‘
Dima
’s security, Perry. Whose do you think? He’s a high-roller. Big-time international. These boys are just obeying orders.’
‘
Your
orders, Mark?’ – turning and peering down on him accusingly through his spectacles.
‘
Dima
’s orders, not mine, Perry, don’t be stupid. They’re Dima’s boys. Go with him everywhere.’
Perry returned his attention to the blond bodyguard. ‘Do you gents speak English, by any chance?’ he asked. And when the baby face refused to alter in any way, except to harden: ‘He appears to speak no English. Or hear it, apparently.’
‘For Christ’s sakes, Perry,’ Mark pleaded, his beery complexion turning a darker shade of crimson. ‘One little look in your bag, it’s over. It’s nothing personal. Routine, like I said. Same as any airport.’
Perry again applied to Gail: ‘Do you have a view on this?’
‘I certainly do.’
Perry tilted his head the other way. ‘I need to get this absolutely right, you see, Mark,’ he explained, asserting his pedagogic authority. ‘My proposed tennis partner
Dima
wishes to make sure I’m not going to throw a bomb at him. Is that what these men are telling me?’
‘It’s a dangerous world out there, Perry. Perhaps you haven’t heard about that, but the rest of us have, and we endeavour to live with it. With all due respect, I would strongly advise you to go with the flow.’
‘Alternatively, I might be about to gun him down with my Kalashnikov,’ Perry went on, raising his tennis bag an inch to indicate where he kept the weapon; at which the second man stepped out of the shadow of the bushes and positioned himself beside the first, but there was still not a legible facial expression between the two of them.
‘You’re making a mountain out of a molehill, if you don’t mind my saying so, Mr Makepiece,’ Mark protested, his hard-learned courtesy beginning to give way under the strain. ‘There’s a great game of tennis waiting in there. These boys are doing their duty, and they’re doing it very politely and professionally in my judgement. Frankly I do not understand your problem, sir.’
‘Ah.
Problem
,’ Perry mused, picking on the word as a useful starting
point for a group discussion with his students. ‘Then allow me to explain my
problem
. Actually, come to think of it I have several problems. My first problem is, nobody looks inside my tennis bag without my permission, and in this case I do not grant my permission. And nobody looks inside this lady’s either. Similar rules apply’ – indicating Gail.
‘Rigorously,’ Gail confirmed.
‘Second problem. If your friend Dima thinks I’m going to assassinate him, why does he ask me to play tennis with him?’ Having allowed ample time for an answer and received none, beyond a voluble sucking of the teeth, he proceeded. ‘And my third problem is, the proposal as it stands is one-sided. Have I asked to look inside Dima’s bag? I have not. Neither do I wish to. Perhaps you’d explain that to him when you give him my apologies. Gail. What do you say we dig into that great big breakfast buffet we’ve paid for?’
‘Good idea,’ Gail agreed heartily. ‘I didn’t know I was so peckish.’
They turned and, ignoring the pro’s entreaties, were heading back down the steps when the gate to the court flew open and Dima’s bass voice drew them to a halt.
‘Don’t run away, Mr Perry Makepiece. You wanna blow my brains out, use a goddam tennis racquet.’
*
‘So how about his age, Gail, would you say?’ Yvonne the blue-stocking asked, making a prim note on the pad before her.
‘Baby Face? Twenty-five max,’ she replied, once again wishing she could find a mid-point in herself between flippancy and funk.
‘Perry? How old?’
‘Thirty.’
‘Height?’
‘Below average.’
If you’re six foot two, Perry, darling, we’re
all
below average, thought Gail.
‘Five ten,’ she said.
And his blond hair cut very short, they both agreed.
‘And he wore a gold link bracelet,’ she remembered, startling herself. ‘I once had a client who wore one just like it. If he got in a tight corner, he was going to break up the links and buy his way out with them, one by one.’
*
With sensibly trimmed, unvarnished fingernails, Yvonne is sliding a wad of press photographs at them across the oval table. In the foreground, half a dozen burly young men in Armani-type suits are congratulating a victorious racehorse, champagne glasses aloft for the camera. In the background, advertisers’ hoardings in Cyrillic and English. And far left, arms folded across his chest, the baby-faced bodyguard with his nearly shaven blond head. Unlike his three companions, he wears no dark glasses. But on his left wrist he wears a bracelet of gold links.
Perry looks a little smug. Gail feels a little sick.
2
It was unclear to Gail why she was doing the lion’s share of the talking. While she spoke, she listened to her voice rattling back at her from the brick walls of the basement room, the way she did in the divorce courts where she currently had her professional being: now I’m doing righteous indignation, now I’m doing scathingly incredulous, now I sound like my absent bloody mother after the second gin and tonic.
And tonight, for all her best efforts to conceal it, she occasionally caught herself out in an unscripted quaver of fear. If her audience across the table couldn’t hear it, she could. And if she wasn’t mistaken, so could Perry beside her, because now and then his head would tilt towards her for no reason except to peer at her with anxious tenderness despite the three-thousand-mile gulf between them. And now and then he would go so far as to give her hand a cursory squeeze under the table before taking up the tale himself in the mistaken but pardonable belief that he was giving her feelings a rest, whereas all her feelings did was go underground, regroup, and come out fighting even harder the moment they got a chance.
*
If Perry and Gail didn’t actually saunter into the centre court, they agreed, they took their time. There was the stroll down the flowered walkway with the bodyguards acting as guards of honour and Gail holding on to the brim of her broad sunhat and making her flimsy skirts swirl:
‘I flounced around a bit,’ she admitted.
‘And
how
,’ Perry agreed, to contained smiles from across the table.
There was shuffle at the entrance to the court when Perry appeared to have second thoughts, until it turned out that he was stepping back
to let Gail go ahead of him, which she did with enough ladylike deliberation to suggest that, while the planned offence might not have taken place, neither had it gone away. And after Perry sloped Mark.
Dima stood centre court facing them, arms stretched wide in welcome. He was wearing a fluffy blue crew-neck top with full-length sleeves, and long black shorts that reached below his knees. A sunshade like a green beak stuck out from his bald head, which was already glistening in the early sun. Perry said he wondered whether Dima had oiled it. To complement his bejewelled Rolex, a gold trinket chain of vaguely mystical connotation adorned his huge neck: another glint, another distraction.
But Dima, to Gail’s surprise, was not, at the moment of her entry, the main event, she said. Arranged on the spectators’ stand behind him was a mixed – and to her eye
weird
– assembly of children and adults.
‘Like a bunch of gloomy waxworks,’ she protested. ‘It wasn’t just their overdressed presence at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. It was their total silence and their sullenness. I took a seat on the empty bottom row and thought, Christ, what
is
this? A people’s tribunal, or a church parade, or
what
?’
Even the children seemed estranged from each other. They caught her eye at once. Children did. She counted four of them.
‘Two mopy-looking little girls of around five and seven in dark frocks and sunhats squeezed together beside a buxom black woman who was apparently some sort of minder,’ she said, determined not to let her feelings run ahead of her before time. ‘And two flaxen-haired teenaged boys in freckles and tennis gear. And all looking so down in the mouth you’d think they’d been kicked out of bed and dragged there as a punishment.’
As to the adults, they were just so
alien
, so oversized and so
other
, that they could have stepped out of a Charles Addams cartoon, she went on. And it wasn’t only their town clothes or 1970s hairstyles. Or the fact that the women despite the heat were dressed for darkest winter. It was their shared gloom.
‘Why’s nobody talking?’ she whispered to Mark, who had materialized uninvited in the seat beside her.
Mark shrugged. ‘Russian.’
‘But Russians talk all the time!’
Not these Russians, Mark said. Most of them had flown in over the last few days and still had to get used to being in the Caribbean.
‘Something’s happened up there,’ he said, nodding across the bay. ‘According to the buzz, they’ve got some big family powwow going on, not all of it friendly. Don’t know what they do for their personal hygiene. Half the water system’s shot.’
She picked out two fat men, one wearing a brown Homburg hat who was murmuring into a mobile, the other a tartan tam-o’-shanter with a red bobble on the top.
‘Dima’s cousins,’ said Mark. ‘Everybody’s somebody’s cousin round here.
Perm
they come from.’
‘Perm?’
‘Perm, Russia. Not the hairdo, darling. The town.’
Go up a level and there were the flaxen-haired boys, chewing gum as if they hated it. Dima’s sons, twins, said Mark. And yes, now that Gail looked at them again, she saw a likeness: burly chests, straight backs, and droopy brown bedroom eyes that were already turning covetously towards her.
She took a quick, silent breath and released it. She was approaching what in legal discourse would have been her golden-bullet question, the one that was supposed to reduce the witness to instant rubble. So was she now going to reduce herself to rubble? But when she resumed speaking, she was gratified to hear no quaver in the voice coming back to her from the brick wall, no faltering or other telltale variation:
‘And sitting demurely apart from everybody –
demonstratively
apart, one would almost have thought – there was this really rather stunning girl of fifteen or sixteen, with jet-black hair down to her shoulders and a school blouse and a navy blue school skirt over her knees, and she didn’t seem to belong to
anyone
. So I asked Mark who she was. Naturally.’
Very
naturally, she decided with relief, having listened to herself. Not a raised eyebrow round the table. Bravo, Gail.
‘“Her name is Natasha,” Mark informed me. “A flower waiting to be plucked,” if I’d pardon his French. “Dima’s daughter but not Tamara’s. Apple of her father’s eye.”’
And what was the beautiful Natasha, daughter to Dima but not Tamara, doing at seven in the morning when she was supposed to be watching her father playing tennis? Gail asked her audience. Reading a leatherbound tome that she clutched like a shield of virtue on her lap.
‘But absolutely drop-dead gorgeous,’ Gail insisted. And as a throwaway: ‘I mean,
seriously
beautiful.’ And then she thought: Oh Christ, I’m beginning to sound like a dyke when all I want is to sound unconcerned.
But once again, neither Perry nor her inquisitors seemed to have noticed anything out of tune.
‘So where do I find Tamara who isn’t Natasha’s mother?’ she asked Mark, severely, taking the opportunity to edge away from him.
‘Two rows up on your left. Very pious lady. Known locally as Mrs Nun.’
She did a careless swing round and homed in on a spectral woman draped from head to toe in black. Her hair, also black, was shot with white and bound in a bun. Her mouth, locked in a downward curve, seemed never to have smiled. She wore a mauve chiffon scarf.
‘And on her bosom, this bishop-grade Orthodox gold cross with an extra bar,’ Gail exclaimed. ‘Hence the Mrs Nun, presumably.’ And as an afterthought: ‘But
wow
, did she have presence. A real scene-stealer’ – shades of her acting parents – ‘you really felt the willpower. Even Perry did.’
‘Later,’ Perry warned, avoiding her eye. ‘They don’t want us to be wise after the event.’
Well, I’m not allowed to be wise before it either, am I?
she had half a mind to shoot back at him, but in her relief at having successfully negotiated the hurdle of Natasha, let it go.
Something about the immaculate little Luke was seriously distracting her: the way she kept catching his eye without meaning to; the way he caught hers. She’d wondered at first whether he was gay, until she spotted him eyeing the gap in her blouse where a button had
opened. It’s the loser’s gallantry in him, she decided. It’s his air of fighting to the last man, when the last man is himself. In the years when she was waiting for Perry, she’d slept with quite a few men, and there’d been one or two she’d said yes to out of kindness, simply to prove to them that they were better than they thought. Luke reminded her of them.
*
Limbering up for the match with Dima, Perry by contrast had scarcely bothered with the spectators at all, he claimed, talking intently to his big hands set flat on the table before him. He knew they were up there, he’d given them a wave of his racquet and got nothing back. Mainly, he was too busy putting in his contact lenses, tightening his shoelaces, smearing on sun cream, worrying about Mark giving Gail a hard time, and generally wondering how quickly he could win and get out. He was also being interrogated by his opponent, standing three feet away:
‘They bother you?’ Dima inquired in an earnest undertone. ‘My supporters’ club? You want I tell them go home?’
‘Of course not,’ Perry replied, still smarting from his encounter with the bodyguards. ‘They’re your friends, presumably.’
‘You British?’
‘I am.’
‘English British? Welsh? Scottish?’
‘Just plain English, actually.’
Selecting a bench, Perry dumped his tennis bag on it, the one he hadn’t let the bodyguards look inside, and yanked the zip. He fished a couple of sweatbands from his bag, one for his head, one for his wrist.