§78

Outside the Imperial, the rain had eased, the street glistened.

“Any chance we could walk?” Blaine asked.

“Oh, it’s close enough.”

“Good. I feel … what’s the word … closeted. I could do with fresh air.”

“Closeted with Burgess is closeted indeed.”

“Exactly. The room was full of him before I even got there. I take it you knew Burgess before his defection?”

“Yes,” Troy replied. “I did. I was one of millions.”

They left the Ring in the direction of Karlsplatz. Troy hoped Blaine would have no more questions. Let him play the Englishman and just talk about the weather.

But once he’d established that one fact, no doubt prompted by something Burgess had said, Blaine seemed to retreat into himself. He was a mutterer, a man who talked to himself—the kind of oddity Troy had recalled being abused at school with the nickname “chunter.” It went with the unnatural bulk of the man, less athletic than awkward in middle age, and with the solid glass barrier between self and other that spectacles could provide to those who sought it. Rowing had probably been his salvation, a team sport that wasn’t a team sport, no ball to pass or fumble. You took your place in a thin blue line and you beat your strokes in time.

Troy decided to take a shortcut via the Red Army War Memorial. The Russians had bunged up their memorials at the speed of light, commemorating their dead even as they were dying—so fast, in fact, that they had built the Berlin memorial before the final division of the city had been completed, and it stood to this day in the British sector, close to the Brandenburg Gate, guarded by Soviet troops demonstrating the goose-step to Berliner and visitor alike every couple of hours. In Vienna, they got the geography right. The memorial was in the former Russian sector—just. It was a few yards from the stencilled white line, and only a couple of hundred yards from the British Embassy—in what had until very recently been known as Stalinplatz. The new Austria had given guarantees for the safety of the monument, and the curving colonnade of pillars that framed it, but none as to the permanence of Stalin’s name. However, the forty-foot high monument to the liberators of Europe still bore his signature, there for all to see in the glare of floodlights that burned all night.

As they reached the vast Victorian fountain—the Hochstrahlbrunnen—in front of the monument, Blaine looked up at the statue.

“Good Lord. It’s monstrous!”

“Are war memorials known for their good taste?” Troy replied. “If you’d been here a couple of years ago there’d have been a T-34 tank parked in front of it as a reminder.”

“Rubbing salt in the wounds, eh?”

“Something like—”

The first bullet sent chips of stone flying from the paving flags between them. Troy ducked under the broad lip of the fountain. The second bullet hit Blaine in his right thigh and his legs shot from under him. He rolled towards Troy with too little momentum to get clear, but enough for the third bullet to ping uselessly off the stone behind him.

He was scrabbling inside his coat.

“Troy!”

His hand emerged clutching a gun. He sent it skidding across the flags towards Troy a split second before a fourth bullet struck him in the chest. Then he moved no more.

Troy rolled out of cover, grabbed the gun, and rolled back too hard. His head hit the side of the fountain and the world turned billiard-table green, then Florentine blue, and finally Bible black.

He had no idea how long he’d been out. Asked to be objective he’d have said seconds, but that seemed impossible. There were boots everywhere, boots walking, boots standing—and right in front of him shiny black shoes and the hem of a trench coat, just at eye level.

“Put the gun down, Herr Troy.”

Eh? What gun?

Troy realised he was holding a gun in his right hand. He’d no memory of this.

He looked up at the owner of shoes and trench coat. A man of his own age. Rimless glasses, good haircut. Every inch the flic. And he wasn’t coming any closer till Troy surrendered the gun.

Troy flipped the gun. Held it out to the flic butt first. Then a helping hand pulled him to his feet. He was unsteady. He looked around. There were uniformed Viennese coppers everywhere, one or two sporting sub-machine guns. Blaine lay where he’d fallen, in an oceanic slick of his own blood.

Then a green surge passed before his eyes and he was out again.