John le Carre - Our kind of traitor

Yvonne writing a meticulous memorandum. Who to? Luke, chin in hand, drinking in her every word, a little too deeply for Gail's taste. Perry gloomily studying a patch of brickwork on the darkened wall. All of them giving her their undivided attention for her swansong.

*

When Ambrose told them to be on parade at the hotel entrance at six, Gail continued in a more measured tone, they assumed they were going to be spirited up to Three Chimneys in one of the people carriers with blackened windows, and let in through a side door. They assumed wrong.

Taking a back route to the car park as instructed, they found Ambrose waiting at the wheel of a 4x4. The plan, he explained in conspiratorial excitement, was to infiltrate the surprise guests by way of the old Nature Path that ran along the spine of the peninsula right up to the rear entrance of the house, where Mr Dima himself would be waiting for them.

She did her Ambrose voice again:

'"Man, they got fairy lights up in that garden, they got a steel band, a marquee, they got a shipment of the tenderest Kobe beef ever came out of a cow. I don't know what they haven't got up there. And Mr Dima, he has it all fixed and prepared down to a fine pin. He has packed off my Elspeth and that whole knockabout family of his to a major crab-racing event over the other side of St John's, just so's we can smuggle you in by the back door, and that's how secret you folks are tonight!"'

If they had been looking for adventure, the Nature Path alone would have provided it. They must have been the first people to use it for simply years. A couple of times Perry actually had to beat a passage through the undergrowth:

'Which of course he loved. Actually, he should have been a peasant, shouldn't you? Then we came out in this long green tunnel with Dima standing at the end of it looking like a happy Minotaur. If there is such a thing.'

Perry's bony index finger jerked upward in admonition:

'Which was our first sighting of Dima alone,' he warned gravely. 'No bodyguards, no family. No children. No one to watch over us. Or none visible. We were a three, standing at the edge of a wood. I think we were both very much aware of that. The sudden exclusivity.'

But whatever significance Perry attached to this remark was lost in the insistent rush of Gail's narrative:

'He hugged us, Yvonne! Really hugged us. First Perry, then shoved him aside, then me, then Perry again. Not sexy hugs. Great big family hugs. As if he hadn't seen us for ages. Or wasn't going to see us again.'

'Or else he was desperate,' Perry suggested, on the same earnest, reflective note. 'A bit of that got through to me. Maybe not to you. What we meant to him at that moment. How important we were.'

'He really loved us,' Gail swept on determinedly. 'He stood there, declaring his love. Tamara loved us too, he was positive. She just found it difficult to say because she was a bit crazy since her problem. No explanation of what the problem might have been, and who were we to ask? Natasha loved us, but she doesn't say anything to anyone these days, she just reads books. The whole family loved the English for our humanity and fair play. Except he didn't say humanity, what did he say?'

'Heart.'

'We're standing there at the end of the tunnel, having this great hug-fest, and he's orating all this stuff about our hearts. I mean, how much love can you profess to somebody you've only ever exchanged six words with?'

'Perry?' Luke prompted.

'I thought he was heroic,' Perry replied, his long hand now flying to his brow to form a classic gesture of worry. 'I just didn't know why. Didn't I put that in our document somewhere? Heroic? I thought he was' – with a shrug dismissing his own feelings as valueless – 'I thought dignity under fire. I just didn't know who was firing at him. Or why. I didn't know anything, except -'

'You were on the rock face with him,' Gail suggested, not unkindly.

'Yes. I was. And he was in a bad place. He needed us.'

'You,' she corrected him.

'All right. Me. That's all I'm trying to say.'

'Then you tell it.'

*

'He walked us out of the tunnel, round to what we realized was going to be the back of the house,' Perry began, and then broke off. 'I take it that you do want an exact description of the place?' he demanded sternly of Yvonne.

'We do indeed, Perry,' Yvonne replied, equally efficiently. 'Every last dreary detail, please, if you don't mind.' And went back to her meticulous note-taking.

'From where we'd emerged from the woods, there's an old bit of service track covered in some sort of red cinder, probably made by the original builders as an access road. We had to pick our way uphill over the potholes.'

'Carting our presents,' Gail blurted from the wings. 'You with your cricket set, me with the gift-wrapped presents for the kids in the fanciest bag I could find, which isn't saying a lot.'

Is anybody listening out there? she wondered. Not to me. Perry is the horse's mouth. I'm its arse.

'The house as we approached it from the back was a pile of old bones,' he continued. 'We'd been warned not to expect a palace, we knew the house was up for demolition. But we hadn't expected a wreck.' The outward-bound Oxford don had turned field reporter: 'There was a tumbledown brick building with barred windows, I deduced the old slave quarters. There was a high perimeter whitewashed wall, about twelve foot high and capped with razor wire, which was new and vile. There were white security lights stuck up on pylons round it like a football stadium, blazing down on whoever passed. We'd seen the glow from the balcony of our cabin. Fairy lights rigged between them, presumably in preparation for the night's birthday festivities. Security cameras, but pointed away from us because we were the wrong side of them. I assume that was the intention. A shining new aerial dish, twenty foot high, directed northish, as far as I could read it on our way back. Pointed at Miami. Or Houston perhaps. Anyone's guess.' He thought about this. 'Well, not yours, obviously. You people are supposed to know that stuff.'

Is this a challenge or a joke? It's neither. It's Perry showing them how brilliant he is at doing their job, in case they haven't noticed. It's Perry the climber of north-facing overhangs, telling them he never forgets a route. It's the Perry who can't resist a challenge provided the odds are stacked against him.

'Then downhill again through more forest to a bit of grass meadow with the headland sticking up at the end of it. In reality, the house hasn't got a back. Or it's all back, take your choice. It's a pseudo-Elizabethan hotchpotch of a bungalow built out of clapboard and asbestos, facing three ways. Grey stucco walls. Poky leaded windows. Plywood pretending to be half-timber and a rear porch with a lantern dangling in it. Are you with me, Gail?'

Would I be here if I wasn't? 'You're doing fine,' she said. Which wasn't quite what he'd asked.

'Add-on bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and offices with front doors on them, suggesting that the place had been some sort of commune or settlement at one time. So I mean, overall a shambles. It wasn't Dima's fault. We knew that, thanks to Mark. The Dimas had never lived there till now. Never touched it apart from a crash job on the security. The idea didn't bother us. To the contrary. It had a much-needed touch of reality about it.'

The ever-inquisitive Dr Yvonne is peering up from her medical notes. 'But were there no chimneys after all that, Perry?'

'Two attached to the remnants of a sugar mill on the western edge of the peninsula, the third at the edge of the woods. I thought I put that in our document as well.'

Our bloody document? How many times have you said that now? Our document that you wrote and I haven't been allowed to see, but they have? It's your bloody document! It's their bloody document! Her cheeks were scorching, and she hoped he'd noticed.