Quiller Meridian

by Adam Hall

  ‘I know. Where are you?’

  ‘In a phone booth.’

  In a moment Ferris said, ‘I’ve already ordered your new papers. I told Control it was fully urgent.’

  The civilian was walking on again, tucking his wallet away, and the patrol car had started off, was rolling nearer the phone booth.

  The glass hadn’t misted since I’d come in here, because of the freezing draught. I had my back turned to the street, all I could do.

  ‘Tell London,’ I said,’ that I’m working on Rusakov.’

  In a moment Ferris said, ‘If you had the freedom of the streets I’d let you keep things running. But you haven’t. You’d have to trap that man before he’d even listen to you.’

  I could hear the tyres of the patrol car, the ice crackling as it broke the frozen ruts; the smell of the exhaust came into the booth through the gap in the door. The nape of my neck was flushed; I stood as if expecting a bullet there. But of course there was no danger of that. They’d simply heave the door open and ask for my papers and all I’d have time to do would be to whisper Mayday into the phone and hang up. Ferris would know what had happened: I’d just told him they were stopping everyone on the street.

  Ice crackling outside.

  ‘If I can manage to contact Rusakov,’ I said into the phone, ‘I’ll tell him his sister’s been arrested, and that I’m going to get her out. If he’s got any feelings for her, that should make him listen to me.’

  Ice crackling and the tyres slipping on the walls of the ruts. A shadow was moving across the scarred aluminum panel behind the telephone, not actually a shadow, the soft reflection of the patrol car as it came past the booth. I stood breathing in the exhaust gas.

  ‘Give that to me again,’ I heard Ferris on the line.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said something about getting Rusakov’s sister out.’

  ‘Yes.’ .

  The shadow moved across the aluminum panel. The reflection.

  ‘They’ll have taken her,’ Ferris said, ‘to Militia Headquarters.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Exhaust gas, stronger now, and sickening. ‘You’re going to get her out of Militia Headquarters?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then the shadow moved on and the panel was clear again, and the crackling of the ice grew faint.

  The line was quiet. He would tell me, Ferris, that he was pulling me out of the mission. He would instruct me to signal him again at thirty — minute intervals until he’d got anew safe — house for me, then he’d tell me to go there and stay there until he had my new papers and a plane lined up. He would make quite sure that I didn’t go through with what he would call the death — or — glory thing and finish up chained to the wall in Militia Headquarters, a blown executive of the Bureau in London today, a prisoner facing trial in the months ahead and after five years, ten years, fifteen, a remnant of humanity breaking stones and hauling timber in the far reaches of Siberia, a creature of the permafrost living out its token life until that too was gone.

  ‘We have to meet,’ Ferris said.

  ‘There isn’t time.’

  The patrol car was fifty yards away now and still rolling, and I pushed the door of the booth open a bit to let the sickening smell of the exhaust gas out.

  And then with a soft shock of surprise I heard Ferris saying, ‘All right, you’ll have my full support.”

  The taxi slid to a stop with a front wheel buried in a drift.

  ‘How far are you going?’ the driver asked me through the open window.

  ‘The nearest red — light district.’

  He hawked and spat. ‘You want class?’

  ‘No. Just a country girl.’

  ‘Get in.’

  He had pointed ears like a gnome’s, and shiny patches of ointment on his face, red raw fingers poking from mittens with the black wool unravelling. A watery blue eye watched me in the driving mirror. They could all be shut, for all I knew, the brothels; in the early afternoon of a day like this the libidos would be frozen right across the town.

  ‘There’s a girl I know,’ the driver said. ‘Peasant girl. She’s half — you know —’ circling a finger against his temple — ‘but with a body like —’ he tried a whistle but couldn’t make it, his lips were too dry.

  ‘I’m looking for variety,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Mikhail. You could get her for—’

  ‘Mikhail,’ I said, and passed him fifty. ‘I want you to stay with me, all right?’

  ‘Keep the meter going?’

  The front of the Trabant bounced and we slid off course, skinning a sand bin. ‘Dead dog,’ Mikhail said.’ they got nothing to eat.’

  ‘Keep the meter going,’ I said,’ that’s right. Give me some change, will you? I want to make some phone calls on our way.’

  ‘You want twos?’

  ‘Ones, twos, fives, whatever you’ve got.’

  He raked in his pocket, and the glint of metal came into his hand like scooped minnows. Ahead of us through the windscreen the sky leaned across the street like a fallen roof, heavy with winter. It suited me. I wanted the darkness to come down on the day. We are more used, we the brave and busy ferrets in the field, to the Stygian shades of night than the light of watchful noon.

  I phoned the army barracks again at a booth on a corner, asked for Rusakov. ‘He is not present.’

  ‘There were canned goods meant to be coming in on a freighter,’ Mikhail said when I got back into the car, ‘did you know?’

  Told him I didn’t.

  ‘salmon,’ Mikhail said, and hit the brakes as the truck in front of us slewed suddenly and wiped out a snow — covered Volkswagen, leaving it piled against a lamp — post with a door burst open and the pink plastic rattle from a baby’s carrier rolling on the ice.

  ‘They’re always doing that,’ Mikhail said bitterly. Truck drivers are the sons of whores.’ He gunned up and span the wheels and found traction on some sand and shimmied his way round the truck, which had gone ploughing into a snow — drift. “The Office of Foodstuffs and Domestic Supplies announced there was a shipment of salmon coming in on a freighter from Kamen-na-Obi, but there’s been no sign of it. They were lying. They’re always lying. They too are the sons of whores.’

  I phoned the army barracks again from a sub post — office where there was a woman squatting on the steps with her onion — pale skin half — buried under shawls, handing out bones as clean as a skeleton’s to a pack of dogs.

  ‘He is not present.’

  In another mile we stopped outside a square sandstone block of flats with some of the windows already showing warm pink lights behind drawn curtains.’ she is the best, this one,’ Mikhail told me, and got a small round tin out of the glove pocket, touching his raddled face with ointment.’ she tells the girls to let the clients take their time, get their trousers back on properly before they go down the stairs. Her name is Yelena.’ He put the little tin away.

  I would have to make contact with Rusakov soon. If I couldn’t warn him that Tanya was at Militia Headquarters they could drop on him at any time if she’d exposed him, and throw him in there too. I couldn’t get both of them out.

  You can’t get her out, even. You ‘re mad.

  Shut up.

  I got out of the taxi and went up the hollowed steps of the building.

  You ‘re out of your mind, you know that?

  Bloody well shuddup.

  The place smelled of wood smoke and vodka and cheap scent and human sweat; the heat washed against my face, suffocating after the numbing chill of the streets. I stayed ten minutes talking to Yelena, a woman with an auburn wig and blackheads and a cough she couldn’t control, but I couldn’t budge her, took it up to three hundred, four hundred, five, no dice, she’d be scared, she said, and called two of the girls as I was leaving, told them to show me their breasts. He looked surprised, Mikhail, when he saw me coming down the steps so soon.

  ‘None I fancied,’ I told him, and the
rheumy blue eye in the mirror had puzzlement in it as he drove off again, he’d always thought a whore was a whore was a whore.

  I phoned the barracks again from a dockside bar and asked for Captain Rusakov.

  ‘He is not present.’

  She was getting used to me, that woman in uniform at the switchboard for Ordnance Unit Three, getting tired of me, couldn’t I take no for an answer or what, and as I got back into the, Trabant I felt the onset of premonition and confronted for the first time the fact that it was already too late: Tanya Rusakova had been broken under the light and had told them what her brother had done last night, and they’d sent a van with metal grilles at the windows to pick him up finis, finito.

  ‘You want another place?’ Mikhail asked me.

  ‘What? Yes. Another place.’

  I would go through the motions, in the mistaken belief that it wasn’t already too late; I would follow this path through the labyrinth as if it could lead me somewhere, until the knowledge came to me from the other — world source beyond the senses that I was wasting my time, performing an exercise in futility.

  Running around like a chicken with your head cut off.

  Shuddup.

  The draught from the open window cut across my face and I sat with my gloved hands covering it as Tanya had done when she’d walked from the Hotel Vladekino to the place of execution last night.

  ‘Can’t you shut that window?’ I called to Mikhail above the din of the snow chains.

  ‘It’s got to stay open,’ he said over his shoulder.’ there’s a leak in the exhaust manifold, the gasket’s gone, we’d both be found with our toes turned up if I shut the window, be a gas chamber in here.’ He reached for his little tin again.

  She wouldn’t hear of it either, Olga, sitting in watch over her gaggle of sluttish girls in the next place we stopped at. I took it to seven hundred and she wavered then, but I didn’t press her because she could chicken out when the time came to go through with it and that would be dangerous.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I told Mikhail,’ they’re like cows in there.’

  He shifted into gear with a clashing of cogs.’ You said you didn’t want class. You get what you pay for, this area. Now I can take you to —’

  ‘I need a phone,’ I told him.

  The sun had lodged among the black frieze of cranes along the dockside, their thorns cutting across its red swollen sac as the dark sky deepened; night would come soon now in the late Siberian afternoon, flooding in from the steppes.

  There was a line of booths near a bus — stop, one of them with the cord still intact, and the two kopeks rattled into the almost empty coin — box.

  Mikhail was watching me from the taxi. He’d asked for another fifty roubles to keep the meter going and I’d given it to him. He would be my companion in the coming night, providing me with wheels and shelter and a shut mouth: I’d mentioned to him that the militia seemed busy of late, and he’d said they were always sticking their snotty noses into other people’s business, they also were the sons of whores.

  She would be frightened, Tanya, as they worked on her at Militia Headquarters. She would be wondering how she could have ignored my warning, would have realized now that I’d meant what I said, that I knew — and should have been trusted to know — more than she did. It couldn’t have been easy for her, to leave that building and make her desperate run for the nearest telephone that would work, that would bring her the voice of her brother and the comfort she hungered for.

  She would be frightened now, under the blinding light. I didn’t want to think about that.

  ‘Ordnance Unit Three.’

  I asked for Captain Rusakov, said it was a matter of urgency. Mikhail had left his engine running; he’d said the starter dog was worn and that it had let him down twice, he couldn’t trust it.

  The booth stank of vomit: there’d been a drunk here. I kept the door cracked open with my boot.

  She would be frightened at the thought of what she might say, of what they might make her say, about her brother. Frightened and alone, and God knew how long it would be before I could reach her, if I could reach her at all.

  Have you ever been questioned by the militia?

  No.

  By the KGB, then?

  Yes.

  What did they do to you?

  They beat me up.

  Then you know what I mean, Tanya. The militia are no different, even now. They’ll get everything out of you, once they start, and that is why you have to stay with me.

  The glass panels of the booth were filthy, and one of them had words scrawled on it by an angry finger — Gorbachev murdered the Motherland. Beyond it the sun was down, crimsoning the earth’s rim as its sac burst at last and spilled its blood across the horizon.

  There was so little time.

  The line clicked.

  ‘Captain Rusakov speaking.’

  Chapter 14

  LIPSTICK

  ‘Are you alone?’

  In a moment he said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Are you alone in the room?’

  ‘Yes. Who is this?’

  ‘Your sister has been arrested.’

  I heard him let out a breath, and then there was another brief silence before he asked me again, ‘Who is this?’ there was caution in his voice now, and an undertone of shock; in the last few seconds his life had lurched.

  ‘Write this down,’ I told him.’ there’s a rooming — house with a bar at Pier 9 on the river, the west bank. The bar is called Harbour Light. Wait for me there at —’

  ‘Where are they holding her?’

  ‘Listen carefully,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got to cover the important things first, in case we’re interrupted.’ A militia patrol — car had crossed the intersection a minute ago, eastwards towards the river. ‘You should know that I am your ally and that I’m going to try getting your sister free tonight. Now I want you to wait for me at a table at the Harbour Light Bar at Pier 9 on the west bank of the Ob at eight o’clock this evening. You should —’

  ‘Give me your name,’ he said.

  Not too bright, this army man, trained to respect discipline, to have his life run for him on rails, didn’t care for anonymous phone calls. But he’d at least had the imagination and the necessary passion to set up an assassination and bring it off, a private enough act, he hadn’t done that to orders.

  Or had he?

  The thought came at me like a stray bullet and I filed it. That had been the second attempt on the life of General Velichko.

  ‘Rusakov,’ I said, ‘if you waste my time you could wreck our chances of getting your sister free. She’ll be under interrogation now and may at any moment expose you, under duress, as the assassin of General Gennadi Velichko. Are you prepared to cooperate with me?’

  A huge shape was on the move beyond the filthy window of the booth, and I watched it.

  What I didn’t want him to do was panic and put the phone down and run for some kind of cover. He would have got the point by now: it didn’t need a lot of intelligence. The instant his sister told the militia who had shot Velichko there’d be a telephone call from the officer commanding Militia Headquarters to the officer commanding the Russian Army garrison with a request that Captain Vadim Rusakov of Ordnance Unit Three be placed under immediate arrest on suspicion of murder pending the arrival of prisoner transport and an officer bearing information.

  If Rusakov ran, I would lose the second key to Meridian.

  The dark shape moved slowly past the gap between the rooming — house and a stevedore’s gantry, and its port riding light bloomed like a rose in the river fog. A freighter bringing salmon, perhaps, canned salmon from Kamen’ — na — Obi in the south for my friend out there in the taxi.

  ‘I am going there now,’ I heard Rusakov saying.

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘To Militia Headquarters.’ His tone was strong, adamant.’ that’s where they must be holding my sister. I will give myself up —’
>
  ‘Rusakov —’

  ‘I will give myself up and tell them she had nothing to do with it!’

  ‘Rusakov, listen to me. They won’t take your word for that. They’ll get at the truth and the truth is that she was an accomplice. She —’

  ‘I must help her! She is my sister!’

  God give me patience. ‘If you go there, Rusakov, you will both be held for enquiries and by midnight tonight they’ll have got the whole thing out of you and there’ll be nothing I can do for Tanya. You will have condemned her.’

  I waited.

  Emergency numbers, it said on a panel by the phone, 01 Fire Service, 02 Militia, 03 Ambulance. It is not necessary to use coins.

  ‘Why should I believe you?’ Rusakov was asking suddenly.

  ‘Why would I call you and warn you to lie low if I didn’t want to help you?’

  Waited again. Time was running out, would go on running out as the minutes and the hours measured the long night’s passing and I did what I could, what I must, before it was too late. I wanted to shout at this man, force him to understand what he’d got to do; but that wouldn’t work: I had to appeal to his intelligence.

  His voice came again. ‘Why should you want to help me?’

  ‘It would take too long, Rusakov, to tell you. I’m going to give you a last chance, and remember that the longer they keep Tanya there the worse it’s going to be for her, and that I alone can hope to get her free. Now write this down.’ I went over it again, the name and location of the bar and the time of the rendezvous. ‘Go there in civilian dress,’ I told him, ‘not in uniform. You should —’

  ‘I am on duty until midnight.’

  ‘Then request immediate compassionate leave: say that you’ve just heard that your sister was injured in the crash of the Rossiya and you must visit her at the hospital immediately. Can you do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. You should put on your oldest clothes: the Harbour Light is a seaman’s hangout. When I go in there to find you I shall look for a pair of slightly odd gloves lying on the table beside you. Now give me your description.’

  He took a moment to think. ‘I shall be wearing a —’