Look outwards, Barley told himself. Outwards is the only place to be.

From the metro a group of teenage girls in cotton frocks and boys in denim jackets trotted purposefully to work or instruction, their glum expressions switching to laughter at a word. Spotting the foreigner they studied him with cool glances - his rounded, pop-eye spectacles, his shabby handmade shoes, his old imperialist suit. In Moscow, if nowhere else, Barley Blair observed the bourgeois proprieties of dress.

Joining the stream he let it carry him, not caring which way he went. By contrast with his determinedly contented mood the early food queues had a restless and unsettled look. The grim-suited labour heroes and war veterans, their breast plates of medals jingling in the sunlight as they waded through the crowds, had an air of being late for wherever they were marching. Even their sloth seemed to have an air of protest. In the new climate, doing nothing was itself an act of opposition. Because by doing nothing we change nothing. And by changing nothing we hang on to what we understand, even if it is the bars of our own gaol.

I shall come at perhaps-eight-fifteen.

Reaching the wide river Barley again dawdled. On the far bank the fairytale domes of the Kremlin lifted into a cloudless heaven. A Jerusalem with its tongue pulled out, he thought. So many towers, scarcely a bell. So many churches, barely a spoken prayer.

Hearing a voice close beside him he swung round too sharply and discovered an old couple in their best clothes asking him the way to somewhere. But Barley of the perfect memory had few words of Russian. It was a music he had listened to often, without summoning the nerve to penetrate its mysteries.

He laughed and made an apologetic face. 'Don't speak it, old boy. I'm an imperialist hyena. English!'

The old man grasped his wrist in friendship.

In every foreign city he had ever been, strangers asked him the way to places he didn't know in languages he didn't understand. Only in Moscow did they bless him for his ignorance.

He retraced his steps, pausing at unswept windows, pretending to examine what they offered. Painted wooden dolls. Who for? Dusty tins of fruit, or were they fish? Battered packets hanging from red string, contents a mystery, perhaps pekoes. Jars of pickled medical samples, lit by ten-watt bulbs. He was approaching his hotel again. A drunk-eyed peasant woman pushed a bunch of dying tulips at him, wrapped in newspaper.

'Awfully kind of you,' he cried and, rummaging through his pockets, found among the junk a rouble note.

A green Lada was parked outside the hotel entrance, the radiator smashed. A hand-inked card in the windscreen said VAAP. The driver was leaning over the bonnet detaching the wiper blades as a precaution against theft.

'Scott Blair?' Barley asked him. 'You looking for me?' The driver paid him not the slightest attention but continued with his work. 'Blair?' said Barley. 'Scott?'

'Those for me, dear?' Wicklow enquired, coming up behind him. 'You're fine,' he added quietly. 'Clean as a whistle.'

Wicklow will watch your back for you, Ned had said. Wicklow, if anybody, will know whether you're being followed. Wicklow and who else? Barley wondered. Last night, as soon as they had checked in to the hotel, Wicklow had vanished until after midnight, and as Barley had put himself to bed he had seen him from his window, standing in the street talking to two youngmen in jeans.

They got into the car. Barley tossed the tulips on to the back ledge. Wicklow sat in the front seat chatting cheerily to the driver in his perfect Russian. The driver let out a great bellow of laughter. Wicklow laughed too.

'Want to share it?' Barley asked.

Wicklow was already doing so. 'I asked him whether he'd like to drive the Queen when she came here on her state visit. There's a saying here. If you steal, steal a million. If you screw, screw a queen.'

Barley lowered his window and tapped out a tune on the sill. Life was a romp till perhaps-eight-fifteen.

'Barley! Welcome to Barbary, my dear chap. For God's sake, man, don't shake hands with me across the threshold, we have enough troubles as it is! You look positively healthy,' Alik Zapadny complained in alarm when they had time to examine each other. 'Why have you no hangover, may I ask? Are you in love, Barley? Are you divorced again? What have you been up to that you require to confess to me?

Zapadny's drawn face examined him with desperate intelligence, the shadows of confinement stamped forever in his hollowed cheeks. When Barley had first known him, Zapadny had been a dubious translator in disgrace working under other names. Now he was a dubious hero of the Reconstruction, dressed in a larger man's white collar and blacksuit.

'I've heard the Voice, Alik,' Barley explained, with a rush of the old fondness as he slipped him a bunch of back-numbers of The Times wrapped in brown paper. 'In bed with a good book every night at ten. Meet Len Wicklow, our Russian specialist. Knows more about you than you do, don't we, Leonard Carl?'

'Well, thank God somebody does!' Zapadny protested, careful not to acknowledge the gift. 'We are becoming so unsure of ourselves these days, now that our great Russian mystery is being held up to public view. How much do you know about your new boss, by the way, Mr. Wicklow? Have you heard, for instance, how he undertook the reeducation of the Soviet Union single-handed? Oh yes. He had a charming vision of a hundred million under-educated Soviet workers longing to improve themselves in their leisure. He was going to sell them a great range of titles about how to teach themselves Greek and trigonometry and basic housekeeping. We had to explain to him that the Soviet man-in-the�street regards himself as finite and in his leisure hours he is drunk. Do you know what we bought from him instead to keep him happy? A golf book! You would not imagine how many of our worthy citizens are fascinated by your capitalist golf.' And in haste, still a dangerous joke - 'Not that we have any capitalists here . Oh my God,no.'

They sat ten strong at a yellow table under an icon of Lenin made in wood veneers. Zapadny was the speaker, the others were listeners and smokers. Not one of them, so far as Barley knew, was competent to sign a contract or approve a deal.

'Now Barley, what is this total nonsense you are putting about that you have come here in order to buy Soviet books, please?' Zapadny demanded by way of opening courtesies, lifting his hooped eyebrows and placing the tips of his fingers together like Sherlock Holmes. 'You British never buy our books. You make us buy yours instead. Besides, you are broke, or so our friends from London tell us. A. & B. are living off God's good air and Scotch whisky, they say. Personally I consider that an excellent diet. But why have you come? I think you only wanted an excuse to visit us again.'

Time was passing. The yellow table floated in the sunbeams. A pall of cigarette smoke floated over it. Black-and-white images of Katya in photographic form came and went in Barley's mind. The Devil is every girl's cover story. They drank tea out of pretty Leningrad cups. Zapadny was delivering his standard caveat against trying to make deals directly with Soviet publishers, selecting Wicklow as his audience: the day-and-night war between VAAP and the rest of the world was evidently raging well. Two pale men wandered in to listen and wandered out again. Wicklow was earning favour by handing round blue Gauloises.

'We've had an injection of capital, Alik,' Barley heard himself explaining from a long way off. 'Times have changed. Russia's top of the pops these days. I've only got to tell the money boys I'm building up a Russian list and they come rushing after me as fast as their short fat legs will carry them.'

'But, Barley, these boys , as you call them, can grow into men very quickly,' Zapadny, the great sophisticate, warned to a fresh burst of docile laughter. 'Particularly when they are wishing to be repaid, I would say.'

'It's the way I described it in my telex, Alik. Maybe you haven't had time to read it,' said Barley, showing a little muscle. 'If things work out as we plan, A. & B. will be launching a brand-new imprint devoted entirely to things Russian within the year. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, juveniles, the sciences. We've got a new line in popular medicine, all paperback. The subjects travel, so do the reputations of the authors. We'd like real Soviet doctors and scientists to contribute. We don't want sheep farming in Outer Mongolia or fish farming in the Arctic Circle but if you have sensible subjects you want to suggest we're here to listen and buy. We'll announce our list at the next Moscow book fair and if things go well we'll bring out our first six titles next spring.'

'And have you, forgive me, a sales force these days, Barley, or are you relying on divine intervention as before?' Zapadny enquired with his showy delicacy.

Resisting the temptation to tell Zapadny to watch his manners, Barley struggled on. 'We're negotiating a distribution deal with several major publishers and we'll make an announcement soon. Except for fiction. For the fiction we'll use our own expanded team,' he said, unable to remember for the life of him why they had settled on this bizarre arrangement or indeed whether they had.

'Fiction is still the A. & B. flagship, sir,' Wicklow explained devoutly, helping Barley out.

'Fiction should always be one's flagship,' Zapadny corrected him. 'I would say that the novel is the greatest ofall marathons. That is only my personal opinion, naturally. It is the highest form of art. Higher than poetry, higher than the short story. But please don't quote me.'

'Well, it is for us literary superpowers, sit, put it that way,' said Wicklow smarmily.

Very gratified, Zapadny turned to Barley. 'On fiction, we should like in this special case to provide our own translator and take a further five percent royalty on the translation,' he said.

'No problem' Barley said genially in his sleep. 'These days, that's the kind of money A. & B. puts under the plate.'

But to Barley's amazement Wicklow briskly intervened. 'Excuse me, sit, that means a double royalty. I don't think we can swallow that and live. You must have misheard what Mr. Zapadny was saying.'

'He's right,' said Barley, sitting up sharply. 'How the hell can we afford another five per cent?'

Feeling like a conjuror who is proceeding to his next bogus act, Barley fished a folder from his briefcase and scattered half a dozen copies of a glossy prospectus at the sunbeams. 'Our American connection is described on page two,' he announced. 'Potomac Bostonis our partner in the project, A. & B. to buy full English language rights in any Soviet work, and sell off North America to Potomac. They have a sister company in Toronto, so we'll throw in Canada. Right, Wickers?'