flinch.
The driver broke the circle. He jostled the people back, and was shouting to them to retreat, pushing a corridor clear through them. Holt could see down the corridor, down the steps, across the pavement, into the street. He could see where the man had stood and taken his time to aim. He was aware of the closing bleat of the siren.
His view of the street was cut by the white bulk of the ambulance.
The driver was tugging at his shoulders, trying to pull him upright, trying and failing to break his hold on Jane's hand. He still held her while the ambulance men swiftly heaved Ben onto a stretcher, carried him away down the corridor to the open rear doors. They came back for her, for his Jane. He saw the shrug in their shoulders. The shoulders and the faces told him that they knew this was not work for ambulancemen.
They lifted her more gently than they had lifted Ben, and more awkwardly because his hand never unclasped hers.
The doors closed behind him. Ben's litter lay on one side of the ambulance's opaque interior, Jane's on the other. Holt crouched in the space between. One ambu-lanceman was with them, going perfunctorily through pulse checks, and bending to listen first at Ben's chest and then at Jane's breast. The ambulance was going fast, siren loud.
Her last words were clear in his memory. Scathing words.
'Don't be childish, Holt.'
Young Holt had loved Jane Canning and the last time he had seen her face it had been puckered, screwed up in annoyance. He bit at his lip. He looked down at the fright that was set like wax on her face. That was the obscenity of it, that all the good times, wonderful times, were blasted out.
'Don't be childish, Holt.'
He had a bowl of beetroot soup in front of him and a tub of sour cream and two slices of black bread. He had a quarter bottle of vodka in the desk drawer beside his knee. The militia major was tucking a napkin into his collar when the news broke out of the control room.
Garbled, staccato chaos. A shooting on Lenin Street, He was gulping a spoonful of soup. A killing at the Oreanda Hotel. His napkin sliding into his soup, Foreign visitors attacked with rifle fire. He was careering from his desk, the sour cream slurping over his papers.
A call for all assistance… It was Saturday lunchtime.
It was the time that Yalta closed itself down and the militia headquarters was at one-third strength. He felt sick. The tang of the beetroot and the chopped onion was choking in his throat.
Into the control room. A relay coming through on the loudspeaker from Ambulance Control. The young sergeant at the console listening at the telephone and writing urgently. The telephone slapped down.
'Major, the management at the Oreanda Hotel on Lenin Street report that the British ambassador and his interpreter were shot outside the hotel…'
''Dead?'
'They did not know… Ambulance Control reports that they are carrying two cadavers and one survivor to the clinic on Naberezhnaya…'
A foreign diplomat, possibly dead… Everything he did now was going to be examined under a microscope at the investigation in a week, in a month.
'Inform the KGB Control, exactly as it comes in.'
The sergeant was reaching for his telephone. To go to the clinic, to go to the Oreanda, to stay in headquarters Which?
He picked up a telephone himself. He rang the number of Criminal Investigation two floors above, and the telephone rang and his fingers drummed on the console surface and his feet shuffled. Bastards gone their lunch. The sergeant came off the telephone and the major told him to send all militia cars to the Oreanda The major ran out of the building, howled in the yard for a driver, had himself taken to the Oreanda.
The KGB had beaten him. Half a dozen of ther there. Crowds gathering but back on the far side of the street. He shouldered his way forward to the knot of men all with radios, all either talking into them or listening to the return messages. In front of the broken plate glass front door he saw the blood stains. Perhaps, in the car he had half hoped the radio at headquarters had carried an aberration.. . well, that some hysterical idiot had.
The bloodstains and the KGB swarming over the steps of the hotel wiped that out.
They treated the militia major as dirt. They were the Organ of State Security, he was a common policeman Brusquely he was told what had happened.
'You had a very fast call,' the militia major said.
For answer there was a cursory gesture, down the steps towards a black Chaika car. A man was sitting haggard over the wheel of the car, a radio in his hand, shaking his head in response to the questions of two others. The driver, the militia major understood; a KGB driver had been assigned to the British ambassador's party.
''So you have a description, something I can broadcast?'
The man he spoke to looked away.
''If I am to seal the city, put in road blocks, I have to have a description.'
'He saw nothing.'
'What? A close quarters shooting, right under your own man's nose, and he saw nothing? How could he see nothing?''
'There is no description.'
'There has to be,' the militia major shouted.
'He did not see the killer approach. He took cover when the shooting started. He did not see the killer leave. There is no description.'
'Shit,' spat the militia major. 'You pick your men.'
The KGB officer walked away. The militia major sighed his relief. The fear of failure was shed. A KGB matter, a KGB failure. Best news he could possibly have been given.
He followed the KGB officer.
'What do you want of me?' the militia major said flatly.
'We have closed the airport, we have suspended all telephonic communication from the city, we have referred all details to Moscow. You should put blocks on all routes out of the city.'
'For what are they looking?'
No response.
He sat on a long wooden bench in a corridor of white walls and polished linoleum flooring. Two old ladies hadat first shared the bench with him, but they had long since been ordered away by the militiaman who stood with arms folded and watched over him. Through the flapping rubber doors on the other side of the corridor the trailing white coats of the doctors and surgeons and the white skirts of the nurses came and went. He waited. Another militiaman stood on guard by the rubber doors. He hadn't fought it, he hadn't wanted to be inside the Emergency Room. He was alert now, conscious of everything around him, aware enough to know that he did not want to see the last medical rites performed on the girl he loved and the man he admired.
Each man and woman who went into the Emergency Room, or came from it, gave him a glance and then looked away when he met their eyes.
It was an older man who came to him. White haired and lean, and with his smock coat bloodstained. He spoke with his hands, his hands said that hope had gone.
In Russian, Holt was told that the man was the senior surgeon on duty at the hospital. He was told that the injuries had been too severe for treatment. He shook the hand of the surgeon, and thanked him.
Holt said that he needed a telephone. Again the hands of the surgeon were in motion, it was outside his prov-ince. The surgeon backed away. Two trolleys, sheet shrouded, were wheeled through the rubber doors and down the corridor. He sat numbed, watched them go.
His attention was to his right. The man wore perfect creased slacks and a well cut wool jacket. The man flashed an identity card, didn't linger with it but it was there long enough for Holt to recognise the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Holt read the name of the KGB officer.
'I want a telephone,' Holt said, speaking in Russian.; The KGB officer was fishing a notebook from his pocket, and a ballpoint pen.
'I said that I wanted a telephone.'
