‘Da. German. He die.’
‘That’s right. Well... he knew Alyosha. The autopsy said Kramer died of a heart attack, but people near him when he died thought he was saying that Alyosha had caused him to have a heart attack. Er... have I said that clearly enough?’
‘Yes. Is clear. About Alyosha, I cannot help.’
I supposed I would have been surprised if he had said anything different.
‘You have been asked before, about Alyosha?’ I said.
‘Please?’
‘An Englishman came to see you at the Olympic committee building. He saw you and the two colleagues who went with you to England.’
‘Is right,’ he agreed gruffly. ‘Is writing for newspaper.’
‘Malcolm Herrick.’
‘Da.’
‘You all said you knew nothing at all about anything.’
A long pause; then he said, ‘Herrick is foreigner. Comrades not say things to Herrick.’
He relapsed into silence, and we drove steadily along the Warsaw highway, leaving the city centre behind and making for another lot of egg-box suburbs. Some light powdery snow began to fall, and Yuri switched on the windscreen wipers.
‘Today, tomorrow, it snow. This snow not melt. Stay all winter.’
‘Do you like the winter?’ I said.
‘No. Winter is bad for building. Today is last day is possible see progress of buildings at Chertanovo. So I go now.’
I said I would be most interested in the buildings, if he felt like showing me round. He laughed in a small deep throaty rumble, but offered no explanation.
I asked him if he had personally known Hans Kramer, but he had spoken to him only about buildings. ‘Well... Johnny Farringford?’ I asked.
‘Johnny... Farringford. Are you saying Lord Farringford? Is a man with red hairs? Ride in British team?’
‘That’s the one,’ I said.
‘I see him many times. Many places. I talk with him. I ask him about buildings. He is no good about buildings. I ask other peoples. Other peoples is more good.’ He stopped, obviously unimpressed by the planning ability of earls, and we drove four or five miles while he seemed to be thinking deeply about anything except my mission: but finally, as if coming to a difficult decision, he said, ‘Is not good Lord Farringford come to Olympics.’
I held my breath. Damped down every quick and excited question. Managed in the end to say without even a quaver, ‘Why?’
He had relapsed however into further deep thought.
‘Tell me,’ I said, without pressure.
‘It is for my country good if he come. It is for your country not good. If I tell you, I speak against the good for my country. It is difficult for me.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
After a long way he turned abruptly off the M4 to the right, along a lesser, but still dual-carriageway road. There was, as usual, very little traffic, and without much ado he swung round in a U turn across the central reservation to face the way we had come. He pulled in by the roadside and stopped with a jerk.
On our left the road was lined as far as the eye could see with rows of apartment buildings, greyish white. On our right there was a large flat snow-sprinkled space bordered on the far side by a stretch of black-looking forest of spindly young trees packed tightly together. On the side near the road there was a wire fence, and between the fence and the road itself, a wide ditch full of white half-melted slush.
‘Is there,’ Yuri said, pointing into this far from promising landscape with a gleam of relaxed humour, ‘equestrian games.’
‘Ye gods,’ I said.
We got out of the car into the bitter air. I looked away down the road in the direction we had originally been travelling. There were tall concrete lamp standards, electricity pylons, dense black forest on the left, white unending impersonal apartment blocks on the right, a grey double road with no traffic, and, at the side, wet white snow. Over it all softly fell the powdery forerunners of the winter freeze. It was silent and ugly and as desolate as a desert.
‘In summer,’ Yuri said, ‘forest is green. Is beautiful place for equestrian games. Is grass. Everything beautiful.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said.
Further along, on the side of the road where we had stopped, there were two large hoardings, one bearing a long announcement about the Olympics, and the other sporting a big picture of the stadium as it was one day going to be. The stands looked most ingenious, shaped like a Z, with the top and bottom ranks of the seats facing one way, and the centre rank facing the other. Events, it appeared, would take place on both sides of the stands.
Yuri gestured to me to return to the car, and he drove us through a gate in the wire, on to the site itself. There were a few men there driving mechanical earth-movers, though how they knew what they were moving was a mystery to me, as the whole place looked a sea of jumbled mud with pools of icy slush amid the usual broken white blanket of half-melted snow.
Yuri reached into the space behind my seat and brought forth a huge pair of thigh-high gumboots. These he put on by planting them firmly outside the opened car door, removing his walking shoes, wrapping his trousers round his legs, and sinking his feet into the depths as he stood up.
‘I talk to men,’ he said. ‘You wait.’
Superfluous advice, I thought. Yuri unfastened his ear-flaps against the chill wind and talked to his men, trudging about and making sweeping gestures with his arms. After a fair while he returned and reversed the gumboot process, tucking the now wet and muddy objects in behind his own driving seat.
‘Is good,’ he said, lifting the centre of his lip and giving me a gleam of teeth. ‘We finish foundations. In spring, when snow melt, we build quickly. Stadium,’ he pointed. ‘Stables.’ He pointed again. ‘Restaurants, buildings for riders, buildings for officials, buildings for television. There,’ he waved an arm at a huge slightly undulating area bordered by forest, ‘is crosscountry for trials, like Badminton and Burghley. In summer, is beautiful.’
‘Will everyone who wants to come to the Games get visas?’ I said.
‘Da. All peoples have visas.’
‘It isn’t always like that,’ I said neutrally, and he replied in the same level tone. ‘For Olympics, all peoples have visas. Stay in hotels. Is good.’
‘What about the Press?’ I said. ‘And the television people?’
‘We build Press building for foreign Press. Also television building for foreign television peoples, near Moscow television building. Use same...’ He described a transmitting mast with his hands. ‘Foreign peoples go only in these buildings. In England, we ask Press peoples about Press buildings. We see what Press peoples need. We ask many Press peoples. We ask Herrick.’
‘Herrick?’ I said. ‘Did you ask him in England, or in Moscow?’
‘In England. He help us. He come to Burghley. We see him with Lord Farringford. So we ask him. We ask many peoples about buildings. We ask Hans Kramer about buildings. He was...’ Words failed him but gestures did not. Hans Kramer, I gathered, had given the Russian observers a decisively rude brush-off.
He tied up the ear-flaps of his hat without taking it off. I spent the time scanning the road for anything that looked like a following car, but saw nothing of note. A bus passed, its tyres making a swishing noise on the slushy tarmac. I thought that the low level of traffic on most roads would make a following car conspicuous: but on the other hand there seemed to be very little variety in make, so that one car tended to look exactly like the next. Difficult to spot a tail. Easy, however, to follow a bright yellow box on wheels.