The Russian Interpreter

He went on looking; it upset and offended him to think that this intelligent and coherent library had been assembled by a petty criminal. Perhaps it was all stolen property.

Among a small selection of books on Borodin and Glinka he came across a copy of A Hero of Our Time. An odd place for it to be – particularly since there was another copy of it among the rest of Lermontov’s works. It occurred to him that he had passed two separate copies of An Economic History of the R.S.F.S.R. in different places. A moment later he saw The Behaviour of Aerofoils in Lateral Turbulence for the second time round, and two copies of The Nimzovich Defence.

Puzzled, he stared at the spines of the two Nimzovich Defences. They seemed to be the same edition. The only difference between them was that one was in a dust-jacket and one was not. He looked back to the two copies of The Behaviour of Aerofoils. Again, they were the same edition. Again, the only difference was that one was dust-jacketed and one was not.

He saw the explanation suddenly and completely, as if it had been held up on a card in front of him. He took out the copy of The Behaviour of Aerofoils with the dust-jacket and opened it. Inside the jacket was a copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems.

‘One of yours?’ asked Manning.

‘Ah!’ said Proctor-Gould.

They began to pull out all the other dust-jacketed books they could see on the shelves one after another, throwing them down on the floor if the jackets did not conceal volumes belonging to Proctor-Gould, until they had recovered some twenty books.

‘I wonder where the suitcase is?’ said Manning.

‘Somewhere on that waste lot outside the window, I should think.’

‘Any more to come?’ asked Manning. ‘I think it’s about time we left.’

‘There should be one or two. What’s that one you’ve got there?’

It was the Proceedings of the Institute of Civic Studies. Proctor-Gould took it out of Manning’s hands and flicked through it.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s call it a day.’

‘Just a moment,’ said Manning. He put his hand into the gap left by the Proceedings and pulled out something which had been concealed behind the row of books. It was a tin of Nescafé.

They both stared at it without a word. Then Manning pulled out all the other books on the shelf. There, lined up against the wall at the back, were four more tins of Nescafé.

‘You lost six, didn’t you?’ asked Manning.

‘She brought one back.’

They picked up the tins and examined them. One of them was almost empty, as it had been when it disappeared from Proctor-Gould’s room. The others were still full. But they had all been opened and unsealed.

‘What do you make of it?’ asked Manning.

Proctor-Gould shrugged.

‘I suppose he opened them to make sure they were genuine.’

Manning thought.

‘Would you have opened them,’ he said, ‘if you’d been buying them?’

‘I might.’

‘You wouldn’t, Gordon. Not if you’d wanted to sell them again.’

‘If I had a suspicious nature …’

‘You might have opened one at random as a sample, Gordon. But not all of them.’

Proctor-Gould fixed Manning with his great brown gaze.

‘What’s your explanation then?’ he asked.

‘I think he was looking for something.’

‘Looking for something? What?’

‘I don’t know, Gordon. Do you?’

Proctor-Gould went on gazing at Manning for some moments. But the focus of his eyes shifted, so that he seemed to be looking right through Manning’s head at the wall beyond. Finally a great sigh heaved his shoulders up and dropped them again.

‘No, Paul,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’

There was a conclusion about another matter that the tins suggested to Manning. He caught Proctor-Gould’s eye.

‘I wonder if you’re thinking what I’m thinking,’ he said.

‘What about, Paul?’

‘Who the girl is who shares Konstantin’s room.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Proctor-Gould. He sighed again. ‘Yes, that did occur to me.’

‘No mystery about her any longer.’

‘No.’

‘Nor where she’s been for the past few weeks.’

‘I suppose not.’

Proctor-Gould picked up the single nylon stocking and rubbed it softly between finger and thumb, then put it in his pocket. He noticed Manning watching him.

‘She’s probably looking for it,’ he said.

26

They staggered along Kurumalinskaya Street with their arms full of books until they found a taxi, and drove to one of the big department stores, where they bought another suitcase to put the books in. Then they took the bus to the Kiev Station, and deposited the suitcase in the left luggage office.

‘Will you keep the ticket, Paul?’ asked Proctor-Gould. ‘Now that we’ve got things straight again I don’t want to take any more chances.’

When Manning had folded the ticket away in his wallet he looked up and found that Proctor-Gould was gazing at him, his head a little on one side, so that he could just touch the lobe of his ear with the tip of his finger.

‘It’s a strange business,’ said Proctor-Gould.