In the course of one morning, Ollie had observed the same couple pass the house twice on the north side, then twice on the south-west side. Once the woman wore a yellow headscarf and a green Loden coat, once a floppy sunhat and slacks. But the same boots and socks, and carrying the same alpine walking stick. The man wore shorts the first time and baggy leopard-spot pants the second, but the same peaked blue cap and the same way of walking with his hands at his sides, barely moving them with his stride.
And Ollie had taught observation at training school, so it was hard to gainsay him.
Ollie had also been keeping a wary eye on Wengen railway station in the wake of Gail’s and Natasha’s encounter with Swiss authority
at Interlaken Ost. According to a servant of the railway with whom Ollie had had a quiet beer in the Eiger Bar, the police presence in Wengen, normally restricted to resolving the odd punch-up, or conducting a half-hearted quest for drug pushers, had been increased over the past few days. Hotel registers had been checked out, and the photograph of a broad-faced, balding man with a beard had been surreptitiously shown to ticket clerks at the train and cable-car stations.
‘I don’t suppose Dima ever grew a beard at all, did he, back in the days when he was opening his first money laundromat in Brighton Beach?’ he inquired of Luke during a quiet walk in the garden.
Both a beard and a moustache, Luke conceded grimly. They were part of the new identity he assumed in order to get himself to the States. Didn’t shave them off till five years ago.
And – call it coincidence, but Ollie didn’t – while he was at the railway news-stand, picking up the
International Herald Tribune
and the local press, he had spotted the same suspicious pair that he had seen casing the house. They were sitting in the waiting room and staring at the wall. Two hours and several trains going in both directions later, they were still there. Ollie could offer no explanation for their behaviour except cock-up: the relief surveillance team had missed the train, so the two were waiting while their superiors made up their minds what to do with them, or – taking into account their chosen position overlooking platform 1 – waiting to see who got off trains arriving from Lauterbrunnen.
‘Plus the nice lady at the cheese shop asked me how many people I thought I was feeding, which I didn’t like, but she
may
have been referring to my somewhat oversized tummy,’ he ended, as if to lighten Luke’s load, but humour wasn’t coming easily to either of them.
Luke was also fretting about the fact that the household included four children of school age. Swiss schools were running, so why weren’t
our
children at school? The medical nurse had asked him the same question when he went to the village surgery to have his hand checked. His lame reply to the effect that the International Schools were having a half-term had sounded implausible even to himself.
*
So far, Luke had insisted on confining Dima indoors, and Dima out of indebtedness had grudgingly submitted. In the afterglow of the scuffle on the staircase of the Bellevue Palace, Luke at first could do no wrong in Dima’s eyes. But as the days crawled by and Luke had to find one excuse after another for the apparatchiks in London, Dima’s mood turned to one of resistance, then revolt. Tiring of Luke, he put his case to Perry with characteristic bluntness:
‘If I wanna take Tamara a walk, I gonna take her,’ he growled. ‘I see a beautiful mountain, I wanna show her. This isn’t fucking Kolyma. You tell this to Dick, hear me, Professor?’
For the shallow climb up the concrete path to the benches that overlooked the valley, Tamara decided she needed a wheelchair. Ollie was sent off to find one. With her hennaed hair, splurged lipstick and dark glasses, she resembled some necromancer’s artefact, and Dima in his boiler suit and woollen ski cap was no prettier. But in a community inured to every kind of human aberration, they made some sort of ideal elderly couple as Dima pushed Tamara slowly up the hill behind the house to show her the Staubbach Falls and Lauterbrunnen Valley in all their glory.
And if Natasha accompanied them, which she sometimes did, it was no longer as the hated love-child sired by Dima and inflicted on Tamara after she was ejected half-mad from prison, but as their loving and obedient daughter, whether natural or adopted was no longer relevant. But mostly, Natasha read her books or sought out her father when he was alone, blandishing him, stroking his bald head and kissing it as if he were her child.
Perry and Gail too were integral parts of this newly constituted family that was forming: with Gail forever thinking up new activities for the girls, introducing them to the cows in the meadows, marching them off to watch Hobelkäse being planed in the cheese shop, or looking for deer and squirrels in the woods; while Perry played the boys’ admired team leader and lightning-rod for their surplus energy. Only when Gail proposed an early-morning four at tennis with the boys did Perry uncharacteristically demur. After
the match from hell in Paris, he confessed, he needed time to recover.
*
The concealment of Dima and his troupe was only one of Luke’s accumulating anxieties. Waiting out the nights in his upper room for Hector’s random bulletins, he had too much time to assemble the evidence that their presence in the village was attracting unwelcome attention, and, in his many sleepless hours, to concoct conspiracy theories that, when morning came, had an uncomfortable ring of reality.
He worried about his identity as Brabazon, and whether the Bellevue’s diligent Herr Direktor had by now made the connection between Brabazon’s inspection of the hotel’s amenities and the two battered Russians at the foot of the staircase; and whether from there, with police assistance, investigations had progressed to a certain BMW parked under a beech tree at Grindelwald Grund railway station.
His most drastic scenario, prompted in part by Dima’s light-hearted reconstruction in the car, ran as follows:
One of the bodyguards – probably the cadaverous philosopher –manages to haul himself up the staircase and hammer on the locked door.
Or perhaps Ollie’s speculative reading of the emergency door’s electronics was a little too speculative after all.
Either way, the alarm is raised and news of the fracas reaches the ears of the better-informed guests at the Arena
apéro
in the Salon d’Honneur: Dima’s bodyguards have been attacked, Dima has vanished.
Now everything is in motion at once. Emilio dell Oro alerts the Seven Clean Envoys, who take to their mobiles and alert their
vory
brothers, who in turn alert the Prince in his castle.
Emilio alerts his Swiss-banker friends, who in turn alert
their
friends in high places in the Swiss administration, not excluding the police and security services, whose first duty in life is to preserve the integrity of
Switzerland’s hallowed bankers, and arrest anyone who impugns it.
Emilio dell Oro further alerts Aubrey Longrigg, Bunny Popham and de Salis, who alert whomever they alert, see below.
The Russian Ambassador in Berne receives urgent instructions from Moscow, fuelled by the Prince, to demand the release of the bodyguards before they can sing, and more specifically to track down Dima and return him post-haste to his country of origin.
The Swiss authorities, who until now have been happy to provide sanctuary for Dima the wealthy financier, instigate a nationwide manhunt for Dima the fugitive criminal.
But there is a twist even to this lugubrious tale and, try as he may, Luke cannot unravel it.
By what trail of circumstance, suspicion or hard Intelligence, did the two bodyguards present themselves at the Bellevue Palace Hotel after the second signing? Who sent them? With instructions to do what? And why?
Or put a different way:
did the Prince and his brethren already have reason to know, at the time of the second signing, that Dima was proposing to break his unbreakable
vory
oath and become the
bitch
of all time?
But when Luke ventures to air these concerns to Dima – albeit in diluted form – he sees them brushed carelessly aside. Hector himself is no more receptive:
‘Go that route, we’re fucked from day one,’ he almost shouts.
*
Move house? Do a night flit to Zurich, Basel, Geneva? For what, finally? To leave a hornet’s nest behind? – mystified traders, landlords, the letting agents, the village gossip mill?
‘I could get you a few
guns
, if you’re interested,’ Ollie suggested, in another vain effort to cheer Luke up. ‘According to what
I
hear, there’s not a household in the village isn’t bristling with them, whatever the new regulations say. It’s for when the Russians come. These people don’t know who they’ve got here, do they?’
‘Well, let’s hope not,’ Luke replied, with a brave smile.
*
For Perry and Gail there was something idyllic in their day-to-day existence, something – as Dima would say wistfully – pure. It was as if they had been landed in a far outpost of humanity, with the mission of exercising a duty of care towards their charges.
If Perry wasn’t out scrambling with the boys – Luke having urged him to take out-of-the-way paths, and Alexei having discovered that he did not, after all, suffer from vertigo, it was just that he didn’t like Max – he was strolling with Dima in the dusk, or sitting beside him on a bench at the edge of the forest, watching him glower into the valley with the same intensity that, crammed into the pepper-pot crow’s-nest at Three Chimneys, he had broken off his monologue and glowered into the darkness, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, taken a pull of vodka and gone on glowering. Sometimes he demanded to be alone in the woods with his pocket recorder while Ollie or Luke kept covert watch from a distance. But he kept the cassettes to himself as part of his insurance policy.
The days, however many there had been, had aged him, Perry noticed. Perhaps the enormity of his betrayal was coming home to him. Perhaps, as he stared into the eternity, or murmured secretively into his tape recorder, he was searching for some kind of inner reconciliation. His demonstrative tenderness towards Tamara seemed to suggest this. Perhaps a revived
vory
instinct towards religion had paved his way to her:
‘My Tamara, when she die, God gonna be deaf already, she pray so fucking hard to him,’ he remarked proudly, leaving Perry with the impression that, regarding his own redemption, he was less sanguine.
Perry marvelled also at Dima’s forbearance towards him, which seemed to grow in inverse proportion to his contempt for Luke’s half-promises, no sooner made than regretfully withdrawn.
‘Don’t you worry, Professor. One day we all be happy, hear me? God gonna fix the whole shit,’ he declared, strolling along the footpath with his hand resting proprietorially on his shoulder: ‘Viktor and Alexei think you’re some kinda fucking hero. Maybe one day they make you
vor
.’
Perry was not deceived by the roar of laughter that followed this
suggestion. For days now he had seen himself increasingly as the inheritor of Dima’s line of deep male friendships: with the dead Nikita, who had made him a man; with the murdered Misha, his disciple, whom to his shame he had failed to protect; and with all the fighters and men of iron who had ruled over his incarceration in Kolyma and beyond.
*
Perry’s improbable appointment as Hector’s midnight confessor, by contrast, came out of the blue. He knew, and Gail knew – Luke did not need to tell them, the daily prevarications were enough – that things were not going as smoothly in London as Hector had anticipated. They knew from Luke’s body language that, conceal it as he tried, the emotional strain was telling on him also.
So when Perry’s mobile chimed its encrypted melody in his ear at one in the morning, causing him to sit immediately upright, and Gail, without waiting to know who the caller was, to hurry down the corridor and check on the sleeping girls, his first thought on hearing Hector’s voice was that he was about to ask Perry to bolster Luke’s spirits, or – more wishfully – to play a more active role in spiriting the Dimas to England.
‘Mind if I chat with you for a couple of minutes, Milton?’
Was this really Hector’s voice? – or a recorder, and the batteries were running down?
‘Chat ahead.’
‘Polish philosopher chap I read from time to time.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Kolakowski. Thought you might have heard of him.’
Perry had, but didn’t feel a need to say so. ‘What about him?’ Was the man drunk? Too much of his malt whisky from the Isle of Skye?
‘Very stern views on good and evil – which I’m tending to share these days – Kolakowski had. Evil is evil, period. Not rooted in social circumstance. Not about being deprived or a drug addict or whatever. Evil as an
absolutely
and
entirely
separate human force.’ Long silence. ‘Wondered whether you had a take on that?’
‘Are you all right, Tom?’
‘I dip into him, you see. At bleak moments. Kolakowski. Surprised you haven’t come across him. He had a law. Rather a good one in the circumstances.’
‘What’s bleak about
this
moment?’
‘The Law of Infinite Cornucopia, he called it. Not that Poles do a definite article. Not
indefinite
either, which tells you something, but there you are. Nub of his Law being, that there are an infinite number of explanations for any single event. Limitless. Or put in language we both understand, you’ll never know which bugger hit you or why. Rather comfortable words, I thought, in the circumstances, don’t you?’
Gail had returned and was standing in the doorway, listening.
‘If I knew the circumstances, I could probably form a better judgement,’ Perry said – talking to Gail as well now. ‘Is there anything I can do to help you, Tom? You sound a bit fragged.’
‘Think you’ve done it, Milton, old boy. Thanks for your advice. See you in the morning.’
See
you?