Our Kind of Traitor

  ‘In Swiss German this means a little flower but it also can mean big flower, because Swiss people like to call anything they are fond of small. The last new chalet on the left side after you pass the school. Barbara’s father built it for them. Actually, I think Max has been very lucky.’

  Blüemli was a young couple’s idyll built in spanking-new pine with window boxes with red flowers, red gingham curtains in the windows and a red chimney pot to match, and a hand-carved inscription under the roof in Gothic letters thanking God for his blessings. The front garden was a patch of fresh-mown new lawn with a new swing and a brand-new inflatable paddling pool and a new barbecue, and chopped-up firewood faultlessly stacked beside the seven-dwarfs front door.

  If it had been a virtual house instead of a real one, Gail would not have been surprised, but nothing was surprising her. The case had not turned on its head, it had simply become worst case: but not worse than the many cases she had put together on her journey here by train, and was putting together now as she pressed the bell and heard a woman call cheerfully, ‘En Momänt bitte, d’Barbara chunt grad!’ which, though she had neither German nor Swiss German, told her that Barbara would be there in a moment. And true to her word Barbara was: a tall, groomed, fit, handsome, thoroughly pleasant woman only a little older than Gail.

  ‘Grüessech,’ she said and, catching Gail’s apologetic smile, switched a little breathlessly to English: ‘Hello! Can I help you?’

  Through the open doorway Gail heard the plaintive grizzle of a baby. She took a breath, and smiled.

  ‘I hope so. I’m Gail. Are you Barbara?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am!’

  ‘I’m looking for a tall girl with black hair called Natasha, a Russian girl.’

  ‘Is she Russian? Well, I didn’t know. Maybe that explains something. Are you a doctor, maybe?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Why?’

  ‘Yes, well, she’s here. I don’t know why. Can you come in, please? I have to look after Anni. She has a first tooth.’

  Stepping briskly after her into the house, Gail smelled the sweet, clean smell of powdered baby. A row of felt slippers, with bunny’s ears, hanging from brass hooks, invited her to remove her grubby outdoor shoes. While Barbara waited, Gail pulled on a pair.

  ‘How long’s she been here?’ Gail asked.

  ‘One hour already. Maybe more.’

  Gail followed her to an airy living room with French doors opening on to a second small garden. At the centre of the room stood a playpen, and in the playpen sat a very small girl with golden ringlets and a dummy in her mouth and an array of brand-new toys around her. And against the wall on a low stool sat Natasha with her head down and her face hidden in her hair, leaning over her folded hands.

  ‘Natasha?’

  Gail kneeled to her and put a hand to the back of her head, cupping it. Natasha winced, then let the hand stay where it was. Gail spoke her name again. To no effect.

  ‘It was lucky you came, I must say,’ said Barbara in garrulous Swiss sing-song, picking Anni up and putting her over her shoulder to wind her. ‘I was going to call Dr Stettler. Or maybe the police, I didn’t know. It was a problem. Really.’

  Gail was stroking Natasha’s hair.

  ‘She rings the bell, I am feeding Anni, not bottle but the best way. We have a lens in the door now because these days you never know. I looked, I had Anni at my breast, I thought well, fine, that’s a normal girl on my doorstep, quite beautiful actually I must say, she wants to come in, I don’t know why, maybe to make an appointment with Max, he has many clients, specially young, because he is so interesting naturally. So she comes in, she looks, she sees Anni, she asks me in English – I didn’t know she was Russian, one doesn’t think of that although one should these days, I think maybe she is Jewish or Italian – “Are you Max’s sister?” And I say no, I am not his sister, I am Barbara his wife, and who are you please, and how can I help you? I am a busy mother, you can see. Do you wish to make an arrangement with Max, are you a climber? What is your name? And she says she is Natasha, but actually I am beginning to wonder already.’

  ‘Wonder what?’

  Gail pulled up another stool and sat at Natasha’s side. With her arm across her shoulder, she gently drew Natasha’s head in to her until their temples were pressing hard against each other.

  ‘Well drugs actually. The young today, I mean one simply doesn’t know,’ said Barbara, speaking indignantly like someone twice her age. ‘And frankly with foreigners, specially English, the drugs are everywhere, ask Dr Stettler.’ The baby gave a scream and she calmed it. ‘With Max also, his young ones, my God, even in the mountain huts, they are taking drugs! I mean alcohol I understand. Not cigarettes naturally. I offered her coffee, tea, mineral water. Maybe she didn’t hear me, I don’t know. Maybe she is having a bad trip, as the hippies say. But with the baby frankly one doesn’t like to say it, but I was a little bit afraid even.’

  ‘But you didn’t call Max?’

  ‘In the mountains? When he has guests? That would be terrible for him. He would think she was ill, he would come immediately.’

  ‘He would think Anni was ill?’

  ‘Well naturally!’ She paused and reconsidered the question, which was not, Gail suspected, a thing she did often. ‘You think Max would come for Natasha? That’s completely ridiculous!’

  Taking Natasha’s arm, Gail lifted her gently to her feet, and when she was fully upright, she embraced her, then took her to the front door, helped her change back into her outdoor shoes, changed her own, and walked her across the perfect lawn. As soon as they were through the gate, she called Perry.

  She’d called him once from the train, and once when she reached the village. She’d promised to call him practically by the minute because Luke couldn’t talk to her himself, he had Dima sitting on top of him somewhere, so please use Perry as the cut-out. And she knew things were very fraught, she could hear it in Perry’s voice. The more calm he was, the more fraught she knew things were, and she assumed an episode of some sort. So she spoke calmly herself, which probably conveyed the same signal to him in reverse:

  ‘She’s all right. Fine, OK? I’ve got her here with me, she’s alive and well, we’re on our way. We’re walking towards the station now. We need a little time, that’s all.’

  ‘How much time?’

  Now it was Gail who was having to watch her words, because Natasha was clinging to her arm.

  ‘Enough to repair our souls and powder our noses. One other thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nobody needs to be asked where they’ve been, all right? We had a small crisis, it’s over now. Life goes on. It’s not just about when we arrive. It’s from then on: no questions of the affected party. The girls will be fine. The boys I’m not sure.’

  ‘They’ll be fine too. I’ll see to it. Dick will be over the moon. I’ll tell him at once. Hurry.’

  ‘We’ll try.’

  *

  On the crowded train back to the valley there had been no opportunity to speak, which didn’t matter because Natasha showed no inclination to; she was in shock, and at times seemed unaware of Gail’s existence. But on the train from Spiez, under Gail’s gentle coaxing, she began to wake. They were sitting side by side in a first-class carriage and looking straight ahead of them, just as they had been in the tent at Three Chimneys. Evening was falling fast and they were the only passengers.

  ‘I am so –’ Natasha broke out, grabbing Gail’s hand, but then couldn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘We wait,’ Gail said firmly, to Natasha’s downturned head. ‘We have time. We put our feelings on hold, we enjoy life, and we wait. That’s all we need to do, either of us. Are you hearing me?’

  Nod.

  ‘Then sit up. Don’t give me my hand back, just listen. In a few days you’ll be in England. I’m not sure whether your brothers know that, but they know it’s a mystery tour,
and it’s going to begin any day now. There’s a short stop-over in Wengen first. And in England we’ll find you a really good woman doctor – mine – and you’ll find out how you feel, and then you’ll decide. OK?’

  Nod.

  ‘In the meantime, we don’t even think about it. We just wipe it out of our minds. You get rid of this silly smock you’re wearing’ – plucking affectionately at her sleeve – ‘you dress slim and gorgeous. Nothing shows, I promise you. Will you do that?’

  She will.

  ‘All the decisions wait till England. They’re not bad decisions, they’re sensible ones. And you make them calmly. When you get to England, not until. For your father’s sake, as well as yours. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Would Gail have spoken in the same way if Perry hadn’t said it was the way Luke wanted her to speak? – that this was the absolute worst moment for Dima to be hit with shattering news?

  Fortunately, yes, she would. She’d have made the same speech word for word, and she’d have meant it. She’d been there herself. She knew what she was talking about. And she was telling herself this as their train pulled into Interlaken Ost Station for their connection along the valley to Lauterbrunnen and Wengen, when she noticed that a Swiss policeman in smart summer uniform was walking down the empty platform towards them, and that a dull-faced man in a grey suit and polished brown shoes was walking beside him, and that the policeman was wearing the kind of rueful smile that, in any civilized country, tells you that you haven’t got much to smile about.

  ‘You speak English?’

  ‘How did you guess?’ – smiling back.

  ‘Maybe your complexion actually,’ he said – which she reckoned quite pert for your ordinary Swiss policeman. ‘But the young lady is not English’ – glancing at Natasha’s black hair and slightly Asian looks.

  ‘Well, actually she could be, you know. We’re all everything these days,’ Gail replied in the same sporty tone.

  ‘Do you have British passports?’

  ‘I do.’

  The dull-faced man was also smiling, which chilled her. And his English was a little too good too:

  ‘Swiss Immigration Service,’ he announced. ‘We are conducting random checks. I’m afraid that these days with open borders we find certain ones who should have visas and do not. Not many, but some.’

  The uniform was back:

  ‘Your tickets and passports, please. You mind? If you mind, we take you to the police station and we make a check there.’

  ‘Of course we don’t mind. Do we, Natasha? We just wish all policemen were so polite, don’t we?’ said Gail brightly.

  Delving in her handbag, she unearthed her passport and the tickets and gave them to the uniformed policeman, who examined them with that extra slowness that policemen all over the world are taught to exhibit in order to raise the stress level of honest citizens. The grey suit looked over the uniformed shoulder, then took her passport for himself, and did the same thing all over again before handing it to her and turning his smile on Natasha, who already had her passport ready in her hand.

  And what the grey suit did then was, in Gail’s later account to Ollie and Perry and Luke, either incompetent or very clever. He behaved as if the passport of a Russian minor were of less interest to him than a British adult’s passport. He flipped to the visa page, flipped to her photograph, compared it with her face, smiled in apparent admiration, paused a moment over her name in Roman and Cyrillic, and handed it back to her with a light-hearted ‘thank you, madam’.

  ‘You stay in Wengen long?’ the uniformed policeman asked, returning the tickets to Gail.

  ‘Just a week or so.’

  ‘Depending on the weather maybe?’

  ‘Oh, we English are so used to the rain we don’t notice!’

  And they would find their next train waiting for them on platform 2, departure in three minutes, the last connection up tonight, so better not miss it or you have to stay in Lauterbrunnen, said the polite policeman.

  It wasn’t till they were halfway up the mountain on the last train that Natasha spoke again. Until then she had brooded in seeming anger, staring at the blackened window, misting it over with her breath like a child, and angrily wiping it clean. But whether she was angry with Max, or the policeman and his grey-suited friend, or herself, Gail could only guess. But suddenly she raised her head and was staring Gail straight in the face:

  ‘Is Dima criminal?’

  ‘I think he’s just a very successful businessman, isn’t he?’ the deft barrister replied.

  ‘Is that why we’re going to England? – is that what the mystery tour’s all about? Suddenly he tells us we’re all going to great English schools.’ And receiving no reply: ‘Ever since Moscow the whole family has been – has been completely criminal. Ask my brothers. It’s their new obsession. They talk only of crime. Ask their big friend Piotr who says he works for KGB. It doesn’t exist any more. Does it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s the FSB now. But Piotr still says KGB. So maybe he is lying. Piotr knows everything about us. He has seen all our records. My mother was criminal, her husband was criminal, Tamara was criminal, her father was shot. For my brothers, anyone coming from Perm is completely criminal. Maybe that’s why the police wanted my passport. “Are you from Perm, please, Natasha?” “Yes, Mr Policeman, I am from Perm. I am also pregnant.” “Then you are very criminal. You cannot go to English boarding school, you must come to prison immediately!” ’

  By then, her head was on Gail’s shoulder, and the rest of what she said was in Russian.

  *

  Dusk was falling over the cornfields and it was dusk in the BMW hire car as well, because by mutual consent they were allowing themselves no lights, inside or out. Luke had provided a bottle of vodka for the journey and Dima had drunk the half of it, but Luke wasn’t giving himself as much as a sniff. He had offered Dima a pocket recorder to record his memories of the Berne signing while they were fresh, but Dima had brushed it away:

  ‘I know all. Got no problem. Got duplicates. Got memory. In London, I remember everything. You tell that to Tom.’

  Since their departure from Berne, Luke had used only side roads, driving a distance, finding a place to lie up while his pursuers if they existed went ahead of him. There was definitely something wrong with his right hand, he still seemed to have no feeling in it, but provided he used the strength of his arm and didn’t think about the hand, the driving wasn’t a problem. He must have done something to it when he coshed the cadaverous philosopher.

  They were talking Russian in low voices like a pair of fugitives. Why are we keeping our voices down? Luke wondered. But they were. At the edge of a pine forest he again parked, and this time handed Dima a labourer’s blue tunic, and a thick black woollen ski cap to cover his bald head. For himself he had bought jeans, anorak, a bobble hat. He folded Dima’s suit for him and put it in a suitcase in the boot of the BMW. It was by now eight in the evening and turning cold. Approaching the village of Wilderswil at the mouth of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, he yet again stopped the car while they listened to the Swiss news and he tried to read Dima’s face in the half-darkness because to his frustration Luke had no German.

  ‘They found the bastards,’ Dima growled in a Russian undertone. ‘Two drunk Russian assholes had a fight at the Bellevue Palace Hotel. Nobody know why. Fell down some steps and hurt themselves. One guy in hospital, the other one OK. The hospital guy pretty bad. That’s Niki. Maybe the fucker choke. Told a bunch of stupid lies the Swiss police don’t believe, each guy different lies. Russian Embassy want to fly them home. Swiss police are saying, “Not so goddam fast, we want to know a couple more things about these assholes.” Russian Ambassador’s pissed off.’

  ‘At the men?’

  ‘The Swiss.’ He grinned, took another pull from the vodka bottl
e and waved it at Luke, who shook his head. ‘Wanna know how it works? Russian Ambassador calls the Kremlin: “Who are these crazy fucks?” Kremlin call the bitch Prince: “What the fuck are your assholes doing beating the shit out of each other in fancy hotel in Berne, Switzerland?”’

  ‘And the Prince says?’ Luke demanded, not sharing Dima’s levity.

  ‘The bitch Prince call Emilio. “Emilio. My friend. My wise advisor. What the fuck my two nice guys doing, beating the shit out of each other in fancy hotel in Berne?”’

  ‘And Emilio says?’ Luke persisted.

  Dima’s mood darkened: ‘Emilio says: “That shithead Dima, world number-one money-launderer, he disappeared off the fucking planet.” ’

  No great intriguer himself, Luke was doing his sums. First the two so-called Arab policemen in Paris. Who sent them? Why? Then the two bodyguards at the Bellevue Palace: why had they come to the hotel after the signing? Who sent them? Why? Who knew how much when?

  He called Ollie.

  ‘All quiet, Harry?’ – meaning, who’s arrived up there at the safe house and who hasn’t? Meaning, am I going to have to deal with a missing Natasha too?

  ‘Dick, our two stragglers clocked in just a couple minutes back, you’ll be pleased to hear,’ Ollie said reassuringly. ‘Found their own way here without any bother much, and everything hunky-dory. Tenish over the other side of the hill about right for you? Nice and dark by then.’

  ‘Ten o’clock is fine.’

  ‘Grund Station car park. A nice little red Suzuki. I’ll be first right as you drive in and as far from the trains as we can get, then.’

  ‘Agreed.’ And when Ollie didn’t ring off: ‘What’s the problem, Harry?’

  ‘Well there’s been quite a police presence at Interlaken Ost railway station, I’m hearing.’

  ‘Let’s have it.’

  Luke listened, said nothing, returned the mobile to his pocket.

  *

  By the other side of the hill, Ollie was referring to the village of Grindelwald, which lay at the opposing foot of the Eiger massif. To reach Wengen from the Lauterbrunnen side by any means except mountain railway was impossible, Ollie had reported: the summer track might be good enough for chamois and the odd foolhardy motorcyclist, but not for a four-wheeled vehicle with three men aboard.