Our Game

"Forgive me, Tim. Didn't it cross your mind to tell the police to come back later, and phone us immediately? Instead of simply opening your doors to them?" she asked, still studying the desk.

"I had a choice—as in any operational situation," I explained, perhaps a trifle patronisingly. "I could have sent them packing and phoned you, which would have sounded their alarm bells. Or I could play it as it lay, normally. Just a normal police enquiry about a normal missing friend. That's how I played it."

She was happy to take my point. "And besides, it probably was normal, wasn't it? It may still be. As you say, all Larry has done is disappear."

"Well, there was the reference to Checheyev," I reminded her. "The landlady's description of Larry's foreign visitor fitted him to a T."

At the mention of CC, her grey-green gaze lifted to me inhospitably.

"Did it?" she said, more as a question of herself than of me. "Tell me about him."

"Checheyev?'

"Isn't he a Georgian or something?"

Oh, Larry, I thought, you should be with us now.

"No, I'm afraid he was quite the other thing. He came from the North Caucasus."

"So he was Chechen," she said, with the peculiar dogmatism I was beginning to expect of her.

"Well, nearly but not quite," I said kindly, though I'd half a mind to tell her to go and look at a map. "He's an Ingush. From Ingushetia. Next door to Chechenia but smaller. Chechenia one side, North Ossetia the other. Ingushetia in the middle."

"I see," she said with the same blank stare as before.

"In KGB terms, Checheyev was a one-off. Russians from the old Muslim minorities didn't make the foreign side of the KGB as a rule. They don't make much at all. There are special laws to control them, they're known as blackarses and kept in the provinces. CC broke the mould."

"I see."

"CC was Larry's name for him."

"I see."

I wished she would stop saying that, since it was so patently untrue.

"Blackarse sounds much worse in Russian than in English.

It used to apply only to Central Asian Muslims. In the new spirit of openness it's been extended to include the North

Caucasians."

"I see."

He cut a heroic figure, at least in Larry's eyes. Dashing, cultrued, physical, very much the gorets, and even something wit. After some of the dross Larry had had to put up with over the last sixteen years, Checheyev was a breath of air."

"Gorets?"

"Mountain man. Plural gortsy. He was a good case officer too."

"Really." She consulted her hands.

"Larry likes to idealise people," I explained. "It's part of his eternal immaturity. When they let him down, nothing's bad enough for them. But with CC that never happened."

I had reminded her of something.

"Didn't Larry have some position on the Caucasus?" she asked with disapproval. "I seem to remember we had to call in the Foreign Office so that he could be heard."

"He thought we should be taking a greater interest in the region during the dying days of Soviet power."

"Greater interest how?"

"He saw the North Caucasus as the next powder keg. The next Afghanistan. A string of Bosnias waiting to happen. He felt that the Russians shouldn't be trusted with the region. He hated them interfering. Dividing and ruling. He hated the demonisation of Islam as a substitute for the anti-Communist crusade."

"And do?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Do. What were we in the West supposed to do, in Pettifer's lexicon, to redress our sins?"

I shrugged, perhaps a little rudely. "Stop siding with the old Russian dinosaurs ... insist on a proper respect for small nations ... renounce our love of large political groupings and give more thought to individual minorities ..." I was quoting Larry word for word—the Pettifer Sunday sermons. Like Larry, I could have gone on all day. "Care about the detail. The humanity, which was what we fought the Cold War for in the first place."

"Did we?"

"He did."

"And Checheyev influenced him in this, obviously.”

“Obviously."

Her eyes had scarcely left mine all this time. Now they flashed accusingly. "And did you share this view—you personally?"

"Checheyev's view?"

"This perception of our Western duty."

No, I bloody well didn't, I thought. It was Larry at his worst, stirring up a storm because he was bored. But I didn't say that. "I was a professional, Marjorie. I didn't have the time to share views or reject them. I believed whatever was necessary to the job at the time."

But I had the feeling, as she continued watching me, that she was listening less to my words than to things I hadn't said.

"Anyway, we heard him," she said, as if that absolved us of blame.

"Oh, we heard him, all right. Our analysts heard him. The Foreign Office's expert on Southern Russia heard him. But it wasn't a success."

"Why not?"

"They told him there was no British interest in the area. We'd told him much the same ourselves, but when he heard it from the horse's mouth he lost his temper. He quoted a Mingrelian proverb at them. 'Why do you want light if you're blind?' "

"Did you know Checheyev retired from his service with full honours two years ago?"