Our Game (36 page)

"Of course."

"I mean he's practically a sort of general to them. Particularly on the logistical front—how to get stuff through, and pay for it, and train people to use it, and so on."

"Of course."

She had evidently heard something in my voice that she thought she recognised and didn't like. "What do you mean? Why do you keep saying of course? Don't be so smooth, Tim."

But I wasn't being smooth, or not consciously. I was remembering my other conversations with Larry's women: "He's bound to be back soon ... well, you know what Larry is.... I'm sure he'll phone or write." And sometimes: "I'm afraid he rather thinks that your relationship has run its course." I was reflecting without fuss that although Larry's love for Emma had undoubtedly been a great passion while it lasted—and for all I knew it was lasting still—actually I had loved her more than he had, and with greater risk. The reason being that women came to him naturally; he just had to reach out for them, and they hopped onto his hand., Whereas Emma for me had been the one, the only one, though it had never been easy to explain this to Larry, least of all on Priddy. And the sum of my contemplations was that I found myself hunting for some clearer sign from him that he loved her, beyond just saying, "Weave and wait for me."

And since I couldn't think of one, my next-best thing was to encourage her to go and find him before his ardour fixed on someone different.

"It just occurred to me ... well, you know this anyway, but there are a lot of people in England looking for you both—not just in England. I mean they're pretty angry. Police and people. I mean thirty-seven million isn't the sort of sum that anybody leaves under the plate, is it?"

She granted me a small laugh.

"So I mean that Caucasus might make rather good sense, in a way. Even if you have to sort of tough it out with the other women, so to speak, and don't get to see that much of Larry. For a time, at least. Till things have died down."

"You mean from a practical point of view," she suggested, raising her voice slightly in challenge.

"Well, it's not always the worst point of view, the practical one. The irony is, you see, I'm in the same boat."

"You what? Nonsense, Tim. Why?"

"Well, the powers that be have lumped me in with your operation, I'm afraid. They think I'm part of it. With the result that ... well, I'm on the run too."

"How utterly ridiculous. Just tell them you're not part of it." She was cross that I should aspire to the heights of their shared criminality. "You're terribly persuasive when you want to be. Your signature isn't on anything. You're not Larry. You're you. I never heard anything so absurd."

"Well, anyway, I just thought I'd wander for a bit," I said, feeling obliged for some reason to persist with this futuristic account of myself. "Stay out of England. Out of harm's way. Let things die down."

But it was already clear that she wasn't faintly interested in my future.

"And it wasn't all a wicked Kremlin plot; we know that now," I said conversationally, like someone determined to look on the bright side. "I mean you and Larry and CC—setting me up somehow, using Honeybrook as a safe house or something. I had these awful conspiracy theories when Iwas low. It was such a relief to discover they were nonsense."

She shook her head, pitying me, and I knew it was a relief to her to discover that I was once more beyond the pale. "Tim. Honestly, Tim. Really."

I was at the door before she realised I was saying goodbye. I considered other things to say—nice things: "I'll always be there if you want me," for instance, or "If I find him I'll give him your love"—but if I had a sense of anything, it was of my irrelevance, so I said nothing. And Emma at the window seemed to have reached the same decision, for she remained looking out as if she were expecting Larry to come striding towards her down the riverbank, wearing one of his hats.

"Yes. So goodbye," she said.

Contact Sergei, who is arranging to post this letter for me, I read as I lay sleepless. Phone him in English only at the number you know . . . In Zorin's world, it was wise to have a Sergei.

I dialled the number in Moscow, and at the sixth attempt it rang. A man's voice answered.

"This is Timothy," I said in English. "Peter's friend. I would like to speak to Sergei."

"Sergei is speaking."

"Kindly tell Peter I'm on my way to Moscow. Tell him to leave word with a friend of mine named Bairstow. He'll be staying at the Luxor Hotel a few days from now." I spelled Bairstow, then added Colin for good measure.

"You will receive a message, Mr. Timothy. Please do not call this number again."

For the three days while I waited for my visa I visited art galleries, ate meals, read newspapers, and watched my back. But I saw and tasted nothing. By day I remembered her with fondness. She was family, an old friend, a rash act long forgiven. But by night visions of mutilated corpses alternated with images of Emma dead in forest pools. Bloodstained heaps of sawdust rose in Caucasian mountain ranges round my bed. I traced the causality of everything that had happened to me in my life till now and saw Emma as the consummation of its failure. I remembered all my avoiding and pretending. I looked back on everything I had valued, the shelter and ease that I had taken for granted, the prejudices I had unthinkingly adhered to and the nimble ways in which I had escaped the import of my self-perceptions. Seated at my bedroom window, watching the old city brace itself for winter, I realised also, without any great sense of revelation, that Emma was dead: which was to say that from the moment it was clear to me that she had no use for my protection, she was as remote from me and as faceless as any passerby out there on the pavement.

Emma was dead because she had killed me, and because she had returned herself to the half-world where I had found her, feet sinking in the mud, eyes fixed on the impossible horizon. Larry alone survived. Only by going after Larry could I fill the pit that for so long had done duty for my soul.

FOURTEEN

THERE WAS NO message from Sergei.

Tsarist chandeliers lit the vast hall; plaster nymphs cavorted in a rainbow fountain, their shiny torsos reflected to infinity by a carousel of gilt-framed mirrors. A cardboard dancing girl recommended the casino on the third floor, imitation air hostesses told me to enjoy my day. They should have told it to the muffled beggarwomen outside on the street corner, or the dead-eyed children hovering purposefully at the traffic lights and in the filthy underpasses, or the twenty-year-old wrecks in doorways, sleeping upright like the dead; or the defeated armies of pedestrians hunting for a morsel of the dollar economy to buy with their evaporating roubles.

But there was still no message from Sergei.

My hotel was ten minutes' walk from the real Lubyanka, in a pitted dark street where the paving stones chimed like metal when I stepped on them and yellow mud oozed between them as they sank. The guard on the front door was six strong: one hard-eyed sentry in a blue uniform to man it from outside, two plainclothes boys to cover arriving and departing cars; and inside the lobby a second trio, in black suits, all so solemn that I could have taken them for a bunch of undertakers, measuring me for my coffin with their head-to-toe stares.

But they had no message from Sergei.

I walked the wide streets, analysing nothing, alert to everything, knowing I had no shelter left to scurry to, no reassuring telephone number to call if I was in trouble, that I was naked, living under a false name in what all my life had been enemy territory. Seven years had passed since I had last been here, disguised as a Foreign Office flunkey on a two-week administrative errand to the embassy, in reality to hold secret meetings with a Party technocrat with wares to sell. And though I had spent some anxious moments smuggling myself in and out of cars and darkened doorways, the worst I had faced was exposure, and an undignified retreat to London, and a couple of inaccurate lines in the newspapers, and a wry smile from colleagues in the senior officers' bar. If I had had a vision of myself, as I looked down upon the unhappy souls around me, it was as the clandestine emissary of a superior world. No such ennobling visions consoled me now. I was part of them, propelled by my past as they were, ignorant of my future. I was a fugitive, homeless and stateless, a small nation of one.

I walked, and wherever I looked the madness of history answered me. In the old GUM building, once host to the world's most unwearable clothes, burly women of the new Russian rich sampled dresses by Hermes and scents by Estee Lauder, while their chauffeur-driven limousines waited in line outside, bodyguards and chase cars in attendance. Yet glance up and down the street, and there were the skeletons of yesterday dangling from their grimy gibbets: iron quarter-moons with the rusting stars of Soviet triumphalism trailing from their tails, hammers and sickles carved into crumbling facades, fragmented Partyspeak scrawled in drunken tracery against the rain-swept sky. And everywhere, as evening gathered, the beacons of the true conquerors flashing out their gospel: "Buy us, eat us, drink us, wear us, drive us, smoke us, die of us! We are what you get instead of slavery!" I remembered Larry. I was remembering him a lot. Perhaps because remembering Emma was too painful. "Workers of the world unite," he would say when he wanted to taunt me. "We have nothing to sell you but our chains."

I let myself into my room and saw a brown envelope staring at me from the luxurious pillows of my king-sized bed.

"You will please come to this address tomorrow at 1:30 p.m., the seventh floor, room 609. You will bring a bunch of flowers. Sergei."

It was a narrow house in a narrow, filthy street on the eastern edge of town. Nothing gave away its function. I had brought a bunch of pinks with no smell, wrapped in newspaper. I had travelled by metro, deliberately changing more often than I needed. I got off one stop early and walked the last half mile. The day was sullen. Even the birch trees in the boulevards looked dark. There was nothing on my back.

It was number sixty, but you had to work that out for yourself from the buildings either side, because there was no sixty on the door. A black Zil was parked in front of the drab entrance, and two men sat in it, one of them the driver. They stared at me and at my flowers, then stared away. Luck and Bryant, I thought, Russian style. I stood on the step, and as I rang the bell a camphorous stench came at me through the gap between the poorly fitted doors, and I remembered the stench that had come at me when I unlocked Aitken May's tomb. An old man admitted me; a white-clad woman at a desk paid me no attention. A man in a leather jacket was sitting on a bench. He studied me over his newspaper, then resumed his reading. I was in a high, dilapidated hall with marble pillars and a broken lift.

The stairs were of polished stone and uncarpeted. The sounds were just as hostile: hard heels on ceramic, trolleys warbling, and the harsh voices of old women calling above the murmurs of their patients. A place of former privilege, now fallen on hard times. On the seventh floor, a stained-glass canopy lit the stairwell. A bearded little man with spectacles stood shyly beneath it, wearing a black suit and clutching a bunch of gold lilies.

"Your friend Peter is visiting Miss Eugenie," he told me all in a rush. "His protectors have allowed him half an hour. Please be brief, Mr. Timothy." And he handed me the lilies to take with me.

My friend Sergei is a card-holding Christian, Zorin had confided to me. If I keep him out of prison, he'll get me into heaven.

Miss Eugenie was a thin white ridge in the grimy sheets that covered her. She was tiny and yellow and breathed in rasping sips, and Zorin the soldier sat to attention over her like her one-man guard of honour, his shoulders back, his chest thrown out for the medals that he ought to have been wearing. His craggy features were carved in grief. While he watched me I ran water into a glass jar and put the flowers in it, then squeezed myself along his side of the bed till I was able to grasp his outstretched hands. He rose, and with his handshake drew me to him like a wrestler for the embrace, left side, right side, and a kiss, before releasing me to sit across the bed from him on what seemed to be a milking stool.

"Thank you for coming, Timothy. I am sorry to be inconvenient."

He took up Miss Eugenie's hand and held it for a moment. She could have been a child or an old man. Her eyes were closed. He replaced her hand on her breast, then moved it to her side for fear it would weigh too heavily on her.

"She is your wife?" I asked.

"She should have been."

We stared awkwardly at one another, neither able to speak first. There were yellow rings under his eyes. Perhaps I looked no better.

"You remember Checheyev," he said.

The ethic of our trade required that I search my memory.

"Konstantin. Your embassy culture vulture. Why?"

He gave an impatient frown and glanced at the door. He was speaking English quickly but in a low voice. "Culture was his cover. I think you know that very well. He was my number two in the residency. He had a friend called Pettifer, a bourgeois intellectual Marxist. I think you know him too."

"Distantly."

"Let's not play games today, Timothy. Zorin has no time, neither has Mr. Bairstow. This Pettifer conspired with Checheyev to steal enormous sums of money from the Russian government, using the London embassy as a front. You will recall I had commercial rank. Checheyev forged my signature on certain documents. The sum they stole exceeded all sanity. It could be as much as fifty million pounds. Do you know all this?"

"Rumour has reached me," I said, and was reminded how, at fifty-five, Zorin still spoke the elaborate English of his spy school, full of pedantry and old-fashioned idiom; and how, listening to him in the safe house in Shepherd Market, I used to picture his tutors as wispy old Fabians with a passion for Bernard Shaw.

"My government wants a scapegoat. I have been selected. Zorin conspired with the blackarse Checheyev and the English dissident Pettifer. Zorin must be brought to trial. What part has your former service played in this?"