They hadn’t expected such a racket. I felt the impetus slacken in them fractionally, and I tore myself out of their grasp and ran. Ran downhill, towards the Intourist. Ran with all the power I could bring to every muscle. Ran like the Olympics.
I heard one of the car doors slam. Heard the car coming behind me. Went on running.
There was life and waiting taxis and people outside the In-tourist. There were also the watchers, earning their keep. I wondered fleetingly if watchers ever went to the help of people running away from other people in black cars, and supposed not.
Not in Moscow.
I didn’t bother to yell for their help. I simply ran. And I made it. Just.
The men in the car must have decided it was too near the Intourist for them to make another attack, especially as I was now running flat out and not walking along with woolly thoughts. In any case, after it had passed me, the car didn’t stop, but accelerated away past the hotel, and turned right at the end of the street, and went out of sight.
I slowed to a fast walk for the last hundred yards, heart thumping madly and chest heaving to take in vast lungfuls of cold wet air. I was nothing like as fit, I thought grimly, as I would have been in any other autumn, when I’d been racing.
I covered the last few yards at ordinary walking pace, and attracted no more eyes than usual when I went in through the big double air lock-type glass entrance. The warmth inside seemed suddenly cloying, stoking up the sweat of exertion: I peeled off my coat and collected my room key, and thought that nothing on earth would persuade me to go back up Gorky Street to retrieve my hat.
My room looked calm and sane, as if to reassure me that hotel guests could not be frighteningly attacked in one of the main streets of the city.
It could happen in Piccadilly, I thought. It could happen in Park Avenue and the Champs Elysées and the Via Veneto. What was so different about Gorky Street?
I threw my coat and room key on to the bed, poured a large reviver from the duty free scotch, and sank on to the sofa to drink it.
Two attacks in one day. Too bloody much.
The first had been a definite attempt to cripple or kill. The second had been — perhaps — an attempt at abduction. Without glasses, I would have been a pushover. They could have got me into the car. And after the drive... what destination?
Did the Prince expect me to stick to the task until I was dead? Probably not, I thought; but then the Prince hadn’t known what he was sending me into.
More than anything, I’d been lucky. I could be lucky again. Failing that, I had better be careful. My heart gradually steadied. My breath quietened to normal. I drank the scotch, and felt better.
After a while I put down my glass and picked up the tape-recorder. Switched it on. Started methodically beside the window, and made slow comprehensive sweeps of the walls. Top to bottom. Every inch.
There was no whine.
I switched the recorder off and put it down. No whine was inconclusive. It didn’t mean no listening probe embedded in the plaster, it meant no listening probe switched on.
I went slowly to bed and lay awake in the dark, thinking about the driver and the passenger in the black car. Apart from general awareness of their age, twenty — thirty, and height, five-nine, they had left me with three clear impressions. The first was that they knew about my eyesight. The second, that the savage quality I had sensed in their attack was a measure of the ferocity in their minds. And third, that they were not Russian.
They had not spoken, so their voices had given me no clue. They had worn only the sober garb of the Russian man-in-the-street. Their faces had been three-quarters covered, with the result that I had seen only their eyes, and even those, very briefly.
So why did I think...? I pulled the duvet over my shoulders and turned comfortably on to one side. The Russians, I thought drowsily, didn’t behave like that unless they were K.G.B., and if the K.G.B. had wanted to arrest me they would not have done it in that way, and they would not have failed. Other Russians were tamed by deterrents like labour camps, psychiatric hospitals, and the death sentence. Frank’s voice drifted back to me from breakfast. ‘There are no muggings in Russia. The crime rate is very low indeed. There are practically no murders.’
‘Repression is always the outcome of revolution,’ I said.
‘Are you sure you’ve got it the right way round?’ Mrs Wilkinson asked me, looking puzzled.
‘People don’t actually like being purged of their lazy and libertine old ways,’ I said. ‘So you have to force their mouths open, to give them the medicine. Revolutionaries everywhere are by nature aggressive, oppressive, and repressive. It’s they who have the power-over-others complex. All for your own good of course.’
I got no rise out of Frank. He merely repeated that in a perfect socialist state like Russia there was no need for crime. The State supplied all needs, and gave to the people whatever it was good for them to have.
Sixty years or so on from the October Revolution (now confusingly celebrated in November owing to the up-dating of the calendar) its wind-sown seeds were germinating their bloody crops around the world, but way back where it all started the second and third generation were not given to acts of private violence.
The eyes looking out of the balaclavas had burned with a hunger for a harvest yet to come: sixty years younger than the blank dull look of a people for whom everything was provided.
10
Frank followed me to GUM the following morning.
When I had gone in through the main door without once looking back, I stood still in the shadows, and watched, and presently he appeared, hurrying a little.
At breakfast, upon Natasha’s insistent enquiry, I had said I was going to see some more horse people, but before that I was going to GUM to buy a new hat, as I had lost my last one.
The tiniest frown crossed Frank’s face, and he looked at me with a shade of speculation. I remembered that when he had followed me into the hotel the evening before, after I had ostensibly said good-night to Stephen, I had been wearing the hat. How careful one had to be, I thought, over the most innocent remarks.
‘Where did you lose your hat?’ he said, showing only friendly interest.
‘Must have dropped it in the foyer or the lift,’ I said easily: ‘I don’t really know.’
Natasha suggested I ask at the desk. I would, I said; and did. One learned. If not fast enough, one learned in the end.
I turned away from GUM’s main door while Frank was still a little way off, and saw the red woollen hat with a white pompom immediately. Below the hat there were two blue-grey eyes in an elfin face, and straight hair in escaping wisps. She looked too young and slight to be married and a mother, and I could see why nine storeys up with no lifts was a crying disaster.
‘Elena?’ I said, tentatively.
She nodded a fraction, and turned to walk purposefully away. I followed a few paces behind. For talking to a foreigner she would have to pick her own moment, and it suited me well for in to be out of Frank’s sight.
She wore a grey coat with a red scarf falling jauntily over her shoulder, and carried a string bag with a paper-wrapped parcel inside it. I shortened the distance between us and said so that she could hear, ‘I want to buy a hat.’ She gave no sign of understanding, but when she stopped it was, in fact, outside a shop selling hats.
The inside of GUM was not a department store along Western lines but like those in the Far East; a huge collection of small shops all under one roof. A covered market, two storeys high, with intersecting alleys and a glassed roof far above. Drips of melted snow fell through the cracks in the heavens and made small puddles underfoot.