One of the other two men came over and flicked his fingers, his dark eyes angry and wary at the same time. With the relief of a job done, Valentin took the packet from his shirt pocket at last and gave it to him. The man swiftly counted the money, like a trader who is experienced at flicking quickly through bundles of banknotes and assessing their value instantly. He seemed satisfied. Then he looked Valentin directly in the eyes.
“Now you take him,” the man said to him. It was an order.
Valentin looked back at him in surprise, then alarm, and finally anger. At first he didn’t understand what the man was saying, but then he realised he’d been right in the first place. It was the man who was gripped by a misunderstanding, not him.
“You don’t understand,” he said at last, quickly. “The money I’ve given you is to care for the boy. It’s for his mother to look after him. I can’t take him with me. It’s impossible.”
The man shrugged. “Either you take him or he will be left,” he replied implacably.
Was he hearing right? Left? He meant left to die, Valentin realised with disgust. Left on the street for animals and strays to pick at. Or by the side of the road outside the city, or up in the mountains somewhere. “The money,” he repeated precisely and slowly in Arabic. “That is what it’s for. To look after the boy.” He felt himself getting angrier. He realised that he’d like to throttle the man, hit him, knock his teeth out. He felt the gun nudging him to it.
“He is cursed by God,” the man said simply.
Valentin looked back at the twelve-week-old boy. What was the man talking about? He unwrapped his son from the filthy cloths and saw a perfectly formed human being. The boy didn’t wake. He saw his tiny chest move with his breath.
“Why is he cursed by God?” Valentin said without betraying his rising anger. He believed they were going to blackmail him for more money, but he had none. It had taken all his wits to get his hands on the local currency as it was.
The man stood beside him and looked down at the boy. “He is cursed,” he said. He shrugged again. “God has cursed him,” he said, as if it was perfectly obvious that this was the reason for not wanting the child, and for killing it.
And now Valentin knew. To these people, any defect in a newborn baby meant that it had been cursed by God—and they would reject the child, reject it with the finality of death. Looking down at the boy he could see no physical defect, however. So the child’s defect must be him—Valentin—he supposed. A foreign father, and out of wedlock, too. Doubly damned. Otherwise the boy looked healthy enough.
Valentin walked back across the room. The other two men were watching him closely. They were afraid, but there were three of them and one of him, and they were in their own home, surrounded by their own people outside in the street. If he’d been on official business in this godforsaken part of the city, he would have threatened them, drawn the gun concealed under his waistband, but he was here in secret, unknown to his boss. He couldn’t afford a scandal, so he kept himself under control. “Where’s his mother?” Valentin asked finally. “I want to see her.”
“She’s not here,” the brother he’d met before snapped in reply. “That is not part of the bargain,” he added.
“Where is she?”
There was silence. He didn’t like to go where his imagination was taking him. He didn’t like to think what had happened to her, what they’d done to her in punishment. If sex with him had been a desperate throw of the dice on her part, it had certainly changed her life. But it was a change that would probably finish it for good, if it hadn’t done so already.
Valentin stopped in the centre of the room and felt the possibilities that faced him diminish. He knew he was beaten. Condemn his son to death, no, that was not possible. “What about an orphanage?” he said suddenly. “Where is there an orphanage?”
The men talked among themselves. “In Damascus. On Khalabbah Street,” one said finally.
“What about here? In Aleppo?”
The men shrugged. Either they didn’t want the boy in Aleppo, or they didn’t know.
Valentin suddenly stopped thinking. “Then I’ll take him with me,” he said.
A few minutes later he was walking back down the street carrying the live bundle of his son and when he’d reached a paved street he took a private car that willingly converted to a taxi to take him back to Damascus. He was late, later than he’d planned to be, and he told the driver to hurry. It was a long journey by road.
On the way to the capital he ran through what he would have to do. With the baby in his arms he understood this had been his only choice to save his son. But he also wanted to tell someone else, not just leave the boy abandoned at an orphanage. If one other person knew, he considered, then he would be able to leave the country with a clearer mind.
There was one person he thought he might trust—just possibly. It was crazy, he knew that. After all, he was an officer in Soviet foreign intelligence. But he knew that the only person he could trust with the knowledge of his son was the wife of his head of station in Damascus, Natalia Resnikova. She was a good woman, a caring person. He believed she might understand. She was pregnant with a child of her own, after all. It would be born less than a year after his son had been born. That is what he decided to do, no matter the risk.
Having made his decision, the only other thing that preoccupied him on the journey to the capital was that his son didn’t have a name.
When the car reached Damascus, they drove to one of the poorest parts, to the east of the city. Behind a concrete area that served as a basketball court in a flat, grey suburb on the fringe of the capital, he dismissed the driver. Then he walked until he found Khalabbah Street. The houses were new here—mostly cheap, concrete, barely functional buildings to accommodate the influx of people coming in ever greater numbers from the countryside to work in the city. There was construction work going on over the whole area; cement dust rose in a mist from the rear of a truck; a bulldozer was piling the broken remains of old, destroyed houses into a heap.
Despite the noise of construction, his son seemed capable of sleeping forever.
He saw the workmen were wearing white cloths to protect their necks against the heat, even now at six in the evening. The noise of machinery and the fumes filled the air around the waste ground they were clearing in order to put up more concrete housing blocks.
Valentin walked on through the dust until he reached an older building on Khalabbah Street made of yellowing stone. A former school or government building, perhaps? But whatever it was in its former life, it was now the orphanage. It was quieter here.
He put his son down in the shade under a portico at the entrance and took out a piece of paper. On it he wrote in Arabic: “This boy has no parents. Please look after him.” They would know it was a foreigner’s writing, and that bothered him momentarily. Then he sucked the pen for a moment and wrote again. “His name is Balthasar.” Balthasar. He hadn’t been able to think of a name throughout the journey from Aleppo, but now it had come to him in a moment. He liked the name. God protect the king. They had dramatic names and that was one of its meanings, in any case. Then he looked for some way of alerting the people inside the building. He found a bellpull made of old cord hanging at the side of the door and pulled on it. He heard a distant chime. Then he walked swiftly away. Whoever ran the orphanage would be accustomed to the ring that announced the abandonment of another child.
He walked for a mile back towards the centre of the city and finally found himself at the Russian embassy compound. The White Houses, the Russians called the compound, in an unconcealed expression of racist superiority.
His mind, he found, was blurred, vague, as if he were in a film of himself rather than being the real Valentin Viktorov. But he went straight to the house of his head of station and rang the bell before he lost his nerve. There was no point in delaying.
It was the maid who answered the door. He asked for Natalia Resnikova. Resnikov’s wife finally came to the door and invited him inside. She was an elegant, beautiful woman, but her eyes were usually shaded with sadness. Married to Resnikov, Valentin wasn’t surprised. He smiled nervously at her and she returned his expression with calm, uncritical serenity. Then she nodded at him sympathetically. He liked this woman and, he liked to believe, she had a soft spot for him, too.
Valentin saw at once that they were alone. He was relieved that his head of station, Colonel Resnikov, was in his study as usual, probably drinking foreign whisky. He would be able to be alone with Resnikov’s wife and she was a good woman, a good person. They sat and took tea in a shaded patio at the rear of the house. When the maid
