‘Show you something,’ he said, stuffing the last of the cake into his mouth and shifting along to the end of the bed, on which he was sitting. ‘A little trick.’
He picked up what I saw was a tape-recorder, and switched it on. Then with a theatrical flourish he stood up and pressed it against the wall beside my head.
Nothing happened. He removed it and pressed it to another spot. Again nothing. He took it away, and put it delicately against a spot above his bed. From the tape-recorder came a high-pitched whine.
‘Abracadabra,’ he said, taking the tape-recorder down and switching it off. ‘From ordinary walls, you get nothing. From a live mike inside a wall, you get feedback.’
‘Do they know?’ I said.
‘Of course they do. Like to borrow it?’ He pointed to the recorder.
‘Very much.’
‘Then I’ll dash to get a chit to take it out.’
‘A chit?’
‘Yes. You can’t just walk out of here carrying things. They say it’s to stop people stealing, but it’s just the usual phobia about knowing what goes on.’
I glanced at the wall behind his head. Stephen laughed. ‘If you don’t complain about the whole bloody repressive Soviet system they suspect you’re putting on an act.’
In the corridor, from the telephone installed for the students, I called Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky. The telephone was safe, Stephen said. The only telephones which were tapped were those in the houses of known dissidents: and Yuri Chulitsky would be anything but a dissident, if he had been sent to England as an observer.
He answered at once.
‘I talk with Nikolai Alexandrovich,’ he said. ‘I meet you tomorrow.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘I drive car. I come outside National Hotel, ten o’clock, tomorrow morning. Is right?’
‘Is right,’ I said.
‘Ten o’clock.’ Down went the receiver with the same crash, before I could ask him how I would know him or his car. I supposed that when I saw him, I would know.
Stephen tried the other number. The bell rang hollowly at the far end, and after ten rings we prepared to give up. Then the ringing stopped and there was suddenly a breathless voice on the line.
‘It’s Misha,’ Stephen said.
‘You talk to him. It’s easier.’
Stephen listened. ‘He wants to see you again, and it must be tonight. He says he is going to Rostov tomorrow with two horses. The snow is coming, and the horses are going south. Nikolai Alexandrovich — that is, Mr Kropotkin — is going next week. It was decided today.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘When and where?’
Stephen asked, and was told. He wrote it down, and the directions took some time.
‘Well,’ he said, slowly replacing the receiver and looking at what he had written, ‘it is miles out of the centre. I think it must be an apartment block. He says he will wait outside, and when you arrive, don’t speak English until he says it’s OK.’
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘You don’t really need me. Misha does speak some English.’ He handed me the address, written in Russian script. ‘Show that to a taxi driver. He’ll find it. And I’ll meet you later, at the Aragvi.’
I looked beyond him to the open door of his room. Gudrun half-sat, half-lay, on the bed, her long legs sprawled in invitation.
I hesitated, but finally I said, ‘I wish you could come. Someone did try to kill Misha or me this morning. I expect you’ll laugh, but if I’m going off into the wilds to meet him, I would feel safer with a back-up system.’
He didn’t laugh. He said goodbye to Gudrun, and came. He also said, ‘Ve have vays of postponing our pleasures until tomorrow,’ and made a joke of it: and I thought that for plain good nature he would be hard to beat.
‘It’s very difficult to think of a good meeting place, if you’re an ordinary Russian and you want to talk to a foreigner,’ Stephen said. ‘There are no pubs in Russia. No discreet little cafés. And there are always watchers, with tongues. You’d have to be pretty solid with the hierarchy to be seen anywhere public with a foreigner.’
We flagged a passing taxi, again without much of a wait.
‘No shortage of these,’ I said, climbing in. Then, as Stephen’s mouth opened, I interrupted. ‘Don’t say it. Taxis are dear, the metro’s cheap.’
‘And the taxi charges have practically doubled recently.’
‘Ask the driver to go via the Intourist Hotel, so that I can drop off the recorder.’
‘Right.’
We sped down the Komsomolsky Prospect and I looked two or three times out of the back window. A medium-sized black car followed us faithfully, but we were on a main road where that was likely to happen anyway.
‘When we get to the Intourist,’ I said, ‘I will get out and say goodnight to you unmistakably. I’ll then go into the hotel, and you and the taxi will drive off, and go round the corner, and wait for me outside the National Hotel entrance. I’ll dump the tape-recorder, and come and meet you there.’
Stephen looked out of the rear window.
‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Do you think you’re being followed?’
‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘Most of the time.’
‘But... who by?’
‘Would you believe, the K.G.B.?’
For all his guided tour to the prying state, he was staggered. ‘What makes you think so?’
‘The Sphinx told me.’
It reduced him to silence. Ve have vays of making you stop talking, I thought facetiously. We arrived in due course at the Intourist, and went through the act.
I spent some time on the pavement talking to Stephen through the taxi window, and then bade him Goodnight in ringing tones, and waved a farewell as I went through the double glass entrance; overdoing it, no doubt. I collected my key from the desk, removed hat and coat, and went up in the lift. Then I parked the tape-recorder in my room, and without hurrying, so as not to alert the old biddy sitting watchfully at her desk by the lifts, walked back, still carrying outdoor clothes, and descended to the ground floor. There were several routes from the lifts to the front door, as it was a very large hoteclass="underline" I took the most roundabout, putting on hat and coat on the way, and wafted at an ordinary pace out again on to the pavement. No doubt the watchers there took general note, but no one broke away to bob in my wake.
I stopped at the corner and glanced back. No one seemed to be peeling off to look in non-existent shop-windows. I walked on, thinking that if the followers were determined as well as professional, my amateur attempts at evasion would have been useless. But they would have had no reason to suppose I knew they were there, or that I would try to duck them, as I had given no signs so far of wanting to; so perhaps they might think I was still somewhere inside the hotel.
The taxi-driver was agitated and grumbling at having had to wait a long time where he was not supposed to. Stephen greeted my arrival with sighs of relief, and we set off again with a jerk.
‘Your friend Frank went into the hotel just after you,’ Stephen said. ‘Did you see him?’
‘No,’ I said tranquilly.
He didn’t pursue it. ‘The driver says the temperature is dropping. It has been warm for November, he says.’
‘It’s December, today.’
‘He says it will snow.’
We motored a good way northwards, and then north-east, through the wide well-lit mostly empty streets. When the roads became narrower I said, ‘Ask the driver to stop for a moment.’
‘What now?’ Stephen said.
‘See if we’ve a tail.’
No car stopped behind us, however, and when we went on, we found no stationary car waiting ahead. I asked Stephen to get the driver to circle a fairly large block. The driver, thoroughly disillusioned by these junkettings, began muttering under his breath.