he had told them, they would have come here.' He drew the cigarette to a bright red glow, and then blew the smoke out in a slow cloud, watching me through it. 'So don't worry. You will be safe here.' I looked at the bed, and the cracked handbasin, and the flimsy bookshelves, one end wired to the wall where a calendar was pinned, two years out of date and with a portrait of Lenin on the yellowed paper. `Was he here in this actual room?' `Yes,' said Gorsky. 'He was comfortable.' Gorsky was responsible for the safe-house, not for people who got arrested in the street. `Telephone?' I said. `You must not use the one in the building. I cannot send messages, either. You must use the telephone box in the street, at the first corner. The light in it doesn't work, but if you need it, screw the bulb in tighter.' He drew deeply on the black tobacco. 'Will you have visitors?' 'No.' `That is better. I won't write your name on the residence record, of course. We shall agree, if it is ever necessary, that I forgot.' He gave a faint smile. 'Though it would be too late for excuses, by then. Tell me,' he said as he moved to the door, 'if there is anything you need. There is an alleyway, quite narrow, not far from the building; you go past the telephone box and turn right, and you will see it. It is useful.' When he'd gone I looked round the room again, at the armchair with the stuffing out and the cracked mirror askew over the handbasin and the pile of dog-eared magazines on the floor by the window. Schrenk had been here, then, before they'd arrested him. I was that close. And that far.

I had the new cover by heart in thirty minutes: Kapista Mikhail Kirov, Moscow representative for the state factory complex in the Ukraine, plastics and allied products. Current Moscow visa for three months, schedule of meetings at the Ministry of Labour; references, employment card, food and lodging vouchers, transport allowance rates per day; members of family and next-of-kin; Party membership card, Izmajlovo chapter. There were voices and I listened. They were a man's and a woman's, nearing along the corridor. A door opened and closed and the voices went on, muffled now. I would have to get to know the voices here, so that one day if strangers came I'd be warned. I trusted Gorsky, but he was human and therefore fallible. A safe-house is a safe-house until it's blown. There was a dossier on Helmut Schrenk, with photographs and a description; I didn't think he'd look much like that now. He was described in his cover as a demolition worker, which was typically close to reality: he'd been trained at Norfolk in explosives. It said that four months ago when he'd been doing a low-key penetration job in Moscow he'd applied for a post as agent-in-place. Why had he done that? I went over the material again: in the last three years he'd completed seven successful missions, apart from his 'liaison work in the north' - Leningrad. At the age of thirty-five he had a lot of steam left and he wasn't the type to sit at a desk and play about with microdots: there was a tremendous amount of latent aggression in the man and he used his executive work as a safety-valve; I'd seen him in action. I'd have to ask Bracken. It was the second thing that didn't fit Schrenk's character; the first had been Dr Steinberg's reference to his bearing a grudge against his interrogators in Lubyanka. I laid the destruct material on top of the charcoal until it caught fire and then held it at the mouth of the galvanized chimney so that all the smoke would go out. Then I put the East German cover and car papers inside the third magazine from the bottom of the left-hand pile and went down to talk to Gorsky again. It was then he told me about Natalya.

'She's over there.' The cafe was crowded. They were mostly young people, perched along the benches with newspapers opened on the tables among the dark bread and bowls of soup - Komsomolskaya Pravda, Sovetsky Sport, Literturnaya Gazeta. At one table they were arguing loudly, and passing separate sheets from their newspapers for the others to read. They were talking about the Borodinski trial. I looked across the room. 'Which one?' 'With the fair hair, next to the man with the beard.' I pushed my way between the tables; some of the men looked up at me, noting my clothes and looking away again. I assumed they'd seen the man sitting alone near the doors and talking to no one. They must have.