“I was head of the line. Standing by the cab. You have to be careful or you wait an hour, then some asshole down the line takes your fare. So I was watching the doors for the next tourist. Out he comes. Black cassock, tall hat.. I remember thinking: What’s a priest doing in a place like that? He looks up and down the line, then comes straight for me.”
“Alone? Any companion?”
“No. Alone.”
“He gave a name?”
“No, just the address he wanted to go. Paid cash in Rubles.”
“Any conversation?”
“Not a word. Just where he wanted to go, then silence. When we got there he said, ‘Wait here.’ When he came back from the door, he said, ‘How much?’ That was it. Look, guys, I swear I didn’t lay a finger …”
“Enjoy your lunch,” the interrogator said, and pushed his face in the sausage. Then they left.
Colonel Grishin listened to the report impassively. It could mean nothing. The man came out of the doors of the Metropol at half-past eleven. He could be staying there, he could have been visiting, he could have walked right through the lobby from the other entrance. But worth a check.
Grishin maintained a number of informers inside the headquarters building of the Moscow militia. The senior was a major general on the ruling Presidium. The most consistently useful was the senior clerk in Records. For this job the one was too high and the other confined to his rows of shelves. The third was a detective inspector in Homicide, Dimitri Borodin.
The detective entered the hotel just before sundown and asked to see the front office manager, an Austrian who had worked in Moscow for eight years. He flashed his militia pass.
“Homicide?” asked the manager in concern. “I hope nothing has happened to any of our guests.”
“So far as I know, no. Just routine,” said Borodin. “I need to see the complete guest list for three nights ago.”
The manager sat in his office and punched up the information on his computer.
“You want it printed out?” he asked.
“Yes, I like paper lists.”
Borodin began to work his way down the columns. To judge by the names, there were only a dozen Russians among the six hundred guests. The rest were from countries all over Western Europe, plus the United States and Canada. The Metropol was expensive, for visiting tourists and businessmen. Borodin had been told to look for the title Father preceding a guest’s name. He could see none.
“Do you have any priests of the Orthodox Church staying here?” he asked. The manager was startled.
“No, not so far as I am aware. ... I
mean, no one has checked in as such.”
Borodin scanned all the names without success.
“I’ll have to keep the list,” he said at length. The manager was happy to see him go.
It was not until the following morning that Colonel Grishin was able to study the list himself. Just after ten o’clock one of the two stewards at the dacha entered his office with his coffee to find the Head of Security for the UPF pale and shaking.
He asked timorously if the colonel was feeling himself, but was waved away irritably. When he had gone, Grishin looked at his hands on the blotter and tried to stop the shaking. He was no stranger to rage, and when it seized him he came very close to losing control.
The name was on the third page of the printout, halfway down. Dr. Philip Peters, American academic.
He knew that name. For ten years he had guarded that name. Twice, ten years earlier, he had scoured the files of the Immigration Division of the old Second Chief Directorate, to which the Foreign Ministry passed copies of every application for a visa to visit the USSR. Twice he had found that name. Twice he had procured and stared at the photo accompanying the application; the tight gray curls, the smoked glasses hiding the weak eyes that were not weak at all.
In the cellars beneath Lefortovo he had shaken those pictures beneath the noses of Kruglov and Professor Blinov, and they had confirmed this was the man who met them covertly in the lavatory of the Museum of Oriental Art and the crypt beneath the Cathedral of the Assumption in Vladimir.
Many more times than twice he had sworn that if the man who bore that face and pseudonym ever came back to Russia he would settle accounts.
And now he was back. Ten years later he must have thought he could get away with the crass impudence, the insulting arrogance of coming back to the territory ruled by Anatoli Grishin.
He arose, went to a cabinet, and burrowed for an old file. When he had it he extracted another picture, a blowup of a smaller one provided long ago by Aldrich Ames. After the end of the Monakh Committee, a contact in the First Chief Directorate had given it to him as a souvenir. A mocking souvenir. But he had kept it like a treasure.