Our Game

"Magomed tells me you are the sons of martyrs," I said, when this topic had run its course.

The mountain boy became very still. "My father was blind," he said. "He earned his living by reciting the Koran by heart. The Ossetians tortured him in front of the whole village, then the Russian soldiers tied his hands and feet and crushed him with a tank. When the villagers tried to retrieve his body, the Russian soldiers fired their guns at them."

"My father and my two brothers are also with God," said the valley boy quietly.

''When we die we shall be ready," said his friend, with the same stillness with which he had spoken of his father. "We will avenge our fathers and brothers and friends, and we shall die."

"We are sworn to fight the gazavat," said his comrade, with similar intensity. "It is the holy war that will free our homeland from the Russians."

"We must rescue our people from the injustice," said the mountain boy. "We must make our people strong and devout so that they cannot be preyed upon by infidels." He stood up and, reaching behind him, drew out a curved dagger, which he offered me to hold. "Here is my kinjal. If I have no other weapon and I am surrounded and I have no ammunition, I shall run out of my house and strike dead the first Russian I see."

It was some while before the fervour passed. But the word infidel had given me the chance I had been waiting for all evening.

"Can an infidel ever be the subject of a Murid's prayers?" I asked.

The boy from the valley clearly regarded himself as the more dependable spiritual authority. "If the infidel is a man of high esteem and morals, and this man is serving our cause, a Murid will pray for him. A Murid will pray for any man who is the instrument of God."

"Could an infidel of high esteem and morals make his life among you?" I enquired, privately wondering how Larry would take to this description.

"If an infidel is a guest in our household he is called hashah. A hashah

is a sacred trust. If he is harmed, the offence will be the same as if the tribe that protected him was harmed. A blood feud will be called to avenge the hashah's death and clear the honour of the tribe."

"Does such a hashah live among you now?" I asked—and while I waited for their answer—"an Englishman perhaps? A man who serves your cause and speaks your language?"

For a wonderful moment I really believed that my patient strategy had paid off. They glanced excitedly at each other, their eyes fired; they spoke back and forth in hushed, breathless sentences filled with unintelligible promise. Then gradually I realised that what the mountain boy would love to tell me, his friend from the valley was ordering him to keep to himself.

The same night I dreamed of Larry as a latter-day Lord Jim, the enthroned monarch of all the Caucasus, and Emma as his somewhat startled consort.

* * *

They came for me at dawn, when executioners come. First I dreamed them, then they were true. Magomed, his gaunt companion, and two of the boys who had watched me being slapped at the nightclub. My Murids had disappeared. Perhaps they had been recalled to Nazran. Perhaps they wished to distance themselves from what was about to happen. An astrakhan hat and a kinjal lay on the foot of my bed. and they must have put them there while I slept. Magomed's stubble had become a full beard. He wore a mink hat.

"We shall leave at once, please, Mr. Timothy," he announced. "Please prepare yourself for a discreet departure."

Then he spread himself expansively in my armchair like a master of ceremonies, the aerial of a cell phone poking from his padded waistcoat, while he watched his boys hasten me through my packing—the kinjal to my suitcase, the astrakhan hat to my head—and kept his ear cocked to the corridor for suspicious sounds.

Magomed's cell phone peeped; he murmured an order and tapped me on the shoulder as if starting his champion on a race. One boy grabbed my suitcase, another my attaché case; each held a machine pistol in his spare hand. I stepped after them into the corridor. Icy air greeted me, reminding me of my thin clothes and making me grateful for the hat. The gaunt man hissed, "Fast, damn you," in Russian and gave me a prod. I climbed two short staircases, and by the time I reached the second, snow was flying down the steps at me. I scrambled through a fire exit onto a snow-clad balcony manned by a boy holding a pistol. He waved me down an iron ladder. I slipped and caught my lower spine a painful blow. He shouted abuse at me. I swore back at him and stumbled forward.