Our Game

" 'Hey, blackarse, how do you like Checheyev?' `No problem,' I say. 'It's a nice name. It's a blackarse name, but it's not too black. Got a nice ring to it.' Any other Ingush, you call him a blackarse to his face, he kills you. But me? I'm a concession man, a comedian. Their white nigger. I use their insults before they do. 'So how about Konstantin?' they ask. `No problem,' I say. 'Great emperor, big lover.' Wasn't till they got to the patronymic that they had their fun. 'Hey, blackarse, maybe we should make you a bit of a Jew,' they say, 'lead them off the scent. Abraham had a lot of sons. One more he won't notice.' So I'm a blackarse, and I'm a Jew, and I'm still smiling."

But he wasn't. He was in furious despair.

"What will you do if you find him?" he asked, wiping the neck of his flask on his sleeve.

"I'll tell him he's embarked on a trail of disaster and dragged his girl with him. I'll tell him that in England three people have already been murdered—"

He cut me short. "Three? Three already! A disaster? Remember that joke Stalin liked? Three people dead in a ditch after a motor accident, that's a national tragedy. But a whole nation deported and half of them exterminated, that's a statistic. Stalin was a great guy. Better than Konstantin."

I kept talking determinedly. "They've committed grand larceny, they've got themselves up to the neck in illegal arms dealing, they've placed themselves outside the law—"

He had risen and, with his hands behind his back, was standing centre stage. "What law?" he demanded. "What law, please? What law has Larry broken, please?"

I was losing patience. The cold was making me desperate.

"Whose law do you throw at me? British law? Russian law? American law? International law? United Nations law? The law of gravity? The law of the jungle? I don't understand whose law. Is that why they sent you—your Office—my Office—the sensitive and altruistic Colonel Zorin: to preach to me about the law? They've broken every law they ever made! Every promise to us: broken! Every pat on the back for the last three hundred years: a lie! They're killing us, in the villages, in the mountains, in the towns, in the valleys, and they want you to talk to me about the law?"

His anger kindled my own. "Nobody sent me! Do you hear me? I found the house in Cambridge Street. I heard that you'd been visiting Larry in Bath. I put it all together. I went north and found the bodies. Then I had to leave the country!"

"Why?"

"Because of you. CC. And your intrigues. And Larry's intrigues. And Emma's. Because I was suspected of being CC's accomplice. I was about to be arrested, like Zorin. Because of you. I need to see him. I love him." As a good Englishman, I hastened to qualify this. "I owe him."

A stirring in the shadows, or perhaps a wish to escape the intensity of his fury, caused me to glance round the shed. Magomed and Issa were seated by the door, their heads close together while they watched us. Two other men guarded the windows, a third was making tea on a primus. I looked back at Checheyev. His exhausted gaze was still fixed on me.

"Perhaps you haven't got the clout," I suggested, thinking I might taunt him into action. "Should I talk to somebody who can say 'yes' instead of 'no'? Perhaps you should take me to your Chief Leader. Perhaps you should take me to Bashir Haji and let me explain myself to him."

Speaking this name, I felt a tensing in the room, like a tightening of the air. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a sentry at the window turn his head and the barrel of his Kalashnikov swing gently round with him.

"Bashir Haji is dead. Many of our people were killed with him. We don't know who. We're in mourning. Tends to make us bad-tempered. Perhaps you should be in mourning too."

* * *

A terrible tiredness had descended over me. The cold seemed not worth fighting anymore. Checheyev had leaned himself in a corner of the stage, his hands deep in his pockets, his bearded head sunk inside the collar of his long coat. Magomed and Issa had lapsed into a kind of trance. Only the boys at the windows seemed to be awake. I tried to speak, but there was no breath in me. But I must have spoken all the same, for I heard Checheyev's answer, either in English or in Russian.

"We don't know," he repeated. "It was a village high up. First they say twenty dead, now they say two hundred. The tragedy is becoming a statistic. The Russians are using stuff we've never seen before. It's like air guns against stealth bombers. You don't even get the bullet in the air before they've fried you. The people around are so scared they don't know how to count anymore. Want some?"

He was offering me the flask. I took a long pull.

* * *

Somehow it was dusk and we were seated round a table, waiting to go on a journey. Checheyev sat at the head, I sat beside him, mystified by my feelings.

"And all those fine subsources he had," he was saying. "You invented them?"

"Yes."

"You personally? Your own professional ingenuity?”

“Yes," I said.