Our Game

"Hey, Timbo. You know what Checheyev told me? They steal. The gortsy do. Stealing's honourable as long as they're stealing from Cossacks. You go off with your rifle, shoot a Cossack, pinch his horse, and come home to a hero's welcome. In the old days they used to bring back their victims' heads as well, for the kids to play with. Cheers."

"Cheers," I say, steeling myself for Larry at his most impressionable.

"No law against killing, either. If you're caught up in a blood feud, noblesse obliges you to top everyone in sight. Oh, and the Ingush like to start Ramadan earlier than scheduled so that they can shove it up their neighbours and demonstrate how pious they are."

"So which are you going to do?" I ask tolerantly. "Steal for him, kill for him, or pray for him?"

He laughs but does not directly answer me. Instead I must be treated to a discourse on Sufism as practised among the gortsy, and the powerful influence of the tariqats in preserving ethnic unity; I must be reminded that the Caucasus is the true crucible of the earth, the great barrier to Asia, the last redoubt of small nations and ethnic individuality—forty languages in an area the size of Scotland, Timbo! I must be told to reread Lermontov and Tolstoy's Cossacks, and dismiss Alexandre Dumas as a romantic slob.

And at one level, if Larry is happy, I am. Before Checheyev's arrival in London, I wouldn't have given two-pence for the future of our operation. Instead all three of us are enjoying a renewal. Come to think of it, so, in clouded secrecy, is Checheyev's poker-backed boss, the venerable Volodya Zorin. But at another level I distrust Larry's relationship with Checheyev more than any he has conducted with his previous Russian controllers.

Why?

Because Checheyev is touching Larry where his predecessors have not. And neither have I.

* * *

Larry too bloody word perfect, I was reading in an irritable footnote in my own hand on the encounter sheet. Convinced he and CC are cooking something up

. . . . Yes, but cooking up what? I demanded impatiently of this useless insight. Robbing lowlanders for sport? It was too absurd. Larry under a stronger man's influence could get up to a lot of things. But falsify receipts, open foreign bank accounts? Take part in sustained, sophisticated fraud to the tune of thirty-seven million pounds? This Larry was nobody I knew. But then which Larry did I know?

* * *

CC PERSONAL, I read, in Cranmer's stern capitals, across the cover of a fat blue folder that contained my private papers on Checheyev, starting on the day of his arrival in London and ending with Larry's last officially recorded visit to Russia.

"CC's a star, Timbo half noble, half savage, all Mensch, and bloody funny...." Larry is rhapsodising. "He used to hate like a creed...." all things Russian because of what Stalin did to his people, but when Khrushchev came along he became a Twentieth Party Conference man. That's what he keeps saying when he gets drunk: 'I believe in the Twentieth Party Conference,' like a creed...

" 'CC, how did you get into the spook business,' I ask him. It was while he was studying in Grozny, he says. He had fought his way into the university against heavy bureaucratic odds. Apparently Ingush returnees are not welcome at neighbouring Chechenia's only university. A bunch of hotheads tried to persuade him to come and blow up Party headquarters as a protest against the way the Ingush were being kicked around. CC told them they were crazy, but they wouldn't listen. He told them he was a Twentieth Party Conference man, but they still wouldn't listen. So he beat the daylights out of them, waited till they'd bolted to the hills, then peached to the KGB....

"The KGB were so impressed that when he'd finished his studies they scooped him up and sent him to school outside Moscow for three years of English, Arabic, and spying. Hey, and get this—he acted Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. He says he was an absolute wow. An Ingush acting Lord Goring! I love him!"

Confirmed by microphone intercepts, prosaic Cranmer had duly noted, in his bank clerk's hand.

* * *

Grozny in Russia? I hear myself ask.

Chechenia, actually. North Caucasus. It's gone independent.

How did you get there?

Thumbed a lift. Flew to Ankara. Flew to Baku. Sneaked up the coast a bit. Turned left. Piece of cake.

* * *

Time, I thought, staring blindly at the stone wall before me.

Cling to time.

Time the great healer of the dead. I had been clinging to it for five weeks, but now I was clinging to it for dear life.

On August 1 I cut off my telephone.