Night was coming to Murmansk. There had been no sun. This was winter. The light was changing from steel grey to gunmetal blue, so slowly that it mesmerized. Shadows deepened as the weight of the dark came down, because the light wasn't leaving; it was simply changing, from the monotone arctic wash of the daytime, sunless and moonlike, to the trembling and fragile glow of the northern lights across the snow.
Only here, and in places along this latitude, does die coming of the night bring shadows. In its strangeness there is a certain quality of safety, if you are being watched: you can find concealment in the kaleidoscope of light and shade. And if you are watching, you can more easily detect abnormal configurations among the formal geometry of streets and buildings, such as the shape of a man's head.
Tonight I was watching. Soon I would know if I were also being watched.
The last I'd seen of Fane, an hour ago, was his short neat body with its swinging walk disappearing into die lift at die hotel. I was glad to see him go. In the days ahead I would need him, of course, perhaps desperately; but if I could make my way through this mission without his help I would like to do that.
There was something wrong about him. There was some-tiling wrong about their not giving me Ferris. I knew this without questioning how I knew, just as I knew without any question that the man at the end of the platform had missed the last train. But I didn't want to pay too much attention to there being something wrong until I knew more about North-light. That was the name across the top of the board at London Control, the name for the mission. It could still be a matter of nerves, though I'd been long enough in this trade to know that your nerves will tell you things more accurately, on a primitive level where sensitivity is subconscious, than your brain, which can make up answers of its own to explain the inexplicable, rather than admit to having none.
When the next train came in, its steam clouding against the pale luminosity of the sky and its hot smell reaching me and bringing warmth, I saw the man get into a carriage and slam the door. He hadn't, then, missed the last train: it wasn't going where he wanted to go, that was all.
'My name is Tanya.'
You can't tell much over a telephone. Her voice had been low, a little husky, that was all. But there'd been caution in the tone, a note of vigilance. There'd been silences, after I'd spoken, in which she had listened a second time to what I'd said, sifting it for danger.
'Why did you want me to telephone?' I asked her.
'Because of…' she'd hesitated, 'the snowbirds.'
She should have brought it in straight away, the moment she'd told me her name; but perhaps some idiot at the embassy hadn't told her that; or she'd forgotten. 'Snowbirds' was the code-introduction.
'What do you want me to do?' I asked her.
'To meet me.'
'Why?' This was routine. I already knew, but I wanted her to go on talking in case there were anything wrong, anything dangerous.
'Because-' she hesitated again — 'because of the snowbirds. That is all I can say, over the telephone.'
'All right. In an hour, then.'
'Very well.' She didn't ask where. They'd told her that it was for me to make the rendezvous. She was getting things right.
'At the east railway station,' I told her. 'How far is that from where you are now?'..'Not far. Perhaps five kilometres.'
'All right. In the small waiting-room at the north end of Platform 4. Repeat that.'
When she'd finished I said: 'Tell me what you look like.'
She hesitated again. 'I am young, and not very tall. I will be wearing an old sable coat, and-'
'What colour are your eyes?' Everyone here was wearing fur; it was twenty-five degrees below freezing.
'They are dark.'
'Brown? Blue?'
'Brown.'
'All right. Don't approach anyone. I'll approach you. Wear an odd pair of gloves, that don't quite match.'
That had been an hour ago and as the train pulled out I saw the man opening a paper behind the grimy glass. He didn't glance out.
In this unearthly light the station had the aspect of an illusion. With the snow-covered roofs reflecting the sky and the shadows darker than they'd been at noon, definition was lost, and the shadows seemed more solid than the buildings themselves. Her short figure had the same sense of unreality: her shadow, moving across the open expanse of snow between the lamps, leaned and turned with a movement of its own as the light changed around it.
I let ten minutes go by after she'd walked into the little waiting-room, checking and double-checking the configurations in the environment: the line of three taxis alongside the iron railings; the black Pobeda with snow on its roof, parked facing the gates; the two men talking near the cafeteria, their breath clouding under the lamps; the group of children stamping their feet to a rhythm that was becoming a dance and leading to laughter; and the sailors over by the huge red tea-wagon. It had taken me fifteen minutes to get here from the hotel and the rest of the time I'd spent absorbing the changing patterns of movement in the whole of the area overlooking the waiting-room, and I was satisfied.
London doesn't warn you to take care when it sends you into a rendezvous. It's your responsibility to check the other party for surveillance and for traps: you're expected to go in and get out and leave no trace, but we don't look at it as a tactical regulation because if we get anything wrong it's our own skin.
'Good evening.' I stood looking down at her for a moment.
She turned quickly to face me, half-catching her breath, her bronze eyes staring into mine with something like fear. She brought her hands upwards across the front of her worn sable coat as if protecting herself, though it was probably to show me her gloves didn't match.
'I thought you weren't coming,' she said huskily.
'Sorry I'm late. It was the snow.'
'Did you-' she left it.
'Did I what?'
'Did you come in a car?'
'We're better off in here. Nobody can watch us. The car's in the open.'
She looked quickly through the small smoke-grimed window, her lips parting as if to say something. Then she looked back at me but said nothing. A shiver went through her.
'Come and sit down.' I led her across to the wooden bench. There was no heating in here; that's why I'd chosen it: so that we'd be alone. It was the best of the four or five places I'd checked out yesterday when the embassy in Moscow had prepared me for an imminent rendezvous.
'Do you know where he is?' She'd been holding the question back: it came out with a little rush, her breath clouding under the light that hung from the ceiling.
I ignored the question.
'Why aid you call my embassy, Tanya?'
She took it as an accusation. 'I… I hoped someone there might know where he is.'
'It's perfectly all right to call us. I just want to know why you did. I mean, why us.'
She was watching my eyes intently, either not trusting what I was saying or believing there was a hidden meaning.
A lot of rdv's are like that, with strangers.
'I…' She looked down, then up again. 'He said sometimes that he had "British friends".'
'In Russia?'
'He didn't say that. He just said friends.'
'So you phoned the British embassy?'
'Yes.' She darted a glance at the window again and at the glass-panelled door.
She says she's Karasov's mistress, the message had told me. It had been in read-through code with the name changed, handed to me by a small man in a duffle coat as I was getting out of the lift at the hotel, a perfect pass — I'd hardly seen his face as he'd turned away. Fane hadn't told me he was running couriers, and I didn't know how the embassy could have made contact with him: the rooms were bugged. We suggest you meet her and see if she can be useful in any way. The telephone number had followed.
'Have you heard from him?' I asked her, and she looked back at me from the window.
'No. That's why I'm so worried.'
I didn't know if she'd seen anyone outside, or was simply frightened. For me there wasn't much risk: I'd gone from covert to clandestine when I'd left the hotel, putting my London papers inside a door panel of the car and bringing the others — Boris Antonov, Moscow work and residence visa — because a visiting foreign journalist had no business talking to a Soviet citizen in the waiting-room of a Murmansk railway station and they'd send me out of the country at a minute's notice after the interrogation was done with. At best. If I made some kind of mistake they'd keep me here and go to work on me.
I took one of her gloved hands. 'It's all right if the militia come in here. I'm a Soviet citizen with full visa.'
She looked surprised, then relieved.
'Then what is your name?'
'You don't know it. You came in here because I was pestering you, but I still followed. With your looks, they'd believe that.'
She glanced away with a little dipping motion of her head.
'Very well.'
'Just go with whatever I say. You're perfectly safe.' I took my hand away. 'He hasn't tried to get in touch with you, even, through friends?'
'No.' She looked suddenly desolate. 'I love him. I love him very much.'
'Are there friends he could use as a go-between?'
'No. We… meet very privately.' Suddenly she asked, 'Do you think he's dead?'
'No. Why?'
'Because even if they'd arrested him, he would have got a message to me.'
'How?'
Her head came down. 'I don't know. Somehow.'
'There's no reason why he should be dead. You should be hearing from him at any time.'
She seemed to know I was just trying to make it easier for her. 'Do you think he's a spy?'
'Why should he be?'
'Because he's missing from his unit, and has British friends. And there's this news about the American submarine.'
'We don't know very much about him.'
'Then why did you come to meet me, when I asked?'
'We're always interested in any Soviet citizen who contacts the embassy, in case they need our help.'
Her hands gripped mine quite hard. 'Would you give him asylum, if he asked for that?'
'Probably.'
'I love him so much, you see.'
'We understand.'
Laughter came suddenly from outside, raucous, masculine. She didn't look up; she wasn't afraid of laughter, only of eyes in the shadow of peaked caps, only of questions.
'If he makes contact with you,' she said with less despair, 'will you tell me?'
'Of course. Will you be at the same number?'
'Yes. It's my apartment.'
'What's the address?'
She gave it to me, and I wrote it down.
The laughter broke out again, and I saw the heads of three sailors passing the window, their breath steaming. I said: 'Did you go to any bars together, any cafes?'
'Sometimes.'
'Which ones?'
'It was never the same ones.'
'But you've gone there, asking if they've seen him?'
'No. I'm afraid.'
'Have the naval police questioned you?'
'No. We-'
'Has anyone?'
'You mean the KGB?'
'Why the KGB?'
She shrugged. 'That's what we always mean when we say «anyone». But nobody has questioned me. They don't know I'm his friend.'
'If anyone asks you about him, I'd like you to tell me.'
'Where will I find you?'
'At the embassy. We'd like to help him.'
Then the tears were in her eyes and creeping down her face, though she made no sound, but just looked down and let them come, and let me brush them away with my finger while we sat like that for a time, listening to the sailors laughing on the platform outside and the first rumbling of a train nearing the station.
'If they send him to a labour camp, it will kill me.'
'He'll be back.'
'I would like-' and then she was really sobbing, lowering her head so that I couldn't any longer see her face, just her fur hat as she brought her arms across the table and let her shoulders go on shaking while I put my hands over hers and waited, wondering for the first time if Karasov had even had a chance in hell of making a clear run out of Murmansk when the whole of the Soviet navy was in a state of freeze in the international limelight. He couldn't have done it in uniform; he'd gone to ground as a civilian. He'd had to; it was the only way, if he'd got clear at all.
Whatever else happens, Croder had said, you've got to bring that man across.
When the sobbing died away I said, 'He hasn't been in touch with you because he doesn't want you involved. That must have occurred to you.'
'Yes.' She straightened up from the table and blew her nose. She smelt of musk, and her coat had fallen open to reveal the softness of small breasts under her sweater; she was, I supposed, with her bronze eyes and that huskiness in her voice and a capacity for loving so desperately, the kind of woman who could hope to see Karasov again, if he were free.
It would be pointless to ask her about his wife, to ask if there were any chance he'd gone there for shelter. That was the last place he'd go; they'd expect him to do that, and she'd be under distant but intense surveillance day and night. If he went anywhere for help, where he knew it would be immediately granted, it would be to this woman who sat humped in the chilly waiting-room of a railway station, the only hope we had, at this moment, of finding Karasov and getting him across to the West and bringing the president of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union to a conference table in Vienna in eight weeks' time.
'The best way you can help him, Tanya, when you see him again, is to let us know. It's perfectly true: he does have British friends, and they're very powerful.'
Then I was watching her small figure again crossing the snow the way she had come, Tanya Kiselev, leaving me with salt on my fingers and the lingering scent of musk.