The man chuckled, and glanced round the hall. The luggage was coming through. ‘Bar’s closed,’ he said. ‘All the children go to bed. Talk about the exotic East — you could have more fun in Tooting bloody Bec!’
‘I’ll see you on the plane,’ said Cayle.
‘You going on to Delhi?’
‘Who knows?’ Cayle began to walk away, and the man called: ‘Hey, don’t you want your book?’
‘Thanks,’ said Cayle. He went over and collected his luggage, then checked at the desk where he was told the next flight to Kabul didn’t leave until eight in the morning. But there was a hotel at the airport where he was assigned a single-bedded concrete cell with a cupboard-sized bathroom on the eighth floor.
It was still only 1.30 a.m., four hours ahead of London time, and he couldn’t sleep. He took a shower and dressed and went downstairs. The bar and restaurant were closed. A couple of black-eyed men in heavy lambswool coats were handing in their keys, then walked out through the entrance and got into a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.
Cayle went out after them and started walking down a deserted avenue under high strips of bluish light. The only sounds were the occasional boom of aircraft and choruses of wild dogs shrieking out of the darkness on either side. Ahead lay the orange blur of the city. He had been walking for about ten minutes, and was thinking about the little Englishman with the red face and swept-back hair.
He never knew what saved him. He heard nothing above the noise of the dogs, and the car was driving on side-lights only. Perhaps it was a last split-second reaction to the shockwaves of air, making him leap sideways and stumble on the broken kerb as the car swept past with a roaring slip-stream that made his trousers flap. He had time to see only that it was a dark-coloured Citroën; but he never saw the driver or the number-plate.
He picked himself up and shivered; he had left his anorak at the hotel. Then he realized that he’d been on the wrong side of the road. At the same moment all the dogs went quiet, and he was aware of a breathless hush. He started back to the hotel fast.
In the lift he caught his reflection in the mirror: there were white rings round his eyes and he was sweating. Steady, he thought. He wanted to hear his editor Harry’s gentle monotone telling him to take a holiday in the sun; he didn’t care any more about Philby and his secret shifty world of plain-clothes cops and gentleman robbers, or even what had become of that old mandarin, Sir Roger Jameson-Clarke. He was suddenly very tired; but as soon as he was in bed again, he rang down and asked for an alarm call for 5.30.
CHAPTER 8
There was no sign of the Englishman next morning, either at breakfast in the hotel or when Cayle boarded the Ariana Viscount on the three-hour flight to Kabul.
They landed at the Afghan capital at noon, with a high wind shrieking off the mountains, carrying swirls of dust off the tarmac that cut Cayle’s eyes, even under the fastened hood of his anorak. He stumbled half-blinded into the terminal where a row of men with ferocious moustaches and knitted earmuffs sat chewing fudge as they stamped passports, chalked luggage and nodded them into the Arrivals hall.
The Aeroflot office was behind a locked door with a chipped inscription in Russian, Afghan and English, announcing that it would reopen at three o’clock. There was no left-luggage office, no restaurant, no bar. Cayle carried his case outside, and after trudging for some time down broad dusty tracks, found a windowless café lined with silent men in skullcaps, smoking elaborately curved pipes. They reminded him of a row of painted chocolate dolls. One of them stared at him as he entered, then ducked through a bead curtain and reappeared with a plate of charred kebab. There seemed no question of Cayle refusing it or ordering anything else. He took it over to an empty chair and ate it off his upended suitcase. There were no tables. No one spoke to him or took the least notice of him.
Two hours later he returned to the Aeroflot office and bought his single ticket to London, via Tashkent and Moscow. He received his forty-eight-hour visa without demur for an extra payment of five US dollars, including airport-tax. Outside, the wind had not slackened. The plane was a heavy-bellied twin-prop Tupolov which Cayle guessed was a converted bomber; the seams of its skin were stained with ancient rust, and the interior was stark and functional like a ramshackle bus.
One of the engines choked and belched smoke past the windows; oil-slicks spat across the wings; the floor shuddered, swayed, and finally lifted. Barry Cayle sat back and waited for the wine and kvas.
CHAPTER 9
Monsieur Charles Pol spent a wretchedly eventful five days after arriving in Moscow.
They began with a small calamity at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport where his plane stopped en route from Paris. The passengers were deposited at the furthest gate from the transit-lounge, linked by almost a kilometre of corridor which the Danes had thoughtfully equipped with push-scooters. Handled with care, these could reach speeds of up to fifteen miles an hour; and Pol, whose immense weight did not encourage walking, gratefully availed himself of one. He did well for the first few hundred yards, until he tried to negotiate a right-angled bend and collided with a couple of imposing blondes. Being a chivalrous man he made a desperate attempt to avoid them, jerking the front wheel to the left and jamming his tiny foot to the floor, and had bounced off both of them and finished up in a tumbled mass against the wall. When the two girls had managed to lift him to his feet he found he couldn’t walk.
He was treated at the first-aid centre, where they bound up his ankle so thickly that he was unable to squeeze on his small fur-lined boot, and had to be transported back to the plane in a wheelchair. For the rest of the journey the pain had been softened by copious champagne in the first-class compartment, so that by the time they began their descent over the dark wastes towards Moscow, Pol was feeling euphoric.
This state of mind ended abruptly at Sheremetyevo Airport. Here there was not only no wheelchair to meet him, but no official limousine. By some oversight the usual VIP treatment accorded to the president of an international company engaged in a multi-million rouble deal with the Soviet Government had been scheduled for the wrong day. Instead, Pol was subjected to the tedious rigours of Soviet Customs and Immigration, during which his three oyster-white Louis Vuitton suitcases were searched and a French magazine confiscated.
But Charles Pol was a patient man, and despite his injured foot, he accepted a taxi into the city. A few hundred yards from the Hotel Intourist, at an intersection on Gorki Street, his driver slammed on the brakes and the taxi slid smoothly into the side of a bus. A lengthy argument followed, involving both drivers, several militiamen and a crowd of bystanders; and Pol was at last allowed to leave his luggage and hobble the remaining few hundred yards through freezing snow, to reach the hotel with the elephantine bandage on his foot reduced to a sopping sponge that left wet marks across the deep pile carpet.
Fortunately, in this most modern of Russian hotels, where piped music plays in all the lifts and toilets, Pol was a familiar and honoured guest. His suite was equipped with three telephones, push-button radio, colour television, soap and towels, and a bowl of crystallized fruit ‘with the fraternal compliments of Intourist’. Two hours after his arrival his suitcases were brought up, scarred and spattered with mud.
His next day began with exhausting efficiency. He was woken at 8.30 a.m. by a phone call from the Ministry of Trade. A car arrived for him half an hour later, and he was driven to a series of lavatory-tile palaces: passed from one scrupulously polite official to another, each accompanied by a pedantic interpreter: refreshments consisting of biscuits and sweet black tea, while piles of documents were produced and translated and discussed, but never signed.
In the evening he learned that he was booked to see Swan Lake at the Bolshoi. Pol disliked the ballet, and Tchaikovsky in particular; but with a subtlety rare among Russians, his hosts implied that a refusal would not be acceptable. His foot was still swollen and painful; and the performance, with three fifteen-minute intervals, lasted four hours. Afterwards
, he was entertained at a banquet where toasts were drunk to Franco-Soviet friendship and to certain French political figures whose names were almost as distasteful to him as the sweet Georgian wines.
His spirits sagged, his foot throbbed, and he longed for his vine-trellised patio above Lac Leman, with his Corsican manservant pouring him Dom Perignon from a chilled bottle wrapped in a white napkin. His deal with Aeroflot, he reflected, should bring him a profit of nearly five million French francs. He was beginning to wonder if it was worth it.
Next day his doubts became misgivings. The enigmatic machinery of Soviet State bureaucracy slipped into top gear. This time it was a Volga saloon that collected him from the hotel and drove at high speed, with its headlamps on full-beam and the militiamen at the intersections holding up the traffic with their lighted batons. They drew up in front of a building that looked like a pre-war wireless-set, where he was escorted by plain-clothes officials into a room lined with marble cherubs and grave, pale men in black suits sitting on either side of a long table. Pol was shown to a seat near the top, next to a man who was introduced as the Deputy Minister of Transport.
The first two hours passed with the usual preambles through interpreters, and the exchange of documents. Then the trouble started. Until now Pol had been dealing with the financial experts, whose job was to haggle over prices; but gradually, ominously, it became apparent to him that several of the dark-suited men at this meeting were not the usual State functionaries, but scientists and aeronautical engineers. The laborious mouthings of negotiation began to give way to questions — many of which, to Pol’s growing dismay, were addressed directly to him, often in fluent French.
But he refused to lose his nerve. Russian bureaucrats, he told himself, were like animals: they only grew méchants when they smelt fear. And Pol had nothing to fear; he had not been openly dishonest in his dealings. All the invoices and bills of conveyance were in order, up to a point. They specified that the engines of the aircraft, which he was negotiating to sell to Aeroflot, in order to help restock their fleet of ageing Tupolovs, were modern. It was just that the bodies into which they were fitted, while renovated, were in many cases more than a decade old; and the Russian experts had discovered that at least three of them were Nord Atlas transport planes which had probably seen service in Algeria.
The mood of the Russians turned chilly. However Pol was a man of spirit who enjoyed a challenge. He argued, blustered, prevaricated, lied, even wept; he puffed and swelled with outraged pride, claiming that if anything was wrong it was the fault of Capitalist cartels and unnamed banking interests who had swindled all of them together.
His protestations were only partly successful. Most of the experts showed their contempt by leaving; but the bureaucrats stayed to haggle over more documents, more figures and dates and details. The Deputy Minister also remained; for Pol still held his trump-card: the giant Troika-Caravelle airbus, whose maiden flight for the benefit of the international Press was now scheduled to take off from Leningrad next week. Pol’s company was the sole agent for the enterprise, and he lost little time in making clear to the Deputy Minister that should either his own or his company’s reputations be impugned, he might be inclined to solicit other clients. The Argentinian Government had shown interest, he said.
The Deputy Minister was politely enigmatic; and Pol knew that he was on probation. He was peeved rather than worried. The situation represented not so much a financial threat as an affront to his judgement; for until now he had entertained many warm illusions about the Soviet Union. These included a firm opinion that where business matters were concerned, the Russians were a soft touch. Any modern nation, he argued, which ordered its affairs according to the teachings of an exiled German Jew who had died in London more than a century ago could be no match for the fiscal agility of Charles Pol.
At the same time he was aware that in any country with a sensible and alert administration he might now be in serious trouble. But here in Russia — while he went on blindly swearing that any irregularities were the work of malign forces in the West — the Soviet officials also began passing blame and responsibility on to anonymous superiors, each reluctant to risk being the cause of an embarrassing diplomatic row with a friendly Western power.
Pol was also helped by his appearance. Vast, pink and pear-shaped, with a goatee beard, and a kiss-curl pasted across his brow, he looked at first like a comic professor out of a nineteenth-century farce. But there was something about the very enormity of him, and the occasional gleam in those impish eyes, that suggested a man of substance, if not integrity. Even his little cherry-lips and his shrill, almost girlish laugh might be thought, correctly, to be deceptive.
Charles Pol was an opportunist, a sybarite and a hypocrite. He was also a ruthless idealist who saw nothing improper about championing the cause of the underdog, while lining his pocket with a handsome percentage for his pains. For the making of money was an amusing game for Pol, a means of scoring off his sillier brethren, as well as supplying him with the necessary luxuries of life. His real passion — besides food and drink — was to play deus ex machina; and the possible collapse of his deal with Aeroflot now seemed to open up a nice opportunity for this.
It had been some weeks since his meeting with the Englishman on his last visit to Moscow. While renegade English gentlemen were not a breed that Pol particularly admired, in this case the sheer scope and audacity of the man’s career made Pol naturally sympathetic. He even felt a roguish affinity with Monsieur Philby.
After only a few hours together, Pol knew there were great possibilities, providing he moved with care. The man was an alcoholic, a disillusioned expatriate, half idealist, half troublemaker. He also had charm and intelligence; but, more important, he was possibly an even higher priest of perfidy than Pol himself. And like a grand chess-master who has grown weary of easy victories, so Pol had quickened to the promise of a really worthy opponent.
He was soon anticipating a dramatic scheme into which the Englishman would fit admirably. If it succeeded, not only would it gratify Pol’s perverse sense of ethics, but he also saw a way of turning it to some financial advantage. London, he knew, were even tighter on the purse-strings than Paris, but he calculated that once he applied the right pressures, reason would prevail. The British, he told himself, were a very reasonable race.
His only concern now was that the Aeroflot deal would collapse completely, and that he might even be ordered to leave the country. However, while his relations with the Soviet authorities did not improve, they were not discontinued; his visa was not withdrawn and he continued to occupy the suite in the Hotel Intourist, which he also used as an office.
In the evening, following his nearly disastrous conference with the Deputy Minister, Pol put into motion the first stage of his master-plan. He called at the British Embassy in Naberozhnaya Morisa Toreza.
Cayle began his first full day in Moscow by going into his bathroom on the twelfth floor of the Hotel Aeroflot and biting off a lump of soap. He swallowed it, washed out his mouth with malt whisky, cleaned his teeth to get rid of the smell, then went along to the lifts. He had neglected to shave.
He did not feel well as he rode down, surrounded by fur-coated Asiatics smelling of cheap scent, and got out at the third floor, where a slim aluminium replica of the TU 144, the Soviet rival to Concorde, stood on a plinth in front of the Aeroflot booking-desk. Several people eyed him warily, as he joined the queue with head bowed, his air-ticket to London gripped in a clammy fist. When he finally reached the woman at the desk, he looked pleadingly down at her and said, ‘You speak English?’
‘I do.’
‘I’m booked to go to London this morning.’
She glanced inside his ticket and nodded. ‘The bus will leave the hotel in ten minutes. You must hurry.’
Cayle blinked at her and his mouth hung open. ‘Excuse me,’ he growled, ‘but I am ill.’
‘You are staying in the hotel?’
‘I’m in transit. From A
fghanistan. I arrived last night, and I think I’m sick.’ He leaned against the desk and gripped his belly.
‘One moment, please.’ She whispered to one of her companions, then turned to him and said, ‘I will keep this ticket and will make other arrangements. Now you will go to your room and wait.’
Cayle obeyed. Twenty minutes later a key turned in the lock and three women marched in. Two of them wore white coats, and one carried a black bag. The third was the woman from the Aeroflot desk. They stood in a row beside the bed, while the one with the bag began fitting a gauze mask across her nose and mouth.
Cayle started to sit up, but the Aeroflot woman pushed him down again, then spoke rapidly in Russian. The one with the mask nodded, leant over the bed and pressed a hard finger into the centre of his stomach. He yelled, and she grunted something through the mask. The Aeroflot woman said: ‘You must tell where the pain is.’
‘The pain’s all over,’ Cayle moaned.
The masked one spoke again in Russian and the Aeroflot woman said, ‘Take off your clothes, please.’
Cayle stripped to his Y-fronts, but they made him take those off too. The third woman, who was younger and prettier than the others, and seemed to be a nurse, looked down at him without interest. The one with the mask now took a stethoscope out of the bag and ran it over his chest. He flinched and grunted at appropriate intervals. She took his temperature, and spoke again to the Aeroflot woman, who told him: ‘It is necessary that you go to the hospital for examination.’
He stared up at her in panic. ‘I can’t! I’m flying to London today.’
‘It is not good that you travel,’ she said.
‘Just give me something for the pain,’ he pleaded. ‘I’ll be all right tomorrow.’
There was a brisk discussion, then the woman doctor pulled off her mask and wrote something in a notebook, tearing off the page and giving it to the Aeroflot woman, who turned to Cayle and said, ‘I will send now for some medicine. You will please stay in this room. If you are not recovered by this afternoon, you will go to the hospital.’
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