been niggardly on health: a silver spoon that bent easily. Even at my age, if one was prone to chest troubles, insurance premiums were loaded. If one’s father and grandfather had both died young for lack of salbutamol or beclo-methasone dipropionate, or sundry other later miracles, one discovered that actuaries’ hearts were as hard as flint.
In between times, and to be fair there were far more in between times than troubles, I was as bursting with health and vigour as any other poor slob living in the damp, cold, misty, bronchitic climate of the British Isles.
I shut the box and replaced it in the drawer: climbed back into bed, switched out the light, and took off my glasses, folding them neatly to hand for the morning. How soon, I wondered, could I decently make use of my return ticket?
Red Square looked greyish brown, with snowflakes blowing energetically across it in a fiendish wind. I stood in front of St Basil’s Cathedral taking photographs in light dim enough to develop them by, wondering if even the deep intense red of the huge brick walls of the Kremlin would make a mark on the emulsion. The vast slush-covered expanse, where sometimes the self-aggrandising parades beat hell out of the road surface for newsreels, was on that day trodden only by miserable-looking groups of tourists, shepherded in straggling crocodiles to and from a group of buses parked nearby.