her knees in the rain beside the father so cruelly torn away from her.
Along the Champs Elysees and into the Place de la Concorde she went, walking steadily.
'Jesus, but she likes her exercise,' Devlin observed.
She turned into the cool peace of the Jardin des Tuileries and Hunter nodded. 'I thought she would. My hunch is that she's making for the Louvre. You go after her on foot from here. I'll drive round, park the car and wait for you at the main entrance.'
There was a Henry Moore exhibit in the Tuileries Gardens. She browsed around it for a little while and Devlin stayed back, but it was obvious that nothing there had much appeal for her and she moved on through the gardens to the great Palais du Louvre itself.
Tanya Voroninova was certainly selective. She moved from gallery to gallery, choosing only works of acknowledged genius and Devlin followed at a discreet distance. From the Victory of Samothrace at the top of the Daru staircase by the main entrance, she moved on to the Venus de Milo. She spent some time in the Rembrandt Gallery on the first floor, then stopped to look at what is possibly the most famous picture in the world - Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa'.
Devlin moved in close. 'Is she smiling, would you say?' he tried in English.
'What do you mean?' she asked in the same language.
'Oh, it's an old superstition in the Louvre that some mornings she doesn't smile.'
She turned to look at him. That's absurd.'
'But you're not smiling either,' Devlin said. 'Sweet Jesus, are you worried you'd crack the plate?'
'This is total nonsense,' she said, but smiled all the same.
'When you're on your dignity, your mouth turns down at the corners,' he said. 'It doesn't help.'
'My looks, you mean? A matter of indifference to me.'
He stood there, hands in the pockets of the Burberry
trenchcoat, the black felt hat slanted over one ear and the eyes were the most vivid blue she had ever seen. There was an air of insolent good humour to him and a kind of self-mockery that was rather attractive in spite of the fact that he must have been twice her age at least. There was a sudden aching excitement that was difficult to control and she took a deep breath to steady herself.
'Excuse me,' she said and walked away.
Devlin gave her some room and then followed. A darling girl and frightened, for some reason. Interesting to know why that should be.
She made her way to the Grande Galerie, finally stopped before El Greco's 'Christ on the Cross' and stood there for quite some time gazing up at the gaunt mystical figure, showing no acknowledgement of Devlin's presence when he moved beside her.
'And what does it say to you?' he asked gently. 'Is there love there?'
'No,' she said. 'A rage against dying, I think. Why are you following me?'
'Am I?'
'Since the Tuileries Gardens.'
'Really? Well, if I was, I can't be very good at it.'
'Not necessarily. You are someone to look at twice,' she said simply.
Strange how suddenly she felt like crying. Wanted to reach out to the incredible warmth of that voice. He took her arm and said gently, 'All the time in the world, girl dear. You still haven't told me what El Greco says to you.'
'I was not raised a Christian,' she said. 'I see no Saviour on the Cross, but a great human being in torment, destroyed by little people. And you?'
'I love your accent,' Devlin said. 'Reminds me of Garbo in the movies when I was a wee boy, but that was a century or so before your time.'
'Garbo is not unknown to me,' she said, 'and I'm duly flattered. However, you still have not told me what it says for you?'
'A profound question when one considers the day,' Devlin told her. 'At seven o'clock this morning, they celebrated a rather special Mass in St Peter's Basilica in Rome. The Pope together with cardinals from Britain and the Argentine.'
'And will this achieve anything?'
'It hasn't stopped the British Navy proceeding on its merry way or Argentine Skyhawks from attacking it.'
'Which means?'
'That the Almighty, if he exists at all, is having one hell of a joke at our expense.'
Tanya frowned. 'Your accent intrigues me. You are not English, I think?'
'Irish, my love.'
'But I thought the Irish were supposed to be extremely religious?'
'And that's a fact. My old Aunt Hannah had callouses on her knees from praying. She used to take me to Mass three times a week when I was a boy in Drumore.'
Tanya Voroninova went very still. 'Where did you say?'
'Drumore. That's a little market town in Ulster. The church there was Holy Name. The thing I remember most was my uncle and his cronies, straight out from Mass and down the road to Murphy's Select Bar.'
She turned, her face very pale now. 'Who are you?'
'Well, one thing's for sure, girl dear.' He ran a hand lightly over her dark hair. 'I'm not Cuchulain, last of the dark heroes.'
Her eyes widened and there was a kind of anger as she plucked at his coat. 'Who are you?'
'In a manner.of speaking, Viktor Levin.'
'Viktor?' She looked bewildered. 'But Viktor is dead. Died somewhere in Arabia a month or so ago. My father told me.'
'General Maslovsky? Well, he would, wouldn't he? No, Viktor escaped. Defected, you might say. Ended up in London and then Dublin.'
'He's well?'
'Dead,' Devlin said brutally. 'Murdered by Mikhail Kelly or Cuchulain or the dark bloody hero or whoever you want
to call him. The same man who shot your father dead twenty-three years ago in the Ukraine.'
She sagged against him. His arm went round her in support, strong and confident. 'Lean on me, just put one foot in front of the other and I'll take you outside and get you some air.'
They sat on a bench in the Tuileries Gardens and Devlin took out his old silver case and offered her a cigarette. 'Do you use these things?'
'No.'
'Good for you, they'd stunt your growth and you with your green years ahead of you.'
Somewhere, he'd said those self-same words before, a long, long time ago. Another girl very much like this one. Not beautiful, not in any conventional sense, and yet always there would be the compulsion to turn and take a second look. There was pain in the memory that even time had not managed to erase.
'You're a strange man,' she said, 'for a secret agent. That's what you are, I presume?'
He laughed out loud, the sound so clear that Tony Hunter, seated on a bench on the other side of the Henry Moore exhibit reading a newspaper, glanced up sharply.
'God save the day.' Devlin took out his wallet and extracted a scrap of pasteboard. 'My card. Strictly for formal occasions I assure you.'
She read it out loud. 'Professor Liam Devlin, Trinity College, Dublin.' She looked up. 'Professor of what?'
'English literature. I use the term loosely, as academics do, so it would include Oscar Wilde, Shaw, O'Casey, Brendan Behan, James Joyce, Yeats. A mixed bag there. Catholics and Prods, but all Irish. Could I have the card back, by the way? I'm running short...'
He replaced it in his wallet. She said, 'But how would a professor of an ancient and famous university come to be involved in an affair like this?'
'You've heard of the Irish Republican Army?*
'Of course.'
'I've been a member of that organization since I was sixteen years of age. No longer active, as we call it. I've some heavy reservations about the way the Provisionals have been handling some aspects of the present campaign.'
'Don't tell me, let me guess.' She smiled. 'You are a romantic at heart, I think, Professor Devlin?'
'Is that a fact?'
'Only a romantic could wear anything so absurdly wonderful as that black felt hat. But there is more, of course. No bombs in restaurants to blow up women and children. You would shoot a man without hesitation. Welcome the hopeless odds of meeting highly trained soldiers face-to-face.'
Devlin was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. 'Do you tell me?'
'Oh, I do, Professor Devlin. You see, I think I recognize you now. The true revolutionary, the failed romantic who didn't really want it to stop.'
'And what wouldit be, exactly?'
'Why, the game, Professor. The mad, dangerous, wonderful game that alone makes life worth living for a man like you. Oh, you may like the cloistered life of the lecture room or tell yourself that you do, but at the first chance to sniff powder...'
'Can I take time to catch my breath?' Devlin asked.
'And worst of all,' she carried on relentlessly, 'is your need to have it both ways. To have all the fun, but also to have a nice clean revolution where no innocent bystanders get hurt.'
She sat there, arms folded in front of her in an inimitable gesture as if she would hold herself in, and Devlin said, 'Have you missed anything out, would you say?'
She smiled tightly. 'Sometimes I get very wound up like a clock spring and I hold it until the spring goes.'
'And it all bursts out and you're into your imitation of Freud,' he told her. 'I bet that goes down big over the vodka and strawberries after dinner at old Maslovsky's summerdasha.'
Her face tightened. 'You will not make jokes about him.
He has been very good to me. The only father I have known.' 'Perhaps,' Devlin said. 'But it wasn't always so.' She gazed at him angrily. 'All right, Professor Devlin, we
have fenced enough. Perhaps it is time you told me why you
are here.'
He omitted nothing, starting with Viktor Levin and Tony Villiers in the Yemen and ending with the murder of Billy White and Levin outside Kilrea. When he was finished, she sat there for a long moment without saying anything.
'Levin said you remembered Drumore and the events surrounding your father's death,' Devlin said gently.
'Like a nightmare, it drifts to the surface of consciousness now and then. Strange, but it is as if it's happening to someone else and I'm looking down at the little girl on her knees in the rain beside her father's body.'
'And Mikhail Kelly or Cuchulain as they call him? You remember him?'
'Till my dying day,' she said flatly. 'It was such a strange face, the face of a ravaged young saint and he was so kind to me, so gentle, that was the strangest thing of all.'
Devlin took her arm. 'Let's walk for a while.' They started along the path and he asked, 'Has Maslovsky ever discussed those events with you?'
'No.'
Her arm under his hand was going rigid. 'Easy, girl dear,' he said softly. 'And tell me the most important thing of all. Have you ever tried to discuss it with him?'
'No, damn you!' She pulled away, turning, her face full of passion.
'But then, you wouldn't want to do that, would you?' he said. 'That would be opening a can of worms with a vengeance.'
She stood there looking at him, holding herself in again. 'What do you want of me, Professor Devlin? You want me to defect like Viktor? Wade through all those thousands of photos in the hope that I might recognize him?'
'That's a reasonable facsimile of the original mad idea. The IRA people in Dublin would never let the material they're holding out of their own hands, you see.'
'Why should I?' She sat on a nearby bench and pulled him down. 'Let me tell you something. You make a big mistake, you people in the West, when you assume that all Russians are straining at the leash, anxious only for a chance to get out. I love my country. I like it there. It suits me. I'm a respected artist. I can travel wherever I like, even in Paris. No KGB - no men in black overcoats watching my every move. I go where I please.'
'With a foster-father, a lieutenant-general in the KGB in command of Department V amongst other things, I'd be surprised if you didn't. It used to be called Department 13, by the way. Distinctly unlucky for some, and then Maslovsky reorganized it in nineteen sixty-eight. It could best be described as an assassination bureau, but then, no well-run organization should be without one.'
'Just like your IRA?' She leaned forward. 'How many men have you killed for a cause you believed in, Professor?'
He smiled gently and touched her cheek in a strangely intimate gesture. 'Point taken, but I can see I'm wasting your time. You might as well have this, though.'
He took a largish buff envelope from his pocket, the one that had been delivered by Ferguson's bagman that morning and placed it in her lap.
