The Russian Interpreter

They listened. There was no sound from the other side of the door. Proctor-Gould knocked again. Then he kicked, making the heavy door reverberate in its frame. At this the next door but one opened a crack, revealing an inch of pyjama and a sleepy eye.

‘They’re not in,’ said the man, apparently trying not to wake himself up any further by the effort of opening or closing his mouth. ‘So shove off.’

‘Thanks,’ said Manning, as the door shut again. He passed the message on to Proctor-Gould. Proctor-Gould leaned his weight against the door of 67 and pushed.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Manning.

Proctor-Gould went on pushing, grunting a little, scarcely breathing, until his face was visibly dark even in the darkness of the landing.

‘For Christ’s sake, Gordon,’ said Manning, looking round to see if anyone could see them.

Proctor-Gould stopped pushing and got his breath back. Then he stepped back to the other side of the landing, bunched his right shoulder up, and charged at the door, changing his mind at the last moment and waltzing round so that he stopped himself awkwardly against the door with the flat of his hands and his forehead.

‘I think perhaps not,’ he said, rubbing his head. He took his key-ring out of his pocket and tried all the possible-looking keys on it.

‘Gordon, it’s not worth risking it just for the sake of a few books.’

Proctor-Gould put the keys away and took out a tiny pearl-handled penknife, with which he began to prod about in the keyhole. Then, abruptly, he straightened up.

‘Did you say the man said they, plural, were out?’ he asked.

‘I think that’s what he said.’

Proctor-Gould began to peer closely at the lintel, running his hands over the pock-marked wood. Then he gazed about the landing walls.

‘Now what are you up to?’ asked Manning, becoming more indulgent now that it was clear nothing embarrassing was going to occur after all.

‘If there’s more than one person living here they may have left a communal key hidden outside somewhere.’

He got down on his hands and knees and crawled about the filthy landing, testing the skirting-board and the risers of the stairs. Manning began to laugh.

‘I must say, Gordon,’ he said, ‘this display of determination is a new side to your character.’

Proctor-Gould put his face nearer and nearer to the floor, until at last he was squinting along it, with his cheek resting on it.

‘If anyone comes by,’ said Manning, ‘I’ll tell them you’re a Moslem. Your face will certainly be dusky enough.’

Proctor-Gould was quite still.

‘I can see it,’ he said. ‘It’s under the door.’

He crawled across to the door, and ran his hand along the floor in front of it.

‘On a thread,’ he added, finding it, and pulling it until the key slid out. He stood up, and without even stopping to brush the dust off his face and knees, unlocked the door and walked inside.

Manning stayed where he was.

‘Come on,’ said Proctor-Gould. ‘Don’t let’s stand here with the door open.’

‘I don’t want to have anything to do with this …’ began Manning, but he stopped. Someone was coming out of an apartment on the floor above. They both listened. There was the sound of a front door shutting, and of a key being turned in a lock. Then the noise of footsteps descending the stairs. One, two, three … in another six or seven steps the man would reach the semi-landing, turn, and look down on them as they stood, half in and half out of the apartment. Manning stepped inside and shut the door. At once Proctor-Gould locked it behind them.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘the sooner we find the books the sooner we can go.’

25

There was only one room in the apartment. It was about twelve feet wide by fifteen feet long, and it looked out not on the courtyard but a derelict back-street running behind the block, lined with shuttered single-storey buildings which sagged in the middle, and plots of waste land covered with old boxes and rusty oil drums. Against one wall of the room was an unmade bed; in the corner, a primus stove standing on an asbestos sheet, and a dirty frying-pan; under the window a solid mahogany desk, covered with a confusion of books, papers, pencils, protractors and luxuriant pot plants.

There was scarcely any wall to be seen. Almost every inch of it was covered with books, crammed on to thin makeshift shelves which sagged under the weight, giving the room an odd impression of being hung with swagged draperies. On the shelves in front of the books was a confusion of objects for which there was no room anywhere else – framed photographs of people in the fashions of thirty years before, pen-and-ink sketches, a marble bust of Lomonosov, a compass, a cheap icon, a jar of feathers, pebbles, birds’ eggs, pieces of quartz, dried flowers, solid projections of mathematical functions, a metronome, a gramophone with a home-made amplifier and a dusty stack of long-playing records without envelopes. It was a dark, overstuffed, sympathetic room, a young man’s room that had gone to seed. The air smelt of frying and paraffin and sleeping.