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pulled, not pushed."
    "He has a violent temper, yes?" Oskar noted. "If he crosses frontiers, whether physical or psychological, he must have the impression that he is controlling his own destiny."
    "What will you do now?" the blind man asked, conceding to the others the question of pace.
    "So," Oskar said, "I will report back to my German Merchants. Then I will sit by the phone and reflect on what the peasants say-that all things come to those who wait, yes?"
    Carroll and Francis were confirmed bachelors. It wasn't that they didn't like women; they just didn't trust them. And what sex drive either came equipped with at birth had long since been channelled into other pursuits. Carroll lived with an unmarried sister in a rented apartment in Georgetown. Francis lived alone in a downtown residence hotel with a kitchenette crawling with cockroaches. He sprayed once a week, ironed his own shirts, darned his own socks and except on Tuesdays and Fridays made his own dinners. On Tuesdays he grabbed a bite in a delicatessen and went to a motion picture; to a spy film whenever possible. On Fridays he dined out with Carroll. They had been meeting Fridays more or less to review their week's work since they began sharing an office, some twelve years before. For eight of those years they had been faithful to a particular Chinese restaurant. Then they discovered the chef sprinkled monosodium glutamate on all his dishes. Now they ate Chinese health food.
    Francis lifted the metal lid on his dish from Column B and sniffed suspiciously at the contents. The gesture annoyed Carroll. "I don't know how you can be so calm," he whispered fiercely. His own face was a mask of frustration. "After what's happened...”
    "Nothing happened that wasn't expected," Francis said.
    "What if he doesn't have what we want?" Carroll whined.
    For a moment Francis thought his partner might actually burst into tears. "The Potter was the novator," he reminded Carroll. "He was in charge of the sleeper school. He has it."
    "Imagine offering us a ten-year-old rezidentura, or an istoclinik at the United Nations! What does he take us for, amateurs?"
    "You act as if he meant it as a personal insult," Francis reproached Carroll. "He's dealing with freelancers, remember, not us. He was simply testing the temperature of the water."
    "I hope to God you're right," Carroll said. The muscle in his cheek twitched several times, then stopped of its own accord. "Our whole scheme depends on him."
    Francis eyes narrowed; some music was forming in the back of his brain.
    "I'm just thinking out loud, but it might not do any harm to shake him up a bit. ..."
    Carroll snapped his fingers; lyrics had leapt into his head. "What if we sent him the names of the rezidentura and the istoclinik”?
    "I knew you'd come up with something," Francis remarked, and he tucked the corner of his napkin into his collar to protect his taxicab-yellow bow tie and attacked the plate of whole-wheat noodles, Chinese cabbage and steamed shrimp.
    "Svetochka," moaned Svetochka, kicking off her worn suede boots, collapsing into an easy chair that badly needed recovering, "is dead."
    She had just come back from the store with two tins of salted fish, a kilo of onions, a box of rice. "Seven lines," she moaned, feeling very sorry for herself. "One for the fish, one for the onions, one for the rice. That's three. Then one to pay the cashier. That makes four. Then back to the first line to collect the fish, another to collect the onions, a third to collect the rice. That's seven. You know your Lenin, Feliks, is there something in it about Communism needing lines?"
    The Potter smiled for the first time in days. "There are lines because there are shortages," he explained.
    "And why," Svetochka demanded, massaging the balls of her feet, "if everybody is working according to their ability, do we still have shortages?"
    The Potter helped himself to some more vodka. "In the old days, before the revolution, they used to say that