ADAM HALL: The Scorpion Signal

`Was he here in this actual room?'

`Yes,' said Gorsky. 'He was comfortable.' Gorsky was responsible for the safe-house, not for people who got arrested in the street.

`Telephone?' I said.

`You must not use the one in the building. I cannot send messages, either. You must use the telephone box in the street, at the first corner. The light in it doesn't work, but if you need it, screw the bulb in tighter.' He drew deeply on the black tobacco. 'Will you have visitors?'

'No.'

`That is better. I won't write your name on the residence record, of course. We shall agree, if it is ever necessary, that I forgot.' He gave a faint smile. 'Though it would be too late for excuses, by then. Tell me,' he said as he moved to the door, 'if there is anything you need. There is an alleyway, quite narrow, not far from the building; you go past the telephone box and turn right, and you will see it. It is useful.'

When he'd gone I looked round the room again, at the armchair with the stuffing out and the cracked mirror askew over the handbasin and the pile of dog-eared magazines on the floor by the window. Schrenk had been here, then, before they'd arrested him. I was that close. And that far.

I had the new cover by heart in thirty minutes: Kapista Mikhail Kirov, Moscow representative for the state factory complex in the Ukraine, plastics and allied products. Current Moscow visa for three months, schedule of meetings at the Ministry of Labour; references, employment card, food and lodging vouchers, transport allowance rates per day; members of family and next-of-kin; Party membership card, Izmajlovo chapter.

There were voices and I listened. They were a man's and a woman's, nearing along the corridor. A door opened and closed and the voices went on, muffled now. I would have to get to know the voices here, so that one day if strangers came I'd be warned. I trusted Gorsky, but he was human and therefore fallible. A safe-house is a safe-house until it's blown.

There was a dossier on Helmut Schrenk, with photographs and a description; I didn't think he'd look much like that now. He was described in his cover as a demolition worker, which was typically close to reality: he'd been trained at Norfolk in explosives. It said that four months ago when he'd been doing a low-key penetration job in Moscow he'd applied for a post as agent-in-place. Why had he done that? I went over the material again: in the last three years he'd completed seven successful missions, apart from his 'liaison work in the north' — Leningrad. At the age of thirty-five he had a lot of steam left and he wasn't the type to sit at a desk and play about with microdots: there was a tremendous amount of latent aggression in the man and he used his executive work as a safety-valve; I'd seen him in action.

I'd have to ask Bracken. It was the second thing that didn't fit Schrenk's character; the first had been Dr Steinberg's reference to his bearing a grudge against his interrogators in Lubyanka.

I laid the destruct material on top of the charcoal until it caught fire and then held it at the mouth of the galvanized chimney so that all the smoke would go out. Then I put the East German cover and car papers inside the third magazine from the bottom of the left-hand pile and went down to talk to Gorsky again. It was then he told me about Natalya.

'She's over there.'

The cafe was crowded.

They were mostly young people, perched along the benches with newspapers opened on the tables among the dark bread and bowls of soup — Komsomolskaya Pravda, Sovetsky Sport, Literturnaya Gazeta. At one table they were arguing loudly, and passing separate sheets from their newspapers for the others to read. They were talking about the Borodinski trial. I looked across the room.

'Which one?'

'With the fair hair, next to the man with the beard.'

I pushed my way between the tables; some of the men looked up at me, noting my clothes and looking away again. I assumed they'd seen the man sitting alone near the doors and talking to no one. They must have.

'Natalya?'

She looked up at me through the tobacco smoke. So did the bearded man.

'Which Natalya?' he asked me, straightening. 'Natalya Fyodorova.'

She went on staring at me without answering, her ice-blue eyes showing nothing at all.

'Who are you?' the bearded man asked me. I went on watching the girl. The man said: 'She doesn't want to talk to you.'

I leaned over the table and spoke close to the girl, on the other side from the man. 'I'm a friend of Helmut's.'

Her hands were on the table in front of her, and I saw them move slightly, coming together. As I straightened up she looked at the man. I thought she was wondering if he'd heard what I'd said.

'She doesn't want to talk to you,' he told me. 'Are you deaf or something?' He pushed his bowl of soup farther away from him, as if to give himself room.

The girl looked up at me. 'Who are you?' Her eyes were still cool, but she was watchful now, involved.

'A friend of his. I'm trying to find him.'

The sound level around me went down suddenly as some of the people stopped talking. I looked into the mirror above the brass samovar and saw two men coming in. They didn't greet anyone, but took up a position on the far side of the room, talking to each other but looking around them. In a minute the sound level went up again, but it wasn't as loud as before.

I looked down from the mirror.

'Whose friend?' the bearded man asked me. He was leaning back, ready to get up if he had to. The girl was quite pretty, and I understood his reactions. I wondered if she'd noticed that he hadn't heard the first thing I'd said to her. It could be important.

'The trial's fixed,' said a young Jew at the same table. 'They're all fixed, we know that. All of them!'

'Shhhh!' a girl said, gripping his arm.

'To hell with them,' he said loudly, and looked across at the two men who'd just come in. The noise level dipped again and recovered. A woman laughed about something, to show that she didn't care. In the mirror I saw the two men watching her.

Natalya stood up suddenly, taking her sealskin hat from the table, knocking against a bowl of soup; the man caught it in time. 'I remember him now,' she told him, 'he's in my office. This is work.' She came round the table, shaking her hair back and putting her fur hat on, glancing into the mirror through the haze of smoke.

'This isn't the time to work!' the man said, and got to his feet.

'Stay here, Ivan. I'm coming back. And get me some more solyanka.' As we moved away she asked me, 'What's your name?'

'We'll talk outside.' The two security men weren't watching us specifically but I didn't want to give them time to take an interest; in this city the faceless live longest.

The militia men were still at the junction of the two streets when we went outside, stamping their feet in the cold; their breath clouded in front of them as they turned to watch us leaving the cafe. A black Volga was parked halfway along the block with its lights out. It hadn't been there before.

The girl asked my name again but I said, 'It wouldn't mean anything to you.' She wanted to stop, but I kept going and she had to come with me; men on surveillance get bored and they'll question anyone in sight. We turned the corner and kept on walking; this street was clean and the Pobeda was parked in shadow between two of the lamps.

'How did you find me?' She kept swinging her head to look at me, frightened because I knew her and she didn't know me. I took her arm so that she'd keep walking; the two militia men would be watching us, simply because we were something that moved in a static environment.

'Gorsky told me where to look.'

'I don't know any Gorsky.' She tried to hold back and I tightened her arm in mine.