"I walked home. I opened the front gate. I saw shadows in the window. In the living room."

"Through the net curtains?"

"They had the door to the kitchen open. They were moving back and forth across the doorway."

"So more than one."

"Two. Maybe three. They were light."

"Light _shadows?__"

"Light on their feet. She saw me. The woman did. Girl. She was wearing a sort of catsuit. I saw her head turn, then she must have dived for the floor and crawled into the kitchen. The door to the back garden was open." Kate could be giving evidence in court, she's so precise. "I ran round the back in case I could see them. A van was driving away but I was too late to get its number."

"What sort of van?"

"Green. Black windows in the back doors."

"Mirrors?"

"I didn't look. What do mirrors matter? It was just a glimpse, for God's sake. For all I know the van had nothing to do with it."

"Old van or new one?"

"Ted, stop interrogating me, will you? If it was conspicuously old or new, I would have said so. It was neither."

"What did the police say?"

"They put me through to the CID and the sergeant asked if anything was stolen. I said no. He said they'd come when they could."

They go into the living room. The desk is an antique kneehole job they bought for a song from a crook in Camden Town. Des says it's so hot he's surprised it hasn't caught fire. It has a flat top with imitation leather and a pillar of drawers on either side. The left pillar is Mundy's, the right pillar is Kate's. He pulls open his three drawers, one after the other, snap, snap.

Old typescripts, some with their rejection slips still attached.

Jottings for a new play he has in mind.

The file marked FILE that contains his mother's letters to the Major and the minutes of the Major's court-martial and the group photograph of the victorious Stanhopes.

Displaced, all of them.

Displaced, but not disordered. Or almost not.

Shoved back, _almost__ in their right sequence, by somebody who wanted to make them look as though they hadn't been disturbed in the first place.

Kate is watching him, waiting for him to speak.

"Mind?" he asks.

She shakes her head. He pulls open the top drawer on her side. She is breathing heavily. He fears she may faint. He should know her better: she's angry.

"The bastards put them back upside down," she says.

Her sixth-form exercise books go in the bottom drawer because it's the deepest, she explains in clipped sentences. Work to be corrected by Wednesday goes on top of work to be corrected by Friday. That's why I dish out color-coded exercise books to my students. Yellow, you're a Wednesday student. Red, you're a Friday. The bloody burglars turned them upside down.

"But why would a bunch of Trots be interested in your students' essays?" Mundy reasons.

"They wouldn't. They were going for Labor Party stuff."

When the police arrive at ten o'clock the same night, they are not much help.

"Know what my wife does, sir, when she's in the family way?" the sergeant asks over the cup of tea Mundy makes, while Kate puts her feet up in the bedroom.

"I'm afraid I don't."

"Eats the toilet soap. I have to hide it or she'd be blowing bubbles all night. Still, I suppose we could arrest everyone with a green van with black windows. That would be a start."

Watching the police drive away, Mundy privately debates whether to make use of the emergency number Amory has given him, but what does he hope to gain? The sergeant, though odious, was right. Thousands of people own green vans.

Kate's right. It was the Trots.

It was a couple of thieving kids, and she disturbed them before they could take anything.

It was a normal incident in a normal life, and the only thing that isn't normal is me.

8.

"YOU ARE TIRED, Teddy?" asks the ponderous, ginger-headed Lothar, ordering up another round of pilsners.

"Oh, just a bit stretched, Lothar, nothing terminal," Mundy confesses. "We did a lot of dancing today," he adds, to overappreciative laughter.

"Tired but happy," Frau Doktor Bahr suggests primly from the head of the table, and her young neighbor, the intellectual Horst, seconds this.

Sasha says nothing. He sits, chin in hand, frowning into the middle distance. He has pulled his beret low over his brow, perhaps for irony. It's their second evening together, so Mundy is familiar with the pecking order. Lothar is Sasha's minder. Horst, the blond intellectual, is Lothar's minder. The stern Frau Doktor Bahr from the East German Embassy here in Prague is minding all three of them. And all four of them are minding Ted Mundy.

The third day of the Prague Festival of Dance has just ended. They are sitting in the cellar bar of a conference hotel at the edge of town, a Soviet-style monster of glass and steel, but the cellar is supposed to re-create Hapsburg times, with fat stone pillars and frescoes of knights and maidens. A few late drinkers sit at other tables, a few girls drink cola out of straws, still hoping to catch a foreigner. In a far corner a middle-aged couple are drinking tea, and they have been drinking the same tea in the same tender way for half an hour.

_You'll be followed and that's par for the course, Edward. It will be professional surveillance, so the important thing for you is not to be aware of it. They'll shake out your room, so don't be too tidy or they'll think you're playing games with them. If they make eye contact with you by mistake, best to smile vaguely and tell yourself you bumped into them at a party somewhere. Your most convincing weapon is your innocence. With me?__ With you, Nick.

In the last seventy-two hours Mundy has sat through bone-wearying displays of sword dancing, folk dancing, tribal dancing, country dancing and Morris dancing. He has clapped his hands off for Cossacks, Georgians, Palestinians doing the _dabke,__ and numberless enactments of scenes from _Swan Lake,__ _Coppelia__ and _Nutcracker__ in a packed baroque theater with no ventilation. He has drunk warm white wine in half a dozen national tents, and in the British tent he has bantered with the usual good chaps and dutiful wives, including a chubby first secretary with circular spectacles who says he once opened the batting for Harrow and Mundy bowled him out first ball, which is the agreed recognition signal. He has been plagued by loudspeaker systems that don't work, scenery going to the wrong theater and stars refusing to perform because there is no hot water in their hotel. And betweenwhiles he has grudgingly allowed himself to be wooed by Sasha and his outriders. Last night they wanted him to go with them to a private party in town and when Mundy declined, saying he must tend his flock, Lothar suggested a nightclub. Mundy declined that too.

_Make the buggers sweat for you, Edward. The only reason they've come to Prague is to get inside your knickers. But you don't know that. You don't know anything except Sasha's your old buddy. You're mixed up, unhappy, drinking a bit, a loner. You're all over them one minute and cagey the next. That's the way Sasha's sold you to them, and that's who he wants you to be.__ Thus Nick Amory, Ted Mundy's drama coach, at the Edinburgh School of Deportment, relaying the stage directions of Sasha our Producer.

Lothar is trying to draw Mundy out, assisted by Frau Doktor Bahr. They tried to draw him out last night, at this same table and at this same hour, and in the same contrived atmosphere of weary geniality. In the low moments of his drinking curve, Mundy has been monosyllabic. In high moments he has regaled them with embroidered tales of his anticolonial past and, to the huge amusement of his audience and his own secret shame, Ayah's enormous bottom. He has described the horrors of a bourgeois English education and let slip the magic name of Dr. Hugo Mandelbaum, the man who first got him thinking, but nobody has taken him up on it. They won't, of course. They're spies.

"So what do you think about England's great lurch to the right, Teddy? Does Mrs. Thatcher's brand of belligerent capitalism alarm you a little, or are you a natural friend of the free market economy?"

The question is so cumbersome, and Lothar's archness so insinuating, that Mundy disdains a reasoned reply.

"Not a _lurch,__ old boy. Not even a twitch, actually. They've changed the name on the shop front, and that's about all that's happened."

Frau Doktor Bahr manages her banalities better. "But if America is going to the right, and Britain also, and the right is gaining ground all over Western Europe, don't you shudder a little for the future of world peace?"

Horst, who fancies himself an expert on all things British, needs to parade his knowledge.

"Could the mine closures lead to actual _revolution,__ Teddy?--somewhat on the lines of the hunger marches of the thirties maybe, then spinning totally out of control? Can you give us a few tips about how the British man in the street is reacting at the moment?"

They are getting nowhere, and must be aware of it. Mundy is yawning and Lothar is about to order up another round of drinks when Sasha emerges like a jack-in-the-box from his stupor.

"Teddy."

"What?"

"This is total bullshit, actually."

"What is?"

"Have you brought your bicycle?"

"Of course I haven't."

Suddenly Sasha is standing, hands wide, appealing to all of them. "He's a cyclist, didn't you know? He's crazy. You know what this crazy man did in West Berlin? We rode bicycles round the streets. We spray-painted the old Nazi houses, then rode like hell to get away from the pigs. And I had to go with him--me, with my legs, on a bloody bicycle!--to look after him. Teddy organized it all. He was a genius. Weren't you, Teddy? Are you trying to pretend you have forgotten?"

Mundy's hand is rising to hide a rueful smile. "Of course I haven't. Don't be bloody silly. Best fun we ever had," he asserts, determinedly sharing the willful distortion of history.

_Sasha's toughest job will be getting you on your own,__ Amory is saying. _He'll work on it but you're going to have to help him. You're a restless sod, remember? Always wanting to go for a walk, run round the park, jump on a bike.__ "Teddy. We have a date tomorrow," Sasha is announcing excitedly. "Three o'clock outside the hotel. In Berlin we did nighttime. Here we do daytime."

"Sasha. Honestly. For God's sake. I've got a hundred and six neurotic British artists to worry about. I can't make three o'clock or any other o'clock. You know that."

"Artists survive. We don't. We get out of town, the two of us. I steal the bicycles, you bring the whiskey. We talk about God and the world, like the old days. Fuck it."

"Sasha--listen to me."

"What?"

Mundy is pleading now. He's the one person at the table who isn't smiling. "I've got modern ballet all afternoon. And I've got the British Embassy reception in the evening and mad dancers round the clock. I can't just--"

"You are being a total arsehole as usual. Modern ballet is pretentious shit. Skip the ballet, I'll get you back to town in time for the Queen. Don't argue."

Sasha has carried the company. Frau Doktor Bahr is beaming her blessing, Lothar is chuckling, Horst is saying he will come too, but Lothar is wagging his finger in an avuncular way and saying these boys deserve a bit of time on their own.

_And the great thing about bicycles, Edward, is they're hell on wheels to follow.__ _Hotel rooms are not sanctuaries, Edward. They're glass boxes. They're where they watch you and search you and listen to you and smell you.__ And marriage is not a sanctuary either, or not for the British Council has-been, closet radical and resentful failed writer who haunts the basements of the arts bureaucracy. His phone calls to Kate must reflect this. First thing this morning he filled in a laborious application form at hotel reception: foreign number to be called, foreign party to be spoken to, purpose of foreign call, proposed duration of foreign call, practically the content of the foreign call in advance--which strikes him as pretty bloody silly, seeing that they'll all be listening in, and ready to cut him off if the talk gets dirty. Crouched on the bed, with the silent phone beside him, he discovers he is shivering. When the phone finally rings it screams so loud he imagines it's about to commit suicide by hurling itself off the bed. Speaking into the mouthpiece, he notices that his voice is higher and slower. Kate notices it too, and wonders whether he is ill.

"No fine, really. Just a bit danced out. Miranda's being an absolute bitch, as usual."

Miranda his boss, the regional supervisor. He asks after the baby. It's kicking, she says. Jolly hard too: maybe one day he'll play football for Doncaster. Maybe one day she will, he agrees in a lackluster voice, but the joke, like Mundy, sounds flat. And how are all the drama kings and queens of St. Pancras? he asks. They're all fine, thank you, she replies, irritated by his low spirits. And has Ted met anyone _nice,__ she asks pointedly, or done anything _amusing?__ Well. Not really.

_You don't mention Sasha to her__ _EVER___,__ Amory is saying. _Sasha belongs to your secret heart. Maybe you've got a crush on him, maybe you want to keep him to yourself. Maybe you're already thinking exactly what they hope you're thinking: that you want to jump over the Wall and sign up with them.__ Mundy rings off and sits at the table, head in hands. He is acting "Christ, life is awful"--but it is. He loves Kate. He loves his family-in-the-making.

I'm doing this so that our unborn child and other people's unborn children will be able to sleep at night, he tells himself with one voice.

He goes to bed and doesn't sleep. He doesn't expect to.

Five a. m. Cheer up. There's hope just around the corner. In a couple of hours our first ballerina of the day will be throwing her tutu out of her crib because her hair dryer doesn't work.

For Mundy, Sasha has obtained a giant-sized English policeman's black bicycle complete with a basket in front of the upright handlebars. For himself, a child's version of the same thing. Side by side they ride between tramlines to a suburban railway station at the edge of town. Sasha wears his beret, Mundy an anorak over his one good suit, and his trousers tucked into his socks. The day is beautiful, the city brave and careworn, its Hapsburg glory crumbling in the sun. There are few cars. The people walk warily, not looking at one another. At the station the two friends board a three-coach local train. Sasha insists they sit in the guard's van with their bicycles. The straw reeks of cow manure. Sasha is still wearing his beret. He unbuttons his jacket to show Mundy a tape recorder in the inside pocket. Mundy nods, to say I understand. Sasha makes small talk. Mundy does the same: Berlin, girls, old times, old friends. The train stops at every lamppost. They are entering deep countryside. The recorder is voice-activated. Its pin light goes out when things are quiet.

At a village with an unpronounceable name they unload their bicycles onto the platform. With Mundy practically freewheeling and Sasha pedaling for all he is worth they bump down an unpaved road past horse-drawn carts and flat fields dotted with red barns. Only the occasional motor-tricycle or truck overtakes them. They draw up at the roadside for Sasha to consult a map. A straight yellow track makes an avenue between tall fir trees. They advance in single file, Sasha in his beret leading. They enter a clearing pocked with mining grottoes overgrown with moss, sawn logs and bits of ancient brickwork. Large bearded irises nod in the breeze. Dismounting, Sasha wheels his bicycle up and down the mounds until he finds one that he likes, lays the bicycle in the grass and waits for Mundy to do the same. Reaching inside his jacket, Sasha extracts the tape recorder and holds it in his palm. His small talk acquires a sneering and impatient edge.

"So you are content with your lot, Teddy," he says, watching the pin light flicker. "That is good news, I would say. You have a mortgage, a wife and a petit bourgeois in the pipeline, and you are leaving the revolution for the rest of us to fight. There was a time when we despised such people. Now you are one of them."

Mundy the ham actor is quick to spot his cue: "That's not a fair description of who I am, Sasha, and you know it!" he protests angrily.

"Then what are you?" Sasha demands, unyielding. "Tell me what you are, for once, not what you are not!"

"I am who I always was," Mundy retorts hotly, as the tape turns in its window. "No more and no less. What you see isn't always what you get. Not with you, not with me. Not even with your bloody Communist Party."

It's a radio play. Mundy's lines sound to him like bad improvisation, but Sasha seems content with them. The pin light is out, the tape has stopped turning, but as a precaution Sasha ejects it, drops it into one pocket and the recorder into another. Only then does he tear off his beret, let out a great cathartic cry of "_Teddy!__" and fling up his arms for the unequal embrace.

The ethics of the Edinburgh School of Deportment now require Mundy to ask a number of routine questions of his field agent before they settle down to the business of the day, and Mundy the natural has them waiting in his head: _What is the cover for this meeting?__ _What is the fallback if we are interrupted__?

_Do you have any immediate anxieties?__ _When shall we next meet?__ _Are you sitting comfortably, or do you see people you recognize, and did they follow you here?__ But the School of Deportment can go hang. Sasha's uncensored monologue is sweeping such mundane considerations aside. He is glaring across the lumpy clearing into the distant blue pines, seeing nothing. Confession and revelation pour from him in a stream of outrage and despair.

"In the months and years after you were removed from West Berlin I entered a total darkness. What use were a few burning cars and broken windows? Our movement was inspired not by the will of the oppressed classes but by the liberal guilt of the affluent. In my personal turmoil I considered the miserable alternatives available to me. According to our anarchist writers, world conflict should lead to creative chaos. If such chaos is intelligently exploited, a free society will emerge. But when I looked about me, I was forced to accept that the preconditions of creative chaos did not exist, neither did the intelligent exploiters. Chaos presupposes a vacuum of power, yet bourgeois power was gaining everywhere, and so was the military might of America, for whom West Germany was by now the arsenal and craven ally in the world war that appeared inevitable. As to the intelligent exploiters, they were too busy making profits and driving Mercedes cars to avail themselves of the opportunities we had created for them. In the same period the Herr Pastor also rose to rank and influence among the fascistic elite of Schleswig-Holstein. From the politics of the pulpit, he had moved to the politics of the pseudo-liberal ballot box. He joined secret right-wing societies and was admitted to certain very select Masonic committees. There was talk of putting him into Parliament in Bonn. His success inflamed my hatred of fascism. His American-inspired adoration of the God of Wealth goaded me to the point of dementia. My future, if I was to remain in American-owned West Germany, was a desert of compromise and frustration.

"If we are to build a better world than this, I asked myself, where do we turn, whose actions do we support, how do we frustrate the endless march of capitalist-imperialist aggression? You know I have the Lutheran curse. Conviction without action has no meaning for me. Yet what is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not the other? I spent much time considering the example of my good friend Teddy. You became my virtue. Imagine. Like you, I had no conscious faith, but if I acted, then the faith would surely follow. After that, I would believe because I had acted. Perhaps that is how faith is born, I thought: by action and not by contemplation. It was worth a try. Anything was better than stasis. You had sacrificed yourself for me without thought of reward. My seducers--you have met one--were wise enough to appeal to me in the same terms. No inducement would have persuaded me. But offer me a long stony path with a single light shining at the end of it, and throw in the opportunity to reverse the hypocrisies of the Herr Pastor, and perhaps I shall listen to you."

He has left the mound and is hobbling impatiently round it with his strange, uneven stride, stepping over the bicycles, gesturing with open hands while he talks, clamping his elbows to his sides as if there is no room to raise them. He is describing covert meetings in apartments in West Berlin, furtive border crossings to safe houses in the East, and solitary lost weekends in the Kreuzberg attic while he struggles to reach his great decision, and his erstwhile comrades slip away to permanent confinement in the open prisons of materialism.

"By the end of many days and nights of deliberation and with the aid of my tireless and by no means stupid seducers, not to mention a good few bottles of vodka, I had reduced my dilemma to two simplistic questions. I described them to you in my letters. Question one: Who is the ultimate class enemy? Answer, unhesitatingly, American military and corporate imperialism. Question two: How do we realistically oppose this enemy? Is it by relying on the enemy to destroy himself, but only after he has destroyed the world? Or is it by swallowing our objections to certain negative tendencies on the part of international communism and allying ourselves with the one great socialist movement that, for all its blemishes, is capable of bringing the victory?" A long silence, which Mundy does not feel inclined to interrupt. Theory, as Sasha has observed, was never his thing. "Do you know why my name is Sasha?"

"No."

"Because it is the Russian abbreviation of Alexander. When the Herr Pastor brought me to the West, he wished for reasons of respectability to rechristen me Alexander. I refused. By keeping my name Sasha, I was able to demonstrate to myself that I had left my heart in the East. One night, after many hours of discussion with my seducers, I agreed to make the same demonstration with my feet."

"The Professor?"

"Was one of them," Sasha confirms.

"Professor what of?"

"Corruption," Sasha snaps.

"Why did they want you so badly?" This is not Amory asking, this is Mundy wanting to know how they both got here. "Why did you matter to them so much? Why go to all this trouble, just for Sasha?"