become.
‘He works only to you,’ he continues, still in English. ‘He will play against you here again in four weeks with great bitterness, same time, singles only. He will challenge you officially by telephone. Tell London he will need matching racquets with hollow handles. These racquets will be exchanged at a convenient moment in the changing room. You will arrange this for him.’
What does he want in return? I ask.
‘Liberty for his people. All people. He is not materialist. He is idealistic.’
If ever a man recruited himself more sweetly, I have yet to hear of it. After two years in Trieste we lost him to Moscow Centre while he was number two in their Northern Europe department. For as long as he was in Moscow he refused contact. When he was posted to Belgrade under cultural cover my masters in Russia department didn’t want me to be seen following him around so they gave me Trade Consul in Budapest and I ran him from there.
It was not till the final years of his career that our analysts began to spot signs, first of exaggeration, then of outright fabrication in his reports. They made more of this than I did. To me it was a just another case of an agent growing old and tired, losing his nerve a little, but not wanting to cut the cord. It was only after Arkady’s two masters – Moscow Centre lavishly and we rather more discreetly – had toasted him and decked him with medals in appreciation of his selfless devotion to our respective causes that we learned from other sources that, as his two careers were approaching their close, he had been diligently laying down the foundations of a third: gathering to himself a slice of his country’s criminal wealth on a scale that neither his Russian nor his British paymasters at their most munificent could have dreamed of.
*
The bus from Prague plunges deeper into the darkness. The black hills to either side of us rise steadily higher against the night sky. I am not afraid of heights but dislike depths and I am wondering what I’m doing here, and how I have talked myself into a wildcat journey that I would not willingly have undertaken ten years ago or wished on a fellow officer half my age. On field officer training courses, over a Scotch at the end of a long day, we used to address the fear factor: how to balance the odds and measure your fear against them, except we didn’t say fear, we said courage.
The bus fills with light. We enter the main thoroughfare of Karlovy Vary, formerly Carlsbad, beloved spa of Russia’s nomenklatura since Peter the Great and today its wholly owned subsidiary. Glistening hotels, bathhouses, casinos and jewellery shops with blazing windows float sedately past on either side. Between them flows a river crossed by a noble footbridge. Twenty years back, when I came here to meet a Chechen agent who was enjoying a well-earned holiday with his mistress, the town was still ridding itself of the drab grey paint of Soviet Communism. The grandest hotel was the Moskva and the only luxury to be found was in secluded former rest homes where a few years previously the Party’s chosen and their nymphs had disported themselves safe from the proletarian gaze.
It is ten past nine. The bus has pulled up at the terminal. I alight and begin walking. Never look as though you don’t know where to go. Never dawdle with intent. I am a newly arrived tourist. I am a pedestrian, the lowest of the low. I am taking stock of my surroundings as any good tourist may. I have a travel bag slung over my shoulder with the handle of my badminton racquet protruding. I am one of those silly-looking English middle-class walkers except I haven’t got a guidebook in a plastic envelope tethered round my neck. I am admiring a poster for the Karlovy Vary film festival. Perhaps I should buy a ticket? The poster next along proclaims the healing virtues of the famous baths. No poster announces that the town is also celebrated as the watering-hole of choice for the better class of Russian organized criminal.
The couple ahead of me are unable to progress at a sensible pace. The woman behind me carries a bulky carpetbag. I have completed one side of the high street. It’s time to cross the noble footbridge and saunter down the other side. I am an Englishman abroad