Our Game

I had said it already, over two days, from call boxes and cafés to answerphones and curt intermediaries, in my hand-pressed Russian, as Larry called it, using the numbers Zorin had given me: I am here, I am Bairstow, I am a friend of Misha, it is urgent, please contact me, here is the telephone number of my hotel. And it came a little strangely to me, I'll admit, to hear myself performing, if only in part, as Zorin's agent.

"Who is Misha, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Misha is an English gentleman, as I am, Issa," I replied breezily, since I did not wish our conversation to sound conspiratorial to the twenty other people listening.

Silence while Issa digested this.

"What is the occupation of Misha, please, this man?"

"He deals in carpets. He buys carpets abroad and has them delivered to his special customers." I waited, but nothing came back. "Unfortunately, the particular exporter that Misha has been using for his deliveries—" But I got no further before Issa cut me short.

"What is your business in Moscow, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Friendship. I have important personal messages for Misha."

The line went dead. Like Larry, few Russians say goodbye on the telephone. I stared into the darkness. Ten minutes later the phone was ringing again. This time Issa was speaking to the accompaniment of crackling voices in the background.

"How is your first name, please, Mr. Bairstow?"

"Colin," I replied. "But people who know me well sometimes call me Tim."

"Tim?"

"Short for Timothy."

"Colin Timothy?"

"Colin or Timothy. Timothy is like a nickname." I repeated "nickname," using the Russian word. I repeated "Timothy," in English, then in its Russian version.

He disappeared. Twenty minutes later he was back. "Mr. Colin Timothy?"

"Yes."

"It is Issa."

"Yes, Issa."

"A car will wait outside your hotel. It will be a white Lada. The numbers of this car"—he put his hand over the mouthpiece as if to confer with someone—"the numbers are 686."

"Who will be in it? Where will it take me?"

The voice became an order, and an urgent one, as if he himself were receiving orders as he spoke to me. "It is outside your hotel now. The driver is Magomed. Come immediately, please. Come now."

I flung on my clothes. The corridor was holding an exhibition of appalling paintings of happy Russian peasants dancing in snowfilled forest glades. In the casino, two sullen Finns were playing against a roomful of croupiers and hostesses. I stepped into the street. A flurry of girls with their pimps advanced on me. I shouted "no" at them more vehemently than I meant to, and they recoiled. Flakes of sleet mingled with the icy rain. I had no hat and only a thin mackintosh. Did the Herr require a taxi? the doorman asked in German. The Herr didn't. The Herr required Larry. Steam was pouring from the drain covers in the cobble. Figures slipped among the shadows across the street. A Lada stood parked between two lorries in the centre of the road, not white but green, and the numbers 688, not 686. But it was a Lada, and this was Moscow, where precision was a variable quantity. A very broad, twinkly man no more than five feet tall was holding open the passenger door, smiling at me. He wore a fat skullcap with a tassel hanging from the crown, a tracksuit, and a padded waistcoat, and he had a jester's sadness. A second man lurked in the shadows of the back seat, his gaunt face barely legible under the brim of his hat. But his pale-blue shirtfront had caught a ray of light from the street lamp overhead. And because in tense moments one sees either everything or nothing, I observed that his shirt had no collar in the Western sense and was of a heavy, hand-loomed material, high at the neck and fastened with toggles of plaited cloth.

"Mr. Timothy?" the jester asked. He shook my hand. "My name is Magomed, sir, after the Prophet," he announced in a Russian as stately as my own. "I regret that most of my friends are dead."

I climbed into the passenger seat, wondering whether he was telling me that my friend was as well. He closed the door on me and reappeared at the front of the car to fit the windscreen wipers into their sockets. Then he alighted neatly in the driver's seat beside me, though he was too wide for it. He turned the ignition once, then several times. He shook his tasseled head like a man who knew that nothing ever really worked, and turned the key again. The engine fired and we set off, weaving between the potholes in the road, and I saw that Magomed was doing what I hoped he would do: he was watching his rear mirror all the time.