Our Game (37 page)

"None."

"Your word?"

"My word."

"So you know of this matter. They have consulted you." The speed and intensity of his questions, and the gravity

with which he put them, persuaded me to set caution aside. "Yes," I said.

"To seek your advice?"

"To question and accuse me. They are casting me in a similar role, as your accomplice. You and I had secret talks, therefore we must be thieves together."

"Is this why you're Bairstow?"

"Yes."

"Where is Pettifer?"

"Here perhaps. Where's Checheyev?"

"My friends tell me he has vanished. Maybe he's in Moscow, maybe the mountains. The idiots looked high and low for him; they pulled in some of his people. But the Ingush don't interrogate easily." His features cracked into a grim smile. "None has so far come up with a voluntary statement. Checheyev's a clever guy, I like him, but in his heart he's a blackarse, and we're killing blackarses like flies. He stole the money to help his people. Your Pettifer assisted him—for money, for who knows? Maybe friendship, even."

"Do the idiots also think that?"

"Of course they don't! So idiotic they are not!”

“Why not?"

"Because they refuse to countenance a theory of their own incompetence!" he retorted, keeping his voice low with difficulty as his pressed-in anger broke free. "If Checheyev was an Ingush patriot, they should never have sent him to London. Do you think the Kremlin wants to advertise to the world the national aspirations of a tribe of savages? Do you think they want to tell the blessed fraternity of international bankers that a blackarse can sign himself a cheque for fifty million pounds across the counter of a Russian embassy?"

Eugenie was coughing. Cradling her in his great arms, he sat her upright and gazed with desolation into her face. I don't think I ever saw such an expression of pain and adoration etched in such unlikely features. She gave a soft, apologetic cry. On his nod, I puffed up her pillows. He laid her gently back on them.

"Find Checheyev for me, Timothy," he ordered. "Tell him to shout it to the world, declare his cause, say he is a good man, say what he's done and why. And while he's about it, he can tell them Volodya Zorin is innocent and so are you. Tell him to move his black arse before the idiots put a bullet in my neck."

"Find him how?"

"Pettifer was your agent, for Christ's sake! He wrote to us. To us. To the KGB, or whatever they call us these days. He made a full confession of his crimes. He told us he belonged to you first and only afterwards to us. But now he wishes to be no one's man but his own. Not yours, not ours. Unfortunately, the idiots have his letter, so it will never see the light of day. All he's done is make a target of himself. If the idiots can kill Pettifer as well as Checheyev, they'll be delighted." He drew an English matchbox from his pocket and laid it on the bed before me. "Go to the Ingush, Timothy. Tell them you're Pettifer's friend. He will confirm it. So will Checheyev.

Those are the telephone numbers of the known ringleaders of the movement here in Moscow. Tell them to take you to him. They may. They may kill you first, but that won't be anything personal. A blackarse is a blackarse. And if you meet Checheyev, cut his balls off for me."

"There's one problem."

"There's hundreds. What the hell?"

"If I were your masters—and if I wanted to catch Checheyev—and if I had you as my prisoner—what you have just suggested to me is exactly what I'd be telling you to say to Cranmer when he walked into this room." He started to protest, but I spoke through him. "Then I'd wait for Cranmer to lead me to Checheyev. And to his friend Pettifer, naturally—"

With a suppressed growl of fury, he cut me short. "Do you think I wouldn't do that if it was there to do? Jesus Christ! I would go to the idiots myself. 'Listen, idiots! Cranmer the British spy is coming to see me! He's soft in the head. He thinks I'm his friend. I've lured him. Let me direct him to the Ingush. We'll trace him together, like a stain in the water, till we reach the well! Then we'll smash their rebel scum to pieces and send their British spymasters to hell!' I would do all of it and more if it would give us back our dignity and standing in the world. All my life I believed in what we did. `Well,' I said, 'we make mistakes, we take wrong roads, we are human beings, not angels. But we are the right side. Man's future is safe with us. We are the moral instruments of history.' When the perestroika came, I supported it. So did my Service. 'But gradually,' we said. 'Spoon-feed them. A little freedom at a time.' They didn't want spoon-feed. They kicked over the bucket and ate the whole meal at once. And what are we now?"

He was staring at Eugenie. He seemed to be talking to her , also, for his voice had fallen and he spoke quite tenderly.

"So we shot people," he said. "A lot of people. Some were good men and shouldn't have been shot. Others were lousy bastards and should have been shot ten times. So how many people has God killed? For what? How many does He kill unjustly every day, without reason, or explanation, or compassion? And we were only men. And we had a reason."

About to leave the room, I looked back. He was bending over her, listening tensely to her breathing, his great face wet with tears.

There were two telephones in my room, red and black. The red, according to the glossy leaflet, was my Personal Direct Line to All the World. But it was the black that, somewhere around two in the morning, tore me from my wakeful slumbers.

"You are Mr. Bairstow, please?" A male voice, speaking precise but accented English.

"Who's speaking?"

"Issa is speaking. What do you wish from us, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

Issa from Emma's answering machine in Cambridge Street, I thought. "I'm a friend of Misha," I said.

I had said it already, over two days, from call boxes and cafés to answerphones and curt intermediaries, in my hand-pressed Russian, as Larry called it, using the numbers Zorin had given me: I am here, I am Bairstow, I am a friend of Misha, it is urgent, please contact me, here is the telephone number of my hotel. And it came a little strangely to me, I'll admit, to hear myself performing, if only in part, as Zorin's agent.

"Who is Misha, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Misha is an English gentleman, as I am, Issa," I replied breezily, since I did not wish our conversation to sound conspiratorial to the twenty other people listening.

Silence while Issa digested this.

"What is the occupation of Misha, please, this man?"

"He deals in carpets. He buys carpets abroad and has them delivered to his special customers." I waited, but nothing came back. "Unfortunately, the particular exporter that Misha has been using for his deliveries—" But I got no further before Issa cut me short.

"What is your business in Moscow, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Friendship. I have important personal messages for Misha."

The line went dead. Like Larry, few Russians say goodbye on the telephone. I stared into the darkness. Ten minutes later the phone was ringing again. This time Issa was speaking to the accompaniment of crackling voices in the background.

"How is your first name, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Colin," I replied. "But people who know me well sometimes call me Tim."

"Tim?"

"Short for Timothy."

"Colin Timothy?"

"Colin or Timothy. Timothy is like a nickname." I repeated "nickname," using the Russian word. I repeated

"Timothy," in English, then in its Russian version. He disappeared. Twenty minutes later he was back. "Mr. Colin Timothy?"

"Yes."

"It is Issa."

"Yes, Issa."

"A car will wait outside your hotel. It will be a white Lada. The numbers of this car"—he put his hand over the mouthpiece as if to confer with someone—"the numbers are 686."

"Who will be in it? Where will it take me?"

The voice became an order, and an urgent one, as if he himself were receiving orders as he spoke to me. "It is outside your hotel now. The driver is Magomed. Come immediately, please. Come now."

I flung on my clothes. The corridor was holding an exhibition of appalling paintings of happy Russian peasants dancing in snowfilled forest glades. In the casino, two sullen Finns were playing against a roomful of croupiers and hostesses. I stepped into the street. A flurry of girls with their pimps advanced on me. I shouted "no" at them more vehemently than I meant to, and they recoiled. Flakes of sleet mingled with the icy rain. I had no hat and only a thin mackintosh. Did the Herr require a taxi? the doorman asked in German. The Herr didn't. The Herr required Larry. Steam was pouring from the drain covers in the cobble. Figures slipped among the shadows across the street. A Lada stood parked between two lorries in the centre of the road, not white but green, and the numbers 688, not 686. But it was a Lada, and this was Moscow, where precision was a variable quantity. A very broad, twinkly man no more than five feet tall was holding open the passenger door, smiling at me. He wore a fat skullcap with a tassel hanging from the crown, a tracksuit, and a padded waistcoat, and he had a jester's sadness. A second man lurked in the shadows of the back seat, his gaunt face barely legible under the brim of his hat. But his pale-blue shirtfront had caught a ray of light from the street lamp overhead. And because in tense moments one sees either everything or nothing, I observed that his shirt had no collar in the Western sense and was of a heavy, hand-loomed material, high at the neck and fastened with toggles of plaited cloth.

"Mr. Timothy?" the jester asked. He shook my hand. "My name is Magomed, sir, after the Prophet," he announced in a Russian as stately as my own. "I regret that most of my friends are dead."

I climbed into the passenger seat, wondering whether he was telling me that my friend was as well. He closed the door on me and reappeared at the front of the car to fit the windscreen wipers into their sockets. Then he alighted neatly in the driver's seat beside me, though he was too wide for it. He turned the ignition once, then several times. He shook his tasseled head like a man who knew that nothing ever really worked, and turned the key again. The engine fired and we set off, weaving between the potholes in the road, and I saw that Magomed was doing what I hoped he would do: he was watching his rear mirror all the time.

The man behind us was mumbling into a cell phone in the language I couldn't understand. Occasionally he broke off to give Magomed directions, only to countermand them moments later, so that our journey became a series of repeated false spurts and hasty realignments until we hurtled gratefully to a halt behind a row of limousines and their minders. Wiry young men in mink hats, roll necks, and cowboy boots stepped forward from a doorway. One carried a machine pistol and had a gold chain round his wrist. Magomed asked him a question, waited, and received a thoughtful answer. He cast a leisurely glance up and down the road, then dabbed at my elbow in the way we steer the blind. Magomed entered an alley between two warehouses held apart by girders. He walked widely, his huge chest forward and head back, his hands curled ceremoniously at his sides. Two or three boys followed us.

We passed under an arch and down a steep flight of stone steps to a red iron door with a bulkhead light burning above it. He rapped a tattoo, and we waited while the rain poured down our necks. The door opened, and a cloud of cigarette smoke engulfed us. I heard the pulse of rock music and saw a mauve brick wall hung with the white faces of Mogamed's dead friends. The mauve turned orange, and I made out dark-clad bodies beneath the faces, a glint of weaponry, and hard hands ready to engage. I was facing a detachment of seven or eight armed men in flak jackets. Grenades hung from their belts. The door behind me closed. Magomed and his friends had gone. Two men marched me along a crimson corridor to a darkened observation balcony that looked down through smoked glass onto Moscow's rich, reclining in the plush alcoves of a nightclub. Slow waiters moved among them, a few couples danced. On foreshortened pillars, naked go-go girls rotated mindlessly to the rhythm of rock music. The atmosphere was about as erotic as an airport waiting room, and as tense. The balcony turned a corner and became a projection room and office. A stack of Kalashnikovs stood against the wall beside boxes of ammunition and grenades. Two boys manned the observation window, a third held a cell phone to his ear and watched a bank of television monitors showing the alley, the parked limousines, the stone stairway, and the entrance lobby.

In a far corner a bald-headed man in underclothes was handcuffed to a chair. He was slumped forward, crouching in a mess of his own blood. At a desk not four feet from him sat a pudgy. industrious little man in a brown suit, passing hundred-dollar bills through an electronic money-detector and totting up his findings on a wooden abacus. Occasionally as he counted he shook his head or lowered his spectacles and peered over the top of them at a ledger. Occasionally he paused to take a portentous gulp of coffee.

And presiding over the room, surveying each part of it with steady, expressionless glances, stood a very athletic man of about forty, in a dark-green blazer with gold buttons, and on his fingers a line of gold rings, and on his wrist a gold Rolex watch enriched with diamonds and small rubies. He was broad-faced as well as broad-shouldered, and I was aware of the muscles in his neck.

"Are you Colin Bairstow they call Timothy?" he demanded, in the English I recognised from the telephone. "And you are Issa," I replied.

He murmured an order. The man on my right put his hands on my shoulders. A second placed himself behind me. I felt their four palms explore my upper body, front and back, my crotch, thighs, ankles. They took my wallet from the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it to Issa, who accepted it in his fingertips as if it were unclean. I noticed his cuff links: big as old pennies, and engraved with what appeared to be wolves. After my wallet, the men gave him my fountain pen, handkerchief, room key, hotel pass, and loose change. Issa laid them fastidiously in a brown cardboard box.

"Where is your passport?"