The Russian Affair - By Michael Wallner Page 0,139

of dust on it. Then she accompanied Anna outside again, turned on the water faucet at one corner of the house, and, while the container was filling up, peered at Anton. “Yours?” she said, meaning the man.

“His,” Anna answered, pointing at the automobile. Just then, Anton lifted the hood.

“Where are you headed?” The woman tried to decipher the license number.

“To visit some friends.”

When Anna brought the water, Anton thanked the woman with a nod. Apparently forgetting her garden work, she went back inside the house.

“What took you so long?” Anton asked, closing the hood.

“She has beautiful wallpaper on her walls.”

By the time they passed Rzhev, the day was drawing to its close. Anna tried to sleep, but the road had become worse, and she was constantly shaken awake. Anton looked at his watch. “We won’t reach the border before midnight,” he said.

The landscape turned monotonous; Anna’s happy feeling had vanished. She thought about the hours that lay before her; she’d see Alexey again, but she wasn’t expected this time, and the circumstances were thoroughly transformed.

“Didn’t you say you’d taken delivery of some documents for Alexey?” Anton nodded. “And so you turned those documents over to him?”

“When I drove him to the airport.”

“But then …” She sat upright as though jolted. “Then you had time to warn him in Moscow!”

“No,” he said softly.

“I don’t understand.” A pothole made Anna’s chin bounce off her chest. “You knew Kamarovsky saw you. Why didn’t you tell Alexey before he got on the plane?”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t know that.” He clicked his tongue. “She didn’t call me until later, when Alexey Maximovich was gone. She told me about Kamarovsky.”

“Who?”

And so Anna learned that the agent for internal security, Rosa Khleb, whom Anna liked to think of as a modern witch, was capable of even more artfulness than she’d imagined. Anna listened in amazement as she learned that the Khleb and Bulyagkov had been in contact for at least a year, and that it was she who had worked out his escape plan via Stockholm. Anton was even able to report that an untimely overlap had taken place the last time Anna visited the Deputy Minister in the Drezhnevskaya apartment: The mysterious visitor was Rosa; she was the one who’d brought Bulyagkov the little parcel, and it was her footsteps that Anna had heard sounding in the stairwell.

They passed villages and little towns; the sun shone red in their faces and finally disappeared; Anton began to smoke, which was the only hint he gave that he might be getting tired; and while all this was going on, Anna was arriving at the realization that she, who had considered herself so clever and calculating, who had even reproached herself for her great cunning, was nothing but a beginner. The game had gone on without any participation from her. She hadn’t even known the rules—she was just a piece that had fit in. She’d done exactly what she’d been expected to do. And at this moment, Anna saw that as her greatest defeat.

THIRTY-FIVE

The Kremlin stands above the city; above the Kremlin stands only God. The fortress was rebuilt eighteen times; why eighteen, the man in the pale blue hospital gown wondered. The first stone wall was erected in 1366; Ivan III’s architects put up twenty towers, a palace, their city’s first fortification. Kamarovsky was gratified to ascertain that his eyeglasses had been taken away from him; the unreliable things only stopped him from seeing connections properly. They were Italians, he thought; in those days, the Italians were the best builders. They put twenty streets and ten squares inside the Kremlin walls—a tour de force of fortification architecture. Why did Napoleon have all that burned down? Out of vexation, Kamarovsky thought, nodding. Who wouldn’t be vexed, after dismantling the biggest country on earth, to wait in vain for someone to come and submit to him? One of the people in the room giggled, and Kamarovsky looked around; that was no giggling matter. Napoleon must have felt like a spurned lover, sitting there in the Kremlin, with not a single Russian showing up for a rendezvous. While he let his capitaines plunder the city, he overlooked the fact that it was already the middle of September: time to start getting ready for winter. The fire he lit in Moscow wasn’t hot enough to warm his army. He who burns something down makes a site for reconstruction, Kamarovsky thought. Thicker walls this time, and then, later, they set shining, red-ruby-colored stars on