The policeman is shining his torch at a purple triangle stuck to the jeep’s windscreen. The letter G is printed on it. The man in city clothes is hovering behind him, blacked out by the glare of the torch. But Perry has a shrewd feeling he is taking a very close look at the jovial driver and his three passengers.
‘Whose jeep is this?’ the policeman asks, resuming his inspection of the purple triangle.
‘Arni Steuri’s. Plumber. Friend of mine. Don’t tell me you don’t know Arni Steuri from Grindelwald. He’s on the main street, next to the electrician.’
‘You drove down from Scheidegg tonight?’ the policeman asks.
‘From Wengen.’
‘You drove
‘What do you think we did? Fly?’
‘If you drove
‘So whose side are
‘Actually, I come from Murren,’ the policeman replies stoically.
A silence follows. Ollie begins humming a tune, which is another thing Perry hasn’t heard him do before. He is humming, and with the help of the beam of the policeman’s torch he is hunting among the papers jammed into the pocket of the driver’s door. Sweat is running down Perry’s back, although he’s sitting quite motionless at Dima’s side. No difficult peak or Serious Climb has ever made him sweat while he’s sitting down. Ollie is still humming while he searches, but his hum has lost its cheeky edge. I’m a guest at the Park Hotel, Perry is telling himself. Luke’s another. We’re playing good Samaritan to a deranged Turk who can’t speak English and his wife is dying. It may work for one-time use.
The plainclothes man has taken a step forward and is leaning over the side of the jeep. Ollie’s humming is becoming less and less convincing. Finally he sits back as if defeated, a rumpled piece of paper in his hand.
‘Well maybe this will do you,’ he suggests, and shoves a second vignette at the policeman, this one with a yellow triangle instead of a purple one, and no letter G superimposed on it.
‘Next time, make sure both vignettes are fixed to the windscreen,’ the policeman says.
The torch goes out. They are driving again.
The parked BMW seemed to Perry’s inexpert eye to repose peacefully where Luke had left it – no wheel clamps, no rude notices wedged under the wipers, just a parked saloon car – and whatever Luke was looking for as he and Ollie walked gingerly round it and Perry and Dima remained as instructed in the back seat of the jeep, they didn’t find it, because now Ollie was already opening the driver’s door and Luke was beckoning to them to hurry over, and inside the BMW it was the same formation again: Ollie at the wheel, Luke up front beside him, Perry and Dima in the back. All through the stop and search, Perry realized, Dima hadn’t moved or made a sign. He’s in prisoner mode, Perry thought. We’re transferring him from one gaol to another, and the details are not his responsibility.
He glanced at the wing mirrors for suspicious following lights, but saw none. Sometimes a car would seem to be trailing them, but as soon as Ollie gave over, it drove past. He glanced at Dima beside him. Dozing. He was still wearing the black woollen cap to hide his baldness. Luke had insisted on it, pinstripe suit or no. Now and then, as Dima lolled against him, the oily wool tickled Perry’s nose.
They had reached the autobahn. Under the sodium lights, Dima’s face became a flickering death mask. Perry looked at his watch, not knowing why, but needing the comfort of the time. A blue sign indicated Belp Airport. Three lines – two lines – turn right
The airport was darker than any airport had a right to be. That was the first thing about it that surprised Perry. All right, it was after midnight, but you’d have expected a lot more light, even from a small on-off airport like Belp that has never quite had its full international status confirmed.
And there were no formalities: unless you counted as a formality the private word Luke was having with a weary, grey-faced man in blue overalls who seemed to be the only official presence around. Now Luke was showing the man a document of some kind – too small for a passport, for sure, so was it a card, a driving licence, or perhaps a small stuffed envelope?
Whatever it was, the grey-faced man in blue overalls needed to look at it in a better light, because he turned and hunched himself into the beam of the downlight behind him, and when he turned back to Luke, whatever it was that he’d had in his hand wasn’t in his hand any more, so either he’d hung on to it, or slipped it back to Luke, and Perry hadn’t seen him do it.
And after the grey man – who had disappeared without a word in any language – there came a chicane of grey screens, but nobody to watch them negotiate it. And after the chicane, an immobile luggage carousel, and a pair of heavy electric swing-doors that were opening before they reached them – are we
So if all this privileged non-attention they were getting was the result of private enterprise on Hector’s part – which Luke had implied to Perry, and Hector himself had effectively confirmed – then all Perry had to say was: hats off to Hector.
The four glass doors to the open tarmac looked closed and bolted to Perry’s eye, but Luke the good man on a rope knew better. He made a beeline for the right-hand door, and gave it a little tug and – behold! – it slid obediently into its housing, allowing a sprightly draught of cooling air to dance into the room and run its hand over Perry’s face, which he was duly grateful for, because he felt unaccountably hot and sweaty.
With the door wide open and the night beckoning, Luke placed a hand – gently, not proprietorially – on Dima’s arm and, guiding him away from Perry’s side, led him unprotesting through the doorway and on to the tarmac where, as if forewarned, Luke made a sharp left turn, taking Dima with him and leaving Perry to stalk awkwardly behind them, like somebody who’s not quite sure he’s invited. Something about Dima had changed. Perry realized what it was. Stepping through the doorway, Dima had removed his woollen hat and dropped it into a handy rubbish bin.
And as Perry turned after them, he saw what Luke and Dima must already have seen: a twin-engined plane, with no lights and its propellers softly rotating, parked fifty yards away, with two ghostly pilots barely visible in the nose-cone.
There were no goodbyes.
Whether that was something to be pleased or sad about, Perry didn’t know, either at the time or later. There had been so many embraces, so many greetings, real or contrived, there had been such a feast of goodbyes and hellos and declarations of love, that in the aggregate their meetings and partings were complete, and perhaps there was no room for another.
Or perhaps – always perhaps – Dima was too full to speak, or to look back, or to look at him at all. Perhaps tears were pouring down his face as he walked towards the little plane with one surprisingly small foot in front of the other, as neat as walking the plank.
And from Luke, a pace or two behind and apart from Dima now, as if leaving him to enjoy the absent limelight and the cameras, not one word to Perry either: it was the formed man ahead of him that Luke had his eyes on, not Perry standing alone behind him. It was Dima with his dignity on parade: bare-headed, the backward lean, the suppressed but stately limp.
And of course there was tactic in the way Luke had positioned himself in relation to Dima. Luke wouldn’t be Luke if there wasn’t tactic. He was the clever, darting shepherd in the Cumbrian hills where Perry had climbed when he was young, urging his prize ewe up the steps into the black hole of the cabin with every ounce of mental and physical concentration he possessed, and ready any time for him to shy or bolt or simply stop dead and refuse.
But Dima didn’t shy, bolt or stop dead. He strode straight up the steps and into the blackness, and as soon as the blackness had him, little Luke was skipping up the steps to join him. And either there was someone inside to close the door on them or Luke did it for himself: an abrupt sigh of hinges, a double clunk of metal as the door was
