“My wife is tired,” Richard informed him, as he was leaving them at the entrance. “We shall not go out this evening.”
Nevertheless when the evening came they crossed the threshold once more. In order to lessen the risk of running into Valeria Petrovna they were not having meals in the restaurant of the hotel. Richard had asked the hall-porter for the name of some restaurant in the old town, and they found their way to the place he had suggested in the ancient street of Andreyev, which leads from the palaces to the docks on the wide Dneiper. After a far from satisfactory meal they went out into the narrow, twisting streets of the quarter, the damp smell of the river came to them from the near-by wharfs, mingled with a hundred other unpleasant odours.
Marie Lou kept very close to Richard. Somewhere in these mean streets lay the drinking shop into which she had been dragged on that terrible night when she had been lost in Kiev and afraid to ask her way.
With some difficulty they found the ill-lit court they had visited in the morning. Fortunately Shubin was at home.
Zackar Shubin was a bald man with cunning eyes set close together in his head. He cursed roundly in Russian when he saw them. Did they want to bring the Ogpu about his ears? Was not one visit from foreigners, dressed as they were, enough? Two in one day was altogether too much. They had the information which he had been paid to give them, already.
Richard mollified him by placing a banknote of some value in his pudgy hand at once, without argument.
Marie Lou spoke rapidly in Russian.
Yes, he knew Yakovkin — a true son of the Ukrainian soil. A kazak to the backbone. Well, what of it?
Marie Lou questioned him about the prison organization. They sat round a bare wooden table, filthy with stains of oil and grease. A guttering candle was the only light. Richard produced his wallet from his pocket.
For an hour they talked and argued. At last Shubin was persuaded to sound Yakovkin when he came off duty the following morning and see how far the man was prepared to go. If he were successful he would slip out of the Lavra himself for half an hour and meet them at a little café that he named near the Vladimirskaya Gorka. He did not seem to think that he was likely to meet with much success. Yakovkin would certainly have to face imprisonment himself if the prisoners escaped while he was on duty. It would have to be a big sum which would tempt him to do that.