“He’s making a telephone call,” Gorchakov said.
“Of course.” Repin had a tape recording of Pope-Ginna.
They sat without speaking. Gorchakov lighted a Russian cigarette and held it out the window as if he knew that Tarp disliked it. He’s had my file, too, Tarp thought. This kind of intimate prying was Repin’s justification for hating Moscow. “You fart in Moscow, they make a note in Dzerzhinsky Square,” Repin had told him. “You fart in Tiflis, people ask you how you are.” It was only a joke, of course, because there were informers in Tiflis, too, but Moscow was the center and therefore the focus of Repin’s distaste for his own system, now that he was one of the victims instead of one of the managers of it.
Repin came out and nodded curtly, then got into the back of the Fiat with Tarp.
“Ready?” Gorchakov said.
“We are ready to be driven, if that is what you mean.”
“Where?”
“Next we go to the Children’s Park.”
“This is where it starts?”
“Maybe.”
Gorchakov reached under his seat and took out two boxes one at a time and handed them back. There was a 9mm Makarov in each one with a full clip and an unopened box of cartridges.
“Are you armed?” Repin said to the major.
“Of course.”
They drove past more factories as a light rain began to fall; then they crossed the river and the rain stopped and a bright spot showed in the clouds where the sun was trying to stab through. As they turned through the gates of the Children’s Park, pale light and pale shadows appeared on the ground as if projected from underneath.
The car park was almost empty.
“Can you see the tree from here?” Repin said.
“I wouldn’t think so,” Tarp muttered. “Not if he’s smart.”
“Well, we know he’s smart. An oak on a knoll above the carousel, Pope-Ginna said.”
“The carousel must be over there where the kids’ rides are.”
Repin grabbed the back of Gorchakov’s seat and pulled himself forward. “We’re going to walk.” He might have been threatening the major.
“Please don’t let the pistols show.”
Repin looked at the back of Gorchakov’s head, then at Tarp, his nostrils lifted in disgust. “Come on,” he said. He got out awkwardly because the Fiat was small and his overcoat confined him.
They found the oak tree. It had an iron bench around it, as Pope-Ginna had said it would, and six feet off the ground there was a hole where a branch had fallen off and the ants had eaten the heart of the wood.
“Radio working?”
Repin took a small black box from his pocket. He pressed a red button and a red light glowed. He nodded, took from the other pocket one of the cigarlike tubes from the habitat. It had been fitted in Paris with a transmitter so they could track it after it was picked up.
“And if he doesn’t come?”
“He?”
“Maxudov.”
“He will come. Maybe not directly, but we will find him. If not this way, then another.”
They waited at the top of a slope from which they could watch both the oak tree and the car park. Gorchakov said that he had another car at the far side of the park in case Maxudov went in that direction, but Tarp never saw it. The day grew warmer and brighter; at two in the afternoon the sun came out in full and he felt suddenly that he was not in Moscow but in Boston, on the Common on an April day. Children appeared as if on cue, like a crowd in an opera; a few young people strolled among the trees. Tarp felt sleepy, but Repin stood tensely, his eyes fixed on the tree and the hole where the tube lay. He had the intensity of the end of a hunt, which Tarp did not yet feel.
At half-past three, a woman and a little boy began to play near the tree. The child was about four. The woman, who seemed to be his nurse, was in her early twenties and very fair.
“Do you think?” Repin said.
“Good cover, the kid. Maybe.”
“Colossal ass on her. Shit, yes, look at that!”
The woman and the little boy had been rolling a ball back and forth. The woman sat on the bench by the tree and rolled the ball from there, and then she bounced it high to the child and he chased after it, and while he was running and shrieking, the woman quickly stood on the iron bench and reached up to the hole and got down again.
“Just like that.”
It had taken only a few seconds. She was still holding the tube in her hand when she sat down, and only when the little boy came lumbering back with the ball did she open her purse and push it inside.
“The bitch.” Repin seemed to hate her for playing a part in this. “Using a kid.”
“It isn’t the first time.”
“Shut up.”
Repin turned on the tracking device and moved it back and forth as the blond woman and the child moved across their field of vision. The box gave out a groaning noise when it pointed toward her and then faded when it moved away. A green crystal display showed numbers — 5 when it was pointed directly at her. 0 when it was all the way off.
“They’re coming this way. Let’s move.”
They went obliquely up the slope, coming around behind their own car from a screen of firs. Gorchakov looked bored but did not seem surprised to have them come behind him. There were other cars in the parking area, most of them clean and shiny, the status symbols of the upper bureaucracy.
“Well?” Gorchakov said when they got in.
“It’s been picked up.” Repin seemed to grudge him that much information.
“And?”
“Coming this way. A woman and a kid.”
“Coming back to her car, probably.”
Repin grunted. He swung the black box and it registered 4, and then the little boy tottered to the edge of the graveled parking area and fell down and began to howl. The woman came after him. Her coat was slung over her shoulders like a cape; under it, her gray wool dress, which was probably meant to look severe, looked provocative because of her body.
“I know her,” Gorchakov said.
“What?”
“She’s Falomin’s mistress. The boy is his. And hers.”
Repin pulled himself upright again with the help of the seatback. “Are you sure?”
“Of course.” Gorchakov leafed through one of the boxes on the seat. His eyes moved back and forth between the woman and the files. “She’s supposed to be the kid’s nurse. He’s supposed to be Falomin’s brother’s kid. But it’s his, and so is she. There.” He handed a photograph over the backs of the seats. It was a greatly enlarged picture of the blond woman and Falomin, both in casual clothes somewhere in the sun where it had been warm and there had been a lake or ocean and they had had to squint.
“She travels in style,” Gorchakov said. The young woman was lifting the boy into the back of a chauffeur-driven Volga.
“Has she still got the tube?”
“Yes.”
They followed the sedan toward the diplomatic section, even turning on Tchaikovsky Street and going right past the American embassy, to Tarp’s rather grim amusement. On they went into smaller streets lined with handsome buildings like small Renaissance palaces from before the revolution, then into a still narrower side street where the sedan parked in front of a handsome wrought-iron gate with gilt spearheads along the top. Gorchakov drove on past, turned the corner, and stopped.
“Well?” Repin said.
“That’s an apartment block. A lot of foreigners. I can go back to see where she’s gone.”
“All right. But if they take off…”
“Then you’ll sit here until I get back! I have the keys. Don’t worry; the other car is in the next street.” Gorchakov said something on his radio and scrambled out.