‘What’s your exact tie-up with the Soviet Union?’ asked Cayle.
‘More or less anything that comes along, old boy. This time it’s an aircraft deal. The boss is flying in from Geneva soon to supervise it. French chappie — great character. One of the fattest sods you ever saw! Can’t be more than five foot two and weighs at least sixteen stone. Should be in a bloody circus!’
‘Is it a private deal,’ said Cayle, ‘or does he represent the French Government?’
Maddox jerked his chin up and gave a crafty smile. ‘To be frank with you, Barry, I shouldn’t really be telling you this. It’s a bit hush-hush, y’see. This French boss o’ mine has a concession to flog the Russians some aircraft — stocking up the old Aeroflot junk, some of which is nearly twenty years old. But he’s also arranged a special new deal with them — a Franco-Soviet airbus. They’re calling it the Troika-Caravelle. And it’s likely to cause a lot of aggro in the EEC.’
Cayle nodded. He wondered if Maddox were merely shooting a line, or whether he was being extraordinarily indiscreet. It seemed hardly credible that this unprepossessing little man should be privy to an international secret; and even if he was, why was he blurting it out to a journalist whom he’d only just met, and who was himself travelling to the Soviet Union, where the deal was presumably to be clinched?
Cayle was not a suspicious man by nature, but his profession had trained him to be wary of importuning strangers. He considered the possibility that Lennie Maddox was giving him this information for a purpose.
He said: ‘Do you work for this Frenchman personally?’
‘I do. And he’s a lovely man to work for. Never entertains without the champagne and caviar. Rich as Croesus — bloody great place on Lake Geneva, travels like a prince, always the best hotels, servants fetching and carrying wherever he goes — and yet he calls himself an international socialist! God knows what the Russians really make of him. But he certainly seems to get his way with them — perhaps because they’ve never met anybody like him before.’
‘When do you say he’s arriving in Moscow?’
‘Next week, next month. You never know for certain with old Charlie boy.’
‘What’s his full name?’
‘Pol. Charles Pol, President and chief shareholder of Entreprises Lipp, and the biggest left-wing capitalist from the Kremlin to Wall Street.’
‘I’d like to meet him,’ said Cayle.
‘Ah. Might be tricky. Don’t know that he’s too keen on the Press — not unless he’s got something special to tell them.’ He finished his wine and let his seat back. ‘Well, must get a bit o’ shut-eye now. Nice talking to you, Barry!’
His interest in their conversation seemed to cease as abruptly as it began, and after the forty-minute stop at Copenhagen, Maddox returned to his seat and went back to the work in his attaché-case.
They landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport at seven o’clock local time. It was a black misty evening, with the runway covered with freezing slush. Inside the terminal they were bunched into a bleak concrete hall, filled with the smell of Russia — the bitter-sweet fumes of Soviet petrol, black tobacco, and a hint of cheap soap. A woman with henna-stained hair handed Cayle a pink Customs form warning of the severe penalties for importing firearms, explosives, drugs, livestock, undeclared roubles, Western newspapers and magazines, and literature hostile to the Soviet Union; and a young Customs officer, in a square-shouldered greatcoat reaching over the top of his calfskin boots, politely examined his luggage. He looked through the new Bodley Head edition of Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent — bought the day before at John Sandoe’s, off the King’s Road — but ignored the two tins of Whiskas, from Cayle’s local supermarket in Fulham.
Maddox had a car waiting for him outside, but pointedly failed to offer Cayle a lift. However, before driving off he asked him where he was staying.
‘The Metropol,’ Cayle replied reluctantly.
‘I’ll call you, Barry. We must get together and have a night out.’ He waved as the car drove off in a wake of slush.
There seemed to be no airport bus, only official limousines. Eventually Cayle found a taxi, and they pulled out into the dark suburbs of the Russian capital.
Like the desert, the sense of adventure on entering Russia is soon dissipated by its vast, sterile emptiness. Cayle felt at once cut off from all spiritual and emotional contact, and was left not so much depressed as crushed and listless. They reached the Leningrad Prospekt, a six-lane highway bordered by apartment blocks like rows of tombstones: then the blaze of light as they approached the city centre, beneath the wonders of Stalinist Gothic with its soap-stone maidens embracing giant sheaves of corn and concrete workers carrying cog-wheels the size of houses.
The Metropol loomed out of the night like a well-lit factory. An ancient porter carried Cayle’s cases through the revolving doors, into a high-vaulted lobby like the entrance to a railway station, full of liverish marble and crowds in steaming, dripping fur. The intourist reception desk was along the far wall, where long queues were waiting to have their passports checked, in return for coupon vouchers and numbered passes to their rooms.
Half an hour later Cayle had cleared the formalities and entered a lift which was already occupied by a large drunken man in a double-breasted suit. Cayle rode up to the third floor, showed his pass to
