He decided to return downstairs and have a drink at the foreign-currency bar. When the lift arrived, he stepped in and collided with the well-dressed drunk who had ridden up with him. They stopped at the ground floor and Cayle stood aside to let him out, but the man stood squinting at the floor, waiting for the doors to close again. Cayle had long accustomed himself to accept that nothing in Russia is quite what it seems to be; and he did not rule out the possibility that the drunk was a security man.
In the bar he paid for his whisky with a pound note and received a Czech crown and two Kenyan shillings in change; then sat inspecting the other guests. There was a delegation of East Germans with lapels studded with Party badges; a couple of Africans morosely sipping beer; a row of Western businessmen laughing and tapping their feet to a noisy number by the Rolling Stones. He recognized no obvious Russians.
After half an hour he left for the huge dining-room where he ate alone to the strains of an orchestra of old men in evening dress ravaging Cole Porter under triple chandeliers.
CHAPTER 3
Cayle woke late and had breakfast in his room, then spent some time on the telephone trying to negotiate for some soap and a plug for the bath. When he finally got downstairs it was lunchtime, but the restaurant was full of old women with mops and vacuum cleaners.
On his way through the lobby he stopped at a desk selling newspapers; there were two racks, one full of the Soviet and East European Press, the other with yesterday’s Western Communist papers. He asked what time today’s papers arrived from the West and was told between three and four o’clock He knew that the Morning Star would be the only English one to be exhibited, but that the big international hotels usually kept a few copies of The Times, along with the Herald Tribune and Le Monde, available on demand to Western guests.
He looked at his watch: he had between three and four hours to kill. He went outside and took a taxi to an Uzbek restaurant which was not well known to tourists. There was a long queue inside the door, but he was soon recognized as a foreigner and shown to a table with two men who were eating curds with their fingers. Nearly an hour later his food came, tepid and highly spiced, and while he was eating it a young man in a blue suit approached him with an offer in English to sell roubles for dollars. Cayle knew this was one of the oldest tricks for compromising foreign visitors, and said something in broken Russian that made the young man walk hurriedly out of the restaurant. But Cayle was puzzled that he should be so readily conspicuous as a Westerner. He had never enjoyed a reputation for sartorial elegance, and his general demeanour had a markedly proletarian aspect — what a friend had described as a middle-brow lumberjack with a hangover.
When he returned to the Metropol, it was nearly four o’clock. Today’s Western Communist papers were still not on display; but he decided to follow through with his plan all the same. He went to his room and collected The Confidential Agent, then took a taxi to the Foreign Post Office in Kirov Street. It was a fifteen-minute drive into a forlorn district full of concrete blocks and broken pavements.
There was a militiaman on the steps of the Post Office who eyed him dolefully as he walked past, into a bright naked hall with queues waiting at the rows of iron grilles. A second militiaman stood at the far end, near the Poste Restante.
The digital clock on the wall said 4.37. Cayle sat down on a bench, tapped out a cheroot and began to light it, when the militiaman yelled at him and pointed at a notice forbidding smoking in four languages. Cayle put the packet away and stared at the crowds. Most of them looked like students: a lot of Africans and Arabs and Indians, and a few Westerners who he guessed had been travelling in the Soviet Union and were returning to collect their mail.
The minutes passed slowly. At 4.58 a bell began to ring. There was a clang as the doors were opened. Cayle stood up and passed two men in bulky overcoats and fur hats coming away from the Poste Restante. One of them had a copy of The Times in an airmail wrapper tucked under his arm. Cayle stepped up beside him and said, ‘Excuse me — Mr Philby?’
A leaky blue eye peered round at him out of a pouchy face, and the man muttered something in Russian and walked on.
Cayle caught up with him again and said, ‘We met twelve years ago on a trip to the Yemen. Nine days without a drink.’ The man hesitated, then spoke again in Russian and his companion took hold of Cayle’s arm. With his free hand Cayle produced The Confidential Agent from inside his anorak. ‘I was asked by a friend to bring you this.’ A second bell rang and the militiaman shouted something from the door. The hall was emptying fast.
‘Wh-who are you?’
Cayle told him.
‘Wh-where are you s-staying?’ Philby asked, wincing with the stutter. He was shorter and plumper than Cayle remembered, and smelt strongly of Russian
