Snow Falcon

now, not weaker.

One telephone call. He could do it with one telephone call, at six the next morning. Valenkov, who had been a close friend of Kyril Vorontsyev — and who had been with him, as a junior officer, from Stalingrad to the outskirts of Berlin — he would answer the telephone, and receive the command, and in his turn issue the commands to the Moscow Garrison…

One telephone call and — he looked across the Kremlin walls — he would start again. It would start again. The new beginning.

He closed his eyes in satisfaction, and was alarmed when an image jumped at him out of the red-spotted darkness behind his lids. Of Alexei Vorontsyev, as a child, holding his hand. The boy had bright red plastic boots, and was kicking up gouts of snow, and laughing.

He shook his head to dear it, and opened his eyes. The image retreated obediently.

Where was he? Where was Alexei now?

The apartment was in a block of Vosstaniya flats on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt, near the Ukraina Hotel, an elaborate wedding-cake, and the Comecon building a modern grey slab, hard-edged against the pale blue of the sky. The apartments had been built during the time of Stalin, when Anna Dostoyevna had been Minister of Culture and had had much to do with the design of the new city centre. She had chosen to live in one of the apartments in the Vosstaniya because her ministry had been connected with their design. When she had been allowed to resign quietly from the Politburo after losing Stalin's favour, she had remained in the apartment.

Vorontsyev remembered her from his childhood — a big, powerful woman with a deep voice, who frightened him. And he disliked her, too, because she seemed to occupy a place in Mihail Pyotravich's private world that should have belonged to his adoptive mother. He sensed, rather than knew, that Anna Dostoyevna was not Gorochenko's mistress in the conventional sense. Rather, she possessed an ideological bond with him, shared an intellectual community from which Goro chenko's wife was excluded.

Vorontsyev had found her name in the files, and remembered the intellectual intimacy that had once bound the two of them. And he had felt he might have found the answer.

He had digested the information in the files, as well as he could, in the washroom at the Komsomolskaia Metro Station, locked in a chilly cubicle, hearing the footsteps across the chequered riles outside, the whistling, the splashing of water.

When he had reduced the file to a list of possibilities, he had torn each sheet into shreds, then the file itself into scraps of blue card, and flushed them away. It had been a setting free of Gorochenko rather than a dismissal.

He had travelled on the Metro all afternoon, moving from station to station, making only one, or at most two, calls from any one place. Slowly, he had crossed through all the names on the list, all the places Gorochenko might be, until he had come to the apartment on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

Because it was the last name, and he was dog-tired now, and crazed with futility, he was certain that Gorochenko would be there; yet knowing that he would not be with anyone whose name was in the file under 'Known Associates'. Yet, caught as he now was in the pattern of this action, from file to contacts to the elimination of possibilities — he was unable to envisage other possibilities, other patterns.

He did not even know, he realised, what Gorochenko was any more. He was a collection of facts and observations that led nowhere. His Surveillance Log was impeccable — he simply could not be, without additional information, the man Kutuzov. Further back, in the thirties and forties, he was a natural survivor, along with Molotov and Gromyko, in a Politburo periodically purged and decimated by Stalin's psychotic suspicions. When had he changed, when achieved another, and radical, view of the Revolution?

Vorontsyev had abandoned the attempt to understand Gorochenko.

He pressed the doorbell of the apartment. Would she explain his father to him? Would she know where he was?

Vorontsyev realised that the former question had become more pressing — that the afternoon had left him barren of investigatory technique or desire. He only wanted to understand.

He was dangerously in sympathy with Gorochenko now, he perceived; it might prevent him ever finding the man.

She was shrunken, but perhaps he had expected the child's perspective, to have to look up into the strong face. She was perhaps five feet ten, dressed in a sweater and cardigan and a drab start of thick wool. Her stockings were thick and dark, and her shoes stout. She looked like a schoolteacher. Her eyes behind the wire-framed spectacles were sharp with a glistening suspicion.

He showed her the ID card, and she involuntarily backed half a step, and her hand gripped the edge of the door so that the ringers whitened. He said, 'Comrade Dostoyevna — might I speak with you?' She was suspicious of the careful neutrality of tone, the implication that she possessed choice.

'What is it, Comrade Major?' An old inflection, one she must have used many times during the years when Stalin let her live on in anonymity. 'What do you want?'

Involuntarily, as if without will, she had opened the door a little more. He stepped forward, and she seemed to retreat silently from the door, spectrally backing towards the lounge. He closed the door behind him, looking at her all the while as at an old film. Cheka, NKVD, MVD, KGB — they were all the same, her posture informed him.

The lounge was sparse yet comfortable. A great many books, one or two blunt, square pieces of statuary and furniture that was old but which had been carefully repaired and recovered. She had never married, he knew. On one low table near the sagging sofa there was a big metal ashtray such as might have come from a bar or restaurant, full of stubs and ash. And one smoking cigarette she picked up with a quick, swooping gesture as if he might have appropriated it.

'What is it?' she said, standing in front of a packed bookcase of dog-eared Russian paperbacks. It lent her solidity, and he suspected that she knew it. Her mind had always been for midable; the books were an assurance of her personality and her past. She was nervous, but seemed calmed to some degree by his quiescence.

'May I sit down?3 She gestured to an armchair recently recovered in a floral pattern of browns and golds. A threadbare patch of carpet seemed to have slid out from beneath it. He said, 'I want to talk to you about — my father…' It was the only way to inject a sincerity, a lack of officialdom which would cause her to close like a shell, into the room. 'Not Kyril — Mihail Pyotravich.'

'What — is the matter with him V It was a selfish question, he saw. Her hands brushed her body, as if admitting its age, as if only illness and infirmity could involve someone she had known a long time ago.

'He is not ill,' he said. She seemed to resent it, and puffed at her cigarette. He noticed that the cardboard tube of the cigarette had been flattened by the pressure of anxiety. 'No — I have to find him, Anna Ilyevna.' He recalled patronymic from the files. 'I have to find him very urgently.'

'To do with your job? You're SID.' Suddenly, the idea seemed to seize her. 'Your own father? 'Please understand,' he began, realising he was being rushed, was losing control of the conversation. 'It is not official. Yes, they are looking for him. I — want to help him.' He hated the cliches. She was evidently suspicious now.

'Help?' She was younger, an old habitual scorn came back to her face and voice.

'Yes!' he blurted out, feeling himself younger also — too young. He had, suddenly, to commit himself. 'Look, I don't know how often you see him, or speak with him, but he — he's into something very dangerous. And they know he is, and they want him very badly! I have to get to him before they do!' There was a plaintive note in his voice, and he was sure his habitual identification with Gorochenko, used with emphasis in that way, had damaged his argument. It would appear to her, little other than a transparent deceit.

She looked at his face, then lifted her stretched, dry skin in a look of scorn. She puffed at the cigarette again, and he noticed that now it was held delicately in her fingers.

'He was always fond of you,' she said, staring at the ceiling. Then the face seemed to subside into its stiff, wrinkled lines again, and the eyes were dark points.

'And I of him!' he said. 'You must know that if you know anything.'

'Perhaps.'

He realised she had taken control of the situation; he thought she must believe him to some degree, otherwise she would not have had the temerity to seize the initiative.