The Scorpion Signal

by Adam Hall

  ‘Yuri, Irina and Tania.’ His head swung to look at me because the question had surprised him.

  ‘You want to see them again,’ I said and pulled his door shut and drove up the ramp into the street. ‘You must take care of yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and I heard emotion in his voice, ‘I understand.’

  I turned into the street without slowing down too much and he rolled against the door with a thump and rolled back: I wanted him to know how extraordinarily helpless the human body can be without the use of hands or feet.

  The evening rush hour was nearly over and the first set of lights was green. ‘He’s at the Pavilion,’ I said to Ignatov, ‘is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I drove north-west along Soldatskaja ulica, feeling the onset of depression. Of all the questions in my head I thought I had the answer to one, and I didn’t like it. Ignatov was a professional driver and would have been trained to watch his mirror when he was at the wheel of those big black shiny Zils because the members of the elite Politburo must not be followed about. But he hadn’t discovered my tag on the way from Spassky Gate this evening: he had seen the Pobeda several times but hadn’t realized it was following him specifically. Certainly I’d taken pains to do the job efficiently, but then I’d taken similar pains two days ago, and he’d known I was there behind him, and there on purpose. It had been daylight then, and this evening it had been dark; but this city was bright by night and visibility was good. So there was an additional factor involved, which had led him to discover the first tag and not the second.

  I thought I knew what it was. I had probably known for a long time, right at the back of the mind where we put things we don’t want to look at But it would have to be brought into the light, and looked at; and that was going to be painful I would almost rather be going to Lubyanka again, in good heart and filled with the fierce animal instinct to fight and survive, than to tins place filled with depression and unable to do anything about it Depression is unreachable, the slow death of the spirit.

  ‘What’s your wife’s name?’ I asked Ignatov. The lights changed to red at an intersection and I put out a hand as he swayed forward again: I’d had to do it several times to stop him hitting his face on the windscreen.

  ‘Galya,’ he said, and looked at me, wondering why I had asked, and perhaps hearing something in my voice: the depression.

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘She teaches the ballet, at the Centre for the Arts.’

  The lights went green and he swayed back on his seat ‘Does she teach your children?’

  We were almost there, but I wanted this journey to last a long time, and I wanted to talk to this man about his wife and his children and the ballet lessons.

  ‘She teaches our two girls,’ he said, his voice wary, suspecting some kind of trap.

  ‘Irina and Tania.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, surprised that I’d remembered. But like most people, I remember most things, and especially those things I’d rather forget.

  ‘I suppose Yuri thinks it’d be sissy for him to learn, does he?’

  ‘Yes, that’s perfectly right!’ As if I’d discovered a profound truth. But the wariness was still in his voice, the fear that I was building up this little edifice of human intimacy only so that I could knock it down. He didn’t have the trust in innocence those children had had in the park:

  He was silent, but I saw he was watching my reflection in the windscreen. I think he was beyond trying to do anything to help himself now, or to stop my going to see Zubarev. I’d found his weakness, or his strength, whichever you want to call it But this didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill me if I gave him the chance and if he believed he had to, for his children’s sake. Or of course for his own.

  The lights were green for us at the turning into Baumanskaja and I didn’t have to stop, though I would have liked to stop, and turn back, and never meet Zubarev.

  The Pavilion block was on our left now and I turned past it and found the car park at the rear, where I’d explored the environment on foot two days ago. The snow was thick here, with the tracks of vehicles making ruts that tugged at the wheel as I drove through the entrance. The building was quite large, with a blank wall facing us and the headlights throwing the shadows of the parked cars against it. A man was walking towards us from the building, going across to his car, and our headlights held him frozen for an instant before I switched them off. He looked transfixed, like a wild creature caught in the dazzle of lights along a country road, and his shadow was enormous on the wall behind him, grotesque and distorted, with one thin shoulder held low like a broken wing and his body twisted to one side.

  ‘Is that Zubarev?’ I asked the man beside me.

  ‘Yes.’

  I watched as the figure moved on again, hobbling towards the car.

  Chapter 14

  Deadlock

  He looked up at me from the driving-seat.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s you.’

  I’d gone across to his car quite quickly, to stop him driving away.

  He watched me steadily for a moment, his pale eyes narrowed and his small gnome’s head slightly on one side. Even sitting down his body was twisted, with the left shoulder held low and noticeably still. He was trying to think what it would be best to do, and I couldn’t have helped him even if I’d wanted to. I’d only just got here in time: I think he’d panicked suddenly while he was waiting for us to arrive, and decided to get out in case Ignatov brought someone with him: an example of the type of intuition we develop in the field as a natural aid to survival.

  But he couldn’t just drive off, now that he’d seen me. There was a question of pride involved. The most he could do would be to pretend he was just popping out for some cigarettes; but he didn’t bother. We both knew the position.

  ‘What about a little drinkie?’ he said with a sudden lopsided smile.

  ‘All right.’

  I stepped back to let him get out of the car. He did it clumsily, though he tried not to let anything show, and I looked away in time to save him embarrassment. Perhaps this was why Ignatov had been impressed by my talk of a wheelchair: he’d seen what it looked like to be half crippled.

  Dr. Steinberg hadn’t told me his patient was as bad as this: he’d just said he ‘tended to hobble’.

  He slammed the door of his car. ‘Is that Ignatov you’ve got over there?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll go and get him.’

  Schrenk peered across at the humped shape in the Syrena. ‘Got him trussed up, have you?’ He gave a dry snigger. ‘Leave him there, he’ll be all right.’

  Oh no you don’t.

  ‘He’ll get bored out here,’ I said, ‘with no one to talk to.’ I went back to the Syrena and got out my pocket knife and cut through the scarf: the knots were there for life. I said quietly to Ignatov: ‘Don’t do anything silly, will you? Remember you want to see the children again, and Galya.’

  ‘Yes. I understand.’ He shook the stiffness out of his legs and came with me towards the building.

  ‘Evening, Pyotr,’ Schrenk said in Russian. ‘Where did you find our friend?’ Another dry little laugh, totally without humour.

  Ignatov said nothing, but stared at the ground as the three of us walked across the rutted snow. Schrenk slipped a couple of times and I remembered I mustn’t help him, even if he actually fell. I knew him that well.

  Other things were coming back to me in flashes of memory: a plastic chess set on the corner table of the Caff, where he used to challenge people, waiting there like a spider; a girl with black hair and smoky eyes and an intimate way of laughing, seaweed draped over one naked shoulder on the beach at Brighton; a black Jensen Interceptor with an anti-radar unit, deafening jazz records, an ashtray made out of a piston and stuffed with butts, and the way his fingers moved over the bomb that time, stroking it like a baby rabbit. Shapiro. Schrenk.

  Signal Bracken. I have the objective.

  Not yet.

  We
went slowly over the snow. I could feel Ignatov’s concern that Schrenk might slip and lose his balance and break an arm: he kept close to him, his head turned, looking down.

  I could also feel Ignatov’s awareness that be mustn’t help him, if he fell: he had tried to help him before, and been told never to do that, never to do it again. I felt these infinitesimal vibrations flowing between us and carrying their intelligence. Things were sensitive tonight I felt Schrenk’s rage.

  ‘How’s London?’

  We always ask that ‘Dockers on strike,’ I told him.

  He laughed again, whinnying softly.

  Perhaps when people laughed to cover panic or fright or rage the sound was in some way inhibited, leaving nothing to show but a rictus.

  ‘Good old London,’ he said, and led us to the heavy metal door in the middle of the building.

  His room was on the ground floor at the rear, either because it was the best he could find or because he couldn’t manage the stairs and didn’t want to get trapped in the lift; or perhaps this was the best he could afford, the London funding having been cut off when he’d left Moscow for Hanover.

  Consideration: Steinberg hadn’t said his patient was as bad as this. Had they worked him over again, after they’d picked him up in Hanover? I didn’t think so. It hadn’t been the KGB.

  We all stopped, not far along the passage. The number on the door was 15 A. Ignatov had seemed to hold back a little on our way from the car park, and I’d let him know I had noticed it and didn’t like it. Ignatov had to stay with me until I was ready to let him go: if I’d left him out there he would have got help from the next good citizen to come into the car park and he would have said it was a prank on the part of some hooligans to leave him tied up like this and he would have gone straight to a telephone and blown me.

  Leave him there, Schrenk had told me, he’ll be all right.

  Oh no you don’t.

  He opened the door of his room. It hadn’t been locked.

  ‘Hello sweetheart,’ he said in Russian, ‘I didn’t go after all -1 met an old friend of mine.’

  She was a plump peasant girl, sturdy and vital and with her skin still glowing from the country air, a girl recently come to the big city to fulfill her dreams of concrete towers and grinding underground trains.

  ‘This is Misha,’ Schrenk said. She gave me both her hands, warm and damp from the kitchen, bobbing and saying she was pleased to meet any friend of Viktor’s.

  ‘Konstantin,’ I said, ‘Konstantin Pavlovich.’

  She bobbed again and then kissed Schrenk on the cheek to show me she adored him, while his bright eye watched me over her shoulder, daring me to judge him for shacking up with a girl like this, reminding me of other times, between missions, when the field executives amused themselves by comparing one another’s fortunes: Christ, old boy, that was an absolute stunner you were with last night! And where did she get the Bentley? It occurred to me, in this moment of contemplation as Schrenk’s eye stared into mine, that nothing in a girl could be much more stunning than adoration.

  Misha smelt of stewed cabbage, and so did the room; she hurried across to the comer and clanked the lid of a black iron pot on the stove, letting out steam.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ Schrenk asked me. He always spoke to me in English, and to the others in Russian. I don’t think he was deliberately ignoring security; I think he felt that security wasn’t necessary, because one of us was totally in the other’s power md was therefore harmless. It was probably true, though neither of us knew which one would be the survivor, because ibis was what we were going to have to work out.

  ‘I’ll have some beet juice,’ I told him, and he asked Misha » pour me a glass while he hobbled across to the plywood able under the window and got himself some vodka, waving ±e bottle to Ignatov, who said he would like a small one, yes. It was all very sociable, though I knew I was in much greater , danger here in this room than I’d been inside Lubyanka.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Schrenk, and tilted his glass. He was having to use so much control that he looked like a half-broken robot going through its mechanical gestures: I couldn’t tell whether the slight trembling of his limbs was due to his injuries under torture or to the rage that was in him. The only human thing about him was the brightness of his eyes, but even that was feverish. I thought he wasn’t far from the edge of a breakdown.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said, and we drank together. Ignatov moved half a pace and I got annoyed because he’d had quite enough warning. I went across to the door and turned my back to it and looked at him until he looked down, sipping his drink. I didn’t want to put a spark to the tension here by saying anything to him directly, but the fact was that if he tried to get out of this room I’d kill him. I couldn’t afford to let him into the streets again: the only hope I had of doing anything for Bracken without losing my life was to take other lives if I had to. They ought to know that; I shouldn’t have to keep telling them.

  ‘Like to sit down?’ Schrenk asked me.

  There was only one small settee, hardly big enough for two people; there was a chair near the window but it was piled with books and magazines and some knitting I supposed the girl was doing - a nice warm scarf for Viktor, perhaps, in the name of adoration.

  ‘I’m all right here,’ I told him.

  He sat down on the settee with a slight twisting motion that he’d become unaware of and no longer tried to cover. Misha moved nearer to him and was going to sit down too but he motioned her away with a little jerk of his head that she understood, even though he didn’t actually look at her. She went back to the stove.

  ‘Likes to mother me,’ he said with a twist of his thin mouth. ‘I’m a crashed pilot, you understand. Suitable cover for the state those bastards left me in.’ He drank some vodka.

  Lights swept across the window from the car park. It had been from this window that he must have seen me two days ago, checking out the environment.

  ‘She seems a nice girl,’ I said, ‘and she obviously looks after you well.’ I was aware of the clock ticking: it was a small grandfather type, tilted with one side resting on a wad of folded paper to keep the pendulum going. Schrenk had always liked clocks, and of course had used quite a few of them in his work. ‘Did you tell this man to blow me?’ I asked him.

  Schrenk’s small head jerked slightly: he hadn’t been ready to talk business quite so soon, and I suppose at the back of his mind he’d been hoping we’d never have to. He got off the settee with a sudden lopsided movement and stood looking away from me for a moment while he fought for control.

  ‘I had to, don’t you know that?’ I saw Misha at the stove swing her head to look at him. ‘Snooping round here like that. I want people to leave me alone.’ He stood shaking, unable to face me, hating me for making him put up some kind of defence against the indefensible. ‘I knew you’d be able to look after yourself, wherever they put you. I think you’ve proved that.’

  Misha came across the room and took a cigarette from the black and yellow packet and lit it and gave it to him, as she must have done so many times: there was habit in her movements.

  ‘Did you tell him who I was?’ I asked him.

  ‘No.’ He drew the smoke in deeply. ‘No.’

  ‘What instructions did you give him? What did he tell the police when he phoned them?’

  He couldn’t answer right away, though I saw he was trying. He’d wanted me to call him all the bastards under the sun for doing a thing like that, for blasting me off the street as if we’d never worked together or been close to death together, as if we’d never learned to trust each other. I would have made it easier for him if I’d gone across to him and smashed him against the wall, and I think he was still waiting for me to do that.

  ‘He told them,’ he said at last, ‘that you were Helmut Schrenk.’ He tried to laugh but it turned into a coughing fit and he bent over, drawing in smoke with the air and making it worse until the girl went over to him and held his thin shaking body.

&nb
sp; I should have thought of that. I should have realized why they’d come at me so fast and with so many men, and why Colonel Vader had been so annoyed when he’d realized I wasn’t Schrenk.

  ‘I had to get you out of the way,’ he said between the spasms of coughing. ‘I had to get you locked up, so that you couldn’t -‘ he broke off, interrupted by a fresh paroxysm, and lost his train of thought ‘But it obviously didn’t work.’

  ‘Yes,' I said, ‘it worked.’

  He turned to face me at last, his eyes bloodshot and the cigarette trembling in his hand and his body twisted with the effort of keeping upright.

  ‘What happened?’

  They took me into Lubyanka.’

  He went on staring at me. ‘You were lucky. Is that all they did to you?’ He meant my face.

  Ignatov was moving.

  ‘What is it you’ve got to do,’ I asked Schrenk, ‘that needs me out of the way? And how much is the KGB going to pay you?’

  The colour was leaving his face. In something like a whisper he said, ‘You think I’d work for them?’

  ‘If you could do what you did to me, you could do anything.’

  He crumpled as if I’d hit him. His head went down and his eyes clenched shut and he stood there sagging like a puppet under invisible wires and for a moment I felt the sweetness of revenge coming into me and warning me, and then, when it was over, I was able to think more clearly and remember that this wasn’t Schrenk at all; it was the remains of the man they had worked on in Lubyanka.

  ‘Help him to sit down,’ I said in Russian to the girl Ignatov moved again.

  It seemed a long time before Schrenk was on the settee, looking up at me, dragging on the new cigarette Misha had lit for him. ‘You think I’d work for them?’

  ‘You don’t seem to be working for us anymore.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said and dragged more smoke in, hungry for it, ‘I suppose you think I blew Leningrad, do you?’

  ‘No. It’s still intact.’

  ‘That doesn’t tell you anything?’

  Ignatov moved again and this time vanished behind my field of vision. He was working his way towards the door, behind me. I got very annoyed and swung round with a face-high back-hammer fist and he hit the door with a crash and bounced off and brought down a stack of shelves with cheap ornaments on them and I watched them disintegrating on the threadbare carpet while the girl screamed. Ignatov was staring up at me, blood trickling on his temple.