Our kind of traitor

THE SEVEN BROTHERS.

One by one, the camera takes a look at each of them in close-up.

*

Luke has long ago given up trying to judge the world by its face. He has studied these faces numberless times, but still finds nothing in them he wouldn't find across the desk from him in any Hampstead estate agent's office, or in any gathering of black-suited, black-briefcased, business types in the bar of any smart hotel from Moscow to Bogota.

Even when their long-winded Russian names appear, complete with patronymics, criminal nicknames and aliases, he can't bring himself to see in their owners' faces anything more interesting than another edition of prototypes from the uniformed ranks of middle management.

But keep looking, and you begin to realize that six of them, either by design or chance, form a protective ring round the seventh at their centre. Look still more closely, and you observe that the man they are shielding is not a day older than they are and that his creaseless face is as happy as a child's on a sunny day, which isn't quite the face you expect to meet at a funeral. The face is such a picture of good health, in Luke's view, that you are almost obliged to assume a healthy mind behind it. If its owner were to pop up uninvited on Luke's doorstep one Sunday evening with a hard-luck story to tell, he would have a difficult time turning him away. And his subtitle?