Our Kind of Traitor (11 page)

Hey, asshole, me again. Is the office they opened in Toronto the same one they closed in Equatorial Guinea? If so, run for cover man. Run now. R.C.

Arena Multi f***ing Global has absolutely zero hits on Google. I repeat zero. The whole outfit is so über-amateurish I get palpitations. P.B.

Do you by any chance believe in the afterlife? If not, start believing now. You are treading on the Biggest Bananaskinski in the laundering arena. Official. M.M.

They were just so enthusiastic about me. Now this. P.B.

Stay away. Stay far, far away. R.C.

*

She is in Antigua, wafted there by another tumbler of Rioja from the kitchen.

She’s listening to the pianist in the mauve bow tie crooning Simon and Garfunkel to an elderly American couple in ducks pirouetting all alone on the dance deck.

She’s fending off the glances of beautiful waiters who have nothing to do but undress her with their eyes. She is overhearing the seventy-year-old Texan widow-woman of a thousand facelifts telling Ambrose to bring her red wine as long as it isn’t French.

She’s standing on the tennis court, demurely shaking hands for the first time with a bald fighting bull who calls himself Dima. She’s remembering his reproachful brown eyes and rock jaw and the rigid, Erich von Stroheim backward lean of his upper body.

She’s in the Bloomsbury basement, one moment Perry’s life companion, the next his surplus baggage, not wanted on voyage. She’s sitting with three people who, thanks to
our document
and whatever else Perry has managed to bubble to them in the meantime, know a whole lot she doesn’t.

She’s sitting alone in the drawing room of her desirable residence in Primrose Hill at half past midnight with
Samson v. Samson
on her lap and an empty wineglass beside her.

Springing to her feet – whoops – she climbs the spiral staircase to her bedroom, makes the bed, follows the trail of Perry’s dirty clothes across the floor to the bathroom and stuffs them into the laundry basket. Five days since he made love to me. Will we establish a record?

She returns downstairs, one step at a time, one hand for the boat. She’s back at the window, staring into the street, praying for her man to come home in a black cab with the last two numbers 73. She’s riding buttock to buttock under the midnight stars with Perry in the bumpy people carrier with blackened windows as Baby Face, the short-haired blond bodyguard with the linked gold bracelet, drives them to their hotel at the end of the birthday revels at Three Chimneys.

‘You had good night, Gail?’

This is your driver speaking. Until now, Baby Face hasn’t let on that he speaks English. When Perry challenged him outside the tennis court, he didn’t speak a word of it. So why’s he letting on now? she wonders, alert as never in her life.

‘
Fabulous
night, thank you,’ she declares in her father’s voice, filling in for Perry, who appears to have gone deaf. ‘Simply
wonderful
. I’m so happy for those
magnificent
boys.’

‘My name is Niki, OK?’

‘OK. Great. Hello, Niki,’ says Gail. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Perm, Russia. Nice place. Perry, please? You had good night too?’

Gail is about to jab Perry with her elbow when he comes to life by himself. ‘Great, thanks, Niki. Fantastic food. Really nice people. Super. Best evening of our holiday so far.’

Not bad for a beginner, thinks Gail.

‘What time you arrive Three Chimneys?’ Niki asks.

‘We nearly didn’t arrive at
all
, Niki,’ Gail exclaims, giggling to cover for Perry’s hesitation. ‘Did we, Perry? We took the Nature Path and had to
hack
our way through the undergrowth! Where did you learn your wonderful English, Niki?’

‘Boston, Massachusetts. You got knife?’

‘Knife?’

‘To cut undergrowth, you got to have big
knife
.’

Those dead eyes in the mirror, what have they seen? What are they seeing now?

‘I wish we had, Niki,’ Gail cries, still in her father’s skin. ‘I’m afraid we
English
don’t carry knives.’
What gibberish am I talking? Never mind. Talk it
. ‘Well,
some
of us do, to be truthful, but not people like
us
. We’re the wrong social
class
. You’ve heard about our class system? Well, in England you only carry a knife if you’re lower-middle or below!’ And more hoots of laughter to see them round the roundabout and into the drive to the front entrance.

Dazed, they pick their way like strangers between the lighted hibiscus to their cabin. Perry closes the door behind them, locks it, but doesn’t switch the light on. They stand facing each other across the bed in the darkness. For an age, there’s no soundtrack. Which should not imply that Perry hasn’t made up his mind what he’s about to say:

‘I need paper to write on. So do you.’ His I’m-in-charge-here voice, normally reserved, she assumes, for errant undergraduates who have failed to turn in their weekly essay.

He draws the blinds. He switches on the inadequate reading light on my side of the bed, leaving the rest of the room in darkness.

He yanks open the drawer of
my
bedside locker and fishes out a yellow legal pad: also mine. Emblazoned on it, my brilliant reflections on
Samson v. Samson
: my first case as a top silk’s junior, my quantum leap to instant fame and fortune.

Or not.

Ripping off the pages on which I have recorded my pearls of legal wisdom, he stuffs them back in the drawer, snaps what’s left of
my
yellow pad in two, and hands me my half.

‘I’m going in there’ – pointing to the bathroom. ‘You stay here. Sit at the desk and write down everything you remember. Everything that happened. I’ll do the same. All right by you?’

‘What’s wrong with both of us being in this room? Jesus, Perry. I’m
fucking
scared. Aren’t you?’

Setting aside any pardonable desire for his companionship, my question is entirely reasonable. Our cabin contains, in addition to a much-used bed the size of a rugger field, one desk, two armchairs and a table. Perry may have had his heart-to-heart with Dima, but what about me, banged up with bonkers Tamara and her bearded saints?

‘Separate witnesses rate separate statements,’ Perry decrees, heading for the bathroom.

‘Perry! Stop! Come back! Stay here! I’m the fucking lawyer here, not you. What’s Dima been telling you?’

Nothing, to judge by his face. It has slammed shut.

‘Perry.’

‘What?’

‘For fuck’s sake. It’s me. Gail. Remember? So just sit yourself down and tell Auntie what Dima has told you that’s turned you into a zombie. All right, don’t sit down. Tell me standing up. Is the world ending? Is he a girl? What the
fuck
is going on between you two that I can’t know?’

A flinch. A palpable flinch. Enough flinch to give grounds for optimism. Misplaced.

‘I can’t.’

‘Can’t what?’

‘Involve you in this.’

‘Bollocks.’

A second flinch. No more productive than the first.

‘You listening, Gail?’

What the fuck d’you think I’m doing? Singing ‘The Mikado’?

‘You’re a good lawyer and you’ve got a splendid career in front of you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Your big case is coming up in two weeks’ time. Is that a fair summary?’

Yes, Perry, that is a fair summary. I have a splendid career in front of me, unless we decide to have six children instead, and the case of
Samson
v. Samson
is set to be heard fifteen days from now, but if I know anything about our leading silk, I’m unlikely to get a word in edgeways.

‘You’re the shining star of a prestigious law Chambers. You’re worked off your feet. You’ve told me so often enough.’

Yes indeed, it’s true, I’m appallingly overworked. A young barrister should be so lucky, we have just endured the worst night of our lives by several lengths, and what the fuck are you trying to tell me through the orange in your mouth? Perry, you can’t do this! Come back!
But she only thinks it. The words have run out.

‘We draw a line. A line in the sand. Whatever Dima told me is private to me. What Tamara told you is private to you. We don’t cross over. We exercise client confidentiality.’

Her power of speech returns. ‘Are you telling me Dima is your
client
now? You’re as loony as they are.’

‘I’m using a legal metaphor. Taken from your world, not mine. I’m saying, Dima’s my client and Tamara’s yours. Conceptually.’

‘Tamara didn’t
speak
, Perry. Not one solitary,
fucking
word. She thinks the birds round here are bugged. Periodically, she was moved to offer up a prayer in Russian to one of her bearded protectors, at which point she signed at me to kneel down beside her, and I obliged. I’m not an Anglican atheist any more, I’m a Russian Orthodox atheist. There is otherwise absolutely fuck-all that passed between Tamara and myself that I’m not prepared to share with you in the finest detail, and I’ve just shared it. My principal anxiety was that I might get my hand bitten off. I didn’t. Both my hands are intact. Now it’s your turn.’

‘Sorry, Gail. I can’t.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m not telling. I refuse to drag you any deeper into this affair than you are already. I want you kept clean. Safe.’

‘You want?’

‘No. I don’t
want
. I insist. I’m not to be wooed.’

Wooed?
Is this Perry talking? Or the firebrand preacher from Huddersfield that he was named after?

‘I’m deadly serious,’ he adds, in case she doubted it.

Then a different Perry transmogrifies out of the first one. Out of my beloved, striving Jekyll comes an infinitely less appetizing Mr Hyde of the British Secret Service:

‘You also talked to Natasha, I noticed. For quite some time.’

‘Yes.’

‘Alone.’

‘Not alone, actually. We had two small girls with us but they were asleep.’

‘Then effectively alone.’

‘Is that a crime?’

‘She’s a source.’

‘She’s a
what
?’

‘Did she talk to you about her father?’

‘Come again?’

‘I said: did she talk to you about her father?’

‘Pass.’

‘I’m serious, Gail.’

‘So am I. Deadly. Pass, and either mind your own fucking business, or tell me what Dima said to you.’

‘Did she talk to you about what Dima does for a living? Who he plays with, who he trusts, who they’re so afraid of? Anything of that sort that you know, you should write it down too. It could be vitally important.’

On which note, he retires to the bathroom and – to his mortal shame – turns the lock.

For half an hour Gail sits huddled on the balcony with the bedspread over her shoulders because she’s too drained to undress. She remembers the rum bottle, hangover guaranteed, pours herself a tot regardless, and dozes. She wakes to find the bathroom door open and Ace Operator Perry framed crookedly in the doorway, not sure whether to come out. He is clutching half her legal pad in both hands behind his back. She can see a corner of it poking out and it’s covered in his handwriting.

‘Have a drink,’ she suggests, indicating the rum bottle.

He ignores her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. Then he clears his throat and says it again: ‘I’m really very sorry, Gail.’

Chucking pride and reason to the winds, she impulsively jumps up, runs to him and embraces him. In the interests of security, he keeps his arms behind him. She has never seen Perry frightened before, but he’s frightened now. Not for himself. For her.

*

She peers blearily at her watch. Two-thirty. She stands up, intending to give herself another glass of Rioja, thinks better of it, sits in Perry’s favourite chair and discovers she is under the blanket with Natasha.

‘So what does he do, your Max?’ she asks.

‘He completely loves me,’ Natasha replies. ‘Also physically.’

‘I meant, apart from that, what does he do for a living?’ Gail explains, careful not to smile.

It’s approaching midnight. To escape the cold winds and amuse two very tired little orphan girls, Gail has made a tent out of blankets and cushions in the lee of the protective wall that borders the garden. Out of nowhere, Natasha has appeared without a book. First Gail identifies her Grecian sandals through a gap in the blankets, waiting to come on stage. For minutes on end they remain there. Is she listening? Is she plucking up her courage? For what? Is she contemplating a surprise assault to amuse the children? Since Gail has not so far exchanged a single word with Natasha, she has no picture of her possible motivations.

The flap parts, a Grecian sandal cautiously enters, followed by a knee and Natasha’s averted head, curtained by her long black hair. Then a second sandal and the rest of her. The little girls, fast asleep, have not stirred. For more minutes on end Gail and Natasha lie head to head, mutely watching through the open flap as salvos of rockets are detonated with uncomfortable proficiency by Niki and his comrades-in-arms. Natasha is shivering. Gail pulls a blanket over both of them.

‘It appears that I am recently pregnant,’ Natasha observes, in groomed Jane Austen English, addressing not Gail but a display of fluorescent peacock feathers dripping down the night sky.

If you are lucky enough to receive the confessions of the young, it is wise to keep your eyes fixed on a common object in the far distance, rather than on one another
: Gail Perkins,
ipsissima verba
. In the days before she began reading for the Bar, she taught at a school for children with learning difficulties, and this was one of the things she learned. And if a beautiful girl who is just sixteen confides in you out of the blue that she believes she may be pregnant, the lesson becomes doubly important.