Our Kind of Traitor

* * *

‘You come sit here, Professor! Don’t trust that goddam Emilio! Gail. I love you. Siddown. Garcon! Champagne. Kobe beef. Ici.’

Outside on the court, Napoleon’s Republican Guard are back at their post. Federer and Soderling are mounting a saluting stand, attended by Andre Agassi in a city suit.

‘You talk to the Armani kids at the table up there?’ Dima demanded sulkily. ‘You wanna meet some goddam bankers, lawyers, accountants? All the guys that fuck up the world? French we got, German, Swiss.’ He lifted his head and shouted down the room: ‘Hey everybody, say hello to the Professor! This guy pussy me at tennis! She’s Gail. He gonna marry this girl. He don’t marry her, she marry Roger Federer. That right, Gail?’

‘I think I’ll just settle for Perry,’ said Gail.

Was anybody listening out there? Certainly not the hard-eyed young men at the big table and their girls, who demonstratively huddled closer together as Dima’s voice rose. At the tables nearer at hand too, indifference prevailed.

‘English too, we got! Fair-play guys. Hey, Bunny! Aubrey! Bunny, come over here! Bunny!’ No response. ‘Know what Bunny means? Rabbit. Fuck him.’

Turning brightly to share the fun, Gail was in time to identify a chubby, bearded gentleman with side- whiskers, and if his nickname wasn’t Bunny it ought to be. But for an Aubrey she looked in vain, unless he was the tall, balding, intelligent-looking man with rimless spectacles and a stoop who was heading briskly down the aisle towards the door with his raincoat over his arm, like a man who suddenly remembers he has a train to catch.

Sleek Emilio dell Oro with his gorgeous silver-grey hair had taken the spare seat at Dima’s other side. Was his hair real or a piece? she wondered. They make them so well these days.

* * *

Dima is proposing tennis tomorrow. Perry is making his excuses, pleading with Dima like an old friend, which is what he has somehow become in the three weeks since they have seen him.

‘Dima, I truly don’t see how I can,’ Perry protests. ‘We’ve got a flock of people in town we’re pledged to see. I’ve no kit. And I’ve promised Gail faithfully this time round that we’ll take in the Monet water lilies. Truly.’

Dima takes a pull of vodka, wipes his mouth. ‘We play,’ he says, stating a proven fact. ‘Club des Rois. Tomorrow twelve o’clock. I book already. Get a fucking massage after.’

‘A massage in the rain, Dima?’ Gail asks facetiously. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve discovered a new vice.’

Dima ignores her:

‘I gotta meeting at a fucking bank, nine o’clock, sign a bunch fucking papers for the Armani kids. Twelve o’clock I get my re-match, hear me? You gonna chicken?’ Perry starts to protest again. Dima overrides him. ‘Number 6 court. The best. Play an hour, get a massage, lunch after. I pay.’

Suavely interposing himself at last, dell Oro opts for distraction:

‘So where are you staying in Paris, if I may inquire, Professor? The Ritz? I do hope not. They have marvellous niche hotels here, if one knows where to look. If I’d known, I could have named you half a dozen.’

If they ask you, don’t screw around, tell them straight out, Hector had said. It’s an innocent question, it gets an innocent answer. Perry had evidently taken the advice to heart, for he was already laughing:

‘A place so lousy you wouldn’t believe,’ he exclaimed.

But Emilio did believe, and liked the name so much that he wrote it down in a crocodile notebook that nestled in the royal blue lining of his crested cream blazer. And having done so, addressed Dima with the full force of his persuasive charm:

‘If it’s tennis tomorrow that you’re proposing, Dima, I think Gail is quite right. You have completely forgotten the rain. Not even our friend the Professor here can give you satisfaction in a downpour. The forecasts for tomorrow were even worse than for today.’

‘Don’t fuck with me!’

* * *

Dima had smashed his fist on the table so hard that glasses went skittling across it, and a bottle of red burgundy tried to pour itself on to the carpet until Perry deftly fielded it and set it upright. All along the length of the sloped glass wall it was as if everybody had gone deaf from shell-shock.

Perry’s gentle plea restored a semblance of calm:

‘Dima, give me a break. I haven’t even got a racquet with me, for pity’s sake.’

‘Dell Oro got twenty goddam racquets.’

‘Thirty,’ dell Oro corrected him icily.

‘OK!’

OK what? OK Dima will smash the table again? His sweated face is rigid, the jaw rammed forward as he climbs unsteadily to his feet, tilts his upper body backwards, grabs Perry’s wrist, and hauls him to his feet beside him.

‘OK, everybody!’ he yells. ‘The Professor and me, tomorrow, we’re gonna play a re-match and I’m gonna beat the shit outta him. Twelve o’clock, Club des Rois. Anyone wanna come watch, bring a goddam umbrella, get lunch after. Winner gonna pay. That’s Dima. Hear me?’

Some hear him. One or two even smile, and a couple clap. From the Top Table at first nothing, then a single low comment in Russian, followed by unfriendly laughter.

Gail and Perry look at each other, smile, shrug. In the face of such an irresistible force, and at such an embarrassing moment, how can they say no? Anticipating their surrender, dell Oro seeks to forestall it:

‘Dima. I think you are being a little hard on your friends. Maybe fix a game for later in the year, OK?’

But he’s too late, and Gail and Perry are too merciful.

‘Honestly, Emilio,’ says Gail. ‘If Dima’s dying to play and Perry’s willing, why don’t we let the boys have their fun? I’m game, if you are. Darling?’

The darlings are new, more for Milton and Doolittle than themselves.

‘OK then. But on one condition’ – dell Oro again, fighting for the upper hand now – ‘tonight, you come to my party. I have a superb house in Neuilly, you will love it. Dima loves it, he is our house guest. We have our honoured colleagues from Moscow with us. My wife at this very moment, poor woman, is supervising the preparations. How about I send a car to your hotel at eight o’clock? Please dress exactly how you like. We are very informal people.’

But dell Oro’s invitation has already fallen on dead ground. Perry is laughing – saying it really is completely impossible, Emilio. Gail is protesting that her Paris friends would never forgive her, and no, she can’t possibly bring them too, they’re having their own party and Gail and Perry are the guests of honour.

They settle instead for Emilio’s car to pick them up at their hotel at eleven o’clock tomorrow for tennis in the rain, and if looks could kill, dell Oro’s would be killing Dima, but according to Hector he won’t be able to do that till after Berne.

* * *

‘You two make absolutely stunning casting,’ Hector cried. ‘Don’t they, Luke? Gail, with your lovely intuition. You, Perry, with your fucking marvellous Brain-of-Britain. Not that Gail’s exactly thick either. Thanks hugely for coming this far. For being so plucky in the lion’s den. Do I sound like a scoutmaster?’

‘I’ll say you do,’ said Perry, stretched out luxuriously on a chaise longue beneath the great arched window overlooking the Seine.

‘Good,’ said Hector complacently to jolly laughter.

Only Gail, seated on a stool at Perry’s head, and running her hand meditatively through his hair, seemed a little distant from the celebration.

It was after supper on the Ile St-Louis. The splendid apartment on the top floor of the ancient fortress belonged to Luke’s artistic aunt. Her work, which she had never stooped to selling, was stacked against the walls. She was a beautiful, amused woman in her seventies. Having fought the Germans as a young girl in the Resistance, she was at ease with her appointed role in Luke’s little intrigue: