The Blind Spy (2 page)

At the end of the alley, or perhaps it was at the end of the one after that, he saw daylight and headed towards it. He took a deep breath. He was approaching the moment. It was time to finish his business here and get back to the capital before he was missed. He certainly didn’t want to have to answer questions from his station head, the truculent and volatile KGB Colonel Resnikov, and account for his time of absence from Damascus. He needed to be out of here within the hour and back to the capital. Suddenly he began to think more clearly, to take a grip on his usually incisive mind in order to carry through what he had come to do.

And then at last he emerged into the blinding white light of a busy street. The thick heat from which the covered market had protected him hit him like a suffocating mask, wrapping him in its intensity with a physical sensation that was almost like a dull, dryfisted blow. With a muscular forearm bared from the rolled-up sleeve of his white shirt, he wiped his forehead as if to ward off the sweat that hadn’t appeared yet. The heat was an insistent presence that demanded your attention, he thought, took over your thoughts.

He looked up and down. The street was a cacophony of horns and shouting. It was full of donkey carts with car tyres for wheels, and with the occasional cars and trucks that by some miracle still functioned vaguely as they were built to do. Exhaust fumes from a vegetable truck up from the country choked him as the driver pressed down on the throttle and its engine squealed agonisingly by him. The man should check his fan belt, he thought automatically.

The café he was looking for was a few hundred yards away. That was the venue they’d told him, the starting point for his real purpose this morning. He could just see it from the souk’s exit. The men would take him from there. It was their own proposition, this meeting place, to which he’d agreed.

He stopped under a shaded awning before committing himself finally. He had come here against all good regulations, let alone good sense. What if something happened now? What if the men in the café had another agenda? They might try to stick a knife in him, he supposed. But most likely they’d let him go once he gave them the packet in his shirt pocket. It was his conscience, as well as his curiosity, that had brought him here and that was bad trade craft – no trade craft at all, in fact. He was going right out on a limb.

He saw them, three of them, sitting at the edge of the café – they were at a table nearest to the road. He knew only one of them, but guessed the other two were also her brothers. When he approached, warily, they didn’t greet him, but they didn’t look hostile either. Blank faces, cold, dark eyes. Neither trusting nor distrusting. But here they were in a public street. Maybe it would be different when they had him in some hidden place. He trusted, however, that they would take what they could get from him and that they wouldn’t dare to harm a Russian from the embassy. He inspired respect from his physical presence, but at least they knew of his position – despite no actual identification – and it was that which inspired fear. Without a word, the men stood as he approached and indicated that he should follow.

The four of them walked for more than half an hour, away from the market and the ancient citadel of Abraham, past the
hammams
and the
khans
behind their old wooden doors, beyond the poor restaurants and bike repair shops, away from the commercial centre and on to the outskirts of the city.

Once they were clear and had reached a chronically poor residential neighbourhood, they finally turned up a small alley of mud houses and he guessed that it was here where the family house would be. But it was only a guess. Valentin had never been here before. He’d only met the woman once, in fact, that one time when she’d been dancing at the restaurant back in the direction from where they’d walked. She’d been a sudden attraction – he twenty-seven, she nineteen.

She’d danced for the three of them, all Russian intelligence officers up from Damascus for the weekend. When the others had left, he’d stayed, infatuated, lost, overturned by her beauty or by her movements or by the drink and the music – or all of those things.

He remembered now how it had been back then. One minute he’d felt like he’d been walking quietly and relatively enjoyably through life – albeit an Intelligence life of suspicion and paranoia – and the next, he was metaphorically hanging upside down from a tree with a noose around his foot. That had been her effect, he remembered. She’d turned him upside down without warning. He remembered her eyes now, eyes that drew him into a whirlpool that was more of his own imagination than from any physical attribute of hers. She was a professional, after all. She was paid to use her eyes like that, as well as her body. Her charms were directed at everyone she danced for, not just at him. But it was he who had fallen for her.

They’d had sex in a room at the back of the restaurant which she and the other dancers used for changing. It was very sudden, unexpected, they’d hardly removed their clothes. He hadn’t gone to the manager enquiring about her with sex in mind. He’d just wanted to see her. It was a vague, rudderless desire that was more about his fear of never seeing her again than anything else. He was infatuated. But the manager had let it happen either because of the money Valentin had given him to keep quiet, or because he was afraid of these Russians. And the woman – the dancer – why had she let it happen? He didn’t know. She’d been a virgin. Most probably she’d seen in him some kind of salvation from the narrow and ever-shrinking opportunities of her life. And he didn’t even know her name, he realised afterwards. Maybe sex with him had been some desperate throw of the dice on her part, an attempt to change her life for ever.

He looked ahead now, along the alley that wound up a slight dirt hill. The men didn’t seem to be worrying that he wouldn’t follow them. And now the three men and he, trailing behind them, seemed to be approaching the house that was their destination. The movements of her brothers were slowing, their walk kinked a little to the left. He stepped over a pile of loose garbage. The alley was filthy, just like all the others. The smell was high with kerosene and stale, human sweat, rotting vegetables and open drains. Half-naked children and rib-thin cats played in the drain. The women were covered here. The secular state didn’t reach into its dark alleyways. Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to notice him. It was as if he wasn’t there.

Why didn’t he turn around now, leave this place and forget what had happened with the woman? He didn’t even know her name, he thought again with incredulity. Was it really his conscience driving him or was it something else? He knew that most of all it was curiosity. He knew deep down that he wanted just once to see the son he would never see again. And he would pay for that in cash, as if it were his conscience paying. Perhaps then he would be able to forget the whole thing.

They told him to wait outside the broken-down mud house which they’d now reached. They’d be getting rid of the women inside, he supposed, sending them somewhere into the back. Then the one brother whom he knew – or at least had met when he’d made the deal – beckoned him inside. The man didn’t waste any time and pointed into a dark corner of a bare room lit only by a shaft of intense sunlight coming through the half-open door.

‘There it is,’ he said. It was a deliberately brutal statement, Valentin thought; an insult.

Valentin looked to the far side of the room, across a flattened earth floor and into the near darkness. When his eyes had adjusted from the bright whiteness of the light outside, he walked towards a small, low wooden table, the only piece of furniture in the room apart from two home-made wooden chairs. There on the table he saw a crude wooden crib constructed from a vegetable box and in the crib, wrapped in dirty white swaddling clothes, was what he had come to see: his son. ‘It’, the man had called him.

He looked down and saw a small face with dark eyebrows, the eyes tight shut, fingers curled up around them. The baby would be just over twelve weeks old, he thought.

One of the other two men came over and flicked his fingers, his dark eyes angry and wary at the same time. With the relief of a job done, Valentin took the packet from his shirt pocket at last and gave it to him. The man swiftly counted the money, like a trader who is experienced at flicking quickly through bundles of bank notes and assessing their value instantly. He seemed satisfied. Then he looked at Valentin directly in the eyes.

‘Now you take him,’ the man said to him. It was an order.

Valentin looked back at him in surprise, then alarm and finally anger. At first he didn’t understand what the man was saying, but then he realised he’d been right in the first place. It was the man who was gripped by a misunderstanding, not him.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said at last, quickly. ‘The money I’ve given you is to care for the boy. It’s for his mother to look after him. I can’t take him with me. It’s impossible.’

The man shrugged. ‘Either you take him or he will be left,’ he replied implacably.

Was he hearing right? Left? He meant left to die, Valentin realised with disgust. Left on the street for animals and strays to pick at. Or by the side of the road outside the city, or up in the mountains somewhere. ‘The money,’ he repeated precisely and slowly in Arabic. ‘That is what it’s for. To look after the boy.’ He felt himself getting angrier. He realised that he’d like to throttle the man, hit him, knock his teeth out. He felt the gun nudging him to it.

‘He is cursed by God,’ the man said simply.

Valentin looked back at the twelve-week-old boy. What was the man talking about? He unwrapped his son from the filthy cloths and saw a perfectly formed human being. The boy didn’t wake. He saw his tiny chest move with his breath.

‘Why is he cursed by God?’ Valentin said, without betraying his rising anger. He believed they were going to blackmail him for more money, but he had none. It had taken all his wits to get his hands on the local currency as it was.

The man stood beside him and looked down at the boy. ‘He is cursed,’ he said. He shrugged again. ‘God has cursed him,’ he said, as if it were perfectly obvious that this was the reason for not wanting the child, and for killing it.

And now Valentin knew. To these people, any defect in a newborn baby meant that it had been cursed by God – and they would reject the child, reject it with the finality of death. Looking down at the boy he could see no physical defect, however. So the child’s defect must be him – Valentin – he supposed. A foreign father, and out of wedlock, too. Doubly damned. Otherwise the boy looked healthy enough.

Valentin walked back across the room. The other two men were watching him closely. They were afraid, but there were three of them and one of him, and they were in their own home, surrounded by their own people outside in the street. If he’d been on official business in this God-forsaken part of the city, he would have threatened them, drawn the gun concealed under his waistband, but he was here in secret, unknown to his boss. He couldn’t afford a scandal, so he kept himself under control. ‘Where’s his mother?’ Valentin asked finally. ‘I want to see her.’

‘She’s not here,’ the brother he’d met before snapped in reply. ‘That is not part of the bargain,’ he added.

‘Where is she?’

There was silence. He didn’t like to go where his imagination was taking him. He didn’t like to think what had happened to her, what they’d done to her in punishment. If sex with him had been a desperate throw of the dice on her part, it had certainly changed her life. But it was a change that would probably finish it for good, if it hadn’t done so already.

Valentin stopped in the centre of the room and felt the possibilities that faced him diminish. He knew he was beaten. Condemn his son to death, no, that was not possible. ‘What about an orphanage?’ he said suddenly. ‘Where is there an orphanage?’

The men talked among themselves. ‘In Damascus. On Khalabbah Street,’ one said finally.

‘What about here? In Aleppo?’

The men shrugged. Either they didn’t want the boy in Aleppo, or they didn’t know.

Valentin suddenly stopped thinking. ‘Then I’ll take him with me,’ he said. Circumventing thought, the decision was made for him.

A few minutes later he was walking back down the street carrying the live bundle of his son and when he’d reached a paved street he took a private car that willingly converted to a taxi to take him back to Damascus. He was late, later than he’d planned to be, and he told the driver to hurry. It was a long journey by road.

On the way to the capital he ran through what he would have to do. He was clear now in his head; it was his only choice to save his son. But he also wanted to tell someone else, not just to leave the boy abandoned at an orphanage. If one other person knew, he considered, then he would be able leave the country with a clearer mind.

There was one person he thought he might trust – just possibly. It was crazy, he knew that. After all, he was an officer in Soviet foreign intelligence. But he knew that the only person he could trust with the knowledge of his son was the wife of his head of station in Damascus, Natalia Resnikova. She was a good woman, a caring person. He believed she might understand. She was pregnant with a child of her own, after all. It would be born under a year after his son had been born. That is what he decided to do, no matter what the risk.

Having made his decision, the only other thing that preoccupied him on the journey to the capital was that his son didn’t have a name.

When the car reached Damascus, they drove to one of the poorest parts, to the east of city. Behind a concreted area that served as a basketball pitch in a flat, grey suburb on the fringe of the capital, he dismissed the driver. Then he walked until he found Khalabbah Street. The houses were new here – mostly cheap, concrete, barely functional buildings to accommodate the influx of people coming in ever greater numbers from the countryside to work in the city. There was construction work going on over the whole area; cement dust rose in a mist from the rear of a truck, a bulldozer was piling the broken remains of old, destroyed houses into a heap.