Snow Falcon

'Bring it to me. Can you do that?'

'Er — yes. My lunch-hour is due in a few minutes. Where?'

Cautiously, Vorontsyev said, 'The cafe — where we used to meet my wife after rehearsals. Yes?'

A pause then: 'Yes. Give me half an hour.'

Vorontsyev put down the clammy bakelite of the receiver. The air outside the opaque of the booth seemed colder, a sudden shock of water flung in his face. He had to have that file. The fact that the girl would help him, at least sufficiently to bring him the file, was a small warm place in his chest.

The TV screen at the head of the bus queue was showing a repeat of Khamovkhin's address to the Finnish Parliament. Vorontsyev ignored it.

The cafe was in a small street off Sverdlov Square, which contained the Bolshoi Theatre, and it specialised fairly cheaply, in Georgian cooking. Vorontsyev had not been there for some time, and most of the waiters were unfamiliar. He sat in a dim corner towards the back of the cafe, knowing that one avenue of escape via the urinal at the back was quickly available. It was risky, moving as openly as he must round the centre of the city — he was the KGB's best means of finding Gorochenko.

He combated his tiredness with dark coffee, and stilled hunger by devouring heavily spiced chicken satsivi with brine-pickled cabbage and red peppers. The overpowering flavour of the food refreshed him, gave him a sense of normality; it did not evoke memories of any personal life.

While he was drinking more coffee after the meal, he saw the girl framed in the square of light at the doorway. He raised his hand, and she joined him.

'Were you followed?'

'I don't think so. I tried to be clever — ' There was a pleasure in conspiracy about Alevtina, and a deeper concern for him in her green eyes. She was concerned for him, wanted to help him — and something was pleased with his isolation and helplessness. 'At least no one saw me removing this, sir.'

Vorontsyev nodded, and pushed his coffee cup aside. Then he took the file from its envelope and opened it. He leafed through the entries, uncertain now that he had it what use it would be. Then he looked up, putting it back in the envelope.

'Now I have to go.' He placed a ten-rouble note on the table.

'Sir — can I help?' Vorontsyev saw the eager, brave look in the girl's eyes, and shook his head. He was refreshed by her concern, but wanted no more of it at that moment.

'No, Alevtina. You may be in trouble already. I have to find my father. If anyone questions you, say I tricked you into this — ' The girl shook her head.

'Don't worry about me, sir.'

Vorontsyev took his overcoat from a chair, put it on. Then scarf and gloves.

'Leave first, will you? Just in case.'

'Sir. And good luck, whatever that means.'

'Thanks, Alevtina. Don't worry about me — ' He motioned the girl towards the door. She stared at him, as if to remember, then went out, turned to the left, and was out of sight. Vorontsyev gave her a few moments, then turned up his collar because the cafe was more crowded now with office workers and shoppers, and he could not be certain of the faces that bent over food or were masked behind newspapers and clouds of cigarette smoke.

He stood in the doorway of the cafe, watching the street, and the few parked cars, and the turning into Sverdlov Square. Then be headed for the nearest Metro station.

From where he stood, sipping coffee he had poured from a flask into the plastic beaker that was its screw- top, Mihail Pyotravich Gorochenko could see, at the other end of Red Square, the hideous bulk of St Basil's Cathedral. A slight shift in his stance at the tiny, dirt-coated window and he was able to see the towers and pinnacles of the Kremlin. Should he care to, to alleviate the tense, wearing boredom that must at some time assail him, he could recite the names of each.tower. For the moment, he stared over the high walls, seeing some distant parts of the gardens. The bare trees, the ordered borders of now bare earth, the patches of thawing snow on the grass, the straight, rulered walks.

What was it Ivan the Terrible had done to the architects of St Basil's he wondered as he shifted his gaze. Bunded them so they couldn't build another? Something of the sort.

He sipped noisily, the coffee wetting, the upper lip and the thick moustache. Far below him, the lunchtime crowds huddled along the square, the trolleys sparked and flashed, and shoppers hurried in and out of GUM. The serpentine queue outside the Lenin Mausoleum, all of whom appeared to be dressed in black, or dark-brown, waited patiently for admission.

A few people sat on the benches in that corner of the Alexandrovski Gardens that he could see from his high window.

The waiting was, he admitted, taking its toll. His eyes wandered over Red Square endlessly, like those of a drunken man lying on his back, not daring to focus for too long in case the room began to spin. Yes, like that. As if he could not look at any one thing out there for too long, in case his moral surroundings began to lurch sideways. He could not even look over the walls of the Kremlin for very long — he could not see Khamovkhin's office from where he stood — despite the hatred that it caused in his breast, hot, fiery like a cardiac pain.

Yet he had to go on looking out over the square, down at the tiny figures bustling — seeming to be blown by the wind that whistled at the grimy window. If he did not, then the megalomania assailed him — that or the fury of rage at still waiting, at the distant threat of Dzerzhinsky Street and his adopted son.

It was strange, he thought, that megalomania, a word in history books or psychologists' reports, was palpable like this. A mounting feeling like phlegm in the back of the throat, or extra air filling the lungs so that the chest strained out. A lightness in the loins. No mirrors, but the eyes seeing from just behind the head, shaping the figure consciously from that angle. He did not enjoy the feeling. In fact, he was ashamed of it, and feared it. If anything, he wished for the purer megalomania that might have been more readily available to a religious man. He was not. His purity of motive had to do with ideology, with politics — and they were not visionary like a religious faith, however desperately he had dung to them over the years.

But the megalomania — the strange sensations, the brimming — no, swelling of the brain in its case of bone — did not come when he looked down at the tiny, insignificant people, or even at St Basil's, or the Kremlin. It came when he did not look at them. When all he had was the perspective of the small, bare dusty room full of unopened crates and a small table on which resided a dust-free telephone whose wire ran across the bare boards to the wall-socket that had been fined for him — when that was his only perspective, then it was no bigger than himself. He inflated, weirdly, to fill the room, like a balloon.

The people, the buildings, in the street, gave him scale, perspective. And he had to have scale — otherwise he had no sense of anything outside himself, nothing but ambition, greed, love of cold power.

He had never thought himself like that, having those qualities. Only in a little way. He had tried, and succeeded, to think of himself as a servant, a conscience-keeper, an acolyte of his own ideology.

Was that a more dangerous megalomania, masked in humility? That would be a religious megalomania, perhaps? Sainthood, willed and purposed. Was that what he was?

He shuddered, and concentrated his gaze downwards, watching one old — man or woman? He couldn't tell from that angle, in those swaddling lumps of clothing. One old being, walking slowly and with difficulty, the wind plucking at coat-tails. He tried, very hard, to say — for you. For you. It did not work.

He looked, instead, at the serpent before the gates of bronze — he smiled at the vivid rhetoric. The queue of the faithful waiting to look on the mummified remains of V. I. Lenin in their glass box; too luridly lit, he had always considered. There were hundreds of them, even in winter. Nearly sixty years on.

For you, he said to himself. For you. There were more of them, a bulk of people, representative.

For you.

It seemed to ease the constriction in his chest, to free his breathing. He inhaled the dusty, prickling air and almost sneezed. He swallowed the last of his coffee, and looked over his shoulder at the telephone. There was a renewal of purpose. The destructive sense of his own motives had gone like a bout of nausea. But he felt stronger