Turned off the taps. Stirred the jar around in the water briskly with the handle of my toothbrush, and then pulled out the plug to let the water run away. When it had gone, the washed jar, the cap, and the toothglass lay in harmless wet heaps on the clear white enamel. I picked them out of the bath and put them into the wash basin, and immersed them once again, to make doubly certain.
Then I stripped off the preservativy and flushed them appropriately down the loo: and took a great deep breath of relief.
In the room Stephen and Ian had straightened and restored everything to order. The syringe and the empty ampoules were out of sight. The matroshka stood with her two halves joined. The broken bottle and its scattered fragments had vanished. The chair stood quietly by the dressing shelf. The tape recorder stood upon it harmlessly. My suitcase was back in the wardrobe. All tidy. All calm. All innocent.
And Malcolm... Malcolm lay in his permanent silence with his trousers up and fastened, and his shirt buttoned to near the top. His jacket and tie lay on the sofa, but folded neatly, not in the heap into which we’d thrown them. Malcolm dead looked a deal more peaceful than Malcolm dying.
The Russian doctor came with an expressionless face and unemotionally began to roll out the red tape. Stephen and Ian gathered that he took a poor view of foreigners who keeled over on Saturday evenings when all services were at a low ebb.
We drifted around as we were told, waiting mostly in the chairs by the lifts and not speaking much. The stumpy lady at the desk came and went several times, and Stephen asked her if she found her work boring.
She said stolidly that nothing much ever happened, but her job was her job. Stephen translated question and answer, and we nodded sympathetically and guessed she’d been away from her desk when Malcolm’s friends called.
The doctor was unsuspicious. In England, Hans Kramer’s death had been adjudged a heart attack even after an autopsy, and with luck it would happen again. The doctor had not mentioned having been asked to bring naloxone, and it appeared that the reception desk had not, in fact, passed on Stephen’s request: fortunately, as it turned out.
Ian developed a thundering headache from the effects of vodka and concussion and sat moaning gently with his eyes shut.
Stephen bit a couple of fingernails.
I coughed.
There were a good many unsmiling faces coming and going, some of which finally said we could return to my room, for Stephen and Ian to retrieve their hats and coats, and me to pack to remove to another room in the hotel.
Ian groaned off home at that point, but Stephen helped to carry my belongings up in the lift to the fifteenth floor. The new room was identical in lay-out; slightly different in colour: and there was no stiff shape lying under a white sheet on the bed.
Stephen cast his gaze round the walls and put two fingers to his mouth. I nodded. It didn’t seem worthwhile fiddling about with the tape-recorder. We made one or two suitable and shocked remarks about heart attacks, just in case, and left it at that.
I had found that in his fast tidying he had rolled all the broken glass and ampoules and the syringe in my dressing-gown and stowed it in the suitcase. We had judged it sensible, in discussion while walking along the corridor, to get rid of them altogether, so we put them all in the outermost shell of the new matroshka, leaving a smaller little mother beaming upon the shelf. We put the rubbish-filled doll into the string bag, and picked up the tape-recorder, and very quietly let ourselves out of the room.
The lady at the fifteenth floor desk gave us an uninterested stare. We smiled at her as we waited for the lifts, but smiling back wasn’t her habit.
Made it to the ground floor. No trouble. Strolled unhurriedly around the longer route to the door, unaccosted. Walked outside under the watching eyes, which did nothing more than watch.
Climbed into a taxi. Travelled trustfully, and arrived safely at the University.
There was nowhere private to suffer from reaction. Stephen and I were both shaking after we’d taken off our hats and coats in his room, and we felt a great compulsive need to talk. I had seldom found anything so difficult as making asinine conversation with a mind stuffed with the evening’s horrors, but the recorder had proved definitely again that we were not alone. The unreleased tension made us both uncomfortable to the point of not being able to meet each other’s eyes. In the end he said a shade violently that he would brew tea and empty the matroshka into the students’ communal rubbish bin: and I went into the passage and made a long telephone call to Yuri Chulitsky.
17
Yuri picked me up in the wan December light of nine o’clock on a Sunday morning from outside the National Hotel.
There had been a fresh fall of snow during the night, and the roads had not yet been cleared, so that everything lay like Malcolm under a white shroud, and my spirits were as low as the air temperature.
The bright yellow car zoomed up like a golden cube, and I slid into the passenger seat beside him, coughing violently.
‘You have illness?’ he said, letting in the clutch as if cogs were made of titanium.
Death warmed up, I thought: but it wasn’t the best of similes.
‘You say,’ Yuri said, ‘you want very important comrade.’ The familiar accent rose above the engine noise. The bags under his eyes looked heavier and there was a slumped quality in his body. The upper lip rose convulsively two or three times, giving me the gleams of teeth. He lit a cigarette, one-handed, expertly, dragging the smoke urgently into his lungs. There was a fine dampness on his forehead.
He had come dressed, as I had, in his neatest and most formal suit, with clean shirt, and tie. He was nervous, I thought: which made two of us.
‘I get Major-General,’ he said. ‘Is very high comrade.’
I was impressed. I had asked him for a comrade of sufficient rank to be able to make decisions: although from what I’d known before and seen since I’d arrived, it had seemed that there was no one at all of that stature. The Soviet method seemed to be ‘action only after consultation’, or ‘until the committee’s met, just keep saying Niet’. No official would make a decision on his own, for fear of it being wrong.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘Architects’ Circle.’
So even the Major-General wasn’t sure enough to meet me upon official ground.
‘He say,’ Yuri said, ‘you call him Major-General. He not say his name.’
‘Very well.’
We drove a little without speaking. I coughed a bit and thought of the night gone past, much of which I had spent writing. It had been a laborious process physically, as I couldn’t hold the pen properly. In the heat of battle I’d picked up a chair and gripped it hard to cut and thrust; but the anaesthesia of hot blood was definitely missing in the cold hours after midnight. In the morning, when he had returned from Gudrun. I had given Stephen the explanatory sheets to read, while I put the telex, the formula, and the two pages of Malcolm’s notebook into a large envelope.
He had read to the end, and looked at me speechlessly.
I smiled lop-sidedly. ‘Ve have vays of taking out insurance.’
I put the hand-written sheets into the envelope, and addressed it to the Prince, which raised his mobile eyebrows another notch. Then I looked at the walls and by common consent we went out and strolled down the passage.
‘If the comrades should be so inhospitable as to cast me in the clink,’ I said, ‘you just beetle round to the Embassy tomorrow morning and insist on seeing Oliver Waterman personally. Tell him the mountains will fall on his head if he doesn’t send that envelope off pronto in the diplomatic bag.’