" 'CC, how did you get into the spook business,' I ask him. It was while he was studying in Grozny, he says. He had fought his way into the university against heavy bureaucratic odds. Apparently Ingush returnees are not welcome at neighbouring Chechenia's only university. A bunch of hotheads tried to persuade him to come and blow up Party headquarters as a protest against the way the Ingush were being kicked around. CC told them they were crazy, but they wouldn't listen. He told them he was a Twentieth Party Conference man, but they still wouldn't listen. So he beat the daylights out of them, waited till they'd bolted to the hills, then peached to the KGB....
"The KGB were so impressed that when he'd finished his studies they scooped him up and sent him to school outside Moscow for three years of English, Arabic, and spying. Hey, and get this—he acted Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. He says he was an absolute wow. An Ingush acting Lord Goring! I love him!"
Confirmed by microphone intercepts, prosaic Cranmer had duly noted, in his bank clerk's hand.
* * *
Grozny in Russia? I hear myself ask.
Chechenia, actually. North Caucasus. It's gone independent.
How did you get there?
Thumbed a lift. Flew to Ankara. Flew to Baku. Sneaked up the coast a bit. Turned left. Piece of cake.
* * *
Time, I thought, staring blindly at the stone wall before me.
Cling to time.
Time the great healer of the dead. I had been clinging to it for five weeks, but now I was clinging to it for dear life.
On August 1 I cut off my telephone.
Several Sundays later—Sunday being our day of destiny—Emma removes her piano stool and antique jewellery and departs without leaving a forwarding address.
On September 18, I do or do not kill Larry Pettifer at Priddy Pool. Until Emma left, I knew only that in the best civil service tradition, steps would have to be taken. Time becomes blank space lit by black light.
Time becomes time again when, on October 10, the first day of Larry's appointed lecture course at Bath University and twenty-two days after Priddy, Dr. Lawrence Pettifer goes officially missing.
Question: How long had Larry been missing before he went officially missing?
Question: Where was Emma when I was or wasn't killing Larry?
Question: Where is Emma now?
And the biggest question of all, which nobody will answer for me even if anybody knows: When did Checheyev visit Larry? For if CC's last visit to Bath occurred after September 18, Larry's resurrection was complete. If before, I must continue wandering in the black light, a murderer to myself if not to Larry.
After time, matter: Where is Larry's body?
There were two pools at Priddy, the Mineries and Waldegrave. It was the Mineries that we locals called Priddy Pool, and in summer children scrambled on its banks all day. At weekends, middle-class families picnicked on the tufted moorlands and parked their Volvos in the lay-by. So how could a corpse as large as Larry's—how could any corpse—stink and rot and float there undetected for thirty-six days and nights?
First theory of matter: The police have found Larry's body and are lying.
Second theory of matter: The police are playing me along, waiting for me to provide the proof they lack.
Third theory of matter: I am ascribing too much wit to the police.
And the Office, what are they doing? Oh, my dear, what we always did! Riding all the horses in the race at once, and coming nowhere.
Fourth theory of matter: Black light becomes white light, and Larry's body isn't dead.
* * *
How many times had I gone back to Priddy to take a look? Nearly. Got out the car, put on an old sports coat, turned out of the drive, only to invent some other purpose—pop down to Castle Cary, do some shopping, look in on Appleby of Wells instead?
Dead women float upward, I had read somewhere. Dead men keep their faces in the water. Or was it the other way round? Was it Larry's grin that was going to accuse me—still there, still staring up at me in the moonlight? Or the back of his broken head as he peered forever into the muddy waters of the hereafter?
* * *
I had turned up a pencilled record of Checheyev's postings, composed from his formal biography and Larry's embellishments.
1970: Iran, under the name of Grubaev. Made his reputation by contacting local (forbidden) Communist Party. Named and praised by Central Committee, of which KGB head of personnel is ex-officio member. Promoted.
1974: South Yemen, under the name of Klimov, as deputy head of residentura. Derring-do, desert skirmishes, throat-cutting. [Larry's indelicate description: he was a Russian Lawrence, living off camel's piss and roast sand.]
1980-82: Crash posting to Stockholm as Checheyev to replace local second man expelled for activities incompatible, etc. Bored stiff. Hated Scandinavia, except for the aquavit and the women. [Larry: he was ticking over at about three a week. Women and bottles.]
1982-86: Moscow Centre England Section, eating his heart out and getting reprimanded for cheek.
1986-90 In London as Checheyev, second man in the residentura under Zorin [because as I had told dear Marjorie, no blackarse will ever make top man in a major Western residency.]
From an envelope pinned to the inside cover of the tile I extracted a bunch of snapshots mostly taken by Larry: CC outside the Soviet Embassy dacha in Hastings, where Larry was sometimes invited to spend weekends; CC at the Edinburgh Festival, living his cultural cover in front of posters proclaiming "A Caucasian Entertainment of Dance & Music."
I looked again at Checheyev's face, as I had looked at it so often in the past: honed but pleasant-featured, an air of wry humour and resourcefulness. Thirty-seven million pounds' worth of calm eyes.
* * *
And went on looking at it. Took up Uncle Bob's old magnifying glass to look deeper into it than ever before. Great generals, I had read, carried photographs of their adversaries around with them, hung them in their tents, mooned over them before saying their prayers to the beastly God of Battles. But my feelings towards Checheyev contained nothing of hostility. I had wondered, as I always did of Larry's other parent, how on earth Larry managed to fool him. But that was the way with doubles the world over. If you were on the right side, the wrong side looked absurd. And if you were on the wrong side, you fought like hell to convince people you were on the right side until it was too late. And surely I had puzzled how anybody whose people had been hounded by Russian colonial rule for three hundred years could talk himself into serving his oppressors.
"He's a Caucasian werewolf, Timbo," Larry is saying excitedly. "Rational spy by day, gorets by night. By six in the evening you can see his fangs appear...."
I waited for his enthusiasm to fade. For once it didn't. So that gradually, with Larry as our go-between, I began quite to like Checheyev too. I came to rely on his professionalism. I marvelled aloud at his ability to hold Larry's respect. And if I didn't understand what Larry called the wolf in him, I was able, even at one remove, to sense the pull of his revolt against the dreary system that he served.
* * *
I am in the surveillance house in Lambeth, seated beside Jack Andover, our chief watcher, while he runs video film of Checheyev in Kew Gardens, emptying a dead-letter box that Larry has filled an hour earlier. First he strolls past the warning signal, which denotes that the letter box is filled, and the camera shows us the child's chalk mark that Larry has scrawled on the brick wall. Checheyev registers it with the corner of his eye and strolls on. His walk is buoyant, almost insolent, as if he knows he's being filmed. He advances casually on a rose bed. He stoops and affects to read the botanist's description of the stems. As he does so, his upper body makes one swift lunge while his hand whisks a package from its hiding place and secretes it in his clothing: but so deftly, so imperceptibly, that I am reminded of a military tattoo that Uncle Bob once took me to, with Cossack horsemen who slid beneath the bellies of their bareback mounts at full gallop, to reemerge at the salute.