front of the food queue in the Kitchen.
'You want me to write a letter to your wife?'
'And none of these people shall know.'
Because in the life of the camp, if the wife of the strongman has terminal bowel cancer and will be dead within a month, then that is weakness, and from weakness there cannot be spawned authority, and without authority the man who breeds fear throughout the hut will disintegrate. i will write the letter tomorrow. I'll get the paper and you will tell me what to write.'
'Thank you, Holly. I am generous to my friends.'
Holly turned away, climbed again on to his bunk.
On his back he began again to count the interval between the water drops. He wrapped the blanket round him, a sparse level of protection against the cold. He thought of Alan Millet… didn't know why, couldn't place the trigger that led him to Alan Millet and a pub in the Elephant and Castle south of the Thames. It would be more than a week since he had thought of Millet. More than a year since they had last spoken, and more than a week since he had last examined his memory of those meetings. It had been a very typical contract that Mark Letterworth had contrived in outline for the sale of the turbine engines to a Moscow factory. And Letterworth had said that the deal was bogging down in that bloody stupid Olympic fracas and the Afghan mess, and that he didn't give a shit for politics, only for selling engines. Holly spoke the language, so he'd better jump on an Aeroflot and get over there and chase it up with the Ministry. All simple, all sweet. And the day after Holly had been up to London to apply from the Consulate for a visa there had been the telephone call at Letterworth Engineering. A call with a bad script…
'You don't know me, Mr Holly, but there's something I'd like to meet you about when you're next in London. Hopefully that'll be in the next week…'
They met near Waterloo station because that was good for a train from Dartford. He knew about Holly, this man who called himself Alan Millet. He had read a file on Stepan and Ilya Holovich that would have come with a dust coat out of a Home Office basement reserved for the histories of Aliens (Naturalized). He knew of attendance by Stepan Holovich at NTS meetings in Paddington, and had the date that a father had taken his son to a house off the Cromwell Road to celebrate the National Day of the Ukrainian exiles with supermarket Italian wine and kitchen table cheese. And Alan Millet had spoken soft words… it's not really anything very important, Michael, it's rather a small thing we're asking of you. It helps us and it doesn't help them, if you know what I mean.'
There must have been a point of no return, but Holly could not remember passing it. It had not occurred to him that he could stand up in the pub, leave the beer half-drunk, the sandwich half-eaten, walk out into the London early evening. When he thought back over it, as he lay on the bunk and water drips splattered every eleven seconds between his ankles, he could remember only a film of excitement that had wrapped him. At their next meeting instructions had been given for a rendezvous. That had been a long meeting. Long and fulfilling because Alan Millet offered the chance to bite at an old enemy whose presence pervaded the rooms of the terraced home in Hampton Wick.
Michael Holly had trusted Alan Millet implicitly. On his back, on his bunk, he doubted if he would ever trust another man again.
If Yuri Rudakov, undressing in the front bedroom of their bungalow, had not been so tired, he would have taken the time to admire the new nightdress that his wife wore as she sat against the pillows and turned the pages of a picture magazine. If he had not been halfway to sleep he would have noticed that far from washing the make- up from her face she had taken the trouble to apply the eye shadow and lip-stick that her mother sent her from Moscow.
She read him. Elena Rudakov knew the signs.
'The fire… still the fire… '
'Still the fire.' Yuri Rudakov settled in the bed beside her, he made no effort to close the gap between them.
'You've let the cold in.'
'I'm sorry… '
'How did the fire start?' i don't know.'
'It takes you two days and half of two nights to find out that you don't know?'
'You want to hear?'
'I've sat here two days waiting for you to come home, waiting to have a conversation with you. Yes, perhaps I want to hear.'
He wanted only for the light to be put out, he waited only for darkness and sleep. He would get nothing before he had fulfilled the chore of explanation.
'Something that was inflammable was in the coal bucket.
'I don't know what it was, perhaps just paper with oil on it, I don't know. The room had draughts, you needed a greatcoat to stand in it. Kypov never complained, never did anything about it, seemed to think that the chiller his office the more masculine and vigorous he was. Would have made him think he was with the poor bloody paras in a tent in Afghanistan… I don't know. There were draughts through the window frame, under the door. He's a fat little bugger and he'd stood his backside in front of the fire. That's all I know. There wasn't a bomb, nothing like that. Just something that ignited enough to get a flame onto his seat. After that, panic… He was shouting, the door is opened, somebody puts a rifle barrel through the window. Draughts all over. I know how it spread, you see. I don't know what started it.'
'What are you going to do?'
'Put a couple in the SHIzo block for fifteen days, the ones who filled the buckets. That's all.'
'Then you don't have to go early tomorrow?'
Her arms reached towards his head, pulled him towards her.
'I've a bastard day tomorrow. Really… They've given me a major interrogation – I'd told you about the Englishman – that's what I should have been working on, not an idiot fire. The interrogation is a challenge to me. It's a compliment in itself that they've given me the chance… '
He felt her body surge away from him. His head fell against the pillow. He saw her back clothed in the flannelette nightdress. He wanted to touch her, but he did not know how.
He reached up for the light switch. Sleep would be hard to find. Before his eyes would cavort the typed words in the file of Michael Holly.
A fire must have a spark, a flash of ignition. So, too, must an idea of action. There is a moment when an idea is born, the clash of a flint.
Holly was on the perimeter path.
He walked alone, deep-wrapped in his own thoughts, and the morning was colder than any of those of the week before.
The cold cut through him, summoned by the winds that had begun their journey on the far plains of Siberia and the Ural mountains and the great Kirgiz steppe.
He felt it at his face and his fingers and his back and his arms, felt it at his buttocks and privates and thighs. No snow in the air that morning, only the wind that gusted and trapped the men on the perimeter path. And the cold was worst at the feet, he thought. Michael Holly had been a prisoner of the camp for less than one month, and already he believed that he could walk this path with his eyes closed.
Four turns to the left on each lap of the compound, and he fancied that he knew at which moment he must drop his shoulder, cut his stride and turn. If he knew the path blindfold after one month, how well would he know it after fourteen years?
In front of him was Chernayev who had not practised his trade of thieving for seventeen years. Twice that morning Holly had passed Chernayev on the path. Now the old man walked in the centre of the path and the way was blocked and Holly had to check his stride.
Chernayev turned his head as if he felt the breathy impatience of the man behind him.
'Holly… the Englishman…?'
'Yes.'
'And in a hurry? Is it different to you if you make four times round the path and not three?'
Holly faltered for an answer, if I go faster then I am warmer.. . ' if you go faster then you are hungrier.'
'Perhaps.'
