John le Carre - Our kind of traitor

Cut too quickly to a bearded beautiful boy in a glittering magenta cape making lavish conversation with two bejewelled matrons:

'Karl der Kleine's latest pet,' Hector announces. 'Sentenced to three years' hard labour by a Madrid court last year for aggravated assault, got off on a technicality, thanks to Karl. Recently appointed non-executive director of the Arena group of companies, same lot that own the Prince's yacht – ah, now here's one to watch' – flick of the console – 'Doctor Evelyn Popham of Mount Street, Mayfair; Bunny to his friends. Studied law in Neuchatel and Manchester. Licensed to practise in Switzerland, courtier and pimp to the Surrey oligarchs, sole partner of his own flourishing West End law firm. Internationalist, bon viveur, bloody good lawyer. Bent as a hairpin. Where's his website? Hold on. Find it in a moment. Leave me alone, Luke. There you are. Got it.'

On the plasma screen, while Hector fumbles and mutters, Dr (Bunny-to-his-friends) Popham continues to beam patiently down on his audience. He is a rotund, jolly gentleman with chubby cheeks and side-whiskers, drawn straight from the pages of Beatrix Potter. Improbably he sports tennis whites and is clutching, in addition to his racquet, a comely female tennis partner.

The home page of The Dr Popham amp; No Partners website, when it finally appears, is mastered by the same cheerful face, smiling over the top of a quasi-royal coat of arms featuring the scales of justice. Beneath him runs his Mission Statement:

My expert team's professional experience includes: – successfully protecting the rights of leading individuals in the international entrepreneurial banking sphere against Serious Fraud Office investigations – successfully representing key international clients in matters regarding offshore jurisdiction, and their right to silence at international and UK tribunals of inquiry – successfully responding to importunate regulatory inquiries and tax investigations and charges of improper or illegal payments to influence-makers.

'And the buggers can't stop playing tennis,' Hector complains as his rogues' gallery recovers at its former spanking pace.

*

In short order, we're in the sporting clubs of Monte Carlo, Cannes, Madeira and the Algarve. We're in Biarritz and Bologna. We're trying to keep up with Yvonne's captions, and her album of fun photographs plundered from society magazines, but it's hard, unless like Luke you know what to expect and why.

But however swiftly faces and places change under Hector's volatile management, however many beautiful people in state-of-the-art tennis gear whisk by, five players repeatedly assert themselves: – jocular Bunny Popham, your lawyer of choice for responding to importunate regulatory inquiries and charges of illegal payments to influence-makers – ambitious, intolerant Aubrey Longrigg, retired spy, Member of Parliament and family camper, with his latest aristocratic and charitable wife – Her Majesty's Minister-of-State-in-Waiting, and specialist-to-be in banking ethics – the self-taught, self-invented, vivacious and charming socialite and polyglot Emilio dell Oro, Swiss national and globe-trotting financier, addicted – we are told by a scanned press cutting that you have to be quick as lightning to read – to 'adrenalin sports from bareback riding in the Ural Mountains, heli-skiing in Canada, tennis in the fast lane, and playing the Moscow Stock Exchange', who gets longer than his due, owing to a technical hitch, and finally: – patrician, urbane public-relations maestro Captain Giles de Salis, Royal Navy, retd., influence-pedlar, specialist in bent peers – presented to the background music of: 'one of the slimiest buggers in Westminster' from Hector.

Light on. Change memory stick. House rules dictate: one subject, one stick. Hector likes to keep his flavours separate. Time to go to Moscow.

Hector has for once taken a vow of silence: which is to say that, released from his mawkish technical preoccupations, he is sitting back in his chair and allowing the baritone-voiced Russian news commentator to do his work for him. Like Luke, Hector is a convert to the Russian language – and, with reservations, the Russian soul. Like Luke, each time he watches the film that is running, he is by his own admission awestruck in the presence of the classic, timeless, all-Russian, bare-faced whopping lie.

And the Moscow-based television news service can manage very well on its own, without help from Hector or anybody else. The baritone voice is more than capable of imparting its revulsion at the grisly tragedy it is recounting: this senseless drive-by shooting, this wanton cutting-down of a brilliant and devoted Russian couple from Perm in their very prime of life! Little had the victims known, when they decided to visit their beloved homeland from distant Italy where they were based, that their journey of the soul would end here in the ivy-clad graveyard of the ancient seminary they had always loved, with its onion domes and thuja trees, set on a hillside outside Moscow at the edge of gently swelling forest: On this dark, unseasonable afternoon in May, all Moscow is in mourning for two blameless Russians and their two small daughters who, by the mercy of God, were not present in the car when their parents were shot to pieces by terrorist elements of our society.

See the shattered windows and bullet-riddled doors, the burned-out carcass of a once-noble Mercedes car tossed on to its side between silver birch trees, the innocent Russian blood mingling in brutal close-up with the fuel oil on the tarmac; and the disfigured faces of the victims themselves.

The outrage, the commentator assures us, has aroused the justified anger of all responsible Moscow citizens. When will this menace end? they ask. When will decent Russians be free to travel their own roads without being gunned down by marauding bands of Chechen desperadoes bent on spreading terror and mayhem? Mikhail Arkadievich – rising international oil and metals trader! Olga L'vovna – selflessly engaged in procuring charitable food supplies on behalf of Russia's needy! Loving parents of little Katya and Irina! Pure Russians, homesick for the Motherland they will never leave again!

Against the rising tide of the commentator's indignation a crawling column of black limousines escorts a glass-sided hurdy-gurdy up the wooded hillside to the seminary gates. The procession halts, car doors fly open as young men in dark designer suits leap out and form ranks to accompany the coffins. The scene changes to a grim-faced Deputy Chief of Police in full uniform and medals posed rigidly at an inlaid desk surrounded by testimonials and photographs of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin: Let us take comfort in the knowledge that one Chechen at least has already voluntarily confessed to the crime, he tells us, and the camera holds his face long enough for us to share his outrage.

We return to the graveyard, and the strains of a Gregorian funeral lament as a choir of young Orthodox priests in flowerpot hats and silky beards proceeds with icons aloft down the seminary steps to a double graveside where the principal mourners are waiting. The picture freezes, then zooms in on each mourner as Yvonne's subtitles surface beneath them:

TAMARA, wife to Dima, sister to Olga, aunt to Katya and Irina: poker upright, under a wide-brimmed beekeeper's black hat.

DIMA, husband to Tamara: his bald, racked face so sickly in its stretched smile that he might as well be dead himself, despite the presence of his beloved daughter.

NATASHA, daughter to Dima: her long hair swept down her back in a black river, her slender body swathed in layers of shapeless black weed.

IRINA and KATYA, children of Olga and Misha: expressionless, each clutching a hand of Natasha.