'Am I going to have the same trouble getting out of here?'
'No, sir,' said the gate man. 'I'll make sure about that You'll never have trouble getting
He smiled and brushed his moustache with his hand. I didn't try to cap it.
There was not one library but many, like strata of ancient Troy. Deepest were foxy leather spines and tattered jackets of the original Trust donations, and then box-files and austerity bindings of the war years, and then, in layers above that, the complete Official Histories of both world wars. Only the new metal shelving held the latest additions, and much of that was stored as microfilm, and could be read only in the tiny cubicles from which came a steady clatter and the smell of warm projector bulbs.
I started with the Northern Fleet but I would have found him even had I selected all the rear-admirals, and worked my way through them alphabetically. None of the microfilm up-datings were of much interest but there were new pictures. This was the man who wanted to be me.
Remoziva, Vanya Mikhail (1924-) Kontr-Admiral,
Commander: Anti-Submarine Warfare Command,
Northern Fleet, Murmansk.
The Remoziva family provided a fine example of revolutionary zeal His father was a metal worker from Orel, his mother a peasant from Kharkov who'd moved farther east when the Germans occupied vast areas of Russia from the Bolsheviks, by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Of their family of seven children, two daughters and three sons survived. And what children they were; not only a rear-admiral, but Piotr, a professor of zoology; Evgeni, a sociologist; Lisaveta, a political analyst; and Katerina, the second daughter, who had been an assistant to Madame Furtseva, the first woman to reach the Presidium of the Central Committee. The Remoziva family sounded like the Ferdy Foxwells of the worker's Soviets.
The compiler had done a thorough jot — even if most: of his data were cross-referenced to Central Registry — and he had included the sociologist's order of Alexander Nevsky, the three amputated fingers of the zoologist — yes, I wondered that, too — and the kidney trouble that was likely to cost the Rear-Admiral his promotion to the First Deputy's office.
I went through the sheet on which was listed Remoziva's career. He owed much to Admiral Rickover, U.S. Navy, for the American decision to build nuclear submarines — armed with Polaris missiles — was the best thing that could have happened to Remoziva. It was a nuclear rags to riches story. When the keel of the
I returned the material, and picked up the analysis that Schlegel wanted. I checked out past the smiling men in the glass box, and took the papers back to the Centre. I dumped them into the reception guard and then strolled through to Saddler's Walk to have a quiet cup of coffee.
There, a Georgian facade had been newly adorned with red and black stripes, and its name, 'The Anarchist', painted in gold letters. It was another of those art, coffee and non-chemical coleslaw hang-outs that sprout, bloom and die. Or worse, survive: a crippled commercial travesty of the original dream.
Che and Elvis shared the walls. The coffee cups were folk-art and the potato salad cut with loving care. It was a bright dry day, the: streets were filled with woolly-hatted Australians, and delicate men with nervous dogs. Some of them were sitting around here drinking coffee. Behind the counter there was a girl anarchist. She had heavy-rimmed spectacles and a pony-tail tight enough to make her squint.
'This is our first week,' she said. There is a nut cutlet free for everyone.'
'The coffee will do.'
'There is no charge for the nut cutlet. It's a way of getting customers to see how delicious a vegetarian diet can be.' She picked up a slice of the pale grey mixture, using plastic tongs like an obstetrician. 'I'll put it on the tray — I'm sure you'll like it.' She poured out the coffee.
'With milk-if that's allowed.'
'Sugar is on the table,' she said. 'Natural brown sugar — it's better for you.'
I sipped the coffee. From my table near the window I watched two parking wardens clobber a delivery van and a Renault with French plates. It made me feel much better. I brought out my notebook and wrote down that biographical note on the Rear-Admiral. And then I listed all the things that puzzled me about the changes to my old flat. I drew an outline picture of Rear-Admiral Remoziva. Then I drew a plan of the old flat and included the secret ante-room with the medical machinery. When I was a kid I'd wanted to be an artist. Sometimes I thought Ferdy Foxwell only tolerated me was because I could pronounce Pollaiuolo, and tell a Giotto from a Francesca. Perhaps I was more than a little envious of the half-baked painters and hairy bohemians that were always in evidence up here in Hampstead. I wondered if I might have been one of them under different circumstances. It was while I was doodling, and thinking about nothing of any consequence, that some subconscious segment of my brain was dealing with the mix-up at the entrance to the Evaluation Block that morning.
I put down my pen and sipped the coffee. I sniffed it. Perhaps it was acorns. Behind the soy sauce was propped a pamphlet advertising 'Six lectures in modern Marxism'. I turned it over, on the back someone had pencilled, 'Don't complain about the coffee, you might be old and weak yourself some day.'
Suppose that the two gate men had not been so far wrong. Suppose that I had been in the Evaluation Block once already that morning. Ridiculous, but I pursued the notion. Suppose I had been drugged or hypnotized. I decided to discount both those possibilities for the time being. Suppose my exact double had been there. I rejected that idea too because the men on the door would have remembered: or would they? The card. Those gate men seldom bothered to look at faces. They checked the card numbers against the rack and against the time-book. It wasn't my
Before I got to the door another thought occurred to me. I sat down at the table and took out my wallet. I removed the security card from its plastic cover and looked at it closely. It was exactly the right shape, size and springiness for sliding up the door catch of my locker. I'd used it to force the lock dozens of times. But this' card had never been used for that purpose. Its edges were sharp, white and pristine. This wasn't the security card I'd been given, someone else had that.
That disturbing conclusion got me nowhere. It just made me lonely. My world wasn't peopled by charming wise and influential elders as Ferdy's world was. My friends all had real worries: like who can you get to service a new Mercedes properly, should the au pair have colour TV, and is Greece warmer than Yugoslavia in July. Yeah, well maybe it was.
I looked at my watch. This was Thursday and I'd promised to take Marjorie to lunch and be lectured about my responsibilities.
I got to my feet and went to the counter. 'Ten pence,' she said.
I paid.
'I said you'd eat the nut cutlet,' she said. She pushed her spectacles up on her forehead to see the cash register better. Damn, I'd eaten the wretched thing without even tasting it.
'You didn't like the coffee?' she asked.
'Is this anarchist's coffee?' I asked the girl.
'Grounds enough for arrest,' she said. I suppose someone had said the same thing before. Or maybe they thought of the joke and then built the coffee shop around it.
She passed me the change. Alongside the cash register there were half a dozen collection boxes. Oxfam, World-Wildlife and Shelter. One of the tins had a hand-written label with a Polaroid photo fixed alongside it. 'Kidney Machine Fund. Give generously for Hampstead Sick and Elderly.' I picked up the tin and looked closely at the photo of a kidney machine.
That's my pet charity,' said the girl. 'Our target is four machines by Christmas. Going all the way to the hospital every week or so is too much for some of the old ones. They can have those machines in their own
