The First Circle [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE The fretted hands of the bronze clock on the sheh stood at five to five. In the dying light of the December day the clock seemed almost black. Reaching to the ground, the tall window with its double panes looked down on the scurrying traffic in the street and the janitors who were shovelling the snow—freshly fallen but already soggy and dirty brown —from under the feet of the passers-by. Staring at them blindly. Counsellor Innokenty Volodin leaned against the window-frame and whistled on a high thin note. His fingers mmed the pages of a glossy, brightly coloured foreign magazine, but his eyes saw nothing. The counsellor, whose rank in the Diplomatic Service equalled that of an army colonel, was tall and thin; he was not wearing his uniform but a suit of smooth material, and looked more like a rich yoimg man about town than a responsible member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was time either to put on the lights in the office or to go home, but he made no move to do either. Five o'clock was not the end of the working day but only of its less important daytime part. Now everyone would go home and have dinner and a nap, but at ten the lights would bum again in the thousand upon thousand windows of the sixty-five Moscow ministries. Sitting up behind his dozen fortress walls, one man suffered from insomnia—and he had trained the whole of Moscow's officialdom to watch with him into the early hours. Knowing the habits of their sovereign, all three-score ministers sat like schoolboys, waiting for his summons. To keep themselves awake they summoned their deputies, the deputies harried their section heads, research assistants climbed step-ladders and looked up card indexes, clerks dashed up and down corridors and typists broke pencils. Even now, on the eve of the Western Christmas, when all the embassies had been quiet for two days, their telephones silent, and the diplomats were probably sitting down in front of their Christmas trees, there would still be night II