The coarse, blunt language, the simple demands from the time and place, eased aside the looming shadows at the back of his mind. He straightened up, walking slowly so that his gait might have a little normality, he pushed through the revolving doors, seeing a man's wizened, clever face moving past him on the other side, nodding in greeting. Vorontsyev did not know him. It was a gesture without suspicion. He stepped away from the doors, heading swiftly through the turnstile, hardly pausing to pick up his twenty-five kopeck ticket. The door of the male lavatory was near the entrance to the museum, he remembered.
At the door of the lavatory, he turned his head. The chequered pattern of the floor seemed unstained, but if he looked carefully he could see one or two faint smears, perhaps a spot or two. Even as he looked, he saw the shoe of an attendant smear one spot out of recognition, and nodded in satisfaction. He dosed the door of the washroom behind him, then locked himself in one of the three cubicles. He slumped wearily on the seat, his strength seemingly drained entirely.
The thought kept hammering in his head like a migraine. He had killed Alevtina — killed her. He hardly envisaged the flung corpse, arms wide, or felt the initial pain in his leg. Merely the moral position, a whirl of abstracts in his mind. Killed Alevtina, a member of my team.
He was dizzy, too, with the lost blood. Carefully, he bent over, his awareness spinning like a drunk's, and rolled up the sodden trouser leg. The bullet from the Makarov had passed through the flesh and muscle of the calf, a neat hole at one side, a darker, cratered wound on the other. His sock was soaked with blood, and he decided not to remove his shoe.
Clumsily, he fished the leather-bound flask of vodka from his hip pocket, and wetted his handkerchief with the spirit. Then he washed around the area of the wound, which seemed to have eased its bleeding since he had begun to rest it. Then he welted the handkerchief until it was soaked, and dabbed it against the wound.
He cried out once, then clenched his teeth in quivering weakness to still the further cries the pain prompted. Then he pulled his shirt from his waistband, and tore off a strip of it. This he knotted over the wound, waiting without breathing to see if the material became dyed. A spot bloomed, but did not spread far. He leaned back against the cistern, grateful, his trouser leg still rolled above his knee, his fur hat askew on his head.
Almost at once, inattentive to the world beyond the cubicle as he was, the mental landscape asserted itself. The brief future — where was Gorochenko? Had he made a mistake in coming? If he was locked in, and the old man wasn't there, hadn't he wasted the last night before the coup? Where would he hide until the museum closed?
And the past — the dead sprawled overcoat on the frosty path near the flats; the dead Alevtina with her face twisted into the dust coating the tiles of the Revolution Square Metro station. The man, whose face he barely knew, did not figure in the flash of images.
And his own death; inescapable, boiling certitude of ideas, raging as soon as he touched on them, an opened box of his world's ills. For he was committed now, irrevocably. Not in the eyes of others, of the organisation or the state he would be judged to have betrayed, but in his own eyes. The death of Alevtina had revoked all extenuation in his own severe judgement.
He had to be strong — he looked at the gloved hands before his face, and he could see them quivering — if he was to finish it now. Nothing definite formed in his mind concerning the final encounter, but he believed that there had to be one. He needed safe darkness for a while. He could not let the whirl of imagery, its mad dance, control him.
He longed for unconsciousness as he might have longed for sleep before a difficult task.
He stood on the leg, rolling down the damp trouser leg, testing his weight. Pain shot through his thigh and side. He sagged against the wall of the cubicle, then unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out. He limped to the single washbasin, and cleaned his hands.
As he left the toilet, idling his way as unsuspiciously as he could towards the stairs to the level below ground, and the boiler-room where he would hide, he wondered how large the night-duty team would be. Two or three, perhaps. He did not know whether or not they were armed. He thought not. But they would have an alarm system rigged direct to the nearest police station, perhaps even to the Centre in nearby Dzerzhinsky Street.
But he would need a plan of the building, or a guide.
He eased himself down the steps, treading softly and nursing the aching leg. He hoped the boilerman had gone off duty. He did not want to kill him.
He noticed a returning calm, as if his severely limited view of circumstances and needs forced other considerations aside. He was glad of that.
Physical acts. Through a door marked 'Private', then along a dusty corridor roofed and walled, it seemed, with lagged pipes. A hollow but muffled click of footsteps, tangible irregularity of movement. He limped on, quicker. Take the gun from the pocket, hold it in both hands for a moment of steadying, left hand clutched round the stub of barrel, right hand on the moulded butt. Then left hand to turn the doorknob. Unlocked He pushed open the heavy door, and the boiler-room was in darkness. He flicked on the light, glanced swiftly round the low-roofed, dusty room with its landscape of huge pipes and the squat old boilers. He switched off the light.
He stepped fully into the room and dosed the door behind him. He did not think the night staff would lock the boiler-room, rather use it for warming themselves, since it was likely that the regulations disallowed the whole building to be heated overnight.
He tried to picture the room. A faint radiance from windows high up near the ceiling aided him. He limped cautiously across the open space he had registered, turned left, left again. His hand reaching forward all the time, then connecting with the rough surface of a wooden crate. A stack of them, against the wall beneath the small high windows. Careful not to bang against them with his left leg, he eased himself behind them, and lowered himself, like an invalid might do into a bath, to the dusty floor. The concrete was warm, the wall against his back also warm.
He settled himself, the Stechkin on the ground immediately by his hand. The luminous dial of his watch indicated five fifty-five. An hour, or a little more.
But he would have to find a plan. The History Museum contained forty-seven halls and rooms and who knew how many store-rooms, cellars repositories. Gorochenko could be anywhere. The dry, dusty heat insisted that he would be found Vorontsyev found his head nodding forward, as he was relaxed by the safety of his hiding place, eased by its silent warmth. A gurgle of pipes, the muted roar of the boilers, but no noises.
He knew he would find Gorochenko. He would find him. Find him.
His tiredness was too imperative. There was no real need for him to be awake before say eight or nine at the earliest. The KGB would not make a thorough search, his ruddled senses reasoned. And he was tired — drained.
He slept.
Kenneth Aubrey had decided on a Folley of genial attentive-ness to detail as a method of auto-suggestion. He had tired of conversation with Khamovkhin, even of badinage or recollection with Buckholz. Bored with the world of diplomacy, he wished to re-create a sense of the secret world, his own covert life. Thus, armed with the files and reports of the duty-team drafted to Lahtilinna, previously in the care of Anders, he retired to his room, took off his jacket — the central-heating was more than adequate — poured himself a large whisky, and began to read.
Slowly his mind seemed to unstick — perhaps a more appropriate image, he thought, might have been of an oil-calmed sea through which now thrust the spars and wreckage of his secret life. He did not feel quite so old, hardly felt useless at all — and enjoyed the jagged, broken bits of reality jostling on the calm waters of diplomacy. After all, he was not employed by his masters to baby-sit the Soviet leader while everyone waited on the KGB, nor form a human wall through which no bullet might reach Khamovkhin. Since the crisis seemed to have passed, he had felt diminished by his occupation, just as he had felt enlarged in importance perhaps five or six days before. But this, this — his hand waved over the apparently untidy heap of papers as if to indicate something to an audience — was what still, apparently, satisfied him most, and most consistently.
There, he thought, turning back a page. What a scratchy account! A boat had been discovered four miles up the lake from the castle. Some attempt, it seemed, had been made to hide it. Aubrey picked up the form, as if checking for some watermark of authenticity. It was a Duty Report Form DRF/22B, which he had issued to Anders for the purpose of collating all duty-team reports. This one was more than a day old — part of an initial wide-sweep search for the missing Ozeroff. At the bottom of the report, the column for 'Diagnosis' and that for 'Prognosis' both remained blank. Aubrey clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The boat was still there — it had been disabled by the report-maker, and left. Obviously not important because it was still there.
Aubrey continued reading. It was two hours before he came across another report on the boat, then
