Our Kind of Traitor (4 page)

‘You a priest?’ Dima asked, with the same earnestness.

‘Why? D’you need one?’

‘Doctor? Some kinda medic?’

‘Not a doctor either, I’m afraid.’

‘Lawyer?’

‘I just play tennis.’

‘Banker?’

‘God forbid,’ Perry replied irritably, and fiddled with a battered sunhat before slinging it back into the bag.

But actually he felt more than irritable. He’d been rolled and didn’t care for being rolled. Rolled by the pro and rolled by the bodyguards, if he’d let them. And all right he hadn’t let them, but their presence on the court – they’d established themselves like line judges at either end – was quite enough to keep his anger going. More pertinently he had been rolled by Dima himself, and the fact that Dima had press-ganged a bunch of strays into turning out at seven in the morning to watch him win only added to the offence.

Dima had shoved a hand into the pocket of his long black tennis shorts and hauled out a John F. Kennedy silver half-dollar.

‘Know something? My kids tell me I had some crook spike it for me so I win,’ he confided, indicating with a nod of his bald head the two freckled boys in the stands. ‘I win the toss, my own kids think I spike the goddam coin. You got kids?’

‘No.’

‘Want some?’

‘Eventually.’
Mind your own bloody business
, in other words.

‘Wanna call?’

Spike
, Perry repeated to himself. Where did a man who spoke mangled English with a semi-Bronx accent get a word like
spike
from? He called tails, lost, and heard a honk of derision, the first sign of interest anybody on the spectators’ stand had deigned to show. His tutorial eye fixed on Dima’s two sons, smirking behind their hands. Dima glanced at the sun and chose the shaded end.

‘What racquet you got there?’ he asked, with a twinkle of his soulful brown eyes. ‘Looks illegal. Never mind, I beat you anyway.’ And as he set off down the court: ‘That’s some girl you got. Worth a lot of camels. You better marry her quick.’

And how in hell’s name does the man know we’re not married?
Perry fumed.

*

Perry has served four aces in a row, just as he did against the Indian couple, but he’s overhitting, knows it, doesn’t give a damn. Replying to Dima’s service, he does what he wouldn’t dream of doing unless he was at the top of his game and playing a far weaker opponent: he stands forward, toes practically on the service line, taking the ball on the half-volley, angling it across court or flipping it just inside the tramlines to where the baby-faced bodyguard stands with his arms folded. But only for the first couple of serves, because Dima quickly gets wise to him and drives him back to the baseline where he belongs.

‘So then I suppose I began to cool down a bit,’ Perry conceded, grinning ruefully at his interlocutors and rubbing the back of his wrist across his mouth at the same time.

‘Perry was a total bully,’ Gail corrected him. ‘And Dima was a natural. For his weight, height and age, amazing. Wasn’t he, Perry? You said so yourself. You said he defied the laws of gravity. And really sporting with it. Sweet.’

‘Didn’t jump for the ball. Levitated,’ Perry conceded. ‘And yes, he was a good sport, couldn’t ask for more. I thought we were going to be in for tantrums and line disputes. We didn’t do any of that stuff. He was really good to play with. And cunning as a box of monkeys. Withheld his shots till the absolute last minute and beyond.’

‘
And
he had a limp,’ Gail put in excitedly. ‘He played on the skew and he favoured his right leg, didn’t he, Perry? And he was stiff as a ramrod. And he had a knee bandage. And he
still
levitated!’

‘Yeah, well, I had to hold off a bit,’ Perry admitted, clawing awkwardly at his brow. ‘His grunts got a bit heavy on the ear as the game went by, frankly.’

But for all his grunting, Dima’s inquisition of Perry between games continued unabated:

‘You some big scientist? Blow the goddam world up, same way you serve?’ he asked, helping himself to a gulp of iced water.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Apparatchik?’

The guessing game had gone on long enough: ‘Actually, I teach,’ Perry said, peeling a banana.

‘Teach like you teach
students
? Like a professor, you teach?’

‘Correct. I teach students. But I’m not a professor.’

‘Where?’

‘Currently at Oxford.’

‘Oxford
University
?’

‘Got it.’

‘What you teach?’

‘English literature,’ Perry replied, not particularly wishing, at that moment, to explain to a total stranger that his future was up for grabs.

But Dima’s pleasure knew no bounds:

‘Listen. You know
Jack London
? Number-one English writer?’

‘Not personally.’ It was a joke, but Dima didn’t share it.

‘You like the guy?’

‘Admire him.’

‘
Charlotte Brontë?
You like her too?’

‘Very much.’

‘Somerset Maugham?’

‘Less, I’m afraid.’

‘I got books by all those guys! Like hundreds! In Russian! Big bookshelves!’

‘Great.’

‘You read Dostoevsky? Lermontov? Tolstoy?’

‘Of course.’

‘I got them all. All the number-one guys. I got Pasternak. Know something? Pasternak wrote about my home town. Called it
Yuriatin
. That’s
Perm
. Crazy fucker called it Yuriatin. I dunno why. Writers do that. All crazy. See my daughter up there? That’s Natasha, don’t give a shit about tennis, love books. Hey, Natasha! Say hello to the Professor here!’

After a delay to show that she is being intruded upon, Natasha distractedly raises her head and draws aside her hair long enough to allow Perry to be astonished by her beauty before she returns to her leatherbound tome.

‘Embarrassed,’ Dima explained. ‘Don’t wanna hear me yelling at
her. See that book she reading?
Turgenev
. Number-one Russian guy. I buy it. She wanna book, I buy. OK, Professor. You serve.’

‘From that moment on, I was Professor. I told him again and again I wasn’t one, he wouldn’t listen, so I gave up. Within a couple of days, half the hotel was calling me Professor. Which is pretty bloody odd when you’ve decided you’re not even a don any more.’

Changing ends at 2–5 in Perry’s favour, Perry is consoled to notice that Gail has parted company from the importunate Mark and is installed on the top bench between two little girls.

*

The game was settling to a decent rhythm, said Perry. Not the greatest match ever but – for as long as he lowered his play – fun and entertaining to watch, assuming anybody wanted to be entertained, which remained in question since, other than the twin boys, the spectators might have been attending a revivalist meeting. By
lowering his play
, he meant slowing it down a bit and taking the odd ball that was on its way to the tramlines, or returning a drive without looking too hard at where it had landed. But given that the gap between them – in age and skill and mobility, if Perry was honest – was by now obvious, his only concern was to make a game of it, leave Dima with his dignity, and enjoy a late breakfast with Gail on the Captain’s Deck: or so he believed until, as they were again changing ends, Dima locked a hand on his arm and addressed him in an angry growl:

‘You goddam pussied me, Professor.’

‘I did
what
?’

‘That long ball was out. You see it out, you play it in. You think I’m some kinda fat old bastard gonna drop dead you don’t be sweet to him?’

‘It was borderline.’

‘I play retail, Professor. I want something, I goddam take it. Nobody pussy me, hear me? Wanna play for a thousand bucks? Make the game interesting?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Five thousand?’

Perry laughed and shook his head.

‘You’re chicken, right? You chicken, so you don’t bet me.’

‘I suppose that must be it,’ Perry agreed, still feeling the imprint of Dima’s hand on his upper left arm.

*

‘Advantage Great Britain!’

The cry resonates over the court and dies. The twins break out in nervous laughter, waiting for the aftershock. Until now Dima has tolerated their occasional bursts of high spirits. No longer. Laying his racquet on the bench, he pads up the steps of the spectators’ stand and, reaching the two boys, presses a forefinger to the tip of each of their noses.

‘You want I take my belt and beat the shit outta you?’ he inquires in English, presumably for the benefit of Perry and Gail, for why else would he not address them in Russian?

To which one of the boys replies in better English than his father’s: ‘You’re not wearing a belt, Papa.’

That does it. Dima smacks the nearer son so hard across the face that he spins halfway round on the bench before his legs stop him. The first smack is followed by a second just as loud, delivered to the other son with the same hand, reminding Gail of walking with her socially ambitious elder brother when he’s out pheasant shooting with his rich friends, an activity she abhors, and the brother scores what he calls a left and a right, meaning one dead pheasant to each gun barrel.

‘What got me was that they didn’t even turn their heads away. They just sat there and took it,’ said Perry, the schoolteachers’ son.

But the strangest thing, Gail insisted, was how amicably the conversation was resumed:

‘You wanna tennis lesson with Mark after? Or you wanna go home get religion from your mother?’

‘Lesson, please, Papa,’ says one of the two boys.

‘Then don’t you make any more ra-ra, or you don’t get no Kobe beef tonight. You wanna eat Kobe beef tonight?’

‘Sure, Papa.’

‘You, Viktor?’

‘Sure, Papa.’

‘You wanna clap, you clap the Professor there, not your no-good bum father. Come here.’

A fervent bear-hug for each boy, and the match proceeds without further episode to its inevitable end.

*

In defeat, Dima’s bearing is embarrassingly fulsome. He’s not merely gracious, he’s moved to tears of admiration and gratitude. First he must press Perry into his great chest, which Perry swears is made of horn, for the three-times Russian embrace. The tears meanwhile are rolling down his cheeks, and consequently Perry’s neck.

‘You’re a goddam fair-play English, hear me, Professor? You’re a goddam English gentleman like in books. I love you, hear me? Gail, come over here.’ For Gail the embrace is even more reverent – and cautious, for which she is grateful. ‘You take care this stupid fuck, hear me? He can’t play tennis no good, but I swear to God he’s some kinda goddam gentleman. He’s the Professor of
fair play
, hear me?’ – repeating the mantra as if he has just invented it.

He swings away to bark irritably into a mobile that the baby-faced bodyguard is holding out to him.

*

The spectators file slowly out of the court. The little girls need hugs from Gail. Gail is happy to oblige. One of Dima’s sons drawls ‘cool play, man’ in American English as he stalks past Perry on his way to his lesson, his cheek still scarlet from the slap. The beautiful Natasha attaches herself to the procession, leatherbound tome in hand. Her thumb marks the place where her reading was disturbed. Bringing up the rear comes Tamara on Dima’s arm, her bishop-grade Orthodox cross glinting in the risen sunshine. In the aftermath of the game, Dima’s limp is more pronounced. As he walks, he leans back, chin thrust forward, shoulders squared to the enemy. The bodyguards shepherd the group down the winding stone path. Three
black-windowed people carriers wait behind the hotel to take them home. Mark the pro is last to leave.

‘Great play, sir!’ – clapping Perry on the shoulder. ‘Fine court craft. A little ragged on the backhands there, if I may make so bold. Maybe we should do a little work on them?’

Side by side, Gail and Perry watch speechless as the cortège bumps its way along the potholed spine road and vanishes into the cedar trees that shelter the house called Three Chimneys from prying eyes.

*

Luke looks up from the notes he has been taking. As if to order, Yvonne does the same. Both are smiling. Gail is trying to avoid Luke’s eye, but Luke is staring straight at her so she can’t.

‘So, Gail,’ he says briskly. ‘Your turn again, if we may. Mark was a pest. All the same, he does seem to have been quite a mine of information. What extra nuggets can you offer us about the Dima household?’ – then gives a flick of both little hands at once, as if urging his horse on to greater things.

Gail glances at Perry, she is not sure what for. Perry does not return her glance.

‘He was just so
snaky
,’ she complains, using Mark, rather than Luke, as the object of her disfavour, and wrinkles up her face to show how the bad taste lingers.

*

Mark had barely sat beside her on the bottom bench, she began, before he started banging on about what an important millionaire his Russian friend Dima was. According to Mark, Three Chimneys was only one of his several properties. He’d got another in Madeira, another in Sochi on the Black Sea.

‘And a house outside Berne,’ she went on, ‘where his business is based. But he’s peripatetic. Part of the year he’s in Paris, part Rome, part Moscow, according to Mark’ – and watched as Yvonne made another note. ‘But home, as far as the kids are concerned, is
Switzerland and school is some millionaire internat establishment in the mountains. ‘He talks about
the company
. Mark assumes he owns it. There’s a company registered in Cyprus. And banks. Several banks. Banking’s the big one. That was what brought him to the island in the first place. Antigua currently boasts four Russian banks, by Mark’s count, plus one Ukrainian. They’re just brass plates in shopping malls and a phone on some lawyer’s desk. Dima’s one of the brass plates. When he bought Three Chimneys, that was for cash too. Not suitcases of it but laundry baskets, somewhat ominously, lent to him by the hotel, according to Mark. And twenty-dollar bills, not fifties. Fifties are too dicey. He bought the house, and a run-down sugar mill, and the peninsula they stand on.’