arm.
Charlie was warmed by the feeling of satisfaction at his instinct proving right, although realistically acknowledging that it barely took him half a step forward. He needed Irena to keep their meeting the following day-and be prepared to talk far more fully-to do better than this. And he wasn’t at all sure that she would. He did, though, know that she worked-and possibly lived-within an area very close to the cafe, with which she was obviously familiar, by getting her to agree to meet him there during a lunch hour. Charlie hoped that she didn’t realize how he’d tricked her into disclosing it and giving him the minimal advantage.
27
Charlie allowed himself a discomforting hour before finally approaching the cafe in which he’d arranged to meet Irena Novikov. It was less crowded than before, the permanent sports channel showing a soccer match featuring Moscow Dynamo. The clothes-cocooned babushka was at the same table and Charlie wondered if she’d even left the previous night.
Charlie risked the brandy and chose the same table as before, able from where he sat to watch the cafe clock as well as the door. There had only been six press calls and two rambling cranks when he’d checked the embassy earlier. But nothing from Mikhail Guzov, Svetlana Modin, or London, which gave a chance for him to consider how to utilize each, when they came. And how to prompt them, if they didn’t. It was 12:15 according to the cafe clock. The place was filling, for the midday break. The majority of customers wore workmen’s overalls and heavy boots, and by Charlie’s estimate more vodka than beer was ordered. The vodka was in unmarked, unlabeled bottles and very visibly the yellow of alcohol-concentrated home distillation. Charlie decided he’d been wise to stay with the brandy.
By 12:35 Irena still hadn’t arrived. He’d give her an allowance, Charlie decided: there could be reasons, even for someone as time-conscious as she appeared to be. How much allowance? A lot. She’d had to force herself yesterday, constantly wavering; would have run-avoided things-if he hadn’t gently pushed. The noise in the cafe was irritatingly rising in proportion to the vodka intake. His own brandy glass was virtually empty. He didn’t want to lose the symbolic table by going to the counter for another but was tempted. It was now 12:45 and the place was becoming crowded, three people needed behind the counter now, the noise-spiked by shouted outbursts-growing at the soccer action on TV. It wouldn’t be easy to maintain unnoticed surveillance outside the cafe if Irena reneged. After his earlier location reconnaissance Charlie had naturally continued to check the surroundings of the cafe as he’d approached. It was situated slightly to the right of a far too expansive square directly overlooked by too many Brezhnev-era apartment blocks and house conversions and, illogically, far too few shops or other bars: there were side alleys and streets but insufficient concealing activity among which he could stay unnoticed.
At 12:50, Charlie tilted his chair against the table, to mark his occupancy, and eased his way through the noisy, tight-packed counter crush. That tightness-and the noise-eased during the time he stood waiting to be served and he realized why when he looked again at the cafe clock registering 1:10 P.M., marking the end of the break.
She’d run, Charlie accepted, as his brandy was finally poured. He’d give Irena the time it took him to finish this drink, maybe even another, but then have to accept what he’d been refusing to contemplate. He’d lost Irena. But only temporarily, he determined, with customary obstinacy. Whatever-however-it took he’d find Irena Yakulova Novikov again and try to convince her again.
And then he saw her.
He was at the edge of the thinning counter group, his first impression only of a figure at his table. Then his vision cleared sufficiently for him to realize who it was. Charlie didn’t hesitate, though, but continued on and by the time he reached her the doubts and the reflections had gone.
“Now you’re late,” he said, relieved that there was no vibrating nervousness today. She was wearing the same coat as the previous night, over what appeared blue canvas work trousers. The auburn hair, no longer covered by the woolen hat, was flecked with gray and in better light, Charlie guessed she was in her early fifties.
“I’m glad you waited.” There was even a wisp of a smile but no immediate explanation.
“What would you like?”
“That looks good,” she said, nodding to the brandy glass he was still holding.
“Would you like any food?”
She shook her head. With even fewer people at the counter now, it didn’t take him as long the second time to get another brandy. There was another soccer match showing on the television screen.
Irena said, “I worked an extra hour, and started two hours earlier this morning, so we’d have the afternoon.” She was already smoking her first cigarette.
“I wish you’d warned me last night.”
“Last night I didn’t intend coming back today.”
“What changed your mind?”
“I decided you’d try to find me. And probably succeed, eventually. So it would only be delaying things. I changed my mind about a lot of other things, too.”
“Like what?”
“That I don’t really care if they do find out and kill me.”
It wasn’t the answer Charlie expected. Or wanted. “That’s depressingly fatalistic.”
“No, it’s not,” she denied. “It’s decisive: my deciding what I want to do and will do, get the people who murdered Ivan brought to justice. That’s what you’ve been trying to persuade me to do, isn’t it?”
“I’m surprised by the change,” Charlie admitted, honestly.
“Let’s both hope I don’t change my mind again.”
“Let’s,” agreed Charlie, wondering if this were Irena’s first brandy of the day. Not trusting the covering sound of the television Charlie came closer over the separating table and said, “You were telling me last night that Ivan had found something?”
“I don’t know it all,” qualified the woman at once.
“Tell me as much as you do know,” encouraged Charlie, gently, unsure which of Irena Novikov’s shifting attitudes he preferred.
“It was to do with his job,” she began. “It took a very long time for Ivan to get properly well. .” She stopped, reflectively. “I don’t think he ever got properly well. The field hospital operation was botched and there had to be more surgery when he got back to Russia: he spent months in hospitals and after that in KGB recovery and rehabilitation centers and as I’d been dismissed because of how I’d been injured in Cairo-and that they
She was straying off on a tangent again, Charlie realized: too soon yet to bring her back on course.
“He was worried, too, that there wouldn’t be a job for him when he finally got better, because of the arm,” Irena was saying. “But there was a job, although obviously no longer in the field. Everything had become FSB by then, of course. But a lot of the changes were cosmetic, for outside-mostly western-consumption. One of the divisions that didn’t change, has never changed since the first name switch from the Cheka, was the Registry and Archives Department. .”
Charlie felt a lurch of grateful satisfaction at holding back earlier from any interruption but risked it now. “Ivan was assigned to archives?”
Irena shook her head. “Not current, ongoing records, although the division to which he was assigned is always ongoing. Ivan was put in charge of the bureau keeping up to date the official history of the Russian intelligence service, from its foundation under Feliks Dzerzhinsky by Lenin. Ivan was an ideal and very obvious choice, of course, with all the languages he could read and so easily translate.”
“What period was Ivan responsible for?” interrupted Charlie again, conscious of his voice sounding almost as hoarse as Irena’s in his excitement.
“I’m not sure of the actual dates,” said Irena, lighting another cigarette. “I guessed from what Ivan used to say from time to time that it spanned the last ten to fifteen years: it could have been longer. It certainly overlapped
