have picked at the handle of my badminton racquet, half unwound the cloth binding, tapped it, shaken it and made a couple of swings with it. Have they been briefed to do this, or is it instinct that tells them: if it’s anywhere, it’s here, whatever it is?
Now they are cramming everything back into my travel bag and the scarred boy is giving them a hand, trying to make a tidier job of it. They want to pat me down. I lift my arms, not all the way, just a signal that I’m ready so come for me. Something about how I do this causes the first man to reconsider me, then step forward again more warily while his friend stands at the ready a step behind him. Arms, armpits, belt, chest area, turn me round, feel my back. Then down on his knees while he does my crotch and inside legs and talks to the boy in Russian, which as a simple British badminton player I affect not to understand. The boy with the starfish scar translates.
‘They wish you please to remove your shoes.’
I unlace my shoes, hand them over. They take one each, bend them, feel them, hand them back. I lace them up again.
‘They ask please: why do you have no mobile phone?’
‘I left it at home.’
‘Why, please?’
‘I like to travel unaccompanied,’ I reply facetiously. The boy translates. Nobody smiles.
‘They ask also that I take your wristwatch and pen and wallet and return them to you when you depart,’ says the boy.
I hand him my pen and wallet and unbuckle my wristwatch. The men sneer. It’s a Japanese cheapo, worth five pounds. The men look at me speculatively, as if they feel they haven’t done enough to me.
The boy, with surprising authority, snaps at them in Russian:
‘Okay. Done. Finish.’
They shrug, smirk doubt, and disappear through the French windows, leaving me alone with him.
‘You are to play badminton with my father, Mr Halliday?’ the boy asks.
‘Who’s your father?’
‘Arkady. I am Dimitri.’
‘Well, great to meet you, Dimitri.’
We shake hands. Dimitri’s is damp and mine should be. I am talking to the living son of the same Arkady who on the very day that I formally recruited him swore blind to me that he’d never bring a child into this lousy rotten world. Is Dimitri adopted? Or did Arkady always have a son tucked away and was ashamed of putting the boy’s future life at risk by spying for us? At the counter the girl in the black suit offers me a room key with a brass rhinoceros attached to it but Dimitri tells her in ostentatious English, ‘My guest will return later,’ then leads me back down the golden carpet to a Mercedes four-track and invites me into the passenger seat.
‘My father asks that you will please be inconspicuous,’ he says.
A second car is following us. I only ever saw its headlights. I promise to be inconspicuous.
*
We drove uphill for thirty-six minutes by the Mercedes four-track’s clock. The road was again steep and winding. It is a while before Dimitri starts quizzing me.
‘Sir, you have known my father many years.’
‘Quite a few, yes.’
‘Was he with the Organs at that time?’ – Russian Organy, secret services.
I laugh. ‘All I ever knew, he was a diplomat who loved his game of badminton.’
‘And you? At that time?’
‘I was a diplomat too. On the commercial side.’
‘It was in Trieste?’
‘And other places. Wherever we could meet up and find a court.’
‘But for many years you do not play badminton with him?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘And now you make business together. You are both businessmen.’
‘But that’s pretty confidential information, Dimitri,’ I warn him, as the shape of Arkady’s cover story to his son becomes clear to me. I ask him what he’s doing with his life.
‘Soon I will go to Stanford University in California.’
‘To study what?’
‘I shall be a marine biologist. I already studied this subject at Moscow State, also Besançon.’
‘And before that?’
‘My father wished me to go to Eton College but he was not satisfied with the security arrangements. Therefore I attended a gymnasium in Switzerland where security was more convenient. You are an unusual man, Mr Halliday.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘My father respects you very much. This is not normal. Also he says you speak perfect Russian but you do not reveal this to me.’
‘But that’s because you want to practise your English, Dimitri!’ I insist playfully, and have a vision of Steff in her goggles riding beside me on the ski-lift.
*
We have stopped at a checkpoint on