The Russia House Read Online Free PDF Page A

notes that you are holding in your hand are the work of an actual student following the course. That’s why they’re here, son, do you see? They are demonstration notes . And the drawings here, they’re to do with the –’
    With socio-economic patterns, son. With demographic population shifts. With vital statistics that you Russkies can never get enough of, can you? Here, seen one of these? It’s called a body book.
    Which might or might not save Landau’s hide, depending on how smart the boy was, and how much they knew, and how they felt about their wives that day.
    But for the long night ahead of him, and for the dawn raid when they kicked the door down and burst in on him with drawn pistols and shouted, ‘All right, Landau, give us the notebooks!’ – for that happy moment, the kit wouldn’t do at all. ‘Notebooks, Officer? Notebooks? Oh, you mean that bunch of junk some loony Russian beauty pressed on me at the fair tonight. I think you’ll probably find them in the rubbish basket, Officer, if the maid hasn’t emptied it for once in her life.’
    For this contingency also, Landau now meticulously set the scene. Removing the notebooks from the pocket of the history kit, he placed them artistically in the wastepaper basket exactly as if he had flung them there in the rage he had felt when he had taken his first look. To keep them company, he tossed in his surplus trade literature and brochures, as well as a couple of useless farewell gifts he had received: the thin volume of yet another Russian poet, a tin-backed blotter. As a final touch, he added a pair of undarned socks that only your rich Westerner throws away.
    Once again I must marvel, as later we all did, at Landau’s untutored ingenuity.
    Landau did not go out and play that night. He endured the familiar imprisonment of his Moscow hotel room. From his window he watched the long dusk turn to darkness and the dim lights of the city reluctantly brighten. He made himself tea in his little travelling kettle and ate a couple of fruit bars from his iron rations. He dwelt gratefully upon the most rewarding of his conquests. He smiled ruefully at others. He braced himself for pain and solitude and summoned up his hard childhood to help him. He went through the contents of his wallet and his briefcase and his pockets and took out everything that was particularly private to him which he would not wish to answer for across a bare table – a hot letter a little friend sent him years ago that could still revive his appetites, membership of a certain video-by-mail club that he belonged to. His first instinct was to ‘burn them like in the movies’ but he was restrained by the sight of the smoke detectors in the ceiling, though he’d have laid any money they didn’t work.
    So he found a paper bag and, having torn up everything very small, he put the pieces in the bag, dropped the bag out of the window and saw it join the rubbish in the courtyard. Then he stretched himself out on the bed and watched the dark go by. Sometimes he felt brave, sometimes he was so scared that he had to drive his fingernails into his palms to hold himself together. Once he turned on the television set, hoping for nubile girl gymnasts, which he liked. But instead he got the Emperor himself telling his bemused children for the umpteenth time that the old order had no clothes. And when Spikey Morgan, half drunk at best, telephoned from the bar of the National, Landau kept him on the line for company till old Spikey fell asleep.
    Only once and at his lowest point did it cross Landau’s mind to present himself at the British Embassy and seek the assistance of the diplomatic bag. His momentary weakness angered him. ‘Those flunkeys?’ he asked himself in scorn. ‘The ones who sent my dad back to Poland? I wouldn’t trust them with a picture postcard of the Eiffel Tower, Harry.’
    Besides, that wasn’t what she had asked him to do.
    In the morning he dressed himself for his own