John le Carre: Our kind of traitor

'And the Prince says?' Luke demanded, not sharing Dima's levity.

'The bitch Prince call Emilio. "Emilio. My friend. My wise advisor. What the fuck my two nice guys doing, beating the shit out of each other in fancy hotel in Berne?"'

'And Emilio says?' Luke persisted.

Dima's mood darkened: 'Emilio says: "That shithead Dima, world number-one money-launderer, he disappeared off the fucking planet." '

No great intriguer himself, Luke was doing his sums. First the two so-called Arab policemen in Paris. Who sent them? Why? Then the two bodyguards at the Bellevue Palace: why had they come to the hotel after the signing? Who sent them? Why? Who knew how much when?

He called Ollie.

'All quiet, Harry?' – meaning, who's arrived up there at the safe house and who hasn't? Meaning, am I going to have to deal with a missing Natasha too?

'Dick, our two stragglers clocked in just a couple minutes back, you'll be pleased to hear,' Ollie said reassuringly. 'Found their own way here without any bother much, and everything hunky-dory. Tenish over the other side of the hill about right for you? Nice and dark by then.'

'Ten o'clock is fine.'

'Grund Station car park. A nice little red Suzuki. I'll be first right as you drive in and as far from the trains as we can get, then.'

'Agreed.' And when Ollie didn't ring off: 'What's the problem, Harry?'

'Well there's been quite a police presence at Interlaken Ost railway station, I'm hearing.'

'Let's have it.'

Luke listened, said nothing, returned the mobile to his pocket.

*

By the other side of the hill, Ollie was referring to the village of Grindelwald, which lay at the opposing foot of the Eiger massif. To reach Wengen from the Lauterbrunnen side by any means except mountain railway was impossible, Ollie had reported: the summer track might be good enough for chamois and the odd foolhardy motorcyclist, but not for a four-wheeled vehicle with three men aboard.

But Luke was determined – as Ollie was – that Dima, in whatever garb, should not be subjected to the glances of railway officials, ticket inspectors and fellow passengers as he approached the place of his concealment: least of all at this late hour of evening, when railway passengers were fewer and more conspicuous.

Reaching the village of Zweilutschinen, Luke took the left fork that led by a winding river road to the edge of Grindelwald. The Grund Station car park was packed with the abandoned cars of German tourists. Entering it, Luke saw to his relief the figure of Ollie in a quilted anorak and peaked cap with earflaps, seated at the wheel of a stationary red Suzuki jeep with its sidelights on.

'And here's your rugs for when it gets nippy,' Ollie announced in Russian as he bundled Dima in beside him, and Luke, having handed Ollie the luggage and parked the BMW under a beech tree, settled himself in the back. 'The forest track is forbidden, but not for locals with business to do, like plumbers and railway workers and such. So if it's all the same to you, I'll do the talking if we're checked. Not that I'm a local, but the jeep is. And its owner told me what to say.'

Which owner and what to say was Ollie's alone to know. A good back-door man is not forthcoming about his sources.

*

A narrow concrete road led upward into the blackness of the mountain. A pair of headlights descended towards them, stopped, and pulled back into the trees: a builder's lorry, unladen.

'Whoever's coming from the top reverses,' Ollie pronounced approvingly under his breath. 'Local rule.'

A uniformed policeman stood alone in the centre of the road. Ollie slowed down for him to peer at the triangular yellow sticker on the Suzuki's windscreen. The policeman stepped back. Ollie raised his hand in leisurely acknowledgement. They passed a settlement of low chalets and bright lights. Woodsmoke mingled with the smell of pine. A fluorescent sign read BRANDEGG. The road became an unmade forest track. Rivulets of water ran towards them. Ollie turned on the headlights and shifted gear levers. The engine took on a higher, plaintive drone. The track was pitted by heavy lorries and the Suzuki was hard-sprung. Perched on its back seat with the luggage, Luke clutched the sides as it bounced and swung. In front of him rode the swathed figure of Dima in his woollen hat, the blanket flapping like a coachman's cape round his shoulders in the wind. Beside him, and scarcely any smaller, Ollie leaned tensely forward as he navigated the Suzuki across open meadow and set a pair of chamois scampering for the shelter of the trees.

The air turned thinner and colder. Luke's breath came faster. An icy film of dew was forming on his cheeks and brow. He felt his eyes glistening, and his heart quickening to the scent of pine and the thrill of the climb. The forest closed round them again. From its density, the red eyes of animals flashed at them, but whether they were large or small Luke had no time to find out.

They had passed the tree-line and again broken free. Light cloud covered a starry sky, and at the very centre towered a black starless void, pressing them into the mountainside, then squeezing them out on to the world's edge. They were passing beneath the overhang of the Eiger North Face.

'You been to Ural Mountains, Dick?' Dima yelled at Luke in English, swinging round.

Luke nodded vigorously and smiled yes.

'Like Perm! Perm we got mountains like this! You been Caucasus?'

'Just the Georgian part!' Luke yelled back.

'I love this, hear me, Dick! I love! You too, huh?'

Briefly – although he was still worrying about that policeman – Luke was able to love it: and continued to love it as they climbed towards the saddle of the Kleine Scheidegg and slipped through the arc of orange lights shed by the great hotel that mastered it.

They began their descent. To their left, bathed in moonlight, rose the sinewy blue-black shadows of a glacier. Far away across the valley, they glimpsed the lights of Murren, and now and then, through the density of the forest as it took them back, the fickle lights of Wengen.

For Luke, the days and nights in the little Alpine resort of Wengen were mysteriously preordained, now beyond bearing, now filled with the lyrical calm of an extended gathering of family and friends on holiday.

The ugly, built-to-let chalet that Ollie had selected lay at the quiet end of the village on a triangle of land between two footpaths. In the winter months it was rented out to a lowland German ski club, but in the summer it was available to anyone who could pay, from South African Theosophists to Norwegian Rastafarians to poor children from the Ruhr. A disparate family of incompatible ages and origins was therefore exactly what the village expected. Not a head turned among the flocks of summer tourists that trudged past it: or so said Ollie, who spent many spare minutes keeping watch from behind the curtained upper windows.

From inside, the world was almost unimaginably beautiful. Look downward from the top floor and you had a view of the fabled Lauterbrunnen Valley; look upward, and the Jungfrau massif rose glistening before you. Behind you lay unspoiled pastures and forested foothills. Yet from outside the chalet was an architectural void: cavernous, characterless, anonymous, and sympathetic to nothing around it, with white stucco walls and rustic grace notes that only emphasized its suburban aspirations.

Luke too had watched. When Ollie was out foraging for provisions and snippets of local gossip, it was Luke the habitual worrier who kept lookout for the suspicious passer-by. But watch as he might, no inquisitive eye lingered on the two small girls in the garden practising with their new skipping ropes to Gail's direction, or picking cowslips on the meadow bank behind the house, to be preserved for all time in jam jars of dry sago bought by Ollie from the supermarket.