"Only one thing surprises me any more," she explained, "and that's the things people admit when they're pissed."

I'd almost sighed. The things people confessed, the deepest secrets of their souls, had long since ceased to amaze me.

This I knew for certain: Richard Lisle would kill.

Was I going to wait for the event?

I went to London. Rosemary Dawsett had operated in Battersea, and so to Battersea I went, back into the old smoke-filled haunts hemmed in by smoke-drenched streets. My joining the secret service was as much about their training and the intellectual challenge as any real desire to learn their tales. I put their skills to use now, learned to be grey, a non-event at the back of the room. I observed Rosemary picking up her clients with the delicacy of a torpedo in an oil tanker and felt an odd pull in the pit of my stomach, remembering what had been between us before. Money, I knew, had been between us before, but in loneliness it can become easy to romanticise these things. I hunted out Richard Lisle and watched him watching. He was still several years away from his first murder, a young man with, perhaps, an uncomfortable manner about him, but nothing which suggested to the casual eye what he would become. He was even vaguely pleasant. He slept with the prostitutes and paid them reliably, had a reputation as a decent lad albeit a slightly odd one. His work colleagues were friendly acquaintances without being friends, and on breaking into his flat in Clapham and examining its contents, I found no black pictures of death, instruments of pain, signs of torture or organic remains. The most unpleasant thing about his flat was the lingering after-smell of corned beef and onion. His radio was tuned to the BBC Home Service, and what few magazines and books he had seemed largely themed around the joys of country living. I could easily picture him, a retired man of sixty-something, walking through gentle countryside in sensible boots, a dog bounding along merrily at his side, before calling in at the local pub, where everyone could call him Rich or Dick or Dicky, and the landlord would always be sure to pour him a proper pint. I see this so easily, almost as easily as I could see the knife in his hand cut through the smog before it sliced into my body.

Yet he had not done this yet.

Could even Richard Lisle be saved?

The voice of Vincent, my sometime student, as we sat together in my study in Cambridge, drinking whisky.

"The question you must ask yourself is this: will the good you do the other man by helping him overcome his problemawhatever that may beagout, let's sayawill the help you do to the other man in overcoming his gout exceed the harm, exhaustion and general sense of distaste that you incur to yourself in helping him? I know it doesn't sound very noble, Harry, but then neither does damaging yourself for the sakes of others, as you will then require fixing, and others will be damaged in the attempt, and so it goes on and on and on, and frankly everyone ends up a worse mess than they were to begin with." A pause while he considered his own world view, before adding, "Besides, gout? Are you really going to help someone get through gout?"

Two weeks later I followed Richard Lisle to the home of Rosemary Dawsett. He stayed for an hour and emerged somewhat less groomed and rather content. She stood in the door and smiled at him as he departed into the dark, and the next day I bought a gun.

Chapter 38.

I'd never killed in cold blood before.

Sitting in Richard Lisle's apartment on a winter's night in 1948 when the ice was beginning to scratch its teeth across the inside of the window, waiting for him to come home, I knew that I would be perfectly capable of pulling the trigger. My anxiety, therefore, was not so much as to whether I could commit the deed, but as to how confident I was of this fact. It is not so far from such a state of mind to absolute sociopath, I reflected. Would it be appropriate to wail? To sob? To bite my lip, to acquire perhaps a nervous twitch? I hoped that my body, if not my mind, would at least have the good grace to demonstrate some psychosomatic disorder, some unconscious manifestation of guilt at the deed I was about to commit. I spent the long waiting hours sitting in the silence and the dark, reproaching myself for my lack of self-reproach. A self-defeating exercise, but even when the logical absurdity of my own thought processes became apparent to me, I was rather annoyed that even this slim manifestation of conscience was so intellectual. I would have far preferred crying into my pillow at night over this calm analysis of my own moral degeneration.

I broke into Richard Lisle's apartment at 9.12 p.m.

He did not come home until 1.17 a.m.

This wasn't particularly uncharacteristic, but nine o'clock had been the optimum time between neighbours settling down and my entry causing an unnecessary disturbance. I kept the light off to avoid questions and waited, gun in my lap, silently in the chair in the living room, which was also the bedroom and, partitioned by a low work surface only, the kitchen too.

He was tipsy without being drunk when he came in.

The sight of me, black leather gloves and small silenced pistol, brought an instant return of struggling sobriety. Rationality, if not intellect, can still overwhelm alcohol when death is on the line.

I should have shot him right then, but the sight of him standing in the door, keys still dangling from their ring, which was threaded over his index finger, a brown woollen vest pulled over his green woollen jumper and face smeared grey from the smog, froze me as well as him. I had no desire to speak to himanothing I could possibly sayabut as I reached for the trigger he blurted, "I don't have much for you to take, but anything you want is yours."

I hesitated, then raised the gun.

"You don't want to do this." His voice was a bare whisper, his words really rather banal as I was already resolved that this was precisely what I wanted to do, and even if I did not, this was now something that needed to be done. "Please." He dropped to his knees, the tears already flowing down his face. "I never done nothing wrong."

I thought about it.

Then pulled the trigger.

Chapter 39.

I like Russian trains.

Not for comfort, of which there is none, nor speed, of which there is barely any to be spoken about, particularly when you relate it to the size of the country that must be crossed. Not even, particularly, for the view, which is inevitably repetitive, as Mother Nature decrees that her works of wonder can only occur so frequently across such a vast and cultivated space.

I like Russian trains, or at least those I travelled on in the early spring of 1956, so many centuries after I gunned Lisle down in cold blood; I like the trains for the sense of unity that all these hardships create in its passengers. I suspect the experience is relative. Take a long, cold, uncomfortable, tedious journey in a carriage with just one difficult, dangerous or mad individual, and it seems plausible that the entire carriage will be dull and silent, for its own protection as much as anything else. But take that same journey in the company of cheerful companions, and you can find the time passes far more quickly.

My companions as I headed north-east from Leningrad under the cover of my new papers were nothing if not cheerful.

"Where I come from is shit," explained Petyr, a seventeen-year-old boy desperately excited by the prospect of working eleven hours a day in a foundry. "All the people are shit, all the land is shit, and shit doesn't even make the land less shit. But where I'm goingathere I'm going to be something, I'm going to do something, and I'm going to meet a girl who wants to be with me and we're going to have babies, and our children, they're not going to have to know the shit that I have."

"Petyr is very keen," explained Viktoria, a quieter nineteen-year-old looking forward to studying agricultural policy. "My parents will be so proud. My mother, she can't even read or write!"

The rattle of a small wooden box announced the advent of Tanya's domino set, and as we huddled away from the mist-stained little windows and deeper into the moist interior of each other and the carriage, counters were laid and hopes dashed with the strategic planning and emotional commitment of Napoleon concocting a long campaign. I have no illusions about my companionsatheir enthusiasm was naive, their hopes rash and their ignorance as to the outside world bordered on the intimidating. I could picture Viktoria fifty years from now, lamenting the loss of those Good Old Communist days, much as Olga now lamented the departure of the tsar; and Petyr, when tested, slammed his fist against his thigh and proclaimed, "We didn't win the war because of all those bastards who disagreed with Stalin!" Is there innocence in ignorance? And if there is, do we tolerate others for their innocence's sake? Sitting inside that train as the steam of our breath crawled up the walls and the carriage jumped over every join in the track like a young gazelle, I found I had no satisfactory answer to this question.

After seven hours of dominoes, even my companions were silent, dozing upright against each other's shoulders and necks. I sat squashed between a shoemaker and a soldier returning home and considered my next step. I was looking for Pietrok-112, and it seemed likely that whoever was trying to prevent me from finding it would be able to predict my movements. Given this, entering undetected could well prove a problem, even with new papers, and the sensible course of action would be to retreat and try another day.

Therein lay the concern: which other day would I try, and what if the trail I was following had run dry by the time I returned? How long did I dare leave this matter resting, and was I prepared to let it go? I was a hunted fugitive, a stranger in a strange land, and I had been neither for more than a hundred years. The discomfort of my predicament was apparent in my grumbling stomach and the ache in my perpetually turning neck, but I had papers, a gun and money, and the exhilaration of my situation had sent adrenaline pumping through my veins like never before. I resolved to press on, knowing that the rational justification for this act was flimsy, and choosing not to care.

There were guards waiting at the end of the line. Local boys who'd received a telephone call, average age twenty-three, average rank private. It seemed likely they had a description but no picture. I lifted a near-empty bottle of vodka from the open bag of one of my travelling companions, swilled some round my mouth, rubbed more into my neck and hands like a perfume, rubbed my eyes until they watered, and joined the queue coming off the train. The sun was setting already, an angry small ball of light on the grey horizon, dull enough to stare at. The platform was slathered in thin black mud, snow-crusted in the shade, sodden in the dwindling light.

"Name!"

"Mikhail Kamin," I slurred, huffing heavy breath into their faces. "Is my cousin here yet?"

The guard examined my papersaperfectaand my facealess so. "Remove your hat!"

I removed my hat. It's easy to overplay alcoholic stupor; my personal preference is to merely highlight those characteristics which you might be manifesting anyway, in this case subservience. I twisted the ear flaps of my hat between my fingers, chewed my bottom lip and peered up at the guard from beneath the furrow of my eyebrows, neck curled in and shoulders hunched like a wading bird.

"What is the purpose of your journey?"

"My cousin," I mumbled. "Bastard's dying."

"Who is your cousin?"

"Nikolai. He's got this really big house. You should do something about him because he's always had this really big house and I asked if I could stay some time but he said no."

I treated the guard to another fragrant blast of breath and saw him flinch. He passed back the papers, nose crinkling in disgust. "Get away," he grunted. "Sober up!"

"Thank you, comrade, thank you," I intoned, bowing my way from his presence like a mandarin from a Manchu emperor. I slipped and stumbled my way out into the muddy street, splattering black stains of slime up my trousers as I went.

The town, if we could call it that, went by the name of Ploskye Prydy, and as I walked down its one still street I half expected to find that the fronts of the wooden shacks sinking slowly into the mud were exactly thatafronts with no backing, a Soviet answer to the cowboy movies, from one of which, any second now, a wildly screaming Cossack would come bursting, pursued by an angry peasant maid with a cry of "God damn you! God damn you to hell!" No such adventure struck. It seemed little more than a place where the railway stopped, a transit town built to service the journeys of people heading to other destinations. The roads were defined merely by the place where the mud was most pressed down; the one store had a sign in the porch which declared, NO EGGS, and the old veteran on his crutches in the door, an obligatory feature of all good cowboy movies, droned the same two lines of the same forgotten song like a tape stuck in a loop. Nevertheless, in its own small way Ploskye Prydy stood as the gateway between civilisation and the land beyond, a ploughed expanse of black mud and drooping trees as far as the eye could see. The only structure of any note was a large brick building on the side of the tracks, where the air simmered and the chimneys choked blackness into the sky: a brick maker's kiln, providing material for the newer developments further north with translated names as glamorous as Institute-75 or Commune-32, a place for all the family. I bribed my way on to the back of the brick maker's truck, heading north, towards Pietrok-111, and spent three black but warm hours sitting between still-cooling bricks, which slid and rattled uncontrollably from side to side as we bounced along the one arrow-straight road to the north. Once the worst of the brick falls had happened, and I was relatively secure in a den of tumbled building blocks, it was almost possible to doze, cocooned in the warmth of the cooling slabs, until with a shudder the truck came to a stop and the back was pulled down with a cheery cry of "Pietrok-111. Hope you enjoyed the ride!"

I climbed out blearily from the back as the brick maker and his assistant began throwing the bricks into a mish-mashed pile on the side of the road, like a newspaper boy hurling his daily delivery at the door of a rude neighbour, chatting away brightly as they did so. I blinked against the dim lights of the town, making out apartment blocks, one general store and, towering over it all, a refinery whose flares of burning gas were the only signs of colour in the dead-black night. The stars overhead were tiny numerous waters, frozen in a cloudless sky. I found Polaris, turning my face further north, and asked of my companions, "How far is it to Pietrok-112?"

They laughed. "Another two hours' drive, but you don't want to go there! It's all soldiers and scientists there, comrade."

I thanked them profusely and headed into what I suppose we should call the vibrant throbbing heart of the town.

It seemed unwise to seek out lodging. There was no reason to believe that the authorities weren't yet pursuing me. The night was too cold to sleep outside, those pools of water which had by day melted in the darkness now turning to treacherous slabs of black ice. I wandered through the unlit streets, feeling my way by the walls, the fires of the refinery and the cold silver of the stars, until at length I stumbled on the town bar. It wasn't advertised as such, and made no invitation to strangers, but it was that universal place that springs up in all towns where there is nothing to doaperhaps once it had been a private home which had simply forgotten to close its door to strangers, and was now transformed into a small warm den with a stove set in the centre of the room, where men could sit in silence, focused on the entirely serious business of drinking themselves blind on moonshine. My presence aroused the odd stare but no comment as I slipped down by the stove and offered the two-toothed woman in charge a few roubles for a glass of alcohol only a few steps above antifreeze and a bowl of rice and beans.

"I'm going to see my cousin," I explained. "He's dying. Do you know anyone who can take me to Pietrok-112?"

"Tomorrow, tomorrow," mumbled the crone, and that, it seemed, was all that there was to say.

Chapter 40.

I had slept, despite myself, and when I was shaken awake, my hand went instantly to my pocket, feeling for the gun, imagining guards, soldiers, retribution. Instead a bright-eyed man with an almost spherical face and a grin that twitched the ends of his tiny ears with its enthusiasm stood over me. "You wanted to go to Pietrok-112, comrade? I'll take you!"

His price was extortionate; his means of transport an ex-Wehrmacht staff car. It takes a great deal to surprise me, but I stared at this thing in astonishment. The metal around the doors and fender was rusted to a crinkled orange, the seats a tangled mess of springs and stuffing, re-upholstered with the remnants of old blankets, but the Nazi emblem was still clearly visible on the front and sides, and as I gaped the young man beamed with pride and exclaimed, "My father killed two colonels and a major, and didn't even damage the paintwork while doing it!" He stood by the car, illustrating the momentous deed. "Bham! Bham, bham! Soft-nosed revolver bullets, that's what it took. Three shots, three corpses. My dad was blown up by a tank in Poland, but he left us the car. You want a ride?"

As vehicles went, it wasn't the most discreet I could imagine, but it was operational and heading where I needed to go.

"Thank you," I mumbled. "It'll be something new."

On the journey to Pietrok-112 I sat in silence, huddled against the tearing wind, and considered my next move. I had come this far, as much for curiosity as any coherent plan of what I'd do when I got there. It was clear that the authorities would be on the alert for me, and I had neither the equipment for a discreet entry nor, I suspected, the luck left in me to deceive my way inside. The question was therefore increasingly becoming, was I prepared to die for my answer? Death in some form seemed likely, considering my circumstances, and I'd far rather a quick and easy death than a prolonged bout of questioning in the Lubyanka. It felt like an insufferable waste of time to die so young in this life, with all the tedium it entailed, and I was absolutely determined that I would not die prior to acquiring as much information as I could about Vitali Karpenko and Pietrok-112. A suicide mission then? Was that what this was going to become? I was prepared to go through with it as long as the information acquired appeared to outweigh the boredom death induced. I considered my situation and knew that emotionally I was already committed, even if intellectually the rationale was flimsy. It was an adventure, a dangerous, reckless, unwise adventure, and I had had so few of these in my time.

If Pietrok-111 was a one-horse town, Pietrok-112 was the glue factory where that horse went to die. A chain fence circled a low mess of cabins and rectangular concrete slabs, windowless, nameless, soulless. The road ran straight to a gate, where a sign proclaimed, PIETROK-112aPASSES MUST BE SHOWN. Two guards in militia uniform were huddled in a small white shed by the gate, listening to the radio. One of them scurried out as we approached, hailing us to stop. He seemed to recognise my driver, giving him a warm pat on the shoulder, but as he approached me, his expression hardened. His fingers tightened on the rifle strap slung across his back, and there was more than just routine caution in his voice as he barked, "Comrade! Your papers!"

Having embarked on a suicide mission, I decided to follow it through with aplomb. I got out of the car, marched straight up to the soldier and replied, "That's comrade Captain, and you are?"

He stood to attention, looking as surprised as I was that this reaction, drilled into him during his training, had become such a physical instinct. The trick with a truly successful intimidation is not to rely on volume or obscenity, but to cultivate that quiet certainty which informs any listener that your people will do the shouting for you, should the moment come. "Where's your commander?" I added. "He is expecting me."

"Yes, comrade Captain," he barked out, "but I need to see your papers, comrade Captain."

"I am Mikhail Kamin, internal security."

"I need to see your pa-"

"No, you don't," I replied softly. "You need to see the papers of farmers delivering grain, of commissars carrying last week's mail, of petty officers who went on the piss last night. You need to see the papers of people who don't have the big picture. What you do not need to see, my son," translating the full meaning of "my son" from cockney gangster into Soviet paranoia is not as simple a linguistic adaptation as you might expect, "are the papers of a man who isn't here. Because I'm not fucking here. Because if I was fucking here, you'd have one hell of a fucking problem, you see?"

The boy was almost shaking with the two conflicting terrors inside himaterror of the known retribution which would strike for disobedience of his superiors, terror of the unknown which would come from disobedience of me. I decided to sway the matter for him.

"I'm glad you're doing your duty, son," I added, resisting the urge to clasp him by the shoulder with a too-hard grip, "but your duty is, if you don't mind me saying so, so far beneath the big picture right now that even thinking about it is giving me a squint. So why don't you walk me to your commander like a good soldier and keep an eye on me, and I won't have to stand around here freezing my fucking balls off in this fucking waste of a fucking place while the shit hits the fan. What do you say, lad?"

Translating the connotations of "lad", as deployed in its most patronising form by red-faced landowners of an uncertain social class, was if anything an even more engaging linguistic challenge than "my son". Sometimes, brute will is the way to deal with a problem, particularly when that problem has been trained from birth to respect the bullies who run the state. The guard knew that there was a security alertaof course he did, his voice as much as any other circumstance had told me as muchaand was it therefore such a surprise that someone from the internal security services had turned up at his door to speak to the commander? Certainly no foreign agent would ask as much. Perhaps it wasn't so implausible. Perhaps thinking was above his grade.

"Please come with me, comrade Captain!"

He even saluted as he let me into the compound.

Chapter 41.

I once spent time working in a settlement in Israel which reminded me somewhat of Pietrok-112. I was going through a pastoral phase, having spent a good hundred and twenty years indulging in wine, women and song. Ironically enough, it was Akinleye, the queen of a good time, who inspired me to move to the Promised Land, where I would, so my reasoning went, rediscover man's purer nature through hard work and agrarian toil. She, who had derided my ambition to kill Richard Lisle, was living at the time in Hong Kong. The year was 1971. I was fifty-two years old and wondering whether heroin addiction was such a bad way to go.

"Don't you see how lucky you are?" she asked, lying on a recliner beneath the stars as the needles were prepared by her silent-footed maid. "You can do things to your body that no one else would dare. You can die of happiness and come back to die again!"

"Are they clean?" I asked, observing the needles carefully on their small silver tray.

"Jesus, Harry, what does it matter? Yes, they're clean. I get them straight off this guy Hong, a triad boy."

"How'd you meet a triad boy?"

She shrugged. "They run all the good-time houses in this place. You got money and a sense of fun in this town, you meet people, you know? Here." She slipped off the recliner and, giggling a little at her own good nature, rolled up my sleeve for me. As I get older, the veins on my arm become bluer, or perhaps the skin whiter, and she chuckled to see the blood bulge in the crook of my arm as she pulled the tourniquet tight. The concern in my face must have showed as she picked up the first needle of amber fluid, because she grinned and slapped my skin playfully. "Harry! You're not going to tell me that you've never done this before?"

"By the time I had the cash and the time," I replied firmly, "I'd also had several lifetimes of exposure to the notion that it was a bad thing."

"You mustn't let yourself be influenced by what the linears say," she chided. "We're not like them."

She was good with a needleaI hardly felt it go in.

Euphoria is, I believe, the term they use to describe the sensation, and upon experience I found it to be an entirely useless definition, as it relies on comparatives that are not apt to the situation. A happiness beyond compare, a contentment beyond understanding, a bliss, a travelling, a freeing of the mind from the fleshathese are all, in their ways, an appropriate description of the process, but they mean nothing, for no recollection can re-create them and no substitute mimic them. So, having known what euphoria is, it remains precisely thataa word with longing attached, but no meaning when actually experiencing the thing. My arms and legs were heavy, my mouth was dry, and I did not care, for my mouth was not mine. I knew that I was still and time was moving, and wondered how it had taken me so long to comprehend that this was the nature of time itself, and wished I had a notebook to hand so I could jot down these thoughtsathese profound, beautiful thoughts I had never thought before, which would, I felt certain, revolutionise the way mankind worked. I watched Akinleye inject herself, and inject the maid, who lay with her head in Akinleye's lap, a dutiful kitten as the drug did its work, and I wanted to explain to them that I'd had the most extraordinary idea about the nature of reality, seen the most incredible truth, if only I could make others understand it!

Opiates suppress sexual desire, but I knew that Akinleye kissed me. We were not young lovers any more, but then it didn't matter, for our love was a thing which, like euphoria, could not be explained to those who did not experience it. I knew that the maid was dancing, and so Akinleye and I danced too, and then the maid danced down the length of the deck, whirling and spinning, until she reached the prow of the ship. We followed, my legs too heavy to move by themselves, so I dragged myself along the floor with my arms, face down on my belly, craning my neck to see Akinleye put her lips to the maid's neck and whisper the secrets of the universe into her ears. Then the maid laughed some more, stood up on the railing that ran round the edge of the ship, spread her arms wide and let her own weight take her down, face first into the water.

Her corpse washed up two days later on the beach.

The coroner's ruling was suicide.

She was buried in an unmarked grave, no family to mourn her. Akinleye had left the port without telling me her servant's name. Three hours after the coffin was covered, I went to Israel, signing on as a worker in a settlement beneath the turbulent ranges of the Golan Heights. I was not Jewish and had no political affection for the state, but a farmer had offered me the chance to pick oranges for him over the summer, and I had nowhere better to go. For seven months I woke at dawn and worked with a basket on my back, ate flat bread at supper and read no words, watched no TV, heard no radio and spoke to no one beyond the settlement walls. I was housed with thirteen other workers in a wooden shack of low bunk beds, and when I failed to do a satisfactory job accepted the chiding of the farmer like a little boy. The family whispered that I was mentally damaged in some way, unable to understand why this white-haired Englishman would have travelled to the sun-drenched hills of a foreign land to crawl in dust and dirt for his days. Sometimes the boys from the local villages would come and stare, and none of us went outside the settlement alone for fear of being attacked by the families whose land the settlement had taken. In time, none of us left the settlement at all, but hid behind the high white-stone walls from a hostile society only a bullet away from retribution.