did not mean she had not slept with the man. Yuri said: ‘So what’s new?’
‘I had a visit,’ she announced.
‘A visit?’
‘My brother, from California. I hoped you’d be back in time to meet him.’ She swivelled, taking a small photograph frame from a ledge, and offered it to him.
Yuri stared down at the picture of the man he’d watched escort Caroline from the advertising agency. The inscription said: ‘To Carro, from Peter’.
Looking up at him, Caroline said: ‘What are you grinning at?’
‘Nothing,’ said Yuri, returning the photograph. ‘I didn’t know that I was.’
‘I told him I’d met you.’
‘Told him what?’ The question only just stopped being abrupt.
‘That I had a new guy who was a journalist. He asked what the magazines were but I couldn’t remember.’
Dangerous, thought Yuri. Like coming here at all. So why had he, without a proper, professional, KGB- approved reason? He said: ‘What does Peter do?’
‘Cameraman at Universal Studios.’
‘Does he visit often?’ queried Yuri cautiously.
‘Once or twice a year.’
Hardly likely to be a problem, Yuri decided. No more than the problems he was creating for himself, anyway.
He said: ‘I still haven’t got anything in. Do you want to go out to eat?’
‘No,’ she said positively.
‘What then?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘I really want to know.’
‘I want to go to bed and eat you.’
Which she did. Fleetingly Yuri wondered if he would have the difficulty with Caroline that had embarrassed him with Inya, but he didn’t. The first time was hurried in their eagerness for each other, like before, but the next time it was slower and better and she screamed out when she came, driving her nails into his back, scratching him. Afterwards they lay quietly, locked together and unspeaking, her head against his chest.
It was Caroline who spoke first. She said: ‘You sure you’re not married?’
‘I told you I wasn’t.’
‘I know what you told me.’
‘So what sort of question is it?’
‘The sort of question that a girl asks a guy when she wants to be sure.’
Unseen above her, Yuri swallowed. He said: ‘No, I’m not married. And I’m sure about it.’
‘Good.’
‘Why good?’
‘Just good.’
‘Isn’t this conversation getting a little heavy?’ he said.
Instead of replying, she said: ‘How long are you back this time?’
‘It’s not definite,’ said Yuri, avoiding again. He was glad her posturing with the cocaine appeared to be over.
‘I want it to be a long time.’
Yuri thought he heard a telephone ringing in the apartment below but decided he had to be mistaken. He said: ‘Maybe it will be.’
‘Stay with me tonight? Sleep I mean.’
‘If you’d like me to.’
‘I’d like you to.’
They made love once more, before they slept, and during the night Caroline awakened him and they made love again. He said: ‘You’re going to exhaust me,’ and she said: That’s what I’m trying to do, tire you out so you won’t have the energy to go with any other girls.’
Yuri had the account already prepared when he entered the United Nations the following day, the explanation that he’d gone to check the apartment and encountered a neighbour again, smiling expectantly when Granov hurried towards him, serious-faced.
‘Where the hell have you been!’ demanded the rezident before Yuri could speak. ‘We’ve tried everywhere to find you!’
‘What is it?’ said Yuri.
‘Your father’s dead,’ said Granov.
Panchenko stared at the scraped and dented wing of the car and the gaping emptiness, where the light had been, remembering Malik’s stumbling, last-minute attempt at avoidance and how he’d had to twist the wheel to hit the man and by so doing made it impossible to avoid the glancing collision with the wall. Nothing more than a minor problem, he decided: now that he had taken the investigation away from the civilian militia there was no danger of any damaging inquiry. Still essential that he take precautions. Repairs through the Directorate motor pool were logged and he had to avoid official records. So it had to be a back-street, no-questions-asked garage: from those same KGB records he wanted to avoid, Panchenko knew the name of every one. But first the car had to be cleaned: there was a surprising amount of blood.
22
The sleet started as the cars approached the Novodevichy cemetery, neither snow nor rain, just adding wet to the cold and making everything greyer. The colour – or lack of it – was one of Yuri’s most positive impressions: dark cars, dark-clothed men, dark-earthed burial place. Even the sprigs and flower arrangements on the other, existing graves seemed withered and old, bleached of any brightness.
The uncertainty at the line-up to the grave was not from any respect for the man they had come to bury but one of protocol because Victor Chebrikov was attending. The KGB chairman chose his own place actually alongside Yuri: earlier the man had nodded, once. Yuri knew that anything further, like conversation, had to be initiated by Chebrikov, so he didn’t speak. He supposed the man’s presence indicated a great honour in memory of his father, like his signing the obituary in Pravda. It seemed immaterial. The self-awareness surprised Yuri. Very recently being in the presence of Victor Chebrikov would have mattered to him a very great deal.
The cortege set off through the graveyard with appropriate slowness and Yuri, who had never before been in a Soviet cemetery, became conscious of the size and ornateness of the burial place. The markers were nearly all elaborate slabs of stone or marble and many were fronted with huge, glass-protected photographs of whoever had died: the monument to a bemedalled soldier whose name Yuri could not read was actually in the shape of the five- pointed stars which adorned the Kremlin towers. More important in death than in life, thought Yuri.
Except in his case, he decided, in immediate and necessary contradiction. The formation at the graveside put Chebrikov and Yuri directly opposite the other mourners, with the coffin in between, and Yuri gazed across the separating gap at six expressionless men for whom he was sure the ritual was a required political act, like putting their names as well to the Pravda report. Apart from Chebrikov the only other people he knew were Vladislav Belov, director of the American section through which he worked and Victor Kazin, from the inquiry. He’d spoken only to Belov, who had mumbled regret and at once shown up the insincerity by hurrying on immediately to practicalities. Because of his father’s rank Yuri would be allowed to retain Kutuzovsky Prospekt until he could arrange the disposal or storage of his father’s possessions, but the Lenin Hills dacha had to be vacated at once, that afternoon if possible. He would, of course, be allowed to remain in Moscow for a few days. Completely missing was the reaching-out attitude of their previous encounters.
Yuri was only passingly interested in his division chief, his concentration entirely upon the twitching, grossly fat Victor Kazin. His initial, extraneous thought was not of what had happened to his father and of this man’s part in
