Snow Falcon

'Do you know where he is?'

She was silent. She paced the worn carpet, circling the furniture, as if she had ambushed the room and its occupant. He saw the power of the mind and will in the frame, and sensed the kind of magnetism such a complementary nature must have had for Gorochenko. Then she looked at him, emphasising her words with little stabs of the cardboard tube.

'I have not seen Mihail Pyotravich for almost two years.' His stomach seemed heavy and his breath constricted. He knew she was telling the truth.

'What has happened to him?'

'In what way?' Interrogative, sharp.

'He — he's organised a coup!' Her eyes sharpened, gleamed with some inner knowledge. 'He's on the point of success or failure. I have to find him before — before…' Weakly: 'Before they do.'

'But will they find him?' She was amused now, and allied with Gorochenko. He wondered how much she had been his mentor.

'Yes, they will!'

'I wonder.'

He saw the mind shut like a handbag, almost heard the metallic dick of the clasp. She had retreated from him again. He was a stupid policeman and his quarry was Gorochenko. The muddle of his own motives, no doubt plain to her, did not justify answers. She would not help him.

'Don't you see,' he said. 'I have to stop.him. He has to be stopped.'

'Why?' The challenge was almost sexual, and she might have been a young woman; but even as he looked at her she became ancient and decayed, and delighting merely in the strength of impotence. Someone she knew, her age and experience — not put out to grass as she had been. Affecting things. Breaking things.

'Because it will not work any more. Everyone who has helped him has been put aside. There's only him.'

'No. You would not be worried if he was alone.'

He admitted the truth by dropping his eyes.

'Yes.' He felt stupid and childish now. And futile.

'Then he will do it!' she whispered.

'You — you persuaded him!' he cried.

She looked at him with contempt, moving a step closer to his chair, her presence more powerful now. Sitting, she loomed over him in the perspective he had anticipated when she opened the door.

'I did nothing, you stupid adolescent. Once I quarrelled with him — quarrelled all the time because he seemed to accept Stalin and Beria and the NKVD and all the filth that went with it!' Her eyes gleamed fiercely. He saw a dab of spittle at one corner of the mouth. The dentures moved in an approximation of speech, but seemed not to diminish the force of her words.

'But he did not accept!' She clasped her hands to her heavy bosom like a young girl. 'All the time — all the time…' She seemed unable to make her feelings coherent.

'But you — you fell from favour with Stalin. He didn't. He was loyal to Stalin, until his death. Then to Kruschev, and to Brezhnev.' He couldn't understand anything, he decided. He was in the KGB — Mihail Pyotravich had made sure of that, even getting him transferred to SID. Now this old woman was talking as if all the time Gorochenko was a traitor to the Soviet Union, had always been.

'All the time it was a game,' she said. 'It must have been a game to him! Waiting his chance.' Then, with regret, she added: 'I had little or nothing to do with it — ' Finally, shame. 'I accused him of toadying to save his skin. Long ago I did that. I didn't understand him, I suppose.'

She sat down, and seemed to resolve everything into silence, as if her mind was dying away like her words. It was as if she had indulged in some physical exercise belonging to her youth, and it had tired her to the extent that now she felt very old. She had relived some of her political life, some of the intellectual passion with which she had loved Gorochenko, and now it had passed, and she was spent.

'Tell me where he is?'

Vorontsyev asked quietly. When she looked up at him, her eyes were vague. She had retreated almost as if he had interrogated her. She shook her head like a stubborn child. He did not know whether she was refusing, or admitting ignorance. Suddenly, he was tired of this cat-and-mouse game with an untidy old woman. He was bone- weary, at the end of his patience.

'Tell me where he is!' he ordered, and her eyes snapped shut, then opened attentively. A voice had spoken from thirty years before — the voice of command and terror.

'I don't know where he is.' Her voice almost whined as it pleaded with him.

'But you can guess — you know him better than I do. Where would he go? To whom would he turn? Where would he hide?' She mistrusted him again. 'I have to help him — I have to be with him — don't you understand that?' Now, she was confused by the smeared emotions, the apparent contradictions, as if he had taken on a multiple personality. 'I want to be with him, Anna. I'm his son,' He saw intolerable pressure in her eyes. She was lonely, she was guilty towards Gorochenko, wanted to do something for him, make some gesture of atonement for the years in which she had despised him.

'He wants to change the history of Russia — just as Lenin did,' she said, concentrating.

'Is that a clue to help me?'

he asked, forcing himself to smile, stifling impatience. He had broken through, had only to sustain the artificiality — and ignore the cold part of his head that mocked his anxiety to learn the ignorant guess of a half- senile old woman who lived alone. 'Give me another due, Anna?' She had adopted that almost foetal position of consciousness that prisoners under interrogation often discovered and utilised. A child knows nothing. The interrogators call it 'Hide-and-Seek'. He would have to continue with the game.

'He would want to watch it — whatever is going to happen, he would want to watch it.' She was staring at the carpet just in front of her feet as she spoke. Of course! So bloody obvious! She did know Gorochenko better than he did.

Red — Square — his mind spelt out carefully.

'You think so?

'Oh, yes.'

A room with a view of Red Square. Vorontsyev closed his eyes, tried to be a rooftop camera, and to sense the best perch a camera might adopt. Where best — ? Then he had it.

The History Museum.

He was in the History Museum! 'To change the history of Russia,' the old woman murmured again. Vorontsyev trembled with understanding. Gorochenko would have chosen his vantage-point cleverly, and with fitting, appropriate irony. A room at the top of the History Museum, watching Valenkov's tanks make history.

He was about to pat her hand with his own, as if to wake her from some light hypnotic trance, about to speak, when the doorbell damaged, broke the silence. Anna Dostoyevna's eyes went bright with immediacy, then her face collapsed into a look fossilised from thirty years ago. Terror. She glanced at him, then at the door of the lounge, then back to him, her eyes wide with guilt and fear.

'It is them,' he said, dropping the words like pebbles into the distressed water of her awareness. 'Hide me. Quickly!'

Seventeen: Young and Old

The doorbell rang again, longer this time.

'Where can I hide?' he asked.

'What?

'Hide!'