“Are you hungry?” the old man demanded. He was in his seventies, or he had suffered enough to look that age. He was dirty, too — obviously a man who had simply given up trying to keep clean.
“I could eat, yes.”
The old man put down a plate of cabbage soup and a big piece of dark bread. It was like a stage version of a Russian meal.
“You see how we have to live,” he said.
Tarp believed that they had been made nonpersons because of some crime. They were lucky to have even this — two rooms, the stove, food — and he knew that they must have them for some other reason than their good fortune. They were probably informers, recruited after the legal punishment for their crime, put in this place to live out their lives as purveyors of gossip. They would be working for the Moscow police or the local Party secretary or even the Fifth Directorate. Probably the last, Tarp thought, because it would explain how Repin knew about them and had some kind of leverage on them.
“It has been a long time, you understand,” the old man said, as if he followed Tarp’s thoughts.
“You need money?”
The old man brightened. He had an evil, cynical, entirely corrupted grin. “Always. You know the situation.”
Tarp did not know, but he pretended to. He put a little money on the table. The old man all but sneered. “It takes many drops to fill a bottle,” he said. Tarp shook his head. He did not want them to appear suddenly rich and start other people asking questions.
The old man took the money and put it up under his heavy sweater in a pocket so high that he had to bend over in a contortion that looked as if he were scratching his own back. When he straightened, he had that dreadful grin again. “You want vodka?” he said.
“A little.”
“You pay by the drink here.”
“All right.”
He opened a cupboard and took down a bottle. There were other bottles behind it. His bank, Tarp thought. The family fortune.
“I got a nephew in the black market,” the man said. He squinted at Tarp. “You’re not after black marketeers?”
“Not my line.”
“Since Andropov, you know, you can’t trust anybody. We’re all to be saints, he thinks.” He poured three glasses of vodka. “Jews? You after Jews?”
“Mind your own business.”
They had been told that the people who came to them from time to time with the code word seagull were clandestine operatives of the Fifth Directorate, who, for unexplained reasons, were working unknown to the Fifth Directorate itself — a Byzantine complexity of double-dealing that only a society haunted by deception could believe.
“Varya,” the old man bawled. He had filled the glasses to their brims, so that a mound of liquid rose above each. “Varya! Vodka.”
She shuffled in, wearing felt slippers and a man’s overcoat over a wool skirt. She had been crying. They drank the vodka in an almost ceremonial way. Welcome to Moscow.
The old man wanted to refill Tarp’s glass and settle down to serious drinking, but Tarp covered it and stood up. “What do you do?” he said. “During the day?”
The old man hedged, finally allowed that he picked through trash containers in the streets.
“You know the statue of Gogol?” Tarp said. “Near the power station?”
“Gogol the playwright?”
“Are there two Gogols?”
“Near a power station?”
“Do you or don’t you?”
“I guess I do.”
“I want you to go there tomorrow.”
The old man looked stunned. “It’s half across Moscow!”
“You’ll be paid.”
The old woman showed Tarp where he would sleep, a filthy space the size of a closet with one small electric bulb in its ceiling for both heat and light. “You want blankets?” she said.
“Of course.” He guessed the temperature in the room to be about fifty.
She shuffled into their bedroom, banged some doors, then appeared loaded down with ancient comforters, seemingly more than he would ever need. She opened her arms when she got near him; bedclothes cascaded to the floor in a pile. She turned around and went back into the bedroom and closed the door.
Tarp put several of the comforters under him, the rest on top. He slept in the long underwear he had worn from France. In the middle of the night he felt movement on his legs, then itching. He had a small flashlight, and in its beam he saw fleas. He stripped, then sat in the cold, cracking the shiny brown bloodsuckers between his fingernails. They were still slow because of the cold, but he got tired of it, and he put out his light and went to sleep. He even smiled a little, feeling the low hum of tension in himself that always came when things were moving. He imagined himself face-to-face with Maxudov, and he fell asleep.
In the morning he marked up a copy of Novy Mir, following the code he had worked out with Repin, handed it to the old man, and told him where to leave it near the Gogol statue.
“Then what do I do?”
“Come home. Pick up rubbish. As you wish.”
“I don’t wait by Gogol?”
“Certainly not.” The man was wearing two overcoats over his sweaters and a torn leather helmet of the kind that aviators used to wear. “I will know if you do not do exactly as I want. You know what will happen if you do it wrong?”
The old man licked his lips. “Yes.”
“Good.”
The next day he sent him to a suburban railway station to look for a message in the restroom. There was none; Tarp had not really expected one yet. The day after, however, the old man had his awful grin on when he came in the door. He handed Tarp a crumpled sheet of newspaper. “It came, it came!” he crowed.
“What came?”
“The message, the message you have been waiting for!”
“You are an idiot.”
The message was stark — three words indicated by needle pricks five words after those that mattered: Yes Where When. Tarp’s first message had been picked up by a French cutout who had passed it to an Italian who had sent it through two Soviet entrepreneurs; the reply had come through a channel almost as tortuous. Tarp marked up another copy of Novy Mir and sent the old man back to Gogol. He sat quietly in the old house, feeling the hum of suppressed excitement but showing nothing, content to smell the sour smell, to listen to the rats in the walls. After he sent off the second message his tension increased, because now he was sitting like the bait in a trap. Now they knew where he was, and if they wanted, they could make him vanish the way magicians caused things to vanish in stories.
At twilight of the next day a van backed into the untended lot behind the house. Tarp was sitting in the kitchen, which was the only warm room. He heard the engine as the driver gunned it up over the curb; the old man and woman heard it, too, and they went to a window and tried to look through the rags.
“It’s a school van,” the woman said, “it says so.”
“This has never happened before,” the man said. He looked tearful, almost sentimental, like the sad clowns that bad painters make pictures of; Tarp knew that he was frightened.
A door slammed.
“Somebody’s coming!” the old woman cried, and she ran into the middle of the kitchen.
“Let them in,” Tarp said.
“No!” She began to whisper to herself. Tarp remembered the same sound when he had arrived.
There was a bold knock at the door.
“Open it,” Tarp said.
The old woman tottered to the door. It took her a long time to unwrap the chain and to take down the wood props that they used for security.
When the door was open a man pushed past her without haste and came into the kitchen. He looked around with professional caution. He had drawn a pistol, a 9mm Makorov, a big, powerful weapon. Two other men came in behind him, similarly armed.