I bought the hat. Elena waited outside in the alley displaying no interest in me, and set off again when I came out. I looked carefully around for Frank, but couldn’t see him. Shoppers blocked every long perspective; and it worked both ways. If I couldn’t see him, very likely he couldn’t see me.
Elena squeezed through a long queue of stolid people and stopped outside a shop selling folk arts and crafts. She transferred the plastic carrier to my hand with the smallest of movements and no ceremony whatsoever. Her gaze was directed towards the goods in the window, not at me.
‘Misha say give you this.’ Her accent was light and pretty, but I gathered from the disapproval in her tone that she was on this errand strictly for her brother’s sake, and not for mine.
I thanked her for coming.
‘Please not bring trouble for him.’
‘I promise I won’t,’ I said.
She nodded briefly, glancing quickly at my face, and away.
‘You go now, please,’ she said. ‘I queue.’
‘What is the queue for?’
‘Boots. Warm boots, for winter.’
I looked at the queue, which stretched a good way along one of the ground-floor alleys, and up a staircase, and along the gallery above, and away out of sight. It hadn’t moved a step forward in five minutes.
‘But it will take you all day,’ I said.
‘Yes. I need boots. When boots come in shop, everyone come to buy. It is normal. In England, the peasants have no boots. In Soviet Union, we are fortunate.’
She walked away without any more farewell than her brother had given on the metro, and attached herself to the end of the patient line. The only thing that I could think of that England’s bootless peasantry would so willingly queue all day for would be Cup Final tickets.
A glance into the tissue-wrapped parcel revealed that what Misha had sent, or what Elena had brought, was a painted wooden doll.
Frank picked me up somewhere between GUM and the pedestrian tunnel under Fiftieth Anniversary et cetera Square. I caught a glimpse of him behind me underground: a split second of unruly curls and college scarf bobbing along in the crowd. If I hadn’t been looking, I would never have noticed.
It was already after ten. I lengthened my stride and finished the journey fairly fast, surfacing on the north side of the square and veering left towards the National Hotel.
Parked just beyond the entrance was a small bright yellow car, with, inside it, a large Russian in a high state of fuss.
‘Seven minutes late,’ he said. ‘For seven minutes I sit here illegally. Get in, get in, do not apologise.’
I eased in beside him and he shot off with a crash of gears and a fine disregard for other traffic.
‘You have been to GUM,’ he said accusingly. ‘And therefore you are late.’
I followed the direction of his gaze and began to feel less bewildered by his clairvoyance: he was looking at the printed tissue-paper inside the string bag which Elena had given me. How cautious of her, I thought, to have brought Misha’s souvenirs in a wrapping to suit the rendezvous, in a bag any foreign tourist could acquire. A bag, too, I thought contentedly, that friend Frank would not query. The secret of survival in Russia was to be unremarkable.
Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky revealed himself, during the time I spent with him, as a highly intelligent man with a guilt-ridden love of luxury and a repressed sense of humour. The wrong man for the regime, I thought, but striving to live honourably within its framework. In a country where an out-of-line opinion was a treachery, even if unspoken, he was an unwilling mental traitor. Not to believe what one believes one should believe is a spiritual torment as old as doctrine, and Yuri Chulitsky, I grew to understand, suffered from it dismally.
Physically he was about forty, plumply unfit, with pouches already under his eyes, and a habit of raising the centre of his upper lip to reveal the incisors beneath. He spoke always with deliberation, forming the words carefully and precisely, but that might have been only the effect of using English, and, as on the telephone, he gave the impression that every utterance was double-checked internally before being allowed to escape.
‘Cigarette?’ he said, offering a packet.
‘No... thank you.’
‘I smoke,’ he said, flicking a lighter one-handed with the dexterity of long practice. ‘You smoke?’
‘Cigars, sometimes.’
He grunted. The fingers on his left hand, resting on the steering-wheel with the cigarette stuck between them, were tanned yellowish brown, but otherwise his fingers were white and flexible, with spatulate tips and short well-tended nails.
‘I go see Olympic building,’ he said. ‘You come?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘At Chertanovo.’
‘Where?’
‘Place for equestrian games. I am architect. I design buildings at Chertanovo.’ He pronounced design like dess-in, but his meaning was clear. ‘I go today see progress. You understand?’
‘Every word,’ I said.
‘Good. I see in England how equestrian games go. I see need for sort buildings...’ He stopped and shook his head in frustration.
‘You went to see what sort of things happened during international equestrian games, so that you would know what buildings would be needed, and how they should best be designed for dealing with the needs and numbers of the Olympics.’
He smiled lop-sidedly. ‘Is right. I go also Montreal. Is not good. Moscow games, we build good.’
The leisurely one-way system in central Moscow meant, it seemed to me, mile-long detours to return to where one started, but facing the other way. Yuri Chulitsky swung his bright little conveyance round the corners without taking his foot noticeably off the accelerator, the bulk of his body making the car’s skin seem not much more than a metal overcoat.
At one point, arriving at a junction with a main road, we were stopped dead by a policeman. Yuri Chulitsky shrugged a trifle and switched off the engine.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
The main road had, I saw, been totally cleared of traffic. Nothing moved on it. Chulitsky said something under his breath, so I asked again, ‘What’s the matter? Has there been an accident?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘See lines in road?’
‘Do you mean those white ones?’
There were two parallel white lines painted down the centre of the main road, with a space of about six feet between them. I had noticed them on many of the widest streets, but thought of them vaguely as some sort of no-man’s-land between the two-way lines of traffic.
‘White lines go to Kremlin,’ Chulitsky said. ‘Politburo people drive to Kremlin in white lines. Every people’s car stop.’
I sat and watched. After three or four minutes a long black car appeared, driving fairly fast in lonely state up the centre of the road, between the white lines.
‘Chaika,’ Chulitsky said, as the limousine slid lengthily past, showing curtains drawn across the rear windows. ‘Is official car. Chaika, in English, is seagull.’
He started his engine, and presently the policeman stepped out of the middle of the side road and waved us on our way.
‘Was that the Chairman?’ I asked.
‘No. Many politburo peoples go in Chaika on white lines. All people’s cars always stop.’
Democratic, I thought.
The small yellow car sped south of the city, along what he told me was the road to Warsaw, but which to my eyes was plainly labelled M4.
He said ‘Nikolai Alexandrovich Kropotkin say tell you what you ask. You ask. I tell.’
‘I’m looking for someone called Alyosha.’
‘Alyosha? Many people called Alyosha. Nikolai Alexandrovich say find Alyosha for Randall Drew. Who is this Alyosha?’
‘That’s the problem,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, and I haven’t been able to find out. No one seems to know who he is.’ I paused. ‘Did you meet Hans Kramer, in England?’