Russian Hide-and-Seek

19

His office had said that Theodore would be in a pub in George Row near the former county hall, now of course the seat of the civil administration. Although the street was only a couple of hundred metres long, Alexander had trouble finding the place. At last he registered the fact that two men were in process of changing its sign; from having been the Marshal Grechko it was that moment becoming the Jolly Englishman, an imaginative stroke, a bold stroke, a stroke that had not been cleared with authority in all its forms. Loud singing was coming from within. It was ragged and some of it was out of tune, but it sounded unnatural, forced, like low- life, rather drunken singing in a movie of sixty years and more earlier. At least it might have sounded so to an Englishman of that time, jolly or not. Certainly it meant nothing at all to Alexander.

‘Get on well, for I must leave you,

Do not let this parting grieve you,

And remember that the best of friends must part, must part.

Good-bye, good-bye, kind friends, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,

I can no longer stay and sigh, stay and sigh,

I’ll hang my harp…’

He threw Polly’s reins to a middle-aged labourer who had perhaps paused to listen to this and strode into what had been the public bar.

Through a cloud of tobacco-smoke (the Festival made its own rules) he had a brief impression of men in check shirts and neck-scarves with pewter tankards in their hands sitting on hard chairs round an upright piano. Theodore, who was at the keyboard, gave a startled look and came over to Alexander as soon as the chorus ended.

‘What’s the-’

‘Shut up. Let’s go.’

After a longer look Theodore called to a young man standing by the piano, ‘Take over, Henry. Go on to the end, then start again at the beginning. Don’t forget the cheers and the clapping. I’ll probably be back before you’ve finished.’

‘Yes, Mr Ivanov. What about the dirty stories?’

‘We can run through those in the morning.’

Outside, Theodore said, ‘You and I were meeting anyway in less than an hour.’

‘This won’t wait,’ said Alexander. ‘Keep walking.’

‘What about your horse? Is that your horse?’

‘I haven’t forgotten her. Here.’

The proffered sheet of paper bore the faint diagonal red lines required by law on any replicated matter, which would otherwise have been indistinguishable from an original. It ran, in part,

FROM THE OFFICE OF THE HEAD OF OPERATIONS

88TH CHIEF SECURITY DIRECTORATE

TOWN HALL, DYCHURCH LANE, NORTHAMPTON,

ENGLAND

AGENTS IN FIELD IN ORDER OF SENIORITY AS AT

1 SEPTEMBER 2035

1 Col-Gen V. S. Alksnis (‘Michael Mets’)

2 Brig Ch. I. Kluyev (‘Aram Sevadjian’)

3 Lt-Col Y. N. Tchernyavin…

That was enough for Theodore for the moment. He had stopped dead on catching sight of the first name, or rather the first supposed pseudonym; a small bespectacled man carrying a tattered parcel had barged into him, apologised lavishly and not been noticed doing either. Alexander saw that clouds had moved over the sun in the short time since he entered the Jolly Englishman. The streets were littered and grimy; every few metres there was a broken paving-stone or a pot-hole filled with rubble that had strayed over the road-surface. People were hurrying home mostly as single individuals, heads down, silent, looking neither to right nor to left. Everything was normal, in fact.

‘Come on,’ said Alexander.

‘Where are we going?’

‘We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to walk the streets, keeping with the crowds. It’s probably the least suicidally dangerous place. I take it Mets is our leader?’

‘I don’t know for certain; I strongly suspect so. Nina and I talked to him for a second in your garden the night we were engaged. I thought he was drunk and Nina thought he was frightened.’

‘Well?’

‘Wouldn’t you be frightened if you had an important job under Vanag?’

‘Naturally I would,’ said Alexander a little irritably, skirting a pile of empty tins and shoddily-lettered cardboard containers outside a soft-drinks shop, ‘but I’d be even more frightened if Vanag was after me. Look, Sevadjian gave me the job of getting that list himself.’

‘He had no alternative. It was a decision of the committee.’

‘Did he support it? Was there a vote? And don’t forget he had an alternative – killing me before I was within a kilometre of the list.’

Theodore had slowed in his walk and was further studying the document in question. ‘Well, things aren’t as bad as they might have been,’ he said as he refolded it.

‘How’?’

‘You and Nina and Elizabeth don’t appear.’

‘Better not tell Nina you checked that.’

‘Aram a brigadier in Intelligence… It must be a trick.’

‘I hope so.’

They turned right into Abington Street and began to move past the ruins of the great shopping-centre, not the result of any concerted effort, just vandalism and the passage of time. Here the passers-by moved slowly for the most part: housewives facing a long walk home, idly chattering groups of schoolchildren, strolling whores. A black Jaguar carrying some high official, perhaps from out of town, perhaps from London, weaved its way among the horse-traffic. After a few metres Alexander put his hand on Theodore’s shoulder and halted.

‘Let’s go back,’ he said. ‘I know what to do.’

‘I wish I did,’ said Theodore, turning. ‘It doesn’t seem to me to make much difference whether it’s a trick or not. Either way we’re hopelessly exposed.’

‘Not necessarily. I’ve had longer to think about this than you have. It does make a difference, perhaps a big difference. If that list is genuine, we are well and truly done for. If it’s a fake, aimed at setting some of us against others, it need mean no more than that they’ve correctly identified a number of our leaders. They may still know everything, of course, but there may be things, quite important things, they don’t know. For instance, although they know about me…

‘How?’

‘Oh, Theodore. They get word a chap’s trying to get hold of a list of their agents, never mind the reason he gives. What would you have thought’? Or at least gone along with to be on the safe side’?’

‘Then she…’

‘Yes. She believed it, I’m sure. She’d believe anything. No, that’s not quite right. The little bit of wiring that enables you to decide what to believe and what not to believe somehow got left out of her. Together with numerous and extensive other bits.’