He went to the door. “I’ll come back in an hour.”
She said, “You’re trying to get away from me.” She held his arm, looking up at him, wanting to make a scene.
“I’ll come back. Maybe not till later. Maybe this evening. But if I do …”
“Yes?”
“It will be dangerous. I shall have to … do something here. Something dangerous.”
She kissed him, a light, silly kiss. “I like danger,” she said.
“Four hours,” Johnson said. “If he’s still alive.”
“Of course he’s alive,” Avery said angrily. “Why do you talk like that?”
Haldane interrupted. “Don’t be an ass, Avery. It’s a technical term. Dead or live agents. It has nothing to do with his physical condition.”
Leclerc was drumming his fingers lightly on the table.
“He’ll be all right,” he said. “Fred’s a hard man to kill. He’s an old hand.” The daylight had revived him apparently.
He glanced at his watch. “What the devil’s happened to that courier, I wonder?”
Leiser blinked at the soldiers like a man emerging from the dark. They filled the cafes, gazed into shop-windows, looked at the girls. Trucks were parked in the square, their wheels thick with red mud, a thin surface of snow on their hoods. He counted them and there were nine. Some had heavy couplings at the rear for pulling trailers; some a line of Cyrillic script on their battered doors, or the imprint of unit insignia and a number. He noted the emblems of the drivers’ uniforms, the color of their shoulder-boards; they came, he realized, from a variety of units.
Walking back to the main street he pushed his way into a cafe and ordered a drink. Half a dozen soldiers sat disconsolately at a table, sharing three bottles of beer. Leiser grinned at them; it was like the encouragement of a tired whore. He lifted his fist in a Soviet salute and they watched him as if he were mad. He left his drink and made his way back to the square; a group of children had gathered around the trucks, and the drivers kept telling them to go away.
He made a tour of the town, went into a dozen cafes, but no one would talk to him because he was a stranger. Everywhere the soldiers sat or stood in groups, aggrieved and bewildered, as if they had been roused to no purpose.
He ate some sausage and drank a Steinhager, walked to the station to see if anything was going on. The same man was there, watching him, this time without suspicion, from behind his little window; and somehow Leiser knew, though it made no difference, that the man had told the police.
Returning from the station, he passed a cinema. A group of girls had gathered around the photographs and he stood with them, pretending to look. Then the noise came, a metallic, irregular drone, filling the street with the piping rattling of engines, metal and war. He drew back into the cover of the foyer, saw the girls turn and the ticket seller stand up in her box. An old man crossed himself; he had lost one eye, and wore his hat at an angle. The tanks rolled through the town; they carried troops with rifles. The gun barrels were too long, marked white with snow. He watched them pass, then made his way across the square quickly.
She smiled as he came in; he was out of breath.
“What are they doing?” she asked. She caught sight of his face. “You’re afraid,” she whispered, but he shook his head. “You’re afraid,” she repeated.
“I killed the boy,” he said.
He went to the basin, examined his face with the great care of a man under sentence. She followed him, clasped him around the chest, pressing herself against his back. He turned and seized her, wild, held her without skill, forced her across the room. She fought him with the rage of a daughter, calling some name, hating someone, cursing him, taking him, the world burning and only they alive; they were weeping, laughing together, falling, clumsy lovers clumsily triumphant, recognizing nothing but each himself, each for that moment completing lives half-lived, and for that moment the whole damned dark forgotten.