Read Our Game Page 32


  “When will I leave here?” I asked.

  “We shall see. One, three days. It will depend.”

  “What on? What are we waiting for?” My conversations with the Murids had emboldened me. “I have no argument with you. I have no evil designs. I am here on an errand of honour to see my friend.”

  His glower unsettled me. His stubble, his ravaged eyes, gave him the appearance of someone who had seen dreadful things. But he offered me no answer. Instead he turned on his heel and left, followed by his fighters. I opened my suitcase. Aitken May’s papers were missing, so was Emma’s pop-up address book. I wondered whether Issa had paid my hotel bill and, if so, whether they had used Bairstow’s cancelled credit card.

  I am hearing Pettifer on the long-distance loneliness of the spy. Half of him is complaining, half content. He is comparing his existence with rock climbing, which he loves.

  “It’s one bloody great overhang in the dark. One minute you’re proud to be on your own. The next you’d give anything for a couple more blokes on the rope. Other times you just want to pull your knife out, reach up, cut the rope, and get some sleep.”

  As each day passed, my most diverting hours—and most informative—were those I spent in dialogue with my Murids.

  Sometimes without embarrassment they would pray before me, after they had prayed alone. They would come into my room wearing their skullcaps, sit down, and, turning away from me, close their eyes and pass each bead reverently from hand to hand. A Murid, they explained, never took a bead in his fingers without invoking the name of God. And since God had ninety-nine names, there were ninety-nine beads, which meant that ninety-nine was the minimum number of invocations. But certain Sufi orders—they implied their own—required the invocation to be repeated many times. A Murid had his loyalty tried and tested in many different ways before he was accepted. The Murid hierarchy was intricate and decentralised. Each village was divided into several quarters, each quarter had its own small ring, headed by a Turqh, or ringleader, who was in turn subordinate to a Thamada, who was in turn subordinate to a vekil, or deputy sheikh. . . . Listening to them, I felt a certain kindred sympathy for the wretched Russian intelligence officer charged with the impossible task of penetrating their organisation. My Murid guards performed their five obligatory prayers of the day, on the prayer mats they kept in the cubicle. The prayers they offered in my presence were supplementary prayers, addressed to certain holy men and special causes.

  “Is Issa a Murid?” I asked, and my question produced hilarious laughter.

  Issa is very secular, they replied amid renewed laughter. Issa is an excellent crook for our cause! He is providing us with financial support from his rackets! Without Issa we would have no guns! Issa has many good friends in mafia; Issa is from our village; he is the best shot with a rifle in the whole valley, the best at judo and football and . . .

  Then the quiet again, while I contemplated Issa in his new persona as Checheyev’s accomplice and perhaps mastermind behind the theft of thirty-seven million Russian pounds . . .

  My urge to question them was nothing beside their intense curiosity about myself. Scarcely had they set my tray before me than they were seated at my table, firing their latest batch of questions:

  Who were the bravest of all the English? they wished to know. Who were the best warriors, wrestlers, fighters? Was Elvis Presley English or American? Was the Queen absolute? Could she destroy villages, order executions, dissolve Parliament? Were English mountains high? Was Parliament only for elders? Did Christians have secret orders and sects, holy men, sheikhs, and imams? Who trained them to fight? What weapons did they have? Did Christians slaughter their animals without first bleeding them? And—since I had told them that I lived a country life—how many hectares did I own, how many head of cattle, sheep?

  My personal situation perplexed them endlessly. If I was a man like a man, why did I have no wife, no children to bless me in my old age? In vain I explained to them that I was divorced. Divorce for them was a detail, the adjustment of a few hours. Why had I no new wife to give me sons?

  Wishing to be repaid by a similar frankness, I answered them with the greatest care.

  “So what brings you both to Moscow? Surely you should be in Nazran, studying?” I asked them one evening over endless cups of black tea.

  They consulted each other, debating who should have the honour of the first reply.

  “We were selected by our spiritual leader to guard an important English prisoner,” the boy from the valley declared in a rush of pride.

  “We are the two best warriors in Ingushetia,” said the boy from the mountains. “We are without rivals, the bravest and best fighters, the hardiest, the most loyal!”

  “And the most dedicated!” said his friend.

  But here they seemed to remember that boasting was against their teaching, for they put on serious faces and spoke softly.

  “We came to Moscow to accompany a great sum of cash for an acquaintance of my uncle,” said the first boy.

  “The money was stuffed inside two beautifully embroidered cushions,” said the second. “This was because Caucasians are searched at airports. But the foolish Russians did not suspect our cushions.”

  “We believe that the cash we escorted was counterfeit, but we cannot be sure of this,” said the first earnestly. “Ingushetians are fine forgers. At the airport a man identified himself to us and drove our cushions away in a jeep.”

  For a while they lost themselves in a tense discussion about what they would buy with the money they had earned by this service: a stereo, some clothes, more gold rings, or a stolen Mercedes car smuggled in from Germany. But I was in no hurry. I could wait my chance all night.

  “Magomed tells me you are the sons of martyrs,” I said, when this topic had run its course.

  The mountain boy became very still. “My father was blind,” he said. “He earned his living by reciting the Koran by heart. The Ossetians tortured him in front of the whole village, then the Russian soldiers tied his hands and feet and crushed him with a tank. When the villagers tried to retrieve his body, the Russian soldiers fired their guns at them.”

  “My father and my two brothers are also with God,” said the valley boy quietly.

  “When we die we shall be ready,” said his friend, with the same stillness with which he had spoken of his father. “We will avenge our fathers and brothers and friends, and we shall die.”

  “We are sworn to fight the gazavat,” said his comrade, with similar intensity. “It is the holy war that will free our homeland from the Russians.”

  “We must rescue our people from the injustice,” said the mountain boy. “We must make our people strong and devout so that they cannot be preyed upon by infidels.” He stood up and, reaching behind him, drew out a curved dagger, which he offered me to hold. “Here is my kinjal. If I have no other weapon and I am surrounded and I have no ammunition, I shall run out of my house and strike dead the first Russian I see.”

  It was some while before the fervour passed. But the word infidel had given me the chance I had been waiting for all evening.

  “Can an infidel ever be the subject of a Murid’s prayers?” I asked.

  The boy from the valley clearly regarded himself as the more dependable spiritual authority. “If the infidel is a man of high esteem and morals, and this man is serving our cause, a Murid will pray for him. A Murid will pray for any man who is the instrument of God.”

  “Could an infidel of high esteem and morals make his life among you?” I enquired, privately wondering how Larry would take to this description.

  “If an infidel is a guest in our household he is called hashah. A hashah is a sacred trust. If he is harmed, the offence will be the same as if the tribe that protected him was harmed. A blood feud will be called to avenge the hashah’s death and clear the honour of the tribe.”

  “Does such a hashah live among you now?” I asked—and while I waited for their answer—“an Englishman perhaps? A ma
n who serves your cause and speaks your language?”

  For a wonderful moment I really believed that my patient strategy had paid off. They glanced excitedly at each other, their eyes fired; they spoke back and forth in hushed, breathless sentences filled with unintelligible promise. Then gradually I realised that what the mountain boy would love to tell me, his friend from the valley was ordering him to keep to himself.

  The same night I dreamed of Larry as a latter-day Lord Jim, the enthroned monarch of all the Caucasus, and Emma as his somewhat startled consort.

  They came for me at dawn, when executioners come. First I dreamed them, then they were true. Magomed, his gaunt companion, and two of the boys who had watched me being slapped at the nightclub. My Murids had disappeared. Perhaps they had been recalled to Nazran. Perhaps they wished to distance themselves from what was about to happen. An astrakhan hat and a kinjal lay on the foot of my bed, and they must have put them there while I slept. Magomed’s stubble had become a full beard. He wore a mink hat.

  “We shall leave at once, please, Mr. Timothy,” he announced. “Please prepare yourself for a discreet departure.”

  Then he spread himself expansively in my armchair like a master of ceremonies, the aerial of a cell phone poking from his padded waistcoat, while he watched his boys hasten me through my packing—the kinjal to my suitcase, the astrakhan hat to my head— and kept his ear cocked to the corridor for suspicious sounds.

  Magomed’s cell phone peeped; he murmured an order and tapped me on the shoulder as if starting his champion on a race. One boy grabbed my suitcase, another my attaché case; each held a machine pistol in his spare hand. I stepped after them into the corridor. Icy air greeted me, reminding me of my thin clothes and making me grateful for the hat. The gaunt man hissed, “Fast, damn you,” in Russian and gave me a prod. I climbed two short staircases, and by the time I reached the second, snow was flying down the steps at me. I scrambled through a fire exit onto a snow-clad balcony manned by a boy holding a pistol. He waved me down an iron ladder. I slipped and caught my lower spine a painful blow. He shouted abuse at me. I swore back at him and stumbled forward.

  Ahead of me I made out the boys with my luggage, disappearing behind a screen of driving snow. I was in a building site amid mounds, trenches, and parked tractors. I saw a row of trees and beyond the trees a huddle of parked cars. Snow poured into my shoes and grasped my calves. I slid into a trench and dragged myself free of it with my elbows and fingers. Snow blinded me. Wiping it away, I was amazed to glimpse Magomed leaping ahead of me, half clown, half deer, and the gaunt man at his heels. I struggled on, using the footprints prepared for me. But the snow was so deep that each time I landed I sank deeper into the Priddy mire, flailing and falling from one trough to the next.

  Magomed and his companion were hanging back for me. Twice they yanked me to my feet by brute force; until with a roar of frustration Magomed scooped me up in his arms and wafted me across the snow and between the trees to a four-track van, its rear half covered in a tarpaulin. As I scrambled into the cab I saw the second of the two boys from the nightclub worm his way under the tarpaulin. Magomed took the wheel, the gaunt man sat himself the other side of me, a Kalashnikov between his knees and spare magazines of ammunition at his feet. The truck’s engine howled in protest as we barged the drifts aside. Through a snow-caked windscreen, I took my leave of the ghostly landscape I had only now set eyes on: blackened apartment houses stolen from old war films; a smashed window with hot air belching out of it like smoke.

  We sidled onto a main road; lorries and cars bore down on us. Magomed slapped his hand on the horn and kept it there while he forced a gap. His companion to my right watched every car that overtook us. He had a cell phone, and I guessed from the laughter and head turning that he was talking to the boys under the tarpaulin. The road tipped, and we tipped with it. A bend lay below us. We approached it confidently, but our van, like a stubborn horse, refused and glided straight on, mounting what was evidently a verge, then rolling gracefully onto its flank in the snow. Magomed and three of the men were on their feet beside it in a moment. In perfect unison they righted the van, and we were off again before I had time to be alarmed.

  Now dachas lined the road, each fretted gable fat with falling snow, each tiny garden draped in its white dust sheet. The dachas ceased. Flat fields and pylons skimmed past us, followed by high walls and three-metre razor-wire fences that guarded the palaces of the superrich. Now, to a kind of common relief, we were in forest—part pine, part shedding silver birch—nosing our way down a pencil-straight track of virgin snow that took us past felled logs and the burned-out wrecks of mysteriously abandoned cars. The track narrowed and grew darker. Clouds of frosted mist rolled over the bonnet of the van. We reached a clearing and stopped.

  At first Magomed kept the engine running so that we could keep the heater on. Then he switched it off and wound down his window. We smelled pinewood and washed air, and listened to the furtive plops and flurries that are the language of the snow. My overcoat, soaked from falling, was wet and cold and heavy. I began worrying about the men under the tarpaulin. I heard a whistle, three soft notes. I glanced at Magomed, but the holy man’s eyes had closed and his head was tilted backward in meditation. He held a green plastic grenade in his hand and had put his little finger through the loop. It was evidently the only finger that would fit. I heard a second whistle, one note. I looked at the trees to left and right of me, then up and down the track, but saw nothing. Magomed gave a whistle in return, two notes. Still nobody moved. I turned to look again at Magomed and saw, framed in the window beside him, the half-bearded face of Issa peering in.

  One man stayed with the van, and as the rest of us set off I heard it drive away and saw billows of snow run after it down the road. Issa led, Magomed walked alongside him, in the manner of a hunting pair, each with his Kalashnikov covering the forest to his side of the path. The gaunt man and the two boys took the rear. Magomed had given me kapok gloves and strap-on overshoes which allowed me decent progress through the snow.

  Our party was descending a steep bank. The trees above us joined in a dense arch; the sky glinted through it in pale shards. The snow gave way to moss and undergrowth. We passed tipped rubbish and old tyres, then carved effigies of deer and squirrels. We entered a clearing filled with tables and benches, and on the further side of it a row of wooden huts. We were in an abandoned summer camp. An old brick shed stood at its centre. On the padlocked door, the word CLUB was stencilled in military paint.

  Issa went forward. Magomed stood under a tree with his hand raised, commanding the rest of us to remain where we were. I glanced upward and saw three men posted above us on the hillside. Issa rapped a signal on the door, then a second. The door opened. Issa nodded to Magomed, who beckoned me to his side at the same moment that the gaunt man gave me an unloving push.

  Magomed fell back, ushering me ahead of him. I entered the hut and saw at the far end of the room one man seated alone on a makeshift stage, his dark head sunk despairingly in his hands. A tattered back-drop portrayed heroic farmworkers with shovels, digging their way to victory. The door closed behind me, and at the sound he raised his head, as if woken from a sleep, and turned to stare at me. And I recognised by the light from the snowed-up windows the harrowed, bearded features of Konstantin Abramovich Checheyev, looking ten years older than his last clandestine photograph.

  15

  “You are Cranmer,” he said. “Larry’s friend. His other friend. Tim, his great British spymaster. His middle-class destiny.” His voice was drugged with exhaustion. He passed a hand across his jaw, reminding me of the Murids. “Oh, Larry told me all about you. Just a few months back, in Bath. ‘CC, are you sitting comfortably? Well, take a big gulp of Scotch—I have a confession for you.’ I was amazed he had anything left to confess. You know that feeling?”

  “Too well.”

  “So he confessed. And I was shocked. I was a fool, of course. Why be shocked? Merely because I betr
ayed my country, why should I expect him to betray his? So I swallowed some more whisky and wasn’t shocked anymore. It was good whisky. Glen Grant from Berry Brothers and Rudd. Very old. Then I laughed. I’m still laughing now.”

  But neither his ravaged face nor his flattened voice suggested it, for I never saw a man so degenerated by exhaustion and, as I read it, self-hate.

  “Who’s Bairstow?” he asked.

  “An alias.”

  “Who provided his passport?”

  “I stole it.”

  “Who from?”

  “My former Office. For an operation some years ago. I kept it back for my retirement.”

  “Why?”

  “As an insurance policy.”

  “Against what?”

  “Misfortune. Where’s Larry? When can I see him?”

  The hand again, passed across the jaw, this time in a brusque gesture of disbelief.

  “Are you seriously trying to tell me you are here on private business?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one sent you? No one said, Bring us Pettifer’s head, we will reward you? Bring us both their heads and we will reward you twice? You are seriously only one person here, looking for your friend and spy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Larry would say bullshit. So I say it too. Bullshit. We are not much given to swearing in my country. We take insults too seriously for swearing to be safe. But bullshit all the same. Double bullshit.”

  He was sitting at a table with one foot forward, a solitary figure on the stage, staring away from me at the workers on the wall. A lighted candle stood on the table. Others burned at intervals along the floor. I saw a shadow move and realised we were not alone.

  “How is the great and good Colonel Zorin?” he asked.

  “He’s well. He sends greetings. He asks that you make some public declaration that you stole the money for your cause.”