Mrs. Harris Goes to Moscow by Gallico Paul

Author:Gallico, Paul [Gallico, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humour, Travel, Historical, Mystery, Adult
ISBN: 9781408832011
Goodreads: 17838934
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1974-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

12

The next day Mrs Harris and Mrs Butterfield with the rest of the visitors were swept away on the inflexible and inexorable routine of Package Tour Number 6A. The guide had duly appeared to lead them to breakfast, the chambermaid had been about, so had a man in a raincoat. When the tourist party was assembled at the entrance to the hotel to board the bus Ada’s sharp eyes and powers of observation plus the warning of the discovery of the search the night before led her to an examination of their fellow travellers. Two of them were a man and a woman she had not seen before, and there was a subtle distinction in the cut of their clothes which just wasn’t right for foreigners. Were these then watchers? And if so what on earth were they being watched for?

Almost for a moment she was tempted to excuse herself, go back to her room and do what Violet had bidden her so long ago: tear up the letter if that was what it was all about and flush it down the loo, until she remembered that the loo didn’t flush. But there was something else that prevented this and that was the thought that perhaps somehow and in some way before her return she might yet encounter Liz, by accident even see that lovely melancholy face somewhere in a crowd.

Marvelling, they paraded across the cobbled stones of the Disneyland of Red Square dwarfed by the breathtaking giantism of the walls, towers and cupolas.

They gawked dutifully at the Czar’s cannon which was so huge that it couldn’t shoot the three-foot calibre cannonball for the power needed to move this mass would have blown up half the Kremlin, and they were also suitably impressed by the Czar of Bells which had never been rung since its two hundred tons’ weight had broken the eighteenth-century scaffolding and knocked a piece out of it big enough to let the tourists wander around inside.

Mrs Harris said, ‘What good are they if they don’t work?’

Mrs Butterfield said, ‘Just as well they don’t. They’d blow your ears off if they did. But they make nice decorations.’ And then she added, ‘Ain’t them churches fancy? We got nothin’ like them at ’ome.’

‘They don’t work either,’ Mrs Harris remarked. ‘Leastwise not any more.’ She was aware that the odd-pair-out who had seemed just that much slightly off-beat to be real tourists were always managing to be close behind them within listening distance wherever they went. Circling the square, the fabulous coloured, turban-topped pile of St Basil’s Cathedral just out of the line of fire of the modern touch of the stainless steel statues of missiles of the peace-loving Muscovites, they traipsed past the Gum state department store which didn’t look like a store but like a palace, the 3,200 room Hotel Rossia which didn’t look like a hotel but like a store, were dizzied by one Technicolor cathedral after another throwing their bulbous towers into the Russian sky.

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