Our Game

The man behind us was mumbling into a cell phone in the language I couldn't understand. Occasionally he broke off to give Magomed directions, only to countermand them moments later, so that our journey became a series of repeated false spurts and hasty realignments until we hurtled gratefully to a halt behind a row of limousines and their minders. Wiry young men in mink hats, roll necks, and cowboy boots stepped forward from a doorway. One carried a machine pistol and had a gold chain round his wrist. Magomed asked him a question, waited, and received a thoughtful answer. He cast a leisurely glance up and down the road, then dabbed at my elbow in the way we steer the blind. Magomed entered an alley between two warehouses held apart by girders. He walked widely, his huge chest forward and head back, his hands curled ceremoniously at his sides. Two or three boys followed us.

We passed under an arch and down a steep flight of stone steps to a red iron door with a bulkhead light burning above it. He rapped a tattoo, and we waited while the rain poured down our necks. The door opened, and a cloud of cigarette smoke engulfed us. I heard the pulse of rock music and saw a mauve brick wall hung with the white faces of Mogamed's dead friends. The mauve turned orange, and I made out dark-clad bodies beneath the faces, a glint of weaponry, and hard hands ready to engage. I was facing a detachment of seven or eight armed men in flak jackets. Grenades hung from their belts. The door behind me closed. Magomed and his friends had gone. Two men marched me along a crimson corridor to a darkened observation balcony that looked down through smoked glass onto Moscow's rich, reclining in the plush alcoves of a nightclub. Slow waiters moved among them, a few couples danced. On foreshortened pillars, naked go-go girls rotated mindlessly to the rhythm of rock music. The atmosphere was about as erotic as an airport waiting room, and as tense. The balcony turned a corner and became a projection room and office. A stack of Kalashnikovs stood against the wall beside boxes of ammunition and grenades. Two boys manned the observation window, a third held a cell phone to his ear and watched a bank of television monitors showing the alley, the parked limousines, the stone stairway, and the entrance lobby.

In a far corner a bald-headed man in underclothes was handcuffed to a chair. He was slumped forward, crouching in a mess of his own blood. At a desk not four feet from him sat a pudgy. industrious little man in a brown suit, passing hundred-dollar bills through an electronic money-detector and totting up his findings on a wooden abacus. Occasionally as he counted he shook his head or lowered his spectacles and peered over the top of them at a ledger. Occasionally he paused to take a portentous gulp of coffee.

And presiding over the room, surveying each part of it with steady, expressionless glances, stood a very athletic man of about forty, in a dark-green blazer with gold buttons, and on his fingers a line of gold rings, and on his wrist a gold Rolex watch enriched with diamonds and small rubies. He was broad-faced as well as broad-shouldered, and I was aware of the muscles in his neck.

"Are you Colin Bairstow they call Timothy?" he demanded, in the English I recognised from the telephone. "And you are Issa," I replied.

He murmured an order. The man on my right put his hands on my shoulders. A second placed himself behind me. I felt their four palms explore my upper body, front and back, my crotch, thighs, ankles. They took my wallet from the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it to Issa, who accepted it in his fingertips as if it were unclean. I noticed his cuff links: big as old pennies, and engraved with what appeared to be wolves. After my wallet, the men gave him my fountain pen, handkerchief, room key, hotel pass, and loose change. Issa laid them fastidiously in a brown cardboard box.

"Where is your passport?"

"The hotel takes it from you when you check in.”

“Remain in this position."

From the pocket of his tunic he extracted a small camera, which he trained on me at a yard's range. It flashed twice. He walked round me with slow proprietorial steps. He photographed me from both sides, wound the film through the camera, shook it into his palm, and handed it to a guard, who hastened from the room with it. The man in the chair let out a choked cry, put back his head, and began bleeding from the nose. Issa murmured another order; two boys unlocked the handcuffs and led the man down the corridor. The brown-suited beadle continued passing hundred-dollar bills through his machine and noting them on the abacus.

"Sit here."

Issa sat himself at a desk. I sat the other side. He fished a sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. He set a pocket tape recorder between us, reminding me of Luck and Bryant at the police station. His hands were large and adept and mysteriously elegant.

"What is the full name of the man you call Misha?”