Cayle did not catch the reply. The Russian opened the door further and Cayle went in.
It was a large room with curtains half-drawn across a window overlooking the square. There was a lot of highly polished buhl furniture, including a heavy ornamental desk and a black marble lamp with a red and gold tasselled shade. Behind the desk, in a wing-chair upholstered in green velvet, a man sat with his head half turned to the window, and the lamp cast a pink glow across his profile, with its thin prominent nose and wing of silver hair. He turned enough to give Cayle a faint, apologetic smile. ‘Come in — do sit down.’
Cayle was used to surprises in his job. He only wished he were more presentable: being unshaven and still half asleep was no fit way to meet a man who until a few days ago had been a senior member of the British Foreign Service. Sir Roger Jameson-Clarke looked a little tired, a little pale, but otherwise he displayed the same patrician poise that he had shown in the Ritz and the ‘Squadron’.
‘Now, Cayle. Perhaps you’d like to tell us what you’ve been up to in the last few days?’
CHAPTER 17
‘The city is situated on more than two hundred islands,’ the girl said. ‘Each island is linked by a bridge. There are altogether six hundred and one bridges.’ She spoke with the enthusiasm of an air hostess telling her passengers to fasten their seatbelts. ‘The city was constructed on a great marsh and its first foundations stood on wooden piles driven into the mud. These foundations also contain the bones of half a million slave-labourers.’
The driver swung the wheel, and she put up her hand to shade her eyes against the Arctic glare that reached in below the smoked upper panes of the coach windows.
‘On our left we now see, in the middle of the river, the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul.’ The driver changed gear with a noisy lurch and several of the passengers woke up. The girl steadied herself against the engine-block and said, ‘The Fortress was used as a prison for many famous people. The most famous was Lenin.’
‘Which famous prisoners are in there now?’ asked a man in a yellow gaberdine suit near the back.
‘Today it is used as a museum,’ the girl replied. ‘Now, to our right we see the Hermitage —’
The man in the gaberdine suit put back his head and yawned. ‘Is this why they made us bolt our lunch? What do they think we are — a goddam Rotary outing from Burlington, Illinois?’
‘Perhaps they have problems at the airport,’ said his companion, a lean young Frenchman with wiry black hair and a lot of complicated camera equipment piled beside him in the gangway.
‘You boys expecting to get anything out of this?’ asked the man in the gaberdine suit; he had the flat ambiguous accent of an American who has lived a long time out of America.
‘There could be a crash,’ said the Frenchman.
‘There are no plane crashes in Russia, Yves. Everybody knows that.’
‘The plane is French,’ said Yves, smiling. ‘And French planes are surely allowed to crash?’
‘You’re a cynic,’ said the American. ‘You’d love that plane to crash.’
‘Normally, perhaps. But please, not when I am on it!’
Outside they drove past an old man taking his dog for a walk. The dog was small and fat, like the man, and wore a leather coat strapped round his belly, and fur earmuffs. A couple of photographers in the coach took pictures of it. They were now crossing the frozen Neva and the girl was pointing out the golden needle of the Admiralty spire. Near the far bank a hole had been cut in the ice and a group of men in bathing trunks and rubber caps were lowering themselves in, watched by a small crowd. Several journalists in the coach laughed. ‘Some way to work off a hangover!’ one of them shouted. The girl broke off and said, ‘They are champion swimmers of the Leningrad Sports Federation. They practise like that all the year.’
‘I must say, she’s a good-looker,’ said the American. ‘And I guess she makes out all right too! That hat looks like mink.’
‘They say these Intourist guides all have lovers in the Ministries or the KGB,’ said Yves. ‘I don’t think they are available, except under special circumstances.’
The American snickered. ‘You got a one-track mind, Yves. Sex and disaster.’ He leaned out and called to the girl: ‘When do we go to the airport?’
She frowned. ‘You want to go to the airport already?’
‘Well, that’s what we’re all here for!’ he cried.
The girl spoke quickly with the driver, who swung the wheel, throwing the girl completely off balance this time, so that she slipped sideways and fell against the door. Her apple cheeks flushed darkly, and she clutched at her white fur hat, righted herself and smoothed down her black coat. ‘If it is your wish,’ she said, with dignity, ‘we will go to the airport.’
They drove back across the river and re-joined the shabby elegance of the Nevsky Prospekt, running wide and straight into the horizon. The girl sat down beside the driver and most of the journalists dozed.
They entered the airport at a far corner, away from the international passenger terminal. The gate was manned by grey-uniformed Frontier Police who came aboard and checked their special passes issued by the Press Office of the Foreign Ministry.
‘Please, from here there must be no photographs,’ the girl said, as the guards stepped down and the bus began to move forward again, down a muddy avenue into a sprawling complex of breeze-block huts.
The afternoon sky was icy blue, with no wind, and across the Gulf of
