Our Game (38 page)

"The hotel takes it from you when you check in.”

“Remain in this position."

From the pocket of his tunic he extracted a small camera, which he trained on me at a yard's range. It flashed twice. He walked round me with slow proprietorial steps. He photographed me from both sides, wound the film through the camera, shook it into his palm, and handed it to a guard, who hastened from the room with it. The man in the chair let out a choked cry, put back his head, and began bleeding from the nose. Issa murmured another order; two boys unlocked the handcuffs and led the man down the corridor. The brown-suited beadle continued passing hundred-dollar bills through his machine and noting them on the abacus.

"Sit here."

Issa sat himself at a desk. I sat the other side. He fished a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He set a pocket tape recorder between us, reminding me of Luck and Bryant at the police station. His hands were large and adept and mysteriously elegant.

"What is the full name of the man you call Misha?”

“Dr. Lawrence Pettifer."

"What are the aptitudes of this man?"

"I'm sorry?"

"His skills. His accomplishments. What is wrong with aptitudes?"

"Nothing. I didn't understand you for a moment. He's a student of revolution. A friend of small nations. A linguist. Like yourself."

"What else is this man, please?"

"A former agent of the KGB but in reality an agent of the British Secret Service."

"What is the official situation in Britain regarding this man?"

"He's a fugitive. The British suspect him of stealing a large sum of money from the Russian Embassy. So do the Russians. They're right. He did."

Issa studied the paper before him while at the same time holding it out of my sight. "When was your last meeting with the man Misha?"

"On September eighteenth of this year."

"Describe the circumstances of this meeting."

"It occurred at night. At a place called Priddy, high up in the Mendip hills in Somerset. We were alone."

"What was discussed?"

"Private matters."

"What was discussed?"

There is a Russian bureaucratic snarl I had occasionally called upon to good effect, and imprudently I called upon it now.

"Don't you talk to me as if I were a peasant. If I tell you it was private, it was private."

I had been slapped at school, too often. I had been slapped by women, though they were never allowed a second bite. I had boxed. But the two slaps that Issa dealt me as he leaned across the desk were like colours I'd never seen and sounds I'd never heard. He hit me with the left hand, then with the right hand almost simultaneously, and the right hand felt like an iron pipe because of the line of gold rings at the stem of each hard finger. And while he hit me I saw between his hands his brown marksman's eyes fixed on me so steadfastly that I was afraid he was going to go on hitting me till I was dead. But at a summons from across the room he stopped and, pushing aside the accountant, grabbed the cellular telephone that was being proffered to him by the boy at the television monitors. He listened, handed back the phone, and turned in question to the accountant, who shook his head, still counting hundred-dollar bills.

"They're jokers," the accountant complained in Russian. "They call it a third, and it is not even one-tenth of a third. It is not enough to pay their dues; it's not enough to feed a mouse. They are such stupid robbers you wonder how they became crooks."

With a skip of his elbows he scooped up the money, presented it to Issa, executed a few quick flicks of the abacus, seized a ruler and a red pencil and drew a line through each of four pages of the ledger, removed his spectacles and placed them in a steel case and posted the case in an inside pocket of his brown suit. At once the whole party of us—accountant, fighters, Issa, and myself—were hastened down the crimson corridor to the lobby. The iron door stood open, the stone staircase beckoned, armed boys were flitting everywhere, fresh air washed over me like a draught of freedom, last stars winked from a pale morning sky. A long car was drawn up at the top of the steps. Magomed's gaunt companion was installed in the driving seat, gloved hands on the steering wheel. At the rear door stood Magomed himself, holding a dotted head scarf, which, with all the deftness of a nurse, he proceeded to bind round my eyes.

I'm passing through the looking glass, I told myself, as the blackness engulfed me. I'm drowning in Priddy Pool. I'm a Berkeleyan. I can't see, therefore I can't breathe. I'm screaming, but everyone's deaf and blind. The last thing I saw was Issa's elegant Italian shoes as Magomed slowly pulled the blindfold tight. They were of woven strips of brown leather and had buckles of gold chain.

What do they want?

Who are we waiting for?

Something has gone wrong. Plans are being revised.

I dreamed I was going to be shot at dawn, and when I woke it was dawn and I could hear footsteps and soft voices outside my door.

I dreamed that Larry was sitting on my bed, staring down at me, waiting for me to wake up. I woke and saw Zorin stooped over me, listening to my breathing, but it was only my young guards bringing me my breakfast.

I heard Emma playing Maxwell-Davies in the church at Honeybrook.

My cellar was a fitness club with ancient gymnasium apparatus shoved against the wall and a notice on the door saying CLOSED FOR REPAIR. It was situated beneath a monstrous slab apartment block one hour's blindfold drive from metropolitan Moscow, at the end of a bumpy gravel road amid smells of garbage, oil, and rotting trees, and it was the unfittest place on earth or under it. The humid air stank, water dripped and gurgled all night long from pipes that ran along the ceiling and down to the cracking concrete floor—pipes for sewage, pipes for hot water and drinking water, pipes for heating, and pipes that were ducts for electricity and telephone, and small grey rats, mostly on their way to somewhere else. To the best of my arithmetic, I stayed there nine days and ten nights, but time was irrelevant because when you are first imprisoned, years go by without your wristwatch advancing more than a few seconds, and the distance between two meals is a march across the entire desert of your life. In one night you sleep with every woman you've known, and when you wake it's still night and you're still shivering alone.

My cellar had no windows. The two grilles high in the wall that were supposed to provide ventilation had long been screwed shut. When I clambered onto a rat-eaten vaulting horse and examined them, I found that their iron frames were welded together with rust. For the first day the stench of my cell was unbearable, by the second day it bothered me a little less, and by the third it had disappeared, and I knew I was part of it. But the smells from above me were a constant theatre of the senses, from sunflower oil and garlic and onion and roasting lamb and chicken to the universal fug of large families in tiny crowded rooms.

"Bashir Haji!"

I woke with a great shudder to the cry uttered in marvel or agony by my guards at dead of night.

First their field telephone had rung. Then this tortured or delighted cry.

Were they celebrating him?

Were they declaring him their creed, shouting his name to the hilltops?

Were they calling down curses on him? Lamenting him? I lay awake, waiting for the next act. None came. I fell asleep.

A prisoner of the Ingush may be lonely, but he is never alone.

A childless man, I was inundated with children. They ran over my head, jumped on it, beat it, laughed at it, and screamed at it, and their mothers screamed back at them. Now and then a loud smack was followed by a bitter, breathless silence, and more screaming. I heard dogs howling, but only from outside the building. While I craved to be let out, the dogs demanded to be let in. I heard cats from everywhere. I heard the pompous boom of television sets switched on all day. I heard Mexican soap opera dubbed into Russian, and an urgent announcement interrupting it, reporting the crash of yet another financial company. I heard the slap of washing, the skirmishing of men in anger, men drunk, women in outrage. I heard weeping.

For music I had cheap Russian disco and mindless American rock, punctuated by something altogether deeper and more welcome: a slow, soft-throated rhythmic drumbeat, agitated and insistent, urging me to get up, brave the day, strive, attain. And I knew it was Emma's kind of music, grown in the home valleys and mountains of the exiles who listened to it. And at night, when most of these sounds were asleep, I heard the steady flow, as old as the sea, of gossip round campfires.

Thus I had in every sense the impression of having joined an underlife, for my hosts were themselves far from home and despised, and if I was their prisoner, I was also accorded the privileges of an honoured guest. When my guards led me to my daily wash, fingers to the mouth to command my silence, dark scowls as they spirited me through the entrails of the building to the tiny lavatory with its freshly torn pieces of unintelligible newspaper, I felt as much their accomplice as their ward.

I am listening to Pettifer on fear. It is not a long dissertation, certainly not a Sunday seminar. Our hotel is in Houston, Texas, and he has just spent ten days in a Cuban gaol on a trumped-up charge of possessing drugs—but in reality, he suspects, to provide the security police with an opportunity to take a closer look at him. First they wouldn't let him sleep. , Then they gave him a night and a day without water. Then they spread-eagled him to four rings on a wall and invited him to admit that he was an American spy.

"Once I got my dander up, it was great," Larry assures me, lounging beside the hotel pool, studying the passing bikinis while he sucks at the straw of his piña colada. "I told them that of all the insults they could heap on an English gentleman, accusing him of being a Yanqui spy was the lowest. I said it was worse than telling me my mother was a whore. Then I told them that their mothers were whores, at which point, more or less, Rogov barges in and tells them to take me down and give me a bath and let me go."

Rogov is the KGB head resident in Havana. It is my secret conviction that Rogov ordered the interrogation.

I ask the impossible question: What was it like? Larry affects to be surprised.

"After Winchester? A piece of cake. I'll settle for a Cuban prison over House Library any day. Hey, Timbo"—nudging my arm—"how about her? Cut out for you. Ugly and willing. No threat."

I had two guards, and they had no other life but me. They did everything together, whether it was night or day. Both had that tipping walk I had noticed in their comrades at the nightclub. Both spoke the gentle Russian of the south, but as a second language or perhaps by now a third, for they were first-year students in Muslim Studies at the Islamic University in Nazran, and their subjects were Arabic, the Koran, and the history of Islam. They declined to tell me their names, I supposed again on orders, but since they were also forbidden by their faith to lie, for those ten days they had no names at all.

They were Murids, they told me proudly, devoted to God and their spiritual masters, committed to a discreet and manly life in the search for sacred knowledge. Murids, they said, were the moral heart of the Ingush cause and of the military and political opposition to Russia. They were pledged to set an example of piety, honesty, bravery, and self-deprivation. The bigger and more studious—I have neither more than twenty—came from Ekazhevo, a large village on the outskirts of Nazran; his diminutive comrade was from Jairakh, high in the mountains close to the Georgian Military Highway at the southern extremity of the disputed Prigorod region, which they told me constituted half of traditional Ingushetia.

All this on the first day, while they stood shyly at the far end of my cell, dressed in bomber jackets and clutching machine pistols, watching me eat a breakfast of the same strong black tea I had found in Aitken May's waiting room, with a piece of precious lemon, and bread and cheese and hard-boiled eggs. Meals were from the start a ceremony. My Murids took turns to carry the tray, and great pride in their munificence. And since I quickly noticed that their own fare was less lavish—consisting, as they told me, of provisions they had brought from Nazran so that no dietary laws were breached—I made a show of eating mine with relish. By the second day, the cooks themselves started to appear: straight-eyed women in head scarves, who peered in at me from the cover of the doorway, the youngest the most modest, the older ones quizzing me with sparkling eyes.

Only once, through a misunderstanding, did I savour the less sociable side of our relationship. I was lying on my bed dreaming, and my dreams must have taken a violent turn, for when I opened my eyes and saw my two Murids staring down at me, one proudly bearing a cake of toilet soap and towels, the other my evening meal, I sprang up with a warlike shout, only to have my feet swept from under me and, as I started to struggle to my feet, the oily muzzle of a pistol pressed into my neck. Alone again, I heard their field telephone crackle and the sound of their quiet voices as they reported the event. They returned to watch me eat my meal, then removed the tray and chained me to my bed.

For my salvation I abandoned all resistance of body and mind. Supine and inert, I convinced myself that the greatest freedom in the world was to have no control over one's destiny.

Yet in the morning, when my guards released me, my wrists were bleeding and my ankles so swollen that we had to bathe them in cold water.

* * *

Magomed arrived with a bottle of vodka. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his round face under his skullcap was dark with stubble. What was saddening him? Or were his smiles always as sad as this? He poured the vodka but drank none himself. He enquired whether I was content. I replied, "Royally." He gave a distant smile and repeated: "Royally." We discussed in no particular sequence the writers Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Ford Madox Ford, and Bulgakov. He assured me that it was rare for him to engage in civilised conversation and asked whether such discussion was available to me in England.