They went in Volodya's car, She had borrowed it for the evening. He was to wait for her outside the Acroport metro station at nine, and at nine exactly the Lada pulled up precariously beside him.

'You should not have insisted,' she said.

The tower blocks glowed above them but in the streets there was already the menacing -atmosphere of curfew. Scents of autumn filled the damp night air. A half-moon, draped in shrouds of mist, hung ahead of them. Occasionally their hands brushed. Occasionally their hands grasped each other in a strong embrace. Barley was watching the wing mirror. It was smashed and some of the bits were missing but he could see enough in it to watch the cars that followed without overtaking. Katya turned left but still nothing passed them.

She wasn't speaking so he wasn't either. He wondered how they learned it, where is safe to speak, where isn't. At school? From older girls as they grew up? Or was it your earnest little lecture from the family doctor somewhere round the second year of puberty? 'It's time you learned that cars and walls have cars just like people…'

They were bumping over a pitted sliproad into a halffinished carpark.

'Imagine you are a doctor,' she warned him as they faced each other across the roof of the car. 'You must look very strict.'

'I'm a doctor,' Barley said. Neither of them was joking.

They picked their way between a maze of moonlit puddles to a pathway covered in asbestos awning, leading to double doors and an empty reception desk. He caught the first alarming smells of hospital: disinfectant, floor polish, surgical spirit. At a crisp pace she marched him across a circular hallway of mottled concrete, down a linoleum corridor and past a marble counter staffed by sullen women. A clock said ten-twenty-five. Making a consciously officious gesture, Barley compared it with his watch. The clock was ten minutes slow. The next corridor was lined with figures slumped on kitchen chairs.

The waiting-room was a gloomy catacomb supported by immense pillars with a raised platform at one end. At the other, swing doors gave on to the lavatories. Somebody had rigged a temporary light to show the way. By its pate light, Barley could make ou ' t empty coat racks behind a wooden counter, parked stretcher trolleys and, fixed to the nearest pillar, an ancient telephone. A bench stood against the wall., Katya sat on it, so Barley sat beside her.

'He tries always to be punctual. Sometimes he is delayed by the connection, ' she said.

'Can I speak to him?'

'He would be angry.'

'Why?'

'If they hear English on a long-distance line they will immediately pay attention. It is normal.'

From the swing doors a man in a head-bandage looking like a blinded soldier from the front wandered into the women's lavatory as two women emerged. They grabbed hold of him and redirected him. Katya unclipped her handbag and took out a notebook and a pen.

He will try at ten-forty, she had said. At ten-forty he will attempt the first connection. He will not speak for long, she had said. To speak too long even between safe telephones is unwise.

She stood up and walked to the telephone, ducking like a regular under the cloakroom counter.

Will he tell her he loves her? Barley wondered - 'I love you enough to risk your life for me'? Will he give her the love talk he gave her in his letter? Or will he tell her that she is an acceptable price for the cleansing of his uneasy soul?

She was standing sideways to him, gazing keenly through the swing doors. Had she seen something bad? Had she heard something? Or was her mind already far away with Yakov?

It's how she stands when she's waiting for him, he thought - like someone who is prepared to wait all day.

The telephone rang hoarsely, as if it had dust in its larynx. A sixth sense had already guided her towards it, so it ' had no chance to give a second squawk before she had it in her hand. Barley was only a few feet from her but he was hard put to it to hear her voice above the background clatter of the hospital. She had turned away from him, presumably for privacy, and she had boxed her hand over her free ear so that she could hear her lover in the earpiece. Barley could just hear her say 'yes' and 'yes' again, submissively.

Leave her alone! he thought angrily. I've told you before and I'm going to tell you again at the weekend. Leave her alone, keep her out of this. Deal with the grey men or me!

The notebook lay open on a rickety shelf attached to the pillar, the pen on top of it, but she hadn't touched either one of them. Yes . Yes . Yes . I did that on the island. Yes . Yes . Yes . He saw her shoulders rise into her neck and stay there and her back stretch as if she had taken a deep breath or enjoyed some pleasurable moment within herself. Her elbow rose from her side to cram the earpiece more firmly into her head. Yes . Yes . What about no for once? No, I won't lie down for you!

Her spare hand had found the pillar and he could see the fingers part and brace themselves as the tips pressed into the dark plaster. He saw the back of her hand whiten as it stiffened, but it didn't move, and suddenly her hand alarmed him. It had found a climbing hold and was clinging to it for grim life. She was on the cliff face and the fingerhold was all she had between her lover and the abyss.

She turned, the receiver still pressed to her ear, and he saw her face. Who was she? What had she become? For the first time since he had met her she was without expression, and the telephone jammed against her temple was the gun that somebody was holding there.

She had the hostage stare.

Then her body began sliding down the pillar as if she couldn't be bothered any more to hold it upright. Atfirst it was only her knees that gave way, then she crumpled at the waist as well, but Barley was there to hold her. He flung one arm round her waist and with the other he snatched the phone from her. He held it to his car and shouted, 'Goethe!', but all he got was a dialling tone so he rang off.

It was an odd thing, but Barley had forgotten until now that he was strong. They started to move but as they did so she was seized with a violent revulsion against him and lashed out silently with her clenched fist, cracking him so hard over the cheekbone that for a moment he saw nothing but a dazzling light. He grappled her hands to her sides and held them there while he pulled her under the counter and frogmarched her through the hospital and across the carpark. 'She's a disturbed patient,' he was explaining in his mind. 'A disturbed patient in a doctor's care.'

Still holding her, he tipped her handbag on to the roof of the car, found the key, unlocked the passenger door and bundled her inside. Then he ran round to the driver's side in case she had ideas of taking over after all.

'I shall go home,' she said.

'I don't know the way.'

'Take me home,' she repeated.

'I don't know the way, Katya! You'll have to tell me right and left, do you hear?' He grabbed her shoulders. 'Sit up. Look out of the window. Where's reverse on this bloody thing?'

He fiddled with the gears. She grabbed the lever and slammed it in reverse, making the gearbox scream.

'Lights,' he said.

He had already found them, but he made her turn them on for him, willing her by his anger to respond. As he bumped across the carpark he had to swerve to avoid an ambulance entering at speed. Mud and water blacked out the windscreen, but there were no wipers because it wasn't raining. Stopping the car again, he sprang out and smeared the windscreen halfway clean with his handkerchief, then back into the car.

'Go left,' she ordered. 'Be quick, please.'

'We came the other way before.'

'It's one way. Be quick.'

Her voice was dead and he couldn't rouse it. He offered her his flask. She pushed it aside. He drove slowly, ignoring her instruction to 'be quick. Headlights in the driving mirror, not gaining or losing. It's Wicklow, he thought. It's Paddy, Cy, Henziger, Zapadny, the whole Guards Armoured of them. Her face lit and went out again under the sodium streeflamps but it was lifeless. She was staring into her own head at whatever frightful things she saw in her imagination. Her clenched fist was in her mouth. Its knuckles were wedged between her teeth.

'Do I turn here?' he asked her roughly. And again he shouted at her, 'Tell me where to turn, will you?'

She spoke first in Russian, then in English. 'Now. Right. Go faster.'

Nothing was familiar to him. Every empty street was like the next one and the last one.

'Turn now.'

'Left or right?'

'Left! '

She screamed the word at the top of her voice, then screamed it again. After the scream came her tears and they went on coming between choking hopeless sobs. Then gradually the sobs began to falter and by the time he drew up at her apartment block they had ceased. He pulled the handbrake but it was broken. The car was still rolling as she shoved her door open. He reached for her but she was too quick. Somehow she had scrambled on to the pavement and was running across the forecourt with her handbag open, foraging for her keys. A boy in a leather jacket was lounging in the doorway and he appeared to want to block her. But by then Barley was level with her so the boy leapt aside for them to pass. She wouldn't wait for the lift or perhaos she'd forgotten that there was one. She ran up the stairs and Barley ran after her, past a couple embracing. On the first landing an old man sat drunk in the comer. They climbed and kept climbing. Now it was an old woman who was drunk. Now it was a boy. They climbed so many flights that Barley began to fear she had forgotten which, floor she was supposed to live on. Then suddenly she was turning the locks and they were inside her apartment again, and Katya was in the twins' room, kneeling on their bed with her head struck forward and panting like a desperate swimmer, one arm flung across the body of each sleeping child.

Once more there was only her bedroom. He led her to it b~cause even in that tiny space she no longer knew the way. She sat on the bed unsurely, seeming not to know how high it was. He sat beside her, staring into her dull face, watching her eyes close, half open and close again, not venturing to touch her because she was rigid and appalled and apart from him. She was clasping her wrist as if it were broken. She gave a deep sigh. He said her name but she didn't seem to hear him. He peered round the room, searching. A minuscule worktop was fixed along one wall, a make-up table and writing desk combined. Tossed among old letters lay a ring-backcd writing block similar to the sort that Goethe used. A framed Renoir reproduction hung above the bed. He unhooked it and set it on his lap. The trained spy ripped a page out of the notebook, laid it on the picture glass, took a pen from his pocket and wrote: