“You don’t have anyone else. Can’t trust anyone else.” There was loud knocking from outside the telephone kiosk that made Charlie jump. He ignored it.
There was silence from the other end but another rap against the glass.
“Tell me how to meet you.
There was a sound that didn’t form into a word, something like a sigh that grew into a groan.
“What was that? What did you say?”
“Where the road joins Rizskij pereulok, on the left. The cafe there. Tonight. Seven. Wait for me to come up to you.”
“I need. .” started Charlie, but the line went dead. His clandestine meeting with Sergei Pavel had been in a workers cafe, arranged over public telephone lines. And now Pavel was dead, Charlie thought.
The cafe was not quite a step but at least a ledge above that in which he’d met Pavel, but thicker with cigarette smoke. The concentration of virtually everyone was on an ice hockey match showing on the screen behind the counter, one group of men enthusiastic enough to shout at goal attempts and the more violent clashes. There were three women already there when Charlie arrived, two gossiping at one table and immediately behind at another, a babushka heavily muffled in a coat and scarf and woolen hat, despite the warmth. All three ignored him. As he had for his meeting with Pavel, Charlie chose a pole-supported stand-up table closest to the wall farthest from the door, where he was able to see everything and everyone inside. He decided the coffee was better than in McDonald’s but the baklava was stale. He still nibbled at it, hungry after ignoring his McMuffin. He wasn’t convinced she would come. He’d decided the unintelligible sound at the end of their conversation had been a sob of fear at edging closer to a decision she was terrified of making, cutting off the words she couldn’t at first utter, a refusal maybe. Charlie didn’t know what to do if she didn’t come now. She’d cut him off before he’d been able to suggest a fail-safe, which he’d anyway been reluctant to do because it would have given her an escape. Now he wished she’d given him the chance. He supposed he could again try the public telephone kiosk for which he had a number, promptly at five: she seemed to need the regularity of time. Or hope she would call the embassy again.
Would Mikhail Guzov have tried to reply to his early morning call? They’d surely make some attempt to restage the press conference; not to do so would give Stepan Lvov another victory. Charlie reasoned there was the danger of a further hijack by the world media ignoring the declared purpose of the conference and instead demanding from Guzov and Interior Ministry officials answers about the arrest and detention of Svetlana Modin. Would she have expected calls from him, even though it was a Saturday? Charlie thought she probably would. Automatically he looked at his watch, realizing the ORT main news was in thirty minutes, and just as automatically glanced toward the television, guessing it unlikely the channel would be changed from the ice hockey coverage.
So engrossed in the match was virtually everyone in the cafe-and so unobtrusive her entry-that Charlie thought he was probably the only person there to register the arrival of the woman he instantly and intuitively was sure to be his caller: it took several moments for the man behind the counter to become aware of her standing, waiting, and Charlie thought there was a professionalism about her nonentity cultivation. She was slight and very thin, anonymously dressed in a buttoned-to-the-neck gray linen coat and gray woolen hat pulled too low to give any indication of her hair shade. Her only distinctive feature when she turned away from the counter was her facial coloring. Charlie didn’t think there was any makeup and was surprised, if anonymity were what she wanted, because it could have reduced the strange mottled brownness to the left of her face. If she were who he believed her to be, he accepted that some of the coloring could have been apprehension but her appearance was that of someone who had spent the majority of her life in perpetual sunshine from which she’d made little effort to protect or shield herself.
She hadn’t appeared to look for him as she’d entered and continued to concentrate, head bent forward, over her cup as she came farther into the cafe, not bringing her head up until she sat at the table directly beside him, nodding then as if in permission for him to join her. As close as she now was, Charlie could see nervousness was trembling through her, the cup she’d carried from the counter puddled in a moat of spilled coffee.
Charlie said: “Relax. Nothing can happen to you.”
“I’ll be all right in a minute.” It didn’t seem possible for her to look directly at him. She coughed, clearing her throat.
“You know who I am. Can I know your name?” It was going to take a long time, Charlie guessed. He would have to be very gentle, not rush anything.
The woman hesitated. “Irena.”
“Irena. .?” encouraged Charlie.
There was another hesitation. “Irena Yakulova Novikov.”
“And Ivan. .?”
Her hands were clenched, to control the shaking. “Ivan Nikolaevich Oskin.”
She wasn’t wearing a wedding band, Charlie saw. “Tell me about Ivan Nikolaevich.”
She jumped at the sudden roar from people watching television. A man’s voice from the crowd said, “Giving the fucking game away!”
Irena coughed again and said, “We were together. Had been, for a long time. Before Afghanistan even.”
“He fought in the Afghanistan war?” The missing arm, Charlie thought at once.
“He was there.” She fumbled for cigarettes from her bag, the cheapest that minimized the tobacco with a hollow tube half its length, and had to steady the match with both hands.
“Is that where he was hurt?”
She nodded, not speaking. There was another roar from the ice hockey watchers. This time she didn’t jump.
“What was he doing there?” asked Charlie, registering her qualified reply.
The hesitation was the longest yet. “KGB.”
“He was a KGB field officer?”
“He was Georgian, as I am. He had the complexion. .” Her hand came up to her own face as she spoke, quicker now, her confidence growing. “He was very good at language. He had Pamini as well as Pashto; a lot of Middle East languages. He was highly regarded, because of his ability.”
“He had to infiltrate the mujahideen?” guessed Charlie. The most difficult and dangerous of all field assignments was trying to adopt the disguise and culture of an enemy in a war or hostile situation.
She nodded again, looking directly at him at last. “He was attached to the military headquarters in Kabul, even though he was KGB, not the military
“Were you in Afghanistan with him?” asked Charlie, aware now that the skin on the left side of her face was puckered, as well as mottled brown.
“Does my face distress you?” she asked abruptly, her hand up to her cheek again.
“Not at all,” insisted Charlie, unhappy at the sideways drift of the conversation. Her pace, he reminded himself.
“It does some people,” she said, accepting his denial. “Ivan and I met on station in Cairo. That was where this happened. .” She laughed, without humor. “The lobster was being flambeed, at the table. The chef poured on too much brandy and somehow the flame blew into my face. .” There was another humorless laugh as she gazed around. “It’s safer here. They don’t go for flambe cooking.”
They were straying even further sideways. He had to get things back on track without appearing impatient. Groping, he said, “Did Ivan go to Afghanistan direct from Cairo?”
“He’d fixed it-Ivan was a good fixer-that we’d get married in Cairo and go to Kabul together: the KGB liked husband-and-wife teams. But I got medevaced back here to Moscow: the concern was not my face but that I’d lose the sight of my eye. They managed to prevent that and did the best they could for the burn scars but it took a long time. The marriage was rearranged here, during Ivan’s leave from Afghanistan, once I got better. Then Ivan was caught in the ambush and he was brought back and was in the hospital for even longer. . ” Irena came to a gulping halt, her throat working, and Charlie realized she was close to breaking down. He held back from filling in the
