'Are you?'

She stared away from him. In the houses across the street, home lights were appearing in the windows.

'I must think not of my children but of all children,' she said, and he noticed two tears lying neglected on her cheeks. He took another pull of whisky and hummed a few bars of Basie. When he looked again, the tears had gone.

'He talks about the great lie,' she said, as if she had just remembered.

'What great lie?'

'Everything is part of the same great lie, down to the smallest spare part of the least significant weapon. Even the results that are sent to Moscow are subject to the great lie.'

'Results? What results? Results of what?'

'I don't know.'

'Of testing?'

She seemed to have forgotten her denial. 'I believe, of testing. I believe he is saying that the results of testing are deliberately distorted in order to satisfy the orders of the generals and the official production requirements of the bureaucrats. Perhaps it is he personally who distorts them. He is very complicated. Sometimes he talks about his many privileges of which he has become ashamed.'

The shopping list, Walter had called it. With a deadened sense of duty, Barley crossed off the last items. 'Has he mentioned particular projects?'

'No.'

'Has he mentioned being involved in command systems? How the field commander is controlled?'

'No.'

'Has he ever told you what steps are taken to prevent mistaken launches?'

'No.

'Has he ever suggested he might be engaged in data processing?'

She was tired. 'No.'

'Does he get promoted now and then? Medals? Big parties as he moves up the ladder?'

'He does not speak of promotion except that it is all corrupt. I told you already that maybe he has been too loud in his criticisms of the system. I do not know.'

She had withdrawn from him. Her face was out of sight behind the curtain of her hair.

'You will do best to ask him all further questions for yourself,' she said, in the tone of someone packing up to leave. 'He wishes you to meet him in Leningrad on Friday. He is attending an important conference at one of the military scientific institutions.'

First the sky swayed, then Barley became aware of the evening chill. It had closed over him like an icy cloud, though the sky was dark and clear and the new moon, when it finally kept still, shed a warming glow.

'He has proposed three places and three times,' she continued in the same flat tone. 'You will please keep each appointment until he is successful. He will keep one of them if he can. He sends you his greetings and his thanks. He loves you.'

She dictated three addresses and watched him while he wrote them in his diary, using his apology for a code. Then she waited while he had a sneezing fit, watching him as he heaved and cursed his Maker.

They dined like exhausted lovers in a cellar with an old grey dog and a gypsy who sang blues to a guitar. Who owned the place, who allowed it to exist or why, were mysteries Barley had never troubled to solve. All he knew was that in some previous incarnation, at some forgotten book fair, he had arrived here drunk with a group of crazy Polish publishers and played 'Bless This House' on someone's saxophone.

They talked stiffly, and as they talked the gap between them widened until it seemed to Barley to engulf the totality of his insignificance. He gazed at her and felt that he had nothing to offer her that she did not have tenfold. In the ordinary way, he would have made a passionate declaration of love to her. A lunge into absolutes would have been essential to his need to break the tension of a new relationship. But in Katya's presence he could find no absolutes to put opposite her own. He saw his life as a series of useless resurrections, one failure supplanted by another. He was appalled to think that he belonged to a society that existed only in materialism and gave so little thought to its great themes. But he could tell her none of this. To tell her anything was to assail the image that she had of him, and he had nothing to offer in its place.

They discussed books and he watched her slipping away from him. Her face became distracted, her voice prosaic. He went after her, he sang and danced, but she had gone. She was making the same flat statements he had been listening to all day long while he had been waiting to meet her. In a minute, he thought, I'll be telling her about Potomac Boston and explaining how the river and the city are not joined. And God help him, he was, doing just that.

It was not till eleven o'clock, when the management put the lights out and he walked her down the lifeless street to the metro station, that it dawned on him against all sane reckoning that he might have made an impression upon her that in some modest way compared with the impression she had made on him. She had taken his arm. Her fingers lay along the inside of his forearm and she had fallen into a wide stride in order to keep pace with him. The white mouth of the elevator shafts stood open to receive her. The chandeliers twinkled above them like inverted Christmas trees as he took her in the formal Russian embrace: left cheek, right cheek, left cheek and goodnight.

'Mr. Blair, sir! Thought I spotted you! Quite a coincidence! Come aboard, we'll run you home!'

Barley climbed in and Wicklow with his acrobat's agility spirited himself into the back seat where he set to work to dislodge the recorder from the small of Barley's back.

They drove him to the Odessa and dropped him. They had work to do. The lobby was like an airport terminal in thick fog. In every sofa and armchair, unofficial guests who had paid the going rate slumbered in the gloom. Barley peered benignly round them, wrinkling his nose. Some wore jumpsuits. Others were more formally dressed.

'Snoot, anybody?' he called, quite loud.No response. 'Anyone care for a glass of whisky at all?' he enquired, fishing his bottle, still two-thirds full, from the poacher's pocket of his raincoat. He gave himself a long pull by way of example, then passed the bottle along the line.

And that was how Wicklow found him two hours later - in the lobby, squatted companionably among a group ofgrateful night souls, enjoying a last one before turning in.