Pol was also helped by his appearance. Vast, pink and pear-shaped, with a goatee beard, and a kiss-curl pasted across his brow, he looked at first like a comic professor out of a nineteenth-century farce. But there was something about the very enormity of him, and the occasional gleam in those impish eyes, that suggested a man of substance, if not integrity. Even his little cherry-lips and his shrill, almost girlish laugh might be thought, correctly, to be deceptive.
Charles Pol was an opportunist, a sybarite and a hypocrite. He was also a ruthless idealist who saw nothing improper about championing the cause of the underdog, while lining his pocket with a handsome percentage for his pains. For the making of money was an amusing game for Pol, a means of scoring off his sillier brethren, as well as supplying him with the necessary luxuries of life. His real passion — besides food and drink — was to play deus ex machina; and the possible collapse of his deal with Aeroflot now seemed to open up a nice opportunity for this.
It had been some weeks since his meeting with the Englishman on his last visit to Moscow. While renegade English gentlemen were not a breed that Pol particularly admired, in this case the sheer scope and audacity of the man’s career made Pol naturally sympathetic. He even felt a roguish affinity with Monsieur Philby.
After only a few hours together, Pol knew there were great possibilities, providing he moved with care. The man was an alcoholic, a disillusioned expatriate, half idealist, half troublemaker. He also had charm and intelligence; but, more important, he was possibly an even higher priest of perfidy than Pol himself. And like a grand chess-master who has grown weary of easy victories, so Pol had quickened to the promise of a really worthy opponent.
He was soon anticipating a dramatic scheme into which the Englishman would fit admirably. If it succeeded, not only would it gratify Pol’s perverse sense of ethics, but he also saw a way of turning it to some financial advantage. London, he knew, were even tighter on the purse-strings than Paris, but he calculated that once he applied the right pressures, reason would prevail. The British, he told himself, were a very reasonable race.
His only concern now was that the Aeroflot deal would collapse completely, and that he might even be ordered to leave the country. However, while his relations with the Soviet authorities did not improve, they were not discontinued; his visa was not withdrawn and he continued to occupy the suite in the Hotel Intourist, which he also used as an office.
In the evening, following his nearly disastrous conference with the Deputy Minister, Pol put into motion the first stage of his master-plan. He called at the British Embassy in Naberozhnaya Morisa Toreza.
Cayle began his first full day in Moscow by going into his bathroom on the twelfth floor of the Hotel Aeroflot and biting off a lump of soap. He swallowed it, washed out his mouth with malt whisky, cleaned his teeth to get rid of the smell, then went along to the lifts. He had neglected to shave.
He did not feel well as he rode down, surrounded by fur-coated Asiatics smelling of cheap scent, and got out at the third floor, where a slim aluminium replica of the TU 144, the Soviet rival to Concorde, stood on a plinth in front of the Aeroflot booking-desk. Several people eyed him warily, as he joined the queue with head bowed, his air-ticket to London gripped in a clammy fist. When he finally reached the woman at the desk, he looked pleadingly down at her and said, ‘You speak English?’
‘I do.’
‘I’m booked to go to London this morning.’
She glanced inside his ticket and nodded. ‘The bus will leave the hotel in ten minutes. You must hurry.’
Cayle blinked at her and his mouth hung open. ‘Excuse me,’ he growled, ‘but I am ill.’
‘You are staying in the hotel?’
‘I’m in transit. From Afghanistan. I arrived last night, and I think I’m sick.’ He leaned against the desk and gripped his belly.
‘One moment, please.’ She whispered to one of her companions, then turned to him and said, ‘I will keep this ticket and will make other arrangements. Now you will go to your room and wait.’
Cayle obeyed. Twenty minutes later a key turned in the lock and three women marched in. Two of them wore white coats, and one carried a black bag. The third was the woman from the Aeroflot desk. They stood in a row beside the bed, while the one with the bag began fitting a gauze mask across her nose and mouth.
Cayle started to sit up, but the Aeroflot woman pushed him down again, then spoke rapidly in Russian. The one with the mask nodded, leant over the bed and pressed a hard finger into the centre of his stomach. He yelled, and she grunted something through the mask. The Aeroflot woman said: ‘You must tell where the pain is.’
‘The pain’s all over,’ Cayle moaned.
The masked one spoke again in Russian and the Aeroflot woman said, ‘Take off your clothes, please.’
Cayle stripped to his Y-fronts, but they made him take those off too. The third woman, who was younger and prettier than the others, and seemed to be a nurse, looked down at him without interest. The one with the mask now took a stethoscope out of the bag and ran it over his chest. He flinched and grunted at appropriate intervals. She took his temperature, and spoke again to the Aeroflot woman, who told him: ‘It is necessary that you go to the hospital for examination.’
He stared up at her in panic. ‘I can’t! I’m flying to London today.’
‘It is not good that you travel,’ she said.
‘Just give me something for the
