Our Game (40 page)

Magomed's cell phone peeped; he murmured an order and tapped me on the shoulder as if starting his champion on a race. One boy grabbed my suitcase, another my attaché case; each held a machine pistol in his spare hand. I stepped after them into the corridor. Icy air greeted me, reminding me of my thin clothes and making me grateful for the hat. The gaunt man hissed, "Fast, damn you," in Russian and gave me a prod. I climbed two short staircases, and by the time I reached the second, snow was flying down the steps at me. I scrambled through a fire exit onto a snow-clad balcony manned by a boy holding a pistol. He waved me down an iron ladder. I slipped and caught my lower spine a painful blow. He shouted abuse at me. I swore back at him and stumbled forward.

Ahead of me I made out the boys with my luggage, disappearing behind a screen of driving snow. I was in a building site amid mounds, trenches, and parked tractors. I saw a row of trees and beyond the trees a huddle of parked cars. Snow poured into my shoes and grasped my calves. I slid into a trench and dragged myself free of it with my elbows and fingers. Snow blinded me. Wiping it away, I was amazed to glimpse Magomed leaping ahead of me, half clown, half deer, and the gaunt man at his heels. I struggled on, using the footprints prepared for me. But the snow was so deep that each time I landed I sank deeper into the Priddy mire, flailing and falling from one trough to the next.

Magomed and his companion were hanging back for me. Twice they yanked me to my feet by brute force; until with a roar of frustration Magomed scooped me up in his arms and wafted me across the snow and between the trees to a four-track van, its rear half covered in a tarpaulin. As I scrambled into the cab I saw the second of the two boys from the nightclub worm his way under the tarpaulin. Magomed took the wheel, the 'gaunt man sat himself the other side of me, a Kalashnikov between his knees and spare magazines of ammunition at his feet. The truck's engine howled in protest as we barged the drifts aside. Through a snow-caked windscreen, I took my leave of the ghostly landscape I had only now set eyes on: blackened apartment houses stolen from old war films; a smashed window with hot air belching out of it like smoke.

We sidled onto a main road; lorries and cars bore down on us. Magomed slapped his hand on the horn and kept it there while he forced a gap. His companion to my right watched every car that overtook us. He had a cell phone, and I guessed from the laughter and head turning that he was talk ing to the boys under the tarpaulin. The road tipped, and we tipped with it. A bend lay below us. We approached it confidently, but our van, like a stubborn horse, refused and glided straight on, mounting what was evidently a verge, then rolling gracefully onto its flank in the snow. Magomed and three of the men were on their feet beside it in a moment. In perfect unison they righted the van, and we were off again before I had time to be alarmed.

Now dachas lined the road, each fretted gable fat with falling snow, each tiny garden draped in its white dust sheet. The dachas creased. Flat fields and pylons skimmed past us, followed by high walls and three-metre razor-wire fences that guarded the palaces of the superrich. Now, to a kind of common relief, we were in forest—part pine, part shedding silver birch—nosing our way down a pencil-straight track of virgin snow that took us past felled logs and the burned-out wrecks of mysteriously abandoned cars. The track narrowed and grew darker. Clouds of frosted mist rolled over the bonnet of the van. We reached a clearing and stopped.

At first Magomed kept the engine running so that we could keep the heater on. Then he switched it off and wound down his window. We smelled pinewood and washed air, and listened to the furtive plops and flurries that are the language of the snow. My overcoat, soaked from falling, was wet and cold and heavy. I began worrying about the men under the tarpaulin. I heard a whistle, three soft notes. I glanced at Magomed, but the holy man's eyes had closed and his head was tilted backward in meditation. He held a green plastic grenade in his hand and had put his little finger through the loop. It was evidently the only finger that would fit. I heard a second whistle, one note. I looked at the trees to left and right of me, then up and down the track, but saw nothing. Magomed gave a whistle in return, two notes. Still nobody moved. I turned to look again at Magomed and saw, framed in the window beside him, the half-bearded face of Issa peering in.

* * *

One man stayed with the van, and as the rest of us set off I heard it drive away and saw billows of snow run after it down the road. Issa led, Magomed walked alongside him, in the manner of a hunting pair, each with his Kalashnikov covering the forest to his side of the path. The gaunt man and the two boys took the rear. Magomed had given me kapok gloves and strap-on overshoes which allowed me decent progress through the snow.

Our party was descending a steep bank. The trees above us joined in a dense arch; the sky glinted through it in pale shards. The snow gave way to moss and undergrowth. We passed tipped rubbish and old tyres, then carved effigies of deer and squirrels. We entered a clearing filled with tables and benches, and on the further side of it a row of wooden huts. We were in an abandoned summer camp. An old brick shed stood at its centre. On the padlocked door, the word CLUB was stencilled in military paint.

Issa went forward. Magomed stood under a tree with his hand raised, commanding the rest of us to remain where we were. I glanced upward and saw three men posted above us on the hillside. Issa rapped a signal on the door, then a second. The door opened. Issa nodded to Magomed, who beckoned me to his side at the same moment that the gaunt man gave me an unloving push.

Magomed fell back, ushering me ahead of him. I entered the hut and saw at the far end of the room one man seated alone on a makeshift stage, his dark head sunk despairingly in his hands. A tattered backdrop portrayed heroic farmworkers with shovels, digging their way to victory. The door closed behind me, and at the sound he raised his head, as if woken from a sleep, and turned to stare at me. And I recognised by the light from the snowed-up windows the harrowed, bearded features of Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev, looking ten years older than his last clandestine photograph.

FIFTEEN

"YOU ARE CRANMER," he said. "Larry's friend. His other friend. Tim, his great British spymaster. His middle-class destiny." His voice was drugged with exhaustion. He passed a hand across his jaw, reminding me of the Murids. "Oh, Larry told me all about you. Just a few months back, in Bath.

`CC, are you sitting comfortably? Well, take a big gulp of

Scotch—I have a confession for you.' I was amazed he had anything left to confess. You know that feeling?"

"Too well."

"So he confessed. And I was shocked. I was a fool, of course. Why be shocked? Merely because I betrayed my country, why should I expect him to betray his? So I swallowed some more whisky and wasn't shocked anymore. It was good whisky. Glen Grant from Berry Brothers and Rudd. Very old. Then I laughed. I'm still laughing now."

But neither his ravaged face nor his flattened voice suggested it, for I never saw a man so degenerated by exhaustion and, as I read it, self-hate.

"Who's Bairstow?" he asked.

"An alias."

"Who provided his passport?"

"I stole it."

"Who from?"

"My former Office. For an operation some years ago. I kept it back for my retirement."

"Why?"

"As an insurance policy."

"Against what?"

"Misfortune. Where's Larry? When can I see him?"

The hand again, passed across the jaw, this time in a brusque gesture of disbelief.

"Are you seriously trying to tell me you are here on private business?"

"Yes."

"No one sent you? No one said, Bring us Pettifer's head, we will reward you? Bring us both their heads and we will reward you twice? You are seriously only one person here, looking for your friend and spy?"

"Yes."

"Larry would say bullshit. So I say it too. Bullshit. We are not much given to swearing in my country. We take insults too seriously for swearing to be safe. But bullshit all the same. Double bullshit."

He was sitting at a table with one foot forward, a solitary figure on the stage, staring away from me at the workers on the wall. A lighted candle stood on the table. Others burned at intervals along the floor. I saw a shadow move and realised we were not alone.

"How is the great and good Colonel Zorin?" he asked.

"He's well. He sends greetings. He asks that you make some public declaration that you stole the money for your cause."

"Maybe they both sent you. The British and the Russians. In the great new spirit of entente."

"No."

"Maybe the world's only superpower sent you. I like that. America the great policeman: Punish the thieves, quell the rebels, restore order, restore peace. There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will remain standing. You remember that very funny joke from the Cold War?"

I didn't but said yes.

"The Russians are asking the West for peacekeeping money. Did you hear that joke also?"

"I believe I read something of the sort."

"It's true. A real-life joke. And the West is giving it. That's an even better joke. For the purposes of peacekeeping in the former Soviet Union. The West supplies the money, Moscow supplies the troops and the ethnic cleansing. The graveyards are full of peace, everybody's happy. How much are they paying you?"

"Who?"

"Whoever sent you."

"Nobody sent me. Therefore nothing."

"So you're freelance. A bounty hunter in the spirit of free enterprise. You are here to represent market forces. How much are we worth on the open market, Larry and Checheyev? Do you have a contract? Did your lawyer negotiate the deal?"

"Nobody's paying me, nobody sent me. I'm not taking orders from anyone, I'm not reporting to anyone. I came under my own power to find Larry. I'm not proposing to sell you. Even if I could. I'm a free agent."

He dragged a flask from his pocket and took a pull from it. It was dull and battered by use, but in design it was the same flask that Zorin had given me, with the same garish red insignia of his former service.

"I hate my name. My dirty, bloody name. If they had stamped it on me with a hot iron, I would not hate it more.”

“Why?"

" 'Hey, blackarse, how do you like Checheyev?' `No problem,' I say. 'It's a nice name. It's a blackarse name, but it's not too black. Got a nice ring to it.' Any other Ingush, you call him a blackarse to his face, he kills you. But me? I'm a concession man, a comedian. Their white nigger. I use their insults before they do. 'So how about Konstantin?' they ask. `No problem,' I say. 'Great emperor, big lover.' Wasn't till they got to the patronymic that they had their fun. 'Hey, blackarse, maybe we should make you a bit of a Jew,' they say, 'lead them off the scent. Abraham had a lot of sons. One more he won't notice.' So I'm a blackarse, and I'm a Jew, and I'm still smiling."

But he wasn't. He was in furious despair.

"What will you do if you find him?" he asked, wiping the neck of his flask on his sleeve.

"I'll tell him he's embarked on a trail of disaster and dragged his girl with him. I'll tell him that in England three people have already been murdered—"

He cut me short. "Three? Three already! A disaster? Remember that joke Stalin liked? Three people dead in a ditch after a motor accident, that's a national tragedy. But a whole nation deported and half of them exterminated, that's a statistic. Stalin was a great guy. Better than Konstantin."

I kept talking determinedly. "They've committed grand larceny, they've got themselves up to the neck in illegal arms dealing, they've placed themselves outside the law—"

He had risen and, with his hands behind his back, was standing centre stage. "What law?" he demanded. "What law, please? What law has Larry broken, please?"

I was losing patience. The cold was making me desperate.

"Whose law do you throw at me? British law? Russian law? American law? International law? United Nations law? The law of gravity? The law of the jungle? I don't understand whose law. Is that why they sent you—your Office—my Office—the sensitive and altruistic Colonel Zorin: to preach to me about the law? They've broken every law they ever made! Every promise to us: broken! Every pat on the back for the last three hundred years: a lie! They're killing us, in the villages, in the mountains, in the towns, in the valleys, and they want you to talk to me about the law?"

His anger kindled my own. "Nobody sent me! Do you hear me? I found the house in Cambridge Street. I heard that you'd been visiting Larry in Bath. I put it all together. I went

north and found the bodies. Then I had to leave the country!" ,why?"

"Because of you. CC. And your intrigues. And Larry's intrigues. And Emma's. Because I was suspected of being CC's accomplice. I was about to be arrested, like Zorin. Because of you. I need to see him. I love him." As a good Englishman, I hastened to qualify this. "I owe him."

A stirring in the shadows, or perhaps a wish to escape the intensity of his fury, caused me to glance round the shed. Magomed and Issa were seated by the door, their heads close together while they watched us. Two other men guarded the windows, a third was making tea on a primus. I looked back at Checheyev. His exhausted gaze was still fixed on me.

"Perhaps you haven't got the clout," I suggested, thinking I might taunt him into action. "Should I talk to somebody who can say 'yes' instead of 'no'? Perhaps you should take me to your Chief Leader. Perhaps you should take me to Bashir Haji and let me explain myself to him."

Speaking this name, I felt a tensing in the room, like a tightening of the air. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a sentry at the window turn his head and the barrel of his Kalashnikov swing gently round with him.

"Bashir Haji is dead. Many of our people were killed with him. We don't know who. We're in mourning. Tends to make us bad-tempered. Perhaps you should be in mourning too."

A terrible tiredness had descended over me. The cold seemed not worth fighting anymore. Checheyev had leaned himself in a corner of the stage, his hands deep in his pockets, his bearded head sunk inside the collar of his long coat. Magomed and Issa had lapsed into a kind of trance. Only the boys at the windows seemed to be awake. I tried to speak, but there was no breath in me. But I must have spoken all the same, for I heard Checheyev's answer, either in English or in Russian.