John le Carre: Our kind of traitor

'Security, Perry,' Mark explained, pressing past Gail to murmur reassuringly into Perry's ear. 'Routine.'

Perry remained where he stood, craning his neck forward and sideways while he digested this advice.

'Whose security exactly? I don't get it. Do you?' – to Gail.

'Me neither,' she agreed.

'Dima's security, Perry. Whose do you think? He's a high-roller. Big-time international. These boys are just obeying orders.'

'Your orders, Mark?' – turning and peering down on him accusingly through his spectacles.

'Dima's orders, not mine, Perry, don't be stupid. They're Dima's boys. Go with him everywhere.'

Perry returned his attention to the blond bodyguard. 'Do you gents speak English, by any chance?' he asked. And when the baby face refused to alter in any way, except to harden: 'He appears to speak no English. Or hear it, apparently.'

'For Christ's sakes, Perry,' Mark pleaded, his beery complexion turning a darker shade of crimson. 'One little look in your bag, it's over. It's nothing personal. Routine, like I said. Same as any airport.'

Perry again applied to Gail: 'Do you have a view on this?'

'I certainly do.'

Perry tilted his head the other way. 'I need to get this absolutely right, you see, Mark,' he explained, asserting his pedagogic authority. 'My proposed tennis partner Dima wishes to make sure I'm not going to throw a bomb at him. Is that what these men are telling me?'

'It's a dangerous world out there, Perry. Perhaps you haven't heard about that, but the rest of us have, and we endeavour to live with it. With all due respect, I would strongly advise you to go with the flow.'

'Alternatively, I might be about to gun him down with my Kalashnikov,' Perry went on, raising his tennis bag an inch to indicate where he kept the weapon; at which the second man stepped out of the shadow of the bushes and positioned himself beside the first, but there was still not a legible facial expression between the two of them.

'You're making a mountain out of a molehill, if you don't mind my saying so, Mr Makepiece,' Mark protested, his hard-learned courtesy beginning to give way under the strain. 'There's a great game of tennis waiting in there. These boys are doing their duty, and they're doing it very politely and professionally in my judgement. Frankly I do not understand your problem, sir.'

'Ah. Problem,' Perry mused, picking on the word as a useful starting point for a group discussion with his students. 'Then allow me to explain my problem. Actually, come to think of it I have several problems. My first problem is, nobody looks inside my tennis bag without my permission, and in this case I do not grant my permission. And nobody looks inside this lady's either. Similar rules apply' – indicating Gail.

'Rigorously,' Gail confirmed.

'Second problem. If your friend Dima thinks I'm going to assassinate him, why does he ask me to play tennis with him?' Having allowed ample time for an answer and received none, beyond a voluble sucking of the teeth, he proceeded. 'And my third problem is, the proposal as it stands is one-sided. Have I asked to look inside Dima's bag? I have not. Neither do I wish to. Perhaps you'd explain that to him when you give him my apologies. Gail. What do you say we dig into that great big breakfast buffet we've paid for?'

'Good idea,' Gail agreed heartily. 'I didn't know I was so peckish.'

They turned and, ignoring the pro's entreaties, were heading back down the steps when the gate to the court flew open and Dima's bass voice drew them to a halt.

'Don't run away, Mr Perry Makepiece. You wanna blow my brains out, use a goddam tennis racquet.'

*

'So how about his age, Gail, would you say?' Yvonne the blue-stocking asked, making a prim note on the pad before her.

'Baby Face? Twenty-five max,' she replied, once again wishing she could find a mid-point in herself between flippancy and funk.

'Perry? How old?'

'Thirty.'

'Height?'

'Below average.'

If you're six foot two, Perry, darling, we're all below average, thought Gail.

'Five ten,' she said.

And his blond hair cut very short, they both agreed.

'And he wore a gold link bracelet,' she remembered, startling herself. 'I once had a client who wore one just like it. If he got in a tight corner, he was going to break up the links and buy his way out with them, one by one.'

*

With sensibly trimmed, unvarnished fingernails, Yvonne is sliding a wad of press photographs at them across the oval table. In the foreground, half a dozen burly young men in Armani-type suits are congratulating a victorious racehorse, champagne glasses aloft for the camera. In the background, advertisers' hoardings in Cyrillic and English. And far left, arms folded across his chest, the baby-faced bodyguard with his nearly shaven blond head. Unlike his three companions, he wears no dark glasses. But on his left wrist he wears a bracelet of gold links.

Perry looks a little smug. Gail feels a little sick.

It was unclear to Gail why she was doing the lion's share of the talking. While she spoke, she listened to her voice rattling back at her from the brick walls of the basement room, the way she did in the divorce courts where she currently had her professional being: now I'm doing righteous indignation, now I'm doing scathingly incredulous, now I sound like my absent bloody mother after the second gin and tonic.

And tonight, for all her best efforts to conceal it, she occasionally caught herself out in an unscripted quaver of fear. If her audience across the table couldn't hear it, she could. And if she wasn't mistaken, so could Perry beside her, because now and then his head would tilt towards her for no reason except to peer at her with anxious tenderness despite the three-thousand-mile gulf between them. And now and then he would go so far as to give her hand a cursory squeeze under the table before taking up the tale himself in the mistaken but pardonable belief that he was giving her feelings a rest, whereas all her feelings did was go underground, regroup, and come out fighting even harder the moment they got a chance.

*

If Perry and Gail didn't actually saunter into the centre court, they agreed, they took their time. There was the stroll down the flowered walkway with the bodyguards acting as guards of honour and Gail holding on to the brim of her broad sunhat and making her flimsy skirts swirl:

'I flounced around a bit,' she admitted.

'And how,' Perry agreed, to contained smiles from across the table.

There was shuffle at the entrance to the court when Perry appeared to have second thoughts, until it turned out that he was stepping back to let Gail go ahead of him, which she did with enough ladylike deliberation to suggest that, while the planned offence might not have taken place, neither had it gone away. And after Perry sloped Mark.

Dima stood centre court facing them, arms stretched wide in welcome. He was wearing a fluffy blue crew-neck top with full-length sleeves, and long black shorts that reached below his knees. A sunshade like a green beak stuck out from his bald head, which was already glistening in the early sun. Perry said he wondered whether Dima had oiled it. To complement his bejewelled Rolex, a gold trinket chain of vaguely mystical connotation adorned his huge neck: another glint, another distraction.

But Dima, to Gail's surprise, was not, at the moment of her entry, the main event, she said. Arranged on the spectators' stand behind him was a mixed – and to her eye weird – assembly of children and adults.

'Like a bunch of gloomy waxworks,' she protested. 'It wasn't just their overdressed presence at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. It was their total silence and their sullenness. I took a seat on the empty bottom row and thought, Christ, what is this? A people's tribunal, or a church parade, or what?'