Free The White Russian by Vanora Bennett Page B

a desk.
    The men had left their equipment out.
    The machine – a big futuristic-looking thing, with two spools of magnetic tape wound round the front, and knobs and buttons everywhere – was standing right in the middle of the table. There was a pile of tape sweepings on the floor, with a broom beside it.
    Absurdly, considering how she’d hated hearing the music playing all day, Constance now wanted to see how the machine worked. Maybe it would amuse Evie, later.
    She plugged it in at the wall and it whirred into life. Lights flashed. But she couldn’t see which was the ‘on’ button that would make the reels move, or how you would operate it.
    Still … imagining herself further into this game, she picked up the heavy headphones the men had left on the back of the chair, sat down, and fitted them on her ears.
    What would you hear, with these on?
    It took her a moment or two just to get used to the feel of them covering her ears, like a pair of hands. It seemed a very long while before she realized that – even though the recording machine wasn’t moving – she was hearing something through them.
    At first all she could make out was static, like a badly tuned radio station.
    But then voices came muttering through the storm, loud, then quiet, then loud again: men’s voices, speaking Russian.
    Why, she thought, astonished, surely the engineers haven’t just been sitting in here recording themselves?
    It took a moment or two more to be able to make out what the voices were saying.
    M AN ONE : ‘I may have the news we’ve been waiting for by tomorrow.’
    M AN TWO : ‘What, really? My dear colleague, do you really mean it? At last?’
    The second voice, fuzzy and hard to hear though it was, was so endearingly full of hope that Constance warmed to it even as she tried to puzzle out what was going on. Was there a radio receiver built into this equipment, perhaps? she wondered, still hoping that a sensible explanation would come to her. Could one of the engineers maybe have been listening while the other edited?
    But who would transmit Russian radio here in Paris? Miller’s people certainly didn’t have a radio station. She didn’t think even those other Russians – the ones at the Soviet diplomatic mission – did …
    ‘I can hardly believe it,’ the second voice went on emotionally. How familiar its cadences seemed through the crackle and fuzz in her ears. And then there was a sneeze.
    Of course she knew who it was. Miller. He’d had a cold for two days. Which meant this wasn’t a recording, or a radio. It was reality. Somehow, and Constance didn’t like to imagine how, she was listening to Miller quietly talking to someone downstairs.
    ‘Well, let’s just see tomorrow,’ the first man was saying, through the thump of her heart. ‘But it is looking pretty good.’
    Constance began twitching for a cigarette. She needed to think, but she had a pain in her chest.
    Hurriedly she let the headphones drop, pushed the chair back and ran out of the room, stumbling against bits of furniture, clattering on the parquet.
    ‘Marie-Thérèse!’ she called hoarsely, hoping the housekeeper hadn’t already finished making up the bed in the spare room for Evie and gone upstairs. ‘Marie-Thérèse! I need you. Now!’

8
    Marie-Thérèse couldn’t help noticing that the two muscly Russians were sitting outside at the café again when she let the doctor in at dusk. As usual, they were muttering at each other and ignoring the chessboard they were supposed to be looking at.
    They’d been there every day for a month, those two men, with their cheap suits, bad skins and pudding-bowl haircuts. They looked … well, wrong, in a way she couldn’t place.
    She was too preoccupied this evening, what with the doctor, Madame’s
crise
and the bit of whalebone that had strayed out of her corseting and was prodding into her flesh, to give her full attention to resenting these
sacrés Russes
in the wholehearted way she usually did