*
He listens up twice, then realizes that he is waiting for the courage to ring Eloise, so he does. It looks as though I could be home quite soon, maybe even late tomorrow, he says. Eloise says that Luke must do whatever he thinks right. Luke asks after Ben. Eloise says Ben is fine, thank you. Luke discovers he has a nosebleed and gets back on the bed until it’s time for supper, and a quiet word with Perry, who is in the sun room practising climbing knots with Alexei and Viktor.
‘Got a minute?’
Luke leads Perry to the kitchen, where Ollie is wrestling with an obstinate deep fryer that refuses to achieve the desired heat for the home-made chips.
‘Mind giving us a minute, Harry?’
‘No problem, Dick.’
‘Great news at last, thank God,’ Luke began, when Ollie had departed. ‘Hector’s got a small plane standing by at Belp from eleven p.m. tomorrow GMT, Belp–Northolt. Cleared for take-off and landing and a clean walk both ends. God knows how he’s swung it, but he has. We’ll jeep Dima over the mountain to Grund once it’s dark, then drive him straight to Belp. As soon as he touches down in Northolt they’ll take him to a safe house, and if he delivers what he says he’ll deliver, they’ll officially land him, and the rest of the family can follow.’
‘If he delivers?’ Perry repeated, tilting his long head quizzically to one side in a way that Luke found particularly irksome.
‘Well he will, won’t he? We know that. It’s the only deal on the table,’ Luke went on when Perry said nothing. ‘Our masters in Whitehall won’t have the family round their necks until they know Dima’s worth his salt.’ And when Perry still failed to respond: ‘It’s as far as Hector can get them to move without due process. So I’m afraid that’s it.’
‘Due process,’ Perry repeated at last.
‘That’s what we’re dealing with, I’m afraid.’
‘I thought it was people.’
‘It is,’ Luke retorted, flaring. ‘Which is why Hector wants you to be the person who tells Dima. He thinks it’s best coming from you rather than me. I fully agree. I suggest you don’t do it now. Early tomorrow evening will be quite soon enough. We don’t need him brooding all night. I suggest six-ish, to give him time to make his preparations.’
Has the man no give in him? Luke wondered. How long am I supposed to meet this lopsided stare?
‘And if he doesn’t deliver?’ Perry inquired.
‘Nobody’s got that far. It’s step by step. That’s the way these things are played, I’m afraid. Nothing’s a straight line.’ And letting himself slip, and instantly regretting it: ‘We’re not academics here. We do action.’
‘I need to talk to Hector.’
‘That’s what he said you’d say. He’s standing by for your call.’
*
Alone, Perry walked up the path to the woods where he had walked with Dima. Reaching a bench, he swept away the evening dew with the flat of his hand, sat down, and waited for his thoughts to clear. In the lighted house below him, he could see Gail, the four children and Natasha squatting in a ring on the floor of the sun room with the Monopoly board at their centre. He heard a squawk of outrage from Katya, followed by a bark of protest from Alexei. Dragging his mobile from his pocket he stared at it in the twilight before touching the button for Hector and immediately hearing his voice.
‘You want the dolled-up version, or the hard truth?’
This was the old Hector, the one he relished, the one who had berated him in the safe house in Bloomsbury.
‘The hard truth will do fine.’
‘Here it is. If we bring our boy over, they’ll listen to him and they’ll form a judgement. It’s the best I can get out of them. As of yesterday they weren’t prepared to go that far.’
‘They?’
‘The authorities. The them. Who the fuck d’you think? If he doesn’t measure up, they’ll throw him back in the water.’
‘What water?’
‘Russian probably. What’s the difference? The point is, he will measure up. I know he will, you know he will. Once they’ve decided to keep him, which won’t take more than a day or two, they’ll buy into the whole catastrophe: his wife, kids, his pal’s kids, and his dog if he’s got one.’
‘He hasn’t.’
‘The nub of it is, they’ve accepted the whole package in principle.’
‘What principle?’
‘D’you mind? I’ve been listening to over-educated arseholes from Whitehall splitting hairs all morning and I don’t need another. We’ve got a deal. As long as our boy comes through with the goods, the rest of them follow with due expedition. That’s their promise, and I’ve got to believe them.’
Perry closed his eyes and took a breath of mountain air.
‘What are you asking me to do?’
‘No more than you’ve done from day one. Compromise your noble principles for the greater good. Soft-soap him. If you tell him it’s a maybe, he won’t come. If you tell him we accept his terms without qualification, but there will be a short delay before he’s reunited with his loved ones, he will. Are you still there?’
‘Partly.’
‘You tell him the truth, but you tell it selectively. Give him half a chance to think we’re playing dirty on him, he’ll grab it. We may be fair-play English gentlemen, but we’re also perfidious Albion shits. Did you hear that or am I talking to the wall?’
‘I heard it.’
‘Then tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m misreading him. Tell me you know a better plan. It’s you or nobody. This is your finest hour. If he won’t believe you, he won’t believe anyone.’
*
They lay in bed. It was after midnight. Gail, half asleep, had barely spoken.
‘It’s been taken away from him somehow,’ Perry said.
‘Hector?’
‘That’s how it feels.’
‘Perhaps it was never his in the first place,’ Gail suggested. And after a while: ‘Have you decided yet?’
‘No.’
‘Then I think you have. I think no decision’s a decision. I think you’ve decided, and that’s why you can’t sleep.’
*
It was the next evening, quarter to six. Ollie’s cheese fondue had been enjoyed and cleared away. Dima and Perry remained alone in the dining room, standing face to face under a multi-coloured metal alloy chandelier. Luke was taking a tactful stroll in the village. The girls, with Gail’s encouragement, were watching Mary Poppins again. Tamara had removed herself to the sitting room.
‘It’s all the apparatchiks can offer,’ said Perry. ‘You go ahead to London tonight, your family follows in a couple of days. The apparatchiks insist on that. They have to obey the rules. Rules for everything. Even this.’
He was using short sentences, watching for the smallest change in Dima’s features, for a hint of softening, or a glimmer of understanding, even of resistance, but the face before him was unreadable.
‘They want I go alone?’
‘Not alone. Dick will be flying to London with you. As soon as the formalities are completed, and the apparatchiks have satisfied their rules, we all follow you to England. And Gail will look after Natasha,’ he added, hoping to allay what he imagined would be Dima’s first concern.
‘She ill, my Natasha?’
‘Good Lord no. She’s not ill! She’s young. She’s beautiful. Temperamental. Pure. She’ll need a lot of looking after in a strange country, that’s all.’
‘Sure,’ Dima agreed, nodding his bald head to confirm this. ‘Sure. She beautiful like her mother.’
Then jerked his head abruptly sideways, then downwards, as he stared into some dark gulf of anxiety or memory to which Perry was not admitted. Does he know? Has Tamara, in a fit of spite or intimacy or forgetfulness, told him? Has Dima, contrary to all Natasha’s expectations, taken her secret and pain upon himself instead of tearing off in search of
Max? What was certain to Perry was that the outburst of fury and refusal that he had anticipated was giving way to a prisoner’s dawning sense of resignation in the face of bureaucratic authority; and this realization disturbed Perry more deeply than any violent outburst could have done.
‘A couple days, huh?’ Dima repeated, making it sound like a life sentence.
‘A couple of days is what they say.’
‘Tom say that? Couple days?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s some good fellow, Tom, huh?’
‘I believe he is.’
‘Dick too. He nearly kill that fucker.’
They digested this thought together.
‘Gail, she look after my Tamara?’
‘Gail will look after your Tamara very carefully. And the boys will help her. And I’ll be here too. We’ll all look after the family until they come over. Then we’ll look after all of you in England.’
Dima reflected on this, and the idea seemed to grow in him.
‘My Natasha go Roedean School?’
‘Maybe not Roedean. They can’t promise that. Maybe there’s somewhere even better. We’ll find good schools for everyone. It’ll be fine.’
They were painting a false horizon together. Perry knew it and Dima seemed to know it too, and welcome it, for his back had arched and his chest had filled, and his face had eased into the dolphin smile that Perry remembered from their first encounter on the tennis court in Antigua.
‘You better marry that girl pretty quick, Professor – hear me?’
‘We’ll send you an invitation.’
‘Wortha lotta camels,’ he muttered, and pulled a smile at his own joke – not a smile of defeat in Perry’s eyes, but a smile for time gone by, as if the two of them had known each other all their lives, which Perry was beginning to think they had.
‘You play me Wimbledon once?’
‘Sure. Or Queen’s. I’m still a member there.’
‘No pussying, OK?’
‘No pussying.’
‘Wanna bet? Make it interesting?’
‘Can’t afford it. Might lose.’
‘You chicken, huh?’
‘Afraid so.’
Then the embrace he dreaded, the prolonged imprisonment in the huge, damp trembling torso, on and on. But when they separated, Perry saw that the life had drained from Dima’s face, and the light from his brown eyes. Then, as if to order, he turned on his heel, and headed for the living room where Tamara and the assembled family were waiting.
*
There never had been any possibility that Perry would fly to England with Dima, on that evening or any other. Luke had known it all along, and had hardly needed to float the question with Hector to get the flat answer ‘no’. If the answer had for some unforeseeable reason been yes, Luke would have contested it: untrained, enthusiastic amateurs flying escort with high-value defectors simply didn’t fit into his professional scheme of things.
So it was less out of sympathy for Perry and more out of sound operational sense that Luke conceded that Perry should accompany them on the journey to Berne-Belp. When you are whisking a major source from the bosom of his family and consigning him with no hard guarantees to the care of your parent Service, he reasoned grudgingly, well yes, then it is prudent to provide him with the solace of his chosen mentor.
But if Luke had been anticipating heart-wrenching scenes of departure, he was spared them. Darkness came. The house was hushed. Dima summoned Natasha and his two sons to the conservatory and addressed them while Perry and Luke waited out of earshot in the front hall and Gail purposefully continued to watch Mary Poppins with the girls. For his reception by the gentlemen spies of London, Dima had donned his blue pinstripe suit. Natasha had pressed his best shirt, Viktor had polished his Italian shoes, and Dima was worried about them: what if they should get dirty on the walk to the place where Ollie had parked the jeep? But he was reckoning without Ollie who, as well as blankets, gloves and thick woollen hats for the ride over the mountain, had a pair of rubber overshoes of Dima’s size waiting for him in the hall. And Dima must have told his family not to follow him, because he appeared alone, looking as sprightly and unrepentant as he had when he made his appearance through the swing-doors of the Bellevue Palace Hotel with Aubrey Longrigg at his side.
At the sight of him, Luke’s heart rose higher than it had risen since Bogotá. Here is our crown witness – and Luke himself will be another. Luke will be witness A behind a screen, or plain Luke Weaver in front of it. He will be a pariah, as Hector will. And he will help nail Aubrey Longrigg and all his merry men to the mast, and to hell with a five-year contract at training school, and a quality house close to it, with sea air and good schools for Ben near by and an enhanced pension at the end of the line, and renting not selling his house in London. He would cease to mistake sexual promiscuity for freedom. He would try and try with Eloise until she believed in him again. He would finish all his games of chess with Ben, and find a job that would bring him home at a sensible hour, and real weekends to bond in, and for Christ’s sake he was only forty-three and Eloise wasn’t even forty yet.
So it was with both a sense of ending and beginning that Luke fell in next to Dima, and the three of them fell in behind Ollie, for the walk down to the farmstead and the jeep.
*
Of the drive, Perry the devoted mountaineer had at first only a distracted awareness: the furtive ascent by moonlight through forest to the Kleine Scheidegg with Ollie at the wheel and Luke beside him in the front seat, and Dima’s great body lurching soggily against Perry’s shoulders each time Ollie negotiated the hairpin bends on sidelights, and Dima didn’t bother to brace himself unless he really had to, preferring to ride with the blows. And yes, of course, the spectral black shadow of the Eiger North Face drawing ever closer was an iconic sight for Perry: passing the little way station of Alpiglen, he gazed up in awe at the moonlit White Spider, calculating a route through it, and promising himself that, as a last throw of independence before he married Gail, he would attempt it.
About to crest the Scheidegg, Ollie dowsed the jeep’s lights altogether, and they slunk like thieves past the twin hulks of the great hotel. The glow of Grindelwald appeared below them. They began the descent, entered forest and saw the lights of Brandegg winking at them through the trees.
‘From now on, it’s hard track,’ Luke called over his shoulder, in case Dima was feeling the effects of the bumpy ride.
But Dima either didn’t hear or didn’t care. He had thrown his head back and thrust one hand into his breast, while the other arm was stretched along the back seat behind Perry’s shoulders.
Two men at the centre of the road are waving a hand torch.
*
The man without the torch is holding up his gloved hand in command. He is dressed for the city in a long overcoat, scarf and no hat although he is half bald. The man with the torch is wearing police uniform and a cape. Ollie is already yelling cheerfully at them as he draws up.
‘Hey, you boys, what’s going on here?’ he demands, in a sing-song Swiss-French argot that Perry hasn’t heard him speak before. ‘Somebody fallen off the Eiger? We haven’t even seen a rabbit.’
Dima’s a rich Turk, Luke had said at the briefing. He’s been staying at the Park Hotel and his wife’s been taken seriously ill in Istanbul. He left his car in Grindelwald, and we’re a couple of English fellow guests playing good Samaritan. It won’t stand checking but it may just work for one-time use.
‘Why didn’t the rich Turk take the train from Wengen to Lauterbrunnen and go round to Grindelwald by cab?’ Perry had asked.
‘He won’t be reasoned with,’ Luke had replied. ‘This way he reckons, by taking a jeep over the mountain, he saves himself an hour. There’s a midnight flight to Ankara from Kloten.’
‘Is there?’
The policeman is shining his torch at a purple triangle stuck to th
e jeep’s windscreen. The letter G is printed on it. The man in city clothes is hovering behind him, blacked out by the glare of the torch. But Perry has a shrewd feeling he is taking a very close look at the jovial driver and his three passengers.
‘Whose jeep is this?’ the policeman asks, resuming his inspection of the purple triangle.
‘Arni Steuri’s. Plumber. Friend of mine. Don’t tell me you don’t know Arni Steuri from Grindelwald. He’s on the main street, next to the electrician.’
‘You drove down from Scheidegg tonight?’ the policeman asks.
‘From Wengen.’
‘You drove up from Wengen to Scheidegg?’
‘What do you think we did? Fly?’
‘If you drove up from Wengen to Scheidegg, you must have a second vignette, issued from Lauterbrunnen. The vignette on your windscreen is for Scheidegg–Grindelwald exclusively.’
‘So whose side are you on?’ Ollie says, still with dogged good humour.
‘Actually, I come from Mürren,’ the policeman replies stoically.
*
A silence follows. Ollie begins humming a tune, which is another thing Perry hasn’t heard him do before. He is humming, and with the help of the beam of the policeman’s torch he is hunting among the papers jammed into the pocket of the driver’s door. Sweat is running down Perry’s back, although he’s sitting quite motionless at Dima’s side. No difficult peak or Serious Climb has ever made him sweat while he’s sitting down. Ollie is still humming while he searches, but his hum has lost its cheeky edge. I’m a guest at the Park Hotel, Perry is telling himself. Luke’s another. We’re playing good Samaritan to a deranged Turk who can’t speak English and his wife is dying. It may work for one-time use.
The plainclothes man has taken a step forward and is leaning over the side of the jeep. Ollie’s humming is becoming less and less convincing. Finally he sits back as if defeated, a rumpled piece of paper in his hand.
‘Well maybe this will do you,’ he suggests, and shoves a second vignette at the policeman, this one with a yellow triangle instead of a purple one, and no letter G superimposed on it.
‘Next time, make sure both vignettes are fixed to the windscreen,’ the policeman says.