over five days, Valentin would be returning to Moscow again for another posting, to another Arab country, he supposed—or maybe it would be just a desk job at the KGB’s highly secretive Department S, in the Arab section, of course.
But it wasn’t nostalgia brought on by his departure from the country that had drawn him up from the KGB station in Damascus to Syria’s second capital, Aleppo. He hadn’t come to say good-bye—not to the country, at any rate, or even just to Aleppo. The private reason for this trip to the north of the country was hard for him to accomplish and he was postponing the moment a little longer. He was neither savouring it—this particular end—nor fearing it. Nevertheless, why he had come to Aleppo contained a finality that he wished to put off.
He turned to the left down another alley in the neat grid of the souk. Like all the others in this maze, it was filled with the conflicting sights and smells of spices and skins and alimentary produce. The sounds of an Arab lute came and went from a record player in a carpet shop. He stopped briefly at the shop and fingered some Kurdish kelims, but as soon as the shopkeeper tried to get him to buy something he walked on, stiffly smiling a thank you and pretending he couldn’t speak their language. He fingered the packet in the buttoned-down pocket of his shirt once more to make sure that it was still there. The gun was cool against his skin and a constant heavy presence.
At the end of the alley, or perhaps it was at the end of the one after that, he saw daylight and headed towards it. He took a deep breath. He was approaching the moment. It was time to finish his business here and get back to the capital before he was missed. He certainly didn’t want to have to answer questions from his station head, the truculent and volatile KGB colonel Resnikov, and account for his time of absence from Damascus. He needed to be out of here within the hour and back to the capital. Suddenly he began to think more clearly, to take a grip on his usually incisive mind in order to carry through with what he had come to do.
And then at last he emerged into the blinding white light of a busy street. The thick heat from which the covered market had protected him hit him like a suffocating mask, wrapping him in its intensity with a physical sensation that was almost like a dull, dry-fisted blow. With a muscular forearm bared from the rolled-up sleeve of his white shirt, he wiped his forehead as if to ward off the sweat that hadn’t appeared yet. The heat was an insistent presence that demanded your attention, he thought, took over your thoughts.
He looked up and down. The street was a cacophony of horns and shouting. It was full of donkey carts with car tyres for wheels, and with the occasional cars and trucks that by some miracle still functioned vaguely as they were built to do. Exhaust fumes from a vegetable truck up from the country choked him as the driver pressed down on the throttle and its engine squealed agonisingly by him. The man should check his fan belt, he thought automatically.
The cafe he was looking for was a few hundred yards away. That was the venue they’d given him, the starting point for his real purpose this morning. He could just see it from the souk’s exit. The men would take him from there. It was their own proposition, this meeting place, to which he’d agreed.
He stopped under a shaded awning before committing himself finally. He had come here against all regulations, let alone good sense. What if something happened now? What if the men in the cafe had another agenda? They might try to stick a knife in him, he supposed. But most likely they’d let him go once he gave them the packet in his shirt pocket. It was his conscience, as well as his curiosity, that had brought him here and that was bad trade craft—no trade craft at all, in fact. He was going right out on a limb.
He saw them, three of them, sitting at the edge of the cafe—they were at the table nearest the road. He knew only one of them, but guessed the other two were also her brothers. When he approached, warily, they didn’t greet him, but they didn’t look hostile either. Blank faces, cold, dark eyes. Neither trusting nor distrusting. But here they were in a public street. Maybe it would be different when they had him in some hidden place. He trusted, however, that they would take what they could get from him and that they wouldn’t dare to harm a Russian from the embassy. He inspired respect from his physical presence, but at least they knew of his position—despite no actual identification—and it was that which inspired fear. Without a word, the men stood as he approached and indicated that he should follow.
The four of them walked for more than half an hour, away from the market and the ancient citadel of Abraham, past the
Once they were clear and had reached a chronically poor residential neighbourhood, they finally turned up a small alley of mud houses and he guessed that it was here where the family house would be. But it was only a guess. Valentin had never been there before. He’d only met the woman once, in fact, that one time when she’d been dancing at the restaurant back in the direction from which they’d walked. She’d been a sudden attraction—he twenty-seven, she nineteen.
She’d danced for the three of them, all Russian intelligence officers up from Damascus for the weekend. When the others had left, he’d stayed, infatuated, lost, overturned by her beauty or by her movements or by the drink and the music—or all of those things.
He remembered now how it had been back then. One minute he’d felt like he’d been walking quietly and relatively enjoyably through life—albeit an intelligence life of suspicion and paranoia—and the next, he was metaphorically hanging upside down from a tree with a noose around his foot. That had been her effect, he remembered. She’d turned him upside down without warning. He remembered her eyes now, eyes that drew him into a whirlpool that was more of his own imagination than from any physical attribute of hers. She was a professional, after all. She was paid to use her eyes like that, as well as her body. Her charms were directed at everyone she danced for, not just at him. But it was he who had fallen for her.
They’d had sex in a room at the back of the restaurant that she and the other dancers used for changing. It was very sudden, unexpected, they’d hardly removed their clothes. He hadn’t gone to the manager enquiring about her with sex in mind. He’d just wanted to see her. It was a vague, rudderless desire that was more about his fear of never seeing her again than anything else. He was infatuated. But the manager had let it happen either because of the money Valentin had given him to keep quiet, or because he was afraid of these Russians. And the woman—the dancer—why had she let it happen? He didn’t know. She’d been a virgin. Most probably she’d seen in him some kind of salvation from the narrow and ever-shrinking opportunities of her life. And he didn’t even know her name, he realised afterwards. Maybe sex with him had been some desperate throw of the dice on her part, an attempt to change her life forever.
He looked ahead now, along the alley that wound up a slight dirt hill. The men didn’t seem to be worrying that he wouldn’t follow them. And now the three men, and he, trailing behind them, seemed to be approaching the house that was their destination. The movements of her brothers were slowing, their walk kinked a little to the left. He stepped over a pile of loose garbage. The alley was filthy, just like all the others. The smell was high with kerosene and stale, human sweat, rotting vegetables, and open drains. Half-naked children and rib-thin cats played in the drain. The women were covered here. The secular state didn’t reach into its dark alleyways. Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to notice him. It was as if he wasn’t there.
Why didn’t he turn around now, leave this place and forget what had happened with the woman? He didn’t even know her name, he thought again with incredulity. Was it really his conscience driving him or was it something else? He knew that most of all it was curiosity. He knew deep down that he wanted just once to see the son he would never see again. And he would pay for that in cash, as if it were his conscience paying. Perhaps then he would be able to forget the whole thing.
They told him to wait outside the broken-down mud house that they’d now reached. They’d be getting rid of the women inside, he supposed, sending them somewhere into the back. Then the one brother whom he knew—or at least had met when he’d made the deal—beckoned him inside. The man didn’t waste any time and pointed into a dark corner of a bare room lit only by a shaft of intense sunlight coming through the half-open door.
“There it is,” he said. It was a deliberately brutal statement, Valentin thought, an insult.
Valentin looked to the far side of the room, across a flattened earthen floor and into the near darkness. When his eyes had adjusted from the bright whiteness of the light outside, he walked towards a small, low wooden table, the only piece of furniture in the room apart from two homemade wooden chairs. There on the table he saw a crude wooden crib constructed from a vegetable box and in the crib, wrapped in dirty white swaddling cloths, was what he had come to see: his son. “It,” the man had called him.
He looked down and saw a small face with dark eyebrows, the eyes tightly shut, the fingers curled up around them. The baby would be just over twelve weeks old, he thought.
