Our Kind of Traitor

‘So how is it with Adrian?’ he inquired, recalling Matlock’s gratuitous intrusion, and wanting to redress it.

‘Oh, better, thanks. Much better,’ said Hector. ‘The shrinks reckon they’ve got the mixture pretty well right now. Six months, he could be out, if he behaves himself. How’s Ben?’

‘Great. Just great. Eloise too,’ Luke replied, wishing he hadn’t asked.

At the hotel’s front desk, an impossibly chic receptionist informed Luke that the Herr Direktor was doing his usual round of the bar guests. Luke walked straight up to him. He was good at this when he needed to be. Not your back-door artist like Ollie, maybe, more your front-door, in-your-face, sassy little Brit.

‘Sir? My name’s Brabazon. John Brabazon. First time I’ve stayed here. Can I just say something?’

He could, and the Herr Direktor, suspecting it was bad news, braced himself to hear it.

‘This is simply one of the most exquisite, unspoiled art nouveau hotels – you probably don’t use the word Edwardian! – that I’ve come across in my travels.’

‘You are a hotelier?’

‘Afraid not. Just a lowlife journalist. Times newspaper, London. Travel section. Totally unannounced, I’m afraid, here on private business …’

The tour began:

‘So here is our ballroom which we are calling the Salon Royal,’ the Direktor intoned in a well-trodden monologue. ‘Here is our small banqueting room which we are calling our Salon du Palais, and here is our Salon d’Honneur where we are holding our cocktail receptions. Our chef takes very much pride in his finger foods. And here is our restaurant La Terrasse, and actually the must rendezvous for all fashionable Berne, but also our international guests. Many prominent persons have dined here including film stars, we can give you quite a good list, also the menu.’

‘And the kitchens?’ Luke asked, for he wished nothing to be left to chance. ‘May I just take a peep if the chefs don’t object?’

And when the Herr Direktor, somewhat exhaustively, had shown him all there was to be shown, and when Luke had duly swooned and taken copious notes, and for his own pleasure a few photographs with his mobile if the Herr Direktor didn’t mind, but of course his paper would be sending a real photographer if that was acceptable – it was – he returned to the bar, and having treated himself to an improbably exquisite club sandwich and a glass of Dole, added a few necessary final touches of his own to his journalistic tour, which included such banal details as the lavatories, fire escapes, emergency exits, car-parking facilities and the projected rooftop gymnasium presently under construction, before retiring to his room and calling Perry to make sure all was well their end. Gail was asleep. Perry hoped to be any minute. Ringing off, Luke reflected that he had been as near to Gail in bed as he was ever likely to get. He rang Ollie.

‘Everything just lovely, thank you, Dick. And the transport’s tickety-boo, in case you were worrying at all. What did you make of those Arab coppers, by the way?’

‘I don’t know, Harry.’

‘Me, neither. But never trust a copper, I say. All well otherwise, then?’

‘Till tomorrow.’

And finally Luke phoned Eloise.

‘Are you having a good time, Luke?’

‘Yes, I am really, thank you. Berne’s a really beautiful city. We should come here together sometime. Bring Ben.’

That’s how we always talk: for Ben’s sake. So that he has the full advantage of happy, heterosexual parents.

‘Do you want to speak to him?’ she asked.

‘Is he up? Don’t tell me he’s still doing his Spanish prep?’

‘You’re an hour ahead of us over there, Luke.’

‘Ah yes, of course. Well, yes please, then. If I may. Hello, Ben.’

‘Hello.’

‘I’m in Berne, for my sins. Berne, Switzerland. The capital. There’s a really fantastic museum here. The Einstein Museum, one of the best museums I’ve seen in my life.’

‘You went to a museum?’

‘Just for half an hour. Last night when I arrived. They were doing a late opening. Just across the bridge from the hotel. So I went.’

‘Why?’

‘I felt like it. The concierge recommended it, so I went.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Yes. Just like that.’

‘What else did he recommend?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Did you have a cheese fondue?’

‘Not much fun if you’re on your own. I need you and Mum. I need you both.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘And with any luck I’ll be back for the weekend. We’ll go to a movie or something.’

‘I’ve got this Spanish essay, actually, if that’s all right.’

‘Of course it’s all right. Good luck with it. What’s it about?’

‘Don’t know really. Spanish stuff. See you.’

‘See you.’

What else did the concierge recommend? Did I hear that right? Like is the concierge sending you up a hooker? What’s Eloise been saying to him? And why in God’s name did I tell him that I’d been to the Einstein Museum simply because I saw the brochure lying on the concierge’s desk?

* * *

He went to bed, turned on the BBC World News and switched it off again. Half-truths. Quarter-truths. What the world really knows about itself, it doesn’t dare say. Since Bogota, he had discovered, he no longer always had the courage to deal with his solitude. Maybe he had been holding too many bits of himself together for too long, and they were starting to fall apart. He went to the minibar, poured himself a Scotch and soda, and put it beside his bed. Just the one and that’s it. He missed Gail, and then Yvonne. Was Yvonne burning the midnight oil over Dima’s trade samples, or lying in the arms of her perfect husband? – if she had one, which he sometimes doubted. Maybe she’d invented him to fend Luke off. His thoughts went back to Gail. Was Perry perfect too? Probably was. Everyone except Eloise has a perfect husband. He thought of Hector, father to Adrian. Hector visiting his son in prison every Wednesday and Saturday, six months to go with luck. Hector the secret Savonarola, as somebody clever had called him, fanatical about reforming the Service he loved, knowing he will lose the battle even if he wins it.

He’d heard that the Empowerment Committee had its own war room these days. It seemed appropriate: somewhere ultra, ultra secret, suspended from wires or buried a hundred feet underground. Well, he’d been in rooms like that: in Miami and Washington when he was trading Intelligence with his chers collegues in the CIA or the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Alcohol, Firearms & Tobacco Agency and God knew what all the other agencies had been. And his measured opinion was that they were places that guaranteed collective insanity. He’d watched how the body language changed as the Indoctrinated Ones abandoned themselves and their common sense to the embrace of their virtual world.

He thought of Matlock, who took his holidays in Madeira and didn’t know what a black hotel was. Matlock cornered by Hector, pulling Adrian’s name out of his pocket and firing it at point-blank range. Matlock sitting at his picture window overlooking Father Thames and droning out his elephantine subtleties, first the stick, then the carrot, then both together.

Well, Luke hadn’t bitten and he hadn’t bowed either. Not that he had much guile, as he was the first to admit: insufficiently manipulative one of his annual confidential reports had run, and he was secretly rather pleased with it. He did not regard himself as a manipulator. Obstinacy was more his thing. Holding out. Clinging to the one note through thick and thin: no – whether you’re chained up in a stockade or sitting in the other armchair of Matlock’s comfortable office at la Lubianka-sur-