The Russia House by John le Carré

Author:John le Carré [Carré, John le]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Suspense, Fiction, General, Thrillers, Espionage, Intelligence Officers, Spy Stories, Love Stories, Publishers and Publishing, British, Moscow (Russia), Physicists, British - Russia, Russia
ISBN: 9780743464666
Google: rAMmwyICzRoC
Amazon: 0743464664
Barnesnoble: 0743464664
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1989-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

10

A low cottonwool sky hung over the imported palaces, making them dreary in their fancy dress. Summer music played in the parks but the summer clung behind the clouds, leaving a chalky Nordic mist to trick and tremble on the Venetian waterways. Barley walked and, as always when he was in Leningrad, he had the sensation of walking through other cities, now Prague, now Vienna, now a bit of Paris or a corner of Regent’s Park. No other city that he knew hid its shame behind so many sweet façades or asked such terrible questions with its smile. Who worshipped in these locked, unreal churches? And whose God? How many bodies had choked these graceful canals or floated frozen to the sea? Where else on earth has so much barbarism built itself such pretty monuments? Even the people in the street, so slow spoken, decorous, reserved, seemed joined to one another by their monstrous dissembling. And Barley, as he loitered and gazed like any tourist – and like any spy counted off the minutes – Barley felt himself a part of their duplicity.

He had shaken hands with an American tycoon who was not a tycoon, and commiserated with him about his sick wife who was not sick and probably not his wife.

He had instructed a subordinate who was not his subordinate to give succour in an emergency that did not exist.

He was on his way to keep a rendezvous with an author who was not an author but was seeking martyrdom in a city where martyrdom could be had free across the counter, whether or not you happened to stand in line for it.

He was scared numb and had a hangover for the fourth day running.

He was a citizen of Leningrad at last.

Finding himself in the Nevsky Prospekt he realised he was looking for the cafeteria called informally the Saigon, a place for poets, drug-pedlars and speculators, not professors’ daughters. ‘Your father is right,’ he heard her say. ‘The system will always win.’

He had his own street map, courtesy of Paddy – German, with a multi-lingual text. From Cy he had a copy of Crime and Punishment, a battered Penguin paperback in a translation to drive him to despair. He had put them both in a plastic carrier bag. Wicklow had insisted. Not just any bag but this bag, advertising some beastly American cigarette and recognisable at five hundred metres. Now his only mission in life was to trail Raskolnikov on his fateful journey to murder the old lady, which was why he was searching for a courtyard leading off the Griboyedev Canal. Iron gates opened to it, a spreading tree gave it shade. He wandered in it slowly, peering at his Penguin book, then guardedly at the grimy windows as if expecting the old pawnbroker’s blood to come seeping down the yellowing paintwork. Only occasionally did he allow his gaze to stray into that unfocused middle distance which is the preserve of the English upper classes, and which comprises

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