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    Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel
    Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel
    Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel
    Ebook405 pages6 hours

    Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel

    By John le Carré

    3.5/5

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    From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies. 

    In this exquisitely told novel, John le Carré shows us once again his acute understanding of the world we live in and where power really lies.
     
    In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and with Britain on the brink of economic ruin, a young English couple takes a vacation in Antigua. There they meet Dima, a Russian who styles himself the world’s Number One money-launderer and who wants, among other things, a game of tennis. Back in London, the couple is subjected to an interrogation by the British Secret service who also need their help. Their acquiescence will lead them on a precarious journey through Paris to a safe house in Switzerland, helpless pawns in a game of nations that reveals the unholy alliances between the Russian mafia, the City of London, the government and the competing factions of the British Secret Service.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Books
    Release dateOct 12, 2010
    ISBN9781101475003
    Author

    John le Carré

    John le Carré (1931 – 2020), born David John Moore Cornwell, was a British-Irish author. He spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld; at sixteen, he found refuge first at the University of Bern, then Oxford. After graduating with honors, he taught at Eton for two years before he was recruited into British Intelligence. In 1961, while still an MI6 agent, he published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, which introduced the world to George Smiley. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, spent 32 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list and earned him a reputation as one of the world’s preeminent spy novelists. Though he declined all British-based honors and prizes, he accepted the Premio Malaparte (Italy) in 1988, the title of Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 2005, and the Goethe Medal (Germany) in 2011. Over the course of sixty years, he published over two dozen novels that would come to define an age; his final novel, Silverview, was published posthumously in 2021.

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    Reviews for Our Kind of Traitor

    3.5/5

    494 ratings42 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I'm not sure what to think of this book. On the one hand, the prose has the usual deft touch of the master. The characters are rich and engaging and the settings colorful. I enjoyed almost every page once it got going. On the other hand, "where's the beef"?

      I never really cared what happened to the characters. I think this is because I was never captivated by their needs or their motivations. And when the last few pages started rushing toward me, all I could think was that the ending was going to be tragically unsatisfying or awesomely wonderful. It was unsatisfying and unfairly left a majority of the plot threads dangling, including the ones that I actually did care about.
    • 2/5
      Even more bleak and depressing than others of le Carré's late-career works.
    • 4/5
      A fairly ordinary British couple meet a notorious Russian gangster while on holiday. The gangster wants out of Russia with his family and fortune intact and a secretive British agency wants to help. The British couple, asked to help, get further and further enmeshed in a world they know nothing about. John le Carre has be writing spy novels for a long time now and this one was excellent.
    • 3/5
      Pure le Carré. It's the writing and the characters.
      Update. Now down-graded to 3/5 after reading "Mission Song."
    • 3/5
      I was going to say this was one of Le Carre's better novels in recent years until the terribly disappointing ending. As with Le Carre's books, you know that the ending will be different from the one you expect but not this! He created so much suspense only for Dima and Luke to die in a plane explosion (sorry for the spoiler). What is going to happen to the others like Natasha, Perry, and Gail?
    • 4/5
      (original review, 2010)

      About a third of the way through “Our Kind of Traitor”, I sat back and reflected on the elegance of the prose and the grace and ease with which the narrative moved back and forth through time, and two words came inescapably to mind: Joseph Conrad. I can't believe, after all the le Carré novels I had already read at that point, that this was the first time the comparison ever occurred to me, but there it is.

      In a way, though, it's fitting that the realization came with that book: "Our Kind of Traitor" is an elegant novel, certainly an accomplished bit of storytelling, but I don't think anyone will ever rank it alongside “Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy” or “The Constant Gardener”. Yet I savored the book for the skill and grace with which it was written. This is what distinguishes Le Carré from somebody like Michael Crichton: he can be read with pleasure simply for the quality of his writing. Crichton is a wonderfully efficient storyteller, and as long as he's got a good tale to tell, he can be great fun to read. What he does is not easy, and at his best he does it very, very well. But I could never imagine sitting back, after reading a page of any one of his books, and simply savoring the language for its own sake. With John le Carré I find myself doing this all the time -- as I do with Raymond Chandler, another truly great writer who happened to work in "genre fiction".

      Conrad was probably the originator of the literary thriller in which a compromised, emotionally tormented male protagonist, an anti-hero no less in the true sense, is placed centre-stage, in a morally ambiguous setting with all sorts of dark shades. And that is very much Le Carre’s model too.

      It’s so very sharp and proficient (as, of course, is the plotting and structure). Some Le Carré detractors grumble about clichés and typical thriller language, but as far as I’m concerned (and I am, admittedly, a very big fan) they are only demonstrating their own philistinism in doing so. He does use the kind of colloquialisms and set phrases that you could dismiss as clichés elsewhere, but half of them he’s invented himself, and the other half he is using knowingly, with perfect confidence. There is nothing wrong with clichés if the writer is good enough to shepherd them around the page exactly as he wants, to be their master. They are only a problem if the writer isn’t good enough, and they come blundering in unbidden and out of control, often in the midst of pretentiously considered sentences. Le Carré, obviously, is plenty good enough. The pacing, the tone: it's all just brilliant, and as a literary device, the way the protagonist retreats deeper into his own repressed psychology as his own physical horizons are narrowed down and down is ever so clever. Love it; absolutely love it.

      I think le Carré is seen as transcending the genre because he creates a world which is very believable even though I am sure that the Circus bears no resemblance to Britain's SIS. For a certain type of high minded reader who frets about such things, books that feature stuff that manifestly don't exist (dragons, amateur detectives, starships) are bothersome. They smell of flippancy and a departure from seriousness and worthiness which is not really acceptable to a reader who views reading as a stern and proper undertaking like a Calvinist at prayer. And I love SF...


      SF = Speculative Fiction.
    • 4/5
      It took me a while to immerse myself in the story. It was probably because I've been no longer [[Le Carré]] read more and therefore have to get used to his writing style again.
      A young couple spends his holidays in Antigua. There they meet Dima a Russian money launderer on a large scale, with his whole family and entourage. Dima wants to know his family protected because he can not expect much support from the Russian money mafia anymore. It's a race with time as Dima soon signs the papers that cut him off. The British secret service, on the other hand, is taking the time to acknowledge him as a defector, as senior members of the government are involved in this money laundering.
      It was an exciting quick read.
    • 2/5
      This is another of those books that got thrust into my hands with a admonition that I'd "LOVE this book." Sadly, the opposite is true. I even made sure to put space between the giving and the reading to keep expectations down.

      The writing itself isn't bad, which is why the book has two stars and not something lower. The execution leaves MUCH to be desired.

      There are constant breaks in the text, even through the middle of the chapters, which designate the change of some form to the scene. Not bad, expect that you had to really pay attention to know if this was going to a flash back, another point of view during the same time, or some melding of the three. This is made worse when the obvious character of who's the point of view is very nebulous. I think the author wanted to write an omnipotent point of view, but this is just a muddled mess.

      From what I could discern before giving up at page 102, this was an ordinary couple who took a holiday to Antigua, met a Russian money launderer who wanted out, and their conversation with MI6 after they got back to the UK.

      I might try this author again, as I'm told his books are decent, but if this is his style, he won't be on my regular read list.
    • 4/5
      Wonderfully written, with the tension slowly building throughout the story and lots of unanswered questions at the end. Brilliant.
    • 4/5
      Had I the power, I would confer on David John Moore Cornwell, aka, John le Carré, eternal life. As long as he promised never to retire from writing. While Our Kind of Traitor may not be his absolute best novel, it's very good and worth remarking on for these reasons.

      First, it's the first novel of his that doesn't revolve around a disgruntled (usually spy) idealist. This time the central character is a pure idealist, a man of high vision, aspiration, and spirit -- a mountaineer.

      Second, le Carré, pairs his hero with a heroine who is his equal in solid English character, also not too sophisticated to have become cynical, and filled with the same kind of intrepid courage to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do, as is her lover.

      Third, the object of attention, a Russian money launderer who wishes asylum for himself and his family in exchange for everything he knows about the international financial crimes racket that centers on money laundering and could incriminate Big Wigs in the British government and Russian oligarchs is so well drawn, complex, sympathetic, alarming, and naive all at the same time that he is easily one of the author's most memorable characters.

      The plot is simple, deviously simple, in comparison to most of le Carré's oeuvre but is rich in examination of character. In fact, he has written a novel entirely motivated and driven by the exploration of the iconic aspect of English character that we identify with Eton's playing fields. That of fair play.

      To say any more about what happens, who is who, and what is what will spoil the enjoyment of the next reader of this novel. But I will add this observation: For all that is unique in this work, separating it from his previous books, there are at least two "things" that all readers will recognize as le Carré's signature -- the curmudgeonly Smiley operative is named Hector and a nemesis of fair play is named Longrigg. How could they be named otherwise?
    • 4/5
      I will not give a spoiler here, but I will say that the book has an ending that was totally unexpected by me. The entire story setting up the scene, and the last page takes that scene and gives it an earthquake shaking.
    • 4/5
      Classic le Carre--dark, just of the edges of normal, the intersection of the things we fear and the things we secretly desire.
      More followable than I expected--or maybe I am getting better at following his somewhat oblique writing. Thoroughly enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      When the Cold War ended one might have been forgiven to think the John le Carre’s career as a writer of the spy novel might have come crashing down along with the Berlin wall. Rest assured, in ‘Our Kind of Traitor’ le Carre shows us that the Russian spy novel is alive and well for the twenty-first century.

      Born to the ranks of the British upper middle-class Perry Makepiece, an English literature tutor at Oxford College and his long-standing girlfriend, Gail, the “sparky young barrister on the rise” take a brief vacation in Antigua to consider their future and play a little tennis. Their holiday is rudely interrupted by Dima from Perm, and his accompanying Russian family, who leeches on to the Brits and take over their time and their tennis.

      Dima makes Perry an offer he can’t refuse. He wants to rat out his fellow Russian crooks to the British government to get his family and since Perry, who is labeled Professor by this Russian money launderer, is “goddam fair-play English” Dima chooses him to pass on this information to the apparatchik’s of the British government.

      Upon returning home, Perry, against Gail’s better judgment, passes on the message to the service. Before they know it the pair are recruited and caught up in the “cut and thrust of high-stakes intrigue” becoming pawns in the hands of everyone they become involved with, be it their British masters, or the sweet innocent kids caught up in their Russian parent’s need for moral endeavor.

      Le Carre proves again to be the master of the understatement as his very British characters charge around Europe waiting, hiding their charges from the Russian gangsters that are trying to stop the traitor from passing on the secrets of the vory, and waiting on the government bureaucrats to cut through the red-tape so they can bring the goods home to spill his guts.

      With the authorities closing in on the illegals hiding out in the Swiss countryside, the family and their handlers start to come unhinged in their hideout, and with time running out le Carre swings the momentum like the pendulum in a grandfather clock until the grand finale.
    • 4/5
      In this novel, Le Carre continues to plumb the depths of modern global capitalism to forge a compelling if profoundly pessimistic view of the world. You follow the unfolding operation (the worlds leading money launderer has agreed to testify against the Russian mafia and must be escorted to safety through a maze of intrigue and deception) with growing dread as corrupt political forces beyond the control of the novel's heroes conspire against them. While the book is tautly suspenseful, I don't think it is a spoiler to warn that there is no happy ending. That seems to have become inevitable in Le Carre's work. His perspective on why the world is tragic is what makes him worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Very typical Le carre : tough read, layered and dark.

      An acquired taste.
    • 4/5
      John le Carré, ein Name der für spannende Agenten- und Spionagethriller steht - mit dieser Erwartungshaltung machte ich mich an sein neuestes Werk. Ich las und las, amüsierte mich prächtig und ertappte mich dennoch dabei, immer oberflächlicher über den Text hinwegzugehen, bis ich bei Seite 202 (ca. der Hälfte) das Buch resigniert zuschlug. Denn von Spannung - keine Spur. Welch eine Enttäuschung!
      Doch ich hatte mich selbst in die Irre geführt, denn bei genauem Hinschauen ist (außer bei der Einordung bei diversen Buchläden) nirgendwo die Rede von Krimi oder Thriller. 'Verräter wie wir' ist eine Lektüre, die zwar im Agentenmilieu spielt und gegen Ende einen eindrucksvollen Spannungsbogen aufweist, aber dennoch nicht mehr oder weniger als ein Roman. Also schickte ich meine Erwartungen in die Wüste und begann nochmal von vorn. Und siehe da....
      Perry und Gail, ein wohl recht typisch britisches, linksliberales Pärchen mit einer eher skeptischen Haltung gegenüber den staatlichen Institutionen, lernen in einem Urlaub einen russischen Oligarchen kennen, der sie unversehens zu seinen Vertrauten kürt. Plötzlich finden die Beiden sich wieder in der Rolle als Mittler zwischen dem britischen Geheimdienst und einem potentiellen russischen Überläufer.
      LeCarré verwendet viele Seiten auf die genaue Darstellung der einzelnen Personen, inbesondere auf die seiner beiden Protagonisten Gail und Perry. Es gelingt ihm bravourös, nicht nur sehr detailliert sondern auch voller Witz die Eigenheiten und Widersprüchlichkeiten der Handelnden darzustellen. Wie Perry beispielsweise, der ewige Kritiker und Verächter der britischen Politik, der sich plötzlich als inoffizieller Geheimdienstmitarbeiter wiederfindet - und es wider Erwarten geniesst. Oder Dima, der russische Oligarch, der England liebt und bewundert und alle britischen Literaturklassiker besitzt, ohne vermutlich einen einzigen davon gelesen zu haben. Dies alles ist zudem in einer wunderbaren Sprache verfasst, über die man sich auf jeder Seite auf's Neue freut.
      Weshalb dann trotzdem nicht die volle Punktzahl? Weil bis zur ca. der Hälfte des Buches die Menge der Perspektivenwechsel etwas überhand nimmt. In einem Gespräch mit dem Geheimdienst, das bis dorthin die Rahmenhandlung darstellt, berichten Gail und Perry über ihre Begegnung mit Dima. Hierbei werden Rück- und Einblicke auf und in die Lebensläufe der Beteiligten eingeschoben, wobei der Großteil dieser einzelnen Abschnitte meist nicht mehr als 4-6 Seiten umfasst, sodass zumindest der Beginn etwas unübersichtlich wirkt .
      Aber abgesehen von dieser kleinen Mäkelei: grandiose Unterhaltung mit (wahrscheinlich) durchaus realistischen Einblicken in das schmutzige Geldwäschergeschäft.
    • 1/5
      Chatty with weirdly mixed tense and seeming to be going nowhere. I am giving up at 60 pages in.
    • 3/5
      Oh it started out so well, with this interesting couple on vacation in Antigua and the mysterious Russian oligarch who took them up. Then it got so complicated, back there at MI5 in England, I couldn't quite follow what had happened back in the old days and who might be the traitor. And then [spoiler alert] he put them on an airplane and blew it up.

      I said to my husband "What a terrible ending! " He said "All his later books have that problem."

      Can't he figure out a plot anymore? I used to love his books so much.
    • 3/5
      Thank you, GoodReads and Viking for the ARC.
      Highly plausible and timely scenario. Well written including some unusual literary flourishes that add to the fun. Characters are believable and the pace is quick.
    • 3/5
      A good spy thriller, with the usual, depressing, John Le Carre ending. What I enjoyed most was the nuts-and-bolts depiction of spycraft.
    • 2/5
      Perry Makepiece and his girlfriend Gail are upper-middle class nearly-thirty-somethings who spend a small inheritance on a once in a lifetime tennis holiday in Antigua. There, in (very) lengthy detail, they meet Dima, a Russian criminal with an extended family who challenges Perry to a tennis match as a cover for inveigling the pair in his plan to defect rather than be assassinated as he soon expects to be. Upon their return to England Perry, trying to shield Gail and her legal career from as much involvement as possible, informs the relevant spooks. So enter Tom, Dick and Harry (the code names the three spies use for a portion of the novel, I’m struggling to remember their real names or why they felt the need for this absurd subterfuge) after which everyone spends some time in a basement and then there's some more tennis.

      That synopsis, interspersed with snippets of Dima’s personal history as a member of the Russian criminal brotherhood, takes about 50% of the audio book to unfold which might give you an idea of the pace of this so-called thriller that slumbers along in second gear for its entirety. If I included the bizarre and disconnected sub plot about Dima's daughter's pregnancy to a climbing instructor but left out all the tedious tennis, spy-craft exposition and wallowing in indecision by the spooks, the remainder of the plot could easily be summarised in a single paragraph and then you could all save yourselves the bother of reading it at all. Even the extraordinarily abrupt ending is dull, as if the author was as tired with the whole thing as I was by then.

      Le Carré assures us that the money laundering and its links to the UK financial crisis at the heart of this novel is very real and I have no reason to doubt him But it doesn't matter how real the basis for the novel is if the author can't make me believe it and I didn't believe the premise for this novel for a single second. Nothing about the character of Dima, his choice of defection route or the use by the British secret services of a couple of randomly chosen amateurs for work like that felt remotely credible. Even if such things go on every day in the real world, le Carré didn't manage to make me believe it in his made up one. The 'instruction' of Perry and Gail seemed much closer to the spy games I played when I was eight (I got a spy kit for my birthday that year which included invisible ink and machines which my best friend and I used to send and receive coded messages that our respective brothers couldn't read) than to any real life espionage. I would have been unsurprised to see the cone of silence?

      The characters are the final let down of this 11 hour and 23 minute disappointment. In the past le Carré has been a master at creating intriguing people who leap of the page and demand to be investigated, absorbed and understood. Here the characters are all flat and kept at arm's length with emotions that seemed the same whether they were facing imminent death, the break-up of a marriage or the fact their cup of tea had grown cold. Tom, the oldest of the MI6 agents, is a poor imitation of le Carré's best-known, bureaucracy mastering creation George Smiley and Dima is a caricature of the evil Russian stereotypes of B grade movies. The rest of the characters have already faded from my mind.

      Listening to this book was like one, long yawn. Aside from an excellent narration and the fact that le Carré can still put words together in a way that is pleasing to a lover of the English language there is really nothing to recommend the thing at all. However, elsewhere on the ‘net reviews of the novel are split fairly evenly. If you do decided to read it I hope for your sake you're in the half of the population that has an entirely different reading experience to the one I had. But just in I suggest you take a pillow.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book right up until the end, where it just seemed to drop off a cliff. Did le Carre just get tired of writing this book? It has his usual well developed and complex characters is morally ambiguous situations. Well worth a read, even if I found it disappointing.
    • 3/5
      This book is very well written, it jumps between the characters lifes effortlessly. Your never sure who you can trust.
      Keeps you guessing what is going to happen.
      Glad I read this book.
    • 1/5
      Horrible spy novel. Uses only one sentence in a paragraph. Sentences are long winded. No fun to read.
    • 3/5
      The characters seemed more like caricatures, and the plot meandered and rather fizzled out. Not really a favourite
    • 3/5
      Well I enjoyed 2/3 of the book. The trouble is Le Carré didn't bother to write the other 1/3. I don't mind downbeat endings, and have got used to them in other recent le Carré novels, But this seemed more like he got bored with the book and characters and just finished it as fast as possible. In some ways it rather reminds me of childhood story writing - when I got rather confused by my own plot and/or bored of writing I would sign off "and then I woke up". Not that the plot is at all difficult to follow in this novel - rather it seems to be more about the characters, which is why the seeming loss of interest in them towards the end is such a let-down.
    • 4/5
      Not my favorite of his recent books, but still very good as expected. A little mellower and slower paced than many le Carre books, and I didn't love the ending, but overall very solid as always. One of my very favorite writers of all time.
    • 4/5
      LeCarre's cynicism runs deep, more so than I can recall in a while, right until the final betrayal. Throughout the read, I wondered who "our kind of traitor might be." Dima, the Russian career criminal; Perry, the academic and tennis player; Gail, his beautiful girlfriend and attorney; Luke, the compromised SIS agent; or Hector, running Dina's exfiltration operation. None of the above. It's England. One longs for George Smiley, but there apparently are none left in the lists. Just people with murky motivations, and some with noble virtues, mucking along as best they can against a system so corrupt they don't even realize it is. Our Kind of Traitor is a good read, more involving than A Most Wanted Man,The Constant Gardener, and The Tailor of Panama. I think LeCarre's hitting a new stride. Here's hoping his next novel continues in a long upward trajectory.
    • 4/5
      Le Carre back into the old style of writing. It's a short book, but slow and full of tension.

      Perry and Gina are innocent brits abroad. When they're approched on the tennis court by a friendly russian it's hard to say no. However the favour he asks for is stranger than they imagine, and soon they are meeting his widely extended family, of various 'uncles' and some very vulnerable children. Perry contacts some 'friends' in London, and the usual inter-agency squabbling ignites.

      I like le Carre's writing, although he is not very direct when it comes to making his point, a lot of his more recent work is enjoyably cycnical regarding the operation of modern governement, and businesses. This is another such installment. From the final third of the book on you know what is going to happen, you read each page engrossed waiting for the shoe to drop, waiting, and waiting. Like the true masterteller he is, with empecable timing, does Le Carre deliever the ending you bothe expected and feared.

      However this bvook doe slack the complexity of many of his better works, you only get to see one side of the argument, the assupmtions about the other, are all left to the reader. And while obvious, it doesn't provide the grey moral ambiguities that make a book superb. Likewise all the political infighting occurs behind closed doors, only the results are imparted by the boss to his leutenants. Although Gail and Perry start out well, they too quickly lose their qualms and end up devoting far too much of their time to a problem that they'd agreed was not any of their business. I could have understood this if they'd acted a bit more indeceive. But they don't.

      Overall, le Carre is not at his very best form in this one, but it's still enjoyable, and far from bad.
    • 4/5
      At last John le Carre seems to be getting back on form. His previous three books were not up to the standard of his glory days writing about the Cold War, and although Our Kind of Traitor does not reach thstandards of the Smiley/Karla books, he seems to have found a new area of spying that is up-to-date and up his street. This book kept me hooked and he really started developing some interesting characters, of whom I'm sure we'll learn more in subsequent books. The cynical commercialisation of government and its departments was all too believable. The ending left enough ambiguity to make me want a follow-up.

    Book preview

    Our Kind of Traitor - John le Carré

    1

    At seven o’clock of a Caribbean morning, on the island of Antigua, one Peregrine Makepiece, otherwise known as Perry, an all-round amateur athlete of distinction and until recently tutor in English literature at a distinguished Oxford college, played three sets of tennis against a muscular, stiff-backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of dignified bearing in his middle fifties called Dima. How this match came about was quickly the subject of intense examination by British agents professionally disposed against the workings of chance. Yet the events leading up to it were on Perry’s side blameless.

    The dawning of his thirtieth birthday three months previously had triggered a life-change in him that had been building up for a year or more without his being aware of it. Seated head in hands at eight o’clock in the morning in his modest Oxford rooms, after a seven-mile run that had done nothing to ease his sense of calamity, he had searched his soul to know just what the first third of his natural life had achieved, apart from providing him with an excuse for not engaging in the world beyond the city’s dreaming spires.

    002

    Why?

    To any outward eye, his was the ultimate academic success story. The State-educated son of secondary-school teachers arrives in Oxford from London University laden with academic honours and takes up a three-year post awarded him by an ancient, rich, achievement-driven college. His first name, traditionally the property of the English upper classes, derives from a rabble-rousing Methodist prelate of the nineteenth century named Arthur Peregrine of Huddersfield.

    In the term-time, when he isn’t teaching, he distinguishes himself as a cross-country runner and sportsman. On his spare evenings he helps out in a local youth club. In vacations he conquers difficult peaks and Most Serious climbs. Yet when his college offers him a permanent Fellowship—or to his present soured way of thinking, imprisonment for life—he baulks.

    Again: why?

    Last term he had delivered a series of lectures on George Orwell under the title ‘A Stifled Britain?’ and his rhetoric had alarmed him. Would Orwell have believed it possible that the same overfed voices which had haunted him in the 1930s, the same crippling incompetence, addiction to foreign wars and assumptions of entitlement, were happily in place in 2009?

    Receiving no response from the blank student faces staring up at him, he had supplied it for himself: no, Orwell would emphatically not have believed it. Or if he had, he would have taken to the streets. He would have smashed some serious glass.

    003

    It was a topic he had thrashed out mercilessly with Gail, his longstanding girlfriend, as they lay in her bed after a birthday supper at the flat in Primrose Hill that she had part-inherited from her otherwise penniless father.

    ‘I don’t like dons and I don’t like being one myself. I don’t like academia and if I never have to wear a bloody gown again, I’ll feel a free man,’ he had ranted at the gold-brown hair clustered comfortably on his shoulder.

    And receiving no reply beyond a sympathetic purr:

    ‘Hammering on about Byron, Keats and Wordsworth to a bunch of bored undergraduates whose highest ambition is to get a degree, get laid, and get rich? Done it. Been there. Fuck it.’

    And raising the odds:

    ‘About the only thing that would really keep me in this country is a bloody revolution.’

    And Gail, a sparky young barrister on the rise, blessed with looks and a quick tongue—sometimes a little too quick for her own comfort as well as Perry’s—assured him that no revolution would be complete without him.

    Both were de facto orphans. If Perry’s late parents had been the soul of high-minded Christian socialist abstinence, Gail’s were the other thing. Her father, a sweetly useless actor, had died prematurely of alcohol, sixty cigarettes a day and a misplaced passion for his wayward wife. Her mother, an actress but less sweet, had vanished from the family home when Gail was thirteen, and was reputed to be living the simple life on the Costa Brava with a second cameraman.

    004

    Perry’s initial reaction to his life-decision to shake the dust of academia from his feet—irrevocable, like all Perry’s life-decisions—was to return to his grass roots. The only son of Dora and Alfred would put himself where their convictions had been. He would begin his teaching career all over again at the point where they had been forced to abandon theirs.

    He would stop playing the intellectual high-flyer, sign up for an honest-to-God teacher-training course and, in their image, qualify as a secondary-school teacher in one of his country’s most deprived areas.

    He would teach set subjects, and any sport they cared to throw at him, to children who needed him as a lifeline to self-fulfilment rather than as a ticket to middle-class prosperity.

    But Gail was not as alarmed by this prospect as perhaps he intended her to be. For all his determination to be at the hard centre of life, there remained other unreconciled versions of him, and Gail was on familiar terms with most of them:

    Yes, there was Perry the self-punishing student at London University where they had first met, who in the mould of T. E. Lawrence had taken his bicycle to France in the vacations and ridden it until he keeled over with exhaustion.

    And yes, there was Perry the alpine adventurer, the Perry who could run no race and play no game, from seven-a-side rugby to pass the parcel with her nephews and nieces at Christmas time, without a compulsive need to win.

    But there was also Perry the closet sybarite who treated himself to unpredictable bursts of luxury before hurrying back to his garret. And this was the Perry who stood on the best tennis court at the best recession-hit resort in Antigua on that early May morning before the sun got too high to play, with the Russian Dima one side of the net and Perry the other, and Gail wearing a swimsuit and a broad-brimmed floppy hat and a silky cover-up that covered very little, sitting amid an unlikely assembly of dead-eyed spectators, some dressed in black, who appeared to have sworn a collective oath not to smile, not to speak, and not to express any interest in the match they were being compelled to watch.

    005

    It was a lucky chance, in Gail’s opinion, that the Caribbean adventure had been planned in advance of Perry’s impulsive life-decision. Its inception dated back to darkest November when his father had fallen victim to the same cancer that had carried off his mother two years earlier, leaving Perry in a state of modest affluence. Not holding with inherited wealth, and being in two minds as to whether he should give all he had to the poor, Perry dithered. But after a campaign of attrition mounted by Gail, they had settled for a once-in-a-lifetime bargain tennis holiday in the sun.

    And no holiday could have been better planned, as it turned out, for by the time they had embarked on it, even bigger decisions were staring them in the face:

    What should Perry do with his life, and should they do it together?

    Should Gail give up the Bar and step blindly into the azure yonder with him, or should she continue to pursue her meteoric career in London?

    Or might it be time to admit that her career was no more meteoric than most young barristers’ careers, and should she therefore get herself pregnant, which was what Perry was forever urging her to do?

    And if Gail, either out of impishness or self-defence, had a habit of turning large questions into little ones, there remained no doubt that the two of them were separately and together at life’s crossroads with some pretty heavy thinking to do, and that a holiday in Antigua looked like providing the ideal setting in which to do it.

    006

    Their flight was delayed, with the result that they didn’t check into their hotel till after midnight. Ambrose, the resort’s ubiquitous major-domo, showed them to their cabin. They rose late and by the time they had breakfasted on their balcony the sun was too hot for tennis. They swam on a three-quarters-empty beach, had a solitary lunch by the pool, made languorous love in the afternoon, and at six in the evening presented themselves at the pro’s shop, rested, happy, and eager for a game.

    Seen from a distance, the resort was no more than a cluster of white cottages scattered along a mile-wide horseshoe of proverbial talcum-powder sand. Two promontories of rock strewn with scrub forest marked its extremities. Between them ran a coral reef and a line of fluorescent buoys to ward off nosy motor yachts. And on hidden terraces wrested from the hillside lay the resort’s championship-standard tennis courts. Meagre stone steps wound between flowering shrubs to the front door of the pro’s shop. Once through it, you entered tennis heaven, which was why Perry and Gail had chosen the place.

    There were five courts and one centre court. Competition balls were kept in green refrigerators. Competition silver cups in glass cases bore the names of champions of yesteryear and Mark, the overweight Australian pro, was one of them.

    ‘So what sort of level are we looking at here, if I may inquire?’ he asked with heavy gentility, taking in without comment the quality of Perry’s battle-scarred racquets, his thick white socks and worn but serviceable tennis shoes, and Gail’s neckline.

    For two people past their first youth but still in the bloom of life, Perry and Gail made a strikingly attractive pair. Nature had provided Gail with long, shapely legs and arms, high, small breasts, a lissom body, English skin, fine gold hair and a smile to light the gloomiest corners of life. Perry had a different sort of Englishness, being lank and at first sight dislocated, with a long neck and prominent Adam’s apple. His stride was ungainly, he seemed to topple and his ears protruded. At his State school he had been awarded the nickname of Giraffe, until those unwise enough to use it learned their lesson. But with manhood he had acquired—unconsciously, which only made it more impressive-a precarious but undoubted grace. He had a mop of brown curls, a wide, freckled forehead, and large, bespectacled eyes that gave out an air of angelic perplexity.

    Not trusting Perry to blow his own trumpet, and protective of him as always, Gail took the pro’s question upon herself.

    ‘Perry plays qualifiers for Queen’s and he got into the main draw once too, didn’t you? You actually made it to the Masters. And that was after breaking his leg skiing and not playing for six months,’ she added proudly.

    ‘And you, madam, if I may make so bold?’ Mark the obsequious pro inquired, with a little more spin on the ‘madam’ than Gail cared for.

    ‘I’m his rabbit,’ she replied coolly, to which Perry said, ‘Sheer bollocks,’ and the Australian sucked his teeth, shook his heavy head in disbelief and thumbed the messy pages of his ledger.

    ‘Well, I’ve got one pair here might do you good people. They’re a sight too classy for my other guests, I’ll tell you that right now. Not that I’ve a vast selection of humanity to choose from, frankly. Maybe you four should give each other a whirl.’

    Their opponents turned out to be an Indian honeymoon couple from Mumbai. The centre court was taken, but court 1 was free. Soon a handful of passers-by and players from other courts had drifted over to watch the four of them warm up: fluid strokes from the baseline casually returned, passing shots that nobody ran for, the unanswered smash from the net. Perry and Gail won the toss, Perry gave first serve to Gail who twice double-faulted and they lost the game. The Indian bride followed her. Play remained sedate.

    It wasn’t till Perry began serving that the quality of his play became apparent. His first serve had height and power, and when it went in, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. He served four in a row. The crowd grew, the players were young and good-looking, the ball boys discovered new heights of energy. Towards the end of the first set, Mark the pro casually turned out to take a look, stayed for three games, then with a thoughtful frown returned to his shop.

    After a long second set, the score was one set each. The third and final set reached 4-3, with Perry and Gail having the edge. But if Gail was inclined to hold back, Perry was by now in full cry, and the match ended without the Indian couple winning another game.

    The crowd drifted away. The four lingered to exchange compliments, fix a return and maybe catch a drink in the bar this evening? You bet. The Indians departed, leaving Perry and Gail to gather up their spare racquets and pullovers.

    As they did so, the Australian pro returned to the court bringing with him a muscular, erect, huge-chested, completely bald man wearing a diamond-encrusted gold Rolex wristwatch and grey tracksuit bottoms kept up by a drawstring tied in a bow at his midriff.

    007

    Why Perry should have spotted the bow at his midriff first and the rest of the man afterwards is easily explained. He was in the act of changing his elderly but comfortable tennis shoes for a pair of beach shoes with rope soles, and when he heard his name called he was still bent double. Therefore he lifted his long head slowly, the way tall, angular men do, and registered first a pair of leather espadrilles on small, almost feminine feet set piratically apart, then a couple of stocky, tracksuited calves in grey; and, coming up, the drawstring bow that kept the trousers aloft, double-tied as such a bow should be, given its considerable area of responsibility.

    And above the bow-line, a belly of finest crimson cotton blouse encasing a massive torso that seemed not to know its stomach from its chest, and rising to an Eastern-style collar that if fastened would have made a cut-down version of a clerical dog-collar, except that there was no way it could have accommodated the muscular neck inside it.

    And above the collar, tipped to one side in appeal, eyebrows raised in invitation, the creaseless face of a fifty-something man with soulful brown eyes beaming a dolphin smile at him. The absence of creases did not suggest inexperience, rather the opposite. It was a face that to Perry the outdoor adventurer seemed cast for life: the face, he told Gail much later, of a formed man, another definition that he aspired to himself, but for all his manly striving did not feel he had yet attained.

    ‘Perry, allow me to present my good friend and patron, Mr Dima from Russia,’ said Mark, injecting a ring of ceremony into his unctuous voice. ‘Dima thought you played a pretty nifty match out there, am I right, sir? As a fine connoisseur of the game of tennis, he’s been watching you highly appreciatively, I think I may say, Dima.’

    ‘Wanna game?’ Dima inquired, without taking his brown, apologetic gaze off Perry, who by now was hovering awkwardly at his full height.

    ‘Hi,’ said Perry, a bit breathlessly, and shoved out a sweated hand. Dima’s was the hand of an artisan turned to fat, tattooed with a small star or asterisk on the second knuckle of the thumb. ‘And this is Gail Perkins, my partner in crime,’ he added, feeling a need to slow the pace a bit.

    But before Dima could respond, Mark had let out a snort of sycophantic protest. ‘Crime, Perry?’ he objected. ‘Don’t you believe this man, Gail! You did a dandy job out there, and that’s straight. A couple of those backhand passing shots were up there with the gods, right, Dima? You said so yourself. We were watching from the shop. Closed circuit.’

    ‘Mark says you play Queen’s,’ Dima said, the dolphin smile still directed at Perry, the voice thick and deep and guttural, and vaguely American.

    ‘Well, that was a few years back now,’ said Perry modestly, still buying time.

    ‘Dima recently acquired Three Chimneys, right, Dima?’ Mark said, as if this news somehow made the proposition of a game more compelling. ‘Finest location this side of the island, right, Dima? Got great plans for it, we hear. And you two are in Captain Cook, I believe, one of the best cabins in the resort, in my opinion.’

    They were.

    ‘Well, there you go. You’re neighbours, right, Dima? Three Chimneys is perched slap on the tip of the peninsula across the bay from you. The last major undeveloped property on the island but Dima’s going to put that right, correct, sir? There’s talk of a share issue with preference given to the inhabitants, which strikes me as a pretty decent idea. Meanwhile, you’re indulging in a bit of rough-and-ready camping, I hear. Hosting a few like-minded friends and family. I admire that. We all do. For a person of your means, we call that true grit.’

    ‘Wanna game?’

    ‘Doubles?’ Perry asked, extricating himself from the intensity of Dima’s stare in order to peer dubiously at Gail.

    But Mark, having achieved his bridgehead, pressed home his advantage:

    ‘Thank you, Perry, no doubles for Dima, I’m afraid,’ he interjected smartly. ‘Our friend here plays singles only, correct, sir? You’re a self-reliant man. You like to be responsible for your own errors, you told me once. Those were your very words to me not so long ago, and I’ve taken them to heart.’

    Seeing that Perry was by now torn but also tempted, Gail rallied to his rescue:

    ‘Don’t worry about me, Perry. If you want to play a singles, go ahead, I’ll be fine.’

    ‘Perry, I do not believe you should be reluctant to take this gentleman on,’ Mark insisted, ramming his case home. ‘If I was a betting man, I’d be pushed which of you to favour, and that’s a living fact.’

    Was that a limp as Dima walked away? That slight dragging of the left foot? Or was it just the strain of carting that huge upper body around all day?

    008

    Was it here too that Perry first became aware of the two white men loitering at the gateway to the court with nothing to do? One with his hands loosely linked behind his back, the other with his arms folded across his chest? Both wearing trainers? The one blond and baby-faced, the other dark-haired and languid?

    If so, then only subconsciously, he grudgingly maintained, to the man who called himself Luke, and the woman who called herself Yvonne, ten days later when the four of them were sitting at an oval dining table in the basement of a pretty terrace house in Bloomsbury.

    They had been driven there in a black cab from Gail’s flat in Primrose Hill by a large, genial man in a beret and an earring who said his name was Ollie. Luke had opened the door to them, Yvonne stood waiting behind Luke. In a thickly carpeted hall that smelled of fresh paint, Perry and Gail had their hands shaken, were courteously thanked by Luke for coming, and led downstairs to this converted basement with its table, six chairs and a kitchenette. Frosted windows, shaped in a half-moon and set high in the exterior wall, flickered to the shadowy feet of passing pedestrians on the pavement overhead.

    They were next deprived of their mobiles and invited to sign a declaration under the Official Secrets Act. Gail the lawyer read the text and was outraged. ‘Over my dead body,’ she exclaimed, whereas Perry, with a mumbled ‘what’s the difference?’, signed it impatiently away. After making a couple of deletions and inking in wording of her own, Gail signed under protest. The lighting in the basement consisted of a single wan lamp hanging over the table. The brick walls exuded a faint scent of old port wine.

    Luke was courtly, clean-shaven, mid-forties and to Gail’s eye too small. Male spies, she told herself with a false jocularity brought on by nervousness, should come a size larger. With his upright posture, sharp grey suit and little horns of greying hair flicked up above the ears, he reminded her more of a gentleman jockey on his best behaviour.

    Yvonne on the other hand could not have been much older than Gail. She was prissy in Gail’s initial perception of her, but in a blue-stocking sort of way beautiful. With her boring business suit, bobbed dark hair and no make-up, she looked older than she needed and, for a female spy, again in Gail’s determinedly frivolous judgement, too earnest by half.

    ‘So you didn’t actually recognize them as bodyguards,’ Luke suggested, his trim head eagerly switching between the two of them across the table. ‘You didn’t say to each other, when you were alone, for instance: Hello, that was a bit odd, this fellow Dima, whoever he is, seems to have got himself some close protection, as it were?’

    Is that really how Perry and I talk to each other? Gail thought. I didn’t know.

    ‘I saw the men, obviously,’ Perry conceded. ‘But if you’re asking, did I make anything of them, the answer’s no. Probably two fellows looking for a game, I thought, if I thought anything’—and plucking earnestly at his brow with his long fingers—‘I mean you don’t just think bodyguards straight off, do you? Well, you people may. That’s the world you live in, I assume. But if you’re an ordinary citizen, it doesn’t cross your mind.’

    ‘So how about you, Gail?’ Luke inquired with brisk solicitude. ‘You’re in and out of the law courts all day. You see the wicked world in its awful glory. Did you have your suspicions about them?’

    ‘If I was aware of them at all, I probably thought they were a couple of blokes giving me the eye, so I ignored them,’ Gail replied.

    But this didn’t do at all for Yvonne, the teacher’s pet. ‘But that evening, Gail, mulling over the day’—was she Scottish? Could well be, thought Gail, who prided herself on her mynah bird’s ear for voices—‘did you really not make anything of two spare men hovering in attendance?’

    ‘It was our first proper night in the hotel,’ said Gail in a surge of nervous exasperation. ‘Perry had booked us Candlelight Dinner on the Captain’s Deck, OK? We had stars and a full moon and mating bullfrogs in full cry and a moonpath that ran practically to our table. Do you honestly suppose we spent the evening gazing into one another’s eyes and talking about Dima’s minders? I mean, give us a break’—and fearing she had sounded ruder than she intended—‘all right, briefly, we did talk about Dima. He’s one of those people who stay on the retina. One minute he was our first Russian oligarch, the next Perry was flagellating himself for agreeing to play a singles with him and wanting to phone the pro and say the game was off. I told him I’d danced with men like Dima and they had the most amazing technique. That shut you up, didn’t it, Perry, dear?’

    Separated from each other by a gap as wide as the Atlantic Ocean they had recently crossed, yet thankful to be unburdening themselves before two professionally inquisitive listeners, Perry and Gail resumed their story.

    009

    Quarter to seven next morning. Mark was standing waiting for them at the top of the stone steps, clad in his best whites and clasping two cans of refrigerated tennis balls and a paper cup of coffee.

    ‘I was dead afraid you guys would oversleep,’ he said excitedly. ‘Listen, we’re fine, no bother. Gail, how are you today? Very peachy, if I may say so. After you, Perry, sir. My pleasure. What a day, eh? What a day.’

    Perry led the way up the second flight to where the path turned left. As he turned with it he came face to face with the same two men in bomber jackets who had been loitering the previous evening. They were posted either side of the flowered archway that led like a bridal walk to the door of the centre court, which was a world to itself, enclosed on four sides by canvas screens and twenty-foot-high hedges of hibiscus.

    Seeing the three of them approach, the fair-haired man with the baby face took a half-pace forward and with a mirthless smile opened out his hands in the classic gesture of one man about to frisk another. Puzzled, Perry came to a halt at his full height, not yet within frisking distance but a good six feet short, with Gail beside him. As the man took another step forward, Perry took one back, taking Gail with him and exclaiming, ‘What the hell’s all this?’—effectively to Mark, since neither the baby face nor his darker-haired colleague showed any sign of having heard, let alone understood, his question.

    ‘Security, Perry,’ Mark explained, pressing past Gail to murmur reassuringly into Perry’s ear. ‘Routine.’

    Perry remained where he stood, craning his neck forward and sideways while he digested this advice.

    ‘Whose security exactly? I don’t get it. Do you?’—to Gail.

    ‘Me neither,’ she agreed.

    ‘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.’

    010

    ‘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.’

    011

    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.

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