Mrs Wilkinson looked as if she’d heard that before, and instead said to me, ‘Did you see your horses?’
Frank’s concentration on food skipped a beat.
‘They were great,’ I said, and enlarged for two minutes on the turn-out and the training exercise. There was nothing else in Frank’s reactions to say he knew I was giving an incomplete account, but then I supposed if there had been, he would have been bad at his job.
Natasha drifted up purposefully to complicate my life.
‘We have been lucky,’ she said earnestly. ‘We have a ticket for you in a box at the Bolshoi tomorrow evening, for the opera.’
I caught Mr Wilkinson’s eye, with its message of sardonic sympathy, as I started feebly to thank her.
‘It is The Queen of Spades,’ Natasha said firmly.
‘Er...’ I said.
‘Everyone enjoys the opera at the Bolshoi,’ she said. ‘There is no better opera in the world.’
‘How splendid,’ I said. ‘I will look forward to it.’
She began to look approving and I seized the moment to say I would be going out with friends for the evening, and not to expect me in for dinner. She tried very delicately to lead me into saying exactly where I was going, but as at that moment I didn’t actually know, except that it was anywhere for some decent grub, she was out of luck.
‘And this afternoon...’ I said, forestalling her, ‘the Lenin museum.’
She brightened a good deal. At last, she was no doubt thinking, I was behaving as a good tourist should.
‘Mind if I tag along?’ Frank said, shovelling in the last of my lunch. His face looked utterly guileless, and I understood the full beauty of his method of working. If following a person might raise their suspicions, tag along in full sight.
‘Pleasure,’ I said. ‘Meet you in the lobby, in half an hour.’ and I vanished as soon as he’d started his specially ordered double portion of ice-cream. It would take a good deal to shift him before he had finished it.
I made fast tracks out of the hotel and along to the main Post Office, which was conveniently nearby.
Telephoned to the Embassy. Reached Oliver Waterman.
‘This is Randall Drew,’ I said.
‘Where are you calling from?’ he said, interrupting.
‘The Post Office.’
‘Ah. Right. Carry on, then.’
‘Have there been any telex messages for me, from Hughes-Beckett, or anyone in London?’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said vaguely. ‘There was something, I think, my dear chap. Hang on...’ He put the receiver down and I could hear searching sounds and consulting voices. ‘Here we are,’ he said, coming back. ‘Got a pencil?’
‘Yes,’ I said patiently.
‘Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky.’
‘Please spell it,’ I said.
He did so.
‘Got it,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘There isn’t any more.’
‘Is that the whole of the message?’ I asked incredulously.
His voice sounded dubious. ‘The whole message, as received by us from the telex people, is “inform Randall Drew Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky”, and then there are a few numbers, and that’s all.’
‘Numbers?’
‘Could be a telephone number, perhaps. Anyway, here they are: 180–19–16. Got that?’
I read them back, to check.
‘That’s right, my dear chap. How’s it going?’
‘Fair,’ I said. ‘Can you send a telex for me, if I give you the message?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I think I should warn you that there’s a spot of trouble brewing on the international scene, and the telex is pretty busy. They told us pretty shirtily just now not to bother them with unessentials like music. Unessentials, I ask you. Anyway, my dear chap, if you want to be sure your message gets off, I should take it along there yourself.’
‘Take it where?’ I said.
‘Oh yes, I was forgetting you wouldn’t know. The telex machine is not here in the Embassy, but along with the Commercial section in Kutuzovsky Prospect. That’s the continuation of Kalinin Prospect. Do you have a map?’
‘I’ll find it,’ I said.
‘Tell them I sent you. They can check with me, if they want. And I should stand over them, my dear chap. Make yourself a bit of a nuisance, so they send it to get rid of you.’
‘I’ll take your advice,’ I said, smiling to myself.
‘The British Club is along there in Kutuzovsky Prospect,’ he said languidly. ‘Full of temporary exiles, wallowing in nostalgia. Sad little place. I don’t go there much.’
‘If any more messages come for me,’ I said, ‘please would you ring me at the Intourist Hotel?’
‘Certainly,’ he said civilly. ‘Do give me your number.’ I stifled the urge to tell him I’d given it to him twice already. I repeated it again, and wondered whether, by the time I left, he would find his office scattered with small pieces of paper all bearing the same number, which he would peer at with willowy bewilderment while smoothing back his grey-winged hair.
I rang off and debated whether or not to lose Frank there and then, and make tracks for the telex: but the message would keep for an hour or two and wasn’t worth the stirring up of trouble. I hurried back to the Intourist, went upstairs, came downstairs, and strolled out of the lift to find Frank waiting.
‘Oh there you are,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d missed you.’
‘Off we go, then,’ I said fatuously, and we walked out of the hotel, down into the long pedestrian tunnel which led under The Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution Square and up into a cobbled street with the red walls of the Kremlin away to the right.
On the underground way he gave me his thoughts on Comrade Lenin, who was, according to Frank, the only genius of the twentieth century.
‘Born, of course, in the nineteenth,’ I said.
‘He brought freedom to the masses,’ Frank declared reverently.
‘Freedom to do what?’ I said.
Frank ignored me. Somewhere under the wet and woolly sociological guff which he ladled so unstintingly over the Wilkinsons and me, there had to be a hard-core card-carrying fully-indoctrinated communist. I looked at Frank’s angular, pitted face framed in a long striped college scarf, and thought he was marvellous: he was giving a faultless performance as a poorly-educated left-wing encumbrance of the National Union of Teachers, so convincing that it was hard to believe he was acting.
It flickered across my mind that perhaps Ian Young was wrong, and Frank was not K.G.B. after alclass="underline" but then if Ian was what I thought, he would be right. If Frank were not K.G.B., why should Ian say he was?
I wondered how many lies I had been told since I had arrived in Moscow: and how many more I had yet to hear.
Frank more or less genuflected on the threshold of the Lenin museum, and we went inside to have our ears bent about the clothes, desk, car and so on that the liberator of the masses had personally used. And this was the face, I thought, looking at the prim little bearded visage reproduced without stint on paintings and posters and booklets and cards, who had launched a million murders and left his disciples bloodily empire-building round the world. This was the visionary who had unleashed the holocausts: the man who had meant to do good.
I looked at my watch and told Frank I’d had enough of the place; I needed some fresh air. He ignored the implied insult and followed me out, simply saying that he had visited the museum every time he’d been to Moscow and never tired of it. Easy enough to believe that that, at least, was true.
Stephen, back from lunch and an unmissable tutorial, was waiting, as arranged, outside. He had arranged, that is, to meet only me. Frank was surplus to requirements.
I introduced them without explanations. ‘Frank Jones... Stephen Luce;’ and they disliked each other at once.