15: FOOTSTEPS

It was just after six in the evening when the Russian came down the stairs and looked around him and walked across the lobby to the bar.

I got up from the table in the corner and went over to him.

'Boris Slavsky!' I said. He turned to look at me. I was holding my drink, to let him know he wasn't expected to shake hands. 'Voss,' I told him, 'Andrei Voss.' In Russian I said, 'You don't know me, but I've heard of you, of course.' He watched me with great attention, a touch of suspicion in his pale clear eyes, which didn't surprise me. He wasn't a man who liked to be heard of by strangers. He smelled strongly of a mediocre cologne; I'd caught it when he and Colonel Choen had gone up the staircase earlier in the day, and that was why I hadn't come here alone this evening.

'Would you care to join us?' I half turned to look across the room. 'We're at the table in the corner.'

Slavsky looked in that direction, then back at me, a token smile touching his mouth. 'Why not?'

'You want to order your drink here, or at the table?'

'I'm in no hurry.'

I led him across the room. 'Gabrielle, this is Boris Slavsky, from Moscow.' He looked down at her, the smile more relaxed. 'Gabrielle Bouchard,' I told him, 'from Paris.'

She held out a hand and he leaned over and kissed it; he was a big man, would be broad-shouldered even without the padding in the flashy tropical suit, made, I would think, in the Czech Republic. Forty, forty-five, starting to brush his hair carefully across the scalp, his face also broad, Slav, the cheekbones prominent, the mouth full, predatory in Gabrielle's presence, but would become hard if he were challenged, would sneer, watching the death of an opponent. I didn't know Boris Slavsky but I knew his type, had worked with people like this, had worked sometimes as one of them. I knew his name because it had been in the hotel register when I'd booked a room here just after he had gone upstairs with Colonel Choen.

'Is she for rent?' he asked me as he sat down. He was still looking attentively at Gabrielle.

'I don't know,' I told him, 'I only met her this morning. But I doubt it — she works for a top French magazine.' He hadn't noticed her camera, slung from the back of her chair, but in any case he didn't really think she was a prostitute: she didn't look like one, and this wasn't the kind of hotel where they would sit with their clients. He just wanted to know if she understood Russian, had been watching her eyes for any reaction to his question, had been prepared, even, to get his face slapped. 'Boris says he's delighted to meet you,' I told Gabrielle in French, and she smiled nicely to him.

Having seen this man's flashy suit when he'd come out of the helicopter, and having smelled his eau de Red Square in the hotel lobby, I thought of visiting Gabrielle at the Catholic Mission, partly to know how she was and partly to tell her about the Russian visitor to Pouthisat. I told her I needed to meet him, and she agreed to help.

'I was afraid you might see it,' I said, 'as being asked to use yourself as bait.'

'How do you see it, then?'

'As using yourself as a weapon against Pol Pot.'

'Exactly. That's why I'll do it.'

So when Boris Slavsky had looked across the room at the table in the corner he'd seen Gabrielle sitting there in a raw silk sarong, one slender arm across the back of her chair, her head tilted as she watched him with her deep aquamarine eyes.

'What'll you drink?' I asked Slavsky now.

'Smirnov.,

'How?'

'Straight up.'

Gabrielle's Pernod was low in the glass so I ordered another one and two vodkas. 'Boris has just arrived,' I told her in French with a Russian accent, from Phnom Penh.' I glanced at Slavsky. 'How was the flight from Moscow?' I'd said that in French too, and he was looking blank, so I switched to Russian again. 'I'm sorry, I just thought we might talk in French as a courtesy to Gabrielle. I was asking how your flight was from Moscow.'

'How is any flight from Moscow, in a TU-154?'

Cagey as hell, didn't even admit he'd come from Moscow. I wasn't going to be wasting my time. He'd tested Gabrielle to see if he could speak Russian freely in front of her, and didn't admit to any French, so that I would feel free to say anything I liked to her, anything I didn't want him to understand. He was in the top echelon, I knew that — I'd been in signals with Pringle today. All the top arms dealers make it their business to swat up a bit of French, English, German, Spanish if it's not their native tongue; their trade is international and they don't want interpreters listening in.

Pringle had done well. I'd telephoned him from the post office, gone straight there after I'd booked in at the hotel. 'How soon can you contact Moscow?'

He couldn't have been ready for that but he didn't react, got straight on with it.

'I can go through the Russian telecommunications satellite direct, but it'll depend on the traffic.'

'I need an updated coverage of the top Russian arms dealers and their networks, particularly those who might be supplying or intending to supply our target.'

'Understood. This is interesting.'

'Yes.' A couple of Khmer Rouge rebels came in from the street cuddling their AK-47s and I turned to face the wall. 'A Russian flew in half an hour ago and he was met at the airfield by Colonel C. He's now booked in at the Hotel du Lac.' This amounted to interim debriefing, and yes, this time Pringle had something for London. 'Colonel C.,' I told him, 'was carrying an attache case, something like half a million US dollars in size. He left the hotel twenty minutes later, without the case.'

'What is the visitor's name?'

'He booked in as Boris Slavsky, and I've no reason to think it's a nom de geurre.' Arms dealers, especially those who wear flashy suits and eau de Red Square, are proud of their names and their reputations for selling megadeath in the marketplace.

'So you need information specifically on him.'

'Yes. By this evening if you can.'

'I shall make every endeavour.'

Pringlese for try like hell and we shut down the signal.

It took him less than two hours to contact our chief agent-in-place, Moscow, and when I phoned Pringle at six o'clock he had what I wanted, even down to a recent bit of scandal concerning Slavsky's involvement with one Fifi Dufoix, the daughter of the French ambassador to Spain: Slavsky had jumped, of necessity, from a third-floor balcony right into a garbage truck to avoid the attentions of her fiance, a national hero of the bullring at that moment murderously enraged. This I would use, but the main briefing concerned the Dmitrovich organization.

'I heard on the grapevine,' I told Slavsky now, 'that you'd be coming to town.'

He swung his head away from watching Gabrielle, and his eyes changed, blanked off. 'Which grapevine?' I knew he'd have to ask: there could have been a leak, and leaks are unwelcome in any extensive enterprise, can wreck a deal, cost money.

'There are so many grapevines,' I said, 'aren't there?' I turned to Gabrielle and said in French, 'Would you excuse us? This is business, and Boris doesn't have any French.'

'But of course.'

She was sitting stiffly in her chair, and Slavsky noticed. 'She's had an injury?' he asked me.

'Apparently she was getting a heavy video-camera off a shelf, and it swung down and bruised a rib.'

'She's a beautiful woman.'

'Isn't she? I wish I could see more of her, but I'm flying out tomorrow, and I don't want to spend tonight — you know — getting involved.' I spread my hands flat on the table. 'So many grapevines, we were saying, weren't we? Look, I'm with Dmitrovich.' I waited, watching him.

His eyes didn't change. 'Who is he?'

I sat back, leaving my hands on the table, ignoring his question. He knew the Dmitrovich group perfectly well — they controlled almost half the underground arms trade in Russia. 'The thing is,' I said, 'your client approached us first for what he needed, but our price was too rich for his blood. As you know, we choose not to be competitive, since we can always guarantee the supply and can often obtain merchandise difficult for others to acquire. Also, your client gets his pocket-money from Beijing, but that's about all it is. So, frankly, when we heard you were meeting his proposals, Dmitrovich was quite pleased.' I leaned forward again. 'It's in our interests that this particular client succeeds in reversing the status quo in Cambodia — or should I say Kampuchea? — and we're quite confident that you'll be able to help him.'