Our Kind of Traitor

nice manners, although he looks a tad irritated in a grouchy, Swiss sort of way that reminds us that his celebrated armour has its chinks. After all, he’s here to make history, not waste the time of day with a spindly man in a red dress who’s burst on to the court and introduced himself.

But whatever has passed between them is over, and the man in the red dress is scampering for the net, skirts and elbows flying. A bunch of tardy, black-suited gentlemen are in comic pursuit, and the crowd isn’t uttering a word any more: it’s a sporting crowd, and this is sport, if not of a high order. The man in the red dress vaults the net, but not cleanly: a bit of net-cord there. The dress is no longer a dress. It never was. It’s a flag. Two more black-suits have appeared on the other side of the net. The flag is the flag of Spain – L’Espagne – but that’s only according to the woman who sang ‘La Marseillaise’, and her opinion is contested by a hoarse-voiced man several rows up from her who insists it belongs to le Club Football de Barcelona.

A black-suit has finally brought the man with the flag down with a rugger tackle. Two more pounce on him and drag him into the darkness of a tunnel. Gail is staring into Perry’s face, which is paler than she has ever seen it before.

‘Christ that was close,’ she whispers.

Close to what? What does she mean? Perry agrees. Yes, close.

* * *

God does not sweat. Federer’s pale blue shirt is unstained except for a single skid-mark between the shoulder blades. His movements seem a trifle less fluid, but whether that’s the rain or the clotting clay or the nervous impact of the flag-man is anybody’s guess. The sun has gone in, umbrellas are opening round the court, somehow it’s 3–4 in the second set, Soderling is rallying and Federer looks a bit depressed. He just wants to make history and go home to his beloved Switzerland. And, oh dear, it’s a tie-break – except it hardly is, because Federer’s first serves are flying in one after the other, the way Perry’s do sometimes, but twice as fast. It’s the third set and Federer has broken Soderling’s serve, he’s back in perfect rhythm and the flag-man has lost after all.

Is Federer weeping even before he’s won?

Never mind. He’s won now. It’s as simple and uneventful as that. Federer has won and he can weep his heart out, and Perry too is blinking away a manly tear. His idol has made the history that he came to make, and the crowd is on its feet for the history-maker, and Niki the baby-faced bodyguard is edging his way towards them along the row of happy people; the handclapping has become a coordinated drumbeat.

‘I’m the guy drove you back to your hotel in Antigua, remember?’ he says, not quite smiling.

‘Hello, Niki,’ Perry says.

‘Enjoy the match?’

‘Very much,’ says Perry.

‘Pretty good, eh? Federer?’

‘Superb.’

‘You wanna come visit Dima?’

Perry looks doubtfully at Gail: your turn.

‘We’re a bit pressed for time, actually, Niki. We’ve just got so many people in Paris who need to see us –’

‘You know something, Gail?’ Niki inquires sadly. ‘You don’t come have a drink with Dima, I think he’ll cut my balls off.’

Gail lets Perry hear this instead of her:

‘Up to you,’ says Perry, still to Gail.

‘Well how about just one drink?’ Gail suggests, doing reluctant surrender.

Niki shoos them ahead and follows, which she supposes is what bodyguards learn to do. But Perry and Gail are not planning to run away. In the main concourse, Swiss alphorns are booming out a heart-rending dirge to a swarm of umbrellas. With Niki leading from the back, they climb a bare stone staircase and enter a jazzy corridor with each door painted a different colour, like the lockers in Gail’s school gymnasium, except that instead of girls’ names they bear the names of corporations: blue door for MEYER-AMBROSINI GMBH, pink for SEGURA-HELLENIKA & CIE, yellow for EROS VACANCIA PLC. And crimson for FIRST ARENA CYPRUS, which is where Niki pops open the cover of a black box mounted on the doorpost, and taps a number into it, and waits for the door to be opened from the inside by friendly hands.

* * *

After the orgy: that was Gail’s irreverent impression as she stepped into the long, low hospitality box with its sloped glass wall, and the red clay court so near and bright the other side that, if dell Oro would only get out of the way, she could reach her hand through and touch it.

A dozen tables were ranged before her with four or six diners apiece. In total disregard of the stadium’s rules, the men had lit up their post-coital cigarettes and were reflecting on their prowess or lack of it, and a few of them were looking her over, wondering if she’d have been a better lay. And the pretty girls with them, who weren’t quite so pretty after the amount they’d been made to drink – well, they’d faked it, probably. In their line of work, that was what you did.

The table nearest to her was the largest, but also the youngest, and it was raised above the others to give Dima’s Armani kids more status than the humbler tables round it – a fact acknowledged by dell Oro as he shuffled Gail and Perry forward for the pleasure of its seven dull-faced, hard-eyed, hard-bodied managers with their bottles and girls and forbidden cigarettes.

‘Professor. Gail. Say hello, please, to our hosts, the gentlemen of the board and their ladies,’ dell Oro is proposing with courtly charm, and repeats the suggestion in Russian.

From along the table a few sullen nods and hellos. The girls smile their air-hostess smiles.

‘You! My friend!’

Who’s yelling? Who to? It’s the thick-necked one with the crew-cut and a cigar, and he’s yelling at Perry.

‘You are Professor?’

‘That’s what Dima calls me, yes.’

‘You like this game today?’

‘Very much. A great match. I felt privileged.’

‘You play good too, huh? Better than Federer!’ the thick-necked one yells, parading his English.

‘Well, not quite.’

‘Have a nice day. OK? Enjoy!’

Dell Oro shoos them on down the aisle. On the other side of the sloped glass wall, Swedish dignitaries in straw hats and blue hatbands are making their way down the rainswept steps from the Presidential enclosure to brave the closing ceremony. Perry has taken hold of Gail’s hand. It takes a bit of barging to follow Emilio dell Oro between the tables, squeeze past heads and say ‘so sorry, whoops, hello there, yes wonderful game!’ to a succession of mostly male faces, now Arab, now Indian, now all white again.

Now it’s a table of Brit males of the chattering classes who need to bounce up, all at once: ‘I’m Bunny, how simply lovely you are’ – ‘I’m Giles, hello indeed! – you lucky Professor!’ – all too much to take in, actually, but a girl does her best.

Now it’s two men in Swiss paper hats, one fat and content, the other skinny, needing to shake hands: Peter and the Wolf, she thinks absurdly, but the memory sticks.

‘Spotted him yet?’ Gail calls to Perry – and in the same moment spots him for herself: Dima, hunched at the furthest end of the room, brooding all alone at a table for four, with a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka in front of him; and looming behind him a cadaverous philosopher, with long wrists and high cheekbones, ostensibly guarding the entrance to the kitchen. Emilio dell Oro is murmuring in her ear as if he has known her all his life:

‘Our friend Dima is actually a bit depressed, Gail. You know about the tragedy, of course, the double funeral in Moscow – his dear friends slaughtered by maniacs – there has been a price. You will see.’

She did indeed see. And wondered how much of what she saw was real: a Dima not smiling and barely welcoming, a Dima sunk in vodka-stoked melancholy, not bothering to get up as they approach, but glowering at them from the corner to which he has been relegated with his two minders. For now blond Niki has mounted guard at the cadaverous philosopher’s side, and there is something chilling in the way the two men ignore one another, while bestowing their attention on their prisoner.