Kazin’s agreement to Malik’s request for a meeting took three days, which Malik considered pointedly too long, almost childishly petulant; he, not Kazin, had been the victim, after all! Kazin’s memorandum stipulated the encounter should be in his office – making Malik go to him – rather than somewhere neutral like the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters. Passingly Malik thought of suggesting an alternative but just as quickly dismissed the idea: it would have been matching petulance with petulance. He did not want any longer to fight.

Kazin’s office was at the front of the Directorate headquarters and obviously better established than that of Malik. The furnishings were predominantly Scandinavian, all light wood except for a conference area to one side where there were dark leather chairs and a couch and a long, chair-bordered table around which at least a dozen people could have assembled. Kazin’s desk, which was quite bare, even the blotter unmarked, was directly in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the traffic-clogged ring road. There was complete double glazing, creating a disorienting effect of scurrying vehicles devoid of noise, television picture with the sound turned down.

Malik hesitated immediately inside the door, unsure now that they were at last face to face how to proceed. Malik’s immediate impression was of Kazin’s weight. When they were friends the man had been stocky, but Malik had never imagined his becoming this fat. Kazin seemed bloated, like an inflated carnival figure. Malik knew he would not have recognized the other man if the encounter had been unexpected.

From the far side of the room, seated behind his desk, Kazin examined Malik. The hair, which Kazin remembered to be deeply black, was absolutely white now but still thick, and Malik wore it surprisingly long, almost an affectation. And the stance was peculiar. After the return from Stalingrad and that one confrontation there had not been many meetings – not with Malik, at least – so Kazin’s strongest memory was of the man before his injury: certainly there was no recollection of him like this, oddly sloped and lopsided. Old; until this moment he’d never thought of Malik as being old.