She replied very loudly, and all the nearby customers turned to stare at him. His face was a scarlet study in embarrassment, but all the same he stood his ground and brought the transaction to the desired conclusion.
‘What did she say?’ I asked, as we left.
‘She said “This foreigner wants... preservativy...” And don’t bloody laugh.’
My chuckle anyway ended in a cough. ‘Preservativy being contraceptives?’
‘Gudrun insists.’
‘I should darned well think so.’
At the hotel we went straight through the foyer to the lifts, as I had taken my room key with me to the University so as not to advertise my absence to the reception desk.
Up to the eighth floor, past the watchful lady at the desk, and along the corridor... and the door of my room was open.
Cleaners?
Not cleaners. The person who was standing inside was Frank.
He had his back to the door and was over by the dressing shelf under the window, head bent, looking down at something in his hands.
‘Hello, Frank,’ I said.
He turned round quickly, looking very startled: and what he was holding was the matroshka. Intact, I saw, with all her secrets still inside. His fingers were still tight with the effort of trying to open her.
‘Er...’ he said. ‘You didn’t come to breakfast. I... er... came to see if you were all right. After last night. I mean, falling in the river...’
Not bad, I thought, as a spot of thinking on the feet.
‘I went to the Hippodrome to see the horses work,’ I said, playing the game that anyone could play if they had a lying tongue.
Frank relaxed his grip and put the painted doll slowly down on the shelf, giving his best weak-schoolteacher laugh.
‘Right on, then,’ he said. ‘Natasha was worried about you not coming to breakfast. Shall I tell her you’ll be in for lunch?’
Lunch... the prosaically normal in the middle of a minefield.
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘And I’ll have a guest.’
Frank looked at Stephen with sustained dislike, and took himself off; and I descended a bit feebly on to the sofa.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said.
‘Scotch or vodka?’ He pulled the morning’s newly-bought bottle out of his overcoat pocket and stood it on the shelf.
‘Scotch.’
I took two of the Apotek’s pills with it, without noticeable results.
Looked at my watch, now miraculously ticking again despite immersion. Eleven-thirty. Picked up the telephone.
‘Ian?’ I said. ‘How’s the hangover?’
From the sound of it, on the mend. The hair of the dog had bitten an hour ago, no doubt. I said I couldn’t make it after all before lunch, and how about him tottering along to my room at the hotel at about six?
Totter, he said, might just about describe it, by then: but he would come.
Stephen was sweeping the walls with the tape-recorder, trying to find the tender spot. I pointed to it, but again there was no whine. And then, just as he was about to give up, the whine suddenly began.
‘Switched on, by God,’ he said under his breath.
‘Let’s have some music.’
He pulled the three tapes from his obliging overcoat and slotted in an energetic rendering of Prince Igor.
‘What next?’
‘I brought some paperbacks... which would you like?’
‘And you?’ he said, looking at the titles.
‘Drink and think.’
So the bug listened for an hour to Stephen turning the pages of The Small Back Room against the urgencies of Borodin, and I listened inside my head to everything I’d been told, both in England and Moscow, and tried to see a path through the maze.
Lunch seemed unreal.
The Wilkinsons were there, and Frank was there. Frank hadn’t told the Wilkinsons he’d saved my life the evening before, and behaved throughout as if nothing of the sort had ever happened. What he thought of my silence on the subject was a mystery.
Natasha and Anna tried by a mixture of scolding and persuasion to make me promise to stop disappearing without telling them where I was going and I helpfully said I would do my best, without meaning a word of it.
Frank ate my meat.
Mrs Wilkinson talked. ‘We’ve always voted Labour, Dad and me, but isn’t it funny, in England it’s always the far left people who want more and more immigrants, but here, where it’s about as far left as you can get, there aren’t any. You don’t see black people walking around in Moscow, do you?’
Frank took no notice.
‘It just strikes me as funny, that’s all,’ Mrs Wilkinson said. ‘Still, I don’t suppose there’s much of a queue in India for wanting to live in Moscow, come to think.’
Mr Wilkinson muttered to his small-sized chips, ‘They’ve got more sense.’ He wouldn’t say much else for the rest of the day.
Frank came to life with a routine damnation of the anti-black policies of the National Front.
Mrs Wilkinson gave me a comical look of bewilderment and despair at never being able to get through to Frank.
‘Front,’ I said mildly, ‘is an overworked word. A cliché. We have Fronts for this and Fronts for that... One should always ask what... if anything... is behind a Front.’
It was again ice-cream with blackcurrant jam. I quite liked it.
Stephen ate like Frank and told me afterwards that the Intourist Hotel food was high class luxury compared with the students’ grub.
Apart from all that, which seemed to be going on in a separate life, I was more positively hearing the voices of Boris and Evgeny, and Ian, and Malcolm, and Oliver, and Kropotkin, and Misha and Yuri Chulitsky, and Gudrun and the Prince and Hughes-Beckett and Johnny Farringford... and the dead voice of Hans Kramer: I could hear them all clearly.
But where, oh where, was Alyosha?
15
Upstairs in my room Stephen balanced the chair on my bed, my suitcase on the chair, and the tape-recorder on the suitcase: and switched on. The whine came forth, alive and healthy.
He switched off the ‘record’ button and pressed the ‘play’, and the listeners got a close earful of a tape of Stravinsky which seemed to be suffering from wow if not flutter.
I spent the time pondering the pieces of paper Kropotkin had given me; the back as much as the front.
‘You don’t happen to have any blue glass handy, I suppose?’ I said. ‘Of a certain particular shade?’
‘Blue glass?’
‘Yes... a blue filter. You see all this handwriting which has been scribbled out? It was written in a darker colour of blue than the scribble... you can see the dark loops underneath.’
‘Well... so what?’
‘So if you looked at the page through some blue glass which was the same colour as the lighter scribble, you might be able to see the darker blue writing. The colour of the glass, so to speak, would cancel out the colour of the scribble, and you could read what was left.’
‘For crying out loud...’ he said. ‘I suppose you could. And where would that get you?’
‘I might guess who sent this to Kropotkin, but I’d like to be certain.’
‘But it could be anybody.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll show you something.’
I opened the drawer which contained my private pharmacy and brought out the folded piece of paper which lay beneath it. Opening it, and smoothing out the crease, I laid it on the dressing shelf, and put Kropotkin’s paper beside it.
‘They’re the same!’ Stephen said.
‘That’s right. Torn from the same type of notebook: white paper, faint blue lines, spiral binding.’