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. 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 warming 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 any more.'