Our Game

FOURTEEN

THERE WAS NO message from Sergei.

Tsarist chandeliers lit the vast hall; plaster nymphs cavorted in a rainbow fountain, their shiny torsos reflected to infinity by a carousel of gilt-framed mirrors. A cardboard dancing girl recommended the casino on the third floor, imitation air hostesses told me to enjoy my day. They should have told it to the muffled beggarwomen outside on the street corner, or the dead-eyed children hovering purposefully at the traffic lights and in the filthy underpasses, or the twenty-year-old wrecks in doorways, sleeping upright like the dead; or the defeated armies of pedestrians hunting for a morsel of the dollar economy to buy with their evaporating roubles.

But there was still no message from Sergei.

My hotel was ten minutes' walk from the real Lubyanka, in a pitted dark street where the paving stones chimed like metal when I stepped on them and yellow mud oozed between them as they sank. The guard on the front door was six strong: one hard-eyed sentry in a blue uniform to man it from outside, two plainclothes boys to cover arriving and departing cars; and inside the lobby a second trio, in black suits, all so solemn that I could have taken them for a bunch of undertakers, measuring me for my coffin with their head-to-toe stares.

But they had no message from Sergei.

I walked the wide streets, analysing nothing, alert to everything, knowing I had no shelter left to scurry to, no reassuring telephone number to call if I was in trouble, that I was naked, living under a false name in what all my life had been enemy territory. Seven years had passed since I had last been here, disguised as a Foreign Office flunkey on a two-week administrative errand to the embassy, in reality to hold secret meetings with a Party technocrat with wares to sell. And though I had spent some anxious moments smuggling myself in and out of cars and darkened doorways, the worst I had faced was exposure, and an undignified retreat to London, and a couple of inaccurate lines in the newspapers, and a wry smile from colleagues in the senior officers' bar. If I had had a vision of myself, as I looked down upon the unhappy souls around me, it was as the clandestine emissary of a superior world. No such ennobling visions consoled me now. I was part of them, propelled by my past as they were, ignorant of my future. I was a fugitive, homeless and stateless, a small nation of one.

I walked, and wherever I looked the madness of history answered me. In the old GUM building, once host to the world's most unwearable clothes, burly women of the new Russian rich sampled dresses by Hermes and scents by Estee Lauder, while their chauffeur-driven limousines waited in line outside, bodyguards and chase cars in attendance. Yet glance up and down the street, and there were the skeletons of yesterday dangling from their grimy gibbets: iron quarter-moons with the rusting stars of Soviet triumphalism trailing from their tails, hammers and sickles carved into crumbling facades, fragmented Partyspeak scrawled in drunken tracery against the rain-swept sky. And everywhere, as evening gathered, the beacons of the true conquerors flashing out their gospel: "Buy us, eat us, drink us, wear us, drive us, smoke us, die of us! We are what you get instead of slavery!" I remembered Larry. I was remembering him a lot. Perhaps because remembering Emma was too painful. "Workers of the world unite," he would say when he wanted to taunt me. "We have nothing to sell you but our chains."

I let myself into my room and saw a brown envelope staring at me from the luxurious pillows of my king-sized bed.

"You will please come to this address tomorrow at 1:30 p.m., the seventh floor, room 609. You will bring a bunch of flowers. Sergei."

* * *

It was a narrow house in a narrow, filthy street on the eastern edge of town. Nothing gave away its function. I had brought a bunch of pinks with no smell, wrapped in newspaper. I had travelled by metro, deliberately changing more often than I needed. I got off one stop early and walked the last half mile. The day was sullen. Even the birch trees in the boulevards looked dark. There was nothing on my back.

It was number sixty, but you had to work that out for yourself from the buildings either side, because there was no sixty on the door. A black Zil was parked in front of the drab entrance, and two men sat in it, one of them the driver. They stared at me and at my flowers, then stared away. Luck and Bryant, I thought, Russian style. I stood on the step, and as I rang the bell a camphorous stench came at me through the gap between the poorly fitted doors, and I remembered the stench that had come at me when I unlocked Aitken May's tomb. An old man admitted me; a white-clad woman at a desk paid me no attention. A man in a leather jacket was sitting on a bench. He studied me over his newspaper, then resumed his reading. I was in a high, dilapidated hall with marble pillars and a broken lift.

The stairs were of polished stone and uncarpeted. The sounds were just as hostile: hard heels on ceramic, trolleys warbling, and the harsh voices of old women calling above the murmurs of their patients. A place of former privilege, now fallen on hard times. On the seventh floor, a stained-glass canopy lit the stairwell. A bearded little man with spectacles stood shyly beneath it, wearing a black suit and clutching a bunch of gold lilies.

"Your friend Peter is visiting Miss Eugenie," he told me all in a rush. "His protectors have allowed him half an hour. Please be brief, Mr. Timothy." And he handed me the lilies to take with me.

My friend Sergei is a card-holding Christian, Zorin had confided to me. If I keep him out of prison, he'll get me into heaven.

* * *

Miss Eugenie was a thin white ridge in the grimy sheets that covered her. She was tiny and yellow and breathed in rasping sips, and Zorin the soldier sat to attention over her like her one-man guard of honour, his shoulders back, his chest thrown out for the medals that he ought to have been wearing. His craggy features were carved in grief. While he watched me I ran water into a glass jar and put the flowers in it, then squeezed myself along his side of the bed till I was able to grasp his outstretched hands. He rose, and with his handshake drew me to him like a wrestler for the embrace, left side, right side, and a kiss, before releasing me to sit across the bed from him on what seemed to be a milking stool.

"Thank you for coming, Timothy. I am sorry to be inconvenient."

He took up Miss Eugenie's hand and held it for a moment. She could have been a child or an old man. Her eyes were closed. He replaced her hand on her breast, then moved it to her side for fear it would weigh too heavily on her.

"She is your wife?" I asked.

"She should have been."

We stared awkwardly at one another, neither able to speak first. There were yellow rings under his eyes. Perhaps I looked no better.

"You remember Checheyev," he said.

The ethic of our trade required that I search my memory.

"Konstantin. Your embassy culture vulture. Why?"

He gave an impatient frown and glanced at the door. He was speaking English quickly but in a low voice. "Culture was his cover. I think you know that very well. He was my number two in the residency. He had a friend called Pettifer, a bourgeois intellectual Marxist. I think you know him too."

"Distantly."

"Let's not play games today, Timothy. Zorin has no time, neither has Mr. Bairstow. This Pettifer conspired with Checheyev to steal enormous sums of money from the Russian government, using the London embassy as a front. You will recall I had commercial rank. Checheyev forged my signature on certain documents. The sum they stole exceeded all sanity. It could be as much as fifty million pounds. Do you know all this?"

"Rumour has reached me," I said, and was reminded how, at fifty-five, Zorin still spoke the elaborate English of his spy school, full of pedantry and old-fashioned idiom; and how, listening to him in the safe house in Shepherd Market, I used to picture his tutors as wispy old Fabians with a passion for Bernard Shaw.

"My government wants a scapegoat. I have been selected. Zorin conspired with the blackarse Checheyev and the English dissident Pettifer. Zorin must be brought to trial. What part has your former service played in this?"

"None."

"Your word?"

"My word."

"So you know of this matter. They have consulted you." The speed and intensity of his questions, and the gravity with which he put them, persuaded me to set caution aside.

"Yes," I said.

"To seek your advice?"

"To question and accuse me. They are casting me in a similar role, as your accomplice. You and I had secret talks, therefore we must be thieves together."

"Is this why you're Bairstow?"

"Yes."

"Where is Pettifer?"

"Here perhaps. Where's Checheyev?"

"My friends tell me he has vanished. Maybe he's in Moscow, maybe the mountains. The idiots looked high and low for him; they pulled in some of his people. But the Ingush don't interrogate easily." His features cracked into a grim smile. "None has so far come up with a voluntary statement. Checheyev's a clever guy, I like him, but in his heart he's a blackarse, and we're killing blackarses like flies. He stole the money to help his people. Your Pettifer assisted him—for money, for who knows? Maybe friendship, even."

"Do the idiots also think that?"

"Of course they don't! So idiotic they are not!”

“Why not?"

"Because they refuse to countenance a theory of their own incompetence!" he retorted, keeping his voice low with difficulty as his pressed-in anger broke free. "If Checheyev was an Ingush patriot, they should never have sent him to London. Do you think the Kremlin wants to advertise to the world the national aspirations of a tribe of savages? Do you think they want to tell the blessed fraternity of international bankers that a blackarse can sign himself a cheque for fifty million pounds across the counter of a Russian embassy?"

Eugenie was coughing. Cradling her in his great arms, he sat her upright and gazed with desolation into her face. I don't think I ever saw such an expression of pain and adoration etched in such unlikely features. She gave a soft, apologetic cry. On his nod, I puffed up her pillows. He laid her gently back on them.

"Find Checheyev for me, Timothy," he ordered. "Tell him to shout it to the world, declare his cause, say he is a good man, say what he's done and why. And while he's about it, he can tell them Volodya Zorin is innocent and so are you. Tell him to move his black arse before the idiots put a bullet in my neck."

"Find him how?"

"Pettifer was your agent, for Christ's sake! He wrote to us. To us. To the KGB, or whatever they call us these days. He made a full confession of his crimes. He told us he belonged to you first and only afterwards to us. But now he wishes to be no one's man but his own. Not yours, not ours. Unfortunately, the idiots have his letter, so it will never see the light of day. All he's done is make a target of himself. If the idiots can kill Pettifer as well as Checheyev, they'll be delighted." He drew an English matchbox from his pocket and laid it on the bed before me. "Go to the Ingush, Timothy. Tell them you're Pettifer's friend. He will confirm it. So will Checheyev. Those are the telephone numbers of the known ringleaders of the movement here in Moscow. Tell them to take you to him. They may. They may kill you first, but that won't be anything personal. A blackarse is a blackarse. And if you meet Checheyev, cut his balls off for me."

"There's one problem."

"There's hundreds. What the hell?"

"If I were your masters—and if I wanted to catch Checheyev—and if I had you as my prisoner—what you have just suggested to me is exactly what I'd be telling you to say to Cranmer when he walked into this room." He started to protest, but I spoke through him. "Then I'd wait for Cranmer to lead me to Checheyev. And to his friend Pettifer, naturally—"

With a suppressed growl of fury, he cut me short. "Do you think I wouldn't do that if it was there to do? Jesus Christ! I would go to the idiots myself. 'Listen, idiots! Cranmer the British spy is coming to see me! He's soft in the head. He thinks I'm his friend. I've lured him. Let me direct him to the Ingush. We'll trace him together, like a stain in the water, till we reach the well! Then we'll smash their rebel scum to pieces and send their British spymasters to hell!' I would do all of it and more if it would give us back our dignity and standing in the world. All my life I believed in what we did. `Well,' I said, 'we make mistakes, we take wrong roads, we are human beings, not angels. But we are the right side. Man's future is safe with us. We are the moral instruments of history.' When the perestroika came, I supported it. So did my Service. 'But gradually,' we said. 'Spoon-feed them. A little freedom at a time.' They didn't want spoon-feed. They kicked over the bucket and ate the whole meal at once. And what are we now?"

He was staring at Eugenie. He seemed to be talking to her , also, for his voice had fallen and he spoke quite tenderly.

"So we shot people," he said. "A lot of people. Some were good men and shouldn't have been shot. Others were lousy bastards and should have been shot ten times. So how many people has God killed? For what? How many does He kill unjustly every day, without reason, or explanation, or compassion? And we were only men. And we had a reason."

About to leave the room, I looked back. He was bending over her, listening tensely to her breathing, his great face wet with tears.

* * *

There were two telephones in my room, red and black. The red, according to the glossy leaflet, was my Personal Direct Line to All the World. But it was the black that, somewhere around two in the morning, tore me from my wakeful slumbers.

"You are Mr. Bairstow, please?" A male voice, speaking precise but accented English.

"Who's speaking?"

"Issa is speaking. What do you wish from us, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

Issa from Emma's answering machine in Cambridge Street, I thought. "I'm a friend of Misha," I said.

I had said it already, over two days, from call boxes and cafés to answerphones and curt intermediaries, in my hand-pressed Russian, as Larry called it, using the numbers Zorin had given me: I am here, I am Bairstow, I am a friend of Misha, it is urgent, please contact me, here is the telephone number of my hotel. And it came a little strangely to me, I'll admit, to hear myself performing, if only in part, as Zorin's agent.

"Who is Misha, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Misha is an English gentleman, as I am, Issa," I replied breezily, since I did not wish our conversation to sound conspiratorial to the twenty other people listening.

Silence while Issa digested this.

"What is the occupation of Misha, please, this man?"

"He deals in carpets. He buys carpets abroad and has them delivered to his special customers." I waited, but nothing came back. "Unfortunately, the particular exporter that Misha has been using for his deliveries—" But I got no further before Issa cut me short.

"What is your business in Moscow, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Friendship. I have important personal messages for Misha."

The line went dead. Like Larry, few Russians say goodbye on the telephone. I stared into the darkness. Ten minutes later the phone was ringing again. This time Issa was speaking to the accompaniment of crackling voices in the background.

"How is your first name, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Colin," I replied. "But people who know me well sometimes call me Tim."

"Tim?"

"Short for Timothy."

"Colin Timothy?"

"Colin or Timothy. Timothy is like a nickname." I repeated "nickname," using the Russian word. I repeated "Timothy," in English, then in its Russian version.

He disappeared. Twenty minutes later he was back. "Mr. Colin Timothy?"

"Yes."

"It is Issa."

"Yes, Issa."

"A car will wait outside your hotel. It will be a white Lada. The numbers of this car"—he put his hand over the mouthpiece as if to confer with someone—"the numbers are 686."

"Who will be in it? Where will it take me?"

The voice became an order, and an urgent one, as if he himself were receiving orders as he spoke to me. "It is outside your hotel now. The driver is Magomed. Come immediately, please. Come now."

I flung on my clothes. The corridor was holding an exhibition of appalling paintings of happy Russian peasants dancing in snowfilled forest glades. In the casino, two sullen Finns were playing against a roomful of croupiers and hostesses. I stepped into the street. A flurry of girls with their pimps advanced on me. I shouted "no" at them more vehemently than I meant to, and they recoiled. Flakes of sleet mingled with the icy rain. I had no hat and only a thin mackintosh. Did the Herr require a taxi? the doorman asked in German. The Herr didn't. The Herr required Larry. Steam was pouring from the drain covers in the cobble. Figures slipped among the shadows across the street. A Lada stood parked between two lorries in the centre of the road, not white but green, and the numbers 688, not 686. But it was a Lada, and this was Moscow, where precision was a variable quantity. A very broad, twinkly man no more than five feet tall was holding open the passenger door, smiling at me. He wore a fat skullcap with a tassel hanging from the crown, a tracksuit, and a padded waistcoat, and he had a jester's sadness. A second man lurked in the shadows of the back seat, his gaunt face barely legible under the brim of his hat. But his pale-blue shirtfront had caught a ray of light from the street lamp overhead. And because in tense moments one sees either everything or nothing, I observed that his shirt had no collar in the Western sense and was of a heavy, hand-loomed material, high at the neck and fastened with toggles of plaited cloth.

"Mr. Timothy?" the jester asked. He shook my hand. "My name is Magomed, sir, after the Prophet," he announced in a Russian as stately as my own. "I regret that most of my friends are dead."

I climbed into the passenger seat, wondering whether he was telling me that my friend was as well. He closed the door on me and reappeared at the front of the car to fit the windscreen wipers into their sockets. Then he alighted neatly in the driver's seat beside me, though he was too wide for it. He turned the ignition once, then several times. He shook his tasseled head like a man who knew that nothing ever really worked, and turned the key again. The engine fired and we set off, weaving between the potholes in the road, and I saw that Magomed was doing what I hoped he would do: he was watching his rear mirror all the time.

The man behind us was mumbling into a cell phone in the language I couldn't understand. Occasionally he broke off to give Magomed directions, only to countermand them moments later, so that our journey became a series of repeated false spurts and hasty realignments until we hurtled gratefully to a halt behind a row of limousines and their minders. Wiry young men in mink hats, roll necks, and cowboy boots stepped forward from a doorway. One carried a machine pistol and had a gold chain round his wrist. Magomed asked him a question, waited, and received a thoughtful answer. He cast a leisurely glance up and down the road, then dabbed at my elbow in the way we steer the blind. Magomed entered an alley between two warehouses held apart by girders. He walked widely, his huge chest forward and head back, his hands curled ceremoniously at his sides. Two or three boys followed us.

We passed under an arch and down a steep flight of stone steps to a red iron door with a bulkhead light burning above it. He rapped a tattoo, and we waited while the rain poured down our necks. The door opened, and a cloud of cigarette smoke engulfed us. I heard the pulse of rock music and saw a mauve brick wall hung with the white faces of Mogamed's dead friends. The mauve turned orange, and I made out dark-clad bodies beneath the faces, a glint of weaponry, and hard hands ready to engage. I was facing a detachment of seven or eight armed men in flak jackets. Grenades hung from their belts. The door behind me closed. Magomed and his friends had gone. Two men marched me along a crimson corridor to a darkened observation balcony that looked down through smoked glass onto Moscow's rich, reclining in the plush alcoves of a nightclub. Slow waiters moved among them, a few couples danced. On foreshortened pillars, naked go-go girls rotated mindlessly to the rhythm of rock music. The atmosphere was about as erotic as an airport waiting room, and as tense. The balcony turned a corner and became a projection room and office. A stack of Kalashnikovs stood against the wall beside boxes of ammunition and grenades. Two boys manned the observation window, a third held a cell phone to his ear and watched a bank of television monitors showing the alley, the parked limousines, the stone stairway, and the entrance lobby.

In a far corner a bald-headed man in underclothes was handcuffed to a chair. He was slumped forward, crouching in a mess of his own blood. At a desk not four feet from him sat a pudgy. industrious little man in a brown suit, passing hundred-dollar bills through an electronic money-detector and totting up his findings on a wooden abacus. Occasionally as he counted he shook his head or lowered his spectacles and peered over the top of them at a ledger. Occasionally he paused to take a portentous gulp of coffee.

And presiding over the room, surveying each part of it with steady, expressionless glances, stood a very athletic man of about forty, in a dark-green blazer with gold buttons, and on his fingers a line of gold rings, and on his wrist a gold Rolex watch enriched with diamonds and small rubies. He was broad-faced as well as broad-shouldered, and I was aware of the muscles in his neck.

"Are you Colin Bairstow they call Timothy?" he demanded, in the English I recognised from the telephone. "And you are Issa," I replied.

He murmured an order. The man on my right put his hands on my shoulders. A second placed himself behind me. I felt their four palms explore my upper body, front and back, my crotch, thighs, ankles. They took my wallet from the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it to Issa, who accepted it in his fingertips as if it were unclean. I noticed his cuff links: big as old pennies, and engraved with what appeared to be wolves. After my wallet, the men gave him my fountain pen, handkerchief, room key, hotel pass, and loose change. Issa laid them fastidiously in a brown cardboard box.

"Where is your passport?"

"The hotel takes it from you when you check in.”

“Remain in this position."

From the pocket of his tunic he extracted a small camera, which he trained on me at a yard's range. It flashed twice. He walked round me with slow proprietorial steps. He photographed me from both sides, wound the film through the camera, shook it into his palm, and handed it to a guard, who hastened from the room with it. The man in the chair let out a choked cry, put back his head, and began bleeding from the nose. Issa murmured another order; two boys unlocked the handcuffs and led the man down the corridor. The brown-suited beadle continued passing hundred-dollar bills through his machine and noting them on the abacus.

"Sit here."

Issa sat himself at a desk. I sat the other side. He fished a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He set a pocket tape recorder between us, reminding me of Luck and Bryant at the police station. His hands were large and adept and mysteriously elegant.

"What is the full name of the man you call Misha?”

“Dr. Lawrence Pettifer."

"What are the aptitudes of this man?"

"I'm sorry?"

"His skills. His accomplishments. What is wrong with aptitudes?"

"Nothing. I didn't understand you for a moment. He's a student of revolution. A friend of small nations. A linguist. Like yourself."

"What else is this man, please?"

"A former agent of the KGB but in reality an agent of the British Secret Service."

"What is the official situation in Britain regarding this man?"

"He's a fugitive. The British suspect him of stealing a large sum of money from the Russian Embassy. So do the Russians. They're right. He did."

Issa studied the paper before him while at the same time holding it out of my sight. "When was your last meeting with the man Misha?"

"On September eighteenth of this year."

"Describe the circumstances of this meeting."

"It occurred at night. At a place called Priddy, high up in the Mendip hills in Somerset. We were alone."

"What was discussed?"

"Private matters."

"What was discussed?"

There is a Russian bureaucratic snarl I had occasionally called upon to good effect, and imprudently I called upon it now.

"Don't you talk to me as if I were a peasant. If I tell you it was private, it was private."

I had been slapped at school, too often. I had been slapped by women, though they were never allowed a second bite. I had boxed. But the two slaps that Issa dealt me as he leaned across the desk were like colours I'd never seen and sounds I'd never heard. He hit me with the left hand, then with the right hand almost simultaneously, and the right hand felt like an iron pipe because of the line of gold rings at the stem of each hard finger. And while he hit me I saw between his hands his brown marksman's eyes fixed on me so steadfastly that I was afraid he was going to go on hitting me till I was dead. But at a summons from across the room he stopped and, pushing aside the accountant, grabbed the cellular telephone that was being proffered to him by the boy at the television monitors. He listened, handed back the phone, and turned in question to the accountant, who shook his head, still counting hundred-dollar bills.

"They're jokers," the accountant complained in Russian. "They call it a third, and it is not even one-tenth of a third. It is not enough to pay their dues; it's not enough to feed a mouse. They are such stupid robbers you wonder how they became crooks."

With a skip of his elbows he scooped up the money, presented it to Issa, executed a few quick flicks of the abacus, seized a ruler and a red pencil and drew a line through each of four pages of the ledger, removed his spectacles and placed them in a steel case and posted the case in an inside pocket of his brown suit. At once the whole party of us—accountant, fighters, Issa, and myself—were hastened down the crimson corridor to the lobby. The iron door stood open, the stone staircase beckoned, armed boys were flitting everywhere, fresh air washed over me like a draught of freedom, last stars winked from a pale morning sky. A long car was drawn up at the top of the steps. Magomed's gaunt companion was installed in the driving seat, gloved hands on the steering wheel. At the rear door stood Magomed himself, holding a dotted head scarf, which, with all the deftness of a nurse, he proceeded to bind round my eyes.

I'm passing through the looking glass, I told myself, as the blackness engulfed me. I'm drowning in Priddy Pool. I'm a Berkeleyan. I can't see, therefore I can't breathe. I'm screaming, but everyone's deaf and blind. The last thing I saw was Issa's elegant Italian shoes as Magomed slowly pulled the blindfold tight. They were of woven strips of brown leather and had buckles of gold chain.

* * *

What do they want?

Who are we waiting for?

Something has gone wrong. Plans are being revised.

I dreamed I was going to be shot at dawn, and when I woke it was dawn and I could hear footsteps and soft voices outside my door.

I dreamed that Larry was sitting on my bed, staring down at me, waiting for me to wake up. I woke and saw Zorin stooped over me, listening to my breathing, but it was only my young guards bringing me my breakfast.

I heard Emma playing Maxwell-Davies in the church at Honeybrook.

* * *

My cellar was a fitness club with ancient gymnasium apparatus shoved against the wall and a notice on the door saying CLOSED FOR REPAIR. It was situated beneath a monstrous slab apartment block one hour's blindfold drive from metropolitan Moscow, at the end of a bumpy gravel road amid smells of garbage, oil, and rotting trees, and it was the unfittest place on earth or under it. The humid air stank, water dripped and gurgled all night long from pipes that ran along the ceiling and down to the cracking concrete floor—pipes for sewage, pipes for hot water and drinking water, pipes for heating, and pipes that were ducts for electricity and telephone, and small grey rats, mostly on their way to somewhere else. To the best of my arithmetic, I stayed there nine days and ten nights, but time was irrelevant because when you are first imprisoned, years go by without your wristwatch advancing more than a few seconds, and the distance between two meals is a march across the entire desert of your life. In one night you sleep with every woman you've known, and when you wake it's still night and you're still shivering alone.

* * *

My cellar had no windows. The two grilles high in the wall that were supposed to provide ventilation had long been screwed shut. When I clambered onto a rat-eaten vaulting horse and examined them, I found that their iron frames were welded together with rust. For the first day the stench of my cell was unbearable, by the second day it bothered me a little less, and by the third it had disappeared, and I knew I was part of it. But the smells from above me were a constant theatre of the senses, from sunflower oil and garlic and onion and roasting lamb and chicken to the universal fug of large families in tiny crowded rooms.

* * *

"Bashir Haji!"

I woke with a great shudder to the cry uttered in marvel or agony by my guards at dead of night.

First their field telephone had rung. Then this tortured or delighted cry.

Were they celebrating him?

Were they declaring him their creed, shouting his name to the hilltops?

Were they calling down curses on him? Lamenting him?

I lay awake, waiting for the next act. None came. I fell asleep.

* * *

A prisoner of the Ingush may be lonely, but he is never alone.

A childless man, I was inundated with children. They ran over my head, jumped on it, beat it, laughed at it, and screamed at it, and their mothers screamed back at them. Now and then a loud smack was followed by a bitter, breathless silence, and more screaming. I heard dogs howling, but only from outside the building. While I craved to be let out, the dogs demanded to be let in. I heard cats from everywhere. I heard the pompous boom of television sets switched on all day. I heard Mexican soap opera dubbed into Russian, and an urgent announcement interrupting it, reporting the crash of yet another financial company. I heard the slap of washing, the skirmishing of men in anger, men drunk, women in outrage. I heard weeping.

For music I had cheap Russian disco and mindless American rock, punctuated by something altogether deeper and more welcome: a slow, soft-throated rhythmic drumbeat, agitated and insistent, urging me to get up, brave the day, strive, attain. And I knew it was Emma's kind of music, grown in the home valleys and mountains of the exiles who listened to it. And at night, when most of these sounds were asleep, I heard the steady flow, as old as the sea, of gossip round campfires.

Thus I had in every sense the impression of having joined an underlife, for my hosts were themselves far from home and despised, and if I was their prisoner, I was also accorded the privileges of an honoured guest. When my guards led me to my daily wash, fingers to the mouth to command my silence, dark scowls as they spirited me through the entrails of the building to the tiny lavatory with its freshly torn pieces of unintelligible newspaper, I felt as much their accomplice as their ward.

* * *

I am listening to Pettifer on fear. It is not a long dissertation, certainly not a Sunday seminar. Our hotel is in Houston, Texas, and he has just spent ten days in a Cuban gaol on a trumped-up charge of possessing drugs—but in reality, he suspects, to provide the security police with an opportunity to take a closer look at him. First they wouldn't let him sleep. , Then they gave him a night and a day without water. Then they spread-eagled him to four rings on a wall and invited him to admit that he was an American spy.

"Once I got my dander up, it was great," Larry assures me, lounging beside the hotel pool, studying the passing bikinis while he sucks at the straw of his piña colada. "I told them that of all the insults they could heap on an English gentleman, accusing him of being a Yanqui spy was the lowest. I said it was worse than telling me my mother was a whore. Then I told them that their mothers were whores, at which point, more or less, Rogov barges in and tells them to take me down and give me a bath and let me go."

Rogov is the KGB head resident in Havana. It is my secret conviction that Rogov ordered the interrogation.

I ask the impossible question: What was it like? Larry affects to be surprised.

"After Winchester? A piece of cake. I'll settle for a Cuban prison over House Library any day. Hey, Timbo"—nudging my arm—"how about her? Cut out for you. Ugly and willing. No threat."

* * *

I had two guards, and they had no other life but me. They did everything together, whether it was night or day. Both had that tipping walk I had noticed in their comrades at the nightclub. Both spoke the gentle Russian of the south, but as a second language or perhaps by now a third, for they were first-year students in Muslim Studies at the Islamic University in Nazran, and their subjects were Arabic, the Koran, and the history of Islam. They declined to tell me their names, I supposed again on orders, but since they were also forbidden by their faith to lie, for those ten days they had no names at all.

They were Murids, they told me proudly, devoted to God and their spiritual masters, committed to a discreet and manly life in the search for sacred knowledge. Murids, they said, were the moral heart of the Ingush cause and of the military and political opposition to Russia. They were pledged to set an example of piety, honesty, bravery, and self-deprivation. The bigger and more studious—I have neither more than twenty—came from Ekazhevo, a large village on the outskirts of Nazran; his diminutive comrade was from Jairakh, high in the mountains close to the Georgian Military Highway at the southern extremity of the disputed Prigorod region, which they told me constituted half of traditional Ingushetia.

All this on the first day, while they stood shyly at the far end of my cell, dressed in bomber jackets and clutching machine pistols, watching me eat a breakfast of the same strong black tea I had found in Aitken May's waiting room, with a piece of precious lemon, and bread and cheese and hard-boiled eggs. Meals were from the start a ceremony. My Murids took turns to carry the tray, and great pride in their munificence. And since I quickly noticed that their own fare was less lavish—consisting, as they told me, of provisions they had brought from Nazran so that no dietary laws were breached—I made a show of eating mine with relish. By the second day, the cooks themselves started to appear: straight-eyed women in head scarves, who peered in at me from the cover of the doorway, the youngest the most modest, the older ones quizzing me with sparkling eyes.

Only once, through a misunderstanding, did I savour the less sociable side of our relationship. I was lying on my bed dreaming, and my dreams must have taken a violent turn, for when I opened my eyes and saw my two Murids staring down at me, one proudly bearing a cake of toilet soap and towels, the other my evening meal, I sprang up with a warlike shout, only to have my feet swept from under me and, as I started to struggle to my feet, the oily muzzle of a pistol pressed into my neck. Alone again, I heard their field telephone crackle and the sound of their quiet voices as they reported the event. They returned to watch me eat my meal, then removed the tray and chained me to my bed.

For my salvation I abandoned all resistance of body and mind. Supine and inert, I convinced myself that the greatest freedom in the world was to have no control over one's destiny.

Yet in the morning, when my guards released me, my wrists were bleeding and my ankles so swollen that we had to bathe them in cold water.

* * *

Magomed arrived with a bottle of vodka. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his round face under his skullcap was dark with stubble. What was saddening him? Or were his smiles always as sad as this? He poured the vodka but drank none himself. He enquired whether I was content. I replied, "Royally." He gave a distant smile and repeated: "Royally." We discussed in no particular sequence the writers Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Ford Madox Ford, and Bulgakov. He assured me that it was rare for him to engage in civilised conversation and asked whether such discussion was available to me in England.

"Only with Larry," I replied, hoping I might draw him.

But his reply was another sad smile, which neither acknowledged Larry's existence nor denied it. He asked how I was getting along with my Murids.

"They are polite?"

"Perfectly."

"They are the sons of martyrs." The sad smile again. "Perhaps they think you are the instrument of God's will.”

“Why should they think that?"

"There is a prophecy, widely believed in Sufist circles ever since the nineteenth century when the Imam Shamyl sent letters to your Queen Victoria, that the Russian Empire will one day collapse and the North Caucasus, including Ingushetia and Chechenia, will come under the rule of the British sovereign."

I received this information gravely, which was how he had imparted it.

"Many of our elders are speaking of the English prophecy," he went on. "If the collapse of the Russian Empire has now come about, they ask, when will be the second sign?"

A fluke of memory reminded me of something Larry had once told me: "And did I not read," I said artfully, in phrases as carefully weighed as his, "that Queen Victoria provided the Imam Shamyl with weapons in order to help him vanquish the Russian oppressor?"

"It is possible," Magomed conceded, without much interest. "The Imam Shamyl was not of our people and is consequently not the greatest of our heroes." He passed his thick palm first across his brow and then his beard, as if he wished to cleanse himself of an unfortunate association. "There is also a legend that the founders of the Chechen and Ingush nations were suckled by a she-wolf. The story may perhaps be familiar to you in a different context."

"It is," I said, remembering the wolves engraved on Issa's gold cuff links.

"More practically, there has always been a view among us that Great Britain could moderate the Russian determination to enslave us. Do you consider this to be another of our empty dreams, or may we hope that you will speak for us in the councils from which we are excluded? I ask you this in all seriousness, Mr. Timothy."

I had no reason to doubt him, but I was hard put to provide him with an answer.

"If Russia breached her treaties with her neighbours...," I began awkwardly.

"Yes?"

"If the tanks ever rolled into Nazran as they rolled into Prague in '68—"

"They have already done so, Mr. Timothy. Perhaps you were asleep at the time. Ingushetia is a country under Russian occupation. And here in Moscow we are pariahs. We are neither trusted nor liked. We are the victims of the same prejudices that prevailed in tsarist times. Communism brought us nothing but the same. Now Yeltsin's government is full of Cossacks, and the Cossacks have hated us since the dawning of the earth. He has Cossack generals, Cossack spies, Cossacks in the committees charged with deciding our new frontiers. You may be sure they will trick us at every turn. The world has not altered for us one centimetre in the last two hundred years. We are oppressed, we are stigmatised, we resist. We strenuously resist. Perhaps you should tell this to your queen."

"Where's Larry? When can I see him? When will you let me out of here?"

He was already rising to leave, and at first I thought he had decided to ignore my questions, which to my regret had a note of desperation not consistent with good bearing. Relenting, he gave me a solemn embrace and gazed fiercely into my eyes and muttered something I could not understand, though I feared it was a prayer for my protection.

"Magomed is the master wrestler of all Ingushetia," said the elder Murid proudly. "He is a great Sufi and a doctor of philosophy. He is a great warrior and spiritual master. He has killed many Russians. In prison they tortured him, and when he came out he couldn't walk. Now he has the strongest legs in all the Caucasus."

"Is Magomed your spiritual master?" I asked.

"No."

"Is Bashir Haji?"

I had foundered against the wall of forbidden topics. They fell quiet, then withdrew to their cubicle across the corridor. Thereafter I heard a deep silence, broken only by the occasional murmur. I assumed that the sons of martyrs were at prayer.

* * *

Issa appeared, looking vast in a brand-new bulky leather jacket, very shiny, and bearing my suitcase and attaché case from the hotel. He was accompanied by two of his armed boys. Like Magomed, he was unshaven and wore a harrowed, serious expression.

"You have a complaint?" he demanded, bearing in upon me so fiercely I assumed he was going to slap me again.

"I am being treated with honour and respect," I returned, equally aggressively.

But instead of hitting me, he took my hand and drew me to him in the same single embrace that Magomed had bestowed on me, and gave me the same confiding pat across the shoulder.

"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, and 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 man 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 talk ing 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 creased. 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 backdrop 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.