'We have to meet,' Ferris said.

'There isn't time.'

The patrol car was fifty yards away now and still rolling, and I pushed the door of the booth open a bit to let the sickening smell of the exhaust gas out.

And then with a soft shock of surprise I heard Ferris saying, 'All right, you'll have my full support."

The taxi slid to a stop with a front wheel buried in a drift.

'How far are you going?' the driver asked me through the open window.

'The nearest red-light district.'

He hawked and spat. 'You want class?'

'No. Just a country girl.'

'Get in.'

He had pointed ears like a gnome's, and shiny patches of ointment on his face, red raw fingers poking from mittens with the black wool unravelling. A watery blue eye watched me in the driving mirror. They could all be shut, for all I knew, the brothels; in the early afternoon of a day like this the libidos would be frozen right across the town.

'There's a girl I know,' the driver said. 'Peasant girl. She's half — you know — ' circling a finger against his temple — 'but with a body like — ' he tried a whistle but couldn't make it, his lips were too dry.

'I'm looking for variety,' I said. 'What's your name?'

'Mikhail. You could get her for — '

'Mikhail,' I said, and passed him fifty. 'I want you to stay with me, all right?'

'Keep the meter going?'

The front of the Trabant bounced and we slid off course, skinning a sand bin. 'Dead dog,' Mikhail said.' they got nothing to eat.'

'Keep the meter going,' I said,' that's right. Give me some change, will you? I want to make some phone calls on our way.'

'You want twos?'

'Ones, twos, fives, whatever you've got.'

He raked in his pocket, and the glint of metal came into his hand like scooped minnows. Ahead of us through the windscreen the sky leaned across the street like a fallen roof, heavy with winter. It suited me. I wanted the darkness to come down on the day. We are more used, we the brave and busy ferrets in the field, to the Stygian shades of night than the light of watchful noon.

I phoned the army barracks again at a booth on a corner, asked for Rusakov. 'He is not present.'

'There were canned goods meant to be coming in on a freighter,' Mikhail said when I got back into the car, 'did you know?'

Told him I didn't.

'Salmon,' Mikhail said, and hit the brakes as the truck in front of us slewed suddenly and wiped out a snow-covered Volkswagen, leaving it piled against a lamp-post with a door burst open and the pink plastic rattle from a baby's carrier rolling on the ice.

'They're always doing that,' Mikhail said bitterly. Truck drivers are the sons of whores.' He gunned up and span the wheels and found traction on some sand and shimmied his way round the truck, which had gone ploughing into a snow-drift. 'The Office of Foodstuffs and Domestic Supplies announced there was a shipment of salmon coming in on a freighter from Kamen-na-Obi, but there's been no sign of it. They were lying. They're always lying. They too are the sons of whores.'

I phoned the army barracks again from a sub post-office where there was a woman squatting on the steps with her onion-pale skin half-buried under shawls, handing out bones as clean as a skeleton's to a pack of dogs.

'He is not present.'

In another mile we stopped outside a square sandstone block of flats with some of the windows already showing warm pink lights behind drawn curtains. 'She is the best, this one,' Mikhail told me, and got a small round tin out of the glove pocket, touching his raddled face with ointment. 'She tells the girls to let the clients take their time, get their trousers back on properly before they go down the stairs. Her name is Yelena.' He put the little tin away.

I would have to make contact with Rusakov soon. If I couldn't warn him that Tanya was at Militia Headquarters they could drop on him at any time if she'd exposed him, and throw him in there too. I couldn't get both of them out.

You can't get her out, even. You 're mad.

Shut up.

I got out of the taxi and went up the hollowed steps of the building.

You 're out of your mind, you know that?

Bloody well shuddup.

The place smelled of wood smoke and vodka and cheap scent and human sweat; the heat washed against my face, suffocating after the numbing chill of the streets. I stayed ten minutes talking to Yelena, a woman with an auburn wig and blackheads and a cough she couldn't control, but I couldn't budge her, took it up to three hundred, four hundred, five, no dice, she'd be scared, she said, and called two of the girls as I was leaving, told them to show me their breasts. He looked surprised, Mikhail, when he saw me coming down the steps so soon.

'None I fancied,' I told him, and the rheumy blue eye in the mirror had puzzlement in it as he drove off again, he'd always thought a whore was a whore was a whore.

I phoned the barracks again from a dockside bar and asked for Captain Rusakov.

'He is not present.'

She was getting used to me, that woman in uniform at the switchboard for Ordnance Unit Three, getting tired of me, couldn't I take no for an answer or what, and as I got back into the Trabant I felt the onset of premonition and confronted for the first time the fact that it was already too late: Tanya Rusakova had been broken under the light and had told them what her brother had done last night, and they'd sent a van with metal grilles at the windows to pick him up finis, finito.

'You want another place?' Mikhail asked me.

'What? Yes. Another place.'

I would go through the motions, in the mistaken belief that it wasn't already too late; I would follow this path through the labyrinth as if it could lead me somewhere, until the knowledge came to me from the other-world source beyond the senses that I was wasting my time, performing an exercise in futility.

Running around like a chicken with your head cut off.

Shuddup.

The draught from the open window cut across my face and I sat with my gloved hands covering it as Tanya had done when she'd walked from the Hotel Vladekino to the place of execution last night.

'Can't you shut that window?' I called to Mikhail above the din of the snow chains.

'It's got to stay open,' he said over his shoulder.' there's a leak in the exhaust manifold, the gasket's gone, we'd both be found with our toes turned up if I shut the window, be a gas chamber in here.' He reached for his little tin again.

She wouldn't hear of it either, Olga, sitting in watch over her gaggle of sluttish girls in the next place we stopped at. I took it to seven hundred and she wavered then, but I didn't press her because she could chicken out when the time came to go through with it and that would be dangerous.

'For God's sake,' I told Mikhail,' they're like cows in there.'

He shifted into gear with a clashing of cogs.' You said you didn't want class. You get what you pay for, this area. Now I can take you to — '

'I need a phone,' I told him.

The sun had lodged among the black frieze of cranes along the dockside, their thorns cutting across its red swollen sac as the dark sky deepened; night would come soon now in the late Siberian afternoon, flooding in from the steppes.

There was a line of booths near a bus-stop, one of them with the cord still intact, and the two kopeks rattled into the almost empty coin-box.

Mikhail was watching me from the taxi. He'd asked for another fifty roubles to keep the meter going and I'd given it to him. He would be my companion in the coming night, providing me with wheels and shelter and a shut mouth: I'd mentioned to him that the militia seemed busy of late, and he'd said they were always sticking their snotty noses into other people's business, they also were the sons of whores.