Our Game (30 page)

"So where are the Americans on this?"

"The what?" he said—implying that while he might be an expert on the North Caucasus, the United States of America were an unfamiliar concept to him.

"Uncle Sam," I said.

"My dear man—" He had never in his life till now used an endearment towards me. "Listen up, do you mind?" He assumed an American accent. It fell somewhere between a Deep South plantation owner and an East End costermonger. "What the fuck's the Ingush, man? Some kind o' Injun, man? Ameringush?"

I pulled a dutiful smile, and to my relief Simon returned to his normal drab voice.

"If America has a post-Sov policy down there, it's not to have a policy. Which is consistent with her post-Sov policy everywhere else, I may add. Planned apathy is the kindest description I can think of: act natural and look the other way while the ethnic cleansers do their hoovering and restore what politicians call normality. Which means that whatever Moscow does is okay by Washington, provided nobody frightens the horses. End of policy."

"So what can the Ingush hope for?" I asked.

"Absolutely sweet Fanny Adams," Simon Dugdale replied with relish. "There are bloody great oil fields in Chechenia, even if they've been screwed up by lousy exploitation. Minerals, timber, all the goodies. There's the Georgian Military Highway, and Moscow intends to keep it open whatever the Chechen and the Ingush think. And the Russian army isn't about to march into Chechenia and leave Ingushetia next door as a joker in the pack. Piss."

He had spilled something on his apron, and it had permeated his trousers. He seized another apron and, though it was even dirtier than the first, wrapped it round his midriff. "Anyway," he said accusingly, "who would you favour if you were the Kremlin? A bunch of bloodthirsty Muslim highlanders, or the Sovietised, Christianised, arse-licking Ossetians, who pray every day for Stalin to come back?"

"So what would you do if you were Bashir?"

"I'm not. Hypothetical codswallop."

Suddenly, to my surprise, he sounded like Larry dilating on the subject of fashionable and unfashionable wars. "First, I'd buy myself one of those smirking Washington lobbyists with plastic hair. That's a million bucks down the tube. Second, I'd get hold of a dead Ingush baby, preferably female, and put her on prime time television in the arms of a snivelling newscaster, preferably male, also with plastic hair. I'd have questions asked in Congress and the United Nations. And when absolutely sod all has happened as usual, I'd say to hell with it, and if I had any money left, I'd take my family to the south of France and blow the lot. No, I wouldn't. I'd go alone."

"Or go to war," I suggested.

He was crouching, packing saucepans into a pitch-dark cupboard at floor level.

"There's a warning out about you," he said. "Thought I'd better tell you. Anyone who sights you is supposed to tell Personnel Department."

"And will you?" I asked.

"Shouldn't think so. You're Clare's friend, not mine."

I thought he had finished, but there was evidently too much left in him.

"I rather dislike you, to be frank. And your bloody Office. I never believed one word you and your people told me unless I'd happened to have read it in the newspapers first. I don't know what you're looking for, but I'd be grateful if you didn't look for it here."

"Just tell me whether it's true."

"What?"

"Are the Ingush planning something serious? Could they do that? If they had the guns?"

Too late in the day, I wondered whether he was drunk. He seemed to have lost his orientation. I was wrong. He was warming to his subject.

"It's quite an interesting one, that, actually," he conceded, with the boyish enthusiasm he brought to all forms of catastrophe. "From stuff we're getting in, Bashir seems to be raising a pretty good head of steam despite himself. You may be onto something."

I took Emma's part and played the innocent. "Can't anyone stop it happening?" I asked.

"Oh sure. The Russians can. Do what they did last time. Turn the Ossies loose on them. Rocket their villages. Gouge their eyes out. Drag 'em down to the valleys, bang 'em up in ghettos. Deport them."

"I meant us. NATO without the Americans. After all, it is Europe. It is our patch."

"Do a Bosnia, you mean?" he proposed in the same triumphant note that in Simon Dugdale celebrated every impasse. "On Russian soil? Brilliant idea. And let's have a few Russian shock troops to sort out our British football hooligans while we're about it." The anger I had been provoking in him had caught light. "The presumption," he reasoned on a higher note, "that this country—any civilised country—has a duty to interpose itself between any two groups of knuckle-draggers who happen to be determined to butcher each other ..." He's talking like me, I thought. "... to patrol the globe, mediating between hell-bent heathen savages nobody's ever heard of ... Do you mind going now?"

"What's the forest?"

"Are you mad?"

"Why would an Ingush warn somebody about the forest?"

Once more his face cleared. "Ossetian Ku Klux Klan. Shadowy mob, fed and watered by the KGB or its derivatives. If you wake up tomorrow morning with your balls in your mouth, which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, in my view, it will like as not be the work of The Forest. After you."

Clare was in the drawing room with a magazine on her lap, watching a black-and-white television set over the top of her reading glasses.

"Oh, Tim, darling, do let me run you to the station. We've hardly talked at all."

"I'm ordering a cab for him," said Simon, at the telephone.

The cab came and she took my arm and led me to it, while Simon the Berkeleyan stayed indoors, denying the existence of everything he couldn't perceive. I remembered the occasions when I had performed a similar courtesy for Emma, fuming inside the house and grimacing at my reflection while she said goodbye to Larry in the drive.

"I always think of you as a man who does things," Clare whispered in my ear, while she chewed it half to pieces. "Poor Si's so academic."

I felt nothing for her. Some other Cramer had slept with her.

I drove, with Larry beside me in the passenger seat. "You're mad," I told him, taking a leaf from Simon Dugdale's book. "Dangerously, cogently mad."

He affected to weigh this, which was what he always did before he struck back.

"My definition of a madman, Timbo, is someone who is in possession of all the facts."

It was midnight. I was approaching Chiswick. Pulling off the main road, I wove through a chicane and entered a private estate. The house was an overdecorated Edwardian gem. Beyond it lay the black Thames, its surface feathered by the city's glow. I parked, fished the .38 from my briefcase, and jammed it in my waistband. The briefcase in my left hand, I stepped round a broken stile and stood on the tow-path. The river air smelled brown and greasy. Two lovers were embracing on a bench, the girl astride. I walked slowly, picking my way round puddles, setting up water rats and birds. On the other side of the hedge, guests were taking leave of their hosts:

"Simply marvellous party, darlings, literally."

I was reminded of Larry, doing one of his voices. I had reached the house again, this time from the back. Lights burned over the back door and on the garage. Selecting a point where the hedge was lowest, I pushed down the wire, dropped the briefcase the other side of it, and nearly castrated myself. I toppled into a garden of mown lawn and rose beds. Two naked children stared at me, their arms outstretched, but as I advanced on them they became a pair of porcelain cupids. The garage stood to my left. I hastened to its shadow, tiptoed to a window, and peered inside. No car. He's out to dinner. He's been summoned to a war party. Help, help, Cranmer's flown the coop.

I propped myself against the wall, my eyes trained on the front gate. I could wait for hours like this. A cat rubbed itself against my leg. I smelled the liquid stench of fox. I heard a car, I saw its headlights bounce towards me down the unmade road. I pressed myself more tightly yet against the garage wall. The car drove on, to stop fifty yards up the road. A second car appeared, a better one: white lights, two sets, a quieter engine. Be alone, Jake, I warned him. Don't make it hard for me. Don't bring me some Significant Other. Just bring me your Insignificant Self.

Merriman's overpolished Rover car bucked through the front gate and up the little ramp to his garage. It had Jake Merriman at the wheel, and no one else aboard, no Other at all, not of either sex. He drove into the garage, he dowsed the headlights of his car. There followed one of those pauses that I associate with single people of a certain age, while he stayed sitting in the driver's seat and by the interior light fidgeted with things I couldn't see.

"Just don't be alarmed, Jake," I said.

I had opened his door for him and was holding the gun a few inches from his head.

"I won't be," he said.

"Switch the interior light to full time. Give me the car key. Put your hands on the steering wheel. Don't take your hands off the steering wheel. How do the garage doors close?"

He held up a magic box.

"Close them," I said.

The doors closed.

I sat behind him. Holding the gun to the nape of his neck, I put my left forearm across his throat and gently drew his head to me until we were cheek-to-cheek.

"Munslow tells me you've been looking for Emma," I said.

"Then he's a bloody little fool."

"Where is she?"

"Nowhere. We're looking for Pettifer too, in case you haven't noticed. We haven't found him either. We'll be looking for you as well after tonight."

"Jake, I will do this. You know that, don't you? I will actually shoot you if I have to."

"I don't need convincing. I'll collaborate. I'm a coward."

"Do you know what I did yesterday, Jake? I wrote a frank letter to the chief constable of Somerset, copy to the Guardian newspaper. I described how a few of us in the Office had decided to rip off the Russian Embassy with a little help from Checheyev. I took the liberty of mentioning your name."

"Then you're a stupid little sod."

"Not as a ringleader but as someone who could be counted on to turn a blind eye at the right moments. A passive conspirator like Zorin. The letters will be posted at nine tomorrow morning unless I say the magic word. I shan't say the word unless you tell me what you know about Emma."

"I've told you everything we know about Emma. I've given you a bloody file on Emma. She's a tart. What more do you want to know?"

The sweat was rolling off him in great drops. There was sweat on the barrel of the .38.

"I want an update. And please don't call her a tart, Jake.

Call her the nice lady or something. Just not tart."

"She was in Paris. Phoning from a public box in the Gare du Nord. You trained her well."

Larry did, I thought. "When?"

"October."

"We're in October now. When in October?"

"Mid. The twelfth. What on earth do you think you're up to? Relent. Make a confession. Come home."

"How do you know it was the twelfth?"

"The Americans picked her up on a random sweep.”

“The Americans? How the hell did the Americans get in on the act?"

"Computerland, darling. We gave them a sample of her voiceprint. They backtracked through their intercepts. Out popped your precious Emma, speaking with a phony Scottish accent."

"Who was she calling?"

"Philip somebody."

I didn't remember a Philip. "What did she say?"

"She was well, she was in Stockholm. That was a lie. She was in Paris. She wished all the boys and girls to know that she was happy and was proposing to make a new beginning. With thirty-seven million quid to play with, one imagines she very well might."

"Did you listen to her yourself?"

"You don't think I'd leave her to some spotty CIA college boy, do you?"

"Give me her words."

" 'I'm going back to where I came from. I'm making a new start.' To which our Philip says, 'Right, right,' which is what the lower classes say these days. Right, right, and cheers instead of thank you. She's waiting for you, you'll be pleased to hear. She's totally devoted to you. I was proud of you."

"Her words," I said.

" 'I'll wait for him for as long as it takes,' spoken with the most marvellous conviction. 'I'll do a Penelope for him, even if it's years. I'll weave by day and I'll unpick by night until he comes for me.' "

With the gun in my hand and the briefcase flying out behind me, I pelted to my car. I drove south till I came to the outskirts of Bournemouth, where I checked into a bungalow motel with crematorium music in the corridors and mauve night-lights marking the fire exists. I'm coming for you, I told her. Hang on. For pity's sake, hang on.

She is dead of cold, except that she is shivering. It's as if I have rescued her from a freezing sea. Her clammy skin sticks as she clutches me. Her face is pressed so hard against mine that I am unable to resist.

"Tim, Tim, wake up."

She has rushed into my room, naked. She has yanked back my duvet and wound her freezing body round me, whispering,—rim, Tim," when all she means is "Larry, Larry." She is shaking and writhing uselessly against me, but I'm not her lover, just the body she hangs on to while she nearly drowns, the nearest she can get to Larry.

"You love him too," she says. "You must."

She slinks back to her room.

Paris, Merriman had said. Phoning from a public box in the Gare du Nord. You trained her well.

Paris, I thought. For her new beginning.

Dee's place, she is saying. Where I was made alive again. Who's Dee? I ask.

Dee's a saint. Dee saved me when I was flat on the deck.

I'm making a new start, Merriman is saying in his perfumed voice, quoting Emma. I'm going back to where I came from.

A grey morning with no sun. A long drive lifting to the house, gulls and peacocks squawking at my arrival. I spoke my name, the iron gates parted as if I had said "Open Sesame," the mock-Tudor mansion rose before me amid misted lawns, and the tennis court where no one ever played and the pool where no one swam. A flaccid Union Jack dangled from a tall white mast. Behind the house, golf links and dunes. In the distance, a ghostly old battleship stuck halfway up the sky. It had been there ever since I first ventured up the same hill fifteen years ago and timidly suggested to Ockie Hedges that he might consider putting a little back by assisting us in certain matters not unrelated to the arms trade.