‘Is that a fact?’
‘Only a romantic could wear anything so absurdly wonderful as that black felt hat. But there is more, of course. No bombs in restaurants to blow up women and children. You would shoot a man without hesitation. Welcome the hopeless odds of meeting highly trained soldiers face-to-face.’
Devlin was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. ‘Do you tell me?’
‘Oh, I do, Professor Devlin. You see, I think I recognize you now. The true revolutionary, the failed romantic who didn’t really want it to stop.’
‘And what wouldit be, exactly?’
‘Why, the game, Professor. The mad, dangerous, wonderful game that alone makes life worth living for a man like you. Oh, you may like the cloistered life of the lecture room or tell yourself that you do, but at the first chance to sniff powder…’
‘Can I take time to catch my breath?’ Devlin asked.
‘And worst of all,’ she carried on relentlessly, ‘is your need to have it both ways. To have all the fun, but also to have a nice clean revolution where no innocent bystanders get hurt.’
She sat there, arms folded in front of her in an inimitable gesture as if she would hold herself in, and Devlin said, ‘Have you missed anything out, would you say?’
She smiled tightly. ‘Sometimes I get very wound up like a clock spring and I hold it until the spring goes.’
‘And it all bursts out and you’re into your imitation of Freud,’ he told her. ‘I bet that goes down big over the vodka and strawberries after dinner at old Maslovsky’s summerdasha.’
Her face tightened. ‘You will not make jokes about him.
He has been very good to me. The only father I have known.’ ‘Perhaps,’ Devlin said. ‘But it wasn’t always so.’ She gazed at him angrily. ‘All right, Professor Devlin, we
have fenced enough. Perhaps it is time you told me why you
are here.’
He omitted nothing, starting with Viktor Levin and Tony Villiers in the Yemen and ending with the murder of Billy White and Levin outside Kilrea. When he was finished, she sat there for a long moment without saying anything.
‘Levin said you remembered Drumore and the events surrounding your father’s death,’ Devlin said gently.
‘Like a nightmare, it drifts to the surface of consciousness now and then. Strange, but it is as if it’s happening to someone else and I’m looking down at the little girl on her knees in the rain beside her father’s body.’
‘And Mikhail Kelly or Cuchulain as they call him? You remember him?’
‘Till my dying day,’ she said flatly. ‘It was such a strange face, the face of a ravaged young saint and he was so kind to me, so gentle, that was the strangest thing of all.’
Devlin took her arm. ‘Let’s walk for a while.’ They started along the path and he asked, ‘Has Maslovsky ever discussed those events with you?’
‘No.’
Her arm under his hand was going rigid. ‘Easy, girl dear,’ he said softly. ‘And tell me the most important thing of all. Have you ever tried to discuss it with him?’
‘No, damn you!’ She pulled away, turning, her face full of passion.
‘But then, you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?’ he said. ‘That would be opening a can of worms with a vengeance.’
She stood there looking at him, holding herself in again. ‘What do you want of me, Professor Devlin? You want me to defect like Viktor? Wade through all those thousands of photos in the hope that I might recognize him?’
‘That’s a reasonable facsimile of the original mad idea. The IRA people in Dublin would never let the material they’re holding out of their own hands, you see.’
‘Why should I?’ She sat on a nearby bench and pulled him down. ‘Let me tell you something. You make a big mistake, you people in the West, when you assume that all Russians are straining at the leash, anxious only for a chance to get out. I love my country. I like it there. It suits me. I’m a respected artist. I can travel wherever I like, even in Paris. No KGB – no men in black overcoats watching my every move. I go where I please.’