“Are you Tarp?” the first one said in Russian.
“Yes.”
If they were going to kill him, he thought, they would not do it here. They would take him somewhere outside the city, out on the still frozen ground of a forest.
The man looked around again. He was in his midthirties, one of those sleek, rather round-faced men who seem good-looking because they take care of themselves. He even smelled good; Tarp caught his scent over the smells of the kitchen and the rats.
He was probably from the Guards Directorate, a hand-picked and utterly loyal gunman.
“This place won’t do,” the man said. “It stinks.” He walked out of the room, moving the old man out of the way with the same ease and the same lack of interest with which he might have moved a curtain. The old man was looking at Tarp with hatred; next to him, the old woman was sobbing. Tarp was the only one sitting down.
He heard a jingle of keys and then the sound of a door, then hollow footsteps from that part of the house where the school things were stored. The footsteps got softer and then louder; doors banged; once, something fell and the old man flinched. After ten minutes the sleek man came back; he had put his gun away. He picked up a rag from the wooden sink and wiped his hands on it, hating the rag as much as the dirt. “We’ll use a room in there,” he said. “I left the light on so you’d know which one. Get to it.”
The other men went past him and disappeared. The round-faced man, who had been wearing a fur hat like the one in which Brezhnev had so often been photographed, put the hat on the broken kitchen table and pulled up a chair. He unbuttoned his heavy cloth coat and let it fall open. Tarp and the round-faced man sat quietly as noises came from the other part of the house; the old man fidgeted.
“Sit over there,” the round-faced man said. He looked at a bench against the far wall; the old couple almost ran to sit on it. “I have vodka,” the old man said, as if he had been waiting to be spoken to.
“No.”
The old woman clutched his arm and wept.
Twenty minutes later one of the men came back and hunted until he found the remains of a broom. He came back a few minutes later with a piece of cardboard covered with trash, and he threw it and the trash and the broom out into the yard.
“You want to look?” he said.
The round-faced man stood up. “Stay here,” he ordered. He was gone only a short time; when he came back he said, “It still stinks. Fix it.” One man went to the van and fetched a string bag in which Tarp could see aerosol cans and plastic bottles. By and by a more pleasant odor, spiced and piney, reached him from the other part of the house.
“You want to look now?”
Again the round-faced man went out, leaving the other as a guard; coming back, he said, “Tell them it’s ready,” and his subordinates and the string bag of cleaning materials disappeared.
They sat in the kitchen for two hours. Tarp made his mind blank, as he had done when he had been captured years before and kept with nothing to do for weeks. Thinking was no help now, so it was best to cleanse the mind. The time passed as if it were the tick of a clock, from which he awoke rested and at ease.
The round-faced man had stood up. “In five minutes,” he said to Tarp, “you must be ready. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need to toilet?”
“No.”
“Walk ahead of me. First, I must search you.”
They walked into the other part of the house. The cold was awesome there. He could smell old wood and mildew and the pine scent. There were overhead lights in the corridor and in one room; the corridor was lined with school desks that had come out of the room, which had been swept and wiped and polished. The floor was glossy with it. The ceiling fixture had been made for four bulbs to swing on short chains, but only one socket had a bulb in it; on the floor was a plain desk lamp with a frayed cord, alight and turned up to shine into the room.
Tarp and the round-faced man stood because there were no chairs. The room encouraged stiffness. It had been bullyingly formal once, a symbol of somebody’s propriety and uprightness, angular and without prettiness. It was a room in which humiliated young men were meant to ask stiff-necked fathers for their daughters’ hands, a room in which the priest was to be received for calls.
A car drew up. It had a big, throaty engine. Doors thudded. Tarp could hear no voices, but he heard feet on a stone walk. The round-faced man stood straighter and checked his tie and his fly, then stepped toward the doorway. There were footsteps in the corridor as several people approached. One figure went past the doorway without looking in, and then a second figure came to it, paused, looked in, and entered.
It was Andropov.
He was so tall that he had a habitual stoop, as if the world’s doorways had not been made large enough for him. He was taller than Tarp. He was both professorial and menacing, as if, in his struggle upward for the supreme power of the organization that was both the source of Soviet control and its greatest sickness, he had coupled the intelligence of the academic with the ruthlessness of the gangster. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a well-made suit, although it fit him as if he had lost weight recently. He was at that age where most men retire and where a few begin the last desperate clawing up the glass mountain of power. He had almost feminine eyes, but familiarity with him showed that not modesty but secretiveness explained them. His lips were full, the nasolabial folds defined, faintly Semitic; in all, he was handsome, intellectual, imposing, weary.
The round-faced man from the Guards quivered from the tension of being in the same room with him. Andropov did not even seem to notice him; one glance took in the stiff room, the poor light, Tarp. He wore no hat, but his long hands were gloved; he took a step into the room, then whirled, drawing the glove from his right hand with his left almost as if it were not a hand but a weapon he was taking from a sheath. He thrust the hand toward Tarp; he took only Tarp’s fingers, let go instantly. He took another step, turned profile. The round-faced man went to the door and stood there with his back to them.
“Repin sent you?” Andropov said in excellent English.
“Yes.”
“You have been slow getting here.”
“Yes.”
Andropov removed his other glove and put both of them on the mantel. “I have ten minutes,” he said. He put his back to the empty fireplace. “What is it you want?”
“I want information.” When Andropov said nothing, Tarp took his silence for permission to continue. “I want the files of the people who are suspected. I want help with a related matter. And I need to know, for form’s sake: Is it you?”
Even in the bad light Andropov’s face seemed to lengthen, to grow paler. “No.” He tipped his head back slowly and looked Tarp over. In the light from the lamp on the floor, his eyes looked Oriental.
“That leaves six possibilities.”
“Five. Galusha died of a stroke on Monday.” He stated it as fact, allowing no objections.
“Five, then.” Tarp’s tension was gone. He felt now a great sense of well-being. “Can two of them be working together?”
“I do not think so, no. I think we would know about that.”
“Repin wanted me to talk to Telyegin first.”
“Good. Telyegin is dying, you know. Maybe dying men are most likely to be honest.”
“Or deceptive. Dying men have nothing to lose.”
“Have you ever died?”
Tarp let the irony pass. It was the one clear sign that Andropov disliked him — or, perhaps, disliked this process and all it implied.