Our Game

And went on looking at it. Took up Uncle Bob's old magnifying glass to look deeper into it than ever before. Great generals, I had read, carried photographs of their adversaries around with them, hung them in their tents, mooned over them before saying their prayers to the beastly God of Battles. But my feelings towards Checheyev contained nothing of hostility. I had wondered, as I always did of Larry's other parent, how on earth Larry managed to fool him. But that was the way with doubles the world over. If you were on the right side, the wrong side looked absurd. And if you were on the wrong side, you fought like hell to convince people you were on the right side until it was too late. And surely I had puzzled how anybody whose people had been hounded by Russian colonial rule for three hundred years could talk himself into serving his oppressors.

"He's a Caucasian werewolf, Timbo," Larry is saying excitedly. "Rational spy by day, gorets by night. By six in the evening you can see his fangs appear...."

I waited for his enthusiasm to fade. For once it didn't. So that gradually, with Larry as our go-between, I began quite to like Checheyev too. I came to rely on his professionalism. I marvelled aloud at his ability to hold Larry's respect. And if I didn't understand what Larry called the wolf in him, I was able, even at one remove, to sense the pull of his revolt against the dreary system that he served.

* * *

I am in the surveillance house in Lambeth, seated beside Jack Andover, our chief watcher, while he runs video film of Checheyev in Kew Gardens, emptying a dead-letter box that Larry has filled an hour earlier. First he strolls past the warning signal, which denotes that the letter box is filled, and the camera shows us the child's chalk mark that Larry has scrawled on the brick wall. Checheyev registers it with the corner of his eye and strolls on. His walk is buoyant, almost insolent, as if he knows he's being filmed. He advances casually on a rose bed. He stoops and affects to read the botanist's description of the stems. As he does so, his upper body makes one swift lunge while his hand whisks a package from its hiding place and secretes it in his clothing: but so deftly, so imperceptibly, that I am reminded of a military tattoo that Uncle Bob once took me to, with Cossack horsemen who slid beneath the bellies of their bareback mounts at full gallop, to reemerge at the salute.

"Your bloke got any Welsh blood in him at all?" Jack asks me, as Checheyev resumes his innocent inspection of the rose beds.

Jack is right. Checheyev has the miner's neatness and the miner's roll.

"My boys and girls have taken a real shine to him," Jack assures me as I leave. "Slippery isn't the word. They say it's a privilege to follow him, Mr. Cranmer." And shyly: "Any word of Diana at all, by any chance, Mr. Cranmer?"

"Fine, thank you. She's happily remarried and we're good friends."

My former wife, Diana, had worked in Jack's section before she saw the light.

* * *

Money again.

After time, matter, and Konstantin Checheyev, consider money. Not my annual expenditure, or how much I inherited from Uncle Bob or Aunt Cecily, or how I afforded Emma's Bechstein that she didn't want. But real money, thirty-seven millions of it, milked from the Russian government, planned white-collar banditry, Larry's hoofprints all over the file.

Rising from the table, I began a tour of my priesthole, peering from each arrow slit in turn. I was reaching for memories that danced away from me as soon as I went after them.

Money.

Call up occasions when Larry mentioned money in any context except tax, debts, forgotten bills, pigs-in-clover materialism of the West, and the cheques he hadn't got round to paying in.

Returning to my table, I started to sift once more among the files, till I came on the entry I was looking for without quite knowing what it was: one sheet of yellow legal pad, scored with prim annotations in my blue rollerball. And along the top, couched in the self-conscious terms I use when I am talking to myself aloud, the question: Why did Larry lie to me about his rich friend in Hull?

* * *

I advance on the question slowly, just as Larry does. I am an intelligence officer. Nothing exists without a context.