He turned and walked on and in a moment the door of the lavatory banged and the bolt went home.

Later in the morning I got out the briefing Jane had given me and went through it and reinforced the mnemonics and folded the three sheets and took them along to the first provodnik's station I could find unattended and pushed them deep under the trash in the waste bin and heard someone coming and got a cup from the shelf and filled it from the samovar.

"That is for me to do.' The provodnik's tone shrill and indignant. 'I can't leave this place for half a minute without someone coming in here and meddling!'

I told her she made the finest tea in all Russia and said I would tell my grandchildren about it in the years to come, so forth, and she took a pinch of it as a compliment and told me to be off with my wily charm, I should be peddling butter in the black market.

Most of the stuff Jane had given me was standard tourist information, and I spread out the maps in my compartment and looked them over; they showed the route and schedules of the Rossiya and vignettes of Tyumen, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, with the major streets named.

A group of youths trooped past the open door and I went out and stopped them, picking two of the brightest looking and giving them twenty roubles to split and telling them what I wanted. Then I looked for Galina and found her blasting a pallid and red-eyed girl in a torn smock — the bulkheads in Car No. 5 were filthy and this was the third time the passengers had complained and who would take the blame when the reports were sent in? She, Galina Ludmila Makovetskaya would take the blame, who else, since she was the supervisor for Cars No. 5,6 and 7?

When the girl had gone I looked into the small bright still-enraged black eyes of Galina Ludmila Makovetskaya and asked her how everything else was and did she think the snowstorm would cause any problems, and learned that this was a bad day for her because her ingrowing toenail was beginning to give trouble just like the doctor had told her it would, but it would mean an operation, only a minor one but the thought of it terrified her. Then I offered her a hundred roubles and explained that since I was a journalist, as she knew, my whole livelihood depended on sniffing out stories, and perhaps she could help me in this.

"The three men,' I said, 'for instance, who were in the dining car last night. They looked important.'

She braced her large body against the bulkhead as the train rocked, and took out a packet of cigarettes. 'You smoke?'

'I'm trying to quit.'

She lit one with a match from a monogrammed book with the winged wheel on it and blew out smoke and looked at me with her eyes no longer enraged but sharp now, bright with conspiracy.'

'They used to be somebody. Now they are nobody. They used to fly everywhere. Now they take the train.' she gave me their names and former ranks, and they tallied with what Zymyanin had told me. 'It's rumoured that two of them — the army officers — were arrested and tried for supporting the coup, but were acquitted.' A shrug of the big padded shoulders. 'Who knows? Who knows who is who, these days, or who they were or what they were doing? Half the army and the KGB has gone underground, as you know, even though they're still marching about for all to see.' She dropped ash circumspectly into a tin tray with the ubiquitous emblem on it, and opened a steam valve on the samovar. The heating system for this coach had broken down soon after breakfast this morning, and the warmth was welcome in here. 'You wish me to make discreet enquiries about those men?'

The faintest of smiles touched her heavily-lipsticked mouth, softening her looks, even though she would smile like this as she buried the knife deep between my shoulderblades if she saw in me an enemy, or even thought she saw. This was my impression.

'Very discreet,' I said. 'Very discreet enquiries, yes.

I asked her other things, and when people came past us or asked for some tea we talked about the snowstorm and the shocking price of everything now that demokratizatsiya was rife in the land.

Before I left her she said,' Of course, I shall have to satisfy others, you must understand.' Her eyes glittered in the folds of flesh, squinting at me through the smoke from her cigarette.

'No others,' I said. 'No others, Galina Ludmila. This is very strictly between you and me. Is that clear?'

A shrug. 'Very well.'

I pulled out another hundred, which was what she was after anyway.

'No others,' she said.

There was no one of interest at lunch in the dining car when I passed through it and later came back. The generals weren't there, or Zymyanin.

In the afternoon the Rossiya drew its great and massive length into a village station, and most of the passengers dropped from it and stood in the flurries of snow that came blowing under the red-painted wooden canopy that hung over the platform. It wasn't a scheduled stop, I was told: we were being given a break, the first and last of the day because we were running late. I saw Slavsky doing his knee-bends — he'd been trying it on the train but couldn't keep his balance — and a party of Chinese went jogging through the snow outside the station, their little flags jerking on top of their rucksacks while the petits rats on their way to the Academy of Dance in Novosibirsk went prancing off in the other direction with their pony-tails flying and their laughter echoing under the canopy like the cries of birds. A drunk was throwing up at the end of the platform and I turned and walked the other way, keeping up what pace I could among the crowd and trying to find some fresh air to breathe, not easy, because most people were smoking with fierce concentration to make the best of the break.

I saw nothing of Zymyanin or the generals, but the young woman in the silver-grey fur hat was walking alone through the snow, her fur-lined boots crunching along the cinder pathway. It was evening when I next saw her. Slavsky liked the compartment door to be open when we weren't sleeping or changing our clothes, and I didn't argue because I wasn't there for most of the time. One of the youths showed himself in the doorway and jerked his head and I followed him along the corridors to the dining car. The other youth was standing in the queue behind the young woman, and gave me his place.

There was only one table for two, at the far end, and I joined her there, even though there were other places and she seemed to want to be alone. We sat opposite each other, she was facing the bulkhead, while I could see down the aisle beyond her. It was a small table, and it would have been difficult for us to sit in silence during the meal, but even so, I think she would have preferred that.

'Tanya Rusakova, I believe.' I leaned towards her a little as I said it. 'I hope I'm not wrong.'

Then her eyes were on me for the first time, a shimmering and iridescent green, widening in surprise.

'Yes.'

'Shokin,' I said, 'Viktor Shokin. You won't remember me.but I think we live on the same street — Grafskij Prospekt? I've seen you there sometimes. And I passed through your office the other day. You' re at the Ministry of Transport, Motor Division?'

'Yes. I'm sorry, but I — '

'You were busy at your desk. I came in for a new driving licence, that was all.'

'I see.' she wished I hadn't recognized her, wished I weren't here.

When the waitress came we tried to get her to bring us anything except boiled chicken, but it didn't work: it was all they'd been given, she said wearily, when the caterers had loaded the galleys in Moscow.

'You're going right through to Beijing?' I asked Tanya while we were waiting.

'No.' she hadn't smiled yet, even as a social gesture, perhaps found it difficult, even impossible, because of her state of nerves and the overwhelming hatred she felt for General Velichko.