'I have the best,' she said huskily,' the best in Novosibirsk. The youngest.'
The heat pressed against my face, sucking the moisture from my eyes and leaving them dry. The smell was the same here as it had been in the other places but with something added, sharp and indefinable, reaching from the lungs into the gut.
'I have Chinese girls,' Marina said.' thirteen, fourteen years old. You should see them. They are like porcelain. I'll show you.'
She picked up a brass bell engraved with dragons, and the sound seemed half -- muted in the stifling air.
'You can have two in a bed,' Marina told me, her small eyes like sparks in the thick folds of her flesh. "Three in a bed, as many as you want. What about a boy? You like variety? Or I have whips here, chains. You like that?'
Perhaps it was stale blood, the sharp iron smell on the air.
I let her go on talking because I wanted to know what my chances were. Mikhail had said this house was the last one in the district and God knew how far we'd have to drive to find the next.
A whore came through the red velvet curtains and stood looking at me, her thick white body wrapped in a soiled nightdress and her coarse dyed hair lying across one shoulder, her lips parted to show the tip of her tongue, her eyes narrowed, fear in them, fear of the gross woman in the chair.
'she can go,' I told Marina. 'I'm not here for that.'
I told her what I was here for.
'You must think I 'm crazy,' she said.
I started at three hundred, implying I would go to five.
A drunk was in there somewhere and a girl was squealing, and the sound pierced the nerves like chalk on a blackboard.
'How do you expect me to do that?' the woman asked me.
'Say it's your birthday. Come on, you're smarter than I am.'
'I would lose my licence,' she said.
'You haven't got a licence. Not for the whips and chains.'
She offered me vodka.
'I haven't got long,' I said. 'One thousand, take it or leave it.' I got up to go.
She watched me, still as a toad. 'Are you on the run?'
'No.'
'You'll have to tell me more about yourself.'
'There's nothing to know. One thousand, cash.'
'Fifteen hundred. I'll do it for that.'
'A thousand's all I have.'
I got as far as the door.
'And suppose I get into trouble with this?' she asked me.
'If you don't know how to keep out of trouble, Marina, nobody does.'
'Let me see the cash.'
She counted it. 'All right.' Her face began creasing, and a wheeze started coming out of her that almost sounded like laughter.' I would have done it for half,' she said, and tears glistened in the folds of flesh.
'I know,' I said, 'but the other five is to make sure you don't cross me.' I went close to her and smelled her foul body smell as I looked into the little black slits of her eyes. 'If you cross me, you fat stinking bitch, I'll see that you croak, they'll find you sitting in this chair like a stuck pig with your throat cut and your blood running under that door and into the street for the dogs to drink.'
I told Mikhail to drive me back to within two city blocks of the safe -- house and check for a usable phone booth on the way.
Ferris answered at once.
'I've got things set up,' I told him.
There was a short silence. He hadn't known, before the phone had rung, that I wasn't already in a red sector at Militia Headquarters and desperate for help.
'I haven't told London,' he said.
He meant he hadn't told London I was going to try getting Tanya Rusakova out of Militia Headquarters. Control would have wanted to talk to me direct on the phone and I didn't have time for that; he would have said no in any case, would have gone through the roof and ordered Ferris to call me in, would have created a strictly monumental fuss, and I'd started moving too fast now for London to block my run; of course Ferris hadn't told them, he knew better than that, he was a seasoned director in the field, and quite possibly the only DIF who was in fact capable of running this particular shadow executive through a mission without calling on London for instructions, because this particular shadow executive is difficult to control -- as Ferris himself has said -- isn't amenable to discipline, so forth, is not your most popular ferret in the Bureau, and that is a bloody shame.
I am a little nervous, my good friend, as perhaps you note.
We are going in very soon now.
It hadn't surprised me when Ferris had said I'd have his full support. He'd had no choice. He's run me before, and through some extremely sticky operations -- Mandarin, Northlight -- and he's learned to read what it says on the bottom line: if I've decided to take a mission into a new direction with some really significant risks attached I 'm not going to back off if the director gets cold feet, I'm going to do it anyway and if I can't do it with his support I'll do it solo. Ferris understands that.
But I felt for him. He wasn't going to get any sleep tonight, and when I signalled him again he would pick up before the second ring.
'What's the score?' he asked me now. His tone was particularly cool, and I heard the control in it.
'I've made contact with Rusakov,' I told him, 'and we've got a tentative rendezvous. There's no time to go into details. Now here it is -- 1 need two support men and two cars. The first one is to pick up Tanya when she leaves Militia Headquarters. The second one is to do a relay.'to take Tanya over from the first one and leave a cold trail.
'Timing?' Ferris asked me.
'I'll come to that. 'I'd have to work it out; it could be two hours from now, three hours, four, midnight, possibly, even as late as that, it'd depend how things went. 'You should deploy the first car just off the square in front of Militia Headquarters, out of sight and in a street with a clear run.' I went over the details with him, told him the car should be parked facing away from the square, told him how I wanted the relay set up, though it wasn't really necessary to spell it out: a relay is a relay and it's designed to do one thing -- to throw off pursuit.
'What else?' Ferris asked me.
'That's all. We just need to get Tanya clear and into your safe keeping.'
'Will you be going with her?'
'No. I'll be making my own way out.'
In a moment, 'When do I send in the support?'