ANGELS IN THE SNOW

Derek Lambert

COPYRIGHT

Collins Crime Club

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1969

Copyright © Derek Lambert 1969

Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008268329

Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008268312

Version: 2017-10-04

DEDICATION

To MONA

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

First Snow

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

First Snow

Keep Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

An author’s first line of defence against possible libel actions always used to be the introductory assertion that all characters in his novel were fictitious and bore no resemblance to anyone living or dead. The custom appears to be dying, but I wish to resuscitate it for the purposes of this book. The book is about Russia and it occurred to me that it was possible that the Soviet authorities might take action against any of their subjects on whom they believed I had based my characters. Certainly a new liberalism expanding freedom of expression is being born in the Soviet Union, but the labour is a long and painful process. Unless the stricture is sanctioned by the Kremlin any criticism of the system can still be interpreted as a hostile act if it emanates from a foreigner, or a treasonable act if it emanates from a Russian. There are Russians in my novel who criticise the system: I met some such critics, albeit not many, when I lived in Moscow. In each case the criticisms stemmed from patriotic love rather than disloyalty, but it would be difficult to convince the police or bureaucratic mind of any such altruistic motives. For this reason I want to emphasise to any Russian who may read this novel that, although I met such people, they are not identifiable here. I did, for instance, visit Khabarovsk in the far east of the Soviet Union near the Chinese border. I was shown around by a charming, knowledgeable and intensely patriotic guide who bears no resemblance whatsoever to the fictitious guide of treasonable intent in the book. Perhaps I am over-dramatising the problem, perhaps I am attaching far too much importance to the novel itself, but if there is the slightest possibility of retaliatory action being taken against any individuals it is preferable to err in those directions.

In the novel I have to an extent re-arranged chronology. The structural requirements of a novel in which the action is confined to one year—my year in Moscow—necessitated this. For example, the demonstration by the Chinese outside the American Embassy did not take place during that year. But the atmosphere and background are, I believe, authentic, and many of the incidents are factual. The principal story-lines are fictional; but that is not to say they could not have happened.

FIRST SNOW

The first snow of winter fell at night. Middle-aged women who saw it rejoiced because in the morning there would be work clearing the pavements; lovers in doorways kissed tenderly because, they said, their love was as pure and clean as the flakes settling on their shoulders; militiamen guarding the apartment blocks where the foreigners lived swore as they peered into the five months of frozen misery that lay ahead.

The snow fell hesitantly at first. It was late this year and the people of Moscow had been waiting for it as they would wait for the thaw in the spring, as people wait for the rains in the tropics, as if crises were seasonal to be buried or thawed or drowned. Soon the tired city was polished with new light.

The flakes touched the window of the bedroom where Luke Randall was making love to someone else’s wife.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘it’s snowing.’

‘Is it?’ he said. The arrival of the snow seemed to crystallise the knowledge that in the morning he would no longer find the woman beside him attractive.

‘Tell me you love me,’ she said.

‘I love you,’ he said. He filed away the knowledge for the night and embraced her softness and warmth. But there was desperation, hatred almost, about his love-making.

On the embankment beside the bridges snow-ploughs held their annual reunion. The river was dark and strong and the only colour in the black-and-white city came from the illuminated red stars on the Kremlin towers; in the morning the cupolas would gleam with a new lustre amid the snow.

The snow covered the children’s playground outside the foreigners’ flats. Yesterday it had been a seedy place: a few benches and a couple of swings planted in soiled sand. Now it was sugared and clean, awaiting the children.

Three floors above Luke Randall’s flat a Middle East diplomat quietly hanged himself. No one ever knew why. Women, men, Moscow. Everyone included Moscow in their speculation. The curtains of his bedroom were drawn and some said that if he had drawn them and seen the snow he might have cancelled, or at least postponed, his journey. Others said he killed himself because he had seen the snow.

Richard Mortimer was not at all surprised to see the snow when his TU 104 landed at Sheremetievo Airport several hours late from London. He had never envisaged Moscow without snow. He had seen pictures of river beaches and sunny boulevards; but only the sombre prints of dark buildings brooding in the snow had been fixed in his mind.

So the airport was as he had expected it. He was elaborately polite to the officials and surprised that the formalities were finished within ten minutes. The red neon letters MOCKBA reminded him of a milk bar.

He was met by a young diplomat in a fur hat who said his name was Giles, Giles Ansell.

‘I’ve got the old jalopy outside,’ Ansell said. ‘It’s only an Eleven-hundred but it’s quite adequate for Moscow. Having a bit of trouble with the gears though.’

He tried to ram the gear lever home and there was a rasping protest from the car. Porters and taxi drivers stared without smiling. ‘Peasants,’ said Ansell. ‘Bloody peasants.’

The first attack of home-sickness, like a small explosion of weak acid inside him, came as they drove through herring-bone woods of silver-birch. He saw them through the falling snow, fragile, cold and lonely. He saw himself as a child walking in the woods at home hearing a wood pigeon disturbing the snow in the ceiling of branches. The wood pigeon flew away and he was alone in the muffled tranquillity. Wellington boots and Balaclava, woollen gloves with fingers sticking out of holes; the humiliating laxative of fear.

‘We saw Giselle last night,’ Ansell said. ‘You don’t know what ballet is until you’ve been to the Bolshoi.’

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ Mortimer said.

‘It’s absolutely bloody marvellous. The choreography’s superb. Nutcracker’s my favourite.’

The small boy began to cry. His Wellingtons were leaking, his fingers aching, and if he ever got home again he would always be good.

‘Does the mail take long?’ Mortimer asked. He would write home as soon as he reached the flat.

‘Ordinary mail I’m told takes about a week,’ said the diplomat. ‘But of course we use the bag.’

They turned on to a broad, badly-lit highway. Headlights swooped on them through the snow.

‘I keep thinking they’re going to hit us,’ Mortimer said. ‘I’m only used to driving on the left.’

‘You’re not allowed to have your headlights on in the city,’ Ansell said. He enjoyed old-handing it with newcomers. He pointed out of the window. ‘See that monument? That’s as far as the Germans got in the last war.’

Richard saw the blurred outline of huge wooden crosses tilted like trench fortifications. Then they were in the outskirts of the city; over a bridge, through a bright tunnel, past big, square buildings.

‘Here we are,’ said Ansell. ‘Home sweet home.’

The snow faltered and faded and Richard Mortimer saw the block. It was as he had expected it: high, bleak and impersonal. Only the cars on parade in the yard seemed snug, rounded and softened by the snow.

The militiaman on guard emerged from his hut to inspect the newcomer. ‘Zdrastvuite,’ he said.

‘Zdrastvuite,’ Ansell said.

Mortimer said: ‘Good evening.’ He looked at the policeman’s gritty, smiling face, the blue uniform, the grey sentry box. ‘I’m in Russia,’ he thought. ‘For heaven’s sake I’m in Russia.’

On the tenth floor the hanging body of the Arab, not long dead, moved in a vague breeze. His eye-balls bulged and his swollen tongue protruded as if someone had just popped it in his mouth.

Three floors below Luke Randall awoke briefly and drank some Narzan mineral water. The woman beside him who could no longer sleep because she was frightened waited for him to put his arm around her, but he turned on his back and slept again snoring gently.

Two miles away Harry Waterman sensed the snow in his sleep because he had been anticipating it for weeks. He awoke and watched the flakes brushing the window. He thought, as he always did when the snow came, of the camp.

He woke his wife. ‘The snow’s come,’ he said.

She shivered although it was warm in the flat; shivered with the knowledge of the winter ahead; shivered with chilled resignation.

‘Somebody always tried to escape when the snow came,’ Harry said.

‘I know, Harry,’ she said. ‘I know.’

She stroked his back, hard and scarred from the mines.

‘Give it six weeks and I’ll be able to go fishing on the ice with a bottle of vodka.’

‘You’re getting too old for that, Harry. You’ll catch pneumonia.’

‘Too old at forty-eight? Don’t talk bloody nonsense woman.’ He spoke in English as he often did when he was angry. She spoke in Russian.

‘You’ve been through a lot,’ she said. ‘You’re not as strong as other men.’

‘I’m as fit as any bloody Russian,’ he said.

She put a hand on his hairless chest. ‘You are Russian,’ she said.

He pushed her away. ‘I’m British. I’m as British as the Queen of England.’

‘Go to sleep, Harry,’ she said. ‘Go to sleep.’

In the morning the children were out early on the playground surrounded by the foreigners’ flats. There was about half an inch of snow and they scooped it up with the sand beneath and threw it at each other, but it disintegrated in mid-flight. They tried to make a slide but the snow was too thin; they tried to make a snowman but the snow wouldn’t stick. But they didn’t care: the snow had arrived.

The day bloomed white, blue and gold and the air rasped with the scrape of the babushkas’ shovels. The women moved with relentless rhythm—‘Fifty roubles a month, fifty roubles a month’—cosseted in scarves and boots and dungarees, moving like automatons, thinking of roubles and soup and hot potatoes. They were the widows of the last war, the mothers of dead children. They worked for warmth and food and if they hated at all they hated only the memory of the Germans. Some took on larger areas of pavement or car park and earned 100 roubles a month.

Snow ploughs began to sweep the streets and motorists who had forgotten winter fought the skids and smiled nervously as the militia, angry with the cold, blew their whistles and waved their batons.

The Kremlin emerged from the night and became a palace of fantasies, its spires and domes notes of music muted and frozen overnight, the gilt as bright as ice. The frosted domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, twisted like barley sugar, were Christmas tree baubles.

Some of the snow sneaked through the windows in Luke Randall’s bedroom and lay, knife-edged, on the window-sill. He, too, remembered childhood; snow in Washington touching the windows of his parents’ ideal-home flat, the maid coming to wake him and the realisation that his parents had left for a two month vacation in Europe.

He rolled out of bed and went to the window, a big man with dark hair just greying, who reminded himself when he looked in the mirror of a badger. He was more aware of his age than other people were and everyone said he didn’t look his thirty-nine years.

A handful of sparrows scattered across the playground and a pigeon with a breast the colour of evening sky in winter, perched on the balcony, ruffled and indignant with the snow.

The breeze picked up a corkscrew of snow and drove it across the car park. In December the children sprayed the playground with water and their skates sang in the dusk. Now they scrabbled and fell and laughed at a puppy nosing in the snow for moles or bones. By February the snow would be piled eight foot high around the clearing as soiled and sordid as dirty sheets.

In the kitchen he drew the curtains and watched two cockroaches, brown and shiny, run for cover frantically waving their long antennae. In India he had seen cockroaches as big as your thumb. He made some coffee and took a cup to the woman waiting for him in the bedroom.

She sipped it slowly, feeling for words, knowing the answers.

‘When does your husband return?’ he asked.

‘Next week. You know that.’

‘I never promised anything,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘you never promised anything.’

‘You make me feel like a heel.’

‘I don’t mean to.’

Two diamond tears formed in the corners of her eyes.

‘For God’s sake don’t cry.’

‘Don’t look at me then.’

The two tears coursed down her cheeks and reinforcements took up their positions. Her eyes were green in the sunlight, the colour of sea-water just past the shallows. The flesh beneath her chin was tired and her breasts beneath the black nylon nightdress chosen for illicit love were flaccid.

‘I’m not looking at you,’ he said. He turned towards the snow again and the bright sky curdling towards the centre of the city into a pall of creamed smoke from the power station. It was always there in the winter, quite grand sometimes or—according to your mood—obscene with the convolutions of a naked brain. A red Moskvich car moved off painting black ribbons in the snow. A Russian chauffeur brushed snow from a Mercedes with a brush made from thick, flowering grass grown in the south, with the delicacy of a hairdresser. He looked very compact and self-sufficient nine floors below. The pigeon peered into the bedroom, pulsing its throat.

‘I know I look ugly,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t ugly last night, was I?’

‘You were beautiful,’ he said. ‘I loved you and desired you.’

‘And then?’

‘And then it snowed.’

Upstairs a fat maid called Larissa arrived early for once in her lazy life and, on her way to draw the curtains in the lounge, walked into the hanging carcass of her master. She felt the body uncomprehendingly, then screamed, then fainted, then screamed again and ran out of the flat. At first no one took any notice because noises in the flats were many and varied and the Cubans across the way were accustomed to screams at any time of the day. Finally a woman delivering cables slapped the maid’s cheeks and fetched the militiaman from the courtyard. The agencies reported the death and it made two paragraphs in the New York Times.

Across the courtyard Richard Mortimer inspected his new home. A narrow, spinsterish bedroom, a small lounge where he would have intimate dinner parties, a bathroom with a hand-shower, a parquet-floored corridor linking all three. It was his for two years and he was excited with the knowledge.

Outside, Moscow was again as he had imagined it. The blocks of flats staring at each other with dead eyes, grey or yellow-bricked. The snow and the mufflered children. From the other window he looked across the highway at a vast hotel, a lunatic cement wedding-cake, sand-coloured and bayoneted with spires.

He dressed carefully in his new charcoal suit. White shirt, striped tie, waistcoat.

Harry Waterman spent the morning sticking strips of newspaper across the joins in the windows to prevent the iced wind piercing the flat in deep winter. He worked slowly and inefficiently, and as he worked the familiar sourness spread inside him like a stain—eight years of his life lost, the dwindling years ahead. He could look neither behind nor ahead for comfort. The sourness was becoming worse, an ulcer of the soul. He drank a neat vodka, then another, and the sourness sharpened into anger.

He went into the kitchen which was the only other room in the flat, to see what his wife had left him for lunch. There was a saucepan of borsch, cold sausage and tomato salad on top of the stove. Soup, sausage and spuds. It was as bad as the food in the camp, he lied to himself.

He went down to the road to a beer hall, hiding his bottle of vodka inside his coat, scowling at the cold. In the beer hall they greeted him and listened to his routine stories of life at the camp on condition that he stoked them with vodka and told them about the girls.

Luke Randall finished dressing and said good-bye to the woman in his bed. ‘Try and be gone before the maid arrives,’ he said.

‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked.

‘I hate myself,’ he said.

‘You’ll destroy yourself,’ she said. ‘Soon you’ll have no one. You can’t go on using people and rejecting them. You can’t say you love people one minute and throw them out the next. No wonder your wife left you.’

‘She’s on holiday in the States,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

‘She’s left you and I don’t blame her.’

‘How do you know she’s left me?’

‘Because I read a letter from her to you.’

‘You’d better be gone when I come back this afternoon,’ he said.

‘She left you because of your affairs.’

He looked at her with distaste. She looked middle-aged and bitter. They had reached the spiteful stage. ‘The trouble with my wife,’ he said, ‘is that she understands me.’

He took his coat, left the flat and waited for the lumbering lift. In the flat across the landing, as bare as a prison cell, a French woman screamed at her husband. The husband screamed back and there was silence.

The lift arrived and he slammed the gate with the finality of a man closing a book at the end of a chapter. Stuck inside the lift, as ponderous as a pulley on a building site, was a typewritten slip advertising a Moskvich for sale; it had been bought duty-free by a diplomat who was now out for his profit on the open market.

Outside, the shining sky had dulled to slate. Wisps of snow as sparse as last autumn leaves drifted from the greyness, flakes of whitewash dislodged from the ceiling.

A snowball squeezed into a small cannon-ball of ice hit him in the back.

‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘who threw that?’ He thought about throwing a snowball back; then thought about his own children and walked away, a big badger of a man, with his head tucked into the wind. Thus he collided with the young man emerging from the adjoining block. A young man too smart by far wearing a new dark overcoat and new sheep’s wool gloves and new shining shoes. Luke Randall was in no mood for pleasantries. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re walking,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Richard Mortimer. And spent the next half hour cursing himself for accepting the blame for what was patently the big man’s fault.

Perversely the encounter stimulated Luke Randall. He decided to walk to work. As he rounded the corner of the block and emerged on to the main street he felt the wind, tunnelled between the buildings on either side, push him. He turned and walked against the wind. The snowflakes accelerated as they turned the corner and fled down the broad highway. He opened his mouth, felt the wind in his throat and raised his head, exhilarated.

He walked quickly, wanted to run. But diplomats never run. He smiled and the pale, screwed-up faces passing by stared at him curiously. No fur hat and a smile on his face—the big man was drunk or mad.

He made a couple of skipping steps like a ballroom dancer showing off with the quickstep, swallowed a snowflake and laughed. He was free again for a while.

CHAPTER ONE

Traffic moved swiftly this morning, the drivers anxious to escape from the new cold. On the Tchaikovsky Street stretch of the ring road which encircles the heart of Moscow lorries bored through the snow while ugly Volga taxis bullied their way along giving precedence only to the big black Chaikas with their curtained rear windows heading for the Kremlin. Single-decker buses and trams were crammed with Muscovites glum with the feel of winter. Drivers turned their Chevrolets and Cadillacs cautiously into the American Embassy convinced that the cab drivers would forgive the cold if only they could score a dent in the side of a bourgeois automobile.

This morning, glowing with temporary elation, Luke Randall noticed people and buildings and cars afresh. He confirmed his first impression that the American Embassy looked like a large, bankrupt hotel—mustard-coloured, old before its time, as prosaic as a plane tree.

The militiaman outside saluted him with the wary cheerfulness which policemen reserve for foreigners. ‘Zdrastvuite.’ What was he at home, denuded of uniform and boots? Did he put his stockinged-feet on the table, grumble behind Izvestia and Pravda and slop borsch down his vest? Or did he divest himself of authority, stick postage stamps in an album and adore a peasant woman with a rump like two bed bolsters?

He collected his mail and took the lift up to his floor. The duty marine who had recently arrived from Vietnam greeted him with a deference tinged somehow with the contempt he felt a military man should feel towards a diplomat. A closed-circuit television set recording departures and arrivals outside flickered beside him.

‘Seen anyone suspicious on that thing today?’ Randall asked.

The marine, crew-cut and built like a Wimbledon champion, shook his head. ‘Seen one helluva lot of snow, Mr. Randall,’ he said.

‘Should be a change after Vietnam.’

The marine shrugged. ‘I guess it’s a change right enough.’

‘But not a change for the better?’

The marine grimaced. What had he done to deserve Moscow?

In his office the secretary he shared with another diplomat was dealing his letters on to his desk.

‘You look like a card sharper,’ he said.

‘No card sharper should have fingers as cold as mine,’ she said.

Her fingers, he reflected, looked cold even in the summer. Thin and chalky like a school teacher’s fingers. Elaine Marchmont finished the deal and sat down at her desk. She was wearing her boots for the first time since the last winter had melted and dried up.

‘Shouldn’t you take those things off in the office?’ he asked.

‘Is it against protocol to wear boots in the office?’

‘Not as far as I know. I didn’t think they looked too comfortable, that’s all.’

‘If it was someone like Joyce Holiday or … or Mrs. Fry wearing them you’d tell them to keep them on.’

‘Why Mrs. Fry?’ he asked. And added quickly: ‘Or why Miss Holiday for that matter?’ He hoped Janice Fry had left his flat by now.

‘Because they’re the sort of women men like to see in boots.’

‘I don’t give a damn about boots on anyone. Those happened to look uncomfortable. You didn’t steal them from a Russian soldier did you? I noticed one on guard outside the Kremlin without his boots on.’

Elaine Marchmont said: ‘Why do you have to keep riling me? We can’t all be sex kittens.’

Then he felt sorry for her. Sorry about the boots that did nothing for her. Sorry about her myopia, her thin body, her hair which was the colour of dried grass rather than straw.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘There’s some decoded cables for you,’ she said. ‘Some mail from the pouch. A report from Chambers in agriculture. Three invitations to cocktail parties and APN’S translations of the Soviet Press.’

There was a duty letter from his wife, written with effort, recording the boys’ progress at school, asking for money to redecorate the flat in Washington. The words only flowed naturally when briefly they were oiled by anger, and she recalled his infidelity. The words became her voice, precise and plaintive and Anglicised. ‘Who, I wonder, is the current girl friend.’ Then she remembered her Bostonian upbringing; the voice faded and she hoped without sincerity that he was keeping well.

The cables contained Washington reaction to Soviet reaction to American policy in Vietnam. Their phraseology was as drearily predictable as the wording of a protest note.

Cocktails with his neighbours who still included his wife on the invitation although they knew she had left. Cocktails with his opposite number at the British Embassy. Cocktails with his own ambassador. Gallons of cocktails, except that there were never any cocktails—Scotch and soda, gin and tonic, occasionally Russian champagne.

Snowflakes pressed against the window and peeped in before dissolving. He walked to the window and gazed down at Tchaikovsky Street. A few parchment leaves adhered to the branches of the trees, clinging hopelessly to summer. Fur hats and head-scarves bobbed and weaved among each other and an ambulance, not much bigger than a limousine, raced towards Kutuzovsky Prospect where he lived.

‘The first road accident of the winter,’ he said.

‘And I’m willing to bet a cab was involved,’ said Elaine Marchmont. ‘The cab drivers are pigs. Worse than the French.’

‘Cab drivers are the same the world over. Except in Lagos. There’s nothing quite as bad as a Lagos cab driver.’

Elaine Marchmont knew nothing of Lagos cab drivers. ‘These pigs won’t even stop for you,’ she said. ‘And when they do they’re as surly as hell.’ She ground out half a cigarette. ‘I hate them,’ she said.

Randall looked at her speculatively. ‘Elaine,’ he said, ‘how long have you been here?’

‘Eighteen months. Going on nineteen. Why?’

‘Isn’t it about time you took a vacation?’

‘Moscow,’ she said firmly, ‘is not getting me down. Not one little bit.’

‘You must be unique,’ Randall said.

‘You know I like it.’

‘Sure,’ Randall said. ‘It’s an experience. Isn’t that right?’

‘I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.’

‘Come on,’ Randall said. ‘Not every minute. What about those minutes when you were trying to get a cab?’

‘And I’m pretty sick of hearing people bitching about Moscow. They should never have joined the diplomatic service.’

‘Moscow gets you,’ Randall said, ‘whether you like it or not. I know of one guy who lasted six days. They had to hold a plane at Sheremetievo to ship him out. He reckoned everyone was after him.’

Elaine Marchmont smiled wanly. ‘At least,’ she said, ‘I know no one is after me.’

‘Come on,’ Randall said. There wasn’t much else to say. Every embassy had its spinsters who volunteered for Moscow in the belief that there would be a surfeit of bachelors. But most of the men were married and the bachelors were careerists unlikely to jeopardise their careers by serious affairs within their embassies. And in any case they could always take the nannies out.

‘You’re a lousy diplomat,’ Elaine Marchmont said. ‘You know it’s true. I remind myself of an actress who used to play the perfect secretary on the movies. Eve someone or other. She used to cover up her lack of sex appeal by making cracks about it and helping her boss with his love affairs while all the time she was in love with him.’

‘Are you in love with me?’ Randall asked.

‘You must be joking,’ said Elaine Marchmont.

‘It’s stopped snowing,’ he said.

‘Sure. And now it’ll melt and there will be fogs and the planes won’t come in and we won’t get any mail.’

‘You sound as if you know your Russian winter off by heart. This is the thing that gets most people. The thought of another winter.’

‘I’ll survive. I don’t mind the real winter. It’s the preliminaries that bug me.’

‘Don’t use that word,’ Randall said. ‘This guy they flew out after six days thought everywhere was bugged.’

‘The preliminaries and the aftermath,’ she went on. ‘The snow that keeps stopping and starting. The mists. And then in April the mud and slush and running water. The whole place sounds like a running cistern.’

Her face was pale and taut, summer freckles on her nose already fading. Everything about her was pale, even her voice.

‘I honestly think you ought to take a holiday,’ he said. ‘Prepare yourself for the winter.’

‘And where should I go? Helsinki—again? I might as well stay here.’

You could fly to Copenhagen,’ Randall said. ‘Or Stockholm. Or London even.’

‘Or Siberia,’ Elaine Marchmont said. ‘I’ve never been there. You seem to forget a vacation costs a lot of dollars which I don’t happen to have.’ She blew her nose. ‘It’s the thought of Christmas that really frightens me.’

Christmas. Children around a tree fragile with bright glass. The elation subsided. Tonight a cocktail party.

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a great Christmas.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘With other people’s children. Buying them lousy Russian toys and helping other women cook the turkey. I just can’t wait.’

‘I think I’ll take a coffee break,’ he said.

The canteen was a small, gloomy place adjoining the transport section. A young German called Hans who had a way with hamburgers and tossed salad was in charge. He was sleekly blond, taciturn and efficient and gave the impression that he had exactly calculated the savings needed to return to The Fatherland to open his own restaurant. In Dusseldorf, perhaps, where a lot of money was spent on schnitzel and steaks and schnapps.

Here crew-cut young Kremlinologists discussed nuances of Soviet policy and reached conclusions which would have astonished the instigators. And when they had decided Soviet intentions in Vietnam, China, the Middle East and Africa they discussed the new ambassador and his wife, gently probing each other’s opinions in case they were in the presence of a confidant of the ambassador. They discussed the winter gathering around them; and they luxuriated in the privations and frustrations of life in Moscow—but only if they were friends because it was easy to become known as someone who was for ever bitching. If they were really close they debated the possibility of love affairs on the embassy circuit in Moscow and, if they were even closer, they confided their own desires.

Here American journalists dropped in for a snack with their hungry, pregnant wives. If there were rivals present they managed through faint praise to deride their exclusive stories; or to hint at their own mysterious assignments with anonymous Russian contacts. Journalists and diplomats mixed warily over hamburgers and salad, canned beer and ginger beer, seeking each other’s knowledge with deference and undertones of contempt for each other’s profession.

Randall took his coffee and joined the correspondents of a magazine and a news agency, who were talking shop while their wives, both as taut-bellied as bass drums, talked about babies, nannies and Russian maids.

They greeted him eagerly. No correspondent had really understood his brief within the embassy. He was a deep one, a dark one, with unfathomed depths of information to be tapped. Or he was a clerical nonentity whose non-slip mask concealed nothing. At cocktail parties each correspondent had stiffened Randall’s whiskies to free the mask; both had failed. Each was valuable to Randall because, with their contacts within the freemasonry of journalism, they gathered a little information from the correspondents of other countries; and sometimes, but very rarely, from Russians.

‘How’s the brains department these days?’ said the agency man. He had no idea what Randall’s job was.

‘Fine,’ Randall said. ‘Just fine.’

The agency man’s wife said: ‘I’m darned sure my maid has been stealing my cigarettes.’ In Cleveland, Randall thought, she would have been lucky to have had a cleaning woman in twice a week.

Everyone made plump jokes about pregnancy. Both women, terrified of Russian midwifery, were taking the train to Helsinki to have their babies.

‘The trouble with Russia where abortion is legal is they might think I’ve gone in to have one,’ said the magazine man’s wife.

‘I guess they would think you were a little on the tardy side,’ Randall said. Everyone laughed. That was one of the assets of being mysterious: everyone laughed at your jokes. ‘What are the agencies putting out today?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know about THE agencies. We haven’t moved a thing except the Pravda stuff on Vietnam and the Chinese. I sometimes wonder who they hate most—the Chinks or us.’

‘They don’t hate either,’ Randall said. ‘It’s just propaganda Soviet style.’

‘It’s so awful,’ said the magazine man’s wife. ‘This slaughter in Vietnam. Those terrible pictures of mutilated babies.’

The men regarded her uneasily. She had been emotional lately what with the baby coming and Moscow in general.

Behind them Hans moved stealthily from hamburger to steak.

‘It makes me want to cry,’ she said.

‘There, there, honey,’ said her husband. ‘You just take yourself to Finland soon and have that son for us.’

‘Sure I’ll have your son,’ said his wife. ‘Just so that he can go to Vietnam and be killed.’

‘That’s a long time ahead,’ said her husband.

‘Sure it’s a long time,’ she said. ‘I just wonder what little old battlefield they’ll have fixed up for him by then.’

The agency man’s wife said: ‘It could be a daughter.’

And Randall, bored by the dramatisation of the unborn, said: ‘Let’s worry about the weather. It’s the only thing we know for sure. It’s going to be very cold very soon.’

‘I don’t think I could stand another full winter,’ the agency man’s wife said.

‘We’re moving off,’ her husband explained.

‘Where to?’ Randall asked politely.

‘Paris, I guess. I’ve done a Vietnam stint.’

Vietnam coloured everything if you were an American, Randall thought. Especially in Russia. Every day the Press attacked American policy with fierce words which had been de-gutted by repetition: instead of crusading the newspapers nagged. But nagging eroded the questioning spirit. ‘Bandit aggression … dirty war.’ The phrases stuck and were assimilated like repetitive advertising. Student demonstrators automatically daubed their banners with these words. They had become a habit.

The counsellor for cultural affairs who looked as if he might have been a prize-fighter walked in and went through a pantomime of being cold. Shivering, rubbing his hands, calling for hot, very hot, coffee. Randall wondered why he still wore a lightweight suit. A first secretary who dealt with Press queries looked round the door, noticed the Pressmen present and hesitated. But the correspondents spotted him and waved; he was trapped.

Two girl secretaries with sallow complexions drank milk and talked intensely. Randall guessed they were discussing their careers or last night’s Bolshoi. ‘So virile … a real man … imagine him leaping into your bedroom.’ It was the Bolshoi.

‘When is your wife coming back?’ the magazine man’s wife asked.

You bitch, he thought. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I had a letter from her just this morning. She’s not quite up to it yet.’

‘Poor girl. I sympathise with her. It’s too darned easy to crack up in this place.’

‘She didn’t exactly crack up,’ Randall said. ‘She would have stayed on if it hadn’t been for the kids. But we had to get them to a decent school. They were growing up too fast.’

The agency man’s wife folded her hands across her big belly. ‘I envy her,’ she said. ‘Oh boy, how I envy her being back in Washington.’

‘You’re free to go any time you like,’ said her husband. ‘You know that.’ There had been a row that morning.

His wife smiled and became pretty again. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know that. But you know I couldn’t leave you here. God knows what you’d get up to.’

They clasped hands, pleased that the others saw them happy together.

‘I must go,’ Randall said.

In the transport section the season’s first automobile casualty was limping in, an apple-green Chev with a buckled fender.

‘What happened?’ Randall asked.

The driver, one of the military attachés, said: ‘A —ing taxi.’

The sky had lightened again and the snow on the ground was fading. But you could feel winter assembling around the city; converging from the Arctic, from Siberia; shivering the match-stick forests of larch and birch, crusting the lakes with tissues of ice, breathing into the rheumy old dachas in the villages.

That afternoon, because the anti-freeze had not arrived at the embassy and the Russian anti-freeze tended to freeze, he poured a bottle of vodka in the radiator of his car.

The rear entrances of the diplomatic block—there were no front entrances—reminded Randall of a set from West Side Story. There was, like Russian diplomacy, very little diplomatic about them.

The tall flats, made of pale, dirty brick, almost surrounded the big car park and ramshackle playground. Balconies which few trusted seemed to have been stuck on the walls and were used by pigeons and sparrows and Africans who draped them with laundry. At night you could see television sets flickering and diplomats dining and sometimes the unwary undressing for bed.

On summer nights youths from a dozen countries lounged against the big packing cases in which furniture was shipped in and out. They wore jeans and sneakers and commented on pretty women passing in languages which they hoped were not understood. Little girls, black, coffee and white, played hopscotch around the chalk-scrawled entrances; and on the benches sat mammies and mummies and nannies remembering greasy Accra evenings, the curried dusks of New Delhi, late sunshine on the Serpentine, night thickening and salted by the sea in San Francisco.

The nights were pierced with children’s cries. Adolescent oaths in Spanish, French, Italian and many varieties of English. It was an international ghetto, a Block of Babel.

When Randall arrived the fire engines had just pulled up. An Algerian boy playing with matches inside an empty packing case had set fire to it and the crate was in flames. The boy lay on the dirty sand shivering violently and whimpering; his clothes and hair were scorched and, although his parents were beside him, he kept calling for his baby sister.

Sparks spiralled into the evening fog pressing down over the city. A breeze blew the sparks to one side and flames, like orange liquid, ran down the side of another case dust-dry after the hot late-summer. The case, as big as a small shop, was addressed in black paint to Cairo. A middle-aged woman with a dark creased face moaned, clasped her hands and shook her head.

‘All her furniture’s in there,’ someone shouted.

‘Let’s get it out then.’

‘Can’t, there’s no bloody key.’

‘The key,’ shouted a Swede. ‘You must give us the key.’

The woman began to rock from side to side. ‘My husband,’ she said. ‘My husband.’

Firemen in khaki were running with a hose to a hydrant.

Randall got a crowbar from his car. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’ll bust it open.’ He grabbed the arm of a young man hurrying across the playground towards the fire. It was the Englishman he had collided with that morning. Most of Randall’s mind was occupied with saving the furniture; but a sliver of it observed maliciously that the stranger’s new coat, bright shoes and raw gloves would never be quite the same again.

Randall jammed the crowbar behind the bar of metal held by a padlock and pulled. The Englishman pulled beside him. He felt the bar give a little. Spectators crowded the precarious balconies and children chased the sparks. Then the jet from the hose hit the side of the case thrusting it backwards. Smoke and steam enveloped Randall and the Englishman.

‘Pull,’ Randall shouted. ‘For Christ’s sake pull.’

The bar ripped loose and the doors burst open. Hot white smoke burst out. Other men ran forward and helped them pull the furniture, bandaged in newspaper, out of the case. The cheap veneer was blistered and butterflies of flames fluttered among the newspaper. The woman watched, still rocking, murmuring to herself in Arabic.

‘Poor bitch,’ Randall said. ‘She was going home tomorrow. That’s all she needed.’ He looked at the Englishman and laughed. His eyes were red, his cheeks coursed with sooty streams, his coat singed and flaked with ash. ‘You’d better come up and have a drink,’ he said. ‘You look as if you need one.’

‘No thanks. I’m perfectly all right. I need a bath more than a drink.’

‘A drink first,’ Randall said firmly. ‘Come on. What’s your name by the way?’

‘Mortimer. Richard Mortimer. I only arrived last night.’

‘A baptism of fire,’ Randall said.

Mortimer smiled, teeth flashing coonishly in his blackened face. ‘It’ll be something to write home about,’ he said.

Randall entered the flat cautiously in case Mrs. Fry had returned, or never left. There was a note in the bedroom: that was inevitable. It would have taken over an hour to compose, vituperation distilled into four painstaking paragraphs. He tore it up without reading it. The room smelt faintly of her hair lacquer.

‘What can I get you?’ he asked. Mortimer was patrolling the lounge examining his possessions—the simova, two heavy brass candlesticks, beaming wooden dolls, flabby succulents, a cactus which had sprouted two ears and looked like a cat, a collection of china eggs bought in one of the commission shops, the modern art sprawled across one wall.

Mortimer said he would have a beer. Randall said: ‘You need a Scotch.’ And poured him one. ‘What do you think of them?’ He pointed at the paintings.

‘I think they’re splendid,’ Mortimer said.

‘I think that one looks like two Indian footprints, one on either side of a lavatory pan. My wife bought it. She bought them all.’

‘I take it you don’t like them.’

‘I don’t mind them for what they are. An hour or so’s decorative work. I object to them being described as art.’

‘I don’t much care for modern art myself,’ Mortimer said.

‘Then why didn’t you say so?’

Mortimer tinkled the ice in his glass. ‘Perhaps because I didn’t want to offend you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps because I’m a diplomat. Perhaps because I’ve been taught manners.’

‘Well said. Have another Scotch.’

Outside, as the evening chilled and darkened, an ambulance arrived to take the burned boy away.

‘Poor little devil,’ said Randall. He was thinking of his own boys. ‘I expect he was looking forward to the snow.’

‘Was he badly burned?’

‘I don’t know. Possibly not. I can’t stand seeing children hurt.’

They stood at the window watching the marionettes far below tidying up the drama. On the other side of the playground women were burning refuse on a bonfire. One by one the lights came on in the block across the way.

‘Sometimes,’ Randall said, ‘I feel as if I can control everything from here. See that car moving over there? I’ll park it in that space beside the Mercedes and the Chev.’ Obediently the car turned in. ‘And I’ll lead the driver across the sand, where he will pause briefly to look at the burned-out case, to entrance seven.’ The man followed the instructions.

‘Very impressive,’ Mortimer said.

‘Not really. He always parks there and he lives at number seven. I knew he wouldn’t bother too much with the fire. He’s a Norwegian, not very imaginative.’

‘There’s certainly a lot of nationalities here.’

‘The lot. The East Europeans are in that new block over there. We don’t mix except for cocktails. You’ll be having a lot of cocktails. Are you married?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘In a manner of speaking. My wife is in America.’ He poured himself another drink. ‘We’re separated if you must know,’ he said; and wondered why the green young Englishman was the first person in whom he had confided.

‘I’m sorry. Have you any children?’

‘Two.’ Randall didn’t want to discuss it any more. ‘A diplomat hanged himself here this morning,’ he said.

‘So I heard.’

The stylised understatement irritated Randall. ‘You Goddam Englishmen,’ he said, is that all you can say—so I heard?’

‘It’s terrible. I’m sorry but I’m a bit overwhelmed. The fire, a hanging, my first day in Moscow …’

‘You’ll soon settle down. When the real snow comes. It sort of cossets you the first time round. It’s how you always imagined Russia. Come February and March you never want to see another snowflake. It’s on your second or third winter that you start to crack up.’

‘It is my experience,’ said Mortimer, selecting his words carefully, ‘that wherever you arrive there’s always someone around who wants to frighten you. I don’t believe that it’s such a bad place. It can’t be that bad.’

‘It isn’t,’ Randall said. ‘It’s me. Have another drink.’

‘No thanks. I’ll have to go now. Thanks for your hospitality.’

‘Don’t mention it. Drop in any time.’

He watched the marionette Mortimer, lit by the lamps round the playground, walking towards his entrance. Soiled overcoat flapping, gloves in hand, staring at the ground. Prim and proud and gullible. The affection which Randall felt surprised him. He retained it, examined it and put it aside. And guided Mortimer into his entrance.

Then he tore up the cocktail party invitation and walked around smoking and drinking whisky. The flat seemed more empty than ever before, resonant, washed with restless shadows. The children’s room was now the lumber room. In one corner stood a pile of broken toys. In a drawer of a filing cabinet he found last year’s Christmas cards. One of them was a Russian New Year card from his wife, a gold bust of Lenin on a blue background scattered with stars. ‘A happy Christmas, darling, and a happy New Year.’ But it had all been over even then. And two more Russian cards, bright, beaming dolls linking arms, from the children. There was a film of dust over the cards.

More whisky and ice from the freezer. He switched on the record player and listened to ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ played by the Bolshoi orchestra, a present from his wife. He opened the window and smelled the night, cold and cruel. Lights glittered in the hotel opposite but they had no warmth.

He went to bed and dreamed that it was the last day on earth. He and his family were trying to climb a slope to escape a wave of radioactive gas sweeping towards them They ran but they were on rollers. The smaller boy fell and the gas engulfed them. He tried to speak to his wife, to apologise for what he had done. She laughed.

The big man lying on the bed whimpered and tried to embrace the emptiness beside him.

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