When he came back he unlocked the gate, swung it open, and said:
“It’s all right, sir. They’re expecting you.”
When I had driven through the gate I could see lights on a hilltop a mile or so ahead and to the left.
“Is that the house?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. They’re expecting you.”
Close to where the boy had stood while talking to me through the gate, a double-barrel shotgun was propped up against the hedge.
I thanked the boy and drove on. The road wound gently uphill through farm land. Tall, slim trees had been planted at regular intervals on both sides of the road.
The road brought me at last to the front of a building that looked like a cross between a fort and a factory in the dusk. It was built of concrete. Take a flock of squat cones of various sizes, round off the points bluntly, mash them together with the largest one somewhere near the center, the others grouped around it in not too strict accordance with their sizes, adjust the whole collection to agree with the slopes of a hilltop, and you would have a model of the Kavalov house. The windows were steel-sashed. There weren’t very many of them. No two were in line either vertically or horizontally. Some were lighted.
As I got out of the car, the narrow front door of this house opened.
A short, red-faced woman of fifty or so, with faded blonde hair wound around and around her head, came out. She wore a high-necked, tight-sleeved, gray woolen dress. When she smiled her mouth seemed wide as her hips.
She said: