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 made fast from inside, and the black hole in the plane’s fuselage disappeared.
Of the take-off, Perry also had no particular memory: only that he was thinking he should call Gail and tell her that the Eagle had Departed or some such phrase, then find himself a bus or cab, or maybe just walk into town. He was a bit hazy about where he was in relation to Belp centre, if there was one. Then he woke to Ollie standing beside him, and remembered that he had a lift back to Gail and the fatherless family in Wengen.
The plane took off, Perry didn’t wave. He watched it rise and tip sharply, because Belp Airport has a lot of hills and small mountains to contend with and pilots have to be nippy. These pilots were. A commercial charter, by the look of it.
And there was no explosion. Or none that reached Perry’s ears. Later, he wished there had been. Just the thump of a gloved fist into a punchball and a long white flash that brought the black hills rushing at him, then absolutely nothing, either to look at or to hear, until
the ta-too-ta-toos of police and ambulances and fire brigades as their flashing lights began to answer the light that had gone out.
*
Instrument failure is the semi-official verdict at present. Engine failure another. Laxity on the part of unnamed maintenance staff is widely touted. Poor little Belp Airport has long been the experts’ whipping boy and its critics aren’t sparing the rod. Ground control may also have been to blame. Two committees of experts have failed to agree. The insurers are likely to withhold payment until the cause is known. The charred corpses continue to mystify. On the face of it the two pilots were no problem: charter pilots true, but plenty of flying experience, sober fellows, both married, no trace of illegal substances or alcohol, nothing adverse in their records and their wives on neighbourly terms with one another in Harrow, where the families lived. Two tragedies, therefore, but as far as the media was concerned, only worth a day. Why on earth a former official from the British Embassy in Bogotá should have been sharing the plane of a ‘dubious Russian Swiss-based minigarch’, even the red-top press was at a loss to explain. Was it sex? Was it drugs? Was it arms? For want of a shred of evidence it was none of them. Terror, the great catch-all these days, has also been considered, but rejected out of hand.
No group has claimed responsibility.
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks to Federico Varese, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University and author of seminal works on the Russian mafia, for his creative and ever-patient counsel; to Bérengère Rieu, who took me backstage at the Roland Garros Stadium; to Eric Deblicker, who gave me the tour of an exclusive tennis club in the Bois de Boulogne not so dissimilar to my Club des Rois; to Buzz Berger for correcting my tennis shots; to Anne Freyer, my wise and faithful French editor; to Chris Bryans, for his advice on the Mumbai stock market; to Charles Lucas and John Rolley, bankers of probity, who sportingly advised me on the practices of less scrupulous members of their profession; to Ruth Halter-Schmid, who spared me many wrong turnings on my journeying through Switzerland; to Urs von Almen, for guiding me through the wilder byways of the Bernese Oberland; to Urs Bührer, Direktor of the Bellevue Palace Hotel in Berne, for allowing me to stage an embarrassing episode in his peerless establishment; and to Vicki Phillips, my invaluable secretary, for adding proofreading to her countless skills.
And to my friend Al Alvarez, the most generous and astute of readers, homage.
John le Carré, 2010