Lamb found his cigarettes. “I might not mention the bit about fucking himself,” he said. Moving into the room, he hooked an ankle round a chair and tipped its burden of hat, gloves and
“So now we’re having a conversation?”
“I need to stay long enough that Demetrio’s convinced we talked the ins and outs of fiscal propriety.”
“He’s outside?”
“In the car. Between you and me, he might go for the first of the month.” He found his lighter, and applied it. “You weren’t on today’s list. We just happened to be passing.”
He was surprising himself, how easily it came back: firing up a legend on the spot. Ten minutes from now, Katinsky’s current life would be spread out between them like a takeaway. And once Lamb had picked the bones out of that, he could get to the meat of the matter.
Katinsky’s debriefing hadn’t actually been serious. Katinsky had been among the sweepings; the exodus of minor hoods triggered by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, all desperate to convert scraps of intelligence into a harder form of currency. They were hardly Grade-A candidates. But all had to be processed, and kicked out the other side, and some even sent back, to prove there was no such thing as a free ride.
Those allowed to stay were given a small lump sum and a three-year passport they sweated over each time the renewal date came round. It was always handy, as Lamb’s mentor Charles Partner once remarked, to have a supply of expendable Russians on the books. Apart from anything else, you never knew when the wheel would spin again, bringing the world back where it started. “Where it started” was a phrase neither questioned. The Cold War was the natural state of affairs.
Katinsky, anyway, had been among the lucky. And look at him now: the once-minor hood, running his own “school” … Late sixties, Lamb supposed. His arms twitched under various sleeves: charity shop tweed jacket, holey grey V-neck, scruffy white collarless shirt. And there was something off about him, even leaving aside the secondhand clothing, the stained walls, the desperate address. Something off; like that gap between the use-by date, and the moment the milk turns.
“We’re busier than we look,” he said, answering Lamb’s question about the school. “We get a lot of enquiries. Web traffic. Foreign students. You’d be surprised.”
“You’d be surprised how little surprises me. Who’s we?”
“It’s a useful plural.” Katinsky smiled thinly, showing grey teeth. “The school has a full complement of pupils at present, but happily we are able to offer places on our subsidiary teaching scheme. A distance-learning arrangement.”
Lamb ran a thumb down a ream of stiff paper stacked on the nearest shelf, then slid the topmost sheet off the pile. A diploma:
Katinsky said, “We get the odd dissatisfied pupil, sure. But you consider the source, yes? The other day there’s a letter, the stupid bastard can’t spell bastard, that’s how stupid the bastard is. I’m supposed to care what he thinks?”
“I’d have thought teaching the bastards to spell would come within your remit,” Lamb said.
“So long as they sign the cheques,” Katinsky said. “Won’t Demetrio be wondering where you are?”
“He’ll be reading the paper. Picking his nose. You know Demetrio.”
“But not as well as you.”
“Probably not.”
“Which is strange, as I’m the one who made him up. Have you finished playing games yet, Jackson Lamb? And if you have, would you mind telling me what you want?
Much earlier the pale-blue sky had been cross-hatched by contrails, and Shirley Dander was deep in unreclaimed countryside; sheep, fields, and an unignorable smell of shit. There were occasional rows of roadside cottages; one with a peacock strutting outside, for Christ’s sake. Shirley stared as it swept across the road and round a hedge. Chickens, maybe, but a peacock? It was like a Richard Curtis movie.
None of which got her there faster, but at least she knew where she was going. Mr. B—Jackson Lamb’s bald man—had stepped off the delayed Worcester train at Moreton-in-Marsh, which turned out larger than its name suggested. It had a reasonably substantial shopping drag, at any rate, including some outlets Shirley wouldn’t have minded browsing. They weren’t open, though. It wasn’t long past seven. Shirley had been up all night.
