Our Kind of Traitor (10 page)

Not utterly sure of anything, actually,
darling
. Not just now. Not utterly sure whether you’re a master-spy or an underling. Not sure why you wear spectacles with thick lenses for driving to Bloomsbury in broad daylight, and no spectacles on the journey back when it’s pitch dark. Or might it be that you spies can only see in the dark?

*

The flat she had jointly inherited from her late father wasn’t a flat but a maisonette on the two top floors of a pretty white Victorian terrace house of the sort that gives Primrose Hill its charm. Her upwardly mobile brother, who killed pheasants with rich friends, owned the other half of it, and in about fifty years, if he hadn’t died
of drink by then, and Perry and Gail were still together, which she presently doubted, they will have paid him off.

The entrance hall stank of number 2’s Bourguignonne and resounded to other tenants’ bickerings and television sets. The mountain bike Perry kept for his weekend visits was in its usual inconvenient place, chained to the downpipe. One day, she had warned him, some enterprising thief was going to steal the downpipe too. His pleasure was to ride it up to Hampstead Heath at six o’clock in the morning and speed-cycle down the paths marked
NO CYCLING
.

The carpet on the four narrow flights of stairs leading to her front door was in its last stages of decay, but the ground-floor tenant didn’t see why he should pay anything and the other two wouldn’t pay till he did and Gail as the unpaid in-house lawyer was supposed to come up with a compromise, but since none of the parties would budge from their entrenched positions, where the hell was compromise?

But tonight she was grateful for all of it: let them bicker and play their bloody music to their hearts’ content, let them give her all the normality they’ve got, because, oh mother, did she need normality. Just get her out of surgery and into the recovery room. Just tell her the nightmare’s over, Gail dear, there are no more softly spoken Scottish blue-stockings or undersized espiocrats with Etonian accents, no more orphaned children, drop-dead-gorgeous Natashas, gun-slinging uncles, Dimas and Tamaras, and Perry Makepiece my Heaven-sent lover and purblind innocent is not about to wrap himself in the sacrificial flag for his Orwellian love of lost England, his admirable quest for Connection with a capital C – connection with
what
? for Christ’s sake – or his homebrewed brand of inverted, puritanical vanity.

Climbing the stairs, her knees began trembling.

At the first poky half-landing they trembled more.

At the second they trembled so wildly she had to prop herself against the wall till they steadied down.

And when she reached the last flight, she had to haul herself up by the handrail to get to the front door before the time-switch cut.

Standing in the tiny hall with her back to the closed door, she
listened, sniffing the air for booze, body odour or stale cigarette smoke, or all three, which was how a couple of months back she knew she’d been burgled before she ever walked up the spiral staircase to find her bed pissed on and the pillows slashed and foul lipstick messages smeared across her mirror.

Only when she had relived that moment to the full did she open the kitchen door, hang up her coat, check the bathroom, pee, pour herself a king-sized tumbler of Rioja, swig a mouthful, replenish the tumbler to the brim and carry it precariously to the living room.

*

Standing, not sitting. She’d done enough passive sitting for a lifetime, thank you.

Standing in front of the non-functioning all-pine, do-it-yourself reproduction Georgian fireplace installed by a previous owner, and staring at the same long sash window where Perry had stood six hours ago: Perry on the slant, birdlike and eight foot tall, peering down into the street, waiting for an ordinary black cab with its ‘For Hire’ light out, last numbers on its licence plate 73, and your driver’s name will be Ollie.

No curtains to our sash windows. Shutters only. Perry who likes sheer but will pay his half for curtains if she really wants them. Perry who disapproves of central heating but worries that she’s not warm enough. Perry who one minute says we can only have one child for fear of world overpopulation, then wants six by return of post. Perry who, the moment they touch down in England after the fucked-up holiday of a lifetime, hightails it to Oxford, buries himself in his digs, and for fifty-six hours communicates in cryptic text messages from the front:

document nearly complete … have made contact with necessary people … arriving London midday-ish … please leave key under doormat …

‘He said they’re a team apart, not run-of-the-mill,’ he tells her, as he watches the wrong taxis go by.

‘He?’

‘Adam.’

‘The man who called you back. That Adam?’

‘Yes.’

‘Surname or Christian name?’

‘I didn’t ask, he didn’t tell me. He says they’ve got their own set-up for cases like this. A special house. He wouldn’t say where over the telephone. The cab driver would know.’

‘Ollie.’

‘Yes.’

‘Cases like
what
, actually?’

‘Ours. That’s all I know.’

A black cab goes past but it has its light on. Not a spy cab then. A normal cab. Driven by a man who isn’t Ollie. Disappointed again, Perry rounds on her:

‘Look. What else do you expect me to do? If you’ve got a better suggestion, let’s hear it. You’ve done nothing but snipe since we got back to England.’

‘And you’ve done nothing but keep me at arm’s length. Oh, and treat me like a child. Of the weaker sex. I forgot that bit.’

He has gone back to looking out of the window.

‘Is
Adam
the only person to have read your letter-document-report-cum-witness statement?’ she asks.

‘I can’t imagine so. I wouldn’t bank on his name being Adam either. He just said
Adam
like a password.’

‘Really? I wonder how he did that.’

She tries saying
Adam
as a password in several different ways, but Perry is not drawn.

‘You’re sure Adam’s a
man
, are you? Not just a woman with a deep voice?’

No answer. None expected.

Yet another taxi passes. Still not ours. Whatever does one wear for
spies
, darling? as her mother would have said. Cursing herself for even wondering, she has changed out of her office clothes into a skirt and high-necked blouse. And sensible shoes, nothing to stir
the juices – well, except Luke’s, but how could she have known?

‘Perhaps he’s stuck in traffic,’ she suggests, and again gets no answer, which serves her right. ‘Anyway, to resume. You gave the letter to an
Adam
. And an Adam received it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have rung you, presumably.’ She’s being irritating and knows it. So does he. ‘How many pages? Of our secret document? Yours.’

‘Twenty-eight,’ he replies.

‘Handwritten or typed?’

‘Handwritten.’

‘Why not typed?’

‘I decided handwritten was safer.’

‘Really? On whose advice?’

‘I hadn’t had advice by then. Dima and Tamara were convinced they were bugged at every turn, so I decided to respect their anxieties and not do anything – electronic. Interceptible.’

‘Wasn’t that rather paranoid?’

‘I’m sure it was. We’re both paranoid. So are Dima and Tamara. We’re
all
paranoid.’

‘Then let’s admit it. Let’s be paranoid together.’

No answer. Silly little Gail tries yet another tack:

‘Do you want to tell me how you got on to Mr Adam in the first place?’

‘Anyone can do it. It’s not a problem these days. You can do it on the Web.’

‘Did
you
do it on the Web?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t trust the Web?’

‘No.’

‘Do you trust
me
?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I hear the most amazing confidences every day of my life. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you don’t exactly hear me regaling our friends at dinner parties with my clients’ secrets, do you?’

‘No.’

Reload:

‘You also know that as a young barrister who is self-employed without a paddle and terrified of where the next job is or is not coming from, I am professionally disposed against mystery briefs that offer no prospect of prestige or reward.’

‘Nobody’s offering you a brief, Gail. Nobody’s asking you to do anything except talk.’

‘Which is what I call a brief.’

Another wrong taxi. Another silence, a bad one.

‘Well, at least Mr Adam invited both of us,’ she says, going for cheerful. ‘I thought you’d airbrushed me out of your document completely.’

Which is when Perry becomes Perry again, and the dagger in her hand turns against herself as he gazes at her with so much hurt love that she is more alarmed for Perry than for herself.

‘I
tried
to airbrush you out, Gail. I did my absolute damnedest to airbrush you out. I believed I could protect you from being involved. It didn’t work. They’ve got to have us both. Initially anyway. He was – well – adamant.’ Lame laugh. ‘The way you would be about witnesses. “If the two of you were present, then two of you must obviously come.” I’m really sorry.’

And he was. She knew he was. The day Perry learned to fake his feelings would be the day he wasn’t Perry any more.

And she was as sorry as he was. Sorrier. She was in his arms telling him this when a black taxi with its flag down appeared in the street outside, last two numbers 73, and a nearly cockney male voice informed them over the house entryphone that he was Ollie and he had two passengers to pick up for Adam.

*

And now she was excluded again. Debarred, debriefed, discarded.

The obedient little woman, waiting for her man to come home, and having another man-sized glass of Rioja to help her do it.

All right, it was in the whole ridiculous contract from the start.
She should never have let him get away with it. But that didn’t mean she had to sit and twiddle her thumbs, and she hadn’t.

That very morning, although he didn’t know it, while Perry had been sitting here waiting obediently for the Voice of Adam, she had been busy in her Chambers tapping away at her computer, and not, for once, on the matter of
Samson v. Samson
.

That she had waited until she got to her office rather than use her own laptop from home – that she had waited at all – was still a puzzle to her, if not a cause for outright self-reproach. Put it down to the Perry-generated prevailing atmosphere of conspiracy.

That she still possessed Dima’s deckle-edged business card was a hanging offence since Perry had told her to destroy it.

That she had gone electronic – and therefore interceptible – was as it now turned out also a hanging offence. But since he had not informed her in advance of this particular branch of his paranoia, he could hardly complain.

The Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate of Nicosia, Cyprus, its website informed her in bad, blotchy English, was a consulting company
specializing in providing help for active traders
. Its head office was in Moscow. It had representatives in Toronto, Rome, Berne, Karachi, Frankfurt, Budapest, Prague, Tel Aviv and Nicosia. None, however, in Antigua. And no brass-plate bank. Or none mentioned.

‘
Arena Multi Global prides itself on confidentiality and entreprenurial
[with an ‘e’ missing]
flare
[misspelled]
at all levels. It offers top-class oportunities
[with one ‘p’]
and private banking facilities
’ [spelled correctly].
Note: this web page is currently under reconstruction. Further information available on application to Moscow office
.’

Ted was an American bachelor who sold futures for Morgan Stanley. From her desk in Chambers she rang Ted:

‘Gail, sweetheart.’

‘An outfit calling itself the Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate. Can you dig up the dirt on them for me?’

Dirt? Ted could dig dirt like nobody else. Ten minutes later he was back.

‘Those Russki friends of yours.’

‘Russki?’

‘They’re like me. Hot as hell and rich as figgy pudding.’

‘How rich is rich?’

‘Anybody’s guess, but looks mega. Fifty-something subsidiaries, all with great trading records. You into money-laundering, Gail?’

‘How did you know?’

‘These Russki mothers pass the money around between them so fast nobody knows who owns it for how long. That’s all I got for you but I paid blood. Will you love me for ever?’

‘I’ll think about it, Ted.’

Her next step was Ernie, the Chambers’ resourceful, sixty-something clerk. She waited till lunchtime when the coast was clearest.

‘Ernie. A favour. Rumour has it that there’s a disgraceful chat site you visit when you want to check out the companies of our highly reputable clients. I’m deeply shocked and I need you to consult it for me.’

Thirty minutes on, and Ernie had presented her with an edited printout of disgraceful exchanges on the subject of the Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate.

Any asshole got an idea who runs this junk shop? The guys change MDs like socks. P. BROSNAN

Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the wise words of Maynard Keynes: Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Asshole yourself. R. CROW

What the f***’s happened to MG’s website. It’s curdled. B. PITT

MG’s website is down but not out. B-s rises to the surface. Assholes all beware. M. MUNROE

But I’m really really curious. These guys come on at me like they have the hots, then they leave me panting and unfulfilled. P.B.

Hey guys, listen to this! I just heard MGTC opened an office in Toronto. R.C.

Office? You’re shitting me! It’s a f***ing Russian nightclub, man. Pole dancers, Stolly and bortsch. M.M.