The Russian Interpreter

Katya was almost running. However much he hurried, Manning was always a step behind her. He tried to breathe without panting, as if panting were a confession of guilty haste.

The dark street turned, and they merged into a broad, well-lit suburban highway, bordered as far as the eye could see in either direction by grey apartment blocks in various stages of construction, standing as plain and bald as shoe boxes among the desolation of builders’ waste. On two or three of the blocks in the distance there was the glare of arc-lights where a night shift was working. There was no one else about. A car went by at speed. Then there was silence.

They found a bus stop, and Manning persuaded Katerina to wait there while they caught their breath. He hoped their shadower would suppose they had been hurrying for a bus. Katerina was sobbing. Manning offered her his handkerchief.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, pushing it away. ‘Nothing, nothing.’

Over her shoulder he could see the man in the overcoat. In the brighter light of the highway he had dropped back and stopped about a hundred yards away. He appeared to be studying one of the official notice-boards where small advertisements were exhibited.

After a while a bus did in fact appear, creeping towards them with unbelievable slowness out of the gigantic suburban emptiness.

‘Get on this bus, Katya,’ said Manning. ‘I’ll wait behind at the stop. It’s me he’s following, not you. You go straight home, and don’t get in touch with me again until I tell you it’s all right.’

He bundled her aboard like a helpless bag of washing.

‘Good-bye, Katya,’ he said, squeezing her hand. ‘Don’t worry.’

Katya said nothing. Manning saw her through the window as the bus drew away, fumbling with her purse in front of the conductor’s desk, her lower lip still pressed tremblingly outwards and upwards to contain her distress.

30

For some minutes after the bus had gone Manning remained by the stop, uncertain what to do. The man in the overcoat had made no attempt to catch the bus. He was still examining the notice-board a hundred yards away, bending close to decipher the cramped handwriting of the cards. There were just the two of them in the great formal emptiness of the prospect.

Manning shivered. He began to walk slowly along the broad pavement beside the highway in the direction Katya’s bus had gone, back towards the centre of the city. He looked out of the corner of his eye. Unhurriedly, as if reluctant to stop reading, the man in the overcoat was turning away from the notice-board and following him.

Manning had never been followed before, so far as he knew. When he had first arrived in Moscow he had expected it. On his way to meet people whom he felt might have been compromised by a foreign acquaintance he had taken pains to double back on himself, to jump in and out of underground trains at the last moment. It had quickly come to seem very silly.

Now that he knew he was being followed he couldn’t think what to do about it at all. He felt self-conscious about each step. It was like having a load on his back that he couldn’t put down, that made the distance to be walked along the highway seem interminable.

He looked discreetly behind him. The man was still there. Every now and then a car or a lorry would go by along the road, and in the silence that followed he could hear the footsteps, quiet, distinct, unhurried.

He tried to work out why he was being followed. Evidently the authorities were interested in Proctor-Gould’s affairs. What conclusion would they have come to? They would presumably know what had taken place in Proctor-Gould’s room, and no doubt Proctor-Gould’s chauffeur had reported the visits to the public dining-room and Kurumalinskaya Street. But had their bargaining in the dining-room been overheard? Had they been seen in Konstantin’s apartment? What sort of reading of the events could it be that made his movements of interest?

He half-turned his head. The man was still there. No nearer. No farther away.

He felt lonely. His solitude was thrown into relief by being observed. How long had the man been following him? Had he been there even before he had met Katya? Had the man watched him as he looked at the stills outside the cinema on Vorontzovskaya Street and brushed the dandruff off his shoulders? As he stopped in the doorway on Chkalovskaya, took off his shoe, and hopped about while he struggled to push a nail down with a fifty-kopeck piece?