He picked himself up and shivered; he had left his anorak at the hotel. Then he realized that he’d been on the wrong side of the road. At the same moment all the dogs went quiet, and he was aware of a breathless hush. He started back to the hotel fast.
In the lift he caught his reflection in the mirror: there were white rings round his eyes and he was sweating. Steady, he thought. He wanted to hear his editor Harry’s gentle monotone telling him to take a holiday in the sun; he didn’t care any more about Philby and his secret shifty world of plain-clothes cops and gentleman robbers, or even what had become of that old mandarin, Sir Roger Jameson-Clarke. He was suddenly very tired; but as soon as he was in bed again, he rang down and asked for an alarm call for 5.30.
CHAPTER 8
There was no sign of the Englishman next morning, either at breakfast in the hotel or when Cayle boarded the Ariana Viscount on the three-hour flight to Kabul.
They landed at the Afghan capital at noon, with a high wind shrieking off the mountains, carrying swirls of dust off the tarmac that cut Cayle’s eyes, even under the fastened hood of his anorak. He stumbled half-blinded into the terminal where a row of men with ferocious moustaches and knitted earmuffs sat chewing fudge as they stamped passports, chalked luggage and nodded them into the Arrivals hall.
The Aeroflot office was behind a locked door with a chipped inscription in Russian, Afghan and English, announcing that it would reopen at three o’clock. There was no left-luggage office, no restaurant, no bar. Cayle carried his case outside, and after trudging for some time down broad dusty tracks, found a windowless café lined with silent men in skullcaps, smoking elaborately curved pipes. They reminded him of a row of painted chocolate dolls. One of them stared at him as he entered, then ducked through a bead curtain and reappeared with a plate of charred kebab. There seemed no question of Cayle refusing it or ordering anything else. He took it over to an empty chair and ate it off his upended suitcase. There were no tables. No one spoke to him or took the least notice of him.
Two hours later he returned to the Aeroflot office and bought his single ticket to London, via Tashkent and Moscow. He received his forty-eight-hour visa without demur for an extra payment of five US dollars, including airport-tax. Outside, the wind had not slackened. The plane was a heavy-bellied twin-prop Tupolov which Cayle guessed was a converted bomber; the seams of its skin were stained with ancient rust, and the interior was stark and functional like a ramshackle bus.
One of the engines choked and belched smoke past the windows; oil-slicks spat across the wings; the floor shuddered, swayed, and finally lifted. Barry Cayle sat back and waited for the wine and kvas.
CHAPTER 9
Monsieur Charles Pol spent a wretchedly eventful five days after arriving in Moscow.
They began with a small calamity at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport where his plane stopped en route from Paris. The passengers were deposited at the furthest gate from the transit-lounge, linked by almost a kilometre of corridor which the Danes had thoughtfully equipped with push-scooters. Handled with care, these could reach speeds of up to fifteen miles an hour; and Pol, whose immense weight did not encourage walking, gratefully availed himself of one. He did well for the first few hundred yards, until he tried to negotiate a right-angled bend and collided with a couple of imposing blondes. Being a chivalrous man he made a desperate attempt to avoid them, jerking the front wheel to the left and jamming his tiny foot to the floor, and had bounced off both of them and finished up in a tumbled mass against the wall. When the two girls had managed to lift him to his feet he found he couldn’t walk.
He was treated at the first-aid centre, where they bound up his ankle so thickly that he was unable to squeeze on his small fur-lined boot, and had to be transported back to the plane in a wheelchair. For the rest of the journey the pain had been softened by copious champagne in the first-class compartment, so that by the time they began their descent over the dark wastes towards Moscow, Pol was feeling euphoric.
This state of mind ended abruptly at Sheremetyevo Airport. Here there was not only no wheelchair to meet him, but no official limousine. By some oversight the usual VIP treatment accorded to the president of an international company engaged in a multi-million rouble deal with the Soviet Government had been scheduled for the wrong day. Instead, Pol was subjected to the tedious rigours of Soviet Customs and Immigration, during which his three oyster-white Louis Vuitton suitcases were searched and a French magazine confiscated.
But Charles Pol was a patient man, and despite his injured foot, he accepted a taxi into the city. A few hundred yards from the Hotel Intourist, at an intersection on Gorki Street, his driver slammed on the brakes and the taxi slid smoothly into the side of a bus. A lengthy argument followed, involving both drivers, several militiamen and a crowd of bystanders; and Pol was at last allowed to leave his luggage and hobble the remaining few hundred yards through freezing snow,
