Our Game (14 page)

Time the great healer of the dead. I had been clinging to it for five weeks, but now I was clinging to it for dear life. On August 1 I cut off my telephone.

Several Sundays later—Sunday being our day of destiny—Emma removes her piano stool and antique jewellery and departs without leaving a forwarding address.

On September 18, I do or do not kill Larry Pettifer at Priddy Pool. Until Emma left, I knew only that in the best civil service tradition, steps would have to be taken. Time becomes blank space lit by black light.

Time becomes time again when, on October 10, the first day of Larry's appointed lecture course at Bath University and twenty-two days after Priddy, Dr. Lawrence Pettifer goes officially missing.

Question: How long had Larry been missing before he went officially missing?

Question: Where was Emma when I was or wasn't killing Larry?

Question: Where is Emma now?

And the biggest question of all, which nobody will answer for me even if anybody knows: When did Checheyev visit Larry? For if CC's last visit to Bath occurred after September 18, Larry's resurrection was complete. If before, I must continue wandering in the black light, a murderer to myself if not to Larry.

After time, matter: Where is Zany's body?

There were two pools at Priddy, the Mineries and Waldegrave. It was the Mineries that we locals called Priddy Pool, and in summer children scrambled on its banks all day. At weekends, middle-class families picnicked on the tufted moorlands and parked their Volvos in the lay-by. So how could a corpse as large as Larry's—how could any corpse—stink and rot and float there undetected for thirty-six days and nights?

First theory of matter: The police have found Larry's body and are lying.

Second theory of matter: The police are playing me along, waiting for me to provide the proof they lack.

Third theory of matter: I am ascribing too much wit to the police.

And the Office, what are they doing? Oh, my dear, what we

always did! Riding all the horses in the race at once, and coming nowhere.

Fourth theory of matter: Black light becomes white light, and Larry's body isn't dead.

How many times had I gone back to Priddy to take a look? Nearly. Got out the car, put on an old sports coat, turned out of the drive, only to invent some other purpose—pop down to Castle Cary, do some shopping, look in on Appleby of Wells instead?

Dead women float upward, I had read somewhere. Dead men keep their faces in the water. Or was it the other way round? Was it Larry's grin that was going to accuse me—still there, still staring up at me in the moonlight? Or the back of his broken head as he peered forever into the muddy waters of the hereafter?

I had turned up a pencilled record of Checheyev's postings, composed from his formal biography and Larry's embellishments.

1970 Iran, under the name of Grubaev. Made his reputation by contacting local (forbidden) Communist Party. Named and praised by Central Committee, of which KGB head of personnel is ex-officio member. Promoted.

1974 South Yemen, under the name of Klimov, as deputy head of residentura. Derring-do, desert skirmishes, throat-cutting. [Larry's indelicate description: he was a Russian Lawrence, living off camel's piss and roast sand.]

1980-82 Crash posting to Stockholm as Checheyev to replace local second man expelled for activities incompatible, etc. Bored stiff. Hated Scandinavia, except for the aquavit and the women. [Larry: he was ticking over at about three a week. Women and bottles.]

1982-86 Moscow Centre England Section, eating his heart

out and getting reprimanded for cheek.

1986-90 In London as Checheyev, second man in the residentura under Zorin [because as I had told dear Marjorie, no blackarse will ever make top man in a major Western residency.]

From an envelope pinned to the inside cover of the tile I extracted a bunch of snapshots mostly taken by Larry: CC outside the Soviet Embassy dacha in Hastings, where Larry was sometimes invited to spend weekends; CC at the Edinburgh Festival, living his cultural cover in front of posters proclaiming "A Caucasian Entertainment of Dance & Music."

I looked again at Checheyev's face, as I had looked at it so often in the past: honed but pleasant-featured, an air of wry humour and resourcefulness. Thirty-seven million pounds' worth of calm eyes.

And went on looking at it. Took up Uncle Bob's old magnifying glass to look deeper into it than ever before. Great generals, I had read, carried photographs of their adversaries around with them, hung them in their tents, mooned over them before saying their prayers to the beastly God of Battles. But my feelings towards Checheyev contained nothing of hostility. I had wondered, as I always did of Larry's other parent, how on earth Larry managed to fool him. But that was the way with doubles the world over. If you were on the right side, the wrong side looked absurd. And if you were on the wrong side, you fought like hell to convince people you were on the right side until it was too late. And surely I had puzzled how anybody whose people had been hounded by Russian colonial rule for three hundred years could talk himself into serving his oppressors.

"He's a Caucasian werewolf, Timbo," Larry is saying excitedly. "Rational spy by day, gorets by night. By six in the evening you can see his fangs appear...."

I waited for his enthusiasm to fade. For once it didn't. So that gradually, with Larry as our go-between, I began quite to like Checheyev too. I came to rely on his professionalism. I marvelled aloud at his ability to hold Larry's respect. And if I didn't understand what Larry called the wolf in him, I was able, even at one remove, to sense the pull of his revolt against the dreary system that he served.

I am in the surveillance house in Lambeth, seated beside Jack Andover, our chief watcher, while he runs video film of Checheyev in Kew Gardens, emptying a dead-letter box that Larry has filled an hour earlier. First he strolls past the warning signal, which denotes that the letter box is filled, and the camera shows us the child's chalk mark that Larry has scrawled on the brick wall. Checheyev registers it with the corner of his eye and strolls on. His walk is buoyant, almost insolent, as if he knows he's being filmed. He advances casually on a rose bed. He stoops and affects to read the botanist's description of the stems. As he does so, his upper body makes one swift lunge while his hand whisks a package from its hiding place and secretes it in his clothing: but so deftly, so imperceptibly, that I am reminded of a military tattoo that Uncle Bob once took me to, with Cossack horsemen who slid beneath the bellies of their bareback mounts at full gallop, to reemerge at the salute.

"Your bloke got any Welsh blood in him at all?" Jack asks me, as Checheyev resumes his innocent inspection of the rose beds.

Jack is right. Checheyev has the miner's neatness and the miner's roll.

"My boys and girls have taken a real shine to him," Jack assures me as I leave. "Slippery isn't the word. They say it's a privilege to follow him, Mr. Cranmer." And shyly: "Any word of Diana at all, by any chance, Mr. Cranmer?"

"Fine, thank you. She's happily remarried and we're good friends."

My former wife, Diana, had worked in Jack's section before she saw the light.

Money again.

After time, matter, and Konstantin Checheyev, consider money. Not my annual expenditure, or how much I inherited from Uncle Bob or Aunt Cecily, or how I afforded Emma's Bechstein that she didn't want. But real money, thirty-seven millions of it, milked from the Russian government, planned white-collar banditry, Larry's hoofprints all over the file.

Rising from the table, I began a tour of my priesthole, peering from each arrow slit in turn. I was reaching for memories that danced away from me as soon as I went after them.

Money.

Call up occasions when Larry mentioned money in any context except tax, debts, forgotten bills, pigs-in-clover materialism of the West, and the cheques he hadn't got round to paying in.

Returning to my table, I started to sift once more among the files, till I came on the entry I was looking for without quite knowing what it was: one sheet of yellow legal pad, scored with prim annotations in my blue rollerball. And along the top, couched in the self-conscious terms I use when I am talking to myself aloud, the question: Why did Larry lie to me about his rich friend in Hull?

I advance on the question slowly, just as Larry does. I am an intelligence officer. Nothing exists without a context.

Larry is just back from Moscow. We are entering his last year in harness. Our safe flat this time is not in the Tottenham Court Road but in Vienna's Hohe Warte, in a sprawling green-tiled mansion scheduled for demolition, the furniture Ministry of Works Biedermeier. Dawn has broken, but we haven't gone to bed. Larry flew in late last night and as usual we launched straight into the debriefing. In a few hours he will be delivering a keynote speech to a conference of International Journalists Concerned, whom Larry has predictably rechristened "Jerkers." He sprawls on the sofa, one slender hand dropped low like a Sickert drawing and the other balancing a mahogany whisky on his belly. A coven of middle-aged Russian analysts—the term "Moscow-watcher" is already out of date—has left him at odds with the approaching daylight. He is talking about the world: our part of it. Even approaching the subject of money, Larry must first talk about the world.

"West's compassioned out, Timbo," he announces to the ceiling, not bothering to stifle a huge yawn. "Running on empty. Fuck us."

You're still in Moscow, I'm thinking as I watch him. With age the switching back and forth between camps is getting harder for you and you take longer to come home. When you stare at the ceiling I know you are staring at the Moscow skyline. When you stare at me you're comparing my nourished contours with the deprived faces you've left behind. And when you curse like this I know you're washed out.

"Vote for the new Russian democracy," he resumes vaguely. "Anti-Semitic, anti-Islam, anti-Western, and corruption to die for. Hey, Timbers ..."

But even on the brink of talking about money, Larry must first eat. Eggs, bacon, and fried bread, his favourite. Nothing makes him fat. The eggs free range and turned, the way he likes them. Fortnum & Mason's English Breakfast Tea, flown in with the coven. Full-fat milk and caster sugar. The bread whole meal. Lots of salted butter. Mrs. Bathhurst, our resident safe-housekeeper, knows all Mr. Larry's little ways, and so do I. The food has mollified him. It always does. In the long brown moth-eaten dressing gown that he takes with him everywhere, he has become my friend again.

"What is it?" I reply.

"Who do we know who does money?" he asks with his mouth full. We have arrived at his goal. Not knowing this, of course, I am uncharacteristically short with him. Perhaps with the end of the Cold War he tires me more than I am prepared to admit.

"All right, Larry, what kind of hash are you in this time? It's only a couple of weeks since we bailed you out."

He breaks out laughing, too heartily for my blood. "Come off it, you ass. This isn't for me. It's for a chum of mine. I need a red-toothed fascist banker. Who do we know?"

So away we go. About money. This chum of mine at Hull University, he explains genially as he spreads his marmalade. Chum you wouldn't know, he adds, before I can ask his name. Poor sod's come into a pot of cash, he says. A mega pot. Totally out of the blue. Rather like you did, Timbo, when your aunt whosit kicked the bucket. Needs his hand held. Needs accountants, solicitors, trusts, all that junk. Someone big league, offshore, sophisticated—who do we know? Come on, Timbo, you know everyone.

So I ponder for him, though mostly I am studying to understand why he has chosen this particular moment to discuss something as irrelevant as the financial anxieties of his chum in Hull.

And it so happens that only two days earlier I have been sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with just such a banker, in my capacity as honorary trustee of a private charity called the Charles Lavender Urban and Rural Trust for Wales.

"Well, there's always the great and good Jamie Pringle," I suggest cautiously. "Nobody could call him sophisticated, but he's certainly big league, as he's the first to tell you."

Pringle was our contemporary at Oxford, a rugger-playing scion of Larry's Unbearable Classes.

"Jamie's an oaf," Larry declares, swilling his English Breakfast Tea. "Where's he hang out anyway? In case this chum's interested?"

But Larry is lying.

How do I know? I know. It doesn't take the soured perceptions of post-Cold War depression to see through his wiles. If you have run a man for twenty years, if you have schooled him in deception, immersed him in it, coaxed out the guile in him and made it work; if you have sent him away to sleep with the enemy and chewed your nails waiting for him to come back; if you have nursed him through his loves and hates, his fits of despair and wanton malice and ever-present boredom, and struggled with all your heart to distinguish between his histrionics and the real thing, then either you know his face or you know nothing, and I knew Larry's like the map of my own soul. I could have drawn it for you, if I had only been an artist: every emphasis of his features, every lift and fall of every telltale line, and the places where nothing happens and a saintly stillness settles when he lies. About women, about himself. Or about money.

Cranmer's tight-lipped note to self, undated: Ask Jamie Pringle what on earth LP was up to.

But with Merriman's axe poised above us, and LP grating quite unusually on my nerves, Cramer must have had other things to do.

So it is not till a couple of months back, when we are two free men and Emma, enjoying our umpteenth Sunday lunch at Honeybrook, and I have directed the rather stilted conversation away from the anguish of Bosnia, and the ethnic cleansing of the Abkhazians, and the decimation of the Moluccans, and I forget what other raging issues of the day that consume them both, that Jamie Pringle's name accidentally crops up. Or perhaps some demon in me gives it a nudge, for I am starting to get a little reckless now.