The torch goes out. They are driving again.
*
The parked BMW seemed to Perry’s inexpert eye to repose peacefully where Luke had left it – no wheel clamps, no rude notices wedged under the wipers, just a parked saloon car – and whatever Luke was looking for as he and Ollie walked gingerly round it and Perry and Dima remained as instructed in the back seat of the jeep, they didn’t find it, because now Ollie was already opening the driver’s door and Luke was beckoning to them to hurry over, and inside the BMW it was the same formation again: Ollie at the wheel, Luke up front beside him, Perry and Dima in the back. All through the stop and search, Perry realized, Dima hadn’t moved or made a sign. He’s in prisoner mode, Perry thought. We’re transferring him from one gaol to another, and the details are not his responsibility.
He glanced at the wing mirrors for suspicious following lights, but saw none. Sometimes a car would seem to be trailing them, but as soon as Ollie gave over, it drove past. He glanced at Dima beside him. Dozing. He was still wearing the black woollen cap to hide his baldness. Luke had insisted on it, pinstripe suit or no. Now and then, as Dima lolled against him, the oily wool tickled Perry’s nose.
They had reached the autobahn. Under the sodium lights, Dima’s face became a flickering death mask. Perry looked at his watch, not knowing why, but needing the comfort of the time. A blue sign indicated Belp Airport. Three lines – two lines – turn right now into the slip road.
*
The airport was darker than any airport had a right to be. That was the first thing about it that surprised Perry. All right, it was after midnight, but you’d have expected a lot more light, even from a small on-off airport like Belp that has never quite had its full international status confirmed.
And there were no formalities: unless you counted as a formality the private word Luke was having with a weary, grey-faced man in blue overalls who seemed to be the only official presence around. Now Luke was showing the man a document of some kind – too small for a passport, for sure, so was it a card, a driving licence, or perhaps a small stuffed envelope?
Whatever it was, the grey-faced man in blue overalls needed to look at it in a better light, because he turned and hunched himself into the beam of the downlight behind him, and when he turned back to Luke, whatever it was that he’d had in his hand wasn’t in his hand any more, so either he’d hung on to it, or slipped it back to Luke, and Perry hadn’t seen him do it.
And after the grey man – who had disappeared without a word in any language – there came a chicane of grey screens, but nobody to watch them negotiate it. And after the chicane, an immobile luggage carousel, and a pair of heavy electric swing-doors that were opening before they reached them – are we airside already? Impossible! – then an empty departure lounge with four glass doors leading straight on to the tarmac: and still not a soul to scan their luggage or themselves, make them take their shoes and jackets off, scowl at them through an armoured-glass window, snap fingers at them for their passports, or ask them deliberately unnerving questions about how long they had been in the country and why.
So if all this privileged non-attention they were getting was the result of private enterprise on Hector’s part – which Luke had implied to Perry, and Hector himself had effectively confirmed – then all Perry had to say was: hats off to Hector.
The four glass doors to the open tarmac looked closed and bolted to Perry’s eye, but Luke the good man on a rope knew better. He made a beeline for the right-hand door, and gave it a little tug and – behold! – it slid obediently into its housing, allowing a sprightly draught of cooling air to dance into the room and run its hand over Perry’s face, which he was duly grateful for, because he felt unaccountably hot and sweaty.
With the door wide open and the night beckoning, Luke placed a hand – gently, not proprietorially – on Dima’s arm and, guiding him away from Perry’s side, led him unprotesting through the doorway and on to the tarmac where, as if forewarned, Luke made a sharp left turn, taking Dima with him and leaving Perry to stalk awkwardly behind them, like somebody who’s not quite sure he’s invited. Something about Dima had changed. Perry realized what it was. Stepping through the doorway, Dima had removed his woollen hat and dropped it into a handy rubbish bin.
And as Perry turned after them, he saw what Luke and Dima must already have seen: a twin-engined plane, with no lights and its propellers softly rotating, parked fifty yards away, with two ghostly pilots barely visible in the nose-cone.
There were no goodbyes.
Whether that was something to be pleased or sad about, Perry didn’t know, either at the time or later. There had been so many embraces, so many greetings, real or contrived, there had been such a feast of goodbyes and hellos and declarations of love, that in the aggregate their meetings and partings were complete, and perhaps there was no room for another.
Or perhaps – always perhaps – Dima was too full to speak, or to look back, or to look at him at all. Perhaps tears were pouring down his face as he walked towards the little plane with one surprisingly small foot in front of the other, as neat as walking the plank.
And from Luke, a pace or two behind and apart from Dima now, as if leaving him to enjoy the absent limelight and the cameras, not one word to Perry either: it was the formed man ahead of him that Luke had his eyes on, not Perry standing alone behind him. It was Dima with his dignity on parade: bare-headed, the backward lean, the suppressed but stately limp.
And of course there was tactic in the way Luke had positioned himself in relation to Dima. Luke wouldn’t be Luke if there wasn’t tactic. He was the clever, darting shepherd in the Cumbrian hills where Perry had climbed when he was young, urging his prize ewe up the steps into the black hole of the cabin with every ounce of mental and physical concentration he possessed, and ready any time for him to shy or bolt or simply stop dead and refuse.
But Dima didn’t shy, bolt or stop dead. He strode straight up the steps and into the blackness, and as soon as the blackness had him, little Luke was skipping up the steps to join him. And either there was someone inside to close the door on them or Luke did it for himself: an abrupt sigh of hinges, a double clunk of metal as the door was made fast from inside, and the black hole in the plane’s fuselage disappeared.
Of the take-off, Perry also had no particular memory: only that he was thinking he should call Gail and tell her that the Eagle had Departed or some such phrase, then find himself a bus or cab, or maybe just walk into town. He was a bit hazy about where he was in relation to Belp centre, if there was one. Then he woke to Ollie standing beside him, and remembered that he had a lift back to Gail and the fatherless family in Wengen.
The plane took off, Perry didn’t wave. He watched it rise and tip sharply, because Belp Airport has a lot of hills and small mountains to contend with and pilots have to be nippy. These pilots were. A commercial charter, by the look of it.
And there was no explosion. Or none that reached Perry’s ears. Later, he wished there had been. Just the thump of a gloved fist into a punchball and a long white flash that brought the black hills rushing at him, then absolutely nothing, either to look at or to hear, until the ta-too-ta-toos of police and ambulances and fire brigades as their flashing lights began to answer the light that had gone out.
*
Instrument failure is the semi-official verdict at present. Engine failure another. Laxity on the part of unnamed maintenance staff is widely touted. Poor little Belp Airport has long been the experts’ whipping boy and its critics aren’t sparing the rod. Ground control may also have been to blame. Two committees of experts have failed to agree. The insurers are likely to withhold payment until the cause is known. The charred corpses continue to mystify. On the face of it the two pilots were no problem: charter pilots true, but plenty of flying experience, sober fellows, both married, no trace of illegal substances or alcohol, nothing adverse in their records and their wives on neighbourly term
s with one another in Harrow, where the families lived. Two tragedies, therefore, but as far as the media was concerned, only worth a day. Why on earth a former official from the British Embassy in Bogotá should have been sharing the plane of a ‘dubious Russian Swiss-based minigarch’, even the red-top press was at a loss to explain. Was it sex? Was it drugs? Was it arms? For want of a shred of evidence it was none of them. Terror, the great catch-all these days, has also been considered, but rejected out of hand.
No group has claimed responsibility.
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks to Federico Varese, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University and author of seminal works on the Russian mafia, for his creative and ever-patient counsel; to Bérengère Rieu, who took me backstage at the Roland Garros Stadium; to Eric Deblicker, who gave me the tour of an exclusive tennis club in the Bois de Boulogne not so dissimilar to my Club des Rois; to Buzz Berger for correcting my tennis shots; to Anne Freyer, my wise and faithful French editor; to Chris Bryans, for his advice on the Mumbai stock market; to Charles Lucas and John Rolley, bankers of probity, who sportingly advised me on the practices of less scrupulous members of their profession; to Ruth Halter-Schmid, who spared me many wrong turnings on my journeying through Switzerland; to Urs von Almen, for guiding me through the wilder byways of the Bernese Oberland; to Urs Bührer, Direktor of the Bellevue Palace Hotel in Berne, for allowing me to stage an embarrassing episode in his peerless establishment; and to Vicki Phillips, my invaluable secretary, for adding proofreading to her countless skills.
And to my friend Al Alvarez, the most generous and astute of readers, homage.
John le Carré, 2010
John le Carré, Our Kind of Traitor
(Series: # )
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