"Our kind of traitor" - читать интересную книгу автора (le Carre John)

4

If it occurred to either of them to decline Dima's invitation, they never admitted it to one another, said Gail:

'We were in it for the children. Two hulking teenaged twin boys were having a birthday: great. That was how the invitation was sold to us, and it's how we bought into it. But for me it was about the two girls' – again privately congratulating herself on not mentioning Natasha – 'whereas for Perry' – she shot a doubtful glance at him.

'For Perry what?' Luke asked, when Perry did not respond.

She was already pulling back, protecting her man. 'He was just so fascinated by it all. Weren't you, Perry? Dima, who he was, the life-force, the formed man. This outlaw band of Russians. The danger. The sheer differentness. You were – well – connecting. Is that unfair?'

'Sounds a bit like psycho-babble to me,' Perry said gruffly, retreating into himself.

Little Luke, ever the conciliator, darted in to intervene. 'So basically, mixed motives on both your sides,' he suggested, in the manner of a man familiar with mixed motives. 'Nothing wrong with that, surely? It's a pretty mixed scene. Vanya's gun. Tales of Russian cash in laundry baskets. Two small orphan girls desperately in need of you – maybe the adults too, for all you knew. And it was the twin boys' birthday. I mean, how, as two decent people, could you resist?'

'On an island,' Gail reminded him.

'Exactly. And on top of it all, dare one say, you were jolly curious. And why shouldn't you be? I mean, that's a pretty heady mix. I'm sure I'd have fallen for it.'

Gail was sure he would too. She had a feeling that, in his time, little Luke had fallen for most things, and was a bit worried about himself in consequence.

'And Dima,' she insisted. 'Dima was the big lure for you, Perry, admit it. You said so at the time. It was the children for me, but when push came to shove it was Dima for you. We discussed it only a few days ago, remember?'

She meant: while you were penning your bloody document, and I was a Christian slave.

Perry brooded for a while, much as he might have brooded over any other academic premise, then with a sporting smile acknowledged the rightness of the argument.

'It's true. I felt appointed by him. Over-promoted is more like it. Actually, I don't know what I felt any more. Maybe I didn't then.'

'But Dima knew. You were his professor of fair play.'

*

'So in the afternoon, instead of going to the beach, we walked into town to do the shopping,' Gail resumed, speaking past Perry's averted head to Yvonne while referring her story to Perry. 'For the birthday boys, the obvious thing was a cricket set. That was your department. You enjoyed looking for a cricket set. You loved the sports shop. You loved the old man. You loved the photographs of great West Indian players. Learie Constantine? Who else was there?'

'Martindale.'

'And Sobers. Gary Sobers was there. You pointed him out to me.'

He nodded. Yes, Sobers.

'And we loved the secrecy bit. Because of the children. Ambrose's notion of having me jump out of the cake wasn't so far off the mark, was it? And I did presents for the girls. With a bit of help from you. Scarves for the little ones, and a rather nice shell necklace for Natasha with alternating semi-precious stones.' Done it. She had let Natasha back in, and got away with it. 'You wanted to buy one for me too, but I wouldn't let you.'

'On what grounds, please Gail?' – Yvonne, with her self-effacing, intelligent smile, looking for light relief.

'Exclusivity. It was sweet of Perry, but I didn't want to be paired off with Natasha,' Gail replied, as much to Perry as to Yvonne. 'And I'm sure Natasha wouldn't have wanted to be paired off with me. Thanks, it's a lovely thought, but save it for another time, I told you. Right? And I mean honestly, try buying decent wrapping paper in St John's, Antigua!'

She plunged on:

'Then there was the business of smuggling us in, wasn't there? Because we were the big surprise. That was going to be a blast too. We thought of going as Caribbean pirates – you did – but we decided it might be a bit over the top, specially with people still in mourning, even if we didn't officially know they were. So we went as we were, plus a bit. Perry, you had your old blazer and the grey bags you'd travelled in. Your Brideshead look. Perry isn't exactly what you'd call a fashion freak, but you did your best. And your swimming trunks, of course. And I put a cotton dress over my swimsuit plus a cardigan in case it got nippy because we knew that Three Chimneys had a private beach and there was a chance we might be expected to swim.'

Yvonne writing a meticulous memorandum. Who to? Luke, chin in hand, drinking in her every word, a little too deeply for Gail's taste. Perry gloomily studying a patch of brickwork on the darkened wall. All of them giving her their undivided attention for her swansong.

*

When Ambrose told them to be on parade at the hotel entrance at six, Gail continued in a more measured tone, they assumed they were going to be spirited up to Three Chimneys in one of the people carriers with blackened windows, and let in through a side door. They assumed wrong.

Taking a back route to the car park as instructed, they found Ambrose waiting at the wheel of a 4x4. The plan, he explained in conspiratorial excitement, was to infiltrate the surprise guests by way of the old Nature Path that ran along the spine of the peninsula right up to the rear entrance of the house, where Mr Dima himself would be waiting for them.

She did her Ambrose voice again:

'"Man, they got fairy lights up in that garden, they got a steel band, a marquee, they got a shipment of the tenderest Kobe beef ever came out of a cow. I don't know what they haven't got up there. And Mr Dima, he has it all fixed and prepared down to a fine pin. He has packed off my Elspeth and that whole knockabout family of his to a major crab-racing event over the other side of St John's, just so's we can smuggle you in by the back door, and that's how secret you folks are tonight!"'

If they had been looking for adventure, the Nature Path alone would have provided it. They must have been the first people to use it for simply years. A couple of times Perry actually had to beat a passage through the undergrowth:

'Which of course he loved. Actually, he should have been a peasant, shouldn't you? Then we came out in this long green tunnel with Dima standing at the end of it looking like a happy Minotaur. If there is such a thing.'

Perry's bony index finger jerked upward in admonition:

'Which was our first sighting of Dima alone,' he warned gravely. 'No bodyguards, no family. No children. No one to watch over us. Or none visible. We were a three, standing at the edge of a wood. I think we were both very much aware of that. The sudden exclusivity.'

But whatever significance Perry attached to this remark was lost in the insistent rush of Gail's narrative:

'He hugged us, Yvonne! Really hugged us. First Perry, then shoved him aside, then me, then Perry again. Not sexy hugs. Great big family hugs. As if he hadn't seen us for ages. Or wasn't going to see us again.'

'Or else he was desperate,' Perry suggested, on the same earnest, reflective note. 'A bit of that got through to me. Maybe not to you. What we meant to him at that moment. How important we were.'

'He really loved us,' Gail swept on determinedly. 'He stood there, declaring his love. Tamara loved us too, he was positive. She just found it difficult to say because she was a bit crazy since her problem. No explanation of what the problem might have been, and who were we to ask? Natasha loved us, but she doesn't say anything to anyone these days, she just reads books. The whole family loved the English for our humanity and fair play. Except he didn't say humanity, what did he say?'

'Heart.'

'We're standing there at the end of the tunnel, having this great hug-fest, and he's orating all this stuff about our hearts. I mean, how much love can you profess to somebody you've only ever exchanged six words with?'

'Perry?' Luke prompted.

'I thought he was heroic,' Perry replied, his long hand now flying to his brow to form a classic gesture of worry. 'I just didn't know why. Didn't I put that in our document somewhere? Heroic? I thought he was' – with a shrug dismissing his own feelings as valueless – 'I thought dignity under fire. I just didn't know who was firing at him. Or why. I didn't know anything, except -'

'You were on the rock face with him,' Gail suggested, not unkindly.

'Yes. I was. And he was in a bad place. He needed us.'

'You,' she corrected him.

'All right. Me. That's all I'm trying to say.'

'Then you tell it.'

*

'He walked us out of the tunnel, round to what we realized was going to be the back of the house,' Perry began, and then broke off. 'I take it that you do want an exact description of the place?' he demanded sternly of Yvonne.

'We do indeed, Perry,' Yvonne replied, equally efficiently. 'Every last dreary detail, please, if you don't mind.' And went back to her meticulous note-taking.

'From where we'd emerged from the woods, there's an old bit of service track covered in some sort of red cinder, probably made by the original builders as an access road. We had to pick our way uphill over the potholes.'

'Carting our presents,' Gail blurted from the wings. 'You with your cricket set, me with the gift-wrapped presents for the kids in the fanciest bag I could find, which isn't saying a lot.'

Is anybody listening out there? she wondered. Not to me. Perry is the horse's mouth. I'm its arse.

'The house as we approached it from the back was a pile of old bones,' he continued. 'We'd been warned not to expect a palace, we knew the house was up for demolition. But we hadn't expected a wreck.' The outward-bound Oxford don had turned field reporter: 'There was a tumbledown brick building with barred windows, I deduced the old slave quarters. There was a high perimeter whitewashed wall, about twelve foot high and capped with razor wire, which was new and vile. There were white security lights stuck up on pylons round it like a football stadium, blazing down on whoever passed. We'd seen the glow from the balcony of our cabin. Fairy lights rigged between them, presumably in preparation for the night's birthday festivities. Security cameras, but pointed away from us because we were the wrong side of them. I assume that was the intention. A shining new aerial dish, twenty foot high, directed northish, as far as I could read it on our way back. Pointed at Miami. Or Houston perhaps. Anyone's guess.' He thought about this. 'Well, not yours, obviously. You people are supposed to know that stuff.'

Is this a challenge or a joke? It's neither. It's Perry showing them how brilliant he is at doing their job, in case they haven't noticed. It's Perry the climber of north-facing overhangs, telling them he never forgets a route. It's the Perry who can't resist a challenge provided the odds are stacked against him.

'Then downhill again through more forest to a bit of grass meadow with the headland sticking up at the end of it. In reality, the house hasn't got a back. Or it's all back, take your choice. It's a pseudo-Elizabethan hotchpotch of a bungalow built out of clapboard and asbestos, facing three ways. Grey stucco walls. Poky leaded windows. Plywood pretending to be half-timber and a rear porch with a lantern dangling in it. Are you with me, Gail?'

Would I be here if I wasn't? 'You're doing fine,' she said. Which wasn't quite what he'd asked.

'Add-on bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and offices with front doors on them, suggesting that the place had been some sort of commune or settlement at one time. So I mean, overall a shambles. It wasn't Dima's fault. We knew that, thanks to Mark. The Dimas had never lived there till now. Never touched it apart from a crash job on the security. The idea didn't bother us. To the contrary. It had a much-needed touch of reality about it.'

The ever-inquisitive Dr Yvonne is peering up from her medical notes. 'But were there no chimneys after all that, Perry?'

'Two attached to the remnants of a sugar mill on the western edge of the peninsula, the third at the edge of the woods. I thought I put that in our document as well.'

Our bloody document? How many times have you said that now? Our document that you wrote and I haven't been allowed to see, but they have? It's your bloody document! It's their bloody document! Her cheeks were scorching, and she hoped he'd noticed.

'Then as we started down towards the house, about twenty metres from it, I suppose, Dima slowed us down,' Perry was saying, his voice gathering intensity. 'With his hands. Slow down.'

'And would it be here also that he put his finger to his lips in a gesture of complicity?' Yvonne asked, popping her head up at him while she wrote.

'Yes it was!' Gail leaped in. 'Exactly here. Huge complicity. First slow down, then shut up. We assumed the finger to the lips was all part of surprising the children, so we played along with it. Ambrose had said they'd been packed off to the crab races, so it seemed a bit odd they were still in the house. But we just assumed something had changed and they hadn't gone after all. Or I did.'

'Thank you, Gail.'

For what, for Christ's sake? For upstaging Perry? Don't mention it, Yvonne, it's a pleasure. She raced on:

'Dima had us on tiptoe by now. Literally holding our breath. We didn't doubt him – I think it's a point to make. We were obeying him, which isn't like either of us, but we were. He led us to a door, a house door, but a side one. It wasn't locked, he just pushed it and went in ahead, then immediately swung round, with one hand up in the air and the other one to his lips like' – like Daddy playing Boots in a Christmas pantomime, but sober, she was going to say, but didn't – 'well, and this really intense stare, urging silence on us. Right, Perry? Your turn.'

'Then, when he knew he had us, he beckoned us to follow. I went first.' Perry's tone by contrast minimal in deliberate counterpoint to hers – his voice for when he's truly excited and pretending he isn't. 'We crept into an empty hall. Well, hall! It was about ten by twelve feet, with a cracked, west-facing window with diamond panes made out of masking tape and the evening sun pouring through them. Dima still had his finger to his lips. I stepped inside and he grabbed hold of my arm, the way he'd grabbed it on the court. Strength in a league of its own. I couldn't have competed with it.'

'Did you think you might have to compete with it?' Luke inquired, with male sympathy.

'I didn't know what to think. I was worried about Gail and my concern was to get myself between them. For a few seconds, only.'

'And long enough for you to realize it wasn't a children's game any more,' Yvonne suggested.

'Well, it was beginning to dawn,' Perry confessed, and paused, his voice drowned out by the wail of a passing ambulance in the street above them. 'You have to understand the amount of unexpected din inside the place,' he insisted, as if the one sound had set off the other. 'We were only in this tiny hall, but we could hear the wind bumping the whole rickety house around. And the light was – well, phantasmagoric, to use a word my students love. It was coming at us in layers through the west window. You had this powdery light from the low cloud rolling in from the sea, and then a layer of brilliant sunlight riding in over the top of it. And pitch-black shadows where it didn't reach.'

'And cold,' Gail complained, hugging herself theatrically. 'Like only empty houses are. And that chilly graveyard smell they have. But all I was thinking was: where are the girls? Why no sight or sound of them? Why no sound of anybody or anything except the wind? And if nobody's around, who were we doing all this secrecy stuff for? Who were we fooling except ourselves? And Perry, you were thinking the same, weren't you, you told me so afterwards.'

*

And behind Dima's raised forefinger, a different face, Perry is saying. All the fun had gone out of it. Out of his eyes. It was humourless. Rigid. He really needed us to be afraid. To share his fear. And as we stand there bemused – and, yes, afraid – the spectral figure of Tamara materializes before us in a corner of the tiny hall where she's been standing all along without us noticing, in the darkest recess on the other side of the shafts of sunlight. She's wearing the same long black dress she wore at the tennis match, and wore again when she and Dima spied on them from the darkness of the people carrier, and she looks like her own ghost.

Gail grabbed back the story:

'The first thing I saw was her bishop's cross. Then the rest of her, forming round it. She'd plaited and braided her hair for the birthday party and rouged her cheeks, and daubed lipstick round her mouth – I mean, really round it. She looked as mad as a bedbug. She didn't have her finger to her lips. She didn't need to. Her whole body was like a warning sign in black and red. Forget Dima, I thought. This is really something. And of course I was still wondering what her problem was. Because boy, did she have one.'

Perry started to speak, but she talked stubbornly through him:

'She was holding this sheet of paper in her hand – A4 typing paper, folded in half – and holding it up to us. For what? Was it a religious tract? Prepare to meet thy God? Or was she serving a writ on us?'

'And Dima, where was he in this?' Luke asked, turning back to Perry.

'Finally let go of my arm,' said Perry with a grimace. 'But not before he'd made sure I was focusing on Tamara's sheet of paper. Which she then proceeded to shove at me. With Dima nodding at me: read it. But still with his finger to his lips. And Tamara really possessed. Both of them possessed, actually. And wanting us to share their fear. But of what? So I read it. Not aloud, obviously. Not even immediately. I wasn't in the sunlight. I had to take it to the window. On tiptoe: which shows you how much we were under the spell. And even after that, I had to turn my back to the window because the sunlight was so fierce. Then Gail had to give me my spare reading glasses from her handbag -'

'- because as usual he'd left them behind in our cabin -'

'Then Gail tiptoed up behind me -'

'You beckoned to me -'

'For your protection – and read it over my shoulder. And I suppose we read it, well, twice at least.'

'And then some,' said Gail. 'I mean, what an act of faith! What were they doing trusting us like this? What made them think we were the ones suddenly? It was such a – such a bloody imposition!'

'They didn't have much choice,' Perry softly observed, to which Luke added a wise nod that Yvonne discreetly copied, and Gail felt even more isolated than she had felt all evening.

*

Perhaps the tension in the under-ventilated basement was getting too much for Perry. Or perhaps – Gail's thought – he was having an overdue fit of the guilts. He yanked his long body back into his chair, lowered his craggy shoulders to relax them and stabbed a forefinger at the buff folder lying between Luke's small fists:

'Anyway, you've got her text there in front of you in our document, so you don't need me to recite it to you,' he said aggressively. 'You can read it for yourselves to your heart's content. You have done so already, presumably.'

'All the same,' said Luke. 'If you don't mind, Perry. For completeness, as it were.'

Was Luke testing him? Gail believed he was. Even in the academic jungle that Perry was so determined to leave behind him, he was renowned for his ability to quote tracts of English literature on the strength of a single read. His vanity appealed to, Perry began reciting slowly and without expression:

'Dmitri Vladimirovich Krasnov, the one they call Dima, European Director of Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate of Nicosia, Cyprus, is willing negotiate through intermediary Professor Perry Makepiece and lawyer Madam Gail Perkins mutually profitable arrangement with authority of Great Britain regarding permanent residence all family in exchange for certain informations very important, very urgent, very critical for Great Britain of Her Majesty. Children and household will return in approximately one and a half hour. There is convenient place where Dima and Perry may discuss advantageously without risk to be overheard. Gail will please accompany Tamara to other area of house. Is possible this house has many microphones. We will PLEASE NOT SPEAK until all persons return from crab races for celebration.'

'Then the phone rang,' said Gail.

*

Perry is sitting upright in his chair as if he has been called to order, hands as before spread flat on the table, back straight but shoulders on the slope as he meditates on the rightness of what he is about to do. His jaw is set in refusal although nobody has asked anything of him that needs to be refused, except for Gail, whose expression as she stares at him is one of dignified entreaty – or so she hopes, but maybe she's just giving him the hairy eyeball, because she's not sure any more what facial signals she's emitting.

Luke's tone is light-hearted, even debonair, which is presumably how he wishes it to be:

'I'm trying to picture the two of you standing there together, you see,' he explains keenly. 'It's a truly extraordinary moment, don't you agree, Yvonne? Standing side by side in the hall? Reading? Perry holding the letter? Gail, you're looking at it over his shoulder. Both literally struck mute. You've had this extraordinary proposition thrown at you to which you're not allowed to respond in any way. It's a nightmare. And as far as Dima and Tamara are concerned, simply by not speaking you're halfway to being co-opted. Neither of you, I take it, is about to storm out of the house. You're pinned down. Physically and emotionally. Am I right? So from their point of view, so far, so good: you've tacitly agreed to agree. That's the impression you can't help giving them. Totally inadvertently. Simply by doing nothing, by being there at all, you're becoming part of their big play.'

'I thought they were both totally barking,' Gail says to deflate him. 'Paranoid, the pair of them, frankly, Luke.'

'Their paranoia taking what form exactly?' – Luke undeterred.

'How should I know? Deciding that somebody's bugged the place, for openers. And little green men are listening.'

But Luke is more doughty than she expects. He comes back sharply:

'Was that really so unlikely, Gail, after what you'd both seen and heard? You must have realized by now that you were standing with at least one foot in Russian crime. And you an experienced lawyer, if I may say so.'

*

A long pause followed. Gail had not expected to be locking horns with Luke, but if he wanted a fight he was welcome to one any time:

'The so-called experience you refer to, Luke,' she began furiously, 'does not unfortunately cover' – but Perry had already headed her off.

'The phone rang,' he gently reminded her.

'Yes. Well, all right, the phone rang,' she conceded. 'It was a yard away from us. Less. Maybe two feet. It had a bell like a fire alarm going off. We jumped out of our skins. They didn't, we did. A mossy, black, 1940s stand-up job with a dial and a concertina flex, sitting on a wobbly rattan table. Dima picked it up and bellowed Russian at it and we watched his face stretch into an arse-kissing smile that he didn't mean. Everything about him was totally against his own free will. Forced smiles, forced laughter, false jollity, and a lot of yes-sir, no-sir, three bags full, and I'd like to strangle you with my bare hands. Eyes fixed all the time on batty Tamara, taking his cues from her. And the finger back in front of his lips, telling us no noises-off, please, all the time he's talking. Right, Perry?' – deliberately avoiding Luke.

Right.

'So these are the people they're afraid of, I'm thinking. And they want us to be afraid of them too. Tamara conducting him. Nodding, shaking her head, rouged cheeks and all, pulling a Medusa face for moments of mega-disapproval. Fair description, Perry?'

'Florid, but accurate,' Perry conceded awkwardly – then, thank the Lord, gave her a real full-beam smile, even if it was his guilty one.

'And that was the first of many calls that evening, I rather believe?' nimble Luke suggested, darting from one to the other of them with his quick, strangely lifeless eyes.

'There must have been half-a-dozen phone calls in the time before the family came back,' Perry agreed. 'You heard them too, right?' – for Gail – 'And they were just for openers. All the time I was closeted with Dima, we'd hear the phone go and either Tamara would come yelling at Dima to answer it, or Dima would be jumping to his feet and hurrying off to take it himself, cursing in Russian. If there were phone extensions in the house I never saw them. He told me later that night that mobiles didn't work up there because of the trees and the cliffs, which was why everyone called him on the landline. I didn't believe him. I thought they were checking on his whereabouts, and calling the house on an old landline was the way to do it.'

'They?'

'The people who didn't trust him. And he didn't trust in return. The people he's beholden to. And hates. The people they're afraid of, so we've got to be.'

The people that Perry, Luke and Yvonne can know about and I mustn't, in other words, thought Gail. The people in our bloody document that isn't ours.

'So this is the point where you and Dima retire to your convenient place where you can talk without risk of being overheard,' Luke prompted.

'Yes.'

'And Gail, you went off to bond with Tamara.'

'Bond my foot.'

'But you went.'

'To a tacky drawing room that stank of bat-piss. With a plasma television playing Russian Orthodox High Mass. She was carrying a tin.'

'A tin?'

'Didn't Perry tell you? In our joint document that I haven't seen? Tamara was carting a black tin handbag around with her. When she put it down it clanked. I don't know where women carry their guns in normal society, but I had a feeling this was her Uncle-Vanya-equivalent.'

If it's my swansong, I'll bloody well make the most of it:

'The plasma TV took up most of one wall. The other walls were decked out in icons. Travelling ones. Ornately framed for extra sanctity. Male saints, no Virgins. Where Tamara goes, there go the saints, or that was my guess. I've got an aunt like that, ex-tart turned Catholic convert. Each of her saints has a different job. If she's lost her keys, it's Anthony. If she's taking the train, Christopher. If she's stuck for a few quid, Mark. If a relative is sick, Francis. If it's too late, Saint Peter.'

Hiatus. She had dried: another lousy actor, washed up and out of a part.

'And the rest of the evening, briefly, Gail?' Luke asked, not quite glancing at his watch, but as good as.

'Simply scrumptious, thank you. Beluga caviar, lobster, smoked sturgeon, oceans of vodka, brilliant thirty-minute toasts in drunken Russian for the adults, great birthday cake, washed down with health-giving clouds of vile Russian-cigarette smoke. Kobe beef and floodlit cricket in the garden, a steel band banging away that nobody was listening to, fireworks that nobody was watching, a drunken swim for the last chaps standing, and home by midnight, for a jolly post-mortem over a nightcap.'

*

A stack of Yvonne's glossy photographs is making its positively last appearance. Kindly identify anybody you believe you may recognize from the festivities, says Yvonne, speaking by rote.

Him and him, says Gail, wearily pointing.

And him too, surely? says Perry.

Yes, Perry, him too. Another bloody him. One day we'll have equal opportunity for female Russian criminals.

Silence while Yvonne completes another of her careful notes and puts down her pencil. Thank you, Gail, you have been most helpful, says Yvonne. It's randy little Luke's cue to be brisk. Brisk is merciful:

'Gail, I fear we should release you. You've been immensely generous, and a superb witness, and we can pick up on everything else from Perry. We're very grateful. Both of us. Thank you.'

She is standing at the door, not sure how she got there. Yvonne is standing beside her.

'Perry?'

Does he answer her? Not that she notices. She climbs the stairs, Yvonne her gaoler close behind her. In the plush, over-prinked hall, big Ollie of the cockney accent and foreign voices folds up his Russian newspaper, clambers to his feet and, pausing in front of a period mirror, carefully adjusts his beret, using both hands.